hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0794.txt

Episode: 794
Title: HPR0794: Full Circle Podcast: U-Cubed De-brief
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0794/hpr0794.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 02:38:56

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The Fault Circle Podcast on Hacker Public Radio in this episode you cupped review.
Hello World and welcome. It's Thursday the 28th of April and I'm feeling somewhat
bereft because my regular co-hosts are off doing other exciting things. Ed is still
unpacking because he's been to Rome where as far as I can make out he's been
complaining about the rain and playing lots of games on his phone. I know he went
off to see various sites in Rome at various times. He just didn't bother to
tell us all about them so we'll give him a grilling and see what cultural
delights he took in while he was in Rome. And Mr Wilkins is off handing in his
dissertation and doubtless doing some army things. So this episode a returning
guest has been volunteered to be a co-host. It is Mr Les Pounder.
Good evening Les. Good evening. Well thank you Pat lovely intro. It was well
volunteered. I think drafted was more than volunteered. I did do think that you
volunteered. I'm not sure you knew what you were volunteering for but I took it
to be a volunteering so to hear you are. Yeah. Last time you were on we were
talking to yourself and John sprigs aka John the Nice Guy about the UKIB
event which was going on at Madlab in Manchester. I'm inclined to start with
that. How did it go? It went really well thank you. It was a really busy day. We
had say about 30 plus people turn up on the day to enjoy lots of different
talks and workshops. I mean highlights of the day were Dan Lynch's talk on
Unity. Now when I say Unity I don't mean that elephant in the room that we
have at the moment which has just come out today. I mean Unity between the
communities that we have in Linux. It was a great talk. I'm going to put a
video up as soon as I've edited it together on the website which is
www.yukubed.info so you can find out more about that. It's a long video. It's
50 minutes long but it's well worth a watch. It's also number great talk by Anne
who's from Manchester Free Software and it's all about the philosophies of
Free Software but it's done in an entertaining manner. It doesn't talk down
to you and it isn't having like RMS in the room telling you that this is this
and you must follow this way. It is an entertaining talk about what Linux is, what
Free Software is and what you can do with everything and I know she's had
requests from a lot of people to do that talk over and over again at different
venues. So did you fill the venue? We didn't fill the venue but we had enough
people there to make sure that we gave a good day for everyone. I mean if we'd
have filled the venue would have been fantastic but it would have been really
tight in the first session because the main session in the main room was quite
small. Madlab it is not a big venue but it is a great venue. I mean it's the
best venue in the North West for doing something like this. You've got all
the facilities that you need. You've got the Wi-Fi, you've got power, you've got
refreshments, you've got space for projectors and whatever you need. It's all
there and they give it to you for free. What we did on the day was rather than
take from them we gave something back. So all the organisers chipped in and we
offered don't refreshments on a day for a donation. We ran a raffle which had
loads of different prizes. The top prize was a full Dell PC which we got
kindly donated by one of Blackpool love members Tony Hughes. We had all sorts
of prizes. Well we had an iPhone was offered that was done by Head. It was
from the pound shop and it was a child's one but it was an iPhone nonetheless.
What was happening on the day was it was just all different things all coming
together. It was arranged around the Ubuntu beta release or beta testing and
global jams that sort of thing but it wasn't just restricted to those
activities. So yes we did have people who were doing ball testing. Yes we are
people learning how to package but we also have people giving talks on
editing video using open shots and using Vi. We had a guy called Dave Gilbert
who is a seasoned pro in Vi. He was telling people who knew how to use Vi what
they could do a bit further. So it was really good to see him do his talk and
the place was packed for his talk. I never know and so many people didn't want
to actually use Vi and then I got asked at the end. So what do you use to
edit text and I was like she had it in nano. I had to get out of there pretty
quick but the purists can have them. I haven't got that much of my life left to
learn Vi and that's just the way it goes. I'm sure it's fantastic but I'm sticking
to what I know. In other things we had there was Blackpool Log we had an idea to
run a Debian demo area which was we all brought some of our computers to the
event had different versions of Debian on them and we let people try them. Now
we initially gave Blackpool Log just a small piece of the room to do this
because we didn't have much space to give. What we should have done is given
them the entire floor and say we're bombed out all day. People are coming
over asking them questions and how to do this, sat in the upper with Linux and
not just a bunch of they were asking about how they can do things with
CrunchBang Linux, how they can do that Debian itself. So the boys were busy
that day so I think Memo in the next time is we give Blackpool Log more space to
do what they can.
