Bob Marley is a very special artist for me. I was introduced to his music approximately two decades ago when I was still a kid by my dear brother Aziz. I still have vivid memories of how Aziz and I used to listen to Bob's tapes on the Sharp player we had in our room. I kind of enjoyed the music but I was not totally in love with it. Remember, I was a kid.

Fast-forward to 1991. Aziz who left for the U.S. in 1985 came back to Morocco during the summer and he brought with him many of his CDs and of course, he had many Marley albums. As a gift he brought me a Sony portable CD player (my first one!). I ended up listening to these albums in an almost infinite loop, broken now and then with Michael Franks's Blue Pacific and Skin Dive.

Survival, Kaya, Uprising and so many others. I was totally hooked. Addicted would be a better word since his music totally took residence in my heart and my soul. His words are so wonderful! Looking at my CD shelf I can count 17 albums of Bob Marley plus the Songs of Freedom CD set.

Last year, I was reading a Vibrations issue when I stumbled upon a review of Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley's latest album. Damian is the youngest son of Bob. I knew of course that Bob had many children. And while I heard of Ziggy and Julian, I had never heard of Damian.

The review made by Vibrations convinced me that this was an album that I should listen to as soon as possible so I ordered it a few minutes after I was done reading my magazine. I received Welcome to Jamrock two days later and indeed it is a very very good album. Damian is very good at deejaying and while his voice sounds at times a lot like Bob's, he has his own musical world even if it is heavily based on Reggae. I loved the album so much that I featured one of the songs in Wonderful Songs, Jan'06.

Yesterday, I was at Damian's concert at Paris' Elysées Montmartre. The concert was excellent and Damian was impressive. I wasn't at the Lyceum back in 1975 to see his father (hey! I was three months old) but I think Damian has nothing to be ashamed of. During more than 90 minutes, he successfully entertained the public as far as I could see. I had been so enthralled that I didn't feel the minutes fly by even if I was standing all the time (there's no chairs at Elysées Montmartre).

By the end of the concert, Damian sang some Bob songs such as Africa Unite, Zimbabwe, Could You Be Loved, War and So Much Trouble In The World. The public knew the lyrics by heart and Damian often called to us to sing along. During these magical moments, he really created the illusion that it was not him who was singing but his father. He is truly the heir of one of the most influential artists of all times.

So I would like to thank Bob and Damian Marley for making such great music that makes me feel so good. And of course I would like to thank Aziz for all the things he has done, consciously or not, for my musical education.

To finish this post, I would like you to read and think carefully about the following part of War's lyrics:

Until the philosophy which hold one race superior
And another
Inferior
Is finally
And permanently
Discredited
And abandoned -
Everywhere is war -
Me say war.

That until there no longer
First class and second class citizens of any nation
Until the colour of a man’s skin
Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes -
Me say war.

That until the basic human rights
Are equally guaranteed to all,
Without regard to race -
Dis a war.

That until that day
The dream of lasting peace,
World citizenship
Rule of international morality
Will remain in but a fleeting illusion to be pursued,
But never attained -
Now everywhere is war - war.

|

Pre-orders of CD sets of the next version of OpenBSD, 3.9, are now open. OpenBSD 3.9 will be released in May 1, 2006. The CD sets will be shipped around this date.

If you want to support the OpenBSD project, please pre-order the CD sets. The money we get from the CD sales allow us to further develop the operating system and the associated projects such as OpenSSH, OpenNTPD, and OpenBGPD.

European users can order directly from Wim, a fellow OpenBSD developer located in Belgium. Other users should use the International site.

According to ZDNet, a Swedish man set up a challenge inviting people to hack a Mac Mini. The challenge was over shortly after since someone succesfully gained root access to the machine and he did so, the report said, in 30 minutes.

If I stop here without giving you real meat to chew on, you'd end up thinking that Mac OS X is not secure and you'll be ill-witted to use this operating system for hosting your valuable data. But MacWorld gave a few more, very interesting details:

Anyone that wanted to hack the machine was given access to the machine through a local account (which could be accessed via SSH), so the Mac mini wasn’t hacked from outside — root access was actually gained from a local user account.


Aha! That's interesting. Anyone working in the I.T. Security field knows that, most of the time, when someone gain local access it's game over. Local exploits are often much more powerful and deadly than remote ones. That's why we have layered network security, security by default, and such. It's like giving access to as many strangers as possible to a besieged castle without knowing if they are enemies or foes. If only one stranger heads for the king's lair (which might not be that secret) and slays the poor man, what good would do your 2-mile thick walls, 250.000 soldiers, and all the other _external_ security measures you have put in place? If I were the stranger who slew the king, first thing I'd do is behead the security officer of the castle.

Mac OS X has reasonable protections against outsiders. But when you punch holes through these protections and let outsiders become insiders, what do you expect? How many operating systems are there that will do better?

