blog

Better living with mutt

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:12:37 +0200

During a chat about the pros and cons of gmail, a colleague told me that he especially likes how gmail inserts your sent messages into the same thread as the one you're replying to.

The idea that a webmailer should be more useable than my beloved mutt simply didn't fit my view of the world. I'm allergic to webmail.

A bit of web search soon brought me this nugget for insertion into my .muttrc:

set record = "^"

Got it from here, and it works like a charm. You'll need mutt version > 1.5.10 or the current_folders patch.

I'm probably the last person on earth to find out about this.

Bye bye, "sent" folder.

Data Loss Weekly, Germany

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:39:54 +0200

Germany has always prided itself on being a nation of engineers. So it's not surprising that unlike the British, who prefer to leave their confidential data on trains or lose it in the post, Germans opt for the technologically more advanced solution of making it available online to all comers (DE):

Bei Einwohnermeldeämtern in Deutschland ist es nach einem Bericht des ARD-Magazins "Report München"
zu einer schweren Panne gekommen: Den Recherchen zufolge waren die
Daten von Bürgern aus rund 200 Städten und Gemeinden über Jahre hinweg
frei im Internet zugänglich.

Die verantwortliche Softwarefirma habe die Zugangscodes auf ihrer eigenen Homepage veröffentlicht,
berichtete das Magazin vorab. Die Passwörter seien erst am vergangenen
Freitag geändert worden.<<>>>

Markus has proposed publishing a magazine called "Data Loss Quarterly", and is looking for contributors.

Why did you castrate xserver-xorg?!

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:04:49 +0200

Though it's Monday morning and I have lots of work on my desk, I'm looking back at a very frustrating weekend.

I decided to do reinstall my desktop machine, moving it from Debian Etch to Ubuntu Hardy. My laptop is running Ubuntu, and administering one system is hassle enough for me.

The initial install went without a hitch. After the obligatory reboot, the login screen came up, and I saw that the resolution was too low - 800x600 instead of the 1280x1024.

Well, that's a familiar issue - X has a hard job to do, and isn't particularly good at autodetecting everything. Still surprising, since both graphics card and monitor are fairly garden-variety stuff: An Nvidia GeForce 6100, and a Samsung SyncMaster 710n.

So what does one do in this case? Right:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

That used to be the height of technical complexity for me, short of editing /etc/xorg.conf, where the syntax is slightly less user-friendly than that of procmail (quite a feat, if you ask me).

But on my new hardy system, this command only let me configure the keyboard, which was working fine, thank you very much. The options for configuring video had disappeared.

Hours of web search, driver installation, configuration etc. followed. I wouldn't have minded spending a sunny Sunday with my family instead.

So I found this thread on launchpad, which was already running from here to Beijing with people complaining about the newly powerless xserver-xorg.

Turns out that at Canonical, they've taken away the most common text-based way of making your video card run, and replaced it with a half-baked GTK application called displayconfig-gtk. This app reminds me of the people who deal with complaints at the German railways company: it looks friendly, but does absolutely nothing useful.

There's also a small problem here for people who are even less lucky than me. If you can't start your graphical environment, a GTK application is not much use.

Another tool is xrandr, which I can't find any information about other than that it's fairly beta. This seems to be the program that is supposed to do the autoconfiguration, but doesn't do it right.

The Ubuntu Xorg maintainer responded quickly:

displayconfig-gtk is a user interactive method for configuring
xorg.conf. Like dpkg-reconfigure it also often produces invalid
configurations. We recommend using the autoconfiguration approach, and
if that does not work for some reason, please report it as a bug. This
way we can roll out a true fix for everyone.

<rant>

Dear Ubuntu folks, so far you've done an excellent job at giving us a GNU/Linux distro that was both newbie-friendly and highly configurable. So what have you been drinking that gave you the idea of taking away a tool that worked fairly ok, and replacing it with several that don't work at all?

And how is it a sensible idea to tell people who complain that autoconfiguration doesn't work for them to please use the autoconfiguration method?

</rant>

Your answers in the comments, please. Thanks.

Creative Commons licence upheld in Bulgarian court

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:27:20 +0200

Veni Markovski tells us that a Bulgarian court has ruled that the terms of a Creative Commons licence are valid and must be obeyed when distributing the work in question.