The full circle podcast is the companion to full circle magazine, the
independent magazine for the Ubuntu community. Find us at www.fullcirclemagazine.org
forward slash podcast.
And just as a side note, when we were speaking to you before the event,
John's wife was imminently about to give birth, which she now has. So we send
them congratulations. I didn't get the details on the outcome.
It's a little boy called Daniel.
Hey, well done to John and his good lady.
And John assures me today that Daniel eats a lot, but doesn't sleep a lot.
Okay, well get used to it, John, because you've got another couple of years of this.
Well, this is a good test, isn't it? We'll see if he's still quite such a nice guy
when his sleep deprived off to the first six months.
John, they're not so nice guy.
John, the John lease, the slightly fractious and techie guy.
Oh, we shouldn't shouldn't take Mickey.
Full circle news.
It's been one of those weeks where lots of cloud-based solutions have kind of fallen off
their cloud a little bit, because we had a few days ago,
Amazon's cloud EC3 service fell off for a few hours,
which everybody's blaming on their North Carolina data center falling over their business
continuity plan evidently failed.
You know, there's no other way to say it.
The business continuity plan will be that the user would have their data center
hosted in two different locations at the release in different regions.
And that only one region went down at that time, the loss of those services at that date.
So if users had had an instance in region one and then region two,
when region one went down, two would still be going.
I gather it took some time for that failover process to kick in.
It did, yeah.
I'm not sure exactly how long, but it was a considerable amount of time.
Yeah, it was several hours.
Yeah.
I mean, we don't have to go into the various rumors and conspiracies and theories of what took it down
and why it took them so long to bring it back up.
But there's an awful lot of comment now about why the cloud as an idea
isn't quite the all-singing, all-dancing solution that everybody keeps selling it as.
Cloud cloud computing is all very well as long as your cloud doesn't break up
and into a little fine fog of Scotch mist.
It doesn't bowed well for cloud computing when Amazon falls over and dad
the biggest name in cloud compute.
Absolutely.
I kept one while we're on that stream, a couple of Sony stories that we picked up.
Sony were suing geohots about the PS3 hacking episode and they've decided to drop the story.
And I think the net conclusion that everybody's come to is that suing your activists
and your customers may be legal, but it's not really fair.
And it makes you look like a bit of an authoritarian jackass to say the least.
And I'm surprised that it took Sony all of what three months to realize that
didn't do their PR any good whatsoever.
Sony hasn't had good PR for last week or so has it though?
Not really, no, because the next cloud related classic is that
Sony's PlayStation Network has been down for, what is it, seven days and still counting?
Yeah, it's looking like it's going to come back on middle of next week,
which is going to be brilliant for everyone to go online and start playing the games,
but the loss of data is massive.
Well, we've got two strands to this.
Number one is the fact that PlayStation Network went down at all and not only went down but stayed
down, but secondly, because the attack that took it down has evidently been so catastrophic
that they've had a massive data breach.
And something like 77 million members' details could have been stolen.
Could have been being the operative word because nobody at this stage is entirely sure,
or if they are, they're not saying.
And the statements, there's been a brilliant round of statements since yesterday and this morning.
The anonymous group who were mounting concerted denial of service attacks against Sony because of
the whole GeoHot's lawsuit. Anonymous have stepped up and said, it wasn't us gov, we didn't do it,
and Sony aren't saying who they think did it, but they are saying it's okay,
they didn't get your credit card details.
And then just as an aside, they probably got everything else up to and including your inside leg
measurement. So this doesn't exactly say an awful lot for cloud services for one and Sony's data
security policy for another.
No, I mean, I'm looking at BBC News now and the credit card details were encrypted,
but why wasn't other bits and pieces encrypted?
In fact, personal data, surely the people who were looking after I Sony should take every measure
to ensure that the customer's data is secure.
Yeah, the news stories this morning were a full of rumours that the class action lawsuits were being
prepared even as we speak and that Sony can expect a significant bill from this one as well as
a significant loss of credibility.
It's going to hurt their online activities, it really is. I mean, Microsoft has Xbox Live,
which obviously it's Microsoft's own thing, it isn't, the pinnacle is not the best in the world,
but it's had limited issues over its lifetime.
The house been bits and pieces, usually at Christmas time, when the network goes down,
just to the sheer volume of users using it any one time.
