Who needs a powerful computer, when you can run ASCIIpOrtal? Now that game is geeky.

Note to fellow time wasters: if (for whatever reason) you want to compile from source, you need to compile PDCurses 3.4 first. Then copy it to / put a link in the source directory.

Last week I came home after spending 10 days in the United Arab Emirates. Here is a clickable selection (pictures linked to are 30% the size of the originals) of my impressions.

Making friends at the Dubai Aquarium Tunnel at Dubai Mall.

A piece of Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi.

Cranes are a mandatory part of the skyline.

Very strict regulations here.

The Grand Mosque.

This fellow seems to handle the climate better than me.

Back to Dubai and Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building at 818 meters.

No comment.

Pictures from Atlantis and The Lost Chambers in The Palm, Dubai:

Thumbnails and respective linked images available under CC by-sa 3.0.

Here’s a nice rocket launch (seems rather similar to an alternative clip which is shorter and has no high quality version, but might contain some more pieces of info), apparently reaching about 1350 meters (4441 feet, according to a comment). Features one very smooth landing, too.

I’ve been following this for a while now. With platforms like Linux around, why not aim for open hardware? OSNews has the latest (here and here).

Update 23 April: added link to second OSNews article.

Doug Mahugh of Microsoft writes¹ on Twitter:

“XPS will be submitted to Ecma within three weeks, likely to be approved at the Ecma GA in June. Have decided not to submit to ISO.”

No ISO submission? Interesting. Note: XPS, Microsoft’s alternative to PDF, depends on their own “HD Photo” (see slide 14) Also known as “JPEG XR”, it is about to be processed through ISO this year.

¹ Someone found this piece. As for myself, I believe I’m “too old” to use things like Twitter.

I’ve always found the man page for top to be painful to get through¹, so I was quite happy when I found some old tips on how to get the most out of this nice utility. Not everything is in there, but it should be enough.

Another thing I’ve been looking for since ages ago is iotop (available in Debian and Ubuntu), letting you monitor disk activity on a per-process basis. This feature requires kernel version 2.6.20 or later.

¹ In a way it feels like reading the man page for mplayer from end to end, albeit 7,000 lines shorter.

Update 7 April: thought I might as well mention jnettop too (its package name in Debian and Ubuntu), and you should of course know about dstat.

Software patents, ah… It’s like the seemingly never ending saga of SCO. Can’t they just leave us in peace?

Soon, the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) at the European Patent Office (EPO) will decide on several questions about software patents, asked by the President of the same organization. We’ll soon find out what kind of independence might or might not exist among the various layers of the EPO… (Interesting setup, for that matter.)

The questions, and some responses from the global community, can be found on the EPO page. Notably, replies from Jacob Hallén (FFII) and Philips are available there. URLs seem to be dynamic so please look these up on the page, right now under “23.10.2008 Case G3/08″. (My organization has no official submission as of yet, the deadline is the end of April.)

Sadly, the questions posed to the EBA are mined with typical EPO philosophy including their definitions of “technical effect”, “further technical effect”, “technical character”, “technical considerations” and other terminology they have used over the years. In that way they justified black being white, or more specifically the applicability of software patents (but, naturally, not “as such”).

Seeing how the specific questions to the EBA are phrased (quite some traps in there), and what is not asked, it seems clear to me that any set of answers with just “yes” or “no” is unable to speak against software patents in any meaningful way. Furthermore, if only one was to accept the premises of the questions, I submit that seemingly innocent arguments could be twisted in a number of ways to justify software patents. Nice job!

In their reply, Philips seems to have got the general idea: (page 4)

“[...] the claims define the invention in terms of the technical features [...] is a technical feature if it has a technical effect. Whether this technical effect is on the computer or on the outside world, is irrelevant.”

Rough translation: “if it’s a new thing that required some thinking to come up with, and it runs on a computer, you can patent it”.

Considering how this opinion seems all too easy to find in certain circles, we have a pessimistic press release on this subject.

Eric Brechner of Microsoft says in his blog: (emphasis added)

“When using existing libraries, services, tools, and methods from outside Microsoft, we must be respectful of licenses, copyrights, and patents. Generally, you want to carefully research licenses and copyrights (your contact in Legal and Corporate Affairs can help), and never search, view, or speculate about patents. I was confused by this guidance till I wrote and reviewed one of my own patents. The legal claims section—the only section that counts—was indecipherable by anyone but a patent attorney. Ignorance is bliss and strongly recommended when it comes to patents.”

I applaud the admission here of one of the core problems of today’s patent system; patents simply don’t serve their purpose if they don’t ensure the distribution of knowledge. Now, if software patents would at least be readable, the other problems with that concept would be even more visible…

Software patents is like patenting an element. Putting arbitrary limits on this beast won’t help, and it would be a start to reach this level of debate in wider circles when we talk about patent reform.