I think the challenge was a very stupid move to attract attention. But it spreads FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) as a side, maybe wanted, effect.

Ali Farka Touré, 67 years old, died yesterday.

I spent last evening enjoying Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley's music at a concert he gave at Elysées Montmartre (more on this later). When I came back at home, I read some news before going to sleep. That's how I learned of the death of one of Africa's best musicians.

These are very sad news. Ali Farka Touré, who was also known as "Monsieur le Maire" (Mister Mayor, since he was the Mayor of Niafunké, Mali), produced great records. The Source, Talking Timbuktu (with Ry Cooder) and In The Heart Of The Moon (with the Kora genius Toumani Diabaté) are my favorite.

Ali, you will always stay in our minds and our hearts. Thank you so much for sharing with us this great music of yours. You will be missed.

Sincerly.

I finally took the time to install the latest release of Solaris Express (02/06, build 31a) for testing purposes. My U10 not being exactly a speedrunner, I installed only Core System Support. That's about 869MB according to the Solaris installer; the Entire Distribution is 5438MB.

The installation went smoothly. And upon login, here is what I can see:

Sun Microsystems Inc. SunOS 5.11 snv_31 October 2007

Warning Will Robinson! Danger ahead! This made me check the clock thrice using independant sources. It appears that Sun Microsystems is way ahead of the competition. Besides DTrace, containers, self-healing and other technologies, it successfully integrated Future Jump(tm) to the latest release of Solaris. What an achievement!

OK, let's see how Future Jump(tm) works by trying to read a file:

# id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root)
# cd /etc
# ls -l ftp*
total 14
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 1518 Jan 3 10:01 ftpaccess
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 946 Jan 3 10:01 ftpconversions
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 104 Jan 3 10:01 ftpgroups
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 108 Jan 3 10:01 ftphosts
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 114 Jan 3 10:01 ftpservers
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 198 Jan 3 10:01 ftpusers

Good! Let's read ftpusers:

# more ftpusers
ftpusers: No such file or directory

Future Jump(tm) prevents root (the almighty root!) from reading /etc/ftpusers which according to ls exists and contains 198 bytes of data. But Future Jump(tm) sees through the future and it knows that this file won't exist anymore starting from October 2007. So why bother reading a file that won't exist anymore in a year and a half? Maybe because the Good Guys at Sun engineering didn't bother integrating an SSH service out of the box in Core System Support so we have to stick to ol' daddy ftpd and that we would like to do so as root?

Welcome to the eighth edition of Wonderful Songs, my monthly blog entry outlining ten exceptional songs I listened to during the past month.

If you have read the previous editions of Wonderful Songs, you know how paramount sharing is for me. It's all about broadening one's horizons. You know also by now that I listen to different kinds of Music. If you hear someone states that she listens to Rock or Jazz only, ask her what other styles she knows about or tried. I do listen to many genres because I do care when people share with me something they consider important or enjoyable. And I don't say "No! If it's not Reggae then forget it".

I listen to what they have to say and I try. Sometimes, I don't like the songs. artists or albums they suggest. But I keep a reference to those somewhere because taste and state-of-mind are an evolving beast. So even some of the genres I suggest are not in your auditory dough, try them please.

And as always, I'd like to hear from you. If you have suggestions, comments, and such I'm all ears. You can either send me an email (saad dot docisland dot org) or use the blog commenting system.

This edition introduces a small enhancement since moving my blog to the new dedicated server. The pictures are now clickable and they will take you to a website where you can listen to music samples whenever possible. I mainly link to eMusic.com, Amazon.com or its siblings, or the artist/label's website.

Offer
For those interested in getting an eMusic subscribtion, you can try it for free for 14 days and you'll get 50 free downloads. If you allow me to invite you to eMusic and after you fully subscribe (that is after the 14 days of trial), I will get 50 free downloads myself that I will share with you: first you'll get half of the free downloads I get. I will download 25 songs of my liking and download 25 songs of yours which I will make you available for download and delete from my hard drive. Second, it will allow me to sample more music that might end up in the future editions of Wonderful Songs. Send me an email if you are interested. Remember that eMusic songs are 100% DRM free!

[Folk] Emily, Stephen Fretwell
From the album Magpie.

Stephen Fretwell has a Dylanesque style of Music. His melancholic voice is very nice and it stands out on Emily, a relaxing song where an acoustic guitar is the only instrument used. The lyrics are also quite good. As a whole, the album is well worth buying if you like relaxing, folkish music that has a slightly melancholic tone.

[Smooth Jazz] St. Lucia, Keith Robinson
From the album Peaceful Flight.

