Skip to content
Dexamethasone 90 Pills Prescription Cheap Consultation : Buy No Prescription 100 Mg Diclofenac Online : Doctors That Will Prescribe Aldactone : Buy Prednisolone Pennsylvania Next Day Delivery : Pharmacy Outside Us Selling Risperdal 30 3 Mg : Buy No Prescription Lamotrigine Online : Where To Find Vpxl 3 Months Supply : Where Can Buy 60 Caps Diabecon In Ak Bay : Segment Of Doctor Prescribing Ampicillin 120 500 Mg 73.9$ : Nevada Doctors Who Will Prescribe Erythromycin : Diabecon No Rx Canada : Strattera Online Usa No Prescription : Free Prednisolone 60 Pills 40 Mg Ct : How Is Allopurinol Prescribed In West Virginia : Best Pharmacies On Somac In Id : How Can I Get Haloperidol 60 Pills 10 Mg In Iowa (ia) : Can You Get Retin-a In Australia Without Prescription?

Support Ogg Vorbis and your own freedom

The Free Software Foundation has started a new campaign to convince people to support Ogg Vorbis with PlayOgg.org. Other formats (such as MP3, AAC, and many others) are patent-encumbered or only available with proprietary software. You shouldn’t have to lose your freedom to control your computer just to play audio and video.

Long-time readers of Digital Citizen know that I host and steer people to multimedia encoded in free formats (Ogg Vorbis for general-purpose audio, FLAC for archival-quality audio, Speex for compressed versions of human speech, and Theora for video). I also work with others (such as News from Neptune) to help them host their media in free formats.

There are a number of programs for various operating systems to play all of these kinds of files. The audio files can be played with portable digital audio players too. So you don’t have to give up portability to keep your freedom when you’re on the road. The FSF has some instructions on acquiring and installing VideoLAN Client, a popular all-purpose media player and media sharing program.

More places you can go to get audio in Ogg Vorbis format (and licensed to share):

  • Jamendo—considerable variety, lots of French music
  • Magnatune—a wide variety of genres of music
  • Kahvi—easygoing electronic music
  • Pandora—Classical music
2007 05 17 J.B. Nicholson-Owens Digital Citizen
Free Software
Oggcast Comments Off Permalink

British Citizens: Tell MPs to not extend copyright term in UK

Seventy MPs have now signed an Early Day Motion calling for retrospective extension to the term of copyright. Despite much evidence to the contrary and a study which concludes that “The European Commission should retain the length of protection on sound recordings and performers’ rights at 50 years.” and the ruckus raised the last time the term of copyright was at issue (remember the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in the US and the related US Supreme Court case Eldred v Ashcroft?), it looks like copyright term extension is going again.

Longer terms of copyright around the world are used as excuses for American copyright extensions—harmonization is the word used for this scam. It’s a scam in two respects: it’s never “harmonized” to exactly the same length and copyright term is always “harmonized” upwardly. So Americans have even more reason to help keep their friends and family from a worse copyright regime.

The Open Rights Group has more details including the 70 MPs that signed on to support copyright term extension and a pointer to a great talk and panel discussion on the topic (local copies of the Jonathan Zittrain talk and the debate that followed). I particularly enjoyed the analysis in the discussion period. I’ll see about converting the video to Ogg Vorbis+Theora.

2007 05 17 J.B. Nicholson-Owens Digital Citizen
Politicos Comments Off Permalink

We can’t recommend hardware that doesn’t support our freedom.

AMD owns ATI, a computer videocard manufacturer. Recent ATI videocards have no free software drivers. The proprietary ATI driver which works with a typical GNU/Linux system is poor quality and as a result many users have problems with it. At the Red Hat summit going on right now, an AMD representative discussed the situation and Tom Calloway blogged about it:

An executive VP from AMD gave a keynote this morning, and he talked up open source and committed to making the ATI driver “better”.