But from what I can recollect, we haven't had a loss of data as of yet.
I couldn't be wrong, and if anyone's proved me right, please do.
Or not one that we know about anyway.
Yeah, but Sony's just had this massive PR explosion.
This is really going to hurt their network, so they're going to have to start shifting
a lot of games, really cheap to get people back on.
Yeah, it's really the whole breach of trust thing
that I think is going to hurt them more than anything else.
But the statement that they released what a couple of days ago saying,
we're not rushing to put the thing back up, there's,
we're going to, I haven't got the quote in front of me,
we're going to solidly rebuild the network from the ground up.
It really says they had a massive catastrophic failure in security somewhere.
I mean, they've got an external security company coming to check
what's happened and do an audit and see what can be done to correct it.
Really, Sony should have got this right from day one, this is people's data.
And what were their previous security consultants doing?
Because I can't imagine a company the size of Sony doesn't have
external audits by Black Hat investigators going in and doing periodic reviews of security.
All of the big business customers that I've had, we've either had consultants on a retainer
to do just that or we've instigated periodic reviews by third parties to come in and do some
penetration tests and policy and procedure tests. Where Sony have gone wrong on this,
it just doesn't bear thinking about.
Okay, a couple of other stories, not that I find this sort of thing particularly fascinating,
but it has been the biggest news on the block for a while.
Apple, suing Samsung for patent infringement.
And this is, I keep covering these, we do these on the side pods every few months
and I occasionally blog something about the latest round of court cases.
Apple going after Samsung mobile division rather than Samsung Corporation in total
because they have, they claim that Samsung have, they've knowingly, willingly and deliberately copied
the iPhone 4 right down to the icons, barring a little bit of color and they're just going
after them all guns blazing. It makes you wonder if Apple's legal department aren't doing this just
for something to do just because there's a building full of them over in Cupertino and they don't
get to play with the other kids. I don't know what it is.
They're probably looking for a bit of publicity now that they've released the Y iPhone 4,
which, you know, everyone's going mad for just because it's a white phone.
I mean, I don't see why Apple has to chase Samsung for patent infringements.
Yes, they both got touch screen phones. Yes, they both got icons on the screen to launch
application. Yes, they both got an app market or an app store or some, some manner.
Yeah, there are similarities.
I've, I've feeling that some of this comes down to the fact that US patent law being the
complete dog's breakfast that it is these days and being completely broken.
Other manufacturers are probably looking at Samsung's phone going, well, that looks exactly
like an iPhone. If they can get away with it, so can we. And Apple's only
recourse is to defend the patents or lose them, which is how the patent system works.
So they may not actually be wanting to go after Samsung.
It's just that if they don't defend against Samsung, they will have no court precedent
to defend it against anybody else who decides to do an iPhone clone.
I can't imagine what this is doing to their business relationship because, apparently,
Apple orders something like $6 billion worth of components from Samsung semiconductor,
which is one of the same parent company, but Samsung mobile is a different division and they're
only going after that division. So who knows? Yeah, but it always happens. You'll get Apple soon
from passing infringements on Samsung. Samsung will do the same with Apple for something else,
which they have in fact done. Samsung strikes back and they've this week launched a counter suit.
It's all part of that whole nuclear arms race and patent law is the one route to mutual
self-destruction. Who knows where this one's going to finish up? It does make you wish that
well, it's wishful thinking. Maybe somebody in the US Congress would stop fighting each other
for long enough to work out that the patent system's broken and that they need to change it.
Further, in the article I'm reading now, you can see Apple's currently embroiled in disputes
with Finland's Nokia, Taiwan's HTC, and the US handset maker, Motorola, among others.
Everybody, somebody is trying to draw up a chart as a graphic of all of the current lawsuits
that going on because you've got, Apple is also suing Microsoft, who is suing them. Everybody's
having a go at HTC, Microsoft's having a go at everybody that's producing Android handsets,
the web of legal cases that are going on in the US and other courts is absolutely mind-blowing
when you try and see it represented as a graphic. It's difficult to spot who isn't suing
somebody else. Interestingly, with Samsung, they're actually going after Apple in some of the European
and Asian courts to establish some court precedent before they then take it back to the US and press
their account suit over there because they're hoping that if they can go back to the US armed with
some precedent, they might bring the things with a bit of a swift conclusion, but I can see this
going on for the rest of the year. It's insanity. It's the point where everybody else says,
guys, can you please just innovate rather than legislate because you're not helping anybody?
