LXNY General Meeting:

Michael Smith
on shell programming
and
the peril of a secret takeover of Earth
by the 4C Entity in alliance with T13

Tuesday 2 January 2001

LXNY will have a general meeting Tuesday 2 January 2001.

This meeting is free and open to the public.

In particular, all members of FBUNY, NYLUG, LUNY!, AnyNIX, the Brooklyn Bunch, the Upstate Alliance, and all other Free Software Groups are welcome!

The meeting starts at 6:30 pm and runs until 9:00 pm.
Enter the IBM building, 590 Madison Avenue, on the corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue and ask at the front desk for the room number.

At exactly 9:00 pm many members will repair to our traditional place of refreshment.

Recently, LXNY members have been getting more and more questions from people who have heard about free software and want to know more. Two sorts of questions come up:

1. How do I do thus and such using free software?

2. Why use free software?

At this meeting we will start to answer questions of both sorts.

Michael Smith, General Manager of LXNY, will present an introduction to the *n*x shell. Part of the reason for *n*x's extraordinary success is that the shell presents to the user a radically object oriented view of just about everything going on in a running system. The question of whether the crudity of the view presented is an advantage or an impediment has exercised flamers on Usenet for twenty years. But one thing is certain: today, if you know the shell, and you run a free OS, you are master of your own box.

But by this summer, knowing a free shell may not guarantee you control over your own box.

Today one of our most important rights, the right to own a computer, stands in grave peril. Vastly stupid but immensely wealthy and powerful secret conspiracies stand poised to seize the hard disks of each and every home and small office computer on the planet.

The plan is simple: require each ATA hard drive to contain secret hardware and software under sole control of the Directorates of Infotainment. This hardware and software will be impossible to control by the putative owner of the hard drive. If four large corporations agree to the proposal, by the summer of 2001, all new ATA hard drives will be required to contain such machinery of surveillance and control. ATA hard drives are the most popular drives in computers used by individuals for private purposes.

We will hear reports on the correlation of forces from members who have gathered information from official and unofficial sources.

LXNY needs volunteers for the hard work of education and propaganda ahead of us. If you want to help come to this meeting.