Free and Open Technologies

Changes Afoot

Sat, 3 Mar 2012 20:47:16 -0100

Forgive the mess. I'm closing several blogs. Most of the remaining blogs will go on a short hiatus while I do some infrastructure switching. I hope to archive and restore the content of the Christians in Business, Owner-Managed Business, and Free & Open Technologies blogs. The WCC LinkBlog, La Voz de la Revoluccion, my Writings blog, and Slingshot will not return.

I also have two blogs hosted on Google's Blogger site: OpenTech and Open Source REXX Blog, and two blogs hosted on Wordpress.com: Opportunity Knocks, and LAMPJR. I believe I want to merge Open Source REXX Blog and LAMPJR, at LAMPJR's address (at least, for now). I am not sure whether OpenTech will stay on its own, whether I'll merge it with Opportunity Knocks, or whether I'll merge it with Free and Open Technologies.

On SOPA, PIPA, and Copyright Maximalism: How We Must Respond

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:48:18 -0100

Joel Spolsky - Google+ - Two things about SOPA/PIPA and then I'll shut up :) (1) …

(1) The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us... then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, "OK, compromise," and gets half of what they want. That's not the way to win... that's the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online.
The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws. It's time to go on the offensive if we want to preserve what we've got. Let's force the RIAA and MPAA to use up all their political clout just protecting what they have. Here are some ideas we should be pushing for:
Elimination of software patents
Legal fees paid by the loser in patent cases; non-practicing entities must post bond before they can file fishing expedition lawsuits
Roll back length of copyright protection to the minimum necessary "to promote the useful arts." Maybe 10 years?
Create a legal doctrine that merely linking is protected free speech
And ponies. We want ponies. We don't have to get all this stuff. We merely have to tie them up fighting it, and re-center the "compromise" position.

Mr Spolsky is expressing thoughts that all of us should be thinking. In fact, I've partially expressed some related concepts before. Only, now that they've been expressed, we need to discuss them, modify them as needed, and then implement them. I encourage you to go to his post on GPlus and read the whole thing.

FreedomBox: Time To Decentralize Your Web Presence

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 20:23:01 -0100

This is long (about 90 minutes), but worthwhile.

Proprietary Software Usually Becomes Software Company Vs Customer/User

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 16:51:16 -0100

Some Behind The Scenes Chaos And A Lesson Learned With Our Business | MyWifeQuitHerJob.com

So finally Monday rolls around, I get a hold of support and they inform me that my software was registered using a different address, email address and phone number than before and that they couldn’t reactivate my software unless I used the original information. But the kicker was that they also couldn’t tell me what info I had used in the past.
After arguing with the sales rep for about 20 minutes, she finally relented and gave me a new activation code. But the damage was already done. This ordeal wasted several days of my valuable time and caused numerous delays with our order fulfillment. The worst part? I paid good money for this software, so why was I getting punished and hassled just because someone else decided to copy it illegally?

This annoying experience is actually pretty common among people who have proprietary software installed on their computers. I recently talked with someone whose hard drive was dying. Being away from his home, he did not have all the license information handy, and wound up having to call the support lines for his software.

It struck me that people who use proprietary software trade present convenience for future pain.

I once had a desktop computer running Windows XP SP2 that decided not to boot up because I had no Internet access for over a year. It demanded that I connect it to the Internet, so that it could check to see whether it was legitimately licensed. As a result, that computer was switched to run Linux instead of Windows.

Now, this isn't a diatribe about switching to an operating system that is based on GNU+Linux. There are a number of other operating systems which respect and / or protect their users' freedoms, such as the BSDs, Syllable, Hurd, HaikuOS, FreeDOS, FD32, Minix, and ReactOS. Some of these are in a usable state and some are not. I would not bother installing the Windows clone ReactOS yet, for example, if I wanted to actually be able to use my computer.

Nor is this about guilt-tripping people into ditching Windows and Mac OS X. The author of the article uses his computer to run a business--including running the stitching machines that embroider his products--and has to use software that does what he needs. Still, if he's at all smart, he has to be wondering (now) whether there is a way to prevent such hassles in the future.

