My favorite whole drive encryption system, hands down, is Truecrypt. One of the interesting features is the notion of plausible deniability. One of the ways this deniability may be accomplished in through a hidden operating system. I don’t really need the deniability features, but I have found that the hidden operating system is useful in allowing me to keep Windows XP on my laptop, but being able to seamlessly boot into Windows 7 (I have also set up Windows 2008 Server in the same way).
I have a 160GB hard drive, which I divided into a 40 GB partition and another 120 GB partition. I have XP installed on the 40GB partition, which is my C: drive. I have another D: drive where I keep data. That’s the 120GB partition. It is important to have a similarly partitioned hard drive. It is also vital that the 120GB partition have enough space to hold all of C:, i.e., 40GB. Do a full sector level backup on the drive. I use Knoppix, then use the dd command to copy the entire /dev/sda drive to a file on a USB hard drive. You should be able to access the individual files on D:. Use ntbackup to run a backup from within Windows XP on the D: drive. Once you have all this done, you can install Windows 7 from scratch, reformatting all the partitions, but only installing on the 40GB one. Leave the 120GB partition empty.
After installing Windows 7, run Truecrypt, pull down on the system menu and select “Create Hidden Operating System . . .” Follow the prompts to create it as normal. After you delete the original partition (the last step in Truecrypt’s hidden OS creation sequence), you should then restore the boot sectors and the first partition from your backup. If you used dd, this just means booting into Knoppix and running something like:
dd if=/path/to/backup/file of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=<number of the last sector of the /dev/sda1 partition, which you can determine by running fdisk –l –u /dev/sda>
This will write over the hard drive up to the point where our outer volume which holds the hidden partition starts. When you reboot, you will boot back into your old Windows XP. It will probably freak out about not being able to get to D. Just install Truecrypt, then mount the outer volume using the outer volume password. You can then restore your backup into that volume.
Finally, encrypt the XP system. This will install the Truecrypt boot loader, where you will be able to provide either the XP decryption password or the Windows 7 decryption password in order to choose which operating system you wish to run.
This allows me to run two versions of Windows with no fear whatsoever that they will interfere with one another. Also, it gets me into the habit of performing disaster recovery backups on my laptop.
The California statute targets commonly used "at-large" elections -- those in which candidates run citywide or across an entire school district. Avila said that method can result in discrimination because whatever group constitutes the majority of voters can dominate the ballot box and block minorities from winning representation. As a remedy, the law empowers state courts to create smaller election districts favoring minority candidates.Of course, there are many reasons why the exact makeup of a governing board might not match the exact percentage of the population (including the simple fact that most people vote on issues, not the ethnicity of the people they're voting for). But, even if there was a problem it seems highly questionable that the two lawyers who wrote the bill are now profiting tremendously from it and appear to be the only ones who do so.
Officials in several California communities said they never heard complaints of voter discrimination until the lawyers stepped forward. In one case, the Tulare Local Healthcare District, now known as Tulare Regional Medical Center, was sued even though its five-member governing board is a rainbow of diversity -- two emigres from India, a Hispanic, a black and a white. The lawsuit argues Hispanics, who make up about a third of local voters, have been shortchanged.
Of course, the environment is far more important than a few million poor foreigners. The government bureaucrats, in their seemingly never ending quest to absolutely perfect their abilities to do evil, work tirelessly to minimize any actually good secondary effects from their actions.
Not until the government got involved was anyone stupid enough to pour sodium silicate into the engines of the trade-ins on used-car lots and render them useless except as junk to be sold by the pound.
A fleet of American used cars like, say, 1977 Chevrolet Caprices could be shipped to any country in the Third and Fourth Worlds and would revolutionize the way people live. Women with sick children would not be hitchhiking 50 miles to clinics.
The UK House of Lords is considering new laws banning forced labor and involuntary servitude. In a shocking oversight, these laws are not expected to cover the huge amounts of labor required of Britons to pay the taxes levied on them by the government. Clearly, private slavery is the only bad kind of slavery.
Ingredients:
A bunch of collard greens. I literally mean a bunch, as in how they are sold fresh in a grocery store, or an entire plant, if you are one to pick your own.
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
3-4 smoked turkey necks or fatback or strickalean, if that’s your cup of tea. Cut the oil in half if you use either of those.
Large pot with lid (3 gallons or so)
Water
Salt
2 packets of Sazón Goya
Cut and wash the greens in the sink. Wash them at least twice to get all the grit out. Heat the pot on medium heat. Add the oil to the pot and allow it to heat for a minute or so. Put enough greens in the pot to fill it to about 4 inches from the top. They should sizzle. Stir the greens into the oil, steadily adding greens until the entire bunch is in the pot. Stir them to coat them in the olive oil. Add enough water to completely cover the greens. Add the turkey necks, the Sazón Goya, and a tablespoon or more of salt to taste. The amount of salt that different people like in greens varies tremendously, so don’t be surprised if you use much more salt than this. Stir everything up, set the heat to low, then cover it and let it simmer. The traditional way would be to simmer them for about 40 minutes. You could use far less water and simmer them for only 20 minutes for a different sort of dish. I tend to go for the long simmer, which is how my family always did it. Serve with hoecakes (also called hot water cornbread).
