Steve: Developing on the Edge

Thoughts on development, Web-services, technology and mountains.

22Nov
Wed2006

Sexbuntu

A little discussion on an apache email list has led me to a new produce concept, an Adult Content Linux distro

Derived from the Ubuntu live CD; minimal changes to keep costs down
Boots off CD only; this implicitly removes all state on power off of the PC (no swap for this reason)
Use Tor for anonymous browsing, out the box. No need to configure the client.
Come with popular codecs for adult content videos
Appropriate bookmarks and background artwork (but not the login screen)

We may actually be able to pay our way from URL placement on the bookmarks or better yet, the external start page/portal the client would be bound to.

From one perspective then, this distro would let people browse the web without leaving a trace on their system. But its real goal is the war on botnets. Every home PC downloading sexually explicit content from a linux distro is a home PC that is not running a botnet service. If the distro actually includes a rootkit scan/antivir scan, it can even sanitize the windows PC, while the user goes to web sites that they cannot go to in working hours.

Judging by the antivirus/security blogs, its those murky parts of the web where a lot of the trojans live. Its the 'download this code to see this sex scene' pages, and the like. It's the sites that exploit the bug of the week in IE to get trojans on you from buffer overflows. This is what a linux distro defends against. And by being CD+RAM only, even if your system does get 0wned in a firefox buffer overflow, they can't do damage (assuming the HDDs for rootkit scans are installed as root read/write only.

I haven't looked at the effort to create a linux distro, and frankly an ultralightweight Xen/vmware image is what I directly need (at work, for application deployment). But if an adult specific Ubuntu distro could reduce botnet infestations, then we'd all benefit.

Update note. Reading this there is the implicit implication that I'd just run the image from vmware. No, a lightweight linux image is for doing short-lived deployments where Xen or Vmware brings up an OS for half an hour or so. DSL linux is the best example right now, but its biased towards being a from CD boot, whereas we want virtual disk images (and maybe PXE preboot install). Xavier @cern has written some sourceforge hosted Xen components for smartfrog, stuff I want to play with. Once I've got the interop docs for the CDDLM deployment out the way, and finished our migration to Ivy

Posted by steve at 17:58

Comments

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	Juxtsupposingreply to this thread On 23 November 2006 at 00: 11 Patrick Logan commented: I wonder how many households would end up running both sexbuntu and christianbuntu? http://www.whatwouldjesusdownload.com/christianubuntu/2006/07/about-ubuntu-christian-edition.html On 23 November 2006 at 10: 21 Steve Loughran commented: oh, that would be funny. We could have a special dual boot edition where the features depended on your login (or whether you pressed a special secret key during login) On 15 January 2007 at 18: 23 Kevin Davison commented: "I wonder how many households would end up running both sexbuntu and christianbuntu?" Surprisingly few. I used to sell accounts for a local ISP called The International Internet Alliance. They offered two services; "The Rocket" (standard dial-up with a high-speed marketing angle, and "Clean-Net" (a scrubbed version of The Rocket with all questionable material blocked at the ISP level). Every customer I sold to thought that it was wonderful that Clean-Net would protect their children from sexually explicit material but in a year and a half of selling, I never sold one Clean-Net account, everyone opted for standard dial-up instead.
	Developmentreply to this thread On 27 December 2007 at 12: 14 aaltan commented: Steve, would you be interested in taking this Sexbuntu thing a step further? I know this is a little late, but I was recently thinking of what it would be like to develop a distro. Contact me if you're interested.