The fact is, when your software is produced by someone who is all about money, it is in the software company's best interest to ensure that users pay for the software as often as possible. If you get a new computer and wish to transfer your license from computer A to computer B, the company would like to get paid. If you want to use the software on more than one computer, the company would like to get paid. And if you've been using the software for five years or more, the company would like to sell you an upgraded version. They would like to get paid.

That is only natural. But your interest is in a stable, useful, usable application that you can use whenever and wherever you wish, including multiple computers and devices, with a single payment (or even zero cost). Your interest includes having a minimum amount of change in the user interface from version to version (and again, reduced-price or even zero-price version upgrades).

The two interests tend to clash over time. However, in the short term, using such software can be the easiest way to satisfy both sides' needs. If you're a short-term thinker, this is enough and acceptable. Just know that it is very likely to cost you some extra money and pain in the future.

If you're the kind of person who will forego some present pleasure in order to avoid a lot of pain and cost later on, you should be looking at ways that you can replace your present computer environment with something like Linux Mint.

Google: Not As Evil As Microsoft, But Getting Close

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 02:36:14 -0100

Official Google Blog: Greater choice for wireless access point owners

We’re introducing a method that lets you opt out of having your wireless access point included in the Google Location Server. To opt out, visit your access point’s settings and change the wireless network name (or SSID) so that it ends with “_nomap.” For example, if your SSID is “Network,” you‘d need to change it to “Network_nomap.”

This sounds wonderful. Until you think about it. Because most people never change the SSID or WPA key on their routers, most DSL and cable services now preconfigure a unique SSID and WPA key before even shipping the router to consumers. So Google is saying here: "only the most technically skilled or privacy aware people can avoid having their wireless routers mapped and publically displayed."

If this action wasn't malevolent, it was stupid. The proper action is to make privacy the default. Let those who wish to be mapped be the ones who take special action to enable it. This is bad. Really bad. As in re-evaluating any ties to bigG bad.

No, this does not match Microsoft, which runs "Genuine Advantage" snoopware every time you start your (Microsoft Windows) computer and sends unspecified information back to Redmond, WA. The same Microsoft which has also been mapping WiFi access points for display on the internet.

Still, that this follows so closely on the #nymwars / real names policy fallacy on Google+ seems, to me, to indicate that something has changed inside the bowels of Google the corporation. Whatever that is, seems to smell of the kind of decaying morals once thought to reside only in Redmond. I don't think I like this new Google.

Privacy And Security Tip #2

Sun, 8 Aug 2010 03:19:47 +0000

This is the second in a series.

A lot of us join various membership and "social networking" sites. Joining such a site, you enter all sorts of personal information, such as your name, your date of birth, your city of residence, zip code, age, educational background, current or past employment, interests, contacts/friends/family, e-mail address, telephone number, and that all-important secret question and answer.

These are all the same pieces of information that identity thieves as well as marketers use to extract your hard-earned money. (If your money is not hard-earned, send it to me.) Identity thieves will obviously prefer it if they can also obtain your social security number.

If you don't want such personal information disseminated for anyone, anywhere, at any time, to use, misuse, and abuse, do not give web sites (including social networking sites) that information. Remember, it isn't just legitimate users that will have access to that information. It is scam collection agencies that will call, write, and otherwise harass you and your family and friends solely because they want you to send them money. I'm not talking only about legitimate debts, either. There are companies that will call you, claiming that a friend or relative used you as a reference on a loan application, and that you are now liable for the person's defaulted loan.

The point is this: without privacy, you have no safety, no security. Better to err on the side of non-disclosure than to expose too much of your private information. Once it gets loose, there is no way to capture it and pull it back. As for the site that wants you to join under your real name and insert your work and educational information, they do this to increase their ad revenue. It has nothing to do with helping you connect to others and everything to do with their pocketbooks. That's why they've suddenly decided that this formerly private information is now public: it gives their customers (advertisers) more information to use in targeting their ads.

Be very stingy about giving personally-identifying information to any website.

You can search for similar content below. If you are a member of any of these services, and you liked this article, please tag / bookmark the article on that site. Thank you.

