[Ubuntu-US-CA] Project: Letters to our Representatives

[George Mulak]

Thank you Peter for chiming in.  What you say makes a lot of sense.  Nathan, as always, has been patient and helpful in the Ubuntu hours and is much appreciated.

I agree with both of you, end-user events are best.  I would, however, love to let our legislature know that there are competitive products out there making a difference in people's lives.  Software that is empowering them, and not hobbling them.

Sincerely,
George Mulak

From: ubuntu-us-ca-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com [mailto:ubuntu-us-ca-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com] On Behalf Of Peter Sullivan
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2013 12:44 PM
To: Ubuntu US California
Subject: Re: [Ubuntu-US-CA] Project: Letters to our Representatives

Hi All,

Although I am new to this group - not new to Linux or Ubuntu - I feel I must chime in at this time.  While raising awareness of the benefits of FOSS/Ubuntu is laudable and likely could save the CA gov't boatloads of cash, the UDS is hardly the venue to promote awareness.  Talks about upstart vs system.d, SELinux implementation, APIs and system calls etc will only have non-tech folk looking at their watches very, very quickly.  I agree w/ the previous statement that an invitation to a user-focused (don't care for the term 'consumer' much) event/forum holds a greater probability for success in raising awareness and generating interest.  This is our aim, yes?  Then let's not shoot ourselves in the foot by boring them to tears first.

A practical example: Today US-CERT listed (I'm on their list) the following rather extreme warning re UPnP (link vetted): http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/922681 which in essence means shutting down at the router level all UDP traffic on port 1900.  Now to us this is a simple task.  How many of our elected representatives would have a clue?  Not many I assure you, though the page above does contain a link to Rapid7 that has issued a Windoze tool for determining said vulnerability along w/ remediation.  My question stands: how many would know to go into their... disable port 1900 across their LAN/WLAN?  So if that is 'voodoo' for them, a developer (the key word some are overlooking here) summit is way out of their league.  As a 'proof' I would offer that former Congresswoman Jane Harman who was a ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee had her home network (my best friend was her aid) set up as WEP speaks volumes.

Bests,

Peter
On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 11:57 AM, Nathan Haines <nhaines at ubuntu.com<mailto:nhaines at ubuntu.com>> wrote:
On 01/29/2013 11:36 AM, George Mulak wrote:
These are true and good ideas Nathan.  No one wants to hurt Ubuntu or UDS in any way that I know of.  Would you help us develop this or give us direction?

Well, as I stated before I think it's a harmful idea, so no, I could not ethically help develop the plan unless someone had a convincing argument that inviting policymakers to UDS would be helpful to policymakers and not harmful to UDS.  My only suggestion until then is to start by collaborating on a justification for the plan.

While I am ready to be convinced, my recommendation would be to abandon this idea and instead focus policymakers at end-user oriented events.


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Nathan Haines
Ubuntu - http://www.ubuntu.com/

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