I drove through a Walmart parking lot and noticed how well the drainage system they have works. It takes some serious flooding to damage a Walmart to the extent that roads, schools, and government buildings have been damaged during the recent flooding in the Atlanta area. I snapped a pic of it. It was doing a very good job of keeping that parking lot clear. That’s very different from what we see of government “services,” where the need to please the customer is lacking, to say the least.
Charles Rangel, the first black man to head the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and Congress’s foremost proponent of slavery, has perhaps topped all of his peers at displaying contempt for those he supposedly serves. In response to reporters’ questions about hidden personal assets, Rangel responded:
I recognize that all of you have an obligation to ask questions knowing that there's none of you smart enough to frame it in such a way that I'm going to respond.
Well, at least he actually does give an accurate assessment of the press. Truth in politics is such a refreshing change of pace.
One of the major factors which will fuel Linux and other open source projects' development will be the developing world. I was listening to a podcast about Ardour, an open source digital audio workstation. One of the interesting things which was mentioned was the ability of members of the community to sponsor code. That is, a person can offer a bounty to have bugs fixed or features added. The fact that incomes vary very widely across the globe can actually help a lot here. Most of the consumers of this software are located in the developed world and have higher incomes than the developing world. As people in areas which have very low average incomes become more technically savvy in software development using free software, some of them will be able to earn nice incomes using their knowledge. This is outsourcing writ large.
I decided to install Ubuntu 9.04 to my 2GB CF card. I wanted to avoid wearing out the CF with writes, so I settled on this method. I installed the server to one partition, so /usr/local is in the root filesystem. You can create the script anywhere in the root filesystem, but i used /usr/local.
Create a /usr/local/bin/mounttmpfs.sh file with the contents below:
#!/bin/sh
rsync -a /var.perm/ /var/
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs -o mode=1777 /var
rsync -a /var.perm/ /var/
Make a soft link from it to /etc/rcS.d with:
ln –s /usr/local/bin/mounttmpfs.sh /etc/rcS.d/S23mounttmpfs.sh
This will cause it to run right after the filesystems are mounted, before any services which write to /var are running.
Add a cron.hourly script to rsync from /var to /var.perm, and you are all set!
I modified this a bit after the inital post. I changed the mounttmpfs.sh script:
#!/bin/sh
find /var/ -type f -exec rm -f {} \;
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs -o mode=1777 /var
rsync -a /var.perm/ /var/
mount -o relatime /dev/vgraid/lv_squid /var/spool/squid3
The find line is actually only needed once. I just deleted the files from the underlying (flash) filesystems, leaving the directory structure. No need to waste space. After that, I mount the /var manually, then copy the permanent files into it. Finally, since I run squid on this server, I mount the squid cache directories after /var. All the other local filesystems get loaded from the scripts in the /etc/rcS.d directory. I also have an hourly cron job which runs the following:
#!/bin/shrsync --delete-excluded --delete-after --exclude=*.pid \
--exclude=spool/squid3/??/??/* --exclude=cache/apt/archives/*.deb\
-av /var/ /var.perm/
This copies all the directory structure, and most files, from /var to the flash card. I skip the squid cache files, since they take up too much space.
A friend of mine, who has a young child, has begun to replace a certain concept with the word “socialism.” For example, “my son just took a massive socialism in his diaper.” Could there be any better description of the nature of the thing than that? It is easily applicable to any number of situations. Something really disgusts you? Scream “socialism” in complete disgust. It works well in some common phrases. “Socialism happens.” “Same Socialism, Different Day.” But I think it works nowhere quite so well as in a phrase used by the older folk during my childhood: “you don’t socialism where you eat.” That one works whether or not you do the mental substitution.
My wife decided she wanted to pay our 10 year old daughter back for always trying to scare people.
I recently installed Windows 7 beta on a Dell Latitude D630 and could not get Sprint Smartview to properly install. I finally found a solution which, while a bit kludgy, does work: using the BB over bluetooth as a dial-up-modem. I found the instructions on BlackBerryForums.com, from user “camattin.”
This finally allows me to use my laptop when I am away from wifi. Smartview is the only important application I have not gotten working under Windows 7, which has been amazingly stable for me.
Libertarian Papers is now online! The welcome text below is taken from the site.
Welcome to Libertarian Papers!
To Authors, Readers, and Potential Libertarians:
A new libertarian journal—a new type of libertarian journal—is born today. Libertarian Papers is an exclusively online peer-reviewed journal. Its home is this elegant, fast, easy-to-use website. Please feel free to browse around.
Watch that sharing spirit go away if you threaten to cut that check.
apt-get install mt-daapd ffmpegThis will get you the software you need. After the packages are installed, edit the /etc/mt-daapd.conf file and change the location of your media files to wherever you keep them. After saving the file, issue
/etc/init.d/mt-daapd restartI have occasionally found cases where Ubuntu starts services immediately after installing them. Restart means it will stop the process first, if there is an active one.
