Do We Need a New Internet?

After reading the NYTimes article "Do We Need a New Internet?", I can't stop laughing about the ingenuous opinions expressed there.

The real issue isn't the Internet security, but the security flaws at the most used Operational System. The communication layer is not responsible for keeping the user data at his computer secure, but the OS is. What we really need is more secure and less bugged OS, but wait, we already have this! So, if the computer users want security, they should choose an alternative OS and not giving up their freedom because of obscure excuses...

Install Ekiga 3 on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)

I always was worried about Skype closed-source code, but after reading this article about "NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution", I became almost paranoid... Happilly there is nice and free open-source apps availiable, like Ekiga.

Ekiga is an open source VoIP and video conferencing application, using H.323 and SIP protocols, suporting many audio and video codecs. You can read some good reviews here and here.

lit2pdf: Convert Microsoft Reader .lit ebooks to PDF

The .lit files are Microsoft Reader proprietary ebook files, but you can convert them to HTML with clit (ConvertLit). To install clit from source, follow this tutorial (or just download this and this .deb compiled versions and double-click them to install).

After installing it, you can use this script that convert the .lit to .html and open it with firefox browser. At the browser, you can "print" them as PDF or just save the HTML, if you want.

I've made this script to install everything and also create an lit2pdf script to make things easier:

doc2odt: Converta seus documentos para um formato aberto e padronizado

Que tal converter seus arquivos do Microsoft Word pro OpenOffice? Utilizar um formato internacionalmente padronizado tem uma série de vantagens, sendo a principal delas você ter a possibilidade de abrir seu documento no programa que preferir: