The other evening I attended a conference by RMS on Free Software and digital exclusion. The talk was interesting and motivating as usual, even though I already agree with 99.99% of what he had to say. There was one point however where in response to a question he said:

I could not help myself from noticing that even at a Free Software conference by RMS himself so many people were armed with computer-phones running one of the most (if not the most) restrictive operating systems known to human kind. And many of these people seemed to be big fans of Richard Stallman.

Today while writing this up I found an audio recording of the talk in mp3 format as well as a video... . in Flash format on Indymedia !! Really ? Yes really. The same on another site, although there is a an "alternative" OGV format.. Shouldn't it at least be the other way around ?

So tell me, how can I not be defeatist ? And what do RMS fans think when they take a picture of themselves with RMS using their Iphone ? Are they totally missing the point ? Which brings me to my first question.

The strongest point (most probably went unnoticed) in my humble IMHO was: If we encourage people to use Free Software by pointing at some kind of practical advantage and not talking about it as justice versus injustice we wont teach people to keep their Freedom. This is precisely the root of the Freedom issue, digital or analog.

• Richard Stallman's personal home page
• Free Software Foundation
• The GNU Project

And not just that, it's also won the "Outstanding Contribution to Open Source/ Linux/Free Software" award at this years Linux New Media Awards. We are all happy to finally have a Free Debian distribution, remember, if the hardware doesn't work with the Free kernel then you should change the hardware. : ]

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One more thing, I'd add the word "Ever" to the title, but I don't get to decide that sort of thing...

I have noticed lately in a few bug reports that oldstable, Lenny, seems to have fewer security issues than the new stable, Squeeze. The most common phrase in the latest security updates is:

In 2 days the new Debian Squeeze will become "stable". Yes, new stable. Wow right ?

Countdown PNG

There is something called the The Humble Indie Bundle #2 where you can buy a few video games for whatever price you want. These games work on MacOS, GNU/Linux and Windows, and do not have DRM though they are not Free.

Interestingly the sales statistics show that on average the GNU/Linux user will offer over two times as much of their money for the bundle.

Screenshot taken today, prices may vary with time as there are 4 more days to go.

Something is very wrong on the Internet, very. When people work on a server many tend to use a workstation, open a terminal and connect to the server and then open a browser to look for various information and eventually a file/package to download. What we would normally should do is find the link to the file we need, then go to the terminal where we are connected to our server and use something like wget to get the file downloaded where we actually need it to be... .. Well my friend, little by little those links are disappearing, you now need to have JavaScript activated to download source code from some of the biggest "open source code sharing lol" sites..

What can we do ? Create a mirror site whose sole purpose would be to contain wgettable links ? Or petition until they put normal transferable download URLs so we can get some work done and not have to transfer files one time to many. And yes, it is not even eco friendly as these bits of code need to be transferred at least twice before getting where they need to be.

What do you think ?

My obsession for finding a way to be social (yeah I know, "me, social ? WTF") and not to go too far against my principals. Anyway, you may have heard of some projects lately, some don't work, some somewhat work IF you can spare a complete server and have the latest browser on the market.. Well since about a week I have been trying out a project that I have started to grow fond of, Mistpark. It works with Php/MySQL and can hence be installed anywhere.

This uses the DFRN - Distributed Friends and Relations Network protocol, and one thing I really like is the distinction/separation between the protocol and the actual server/client software.. and it works..

So go install your node, play with it, report bugs, hack it, host nodes for your friends who do not have time/knowledge to do this on their own. Take the Internet back, piece by piece.

Now you can now subscribe to Mistpark users from GNU Social, StatusNet and Diaspora..

Finally Diaspora is ready, after 3 months and 200 000 dollars it is finally ready for pre pre alpha beta alpha testing. It seems they have kept it to the strict minimum, I mean no extra features, plugins or add-ons or fancy poking beer racing card games, I like that. So after installing about millions of software and then starting the server I logged in and found that basically nothing works, then some things did work, and then uploading photos did not and then with some browsers weird things happen. I think there has been alot of work on the interface.. . maybe that could be a problem.

This still led me to wonder what else has been going on, and after stumbling on jappix and appleseed I found the truth, of course, that is where my search should have started: GNU-Social. I am going to say that I did not see the benefit of projects like StatusNet until now. They have developed ways to connect nodes. Without having to open extra ports and install half of the internet and steal CPU.. This is like Diaspora but in Php/Mysql ! You can sign up, upload photos and connect with other instances of GNU-Social. So you don't have to build a dedicated (v)server just for this to reserve certain ports and block others etc (and keep your other systems clean), all you need is a basic LAMP setup.. . I like. (it's still in beta but it works.)