The Bulgarian blogger Elenko Elenkov filed a lawsuit against the newspaper "24 hours" for having used one of his photos, licenced under the CreativeCommons BY-SA, in one of their edition on 20 September 2007 on the cover page and on page 3. The picture did not mention the author or the licence used, but rather attributed the photo on page 3 to "The Internet".

Ouch.

via EDRI-gram

Interview über Interview-Rechtsprechung

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:30:23 +0200

Telepolis hat ein Interview mit Andreas Buske geführt. Der fällt am Landgericht Hamburg beeindruckend weltfremde Urteile zum Persönlichkeitsrecht in den Medien, insbesondere im Internet.

Und er gibt keine Interviews.

 In diesem Fall distanziere ich mich von diesem Interview und 
bestreite, es jemals geführt zu haben.

Buske:
 Das bestreite ich ebenfalls. Ich bezweifle allerdings, dass Ihre 
Distanzierung unseren Kriterien genügt.

 Danke, dass Sie nicht mit uns gesprochen haben.

Buske:
 Gerne, jederzeit wieder nicht!

Schon beeindruckend, wohin sich die deutsche Rechtsprechung in den letzten Jahren so bewegt hat.

[via netzpolitik.org]

ACTA: the next front in the A2K fight?

Fri, 16 May 2008 17:19:36 +0200

For the moment, WIPO is busy with its new Director General (Francis Gurry just got elected to the post), and the Development Agenda process has forced the advocates of strict copyright to at least re-shuffle their cards for a moment.

But another front is opening up elsewhere. There's an agreement that's being prepared for negotiation. Under the name of ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), rich country governments in cahoots with some business lobbies are trying out yet another way to impose their agenda on the rest of us.

In Knowledge Ecology Studies, Aaron Shaw has recently published an excellent write-up explaining why this is a problem. According to him, it wouldn't just mean that overly strict rules for copyright and patents are foisted upon people that don't need them. It would also set a very bad precedent for global governance:

So why is ACTA such a big deal? If signed, the agreement would constitute a diplomatic putsch by a handful of wealthy states and corporations against the rest of the world. Already, it signals an overt and troubling rejection of multilateralism. The so-called “plurilateral” approach represents an outdated model of international treaty-making whereby the unelected representatives of Northern states and a few corporate lobbyists dictate the rules of global markets. Such arrangements were commonplace during the 1990s under the neo-liberal “Washington Consensus” and prior to the Doha Round of negotiations in the WTO. Today, however, this kind of blatant disregard for global consensus and the needs of developing regions poses a threat to the world's prosperity, security and health.

So keep your eyes peeled. And go do something about it.

German "online search" engine

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 12:13:20 +0200

In Germany, a discussion is raging on whether the police should be allowed to search a suspect's computer by hacking into it (rather than by confiscating it and reading out the hard drive).

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble is the chief advocate of this. The youth organisation of the Social Democrats -- a party that shares the government with Schäuble's Conservatives and isn't necessarily opposed to the measure -- has developed its own vision of what such a tool might look like.

Research paper on WIPO Broadcasting Treaty

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:20:55 +0200

The talks about a broadcasting treaty at WIPO have collapsed for now. But I bet this wasn't the last time we've heard of it.

The South Centre has just published a research paper (.pdf, 350 kB), looking at the broadcasting treaty from the perspective of developing countries. Here’s what it says in a nutshell:

The research paper concludes that there is a lack of evidence indicating that the array of additional rights and protection for broadcasting and cablecasting organizations, as incorporated in the text of a Revised Draft Basic Proposal for a WIPO Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations, are either necessary or desirable from a developing country perspective. On the other hand, evidence suggests that the proposed treaty in its current form would create more costs thanbenefits in the short- and long-term for developing countries and is not conducive to social and economic development.

You might think that it’s tough luck for the authors, Viviana Munoz of the South Centre's Innovation and Access to Knowledge (IAKP) Programme and Andrew Chegue Waitara, a researcher at the Plato Institute in Nairobi: Now that the paper is out, the talks have collapsed.

But I wouldn’t be so sure. Firstly, the South Centre’s research papers are usually very insightful and substantial, so I suppose this one will go on to influence a lot of discussions.