There has been significant activity in space recently, first with the Chinese mission and also SpaceX (a private company founded in 2002) who on their fourth attempt just achieved a successful orbit in space. Nice!

Update 00:30 : fixed an erroneous statement about the “special court”.

See also: part one ; demonstrations.

All references below are in Swedish, so you may want to use Google Translate. There’s an enormous amount of information available in Swedish blogs and other media, but not so much translated material. Nikke Lindqvist has gathered links to some English resources, in particular a video published shortly after the recent demonstrations against FRA.

Ignorant government

After a long fight, and countless scandals, the Swedish government is now presenting ideas for how the already approved wiretapping law (commonly called the “FRA law”, referring to the government agency which would do the work) can be “fixed” to meet certain criticism.

This package is being presented by some as a “new law”, but it seems naive at best to expect that the fundamental errors of design can be overcome like this. I’m not sure who should be more worried about their innocent activities – Swedes, or people abroad who (knowingly or not) risk having their traffic (e-mail, phone calls, …) intercepted by FRA (that could involve a lot of countries…).

Not too long ago, though, our Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt claimed that critics didn’t understand the law (see DN and SvD), and that “everybody will benefit if the debate stops”, and not to forget the – ahem – “differences of opinion” that he had with a member of his own party. And yet here we are, with last-minute proposals being presented again. To top it off, he now says that they have “learned to listen”. How can I possibly respond to such eloquence?

Abuse seems inevitable

There are nevertheless fundamental problems which I would suspect will remain, judging by how the government has operated so far. Let me point at some of them. Firstly, FRA or another government agency may get direct access to cable-bound communication, and we’re supposed to trust that they will follow rules or not abuse this (see Henrik Alexandersson’s blog entries: 1, 2). It is not yet clear how (if at all) this will change under the new proposal.

Secondly, FRA has its own regulations for what personal data can be stored (religious and political beliefs, among other things), and they seem rather interested in mapping social interactions on a massive scale. Olof Bjarnason has a nice visualization of the “sociogram”.

Finally, there’s nothing to stop a government from redefining the purpose of available tools – this may already be under way with millions of Swedish blood samples which were obtained solely for research. (See the editorial in Expressen.) I don’t think it hurts to be a little paranoid here…

The quicker, the better?

Apparently we are to believe that the “new law” meets all standards now due to the – yet to be detailed publicly – suggested changes, but since we have already discussed the “old law”, there’s no need to prolong the discussion, right? In other words: “the law is perfect, but we’ll make it better since you insist”.

Is this a responsible way to handle legislation? I found that a Member of Parliament, Alice Åström from the Left Party, summarized it quite well:

“Flera av de förbättringar som nu diskuteras går i rätt rikning, men oavsett vilka förbättringar som regeringspartierna kommer överens om kan vi inte ha en ordning där så här viktiga lagar förhandlas i sista minuten och bakom låsta dörrar. Detta trodde jag att vi var överens om över partigränserna efter integritetsutredningens slutbetänkande [...] De borgerliga kritikerna av FRA-lagen sviker nu ännu en gång. Det enda rimliga förfarandet hade varit att tillsätta en parlamentarisk kommitté och börja om från början.”

Rough translation:

“Several of the improvements which were discussed yesterday are a step in the right direction, but regardless of which improvements the governing parties agree on, we cannot have an order where such important laws are negotiated in the last minute and behind closed doors. I thought we had agreed over party lines about this after the final consideration of the Commission of Inquiry on Integrity [...] The non-socialist critics of the FRA law now let us down once more. The only reasonable approach would have been to call for a parliamentary committee and start over.”

That said, it’s not yet clear what various critics will do, but it is worrying, especially considering that six of the people in question made a recent public commitment to tear up the law and start from scratch.

Politicians, wake up!

The size of this mess is increasing by the day, and there’s a significant risk that politicians will once again vote for a law which they don’t understand – or worse, vote against their beliefs. One difference this time is that they can’t claim it will be “fixed later” (not that there was much room for that in June, but some did anyhow after voting for it).

There are also talks about a “special court” which would grant permissions for wiretapping, supposedly on a case-by-case basis; it’s still unclear what is meant more specifically, a wording that has been used is “trafikstråk” – which I guess translates to something like “communication stream”. Considering the timing of this proposal, I’d say one has to love this level of creativity… Present the whole proposal first if you please, then we’ll talk.

Then again, why don’t we rewrite the whole Swedish constitution while we’re at it? One week should be enough time to review it… Then we wait a few years, and rubber-stamp the changes. Any takers?

I hope that enough politicians will wake up and put things into perspective, but if the Social Democrats are willing to deal this time, we can expect that the law is put into force, with more or less cosmetic changes. We’ll find out soon enough if anyone will keep their word…