With all these open/free projects, some even a bit old, I do still think we can has cheeseburger one of these days.

/addon:
I just realised today why I was not getting anything from the mailing list I signed up to. Because the real mailing list is somewhere else, it's on.. google mailing lists !

I just have to say one thing: OpenOffice as much as any other "office" program is just the worst thing that has ever happened to computers. I have never wasted so much time with any program, even Windows is more entertaining.. Today I tried to do 2 things with OpenOffice Impress (the thing to do slide show presentations, mostly using a computer screen (or projector) to display the finished work).

1. Set the background to a color not in the drop down list
2. Use pixels as a unit of measure

It seems again that I am wrong to even want to do those things as apparently the majority of humans think in centimeters even when doing work that that will stay on a screen. Alone ? Maybe not, a few others also have the same issue. As for the colors, I don't know maybe I'm the only one with a screen that supports more than 256 colors ?

So I guess I'll have to do things the wrong way, again.

What I have learned today: If no shoe fits, walk barefoot.

A few years back I heard quite a few times things like "What do I need a website for ?", some would add things like "Why would I ever post photos of my last vacation, family and/or pets online ?". Today, almost everyone I know has a social network profile (orkut, friendster, myspace, facebook, twitter, etc etc). Of course there is one major difference; Everything is neatly centralised and completely out of the control of those who create all the content. A few side effects are:

• Communications between 2 peers always goes through a third party (and their sometimes partners) system, and stays there
• Loss of publishing freedom
• Limited formats/method of communication (videos, image sizes, things like that)
• Censorship
• Terms of service - nobody ever reads this stuff ! Why ?
• Copyright issues - because this is not a private space and we must all obey United States laws
• Targeted advertisement, because of course it is not free (IMHO having advertisements in a "private" space can be slightly annoying)
• Personal data and anything you do on the site can be used for marketing studies.. up to you to weigh the good/bad

So what now ? Well this situation has created a need for something more Internet-relevant and voilà, 4 guys have decided to dedicate their summer vacation to creating an open platform that will allow people to be their own part of the social web. The idea is to provide a CMS type application that people can install wherever they want, just like a personal web site. This means you would have control over your stuff and communications would not go through a central 3rd party service and get read/analysed, altered, moderated, censored or any such thing.

This is not even about being against social networking sites but more about the limits of their design, a commercial website must follow rules/laws/regulations etc, in short they have to take some responsibility for the published content as well as the interactions between users of their service. Of course you can (and should) also add the fact that the main interest of most (if not all) of these social networking sites is revenue by advertisement, this kind of means that the user is not the real client and hence is not the most cared for.

Because each node runs completely independently the whole network is never directly connected, meaning if you wish you may completely isolate your node from the public eye, restrict access to it to specific nodes or even run a set of nodes on a private network for some kind of intranetish activities.

This project should hit the first usable stage somewhere in September so stay tuned to: Joindiaspora.com.

The other day I was running some tests because it seemed that my VPN traffic was being slowed down quite alot. One of the tests was plain FTP, that went at about 1mbyte/sec, then FTP via VPN, that seemed capped at around 200kbytes/sec. Some say "overhead because encryption", and I believed it, until I tested between two weak machines (VIA 2ghz) on a LAN:

• FTP: 10Mbytes/sec
• FTP/VPN: 6.5Mbytes/sec

obviously 200kbytes is a joke.

I of course suspected one of my ISPs (ADSL or dedicated server provider) of doing something uncool.. this lead me to discovering two things:

• Some ISPs openly cap VPN traffic like PlusNet. They actually have a whole timetable with various speed limits for various services ! You might have noticed P2P gets the lowest speed ever and youtube is way up there.... ..in short, the client's needs are not important, what is important is who's paying.. anyway.
• a cool tool called shaperprobe. This tool helps detect if there is any packet shaping happening on your network.

I soon after figured out where the issue was, my ISPs who say they don't throttle or shape etc are correct. : ] The issue was with this WAG54GS I hooked up temporarily that has this super cool option called "SPI Firewall", it's sole purpose is to slow down your VPN traffic, that's all it does.

In the end I learned that there are many bad ISPs nowadays that decide what's good for you, I am glad mine(s) don't, but how long will this last ? As they say, it's the consumer who decides, so if this matters to you, pick an ISP that doesn't shape their bandwidth.