Monthly Archives: August 2006

Is Gore exchanging one friend for another?

Posted on by

Former US Vice President Al Gore complains about the consolidation of the corporate media but no mention is made how this conflicts with his other loyalty: the Democratic Leadership Council.

First, check out this Gore quote from the Associated Press

Questions of fact that are threatening to wealth and power become questions of power, he said. And so the scientific evidence on global warming — an inconvenient truth for the largest polluters — becomes a question of power, and so they try to censor the information.

Yes, all fine and with the movie title namedrop as well, but when he was in power he was reluctant to challenge large-scale pollution. According to Joshua Frank and leading environmental muckraker Jeffrey St. Clair, Gore supported a free-market approach to handling pollution by supporting NAFTA which helped move big business polluters to Mexico where environmental law is weaker and less frequently enforced than in the US. Gore was placating the DLC, a group he conflicts with when he criticizes a monolithic media.

While Gore makes his claim, Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) is running for re-election and getting quite a boost from Time-Warner station NY1 financially—Time Warner has donated $100,000 to her campaign making that corporation the number 6 contributor to her campaign—and in the form of excluding her anti-Iraq-war competition, Jonathan Tasini, from televised debates by setting the bar for inclusion ridiculously high. NY1’s public relations manager, Edward Pachetti, says

The criteria are that a candidate must poll at least five percent (including margin of error) in a recognized independent poll and would need to have spent and/or raised $500,000.

Listen to Tasini and Ralph Nader, who also knows a thing or two about being excluded from televised would-be debates, as they talk about this development in depth on Democracy Now! on Wednesday, August 9, 2006 (Ogg Vorbis or FLAC format). Their discussion starts at 25m26s into the show. Nader points out that any ballot-qualified candidate should be able to participate in any debates. Any modern media player can play these files (scroll down a bit to see the list of operating systems and media players).

Kerala chooses GNU/Linux

Posted on by

The Indian state of Kerala has chosen to migrate to GNU/Linux and it was a visit from Richard Stallman that put free software over the top.

Free software guru Richard Stallman’s visit last week had nudged the schools to discard the proprietary software altogether, state education minister MA Baby told FE [Financial Express]. Stallman has inspired Kerala’s transition to free software on the lines of an exciting model of a Spanish province, which did the same, the minister said.

Local computer vendors will appreciate this sales opportunity, particularly after Microsoft’s recent sting operation executed there.

Not everyone runs MacOS X on Apple hardware.

Posted on by

After much bad press about Apple’s hardware failing including causing two instances of minor burns to people handling the machines, Apple has issued a recall on a bunch of bad batteries in their customer’s iBooks. Mike Pinkerton mentions a colleague’s Apple iBook battery won’t be recalled and asks

The odd thing is that all the tech notes tell you that to find the serial number on an iBook, you have to pry open the machine and look under the keyboard (ok, pry is exaggerating, but you get my drift). In reality, all you have to do is look in the System Profiler app; the serial number is listed on the main Hardware tab. I copied and pasted and it validated the serial number as an affected model, so I know it’s correct. Why wouldn’t Apple’s detailed tech notes mention this very simple alternative?

It would be a good idea to accomodate those that can get the serial number in software, just as Pinkerton says. However, not everyone using an Apple iBook runs MacOS X. Some run MacOS 9, some run free software operating systems including OpenBSD and GNU/Linux which have been ported to run on PPC hardware.

Bad batteries are a hardware issue; bad batteries will adversely affect all users regardless of operating system. If the hardware is warrantied without exception to one’s OS (as it should be), it makes sense to give directions that all iBook users can use, not just those running MacOS X. It would be unwise to exclusively list the software method for determining one’s serial number because this method would be vastly different in OSes and not available in some OSes.

30 Days of DRM

Posted on by

Prof. Michael Geist is the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. Prof. Geist is working on 30 Days of DRM where each day for 30 days he brings something new to your attention in an attempt to examine the restrictions and limitations the Canadian government should include if Canada adopts a DMCA-like law.

Here’s hoping no other countries get a DMCA-like law and the countries that have them overturn these laws immediately. What’s in this for you, as an ordinary computer user? A law that will give copyright holders the ability to enact digital copy restriction systems that never expires (even if the underlying copyrighted work eventually enters the public domain); copy restriction programs that are illegal to circumvent or to tell anyone how to circumvent.

Your freedom of speech is at issue, as is your ability to use what you legally obtained in a way that benefits you preserving your works, your culture, and your investment in others’ copyrighted works.

The consequences of following freedom versus convenience.

Posted on by

Fedora Core 5 GNU/Linux does not come with the latest version of the X11 GUI display software, software virtually everyone using this system runs and depends on for drawing a graphical display. Ante Karamatić doesn’t agree with the decision and asks

Fedora, remeber RMS and the GNU movment? Do you recall what OpenSource is?

The FSF is quite clear that the free software movement and the younger open source movement are not the same. For years they’ve published an essay about this and its consequences. Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html or get a copy of the essay in “Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman”.

As for how much should one accomodate proprietary software, Canonical has made their choice very clear.

Continue reading →

You don’t have to act that way.

Posted on by

On Slashdot, a technical discussion site, a poster tried to convince the readers that because the Free Software Foundation (which wrote the GNU GPL and is a big player in the free software movement) and the Motion Picture Association have the same power as licensors or defenders of licenses, one must see them the same way—oppressors that can squash your freedom to share and modify at their whim.

I don’t think so.

Continue reading →

What XPAT-less NNTP servers could do to give their users XPAT support.

Posted on by

I’m starting a new tag with this article—Technical—where I’ll cover technical subjects with little or no explanation of the jargon. These topics are not intended for the novice or the uninitiated. Everyone’s free to read and participate in the discussion, of course, but sometimes I feel like getting to the heart of the matter more than I feel like setting up the discussion.

Chris Ilias quoted Giganews support on why XPAT isn’t supported on Giganews servers:

The XPAT command attempts to search through our entire spool of over 700 million articles, to match on a specific keyword, that is often found only in a handful of newsgroups. The command puts enough of a load on our servers, that several people using this at one time can affect the performance that all of our customers receive.

As one of the posters in that blog pointed out, this is somewhat misleading. XPAT only searches one group; a GROUP command must preceed an XPAT command. That reduces the number of articles being searched by a great deal. But what if it could be reduced further still?

Continue reading →

An interview, a talk, and a book.

Posted on by

Richard M. Stallman gave an interview to Source21.nl during FOSDEM. Eben Moglen also gave a talk and took questions. This is available in two parts (1, 2). The second section has the Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted in any medium provided this notice is preserved. license in it.

You can download a PDF copy of RMS’ book of essays Free Software, Free Society. My father bought me a copy when it was first printed.

The licenses for each work are embedded in the works, so passing on a copy of either file or both is all you need to do to share with a friend. If you wish to modify the book you can do so, license terms are on page 2.