IceRocket tags: ,

Technorati tags: ,

Delicious tags: ,

Ma.gnol.ia tags: ,

Privacy And Security Tip #1

Sat, 5 Jun 2010 04:54:13 +0000

In this age of privacy-invading websites, it is easy to get distracted from the basics. If you still receive your bills and balance statements in the mail, you should implement a comprehensive shredding program.

Often, we shred the occasional document that we consider privacy-sensitive. We don't shred non-important documents, such as junk mail or shopping lists. In the process, we give "dumpster divers" a clear signal about which items in our refuse stream have a high value. We tell them which pieces of paper are worthy of their reassembly efforts by only making reassembly necessary (by shredding) when the contents are sensitive.

Instead, we need to obscure the high-value, privacy-sensitive documents in a deluge of shredded junk mail, television schedules, and homework.

Shredding personal documents may not be enough. If you only shred
sensitive information, your refuse stream will be easy to segregate into
sensitive / non-sensitive.

Instead, shred everything you can, so that dumpster divers will find it
more difficult to reassemble documents.

Even though it is our electronic communications that people find scary, most of us are probably more likely to suffer breaches through dumpster diving and dishonest waiters than we are to suffer losses through online bad guys.

"Open Source" May Not Be Sufficient

Mon, 5 Apr 2010 22:59:13 +0000

Twitter / lnxwalt: Open source is about *firs ...

Open source is about *first-order* freedoms, those which the developer grants to the immediate downstream user/modifier....

Twitter / lnxwalt: Free Software is about *se ...

Free Software is about *second-order* freedoms, those which the immediate downstream passes to subsequent users/modifiers.

Twitter / lnxwalt: This explains why "open so ...

This explains why "open source" is not always sufficient.

Our world of Free software / Open source software may not be enough of a foundation for free culture and the historic Constitutional freedoms we have enjoyed for hundreds of years. Much has been written, and rightfully so, about the way our nation refused to extend to various ethnic groups (and women in general) the rights we claimed were so fundamental that they were self-evidently granted to all "men" by our creator. But we've come a long way toward rectifying those errors. And yet, we are rapidly heading toward a time when it is no longer ancestry or body parts that determines whether one has rights, but whether one is a corporate officer of a small number of corporations.

ACTA: An Orgasmic Festival Of Greed And Glutony

Glyn Moody has done a lot to inform the UK public about the secret treaty called ACTA. ACTA is an effort by the copyright abuse industries (corporations that control music, movies, publishing, and software) to prevent social and technological changes from threatening their business models. Among the provisions being negotiated into this proposed treaty is "three strikes". Essentially, if you or a member of your household are accused--not charged, not convicted: accused--three times of violating copyrights you lose Internet access for life. Your Internet provider would be required to track every site and file, to prevent you from accessing any potential copyright violating material. So no more visiting YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, or any other user-generated content sites, since "The Numa Numa Dance" might feature a copyrighted song.

But that's not all. Draconian copyright-enforcement rules damage freedom-preserving software, such as that which the Free Software Foundation endorses, as well as open source software (such as the Open Source Initiative endorses) because closed-source software may (because no one can see the source) utilize its more open competitors within its products, but those competitors may not utilize the closed source product. Stopping at "exposing source code" isn't good enough. That source code needs to be protected with "cannot close derived code" defenses, such as those advocated by the FSF.

Even there, however, we need to ally our quest for freedom-preservation in software with similar efforts in other creative fields. For example, consider supporting Creative Commons the organization and even more importantly, insisting that you view or listen to only CC-licensed media. Surely there is little on the latest reality show to be worth its toxic effects on your rights as a content consumer and as a potential remixer or other producer of derivative content? This is where the rubber meets the road: these draconian copyright enforcement actions are really about destroying both fair use and derivative rights. Opposing the scam requires both political action and principled purchasing. We cannot win if we continue to give money to the already-huge media corporations that oppose our interests. We have to stop buying music, software, movies, books, magazines, newspapers, and other "content", including removing ourselves from the audience for broadcast operations and web properties, whenever the copyright owner advocates, lobbies, or otherwise promotes copyright extremism.

