I'm sure most of you have heard about the rather big story of Lower Merion School District allegedly spying on students using laptops in their school issued machines. As more news comes out about this, I'm personally getting more and more disturbed by it.

I think my views are somewhat unpopular, but I have a real problem with the basic premise that high school students (or any students) are untrustworthy and need anything approaching the sort of monitoring that went on. Even if we assume for a moment that they only ever used it as claimed, to recover stolen laptops, it seems to me even this was aimed at keeping students honest by not allowing them to steal these machines and sell them. While I don't question that such a thing may happen, I believe that protecting against it in this manner is not ideal, at best.

The issue isn't just a few laptops, and even if we find this school district was in fact using this software to spy on other occasions, I think it goes much further than just this story. In the grand scheme, this isn't even important. What IS important is the slow erosion of rights of our students. Students today are told they essentially have no rights beyond the right to an education. This incident is just an implementation of this policy, of showing these kids that they really don't have any rights, in or out of school. Month after month, new stories surface of how students are being punished or at least spoken to for things they are doing outside of school, for posts they are posting on line, for pictures they are taking and sending to friends. Why is this tolerated still?

Our rights are not something to just let slip away, and teaching our youth that they are mutable and unimportant is no way to raise the next generation in this nation. This is a deep issue with national, and even worldwide implications, not just a few pictures from a students laptop. Amidst all the chaos around this issue, lets not forget the big picture.

These kids are tomorrows adults. Start treating them like it.

We're continuing to finalize details on fosscon, with registration now open and sponsorship opportunities posted. I'm terrifically excited about the prospect of this event and can't wait to see it realized.

We've also just moved, which is adding to the chaos... of course, by just moved, I mean we moved nearly a month ago, and we're still settling in, but the best part of this for me is clearly setting up my new basement workshop. There is TONS more space in this new house, and this means I have plenty of space to setup my equipment and have a little fun... finally. The only bad news is it looks like my o-scope gave up the ghost shortly after the move.

All in all, love the new place, hated the move, and hopefully we can stick here a decade at least.

This June, in Rochester. Fosscon is a free and open source software conference, assembled by the foss community and for the foss community. You can be a part of fosscon. All of us involved are very excited as this great project moves forward! Take a look at http://fosscon.org, registration will open soon. Besides checking out the website feel free to drop in #fosscon on chat.freenode.net to talk to others involved in fosscon.

Tomorrow I'll be heading to CPOSC, and speaking there too, it seems. It's been quite a while since I've spoken in front of a group larger than perhaps a dozen, so here's to not fainting.

The event looks like lots of fun, and I'll know at least a few people there (lyz and waltman) so well, away we go. Heading to the train.

Yesterday I received some spam. Just another day on the internet, right? Well, this spam was special.

Got back from SELF about 2 weeks ago. It was by far the best FOSS event I've been to, not that I've been to that many.
It bugs me that there aren't very many good ones. Ohio linuxfest is well spoken of, but it's pretty far, not that SELF was any better.

In just a couple weeks I'll be heading over to Southeast Linuxfest in South Carolina. I don't know if anyone out there would like to join me, but it looks like loads of fun. I'll be running a booth on behalf of freenode so if you are in the area, come check it out. More details at http://southeastlinuxfest.org/

I love irssi. I don't know any other irc client that even comes close for the sort of use I do. Recently, I've taken (with LOTS of help) to writing some scripts for irssi, the most useful of which (to me anyway) is one that logs channels I'm in to a mysql DB. I then use this DB along with some other scripts to get information about what is going on within my irssi client in a more convenient form.

So, I think I like this. Since I'm using ubuntu on the desktop (at least in the places I use a linux desktop, which no, is not everywhere) debian on the backend is working out for me. I'm playing around with some stuff that I think is rather cool (irssi scripting and the like). Those of you who know me well, know I spend a lot of time on irc, so I'm hoping to make something useful of all this. I think I have some ideas for irssi scripting that could make for some very interesting stuff.

So about a week ago I moved my irssi VPS from centos to debian. Funny stuff, because some things that just didn't work before are now. Specifically my cell phone (a windows mobile 6 device from which I use pocketty) now renders irssi properly when I ssh in and attach screen. This NEVER worked correctly for me before, multi-line messages would overwrite other messages and not scroll right. I don't know where the breakage was, but it works now and I'm very happy about it.

I'm rather preferring apt-get over yum too, for the most part. Aptitude rocks for a text only box.