CajunTechie's Mindstream

Android Development the Easy Way

2012-01-31T13:16:00.001-08:00

You've probably noticed that Android development is hot these days. It seems like the entire world is dominated by just two mobile platforms, Android and iOS, with Android quickly creeping up on iOS as the platform of choice for many people. But, let's be honest, developing software for Android sucks. I mean it really sucks. Not only do you have to write your code in Java, but you have to learn to use all the various and tedious tools that come with the SDK. Trust me, it's not a picnic even for an experienced developer.

The other day, I was browsing Bryan Lunduke's blog and came across this post about a new program called Easy Development Studio. The software is pretty cool. It lets you do a lot of the things that usually take hours or days in a visual and easy to understand environment and allows you to dive into Android development without all the complexity that you'd normally have to deal with. Best of all, as far as I can tell, you don't need to use Java! That fact alone made me jump for joy.

Easy Development Studio can even help you in creating custom Android ROM's so, if you've been wanting to play around with deep Android development, now is your chance.

I'll do a fuller review of the software next week once I've gotten a chance to play around with it. But if it does all it seems to do, this could soon become the de facto standard for people who just want to get things done on Android without all the fuss.

Also, since this post all started after reading an entry in Bryan's blog, I should mention that Bryan's company, Radical Breeze Software, creates an amazing visual development environment called Illumination Software Creator. ISC allows you to build software visually by connecting 'blocks' of functionality then extending functionality using the easy to use Python programming language. It's cheap, easy to use, and a great choice for anyone interested in creating cool software without all the fuss. Check it out when you have time. You won't be disappointed!

Ubuntu TV has an incredible chance. Can Canonical see it through?

2012-01-17T13:40:00.000-08:00

Canonical, makers of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, made a huge splash at this years CES with their announcment of their forthcoming UbuntuTV. They didn't demo any devices and showed off only a handful of concept software, but the excitement they created gives Canonical an amazing opportunity to catapault itself directly into the mainstream marketplace.

This makes me nervous for a number of reasons. One is that, by announcing UbuntuTV, Canonical is positioning itself as a direct competitor to both AppleTV and GoogleTV. Some might argue that both Apple and Google's offerings are fairly miserable failures but the fact remains that these are two massive companies with billions of dollars in their arsenal that they could commit to fight competition like Canonical. If either company saw Ubuntu TV as a threat, there's a very good chance they would take some hard shots at Canonical and I'm not too sure the company could withstand that kind of attack.

Additionally, both Apple and Google have something Canonical doesn't: a strong, existing, partnership with television manufacturers and content providers. Canonical is building partnerships from the ground up, Google and Apple have them in place already and that could give them an enormous advantage in the short run.

Another thing that really bothers me (and makes me worried for Ubuntu TV's long term survival) is Canonical's 'dog after a bone' mindset. It seems like 'what's the next big thing for Ubuntu' is constantly changing and never executed well. First it was 400 million desktop users, then it was servers with ARM processors, now it's phones and televisions. None of these have been properly executed; none of these have reached their goal before the company moves on to something new. Canonical reminds me of that one kid on the playground who's desperately seeking friends but who can't quite seem to make any long-term connections.

Will Ubuntu TV be any different? I hope so and I think Canonical has an amazing opportunity if it focuses like a razor on televisions, smart devices, and tablets. The desktop OS is quickly becoming irrelevant thanks to the proliferation of web applications. Users aren't going to care so much about the 'desktop experience' since much of that experience happens within a web browser now. But users are going to want a killer phone, television, and tablet, experience and that's where Ubuntu can shine.

Looking back, it seems like everything Canonical has been doing lately has been moving us to this point: media deals, Ubuntu One, the Unity Desktop. All of those things are kind of ho-hum on the desktop but add to the WOW! factor on non-PC devices. Looking at Unity in particular, it seems like it was a match made in heaven for Ubuntu and televisions and tablets. Unity sucks for desktop use but thrills on a television or tablet. Maybe that's where Canonical has been leading us with all the changes. Maybe Mark Shuttleworth isn't completely insane after all.

I'm hoping that, by the time CES rolls around next year, there'll be some Ubuntu devices to show. By going public this early, Canonical has set the bar high for the team and failure to deliver could be catastrophic for their reputation. Right now, Ubuntu has the limelight. Can Canonical be trusted to carry it into the future or will they stumble due to lack of focus.

My money is on Canonical and Shuttleworth. I predict that we will see an Ubuntu based device by the end of the year and it's going to be stellar. If it's a television, it's going to smash Google TV and if it's a tablet, it's going to give the iPad quite an butt kicking. I know Canonical has what it takes to be a contender. My only question is will it do what it needs to do?

A message to the Occupy Wall Street Movement

2011-12-10T21:23:00.001-08:00

The United States is in desperate need of change. Our economy is in ruins, our political system is run by and for corporate interests, and our social welfare programs are simply out of control and will not be viable for much longer. It's a mess.

The Occupy Wall Street movement seeks to address the crisis and bring about the change we need. Unfortunately, the movement misses the mark on a number of things and their 'solutions' are often rife with destructive, unintended consequences. We don't really need government to mandate anything about social change, we need to take control and change things ourselves. Asking the government to change things is like asking a slave master to set you free.

In this video, I discuss what I believe will change things. In fact, it's really the only thing that has ever been effective against corporate excess and it is the only thing that will continue to be successful. Once the Occupy movement (and everyone who identifies with it) starts to take action, the corporations and government will have no choice but to change or perish.

Comments on the Occupy Wall Street Movement

2011-11-30T20:14:00.000-08:00

I recorded the video above after watching Occupy LA attacked by police last night who showed no regard for the protestors Constitutional rights. The police will say they are 'just doing their job' but I believe there comes a time when, if you are asked to do something immoral or wrong, you stand up with a stiff back and loudly and boldly refuse to do so. Unfortunately, we've not seen many police officers willing to do that which saddens me and worries me for the future of this country.

