Arch Linux. Not as scary as you think.

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Yes I'm a nerd. Yes I use Arch Linux. There is a somewhat unfair view that you have to be a programmer to use Linux, and that Arch Linux in particular is very difficult. Yes I happen to be a programmer, and it might be true that Linux may be particularly useful for programmers considering most distros come with a lot of editors and compilers and such. But it really is a really stable and powerful OS for anyone (that's not computer illiterate). If you want to just use your computer without having to thinking about it, you will probably use whatever Windows version your computer came shipped with, and not bother to install anything else. However if you actually want to Learn how to use Linux, Arch is a good choice, because it assumes you know how to use the command line during the install process. In other words the process of installing it forces you learn som basics of Linux (if you don't already know). Still it is not very difficult. You don't have to compile
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Mr. Robot



Ok, so this show started airing two years ago and is currently on it's third season, so if you never heard of it you're either not that much of a computer nerd, or you don't watch much TV.

Nevertheless I thought this was a suitable place to talk about it, although I don't want to write too much in case you actually missed it, but want to see it after reading this (I'll try to avoid major spoilers).

The story centers around Elliot Alderson (played by Rami Malek), a genius hacker, and programmer, who suffers from mental illness; social phobia, and dysthymia.
He works at a computer security company by day, and is recruited by a hacker organisation called fsociety.
It early becomes clear that one of the main targets of fsociety is E-corp. Short for Evil Corporation. This is of course not the actual name of the corporation, however Elliot has conditioned his mind to automatically translate the company name to evil corp, and that is what the audience get to hear/see throughout the series.

The series goes through a lot of turns and twists, and we see everything from Elliot's sometimes muddled mind.

An fsociety hacktivist (left), and an anonymous hacktivist (right)
(The parallels aren't exactly subtle)

The members of fsociety wears masks taken from a 1984 cult horror movie called "The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie" (this is of course a fictional movie, made up for the series).

The parallel  to the real life hacktivist group Anonymous are pretty obvious, although Anonymous use a mask from the movie "V for Vendetta" (although that movie was based on a graphic novel, and the mask was based on a real person).

What strikes me the most with this series is that it depicts real hacking, as opposed to the hacking in most any other series/movie to date, that has almost nothing to do with reality.
I must admit that I'm far from an expert on the subject on hacking, so I might be mistaken, but from the little I know this seem to depict actual hacking, using real life tools. Kali Linux is featured prominently in the series for instance.

Kali Linux with a terminal window open, being used by a hacker on the show

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