We don’t need the driver to be “better”, Mr. AMD, we need the driver to be “free”. You make it free. Free your specs. Free up a little of your manpower to answer technical queries from developers. Free Dave Airlie from his NDA restrictions. Free your existing code.

You make it free. We’ll make it better. Everyone will benefit.

Calloway has the right message; software freedom will lead to improved code quality. If ATI supported our freedom we could change our position from recommending against ATI hardware to telling people which ATI videocards to buy, just like we tell people which Intel hardware to look for in their next machines as a direct result of Intel’s stance supporting free software. On a related note, consider what ATI spokesperson Henri Richard is reported to have said and the skeptical reaction recorded on Christopher Blizzard’s blog.

The situation Calloway describes here bears an eerie similarity to something we’ve heard before.
Continue reading ›

2007 05 09 J.B. Nicholson-Owens Digital Citizen
Free Software
Technical Comments Off Permalink

More OLPC progress

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is progressing and the folks at OLPC have put together another video with interviews of the people behind the project.

If you’re unfamiliar with their work, you can search for “OLPC” on this blog and find their other video.

As before, the new video is licensed to to share under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 2.5 license (local copy).

2007 05 09 J.B. Nicholson-Owens Digital Citizen
Free Software
Oggcast
Technical Comments Off Permalink

DNC PR head is an RIAA shill

Let Boing Boing take you through a few choice quotes from Jenni Engebretsen, the RIAA’s Director of Communications who is now the head of public relations for the Democratic National Convention. Also, Boing Boing has more on the shill’s avoidance of difficult issues including:

The liberal blogosophere is united on many fronts — not just disliking US foreign policy. We also hate the RIAA — for suing our friends, for lobbying for laws that suspend due process rights of the accused (the RIAA’s favorite law, the DMCA, was used by Diebold to suppress information about failures in its voting machines), and for demanding the right to “pretext” (commit wire fraud) in order to catch “pirates.”

Worse still, the RIAA are part of the initiative to corrupt net neutrality, imposing centralized controls on the transmission of information across the network.

However I should add that I don’t agree with “liberals” on some issues, their love for proprietary software for instance.

2007 04 13 J.B. Nicholson-Owens Politicos Comments Off Permalink

More corporations instead of fewer?

In its latest letter, FreePress.net tells us

The controversy over Don Imus’ racist remarks goes far beyond one bigoted commentator. But getting rid of Imus won’t fix the media problem.

Most of our TV and radio stations are owned by giant corporate conglomerates. They don’t represent the views of most Americans — and they make huge profits off the public airwaves.

What we need are more diverse, independent and local media owners. Yet right now less than 10% of TV and radio stations are owned by people of color or women.

But instead of addressing this national disgrace, the Federal Communications Commission is actually trying to let the largest companies buy up even more stations!

What if more media corporations owned more radio stations and what if those media corporations were owned by people of color or women? Wouldn’t those corporations seek a profit even at the expense of the public good?

Additional corporate ownership of media won’t properly address the latest diversion from the continuing occupation of Iraq, lack of universal single-payer health care, non-living wage paying jobs, environmental exploitation, and other life-or-death social maladies. If the independence FreePress.net speaks of would include individuals sharing media bandwidth like we share the Internet now, that would be more interesting to me. But in order to get that we’d have to do away with the idea that spectrum should be auctioned off as a marketable commodity because that ensures it would go to the richest person or organization and we’re right back to locking up spectrum in the metaphorical hands of the megacorporations.

Additional ownership of media won’t necessarily give us more ownership by people of color or women. Nor am I convinced that changing the people at the top is going to effect change for the user. FreePress.net disagrees, they would have us believe that Don Imus’ latest kerfuffle should be resolved by shuffling the deck chairs of management:

The best way to stop this race to the bottom is to change who’s sitting at the top — and making the decisions about who’s behind the mic.