There are a million reasons not to agree with what the Occupy movement stands for. But there are also a million reasons to stand with them in the name of free speech. The implications of allowing the state to arbitrarily deny us our constitutional rights is chilling. Someone must speak out; someone must challenge this false sense of authority. But who?

Last night, I expected local LA media to be all over the Occupy eviction. Instead, they acquiesced to police and city officials and allowed themselves to be kept in a little holding area until all of the dirty work was done. None of them had the guts to refuse to be contained, to assert their rights as the media, or to risk arrest in order to bring the public the truth. We just don't seem to have many reporters like that anymore.

So, if anything, the Occupy movement has shown me how much society has been cowed by the state, how willing we are to simply 'follow orders' and how easy it is to start the slide down that slippery slope. This video discusses that.

Planned Obsolescence: Designing Products to Break

2011-11-25T15:10:00.001-08:00

The concept of planned obsolescence has been with us for over a century. Basically, the idea is to drive consumer demand, not by making great products that people want then making even better versions that they want to upgrade to, but to intentionally design products to fail and force consumers to buy newer versions.

The reasons behind this practice are many. But the most common reason cited is that, if you designed products that lived forever, nobody would ever upgrade and the economy would grind to a halt. Obviously, this isn't true. Consumers will always want better versions of the stuff they have and companies who innovate will never find themselves short of customers. In reality, there's no justification for designing a product to break. Yet companies have been doing it since shortly after the design of the electric light bulb.

The documentary above, called "The Light Bulb Conspiracy" looks at the practice of planned obsolescence and discusses how prevalent and widespread the practice is throughout product design. From consumer electronics down to automobile makers, almost every product you own is intentionally designed to fail for absolutely no other reason than to make you buy a new one.

If you've never heard of the concept, this film will shock you. If you've ever wondered if your suspicions about why products fail might be true, this film will leave you nodding your head. Definitely worth watching for anyone interested in sustainability.

Product design sucks

2011-11-19T16:52:00.001-08:00

Over the last few weeks I've started to pay more attention to product design. I don't know if that's because I've recently read the Steve Jobs biography that paints him as a legendary stickler for good design or if it's because I'm slowly moving my company towards its first real product release but, for whatever reason, I've started taking notice.

Largely, I've noticed how much most product design sucks.

Walking through a large department store the other day, I started looking at some of the home appliances; looking for anything that jumped out and grabbed my eye. Nothing did. I saw the same smooth curves or sharp angles on everything. Nothing looked remotely different, unique, or exciting. Everything was just really boring.

It's not just home appliances. Look at your computer, your television, your MP3 player, your car. None of it truly has the style to grab you by the neck and make you take notice. None of it is beautiful or looks like anyone paid much attention to pleasing the eye. It's the same tired, old, motifs repeated over and over on product after product. Nothing is special.

As our company starts designing its own product, I wonder if we'll be faced with the same dilemma. Will our product pay more attention to function over form? Will we seek to delight the users eye as much as we strive to meet their tech needs? Is there a need for compromise between radically different product design and really great functionality? Can you have both in the same product?

Personally, I believe the dearth of boring products is because consumers don't really notice anymore - especially on the low end. Sure, someone who pays $3,500 for a home stereo system is going to want something that looks amazing but what does someone who pays $159 for one expect? Good sound. That's it. The lower we go, the more function seems to become more important than form.

When I worked at Walmart, I had a mantra I lived by and still live by today: Every customer gets the million dollar purchase treatment even if they're only spending $5. When you choose to give me the money you worked hard to earn, you deserve to be treated to a spectacular experience. How much you're spending doesn't really matter. The fact that you're spending it with me instead of a competitor is what matters.

My coworkers and managers often didn't understand why I'd spend enormous amounts of effort helping customers choose sometimes incredibly cheap products. It's because they deserved my time and effort. The deserved the best. That's how I feel about product design: customers deserve the best effort and I don't believe designers are giving them that.

How about you? What are some products who's designs just 'wows' you? Why does it make such an impact on you? What about shoddy products? What would you do to change the design to make them amazing? Leave your comments below or send me an email and discuss it.

What the classroom of the future might look like

2011-11-16T15:07:00.001-08:00

The public education system in the United States is horrible. While it's never been a great system, we now have a situation where students are graduating high school without the ability to read well, do basic math, or solve even the simplest multi-step problems. Students in the United States are woefully unprepared for the global business environment they will be entering and most are skilled only enough to be worker bees instead of heads of industry or world changers.

Most people blame the lack of money for the crisis in which we find our education system, but I think that's not going far enough. We've dumped billions of dollars into this failing system for decades and it's only getting worse. The real reason our school systems are crumbling isn't the amount of money we pay teachers, or the curriculum we're teaching our students but rather the way education is being delivered.

Every day we pack millions of children into little sardine cans and bus them to the closed, guarded, uncomfortable, tightly controlled prisons that we call schools. There, their every move is monitored, evaluated, and controlled. They are told when they can go to the bathroom, when they can interact with their fellow students (even in positive ways) and when they can leave. They learn their studies through the rote repetition of facts and figures and are punished for being creative, challenging, questioning the facts they're taught, or pushing authority.

Obviously, this system is broken. It's so broken, in fact, that I don't think it's worth fixing. It needs to be completely gotten rid of and something new should take its place.

Technology has brought us to the point where we now know what that 'something new' could be. We can imagine it. We can build it. And we can create an order of magnitudes better system than the one we have now. Let's imagine what the classroom could look like if we were to effectively use the technology we have right now to build a better system.