And secondly, the phrase is floating around that the Broadcast Treaty now is “a problem waiting for a place to happen”. The treaty’s backers will take their worries to other fora, or try to strike bilateral deals. If keeping bad regulation out of one treaty is bad, try keeping it out of some fifty to hundred bilateral agreements.

My advice is to grab the paper now, give it a read, and save it for another day, when the Broadcast Zombie will start roaming the lands again.

Finally: WIPO has a Development Agenda

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:00:55 +0200

Last week brought truly good news. After two years of negotiations, it looks like the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) may finally turn into an organisation that works for the interest of society at large, rather than just those of a small group of major holders of intellectual monopolies.

Last week’s meeting of the “Provisional Committee on a Development Agenda” (PCDA) resulted in a total of 45 recommendations (derived from 111 proposals).

WIPO's General Assembly still has to approve the recommendations in September.

While this is not quite cherry pie and whipped cream for all, it's a little step in a new direction. It gives me hope that there may be a day when WIPO no longer, as Cory Doctorow says,

has the same relation to bad copyright that Mordor has to evil.

A large coalition of civil society groups got together for this debate under the banner of Access to Knowledge (A2K). Thanks are due to all of them, here are links to just a few. FSFE was involved from the beginning, and I'm proud of having contributed something to this process. FSFE's participation was only possible thanks to support from the community. It's always difficult to find the money to attend WIPO meetings; Geneva is expensive. Thank you all!

Sangeeta Shashikant from the Third World Network has posted a first analysis of the outcome. Developing countries didn't get all they hoped for, and had to abandon some of their core proposals. On the other hand, two years ago nobody thought that this was actually possible.

IPWatch says:

Negotiators concluded a weeklong meeting with agreements on a wide range of proposals for new development-related activities - some hard to imagine for WIPO two years ago - and a recommendation to set up a new committee to implement the proposals.

“This is a major achievement,” said a participating official. “It’s a complete overhaul of the WIPO concept, broadening it to reflect society’s growing concern with ownership of technologies and knowledge, and its effects for the future, both in developed and developing countries.”

Recommendations cut across al areas of WIPO, from its work in “technical assistance” (advice to developing countries on building systems for the enforcement of intellectual monopolies) to WIPO’s own mandate and governance. The recommendations about the organisation’s mandate could prove crucial. The PCDA recommends that WIPO should coordinate its work more closely with other UN organisations, something that more conservative members were reluctant to do. After all, a discussion about copyright exceptions for educational materials might turn out slightly different when UNESCO is involved.

Another recommendation is ” To request WIPO, within its mandate, to expand the scope of its activities aimed at bridging the digital divide, in accordance with the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), also taking into account the significance of the Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF).” This may help to introduce more progressive views on the digital world into WIPO, and would have been unthinkable two years ago

The recommendations still need to be adopted by WIPO’s General Assembly in September. I’m curious to see how this goes - the whole process was a heated battle, and progressive texts have a tendency of disappearing at WIPO. But if these recommendations are adopted, WIPO will be on a path that’s much more helpful not only for developing countries, but for everybody on this planet who isn’t a major record label, movie studio or pharmaceutical giant. The latter three may suffer if they cling to their outdated business models, but don’t worry about them just yet. They’ll retain more than enough political influence.

The United States, which had been the staunchest opponents of a Development Agenda for WIPO during the negotiation process, emphasised that the decisions taken were within WIPO’s mandate. In what looks like an attempt to establish a give-and-take, they also sought to link the results to renewed work on harmonising national patent laws across the globe. This has long been a pet goal of the US, but developing countries are sceptical, as they think they are unlikely to benefit.

Extensive reporting on last week’s negotiations and the Development Agenda in general can be found at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (in English), at FGV law school (in Brazilian Portuguese), and at Knowledge Ecology International (in English). They were some of the numerous civil society groups that put a huge amount of work into making this happen.

Anti-climax at WIPO: Broadcasting treaty not quite dead

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 18:29:02 +0200

It's been a harrowing day, and I'm not even near Geneva, where the negotiations on a WIPO broadcasting treaty went through some ups and downs today. After yesterday's session, it looked as if the treaty would be gone for good, as numerous delegations had piled in to make new demands just before closing time.

