Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are now running WordPress 2.0! The upgrade was pretty seemless. No visible changes for now, but the admin interface is considerably better.
Weekend
Somehow, this weekend involved several scorpion bowls. Ours didn’t have that cool smoke floating over them though.
I had to wait a very, very, very long time, but my Nokia 770 has finally arrived. I love it. It took about 2 minutes to find and install the driver for the nokia bluetooth keyboard I bought, and now I’m typing this post from the 770!
Things I love so far: the full-screen and zoom buttons. The large, crisp screen. The debian-based package management. The intuitivity of the interface. The sturdyness of the device.
And most of all the fact that it runs GNU/Linux. The community at maemo.org is growing, and the increasing availability of third-party Free Software is the main attraction of this device to me. I was trying to explain this to a friend yesterday – comparing the ‘walled gardens’ that Palm or (shudder) CE devices are with the openness of the 770, and I think it made sense to her. I think Nokia is going to sell a heck of a lot of these things.
What does puzzle me though, is the noise some people are making about the fact that the 770 ships without PIM software installed. So what? Just head over to maemo.org, and see what you can download from there. And if what you want is not there yet, it’s certainly just a matter of time before someone will write or port a PIM to the 770. That’s the key; software WILL be available, we don’t depend on the supplier of the device to give us more features! Now THAT is the power of the Free Software community…
Just three more days, and the first draft of the GPLv3 will be made available at the launch event at MIT. If you’re in the neighbourhood on Monday, do stop by! Pre-registration is now closed, but there should still be some extra space, just show up between 9 and 10am to register on site. It’s free, of course, and you will be part of this historic moment! From 10 to 12am, RMS and Eben Moglen will go through the details of the proposed changes in the new license, which should be very interesting.
If you can’t make it, check out the GPLv3 site on Monday for a copy of the first draft.
A lot has been written about the 2006 CES show in Las Vegas. What I’ve read or heard so far has been pretty meaningless – new non-existing product from X, new gadget from Y that only works with Windows, etc etc. Until today. One of the LinuxToday editors has written an informative and interesting piece about his experience at the show and the Google keynote.
Two very interesting points to note. First of all – the Intel laptop salesperson claiming that laptop vendors were pretty unanimous in insisting that Intel have GNU/Linux device drivers available for all the new Duo chips and boards before they would incorporate them into the next generation of notebooks. Now that is news. Remember how long it took for Intel to release GNU/Linux drivers for the Centrino chipset? If this is true, it means that 2006 could well become a pretty interesting year for GNU/Linux on the desktop/laptop…
The second bit of interest was a quote from an S3 rep, explaining the whole GNU/Linux video driver malaise we are currently in – as in, video card manufacturers refuse to release free software drivers for (all features of) their cards. Nvidia does its best with a (mostly) open source driver, but ATI just refuses to support linux. The guy from S3 claims that is because open sourcing the drivers would release the workarounds that they include for flaws in the graphics chips. He claims that competitors would then use those flaws as negative marketing ammo.
Frankly, I find that a little hard to believe. I don’t think that an obscure driver workaround and the accompanying flaw in a company’s hardware is going to be useful for any marketing department. Sure, the hard-core graphics card geeks will talk about it, but I am positive that the statement ‘we are better than X because their hardware does this wrong’ will mean absolutely NOTHING for joe sixpack.
I’m thinking that open sourcing the drivers might actually cause enough embarrasment on the part of the hardware teams at ATI/S3/Nvidia/… to fix those flaws in the next iteration of their hardware. And that can only be beneficial for the public and the manufacturers…
On to something else – this must be one of the most hilarious writeups of an Apple rumour I’ve ever read. I don’t care if it’s true or not – the story just rocks 
Sometimes the MBTA just works really well… Coming home last night, it took me 5 minutes to walk to Park street station, where a train was ready to be boarded. Nine minutes to Lechmere, where the bus was waiting. Five minutes on the bus, two minutes to walk home – home from downtown crossing in 21 minutes, a new record! Try that with a car
In other news I finally broke down and ordered a second-hand Aeron on Ebay for my home office. Not quite as expensive as brand new, but still bloody pricy. It’s a great chair though – it should arrive by the end of the week, and I can’t wait!
Another exploit is loose in Windows land; this one is for XP and 2003 server and there is no patch yet from Microsoft. It’s got to do with the parsing of WMF files, which apparently are Windows Meta Files (pictures etc). More info from the Washington Post. Am I glad I don’t use Windows…
The article refers to Metasploit, an interesting exploit/payload framework that can be used for security testing. The most interesting thing for me though is that the next version of the framework (currently in alpha) is written in (50,000 lines of) Ruby!
Good news from Australia – the Australian government will soon legalize time and media-shifting of copyrighted materials for personal use. So it will become legal for Australians to make MP3s from their CDs, and to use their VCRs to record tv programming for later viewing.
The article is on news.com.au (thanks Slashdot :)) – and it contains a few disturbing statements. Take this for example:
But yet to be decided is whether a levy will be slapped on the store price of blank CDs and MP3 players, such as iPods, to compensate artists for the revenue they stand to lose under the new laws.
Elsewhere, the article states that – obviously – millions of Australians are using their VCRs for time-shifting, and that the 100,000 iPod owners in Australia have converted their CD collections to MP3s. Why, then, would this law that simply legalizes an existing practice, nothing more, nothing less, make the artists ‘loose’ any new revenue? Why would these artists require additional compensation?
The second problematic statement is a direct quote from the Australian Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock:
“We should not treat everyday Australians who want to use technology to enjoy copyright material they have obtained legally as infringers where this does not cause harm to our copyright industries.”