First, we eliminate the concept of centralization. There's no need for students and teachers to be in the same place physically anymore. Students in the future may choose to learn from home, may attend classes while on vacation with their families, or might even skip a day or two entirely knowing that they can go back and watch the recorded class and interact with the teacher virtually should they need help. All live interaction would be via video conference or maybe even happen in a virtual world like Second Life where the students could come together in a virtual classroom, interact with one another, and experience many of the same benefits of a classroom environment without all of the drawbacks.

The learning environment would shift from being the stark, prison like experience it is today, to the comfortable familiarity of home where students would be surrounded by the things and the people they love. Student stress would be lower and, thus, bad behavior would become less of a problem.

Teachers in the new system could teach from anywhere and could provide their students with amazing experiences by better integrating their lives into the curriculum. Ordinarily, a teacher might deliver lessons from a small home office or living room, but what if she decided to travel to a foreign country for an extended trip? Her daily lessons could still be delivered on time and with the same level of interaction as when she was at home but now she could include the cultural experience of her trip to Spain or wherever she was into the lessons. She could take her students with her to exotic, historic places and provide them with a live education, guest lecturers, amazing things, all while not disturbing the order of the students lives or inconveniencing her vacation or trip very much.

Books would all be digital and provided on either PC's or tablets that would be updated to the newest version automatically. Since they're digital, they would be much more affordable than they are now and even the poorest communities might be able to afford the latest textbooks as they come out. Also because they're digital, the books can contain a full multimedia experience where video, audio, and animations are seamlessly integrated into the book itself, offering students an incredibly engaging learning experience.

As a result of the correct and efficient use of technology, teacher pay could increase thereby pulling better teachers into the system while allowing more per-student spending on the part of the school. Administrative costs would be lower as well since the challenges of maintaining physical facilities would be eliminated or greatly reduced.

We have the technology to implement a system like this right now. The only thing stopping us is the fact that we're stuck in an old model mindset of what education should be. We're not looking to the future, we're not pushing the limits, we're not thinking 'what if'. Modern technology, not to mention what might be here in 5-10 years, offers us an opportunity to provide our students with an amazing, world class, educational experience. One that would not only prepare them to work within the global marketplace, but dominate it. We just have to be willing to break from tradition, admit that what we have now is simply trash, and start over.

I believe small private schools are going to be able to do this first. They are the ones who are most willing to experiment. I expect to see a school take this path sometimes within the next 5 years. Public schools, which are almost to the point of collapse under their own bureaucracy, will take a bit longer but will eventually come around when they see the results. Eventually, we will have a completely decentralized education system that works better than anything else we could imagine.

Who will be the first to dare to think big and lead the way into the future? That's the only question left to answer. Everything else is implementation.

Canonical continues to amaze and confuse Ubuntu users and developers alike

2011-11-08T20:57:00.000-08:00

With the most recent Ubuntu Developer Summit wrapped up, many are looking at Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, and scratching their head. I'd assume no greater amount of head scratching is going on anywhere else than in the developer community. Canonical has become a confusing company who's CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, seems to be a confusing man.

At the last UDS, Shuttleworth shocked attendees by saying he wanted a push for 200 million users on Ubuntu in 4 years. Ambitious, to be sure, but everything in the Ubuntu world seemed to be aligning perfectly to bring those users in: the new software center, the introduction of the new Unity desktop environment, look and feel redesigns, everything. Linux developers were overjoyed because, a 200 million user base also means 200 million potential software users as well. Everyone got to work trying to make Ubuntu as user friendly to newbies (especially those coming from the Microsoft Windows world) as possible. Everyone was excited and ready to go.

Now, less than one year later, that push seems to have changed. The push this time around isn't to hit that 200 million user mark but rather to push Ubuntu onto smartphones and tablets. Now, granted, having Ubuntu on those devices is going to increase the Ubuntu user base. But it's not going to help the legions of developers who've spent the last year fervently developing for the desktop and who now find that their creations probably won't work on tablets or the ARM archetecture that many tablets run on. To those developers, they must either completely scrap their work and start over with the new focus (which might change again next year) or continue to develop for the desktop with the hopes that more users of Ubuntu of mobile devices will also translate to more users of Ubuntu on the desktop (which it might).

I think Canonical and Shuttleworth are missing a huge point with this push to smartphones and tablets: on these devices, operating system doesn't really matter. With a huge section of computing moving to the cloud, users are being abstracted further and further away from the hardware and the system that drives it. It doesn't matter that your device will run Ubuntu because, ultimately, the software you're going to run will run on anything. Tablet users aren't likely to interact with the underlying OS in any meaningful way. They'll click to start a web browser, browse to their favorite web applications, maybe play music or video, but having Ubuntu on a device, overall, will make very little difference in the lives of most users.

Personally, I believe Canonical is shooting itself in the foot with this new push. Focusing on the desktop market makes sense because, on the desktop, the operating system you use matters. It ties into the software you use, the service you use, everything. On tablets and smartphones, it doesn't and Canonical is going to lose what little chance it has to hit that 200 million user number if it doesn't abandon the schizophrenic 'we want to be on everything' attitude and focus on their core.

The desktop, contrary to what ZDNet might way, is not dead. There's a lot of users to be won there and a lot of money to be made. Canonical would do very well by continuing to polish Unity, provide developers with great tools to develop new and compelling desktop applications, deepen the desktop-cloud tie-in, and focus on giving desktop users the absolute best experience out there.

That said, I would still kill to get my hands on an Ubuntu based tablet. So maybe all hope isn't lost after all.

What do you think? Does the operating system that runs your mobile devices matter that much to you? Would you buy an Ubuntu tablet or smartphone? How do you feel about the new push to mobile? Leave a comment and get in the discussion!

