kaos.theory: fractal blog

I just ordered a couple T-shirts from the OpenBSD project and thought it would be a good time to ask others to contribute as well. Please take the time to give back to the community that gives so much to you. There are several ways to help open source projects, either with time or money. If you don’t have the money to donate take the time to help by submitting useful and complete bug reports or by submitting new ports for OpenBSD or by running a Tor server. Those are just a few ideas. Feel free to contact members of various OSS groups and ask them how you can help. We, of course, will be contributing back to the technologies and projects we use to build Anonym.OS in many capacities.

Here are a few links to help you get started:

OpenBSD
Tor
EFF

For those wondering why it took soooooo long for SF mirrors to make Anonym.OS available:

Comment By: R L

Date: 2006-01-17 22:59

Message:

Logged In: YES

user_id=1054

Hello,

First off, I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused
you. It is *not* normal for new releases to take three days
to sync. The SF.net mirror system is at something of a cusp
point right now where many of our mirrors are starting to
run out of space. Because of this, we’re working on
restructuring our mirror system so the mirrors always have
at least the “newest stuff”, and as much of the older files
as possible. This isn’t in place yet, but in the mean time
I will manually sync your project. I’ll update this ticket
when I’ve finished this.

Technorati Tags: miscellaneous

Well, it’s been a busy three days. I’ve received dozens of emails following our first public beta release of Anonym.OS, and I hope everyone will be patient with me as I try to respond to each email. In the meantime, I can address a few of the more common questions:

1. Where can I download Anonym.OS?

There are currently two download sites — Sourceforge and LinuxTracker

2. Is there an MD5 digest for the ISO?

Don’t know how I missed posting this with the ISO, sorry. :-/ aa3907cbe3220f57e1c1a1bbaec062ef

3. What do I have to do to burn/boot the CD?

You do not have to extract the ISO. Just burn it right from Windows, Mac OS, Linux or BSD and boot right off the CD.

Everything else I haven’t addressed here, I will be addressing in individual email responses, and I will try to compile the more pertinent points into a FAQ that everyone can refer to in the future.

Technorati Tags: bsd, presentations, privacy, security

For those still having problems downloading, please accept my sincerest apologies. We had absolutely no idea how popular Anonym.OS would become, nor how quickly.

In roughly 36 hours since it’s release, we’ve now seen over 190,000 downloads of Anonym.OS via Sourceforge alone, amounting to roughly 110 TB served! One hundred and ten terabytes. Holy crap.

Additionally, we’ve had over 2800 successful snatches via Bittorrent and have had over 600 active seeders and up to 2500 total peers at peak. Therefore, if you’re having problems getting a copy, give it a while and try again; all of the mirrors that have a copy of the file are busy, and there are over 200 peers still downloading the torrent as I write this. Good luck, and safe surfing!

Technorati Tags: bsd, privacy, security

First of all, I’d like to take a moment to express, on behalf of kaos.theory, how excited and flattered we are by all of the attention that we and Anonym.OS have received. We always thought we were working on a cool project, but we really underestimated the overwhelming response that we’ve had. Scores of terabyte upon terrabytes of data have flowed and the hit counters keep on ticking. It appears that privacy is as big of a concern for a large segment of the population as it is for us.

That being said, there have been a few comments made and viewpoints published that we would like to address while we have the bully pulpit provided by the good folks at digg, Slashdot, Reddit, Wired News, and Ars Technica, among others.
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Well, Anonym.OS just got Slashdotted. Guess we’ll see how well Dreamhost stands up to the challenge, eh?

Technorati Tags: bsd, miscellaneous, privacy, security

Since this picture didn’t seem to make it into the Wired article, I thought it would be nice to post it here for those who haven’t yet booted Anonym.OS.

I also really liked this picture from our photo shoot, though it didn’t make it to print. Great idea, decent execution. Kinda captures the spirit of Anonym.OS, wouldn’t you say?

Technorati Tags: bsd, privacy, security, shmoocon

For those that didn’t see us at ShmooCon, our Anonym.OS presentation went off superbly! Unfortunately, it seems that there have been problems downloading the ISO via SourceForge. Out of approximately 21,000 download attempts, it seems that only a few have been successful.
Although it looks like the image is now slowly propagating across all of the SF mirrors, we’ve set up a torrent at LinuxTracker.org so that everyone can grab a copy now.

Look forward to everyone’s feedback — get it, use it, and tell us what you think!

Technorati Tags: bsd, presentations, privacy, security, shmoocon

I’m sitting in the back seat of my lovely friend Lisa’s car, stopped at a light. Talking on the phone to the lovely Dr. Madelyn Hatter.

Screeching truck, on the right, sound of brakes. BOOM, face hits laptop, bluetooth headset… gone. Ouch, mouth is bleeding. Cellphone rings, it’s the Doc. “Is everyone alright? Are you guys ok?” Yes, we’re fine, I think. Bleeding cheek, coffee on pants, seats, floor. Mouth-flesh on laptop. Gross. Brand new car, three weeks old, thank god it’s mostly cosmetic damage. Fender bent, trunk shows damage. Definitely not Lisa’s fault. Still, she’s sad. “Nicest car I’ve ever owned,” she says, “for three weeks.”

What a strange, surreal, exciting… and unnecessary event for a Wednesday.

Technorati Tags: miscellaneous, puppy

As I sit here watching a presentation given via WebEx, I find myself rather critical of the presenter’s style. Although the presentation is good, this presenter seems to be plagued by the same problem I see in the majority of the presentations I attend — he is using the presentation itself as presenter notes, i.e. he is essentially reading from a number of well-written but overly-detailed slides.

Technorati Tags: events, howto, miscellaneous, presentations

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