Proprietary Software Sucks (but F/OSS Is Poorly Documented)

A few weeks ago, I suffered a complete and total computing-system breakdown. This was problematic, as I needed to use financial data (I am, after all, enthralled to the US government), resumes (I am, after all, self-employed), and other essential data from those drives. This was Not Good!

How did this happen? Well. . .  I am not entirely sure. I have always been dismissive of those who succumb to virii–what were they thinking, not updating their systems, not running good anti-spy-mal-virus software, not working with a good firewall, clicking “yes” willy nilly. Ha. Shows me. I had a reasonably secure system. I was up to date. I was using a good combination of security software packages. And yet something spread throughout my network and infected everything (except, perhaps, Her laptop, ‘lil’, although a we did have to get rid of a few funny & perhaps unrelated daemons). I am thinking that some combination of security holes in flash/java/Windows was the likely culprit, but there is no way to know for sure. Why? Because the only people who can mess around with the relevant source code are restricted from sharing it with the outside world. Does this make it more difficult for the nasty people of the world to break into these systems? At first, sure. But, once an exploit has been discovered, it takes quite a while for those few “trusted” software engineers to fix it (and even longer to get it rolled out to the likes of you and me).

Where did this leave me? Desperately needing to get some sort of secure system up and running. And I turned to Linux.

And nothing would run on my desktop. Not even Linux Mint or Ubuntu (two of the most userfriendly distros out there). Why? Again, I was foiled by proprietary systems & safeguards. My system is about three years old, though it was fairly cutting-edge when I built it. I wanted to watch blu-ray movies on it. So, I picked the appropriate graphics cards, crazy cables, TV, and software. . . She and I spent many a lovely evening watching Wall-E and the Omega Man. . . and now, this seems to mostly for naught.

What does this have to do with the proprietary problems foiling my attempt to rebuild my electronic-life? Ah. Well. The Good People of the Motion Picture Association decided that they are Really Scared of Piracy. In fact–it costs them One Hundred Trillion Dollars every second*, and they are firmly convinced that Movie Piracy is the Original Sin. And they convinced the hardware manufacturers to adopt a crazy data protection scheme in order to be “certified” to run.

Linux, being a free and open operating system, doesn’t properly fit into this system. getting it to run has been a real pain. more another day.

*okay, not really, but their actual data is based on some really crazy assumptions such as “people would go see every movie that they may watch streaming over the net,” and “people in China can afford to purchase “official” DVDs of movies” and “most movies that get made are good.” Ha.