Two months ago, I was randomly searching through a stack of used CDs at Jussieu Music's Jazz shop when I fell on Peaceful Flight. I've never heard of Keith Robinson before that day and unless the search keywords I used are bad, there is very few data of interest about him and his music online. I wonder why this artist has drawn so little an attention with such a good album. While I bought the album for no particular reason besides its cover, I don't regret it a single moment. The guitar play on St. Lucia is very cool and the addition of background voices is a nice touch.

[World] Tapha Niang, Toumani Diabaté's Symmetrical Orchestra
From the album Boulevard De l'Indépendance. To be released on March 26th 2006

No picture available

Toumani Diabaté is one of the best Kora players in the World. I really love his mastership of this amazing 21-string African instrument. After Toumani's excellent partnership with Ali Farka Touré on the awesome In The Heart Of The Moon album not so long ago, he will surely treat us to excellent African Music on his soon-to-be-released album Boulevard De l'Indépendance where he invited many Western African musicians from Guinea, Senegal and Mali (his home country). To prepare us for this, he released Tapha Niang. Believe me, you will get a shock after hearing this 7 minutes song. I can't wait to get the album. eMusic subscribers might want to hear some of his previous work. Just search for "Toumani Diabate" on the website. My favorite album so far is New Ancient Strings with fellow Kora master, Ballaké Cissoko. The other albums are OK but nothing as good as Tapha Niang.

[Electronica] "Coumbite" Mesi Bon Dyé, David Walters
From the album Awa.

I've never heard something that sounds like Awa. It is a very good but strange album that can't really be classified in the Electronica genre. David Walters is a former French athlete who turned musician because of an injury. He has a nice voice and he sings in Creole and English. I don't listen much to Electronica because I often find this kind of music aggressive and unequally balanced. However, Walters distills just the right dose of computer-generated loops and mix them with great art to Folk and percussions to create enjoyable sounds. "Coumbite" Mesi Bon Dyé illustrates this process best. I listened to it a lot during the last month.

[Jazz] I Believe I'll Dust My Broom, Pyeng Threadgill
From the album Sweet Home: The Music Of Robert Johnson. Available from eMusic

Pyeng Threadgill, the daughter of the multi-talented artist Henry Threadgill, does an excellent job when revisiting Robert Johnson. The task at hand is far from being easy but Pyeng handles it quite well. I Believe I'll Dust My Broom is a well-balanced song that makes Pyeng's voice shine.

[Hip-Hop] Fly That Know (feat. MF Doom), Talib Kweli
From the album Right About Now (The Official Sucka Free Mix CD). Available from eMusic

Talib Kweli is a very good Hip-Hop artist and I like his slighty Old Schoolish style. His voice and flow are among the best in today's Hip-Hop generation. Fly That Know features MF Doom, another talented artist (featured last month on Wonderful Songs for his work with Danger Mouse). His voice balances nicely Talib's. The songs also features an excellent rhythm,

[Folk] Talk Of The Town, Jack Johnson and Friends
From the album Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies from the film Curious George.

Unless you are living in a cave, you certainly heard of Jack Johnson, one of the best living artists I know of. His sweet voice and relaxing guitar play makes his songs an excellent way to relax all-day long. I have all of his records and I consider them all excellent. Launch Talk Of The Town and close your eyes. You are instantly transported to some imaginary beach full of coconut trees. The weather is sweet and the green sea is calm. You are walking on the white sand barefooted. You feel its mild heat and it warms your heart. You go under a coconut tree and get some shading from the sun. You lay down. Sweet dreams.

[Reggae] Mama, Bantu feat. Ayuba
From the album Fuji Satisfaction. Available from eMusic

Bantu and fellow Ayuba give us here an nice Reggae variation composed of Roots, Ragga (mild), and tropical rhythms. The percussions are great. Definitely a resfreshing song.

[World] Land's End, Baka Beyond
From the album Journey Beyond. Available from eMusic

Land's End is a pleasing song that blends Celtic and African styles with a bit of New Age in a spacey setup. Baka Beyond consists of musicians from Europe and Africa.

[Electronica] Night, Midival Punditz
From the album Midival Punditz. Available from eMusic

Night has nothing to do with the ugly patchwork practiced by the London's Indian Electronica scene. It is an enjoyable and song which features a sweet female voice and good beats. Midival Punditz are a bit heavy on the synth side. But except for this minor grip, it's nice. However, some of the other songs of the album are subpar. So I don't recommend it unless you have money to spare.

Le numéro de Mars 2006 de PC Expert, un magazine informatique français, contient un dossier fourni sur les virus.

Philippe Roure, co-auteur du dossier m'a consulté sur un certain nombre de sujets et notamment les IDS/IPS, les débordements de tampon et de tas, la qualité des logiciels, et la rétroconception binaire utilisée pour créer très rapidement des exploits à partir de correctifs de vulnérabilité. Je suis cité à deux reprises pages 56 et 57.

Ceci est ma deuxième contribution auprès de ce magazine.