« We all read, damn it | Home | Bandwidth: I has it »

I live for irony

I’m fixing a friend’s laptop that was down for the count last week. I’d fixed it before, and now it’s “dead” again after only maybe a month. It appears the hard drive is failing, but I ran fsck and the filesystem is now at least breathing again, if coughing, too.

I’m also doing maintenance on my own machine, so it’s really convenient to have a second one on my desk. (Nothing like two screens to make me miss home.) This way I can still surf and chat while I mess around with low-level settings on my box. It’s great.

As I’m working today, I get an IM from Will. He and I have our IM clients configured to automatically exchange digital fingerprints and encrypt our conversations. He of course didn’t know I wasn’t on my normal machine, so he IMs me and I get hit with about three paragraphs of ciphered text. I laugh and tell him (unencrypted) to hang on while I install the encryption package on this machine.

Here’s the terminal output from that effort:

conor@roslaptop:~$ sudo apt-get install pidgin-otr
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libotr2
Suggested packages:
libotr2-bin
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libotr2 pidgin-otr
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 93.5kB of archives.
After unpacking 324kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
libotr2 pidgin-otr
Install these packages without verification [y/N]?

I’m sorry, but I find it absolutely hilarious that a digital verification package meant for encryption and online security fails an authentication check itself.

I know it’s just a temporary glitch in the repository, or even something weird I’m doing with my network here, but I thought it was a blast. I love how the recommended choice for proceeding was no (capital N).