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Newport state of mind.

I’m not sure how I missed this the first time round, maybe I should watch RudeTube more often.
Newport state of mind was pulled from YouTube because the original artists didn’t like the parody. Unfortunately, as Weird Al will tell you, parody is generally considered fair use in the USA and is also allowable under UK law, and anyway, once it’s on the internet it’s out there and not likely to be able to be removed in the long run. I was a little confused by some of the references to things like the Millennium stadium and LlanfairPG, but was kinda willing to let it slide as the accents are so nice.

However, The GLC took it upon themselves to put together Newport State of Mind (you’re not from Newport) which whilst not quite as funny, does have more accurate references to local Newport sights and actually mentions the Ryder Cup.

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Farewell del.icio.us you were truly great

Looks like Yahoo is closing down del.icio.us I just exported my bookmarks, but that means that I’ll have them on one machine but not the others, and keeping the several machines I use on a regular basis will be more of a pain.

Anyhow it looks like there are a few alternatives out there that I’ll have to investigate which give me something else to do over the holiday.

Is it really going to save a huge amount of money for Yahoo, compared to the pain that it’ll cause the users and the bad publicity for them. I’ve already heard that several people ruminating about the long term future for flickr – I’ll not be buying a flickr pro account in the near future.

Warren Ellis has some more on the story.

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Possible backdoors in NetBSD IPSEC stack?

I just picked this up from a friend at the FSFE.

Apparently, someone who was working with the FBI a few years ago alleges that he came across information regarding backdoors that had been inserted into the IPSEC stack.

I know, that this is technical but it comes down to the fact that the FBI can snoop on “secure communications” that are encrypted using the NetBSD IPSEC stack. Now is the time for a code review, especially as it appears that the FBI have apparently been pushing use of the allegedly backdoored stack for firewalls and VPN tunnels.

The email that details this is linked below:
http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129236621626462&w=2

I do like the “Merry Christmas” at the end.