Recently, Prime Minister Modi of India decided to abrogate Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution and fully annex Jammu and Kashmir. This article from inside Kashmir talks about police- and military-enforced curfews, internet and phones being blocked, and a general sense of oppression.
Defenders will point to Pakistan's decades-long policy of interfering in Indian-controlled parts of Jammu and Kashmir. This, in its own right, is a form of imperialism and must be opposed. However, this is no excuse for Indian imperialism.
This whole thing is complicated, right? Because there are two conflicting desires.
So a while back, I decided to get a Raspberry Pi to setup as a UPnP media server for my local network (not accessible from outside the network). Of course, the standard procedure is to install Raspbian, which is a customized Debian-based distribution that works well with the Raspberry Pi.
However, this presents an annoyance: the Raspbian repositories contain a very tiny subset of the Debian respositories. This means that your software choice is reduced by a lot and, given that I wanted this to be a “set it and forget it” type of media server, compiling and updating programs from source was mostly out of the question (especially when that software was available in Debian!). I decided to go on an adventure and convert Raspbian to Debian proper.
Note: I did this a while ago, so I may be missing some steps. Please let me know in the comments and I will update it with more details if need be!
The modern web is fantastic — it offers super advanced functionality and APIs to the point where Progressive Web Apps are actually plausible replacements for full-blown native programs (although I personally am against them, it's clear that they satisfy the use cases for the vast majority of users, given their popularity).
But the modern web is also a privacy nightmare. Trackers, analytics, you name it, it's there. Javascript APIs to sniff location, bluetooth state, battery state — it's ludicrous. Browser fingerprinting, where the interested party uses attributes of your browser (such as screen size, color depth, operating system, and so on) to track you (possibly without cookies), is more of a concern than ever. All of this on top of the fact that browser makers themselves have access to a wealth of information about the user, something that doesn't escape the notice of e.g. Google or Microsoft.
So what can we do? What can we, the humble users of these products, do to protect ourselves from all this tracking? Well…as someone who's been trying to fight this stuff since I learned about it, I've come up with a couple of tricks, which seem to work fairly well.
Before you read further, I want you, the reader, to head over to this comment on Reddit which details, with nauseating clarity, just how many times unarmed Palestinians have been killed by the IDF, Israeli police officers, or other agents of the state (with sources). Go ahead, I'll wait.
It has always been clear to me that the Israeli government actively wants to kill and displace Palestinians and that they have treated them as second-class citizens. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said:
I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid. I have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children made to wait hours at Israeli military checkpoints routinely when trying to make the most basic of trips to visit relatives or attend school or college, and this humiliation is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and regularly insulted by the security forces of the Apartheid government. It is not with rancor that we criticize the Israeli government, but with hope, a hope that a better future can be made for both Israelis and Palestinians.
The UN has criticised Israeli settlements as illegal, saying:
Israel’s establishment of settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, had no legal validity, constituting a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the vision of two States living side-by-side in peace and security, within internationally recognized borders.
and reiterated its demand that “Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.”
A couple of weeks ago, my laptop's hard drive died and I ended up purchasing a new one. I hadn't taken a backup in about 3 weeks, so I lost some progress on my research. This got me thinking about having a backup method with less friction than my current one.
My existing backup routine consists of plugging in my external hard drive, mounting it, running my backup script, taking a full image of my boot drive, and unmounting it. Not entirely awful (most of it is automated and it's mostly just waiting), but there's still friction around the initial steps of plugging in the drive and mounting it. Additionally, taking a full system image means having a read/write LVM snapshot (which becomes an issue if it is completely filled), which means I need to sit and wait around for the system image to finish — if I leave it for too long, the writes to the snapshot will accumulate, the snapshot will fill up, and bad things will happen.
I have long resisted backing up to the cloud due to the inherent privacy and security issues at stake. As the saying goes, the “cloud” is just someone else's computer, and storing your files there is giving them access should they want it. You're also at their mercy regarding security practices – if they're breached, your data is at stake. At the same time, the golden rule for backups is 3-2-1: 3 total copies of your data, 2 on-site and 1 off-site. The 2 on-site copies are satisfied by my laptop and external hard drive. But the off-site version was not something I had ever seriously considered.