Snoopware Built In

One of the things that no one talks about, or at least not regularly, loudly, and in public arenas such as the Web, is the incentive for proprietary software companies to include snoopware in their products, so they know about your system's hardware and software environment and can identify when you try and install the software on a different computer. Microsoft has its Genuine (Dis)Advantage, which runs in the background even before your computer will allow you to log in, and which periodically phones home with unknown data. Is it checking what browsers and office suites are installed? Is it reporting which sites you've visited? Does its report include personally-identifying information such as your name or your username? Does it include GeoIP information that can tell what neighborhood you're accessing the Web from? Again, no one knows for sure. But without a clear concern for at least first-order freedom, it is difficult to resist the temptation to try and bump up revenue by suppressing suspected cheating, even if that process tramples individual rights and freedoms or exposes private information.

Now, I am not opposed to companies making money on software. But when their business is built around proprietary (EULA) licensing, it is predictable that their interests and the interests of the users of their products will clash eventually, and that is when snoopware and technological usage restrictions (TUR, often euphemized as digital rights management [DRM]) become tempting for the companies. TUR is the use of technological means to restrict what the user can do with the software. An example of this might be the code built into Apple's operating system to prevent its use on non-Apple hardware, or code which prevents you from using MS Office 2007 once the trial period expires unless you enter the "activation code" or the region code which prevents you from viewing that DVD you got for $3 in Japan. The purpose of those restrictions is to prevent you from using content you purchase in ways the copyright owner does not approve.

It is also predictable that, in the absence of such anti-user provisions, the average selling price of most areas of software will drop over time, just as prices do with most other products. That the price of some companies' office suites or operating systems continues to remain high is a testament to how effective anti-user, anti-competitive technological means can be (especially when coupled with a legal assault to back up the TUR).

I should also point out that this isn't just seen in software. When we obsess on copyrights for corporations, we find music companies infecting people's computers with rootkits; we find movie companies using TUR to prevent a DVD purchased in one part of the world from being viewed in another; we find insanely-rich companies obsessively filing "take-down" orders against teens and parents of small children because they used a song in the background of a video they uploaded to YouTube; and we find the government negotiating secret "intellectual monopoly" treaties with draconian punishments for anyone who is even accused of violating a copyright. The way primary to to stop this is to simply refuse to buy, watch, listen, or otherwise support the products of those companies and anything else that has licensing that is not freedom-preserving. Also: join the Free Software Foundation, donate to the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, Creative Commons, and the Open Source Initiative; and to make sure your congressional representatives (House and Senate) and presidential candidates know that voting with the copyright abuse industries will cost them your vote.

We need to be loud, persistent, and very clear that the power-grab by the copyright abuse industries will not be tolerated. I believe that we can regain control of our nation from the corporate interests. It won't be quick, nor will it be easy. We will have to beat back those who seek to shortcut the process through the rhetoric of revolution. We will have to counteract the proven-effective media promotion of the ultra-copyright viewpoint. We will have to use political pressure and the law to gain control of our state universities; our state legislatures, governors' mansions, and courthouses; and the federal equivalents of those state institutions. We cannot afford to endorse (even through silence) those who seek a violent re-ordering of society, but instead must quickly and loudly oppose their every pronouncement. Above all, we must indoctrinate the teens and twentysomethings of today, recognizing that our own generation will die off someday and theirs will run the ship. It is a long-term effort to bring back common sense to copyright, but it is one that we need to undertake beginning now.

You can search for similar content below. If you are a member of any of these services, and you liked this article, please tag / bookmark the article on that site. Thank you.

IceRocket tags: Open Source, Copyright

Technorati tags: Open Source, Copyright

Delicious tags: Open Source, Copyright

Ma.gnol.ia tags: Open Source, Copyright

This article is copyright � 2010, Disco Technologies division of Open Technology Pros, LLC. Copyright � 2010, Walt J. Hucks. Licensed under Creative Commons attribution-non-commercial-sharealike license. Some rights reserved. If your site relies upon subscription or advertising, you may not use more than three paragraphs without prior written permission.

