A post on Slashdot caught my eye:
I have been asked by the Office of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government in Exile to offer some policy recommendations in light of the ongoing targeted malware attacks directed at the Tibetan community worldwide. … One of the more controversial moves being actively debated by Tibetans … is a mass migration of the exile community (including the government) to Linux, particularly since all of the samples of targeted malware collected exploit vulnerabilities in Windows.
The discussion — although with some predictable Windoze-bashing — has been really interesting. This is a case where “security through obscurity” might not be a good thing. The argument is that Linux is (at least partially) more secure because fewer hackers target it. However, with the full resources of the Chinese government (allegedly) behind the Ghostnet hacking, writing a Linux exploit might be just as easy as writing one for Windows — and fewer people would be affected to notice it.
The counter-arguments are just as interesting.
Another interesting issue they have to wrestle with is the lack of good-quality fonts for Tibetan. Posters have offered up a couple of good unicode Tibetan fonts, but I found it near to learn that the Tibetan language doesn’t work well with discrete letters, like we use. They stack consonants into wild ligatures. I don’t really understand it.
But, as one commenter pointed out:
Combining letters aren’t an intrinsic necessity in any language, they are an affectation and a mechanism for keeping people illiterate. European languages used to have them and got rid of them because the only purpose they serve is to restrict access to reading and writing.
Tibetan can be written just fine in an alphabetic style. It would be prudent for the Dalai Lama to make that the standard for the Tibetan community.
Now that could be interesting! Overhauling a whole writing system and not just a computer system.
Grant Hamilton
One Response to “Cool job assignment: Working for the Dalai Lama”
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The Dalai Lama already has to contend with an ocean of trouble just keeping his culture alive, let alone tinker with some of its fundamentals.
Gotta disagree with the necessity of adopting a more computer-friendly language — much bigger fish to fry for that battered, beautiful culture.