[nmglug] February 27th

[Arlo Barnes]

Who is planning on going tomorrow? I went last week accidentally, no big
deal, just went for a walk around the block and then used the public Linux
box there.
And I noticed: not only had someone installed Firefox** because they did
not know that, aside from branding, IceWeasel is identical (I figured it
did not matter, since the reason branding had to be changed was that Debian
could not include trademarks with a restrictive license like Mozilla uses
[although obviously the code has a free license and is allowed] in their
repositories; since we [probably?] do not care about that, it seems
simplest to just leave Firefox on there and uninstall iceweasel, except it
seems I have either forgotten the root password [thought it was the same as
the username, *sfbc*] or it got changed) but Dropbox was installed and
connected to someone's account...I saved their stuff, disconnected the
account, and sent them an email telling them to leave that kind of thing
for a *private* computer.
And then I noticed how much stuff there was generally: literally gigabytes
upon gigabytes of images, video, PDFs, music, and so on tucked away in
various folders in the user directory. I moved it all to a folder on the
desktop and was going to compress it but did not get a chance before I had
to leave. If I had known who put each thing there, I would have encrypted
it and sent the respective people the key.

Much of it seemed composed of conspiracy-theory-related media, particularly
involving 9/11. I figure that is par for the course for Santa Fe, and maybe
they were paranoid enough to want the improved anonymity of a public
computer.
A lesser but still significant portion of the files were various images
that seemed to have been downloaded for the purpose of putting up as a
background; why one would need to do this for a computer at which one will
spend a few hours tops, I have no idea. Indeed, there was an interesting
sepia-tone picture of a Navajo boy running through the scrub when I got
there; it disappeared when I moved the source image into the dump folder on
the desktop.
I decided to make an image (SVG <http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/>, because
that is how I roll) to be set as the background, it would in a very basic
manner introduce people to the system, show them what is there, and ask
them to clean up after themselves (by the way, thanks to whoever set up
Firefox to delete history and so on when the session ends, things like that
are a good idea both for preserving privacy and also for general cleanup;
unfortunately, people still thought to bookmark things...). I feel like the
presence of a more 'official' background would remind people that it is a
public resource.

However, I had little time and only put up a draft image, so we will see if
it is still up tomorrow, and I plan to bring a better one on a flash drive.
If any of you know of Linux tools to match some of the Windows setups I
have seen at (for example) public libraries, but that respect user intent a
little more (restore a backup/savepoint/disk image between sessions, but do
not disallow people from downloading or installing [as non-root?] whatever
they need for that session), I would be interested to hear about them.

-Arlo James Barnes

**Not sure how they would do this without the root password, so maybe it
was one of us. Presumably whoever did it just downloaded a .deb from one of
Mozilla's sites (like getfirefox.com) thus bypassing any repositories.
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