Net Neutrality Letter

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:29:32 +0000

This was my submission to the FCC regarding Net Neutrality. I found it again today and thought it might merit circulation. Even though it is too late to submit similar comments to the FCC, there are two senators and a representative who still need to see this.

In the beginning, entrepreneurs put banks of modems in their garages and started Internet service providers offering dial-up service. And it was good. And lo, the telephone industry offered dial up. And their competitors offered better service at lower prices, and everyone's phone payment paid the costs of building the infrastructure.

Then came dark days, for someone in the FCC decided to allow the telephone and cable television industries to offer high-speed access, but they needn't allow competing ISPs to sell high-speed access through those lines. And the cable companies raised their prices and offered inferior service. They interfered with their customers' use of phone- and video-over-Internet services in order to promote their own, higher-priced offerings. They placed arbitrary limits on bandwidth use for supposedly "unlimited" access. The phone companies, meanwhile, continued to offer only a relatively slow-speed version of Internet access. And the FCC and Congress hemmed and hawed and did little to nothing about the injustices they saw.

And lo, a new ruler arose, and with him, the FCC began to discuss whether it should mandate "net neutrality" to prevent the abuses they had observed, and worse besides. And the telephone and cable television industries gave money to Congress and gained an inside track. And there arose a movement that sought to get the FCC and Congress to protect the interests of citizens.

And this is where we stand today. I ask you to impose net neutrality because the FCC erred in allowing wireline owners to offer access and service-consuming services to the public themselves. It should have been an arm's length transaction with similar terms available to multiple qualified ISPs (and no throttling or interference by the cable or telephone company owning the "pipes" at all). Because of this mistake, there is no free market for many consumers.

In many areas, there is the cable company and there are a few surviving dial-up competitors. In other areas, there is a duopoly, where the cable company offers faster speeds at higher prices, and the telephone company offers moderate speeds at medium prices. When the only game in town decides to interfere with the Internet services you use (possibly to make your living), you are screwed.

I ask you, members of the Federal Communications Commission, to recognize that the Internet is not the property of any company. It is not something of no consequence that can be restricted or limited for company purposes without fundamentally harming the American economy and those of us who pay those companies for our access. I ask you to represent the interests of "We the people", the ones you work for, and not solely the interests of a few large corporations.

And I remind you that I am a registered voter and will withhold my vote from candidates for federal office who do not support the American people through Net Neutrality.

Changing The Open Source Initiative

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:26:30 +0000

OSI Board Addition May Bring Needed Change | ITworld

The OSI has been one of those organizations that seemed to fall short of its true potential, which is always a source of frustration; you want them to succeed, and don't understand when things go awry. It's particularly difficult to stand by and watch it happen to people whom you genuinely respect, like Michael Tiemann, Danese Cooper, and Phipps himself, who has this week has been elected to the Board of Directors, effective April 1. They, and other members of the OSI board, are individually very smart and more than capable of spearheading the open source governance body.

The OSI, if you recall, is primarily responsible for enforcing the Open Source Definition, the document that literally defines what is open source software. The practical extension of this enforcement is, in a nutshell, the OSI decides what constitutes an open source license.

Unfortunately, in the selfsame spirit of openness that the OSI is trying to promote, the group has, in the past, approved a lot of open source licenses. Currently there are 66 licenses officially sanctioned by the OSI, which many people, myself included, believe dilutes the significance of open source.

I have not been critical of the Open Source Initiative, even though license proliferation is problematic. Lately, though, I have come to see that open source software and free software, while they often refer to the same software & licenses, have different goals and are promoted by those with different agendas. That is, open source (and OSI) is concerned with first-order freedom: what the immediate recipient of the software can do with it. Free software (and the Free Software Foundation) generally goes beyond this and is concerned with second-order freedom: ensuring that the immediate recipient of the software is not able to remove user freedoms before passing it downstream to others.

Because of the confusion that comes when we refer to "free software", I tend to use the more explicit term "freedom-preserving software" instead.