That's it. Well, how much innovation have they all got at the moment? With markets around the world
as they are, there's not much money out there. Well, you say that, but Apple just turned in another
record-breaking set of results for the last quarter. So they are evidently making money.
Apple will make money because they're just repackaged something. I mean, I've had to love iPhone 5
by the end of the year. So all the iPhone 4 people really upset me trading those in, or as all the
Android people will be happy as Larry because they've got cracking phones already. And one of them.
So yeah, I've got to update the wildfire to a signage in mod 7 at some point over the weekend.
Get some gingerbread on there. Moving swiftly on, one thing that did cheer me up slightly,
internet filtering, possibly to be outlawed in Europe. The European Parliament is getting
it's act together and trying to preserve some net neutrality, which is in marked contrast to
the U.S. Congress, which seems to be so cozy with the telecoms carriers that it's prepared to
hand over any net neutrality it might have so that mobile carriers can carry on making some money.
European Parliament's starting to legislate and in individual national parliaments as well,
to try and block filtering and throttling of traffic. And I saw another story this morning
where the Dutch Parliament are actually starting to put this into legislation. So I thought that was
that was worth hailing the European Parliament, which I loathe with a passion for actually doing
something right or see if they can pull it off. Well, I see we need net neutrality. I mean, if we have
a teared net, it's just going to degrade the experience for everyone. It's the last possible
thing we want. There are very few places in life where everybody has any kind of equality and
the web is one of those and I know it's under threat but I'd prefer to see it stay as neutral as
possibly can. Next story, there's a new KDE project which is aiming at tablets and mixed user
interfaces and I haven't seen an awful lot of detail on this one but there is a new open source
project launched by the KDE developers aimed at bringing a consistent user interface across a
variety of touch screen interfaces and I'm just thinking that maybe KDE could be one of those
tablet interfaces that actually works. Yeah, I mean KDE, it's big in its brush with the widgets
and the layout of the desktop. It's really good for a touch-based interface. It's a lot better
than what we've seen at the moment with the Unity interface which is a little bit
mishmashed at the moment. I don't think it's ready yet to actually be mainstream whereas KDE,
it came out in 4.0 and it was dire but it has been slowly getting better with each dot release.
4.5 and 4.6 are fantastic and I'm not a KDE fan but I do appreciate that they've come on
leaps and bounds and there is something quite elegant, usability, I think they've got a little bit
a way to go still but it's very very glossy, very slick, very attractive and I can see people
being drawn to KDE on different devices. Yeah, well I'm not on a tablet, it'd be fantastic
because it's big in its brush but you can press the button and the Firefox will load, you can press
this and Skype will load. It's what the user wants a tablet for. They don't want miniscule buttons
and loads of switches and weird and wonderful little buttons to press. They want big brush
in your face. I want to do this right now. Yeah, so more power to the KDE people and we would
kind of touch on it just then. I think the big story of the day for us is ta-da. Ubuntu 11.04,
the Natty Narwar, and we'll try and ignore the code name. 11.04 is released today, the official
release. Complete with its Unity user interface which various people either love or hate but
it's like Marmites, there is no possibility of indifference, you either love it or hate it.
I've noticed that a lot of people in the last few days have been putting their defences up
already and saying yes we know it's still a work in progress. It is still a work in progress.
