Warren Ellis swearing at the Internet Of Things

Warren Ellis is famous for many things, including Transmetropolitan; two novels; the scripts for various video games, a movie starring Helen Mirren and a run of James Bond comics; and many other things.  He is very smart, and when the mood takes him, extremely sweary.  Both of these things make for humorous and insightful writing.

His talk at ThingsCon 2015 was exemplary of him being both smart and sweary.  It is reproduced neatly here, and the original source is here.  (For more of this kind of writing, and everything from recipes, travelogues, technology reviews and musings on the history of English folk magic, as well as copious detail on his work (largely in the field of comics), subscribe to his newsletter: Orbital Operations.)

In summary, electronic device manufacturers and digital disruptors of any sort start needing to care more about the effects of the technology they are unleashing into the world.

Making OpenVPN easier

I have become annoyed at the easy-rsa scripts shipped with OpenVPN. I like the goal, I just think the execution is flawed due to the inflexibility of the scripts. I mean, sure one could copy the whole directory and tweak the scripts, but they should be customisable with a config file. How about editing openssl.cnf? Wrong answer... the scripts pass options that override many of the settings in this file.

So, rather than fixing the scripts (e.g. so that they accept options that allow you to change the way they operate), I came up with what I think is a better answer. Since I already created a Makefile (with a set of targets that manage the workflow of creating server keys, client keys, zip files that people can extract into their OpenVPN directory on MS-Windows, etc.) why not run openssl commands directly?

So that is my current goal for the code in SVN. It's at revision 67, so when the Makefile jumps above that, it should be streamlinedt. (Feel free to bug me about making a commits mailing list for the tools repository.)