Today, on the last day of the relevant committee's session, the chairman (who's been on the job for decades, apparently) came back with the recommendation - to the sound of jaws dropping - to convene a diplomatic conference next year. A conference means that the treaty is basically a done deal.

In today's afternoon session, negotiators finally reached an anti-climax, which is quite typical for WIPO. The treaty will stay on the committee's agenda, but that's it for now:

The General Assembly decides that the subject of protection of broadcasting and cablecasting organizations be retained in the agenda of the SCCR for its regular sessions, and considers the convening of a diplomaticconference only after agreement on object and scope of the treaty [...].

Thanks to KEI's Manon Ress for quickly posting the decisions. They'll take weeks to appear on the WIPO website; so much for transparency.

Dell refunds Microsoft Licences

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:41:52 +0200

Marcus Dapp has managed to return the Microsoft Windows and Works licences for his new Dell laptop, and to get the money refunded. Apparently, it was quite simple, with only a couple of emails back and forth. Congratulations!

Read the story in English or German, and feel free to use his mails to get your own refund.

Though it's nice to see that it's possible to return unused licences, I'm looking forward to the day when my new computer comes with a free OS pre-installed, not with proprietary programs I don't want or need.

via netzpolitik.org

Dell customers want GNU/Linux pre-installed

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 12:31:43 +0100

At Dellideastorm.com, the computer seller is running a forum where people can post what they would like Dell to offer. At the top of the list are -- you guessed it -- computers with GNU/Linux pre-installed.

So what's the second-most popular idea, then? OpenOffice pre-installed. Also in the top ten are a laptop working 100% with GNU/Linux, the option to buy a computer without an OS, and Firefox pre-installed as a default browser.

Would be nice to see Dell give their customers what they're asking for.

via Slashdot

High-profile expert to leave South Centre suddenly

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 15:51:13 +0100

IP-Watch reports that Sisule Musungu, a key expert of the international community discussing copyright and patent reform, has been asked to leave his position yesterday without warning.

He was the head of the South Centre's Innovation and Access to Knowledge programme. In this function, he worked hard to give more weight to the interests of developing countries at the WTO, WIPO, and many a UN organisation. He is a prime expert on policies about copyrights, patents and other intellectual monopoly powers (IMPs), and much respected throughout the Access to Knowledge scene.

He is the author of numerous texts on TRIPS, patents, and the consequences of IMPs on developing countries. He is also a brilliant thinker and analyst.

The South Centre is an intergovernmental think tank for developing countries in Geneva. It is vital in coordinating southern policy interests, as developing country representation at international organisations often suffers from a lack of coordination.

IPWatch says that his departure is related to a disagreement with the South Centre's director, and that Musungu will challenge the decision. I've benefitted enormously from Sisule's expertise, and hope to be able to continue meeting him in my line of work, in this function or another important one.

Brits: Help ensure Free Software access to BBC content!

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 14:22:33 +0100

The BBC is asking the "commercial sector, industry bodies, interests groups and BBC management" and -- gasp -- even "licence fee payers" (shouldn't they put them first? After all, it's where a bunch of their money comes from) for input on how they'd like new BBC services to be implemented. One of those services would be to make all (or at least most) BBC material online a week after it's been broadcast.

In a rather clunky process, you can go to the BBC Trust's website, download a PDF with some proposed questions and let them know what you think. One item is especially worth considering:

 "How important is it that the proposed seven-day catch-up service over
the internet is available to consumers who are not using Microsoft
software?"

Rather important, I should say. It's definitely worth a few minutes of your time. At'em, me hearties! Make the BBC support open standards!

via BoingBoing

Second Life? Get a first life! [update]

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 13:16:13 +0100

While Stefano relishes his Free Software client for Second Life, BoingBoing brings us this beauty:

Get a First Life: "Your World. Sorry about that."

The website states that "First Life is a 3D analogue world where server lag does not exist", and encourages us to "Go outside -- Membership is free".

One of the main features of First Life? "Fornicate using your own genitals." Hey, I'm a resident!

What makes this parody even cooler is that Linden Labs, the company that runs Second Life, sent the author a "proceed and permitted" letter, the opposite of the usual "cease and desist".

UPDATE:

Dedicated First Life residents might also be interested in gadgets such as pMail and the iPad. Unusual for Apple, the latter even comes without crippling DRM!

(both via BoingBoing)