How to create secure, easy to remember, passwords

2011-10-18T21:20:00.000-07:00

You know you should be using secure passwords to protect your online accounts. But the rules for what constitutes a secure password makes it sound like creating and remembering one is a Herculean task that only the brainiest among us with near photographic memories could ever hope to master. But I'd like to introduce you to a fast, simple, and reliable way to create secure passwords that guarantee passwords that are almost completely unbreakable but easy to remember.

First, let's discuss what the general guidelines for a secure password are:

1. Don't use anything under 8 characters
2. Don't use the names of friends, pets, spouses, etc
3. Use a combination of numbers, special characters, and a mix of upper and lower case letters.

Following these three guidelines, you would think that the password Xcv234**%hnjdf-f433438(* is about as secure as a password can get. Surprisingly, though, I consider this password weak in a sense. While it's technically a strong password, it's not too easy to remember, is it? That means that you're likely to write it down, store it somewhere that's easy to get to, or choose a weaker password like 'fluffy35' pretty soon. So, in reality, while the password is indeed hard to break, you are the inherent weakness in its security and, thus, it's not a good password.

Now, let's look at my rules for generating a secure password and see how they compare:

1. Choose three related words that mean something to you.
2. Choose two dates that mean something to you.
2. Choose two 'special characters' that make sense to you

Now, let's see how we can construct a secure but easy to remember password using those three rules:

Three related words that mean something to you: I'm going to choose three cities where I've lived in my lifetime: Odessa, Ottawa, Lake Charles.

Two dates that mean something to you: I'll choose my year of birth and the year I moved to Ottawa: 1974, 1998.

Two special characters that make sense to me: I like the ^ character and the . so I'll use those.

Now, let's put that all together to make a secure password:

^Odessa.Ottawa.LakeCharles.1974.1998^

As you can see, it's long enough to be safe, isn't a dictionary word, and contains all of the required mix to make it unguessable by human or machine. For most intents, this is a very secure password and it's incredibly easy to remember.

So that's my quick tip on how to easily create a secure password. Using this formula you can mix and match any kind of meaningful information in ways that only make sense to you. The best part is it's easy to remember but impossible to guess or brute force.

What are your favorite ways to generate strong passwords?

Being paranoid: imagining a grand encryption conspiracy

2011-10-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

There are times when we all need to communicate securely. There are other times when that communication needs to be safe from even the most determined interloper and it's in those times that we turn to encryption. Using the right algorithm with the right passphrase and the right security measures, it's generally accepted that good encryption would take on the order of thousands to billions of centuries to break and, in some cases, trillions of centuries. Against those odds, how would any attacker ever hope to decipher secret communication?

Most experts agree that trying to find someones encryption passphrase through ordered guessing is useless. The search space is simply too massive and even our most impressive computing resources aren't generally believed to be able to process such massive amounts of data in a timely way. That's why those who are dedicated to the cause of codebreaking often use some sort of cryptanalysis where, instead of attacking the passphrase the user chose, they attack the encryption algorithm itself hoping to find flaws that would short curciut or completely eliminate the need to find the users passphrase.

But cryptographers are clever and they've developed all sorts of tricks to stop many attacks on crypto and there are a few algorithms out there that are widely considered currently unbreakable. This, of course, presents all sorts of problems for entities like governments who've dealt with strong crypto in various ways. Some have outright banned its use, some have made it a crime not to reveal your passphrase during an investigation, and others, like Sweden, have basically ignored it.

But I believe some governments may be taking a much darker approach; one that quickly makes us understand why the spy world lives by the motto "trust no one".

Imagine this scenario for a moment:

Most people, even those who are highly paranoid, have trouble with coming up with truly random, long, passphrases. The human brain simply doesn't do well with randomness and works much better in order and meaning. That's why many people use websites and programs that either generate or generate and store secure passwords for them and this is where the problem comes in.

Imagine a government dedicated to spying on its citizens faced with a large and growing subset of those citizens who use cryptography to protect their communications. They aren't doing anything 'wrong' or illegal, they just don't want to be snooped on by the government (or anyone else, for that matter). So the government goes to work, as it has many times in the past, creating a series of 'trusted identities'. These trusted identities are people on the Internet who become trustworthy. They are knowledgeable of cryptography, join and contribute to communities, rail against the 'surveillance state' that they see developing, and maybe even work on protecting privacy by creating some really good crypto software or algorithm. They become a legend in the crypto community; someone who's name is the first to come to mind when the subject comes up.

Over time, they become trusted; trusted to the point where it is almost considered sacrilegious to speak ill of them or question their intentions. WHY would they betray the community, after all? They've, by now, helped build it!

Now this person puts up a website because he knows people don't like to download and set up software and it's just easier to go to a site and get stuff done. This site generates incredibly secure passwords, does not track or identify you in any way, and even analyzes your password and gives you an idea of just how strong it is. The site is amazing, safe, and used pretty widely by the community.

At this point, most people would deem this site safe to use. But what if that site were saving a copy of every single password it generated and then sharing that with codebreakers in government or law enforcement? "Well", some would say, "that doesn't matter because they aren't tracking who the passwords are assigned to! I'm safe."

Wrong.

What this site has done is greatly reduce the search space for attacks. Now, anyone armed with the list of passwords the site's generated will first run through this list before resorting to brute force guessing. If the site is widely enough used, there's a fairly decent chance that the users password was generated from this site and, thus, will be on the list. The attacker doesn't need to know which password was assigned to you; it just needs to be contained in the list.

At this point 120 character long random passwords that contain numbers and letters which would normally take trillions of years to determine, can be broken in minutes or seconds. The more widely used the site is, the more likely it is that a password will be in the list.