I mean it's not perfect, yeah. I've been using it for a week on my Samsung network and the
experience is good but it's not earthsharing. I still prefer the standard no-minute interface
but it does do the job. Yeah, I've got to say I'm still with you on that one. I posted a comparative
review on Unity and Nome 3, the Nome Shell last weekend and I'm not the only one to say this but
I don't think either of them are the finished obstacle yet. No, it still has little things that
needs to be sorted out. I mean on the podcast with FabPot Linux I lost 2.02 we'll talk about how
you shut down the computer, you have to press the alt key and then go up to the shutdown button
to actually turn the computer off. That has been sorted out as a package you can download that
will actually rectify that but it's just little things like that that should have been really
force of at the start the basics and then build upon the basics to make it better. It just doesn't
seem right yet. I'm all for trying out a new kinds of interface. Unfortunately they both seem
to be so desperate to get rid of convention or drop down menus and hierarchical menus
but we've thrown out the baby with bathwater. You open up Unity and in application spaces
you'll get various lines of icons open up and then if there's more than you can display on the
screen it will say cn number more and even if that number is just one you have to click on that link
to see what the other extra icons are. There's no concept there of scaling things to fit the
available space. It seems a little bit for all where claims of being radical and thinking outside
the box and maybe this is a coding issue but you get to a certain point and it's very fixed and
very dogmatic in its layout and it's thinking and its usability. I think it's still got a long
way to go. I think if we give another two months like the people who are behind the scenes doing all
the coding and all the book testing see what the reports are from the field work on the books
and then produce updates that will rectify some of the issues that have currently been experienced
by the users and then give it a proper honest review then because right now it's ready but it's
still not fit for purpose. It's bleeding edge. I got a hold of I downloaded the beta 2 that was
updated on I think it was Saturday or Sunday. Put it on a USB stick. It's still not working on
smaller Intel graphics. Unity doesn't want to know my big Dell 6400 laptop at all. Just refuses
to run natively. Put it on a Dell network. That's absolutely fine because it's got a relatively
new what's that 18 18 month old Intel graphics chip on it. Unity runs fine out the box. No extra
drivers required. It's fine. You've got full 3D work size intended but that's that's one machine
out of the four that I've got here at the moment. I'm just waiting to see how many people with older
hardware are going to be lighting up the forums and the wikis saying it doesn't work.
I suppose that's where the other derivatives of Ubuntu will come into their own such as
Ubuntu, Ubuntu and Ubuntu as well because they're not using this interface. They could
see a surge in more users coming over to them. I think you've missed the most obvious one which is
mint. Yeah, I did miss that one. It's the gateway distribution isn't it really. People put
windows. Yeah. And I think the the claims not made any indication that he's in any rush to
jump to unity and some of the things that I've seen coming out of the mint camp would indicate
that they're going to stick with classic gnome because they've got their mint menu that they put
on top which is very windows like and the kind of thing that people will be used to. So we'll have
to see what what the downloads are like for 1104 in the in the short term and whether or not there's
a spike in the derivatives downloads as people decide that unity isn't for them and either
drop back onto classic gnome 2 with the classic no menus and panels or they decide that they've
had enough of canonicals dictating how the interface should work and they jump ship and go to one
of the others. Well, Linux meant you've also got the Debian based version development which is
a roll release. Yep. So that looks the last time I looked at it it was almost indistinguishable
from the Ubuntu version. Yeah, it's practically indistinguishable. I'll try and say that word.
That's easy for you to say yes. In the Debian version it's a roll in release so you install it once
and it just keeps updating itself as you update it. Yeah, you don't need to think oh well,
now Linux meant whatever the the uh it's a hooker name to give it hell and air or
restating or something. They've always given it, as you said on Linux Atlas, we're giving it a dodgy
name. You can cut that a bit out. Yes. Debian edition is a roll in edition. It's just got a time stamp
for when it was created that ice I was created but the other one which based on Ubuntu all have
code names. So Linux meant 11 will be some woman's name and then again. Mint 10 was Julia
which was one of the more sensible names that they've used. It doesn't sound like a Russian street
walker. I'll cut that bit out as well. Yeah. We'll watch the stats for 1104 and see what the uptake
is like. Any more news? I think we have covered all of them. We've covered what we're going to cover.
Feedback. You can post comments and feedback on the podcast page at fullcirclemagazine.org
forward slash podcast. Send us a comment to podcast at fullcirclemagazine.org. You can also send us
a comment by recording an audio clip of no more than 30 seconds and sending it to the same address.
Comments and audio may be edited for length. Please remember this is a family friendly show.
Okay shall we wrap up? I think we should yes.
Excellent. It's going dark here and I can't actually see my keyboard anymore.
So we've probably been on for too long. Well it's been good to have you on. Change of host. I can now use
you as a a stick to beat Wilkins and Ed with and say if you don't behave yourselves I've got a reserve
reserve host waiting in the train. It seems to get subbed on the pitch. That's all right. I'd love to
have you back on another show. Keep us up to date with some of the other events that you've got lined up.
We'll try and we'll try and promote a few more of those as well. Get people out and about and
get involved. Communitize the community. Oh sorry that's copyright downlink isn't it?
We'll say good night. Thanks very much Les. We'll see you on the next one and thank you everybody
for listening. This has been full circle. Thank you very much. I'm Robin Catling. Good night.
Thank you for listening to H.P.R. sponsored by Carol.net. So head on over to C-A-R-O dot
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