The Corporation shows us that the problems of corporate power are structural not personal; very nice people can become CEOs of corporations with sexist, anti-environmental, racist, and homophobic policies that have made their shareholders rich in the past. An organization built to pursue shareholder wealth above all else gives heads of corporations the power to behave in ways they wouldn’t otherwise behave. For more on this, listen to this extract of Mark Achbar’s commentary track from the excellent movie “The Corporation” (Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Speex). In the background you can hear the soundtrack of the movie “The Corporation” including Noam Chomsky discussing this point.

2007 04 13 J.B. Nicholson-Owens Politicos Comments Off Permalink

What does your town and University say about protests?

Students at the University of Southern California are protesting sweatshop-made school merchandise. Boing Boing has a good take on this:

The students from SCALE — the anti-sweatshop group — tell me that the last time they protested, they were thrown out of the “free speech zone” by a security guard who told them they had “too many people for the free speech zone.”

It’s shameful for the university to buy sweatshop goods, and doubly shameful for the administration to betray the principles of free speech and free inquiry that are supposed to be uppermost in the academy. What a crummy civics lesson to impart to our students: “get in the box and shut up.”

Or, the box exists so that the University can tell people what they’re allowed to say by disallowing free speech outside the box and regulating who can enter the box.

Both major corporate-funded political parties had “free speech zones” at their national conventions.

Related links:

2007 04 11 J.B. Nicholson-Owens Politicos Comments Off Permalink

DRM is merely a foot in the door

I’m not convinced that any of the large publishers want to stop unauthorized copying, really. I think digital restrictions management (a far more honest expansion for DRM as it focuses on the effect for the largest group of people–the users) is merely the latest means to an end: getting more power and money from those who believe large publishers want to stop unauthorized copying.

Consider this from the venture capitalist’s perspective: if any of them are foolish enough to believe that DRM could work (if only it were implemented in the correct way), foolish enough to believe that a computer can discern intent (and thus distinguish between a copy made for an approved purpose versus a copy made for any other purpose), there’s a business willing to take that money and build a shoddy DRM system.

Congress has been quite willing to give copyright holders more power on the logic that they must do something to stop unauthorized copying; even at the expense of free speech, interoperation, and competition (see the Digital Millennium Copyright Act).

The large publishers are doing the majority of the talking when it comes to lobbying Congress for increased monopoly power.  Even if you’re a copyright holder sympathetic to the concerns about unauthorized copying, should you let them speak for you?

2007 04 11 J.B. Nicholson-Owens Digital Citizen
Politicos Comments Off Permalink

Who benefits from your support for “online music”?

FreePress.net claims that “[o]nline music is in danger”:

Online music is in danger. A recent ruling by an obscure regulatory board threatens to put independent and public radio on the Internet out of business.

The “Copyright Royalty Board” is dramatically increasing the royalties “webcasters” must pay every time they stream a song online. Public Internet radio like NPR is especially at risk.

The rules could shut down nonprofit and smaller commercial Internet radio outlets and force larger webcasters to play the same cookie-cutter music as Clear Channel. So much for new online alternatives.

No, online music is not in danger. FreePress.net is talking about music from members of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a lobbyist organization for corporate record labels. It might become more difficult to webcast tracks published by RIAA members due to a new fee schedule. But there are plenty of artists licensing their music to share. It’s time to work with those artists and send a clear message to the major label artists that they need us more than we need them.

More importantly there’s the question of (even indirectly) doing business with the RIAA—why lobby to play those tracks when the RIAA treats the public so badly? Answering this question can easily bring one to conclude that it’s not ethically justifiable to do business with the RIAA.

Continue reading ›

2007 04 01 J.B. Nicholson-Owens Digital Citizen
Politicos Comments Off Permalink

Why is the University of Illinois stumping for the RIAA’s interests?