I know some of you may think I'm being paranoid and you're right. But I have a reason behind my paranoia. History is littered with examples of government integrating itself info communities specifically to disrupt them or gain an upper hand in intelligence gathering operations. While there's no reason to suspect any current member of the cryptography community of doing this kind of action right now, there's also no reason not to suspect every single member of doing it. The truth is, we can never know and that's the constant dance those of us who want or need to protect our information constantly go through.

I believe that, as crypto gets better, we're going to see much more infiltration type attacks than we will brute force or cryptanalytic ones. Even with computing resources becoming cheaper and faster, it's also getting harder and harder to break good crypto so those who want to do it will need to find other, more efficient, ways to do it. I believe the scenerio I described above is one of those ways that will be used in the very near future if it's not already being used now.

Of course, this doesn't just apply to password generation. Fake sites around trusted identities (and keep in mind these 'identities' don't need to just be individuals, they could be organizations too) are fairly easy to set up and administer. There's little stopping a dedicated attacker from spreading their wings wide and performing a multi-pronged attack against the community and no one would ever know.

So what's the answer and how do we fix it? A first step would be to adopt the spy motto I mentioned earlier. Place no one above suspicion. Make friends, have fun, but if you have information that really needs protection, always be suspicious.

Next, stop using online password generators and storage vaults. They're ripe for abuse and you'd never know they were compromised. Instead, learn the open source tools that are available to help you protect information and use them on your own computer. Tools like GnuPG, KeepassX, TrueCrypt, LUKS, and their brethren, can go a long way in making sure that your information isn't being leaked into the wrong hands.

Last, and this has been security advice for a long time, don't use the same password anywhere. Assume every site is collecting and sharing your password with someone and that data could be used to attack you. What if you use the same long, random, passphrase for your Gmail account that you do for your cryptographic key? Wouldn't you think that your Gmail password might be one of the first passwords an attacker might try everywhere else, including your key?

Could I be completely insane? Sure. Perhaps I've been reading too many Robert Ludlum novels. But what if I'm right? What if that last email you just sent isn't protected at all even though it's encrypted?

What if?

Secret code could kill you

2011-10-12T13:34:00.000-07:00

Karen Sandler knows the importance of open source software. That's why, when she was told she needed an implantable defibrillator to save her life in 2009, she immediately thought to ask 'what software runs on it and can I examine the code?" You might think that would be a no-brainer. Why would companies prevent people who are going to put something that might kill them in their bodies, from seeing the software that controls those devices? But that's exactly the situation Sandler found herself in when she began calling defibrillator manufacturers and asking them to 'show her the code'.

The situation is not uncommon at all. No implantable medical device (IMD) manufacturers anywhere in the world make the code that runs their devices available for public view. They cite a number of reasons for that behavior from 'trade secrets' to 'liability' but it all ends up the same: you have to trust that a device that could kill you was programmed perfectly.

Of course, we know that no software is perfect and there are no perfect programmers. In fact, IMD's have killed people in the past by doing things like delivering excessive shocks to people who were not in need of them or not delivering shocks or other functions when they were. The Software Freedom Law Center (Sandlers ex employer) even has a report about the issue and how big of a problem proprietary software on IMD's really poses.

The bottom line is this: if you are to put something in your body, do you have a right to know everything about it? Is it reasonable for manufacturers to put your life up for grabs with their flippant 'trust us, we've tested it' mentality or should you expect, and demand, more? Karen Sandler believes she knows the answers to those questions and, by the end of this video, I believe you will to.

Creating Beauty

2011-10-06T09:09:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot over the last 24 hours about the lessons I've learned from Steve Jobs. While I didn't know him personally, my life was touched by him in the same way he touched the lives of millions of people worldwide. I didn't know Steve, but I learned valuable lessons from him and how he ran Apple. One of those lessons, and perhaps one of the most important in regards to my work, is the beauty of technology.

From the very beginning, creating technology was not enough for Steve Jobs. He didn't want average, ordinary, run of the mill hardware and software. He wanted art. He believed in the experience of technology as strongly as he believed in the functionality of it. In Jobs' world, each product released by Apple was a new painting, filled with nuances, subtleties, and things that were often there for no other reason than to delight the user. Steve was a businessman, sure, but he was also an artist who used the bits and bytes, the wires and circuit boards of his products as the canvas on which he painted his most glorious masterpieces.

As technologists, we often forget that technology can and should be 'sexy'. Whether we operate a full-fledged company or are just some guy or girl writing code in their basement, each product we release has the potential to be our own personal Mona Lisa.

Too many times, we focus intensely on getting functionality right but completely miss the experience. 'Beautiful' is not a term you often hear in the technology space. "Innovative', 'cutting edge', ' forward thinking' are the main selling points of most new products and there's a good reason for that: the technology industry has lost the lust for beauty it once had and, to a large degree, Steve Jobs fought a 30 year battle to get that lust back.

People often complain that Apple's products are overpriced for what you get. Those people are only looking at the functionality. Apple users don't pay a premium because it's the best, most functional technology. They pay a premium because of the experience that comes with owning an Apple product. The success of Apple shows that experience matters to consumers and they're willing to pay more to be part of something special.

To a large degree, I've been like most people in the industry: I've focused on functionality and said 'who cares if it's sexy'? But looking back on the lessons that Steve Jobs taught us, I have to admit that a lot of people care. I want to make sexy software. I want to use my brush to create beautiful, vibrant, multi-layered works of art. Anyone can create software, but an artist creates beauty.

How do you create beauty in your work?

Goodbye to Steve Jobs

2011-10-05T17:14:00.000-07:00

I am not an Apple fan. I don't own a single piece of Apple hardware, have never even really seriously considered buying one, and often find some of Apple's business practices as distasteful as those of Microsoft.

