Liberty leading the people

It's amazing to see the courage of the Iranian women during the recent protests in Tehran. One girl called Neda even paid with her life for taking a stand against the regime. We can only hope that her death was not in vain and that the people in Iran, especially the women, can finally overcome the oppression.















Edit: I added some more pictures and exchanged the others for higher resolution versions, taken from The Big Picture where a lot of other pictures from the Iran election can be found. Additionaly, I chose to exchange the photoshopped middle finger picture for the unaltered original and decided to also include a picture of Neda - as gruesome as it is, it just wasn't right to exclude it.

Internet censorship

Much has happended during the last days. Not only is the Pirate Party of Germany now represented in the federal parliament after a former member of the social democrats, Jörg Tauss, switched sides over a dispute on internet censorship. But we also have seen a practical example on how internet censorship works during the recent protests in Iran. Even in Iran, which is much more repressive than our western democracies, it is impossible to suppress information. Just check out #iranelection on twitter, the news comes in so fast, it's impossible to read everything.

But the development in Iran does not only prove that it is impossible to enforce censorship on the internet, it also shows that liberty cannot be taken for granted. It has to be defended against the government, e.g. by joining Tor or Freenet.

Linux on a stick

Before setting up my new server, I decided to prepare a USB drive with an Ubuntu Live installer.

There are numerous advantages over a CD. A USB drive can easily be carried around, e.g. on a keychain, so we will always have access to our Ubuntu Live system. Updating it is as easy as copying the new version to the drive. There is no need to burn a new CD. The particular setup I used also allows for modifications to be saved to the drive. It's no longer necessary to change the keyboard settings everytime the system is booted. Even more important is the ability to install additional software on the stick. This allows us to use it as a rescue system in situations where there is no Internet access available but special software packages or drivers are necessary to access the crashed system.

Basically, I just followed the guide "A better way to create a customized USB drive with Ubuntu Live on it". Please take note of the comment at the bottom of the page as I encountered the same problem and had to use menu.lst instead of grub.conf for it to work. I only deviated from the guide in one way: I reserved most of the space of the USB drive for an encrypted filesystem. But this will be a topic for another article.

There is also an automated way to install Ubuntu on the USB drive, but then the whole space of the drive is used with no option to add an encrypted partition later on.