Michael's musings

Mon, 06 Jul 2009

Rails 2.3.x requires new test_helper

I was getting weird errors like:

.../test/test_helper.rb:11: undefined method `use_instantiated_fixtures=' for Test::Unit::TestCase:Class (NoMethodError)

When trying to run "rake test" on an application that actually had no tests defined, (my goal is to add a few) that was built with rails 2.3.2.

It turns out that in rails 2.3 (?- maybe 2.2, my other applications are at

2.1), the unit test cases are now subclassed from ActiveSupport::TestCase

instead of Test::Unit::TestCase.

This matters for both test_helper.rb and the *_test.rb files.

Open proxies vs network censorship vs security issues

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/06/the-proxy-fight-for-iranian-de.shtml

this is a very good read as are the previous posts about Iran.

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/06/strange-changes-in-iranian-int.shtml http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/06/iran-and-the-internet-uneasy-s.shtml

The conclusion is sad, but it does remind me of various Verner Vinge books (both Deepness in the Sky and Rainbows End) about needing little mote sized routers....

People we talk to inside Iran say that almost no proxies are usable any more. Freegate, a Chinese anti-censorship application that makes use of networks of open proxies, has proven popular in Iran. But this week, it, too, has been experiencing problems. Many popular applications, like Yahoo! Messenger, have stopped working. The authorities are said to be using power interruptions as a cyberweapon, causing brief outages during rallies that cause computers to reboot, just as people are trying to upload images and video. The net result, as Arbor's excellent analysis shows, has been a drastic reduction in inbound traffic on filtered ports since the election.

If there's a lesson here for the rest of the world, perhaps it's this: Install a few proxy instances on machines you control. Learn how to lock them down properly. Swap them with your friends overseas who live in places where the Internet is fragile. Set up your tunnels and test them. And don't wait until the tanks are in the streets to figure this out, because by that point, you may have already lost the proxy war.

This is why people need to be using privacy and security tools on a regular basis. That was one of the major reasons behind the FreeS/WAN project.