No, I wasn't an Apple fan. But I was a Steve Jobs fan.

When the historians look back on our time in history, they will signal out a few people as relevant, game changers, revolutionaries, and visionaries. Steve Jobs will be one of those people. Arguably, Jobs was one of the most forward thinking and visionary CEO's in all of tech. He could make or break a new product by uttering one word:

"Sexy"

If Jobs said your product was sexy, you knew you had a hit on your hands. You knew hoards of Apple fans would soon be lining up at your doorstep to buy from you and you knew that you had a really good product because Steve Jobs didn't utter that word unless he really believed it. He was a harsh critic but he was usually right.

I remember last year when Apple bought a music service I really liked then closed it, I emailed Steve to express my disgust. To my surprise, he emailed back. We exchanged about 10 emails before he finally said 'sorry then, don't use iTunes'. I was pissed off but I felt good at the same time. Out of all of the people I didn't expect to respond to a customer complaint, Steve Jobs was at the top of my list. But he cared about Apple and its customers. He didn't want to see customers unhappy but he also had an acute sense of business reality and he wasn't afraid to express that.

Steve led Apple through some very tough years, saved their ass on occasion, and pushed things to incredible popularity in a way that no other corporate leader could ever have done. Even poorly designed products from Apple had a huge cult following because, largely, the Cult of Apple was really the Cult of Steve Jobs.

Today, Steve died after a brave and long battle with pancreatic cancer. It wasn't totally unexpected but it still was shocking. Though I am not a friend, family, or even associated with him as a customer, I feel as though the world - not just the tech world, has lost someone we can never replace. My heart wells up as I think of where we'd be without Steve's brash, brazen, leadership and how far we've come because of it. He will be missed. But his influence will be felt for many years to come: through the company he built to the lives he's influenced, and through the dreams he's nourished.

Steve Jobs, my hat goes off to you sir. Tonight, the only words I can think to say to you are 'thank you'. You have shown us all what 'sexy' really meant.

The Face of the New American Gangster: Your Local Police Department

2011-09-27T15:32:00.000-07:00

Imagine a world where armed gangs of thugs roam the streets with absolute impunity. There's nothing the can't do, there's no one that's too far for their reach, and there are no repercussions for any of their actions. If something happens that people complain too much about, their bosses step in and make it go away. Worst of all imagine if we weren't only taught to fear these thugs but respect them as well.

If you can imagine such a world, you've glimpsed into the world of the New American Gangster: your local police department. Gone are the days where approaching a friendly cop standing on a street corner would result in a bit of conversation and perhaps directions as to where you wanted to go. These days, you more likely to get maced, beaten, or worse, if you approach the right cop on a bad day or the wrong cop on any day.

In 1991, when the world learned about the Rodney King beating by members of the LAPD, we were told it was just a few bad cops and not a culture of corruption as some were claiming. But the intervening years have left us no doubt that the beating and abuse King suffered was not the result of rogue officers but a culture of thuggery that is, not only accepted, by encouraged by the police. Fellow officers look the other way when their colleagues go too far, commanders make excuses, and internal affairs investigations usually go nowhere. Our criminal justice system is well equipped to handle civilian criminals but has no real way to deal with criminals who wear a badge.

Many who defend the police will tell you that they have a tough job and should be given leeway. How much leeway should someone be given when the result of their 'bad day' could mean someone innocent dying or being beaten into a coma? How much leeway are you given when you're having a bad day? Wearing a badge doesn't give one extra rights; it gives them more responsibility to behave.

When I criticize the police on social networks, I'm often met with the same tired old song: you can always file a complaint. Let's look at the complaint process in most police departments and see how effective filing our complaint might be.

Most people are under the mistaken assumption that anyone can walk into a police station, ask for a complaint form, and file it with the department. The reality is quite different. First, many police departments don't even have complaint forms. Complaints are taken by an officer in the form of a report and then, if that officer believes there's merit to the complaint, forwards it to the appropriate supervisors.

But even in those departments that do have formal complaint forms, it's still not as easy as walking in and asking for one. You must first justify your reason for wanting to file a complaint with an officer who will then decide if your complaint warrants giving you a form. You must identify both yourself and the officer who is the target of the complaint (who may be a friend of the officer you're telling the story to) and give details of the incident surrounding the complaint. If you're lucky enough to actually get a complaint form, you're halfway there but not quite at the finish line.

Next, the complaint will work its way up the chain to a point where someone (either the officers supervisor or someone from Internal Affairs) will speak with the officer about the complaint. As in court, the officers word is given more weight than yours and, if the officer can come up with a believable excuse, the complaint will probably go no further.

In some cases, complaints result in actual discipline. These cases are usually the ones where video or audio evidence makes it so that the department can't cover up the incident (which is why it's important to always have a camera with you to record any police interaction). In these cases, the officer will usually be given paid administrative leave. Sometimes, even in the case of severe crimes like rape, only 3-5 days. Again, notice I said paid administrative leave. A note may or may not go into the officers permanent file at this point.

So what happens if you're not satisfied with an officer who raped you getting a 3 day paid vacation? Well, you can't usually sue the officer personally (police officers have immunity when performing their 'duties') but you can sue the department. The problem, of course, is finding an attorney who's willing to do it. The criminal justice system is stacked decidedly in the interests of the state. When you go into court against a police department, it's basically you and your attorney standing against the judge, the departments defense attorney, and the police department as a whole. Don't expect to be treated fairly. In fact, the vast majority of suits against police departments are either settled before they reach court or the officer and department are exonerated during trial.

It's a complicated process. It's made more complicated by the fact that we hold the police to a hero worship status that's right under our chosen deity. We are taught from a young age to trust and respect the police, that they have our best interests at heart, and that all (or most) cops are good. Most people are shocked to see the dark underbelly of the police and most don't encounter it until their rights or the rights of someone they know are violated and they attempt to get redress.

