Linux format frees cover art

Due to the ammount of people asking for it, the Linux Format magazine has decided to release it's cover art as Wallpaper. This wallpapers are freed under a Creative Commons licence, similar to the one that protects and frees this blog contents.

This licences are copyleft type, quite similar to the GNU licence, which means that as long as some simple conditions are respected, the content is completely free. So, if you respect them, you'll receive respect and confidence in return. This is what Copyleft means (which make it's opposed to copyright)

I've already downloaded and have one of this wallpapers installed. It's the wallpaper number 4 that rotates every 16 hours (this is a feature of KDE4.x, which is default in my Kubuntu). This wallpapers where you can see great artwork, with an attention to detail that adds to form the whole picture.

I highly recomend them, so visit the page where this wallpapers are released, and remember to ask for the ones you want that are still not featured, as they will add them when asked for.

New in Linux? Coming from Windows? Please read this.

Greetings. You are coming into a new territory. But contrary to the space you used to inhabit, that didn't belong to you, this new territory has a piece of free land with your name on it.

It sounds a little too good to be true, but it is true. There are some things we must make clear, though. This piece of land, your piece of land, is inside a really big terrain of millions of free pieces of land, each one with it's owner.

That's why now that you are moving into our neighborhood, ours, of every one of us, yourselves included, I want to tell you to pay a little attention to the way we tend to act, because if you adapt you'll have a really good time here. And we will be adapting too, you are not the only ones supposed to do so. We will also learn from your habits, and if we find some we like, we'll make it our own.

This is a weird neighborhood, in it we share our tools, and build together. It's something we do freely, without obligation, and that has a lot of benefits. We also like to teach how to use the tools, though you might want to forgive us because we sometimes use a technical language, it's what suits us more. The manuals that come with the tools are sometimes written too technically, but don't worry, there are some neighbors that are able to translate things to more human languages, you'll only have to find them.

This is a really special neighborhood, where the better builders are listened to, a sort of meritocracy. As we have one mouth and two ears, we believe it's common sense to hear twice as much as we speak, because that benefits us. We just have to remember that sometimes they don't want to talk, and that they talk for people that understand them. Once more, please don't complain. Instead, search for the neighbors that are capable of lowering that information to a more human language. That's the best for us all, this way everyone has it's own.

Please, don't demand. Nobody here owes something to you. Just ask nicely for help and you'll receive. We tend to consider important that you tried yourself to build the bed, even when now it seems no mattress will fit it's weird triangular shape. This is important, because by showing you tried and made an effort, you just climbed a few steps in this meritocracy ladder, and you helped establish some common ground to start talking, and talking leads to helping. And helping leads to a good bed to dream on.

Please, help us help you. Let's make this territory a place where every one of us can live in peace and liking it.

A new type of brute force attack

Till now, it was easy to spot brute force attacks. A brute force attack is one where attackers are using dictionaries to try and guess correct combinations of username and password.

As those dictionaries are really long, this type of attack used to be easily detectable, because the attacker had to put a big part of his machine to the task and so he tended to do a lot of attempts per second, so this was easily spotted by most firewalls.

But since the the technology to herd large zombie computer farms was developed, this is changing in a subtle way. For better understanding, a zombie computer is a dormant infected computer, and has inside a virus, worm, rootkit or back door that allows the attacker enter and use commands from that machine as if it were his own.

A zombie computer farm is a group of dormant computers infected by the same person, so he can make this group of computers send massive quantities of spam, a little each one. He also can use them to host webpages with ilegal content, whithout risking being traced. The last use was a joint attack to some server, trying to get a Denial of Service provocked by the sheer ammount of virtual attackers.


However, once more this evil minded people have shown they have brains up there and know how to use them. Using zombie computer farms, they aren't using them to do mindless ping attacks. They are now using them in a step by step kind of attack, where each zombie uses a small part of a far bigger dictionary to do spaced attempts.

So, instead of getting a lot of quick attacks from a single IP, now we get tens, hundreds or thousands computers, each one slowly and patiently testing a combination of username and password.


This is almost impossible to detect by automatic means, you need to do a manual revision of firewall logs to check the attempts to access the system over a long time to detect the pattern. Luckily, there's some hope. Most zombies seem to come from a pretty limited range of IPs, so the people over at Begin Linux posted a method to block most zombie machines with iptables, using a list of offending IPs gathered by spamhaus.

In case you were wondering about the idea mentioned in the first post, here it is.

There's a game studio made by only two people, that released an excellent game for Windows, called World of Goo. I recently saw that the piracy on this game is over 95%, and it's only a 20 dollars game.

This game is being pirated because it's really good, but with the same mindlessness that they pirate big chain's 40 or 60 dollar games. And that's something that's completely unfair, because this isn't some impersonal game chain, here they are going against a pair of extremely imaginative programmers that released an addictive, intelligent and anything but monotonous game,

The game also features a generous whole chapter demo, so you can't complain that you can't test it before buying it.

Now, the fun begins. Some of you will ask, what does this have to do with Linux anyway? Easy to answer. Lately this programmers are working in a Linux native port, and that gives us an amazing opportunity.

Imagine for a moment what would happen if Linux users bought more original copies than Windows users. I can answer what could happen. Those innovative programmers will make next game for Linux, and not Windows.

Even more, when the Linux version of World of Goo is released and we buy a lot of copies, this will bring a press release of enormous importance "There are more Original copies of a Linux version of a game sold than for Windows". This sends three important messages: There are games for Linux, there's money to be made programming for Linux and, more important of all, there's no need for anticopy systems under Linux to make people buy the games.

This is why I make this political declaration: I'm now saving the 20 dollars to buy the game once it's released for Linux. I strongly suggest you all do the same.

Now, following my own license, I say that this idea originally appeared on
Demasiado Personal, and as long as that credit is given this can be freely copied.