If you run a big company like Google or IBM, you're may desire to support first-order freedom, so that you can do as you wish to enhance applications to fit your needs, but you may not be as concerned about enabling others to share in those enhancements, especially if the enhancement must carry the same kind of licensing. On the other hand, if you run a smallish company, and you're sponsoring an open source project to develop your primary product, you'd better be concerned about second-order freedom, or you'll regret it when a competitor takes your code, enhances it, and then uses that improved version of your own product to compete with you without releasing the changes under the same license.

Likewise, if you are really concerned with education, you'll be interested in first-order freedom and likely also interested in second-order freedom, so that students can legally explore, extend, and improve the software. That is, you should be interested in those things. It seems that many so-called computer-skills training classes are click-here-click-there walkthroughs of a particular brand and version of widely-used proprietary software. Sadly, this is brittle training, because two years down the road, the vendor comes out with a new version that rearranges the buttons and menus, and the student hasn't a clue about how to use the product any more.

I'm firmly in the smaller, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs) camp, and therefore both first-order and second-order freedom are important to me. I look for freedom-preserving software, and I loathe dealing with rights-curtailing EULA-licensed sofware. (EULA is the end user license agreement found primarily in proprietary software. It typically bans a long list of things that are otherwise legal, including publishing comparisons of the product to a competing product.)

There's one more reason that I hope Mr. Phipps' impact helps OSI to focus more on both first-order and second-order freedoms. The leader of the Free Software Foundation, which has always focused on second-order freedoms, is deeply entangled in the extremo-liberal NPR-talking-points thing. Paying some attention to his output on Identi.ca, I see his stream is filled with messages about the cruel & inhuman Israelis refusing to stand still and let the valiant Palestinian freedom fighters blow them up. Typical NPR left-wing ignore-the-facts stuff. But coming from the head of the FSF, it is off-putting to those who aren't in that political camp to read this from the same mouth that proclaims a freedom that any Constitution-lover immediately identifies with and craves. (US conservatives used to talk in favor of similar freedoms until they realized that big corporations like Microsoft as well as the dictatorial state may be threatened by such unbridled bottom-up freedom.) OSI could be, and should be, an organization that pushes hard on the first-order freedoms that have been its major focus, while educating people about second-order freedoms (such as freedom-preserving software and creative commons content), serving as an important back-up to the FSF. OSI should make second-order freedoms a second focus, taking a cue from Richard M. Stallman (perhaps modifying his more extreme political views with some input from Theo de Raadt and the American founding fathers).

One area I would like to see OSI look at is using open source software within the schools and teaching students about first-order and second-order software freedoms. It is totally backwards that we take students, sit them down in front of software which does not confer either first-order or second order freedoms, software which they cannot use at home unless they buy a license (and the versions used are generally higher-priced than the home versions they are likely to have at school), and then lecture them about "hacking" and unauthorized access. So if they discover an area of interest, they are unable to pursue that interest any farther than the two hours of guided computer lab time each week. Instead, OSI, FSF, and others should be promoting the idea of software freedom both to educators, students, and their families.

(Whatever else one may say about OLPC, at least it does have the idea of carrying software that gives first-order and sometimes second-order freedom to its users. That is so much more important than just another step-by-step tutorial on using Microsoft Word. Mark Pilgrim wrote (about the iPad's closed, uptight environment) about how computer makers (and specifically Apple) used to produce computers that inspired people to examine and modify the internals, which helped launch a generation of programmers. I'm still hopeful that because of the OLPC, there will be thousands if not millions of low-income children who grow up in control of their systems, who go on to launch independent business ventures in countries all around the world, and who do not depend upon the big software and media companies, but go around them to help define, refine, and meet the needs of people in their respective parts of the globe. However, it would be good if OSI made more noise about the need for open platforms like OLPC to be the foundation of "computer education".)

You can search for similar content below. If you are a member of any of these services, and you liked this article, please tag / bookmark the article on that site. Thank you.

IceRocket tags: Open Source, Free Software

Technorati tags: Open Source, Free Software

Delicious tags: Open Source, Free Software

Ma.gnol.ia tags: Open Source, Free Software