If you think all of this sounds kind of like the mafia, you're right, it does. In essence, the police are an armed gang who can do what they want to who they want and get away with it. Their department (the family) offers them protection and there's a cartel in place that offers them more in the event that their department can't protect them adequately.. Just like in the real mafia, many people who go up against police find themselves 'sleeping with the fishes' or at least beat into unconsciousness, their homes raided and trashed, or suspiciously being charged with crimes that shock their friends and neighbors.

Now I know that not all police are bad. But the culture of the police industry encourages bad behavior, rewards it, and sometimes, even celebrates it. Good cops remain silent because they know that the day might come when they need their fellow officers to have their back and, so, the cycle of silence and blind eyes continues.

Police are not our friends anymore. They are agents of a state that is hell bent on subjugating us under its will. They will blindly follow orders that result in anything up to and including our severe injury or death. They will do the song and dace about 'just doing my job' as though blindly following orders makes anything they do right. The workers in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany were just following orders too. There is no morality in just following orders. There is no honor in it.

The time has come for both citizens and police officers in this country to wake up. We don't have to be enemies. We can work together to build a better, safer, more secure, world. But it's going to take a lot of brave officers who are willing to tell their superiors 'no' and a few brave citizens who are willing to do the same to police officers. Together, we can make a difference.

* I know most of this article is biased towards a given opinion about police officers and I've offered no proof to back up my claims. For proof, I invite you to visit this link and this link then make up your own mind.

Home cloud in a box

2011-09-23T05:34:00.000-07:00

I'm in love with cloud computing. OK, so I'm not really in love with cloud computing itself, but I love the idea of being able to access my data from anywhere. Cloud computing itself scares me a little bit. The idea of putting my unprotected data in the hands of someone else and trusting them to keep it safe and keep it from prying eyes isn't something I'll likely ever get comfortable with. So, while I love the universal data access that the cloud offers, I generally avoid using any cloud services because I don't trust them.

Thankfully, the days of having to rely on Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, for your cloud services are quickly coming to an end. Free software alternatives are being built and made better every day that will give us total control over our data and allow us to have a 'home cloud in a box'. Add the fact that computer hardware is getting cheaper every day and there's virtually no reason why anyone has to rely on the public cloud.

Just last night, I was looking at a pretty sweet free software web based office suite that's pretty much a drop-in replacement for Google Docs, and a web based email app that not only replaces Gmail and other web mail providers, but does a better job with web mail than its non-free counterparts. Oh, and let's not forget easy replacements for Facebook and Google+ and Twitter. I'm still looking for a good free software replacement for Dropbox so I'm using Ubuntu One (which works on Windows and Mac too) until I can find something that allows everything to live on my server. Free software has come a LONG way and is just getting better every day.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be testing a bunch of these solutions on my home server and writing a series of posts about how they perform against their non-free alternatives. If things work out really well, I'll write up a quick and dirty guide on how to set them all up on your own home server so that you can get rolling quickly and easily. Watch this blog for updates and (maybe) even a few screenshots.

Yep, we've come a long way baby.

Want to chat with Anonymous? Here's how to do it securely!

2011-08-20T07:46:00.000-07:00

Many of you have emailed me asking how to connect with Anonymous and how to join the IRC network. Instead of writing individual emails to about 25 people, I'm going to simply post basic instructions here and hope those who are interested take time to read them. I'm going to assume you have very little security experience and just want to make a secure connection, do a little chatting, and retain your anonymity while doing so.

NOTE:
Before we get started I want to clarify something I've been hearing a lot about. When you join one of the Anonymous IRC channels, particularly #opnewblood, you will often see a message telling you to go to the #vhost channel and get a vhost for protection. THIS IS MISLEADING. While getting a vhost will indeed prevent your fellow chatters from knowing who you are, IT WILL NOT PROTECT YOU from anyone monitoring the IRC server directly. Anyone having administrative privileges on the IRC server can easily see your real connection information and link it to your Internet Service Provider and even what town you're in. If you plan to stick around the Anonymous channels, you need to do more than get a vhost.

LET'S TALK OPTIONS

There are two ways to protect your anonyminity from both your fellow chatters and anyone monitoring the server when you're in the Anonymous IRC channels

1) You can use a VPN (preferably in a privacy friendly country) and connect directly to the Anonops server through it,

2) You can use a special piece of software called I2P which provides good, strong, anonymity and encryption from other chatters, your ISP, and anyone monitoring the IRC server.

Since we're assuming that you have no technical or security experience and there are some questions about finding a trustable VPN provider, we're going to go the I2P route to get connected to the channels. I2P, provided by the German Privacy Foundation, is one of several programs that routes your internet traffic through several different machines before reaching its destination so, by the time you actually touch the server, who and where you are is nearly impossible to figure out.

The first thing you'll need to do is download the I2P software. It's free and can be obtained by going to http://www.i2p2.de and clicking on the 'download' link on the left hand panel. I2P is a relatively small download and shouldn't take more than a few minutes on even a slow connection. Once it's done downloading, just click on the executable file and start the installation (I'm assuming you're on Windows. Linux and Mac are similarly easy). Once I2P has installed, you will notice 3 new icons on your Windows desktop. To start I2P, simply click the "Start I2P (no window)' icon and give it a few seconds. You won't see anything but pretty quickly, I2P will be running. To verify this, click on the icon titled 'I2P Router Console' to bring up the web based information and configuration system.

You may need to give I2P a few minutes to fully configure itself the first time it runs, But once it's done (by a number of 'active' peers being greater than (0) you can use it to connect to a variety of services including Anonymous IRC.