After this latest incident, I decided to investigate inexpensive cloud storage providers — given that my biggest usage will be storage (and I hope I never have to download the data), I don't mind some tiny charges on downloads and other transactions. I found Backblaze B2, which offers storage for $0.005/GB/month, or $5/TB/month, after the first 10 GB free. While there are other charges (for example, $0.01/GB download charges after 1 GB free per day), my main concern is storage charges.
Taxes have always been an annoyance, at least here in America where the tax code is as long as your intestine (and just as convoluted!). But taxes are extra annoying on Linux due to the scarce availability of tax prep software on the platform. When I first started doing my taxes, I copped out and used a version of Turbo Tax on a Windows virtual machine I had (my parents had TurboTax already, so it was just a matter of installing it). But that year, I resolved to make taxes work on Linux.
Given that my taxes are generally fairly simple (I'm a graduate student...generally it's just a W-2 and 1099-INT), the biggest hurdle I faced was finding a way to (easily) fill in the PDF forms. Enter pdftk.
pdftk is a fantastic piece of software for many reasons. In this case, though, it's particularly useful because of two commands: dumpdatafields and fill_form. You might be able to see where this is going.
I want to take some time to talk about fair trade, both within the context of our current system as well as how it might look going forward.
Let's start with a fact: Our current economic system, whatever you want to call it, is exploitative. It is built on exploitation and slavery, and there isn't really any way to contest that. From chocolate to textiles to seafood, I could endlessly list industries – almost every single one is touched by this kind of exploitation on an industry-wide scale. Enter fair trade.
Fair trade is a system that has developed over the past couple of decades which attempts to bring supply-chain transparency and worker empowerment to various industries. For the moment, the certification bodies largely target agriculture and textiles. The essential idea is that a third-party certification body will verify that companies are treating their workers ethically all along the supply chain. There are also often environmental components to the certification, ensuring the company does not wantonly destroy the environment during the course of operations. Finally, the fair trade premium is used by workers for community initiatives, and this will look different depending on the community.
I implore my friends, especially my liberal ones, to stop and consider the possible implications a US-backed coup in Venezuela. Yes, Maduro is awful, No doubt about that. But a US-backed coup would most likely lead to a civil war, massive civilian casualties, and possibly a right-wing authoritarian government (e.g. a military dictatorship) — the US is great at getting those kinds of governments installed. Just. Look. At. History. Were y'all the same people who wanted to invade Iraq on a humanitarian basis? Serious question.
It's been terrifying seeing so many of my friends latch onto imperialist rhetoric, and I understand the impulse to want to do something. As Cody says, there are non-military options that include brokering diplomatic negotiations, actual humanitarian aid (rather than political destabilization masquerading as humanitarian aid), and possibly getting Maduro to agree to new elections held by the UN.
As you might have noticed from my recent posts, we are coming upon an election! I know I've spoken with many of y'all personally over the past 2 years(!), but I want to take some time here to discuss my personal reasons for voting yes for SUGSE.
Crucially, my personal experience here at Brown has been pretty great — my adviser is pretty awesome, my classes have been taught well, I don't have a requirement to TA (but can if I want to), my stipend isn't too bad, and so on. So this begs the question: why exactly do I want a union? And this is something I've thought about over the past couple of years, and the reasons have slightly evolved over time.
Note: Ideologically, I am fairly left-wing (at least in the context of American politics), so I'm already predisposed to supporting unions in that regard. While that certainly helps, it has mainly served as extra inspiration during certain rough patches.
Let's talk family separation for a second. Yes, it's very clear that what's happening now is unprecedented. Yes, it's true that Trump created the policy (not the Democrats). Yes, it's true that we should be agitating to end it once and for all (somehow I don't trust that the executive order actually did anything).
But let's not kid ourselves. We were doing inhumane, awful things to undocumented immigrants at the border well before Trump. And the kinds of stuff Trump says could very easily have been said by a Democrat. Hell, they were. Trump (or rather, Sessions) said that the purpose of separating families was to send a message. When asked what the policy should be regarding children seeking asylum from Central American countries, Clinton is clearly on the record stating that we need to send them back to send a message to their parents. Obama, too, has defended his actions regarding family detention, saying that we need to send the parents a message. I could go back further, but hopefully this is sufficient to show that this kind of dubious rationale is not only not new, but also bipartisan.