In other words – it’s ok if our citizens do things as long as it doesn’t cause harm to our copyright industries. Now; I don’t know anything about the legal basis for copyright law in Australia, but in the UK where copyright was first put into law the idea was a balance between the rights of the public and the rights of the author of a work. It was explicitly recognized that the author could not have created their work without relying on the support from and input of the community they lived in, and therefore, only a temporary monopoly on their work was granted to them, long enough to recover their costs and make a living for a resonable period of time. Initially, this term was 14 years, which could be renewed once, for a maximum total term of 28 years.
That’s quite different from Mr. Ruddock’s quote. Elsewhere, the article paraphrases him as saying there should be a balance between the interests of users and the rights of the copyright holders, which makes me believe that the legal foundation for Australian copyright laws is probably quite similar to the one in the UK.
In my view, though, the quote is symptomatic for the current copyright imbalance. It shows how Mr. Ruddock thinks about copyright law as a right that needs to be defended rather than a a temporary granting of more or less exclusive control over content by the public to an author. The industry has rights, and only when there is no monetary loss for the industry, the people can use copyrighted material as they see fit.
The people who make the laws and the ones who enforce them do not have an true appreciation for the original idea of balance behind copyright law. That’s why we currently have life + 75 years as the copyright term.
I’m guessing that’s why there are so many bad movies out there – this kind of climate where everything is copyrighted, everything needs to be checked, rights need to be cleared, is not exactly condusive for true artistic expression!
Thank God for Creative Commons.
A bit quiter for a few days, after all it is the holiday season. I’m in San Antonio visiting family, and I can now confirm that everything is bigger in Texas. Even the christmas tree ornaments.
Happy holidays!
So Microsoft is working really hard to derail the Massachusetts efforts to adopt a truely open standard for its documents.
Bravely, Massachusetts decided in September to adopt the newly finalized OpenDocument standard for all its office documents, ensuring that the documents will remain readable in the future, and effectively breaking the hold that Microsoft, the proprietary software vendor, currently has on the state.
Of course, Microsoft was seriously scared by this. They moved quickly and decided to release their Office XML file format (will be in the next version of Office) as a ‘standard’ by submitting it to a standards organisation in Geneva, that will take 18 months to publish the specifications. At which point, of course, Microsoft will have made lots of changes to the ‘standard’, which will then take years to get through this standards body, etc. You get the idea – Microsoft controls the ‘standard’, and their software will always implement the latest and greatest, and there is no level playing field for competition.
Also, OpenXML is licensed in such a way that GPL’ed software is not allowed to parse and/or modify documents stored in the format. In addition to that, the specification is patent encumbered, and Microsoft has not issued a blanket, non-descriminatory royalty-free license to anyone wanting to use the format.
Some standard, that, eh?
Compare with Open Document: a published OASIS standard, not patent encumbered, not controlled by any single commercial entity, and truly Free in the broadest sense of the word.
So what does Mr. Yates of Microsoft say? “Competition between standards we believe is a very good thing.â€. Even if we ignore the fact that OpenXML doesn’t even qualify as a proper standard, this statement is simply not true.
Honestly. Of course, it’s great for the people when there are competing standards. Didn’t you love it when you couldn’t read or write that DVD-R because your computer had a DVD+R drive? Don’t you love the 19 different memory card standards we have today? Your camera takes one kind of cards, your PDA some other kind, and your spiffy new phone yet another kind! And if you’re old enough to remember VHS versus Betamax versus Video2000… I don’t need to draw a picture. Competition between standards sucks. That’s why we call them ‘standards’, right? Don’t let Microsoft tell you otherwise – statements like these are why one should take anything they say or do with a small mountain of salt.
So, Mr. Yates, please cut the crap. Competition between companies is a very good thing. Competition between standards is a very bad thing. Except, of course, for your company…
So, thanks to the Conservatives and Socialists in the European Parliament (the two biggest fractions), a European Directive has been passed for mandatory data retention. It needs to be implemented in national law within 2 years in all of the member states.
This means that information about the e-mails you send and receive will be kept, as well as the time you log on and off from your ISP, for at least 6 months, and up to two years. The same for your telephone records. Of course, this proposal originated with the European Commission, and it was rushed through Parliament in 1 reading. Nevermind the shaky ‘evidence’ for the necessity of this data retention: the whole thing was based on just one study, of which the results were misrepresented. Never mind the 58000+ signatures against the proposal.
All of this, of course, because proponents say it will help ‘anti-terrorism’ efforts. In practice, terrorists will circumvent the logging, and only ordinary people’s data will be stored. Of course, the cost for the retention will be passed on to the people – either through more expensive telecommunication services or through taxes. The EU actually has good data protection laws – but this Directive does not mention data protection at all. So, while the data is supposedly only for government use, expect the IFPI and other private organisations to get their claws on it too, over time.
Be very, very afraid.
Suw Charman explains the issues clearly, from a UK perspective. More background here.
One last thing:
The voting records from the EP will be out soon. I will update this post at that point. If you live in the European Union, please consider what these people have done at the next election. Politicians that pass bad laws need to be removed from power.
Update: the roll-call votes are now available:
Original (word file) : Original (word file)
Analyzed as per the FFII vote recommendations:
HTML
OpenOffice
Excel
Anyone who shows up in red in the FFII files voted bad. Refer to this list when considering who to vote for in the next European election, please. We need to show those MEPs that their actions have consequences.
Welcome to a Brave New World where the government knows about every e-mail you send, every phone call you make, and every website you visit… I’m sorry, but if you’re from the EU, reading this blog will probably put you on your Government’s blacklist. Thanks, European Union!
![[FSF Associate Member 859]](/blog/wp-content/photos/fsf_member_859.png){kind=small}
![[Play OGG]](/blog/wp-content/photos/play_ogg_small.png)