Nate first pointed me to the latest University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign mass mailing. Since then, the letter has been posted online in a publicly-accessible fashion. In case you wondered why doing business with the RIAA is troublesome, check out what their supporters in the University of Illinois have sent to everyone in the University:

The University does not condone the use of peer-to-peer software for illegal file sharing. Those who engage in it violate U.S. Copyright laws as well as the campus’s own policies, including the Student Code and Policy on the Appropriate Use of the Computer Network. Additionally the University bears significant costs associated with responding to DMCA violation notices and the network capacity absorbed by file sharing reduces its availability for general research, teaching, and administrative purposes.

Since copyright infringement is civilly and criminally punishable, there’s no need for University policy to say anything about it. Such duplication raises the possibility that the University policy will inaccurately capture the complexities of copyright law and be more restrictive than copyright law is. Responding to DMCA notices properly is part of the cost of doing anything online; the only way to avoid it would be to take down one’s Internet connection. This obviously poses far more practical problems then can be accounted for by avoiding DMCA violation notices. Invalid DMCA violation notices are out there (Uri Geller, Michael Crook, NFL, Viacom with help from Google, just to name a few) and not something one can pin on “use of peer-to-peer software for illegal file sharing”. The language above suggests that file sharing is not a proper part of “general research, teaching, and administrative purposes” when just the opposite is true.

Often the software used for the purposes of illegal file sharing comes bundled with ‘spyware’ and other software that maliciously captures personal information that contributes to identity theft. You can learn more about protecting yourself from identity theft by reviewing the information at http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/security/index.html. Further, some file sharing programs, even when used for legitimate purposes, will use your computer to transfer illegally obtained material between other users. I strongly encourage you to remove software used for file sharing as well as to immediately remove any illegally obtained material such as music or movies.

BitTorrent software is the most popular peer-to-peer file sharing software: “BitTorrent accounts for an astounding 35 percent of all the traffic on the Internet — more than all other peer-to-peer programs combined — and dwarfs mainstream traffic like Web pages.“. Most BitTorrent software in use (such as the official client and Azureus) qualifies as free software—software users are free to run, share, and modify at any time for any reason. Free software, unlike proprietary software, grants everyone the freedom to inspect, improve, and share the software. Thus, free software BitTorrent programs are far less likely to include spyware and other malicious code; the community inspects free software and removes the objectionable parts. If you don’t believe they’ll do this, as would be wise, you can inspect and modify the program before you run it (or hire someone to do this for you). Compare that to a proprietary program: No matter how you get proprietary software you set yourself up for all sorts of malevolent programs. The RIAA (and now UIUC) would love for you to believe there’s a link between malevolent software and file sharing programs so that you don’t use a popular means of sharing tracks whose copyrights are held by RIAA members. It’s silly to draw a distinction between what are commonly called peer-to-peer programs (like BitTorrent) and other means of sharing files (like UIUC’s own “NetFiles” service, FTP programs, etc.) on the basis of computer safety. In order to truly understand the proper parameters of this issue, you have to understand software freedom. UIUC should teach students about software freedom for its own sake, not threatening them at the behest of the recording industry.

Calling for UIUC network users to stop using and remove file sharing software is preposterous, reveals who UIUC really works for on this issue, and poses bad consequences for the user. File sharing software is necessary for modern computer use; you would complain if your OS came with no ability to share files between computers. Many free software operating systems are distributed via BitTorrent because BitTorrent allows the community to take on some of the load in distributing data. Discouraging use of file sharing software makes it unnecessarily harder for students to install a free software operating system and enjoy software that respects their freedom.

With the announcement by RIAA, MPAA, and others of the intent to target college students with law suits, it should be noted that many of the students sued have settled out of court for amounts on the order of $4- 5000.

How many of those settlements happened because the students were too poor and scared to defend their case? Will the University legal facilities available to students help them if they are accused of copyright infringement by the RIAA?

2007 04 01 J.B. Nicholson-Owens Free Software
Politicos Comments Off Permalink