Centralized versus distributed version control is one of the bigdiscussion topics in the field. Being distributed complicatesthe software, and CVS and Subversion (the two version controlsystems most widely used for open source) are both centralized.Recently, Ian Bicking has written some interesting articles on the issue, in Centralized vs Decentralized and its part 2 .

I believe that open source development needs distributed versioncontrol. The argument why this is necessary is a bit too long fora comment on Ian Bicking's articles (and besides,

I feel like I've arrived somewhere: WanderingThoughts , this blog, hashad its first case of comment spam. It's interesting to look at thetrail of breadcrumbs and the actual spam, and to see both how much andhow little work the comment spammers seem to be putting into this.

To skip to the punchline: some machines in 69.57.150.0/24 (ev1.net)left a peculiarly crafted comment spam pushing a web page on the

Every so often, people in my line of work are surprised when users andother people don't take security seriously. However, we reallyshouldn't be, for a simple reason: security is a pain .

Almost always, computer security means extra work that you have to doand things that get in your way; hoops that you have to jump throughbefore you get to what you really want to do. Is it any surprise thatpeople don't like it and avoid it when they can?