The software connects you securely to Anonymous IRC by running a proxy server on your machine. When you connect your IRC client to that proxy, it will automatically go through the I2P network and end up where you want to be. Right now, only the I2P network is supported. If you want to connect to something like Dalnet or Undernet, you're out of luck. Sorry.

Now, we're ready to connect to Anonymous IRC! Open your chosen IRC program (links to some at the bottom of this post) and type '/server localhost:6668' (without the quotes) in the window you see. ''localhost' refers to your own computer (where the software is running) and '6668' is the port I2P is listening on for IRC connections. It might take a while, but eventually you'll be connected to the network and should see a welcome message.

Next, you can get a list of all the channels on the network by typing '/list' (again, without the quotes) and pressing enter. You'll see a variety of channels that you can join. Not all of them are Anonymous' channels. Some are just regular I2P channels that have nothing to do with the group. You can recognize Anonymous' channels by their name. They usually begin with 'op' or 'anon' (for example 'opsyria' or 'anonops'). If you're completely new to Anonymous and want to ask questions, I recommend that you spend some time in #opnewblood where experienced users hang out and are ready to help you. #anonops is where general discussion often happens and you can think of it as the 'Anonymous water cooler' so you might want to hang out there too.

Now that you're connected, spend some time exploring the network and chatting. Don't give any identifying information though and never give out your real email address as that compromises your anonymity. Once you've been there a while, you'll learn the ropes and will be chatting like a pro. Who knows you might even end up as part of an op.

Last but not least, remember the lulz. It's all pretty serious but find the fun where you can. Enjoy your experience, learn, and help out where you can. Remember, YOU are Anonymous.

IRC PROGRAMS FOR WINDOWS
--------------------------------------

mIRC     - http://www.mirc.com
XChat    - http://xchat.org
NetTalk - http://ntalk.de

IRC PROGRAMS FOR LINUX
----------------------------------------

BitchX    - http://www.bitchx.org
XChat    - http://www.xchat.org (may be already included - check!)

IRC PROGRAMS FOR MAC
-----------------------------------------

Ircle     - http://www.ircle.org
XChat - http://www.xchat.org (thanks to @BenMcGinnes for the info)

I'm part of the 'unparty'

2011-07-08T20:26:00.001-07:00

I tend to post a lot of political information on Facebook. I mean a lot. I view the service as much as a platform for public activism as I do a place to socialize with friends and family and one of my goals is to reach out to my connections and make them think. I don’t expect them to agree with me or even like me after reading a specific post, but if I make them think about things a little differently just for a few seconds, I’ve more than achieved my goals.

A few people have emailed and accused me of being a conservative while others have labeled me a liberal. While some of my views certainly fall on both sides of the political spectrum, I prefer to think of myself as part of the ‘Unparty’.

What is the ‘Unparty’ you ask? We’re the people who’ve broken out of the left/right paradigm and have realized that both parties are the problem. Republicans blame Democrats; Democrats blame Republicans but, in the end and regardless of which party is in power, nothing significant ever really changes.

That’s where the ‘Unparty’ comes in. We understand that, if we are ever to have real change, we have to stop playing the game. We have to stop looking at left and right and start looking at what’s sensible and works. In the end, it matters little which party someone belongs to and more what they do to advance the causes of liberty and freedom.

A politician who destroys our economy, discriminates against humans who are different from themselves, or one who devalues the dignity of those they don’t agree with is an evil and corrupt person regardless of what political label the choose to slap on their chest. Many times, I fear the game is actually constructed so that we get so caught up in the left/right battles that we don’t pay too much attention to what’s actually going on or how little difference there is between the two sides. It’s an expertly contrived scam that’s worked on voters for more than 100 years and it seems to be as effective as ever.

As a person of conscious, I find myself in a place where I simply can’t play the game anymore. I can’t be part of a party that segments people away from each other, plays word games as to what ‘freedom’ really is, or puts value on someones contributions based solely on if their paperwork is in order or not. Nor can I be part of a party that believes bigger government, larger social programs, and giving more handouts is the way to go while absolving people of personal responsibility. It seems like I just don’t fit into the standard two party system anymore and, I have to say, I’m glad I don’t.

Thankfully, I’m not alone in my disgust of politics as usual. Millions of others are joining me and they’re mad as hell. They’re waking up to the reality that both major parties in the US are bought, owned, and sold, by corporations who’s only goal is to increase profit and who have no qualms about harming or enslaving others to do so.. They understand that our politicians no longer actually work for us but rather work for GE or Ford, or Monsanto. For these politicians, it’s all about the money and the average citizen simply doesn’t matter. Freedom, liberty, constitutional right? Those are just abstract, antiquated, concepts on some 200 year old piece of paper. They aren’t relevant today. Today, the republic means nothing to these people; the corporatocracy is the only thing that matters.

Unfortunately for those politicians, and fortunate for the people, there are liberty minded people outside of the two party system who are willing to stand up and say ‘enough is enough!’. They are willing to fight and bleed for freedom and the natural rights that we all have. They recognize our innate right to self ownership and they understand that we are not slaves and are entitled to keep that which our labor generates.

These people, the Libertarians, are the reason I’ve not completely given up on our political system. I’d all but lost hope that principled people of conscious could make any difference at all. But they are making a difference. In local and state elections around the country they are waging a war for individual freedoms and against the status quo. They are not content with leaving things the way they are because they understand the way they are is broken. They’re offering real solutions to real problems without the need for increased government or new laws. Imagine that! When was the last time you heard a politician say ‘no, it’s ok, we don’t need a new law for that’? Shocked me too when I first heard it.

Before this becomes nothing more than an ad for the Libertarian party, I want to stop and say that there are things the part stands for that I don’t agree with. But they’ve gotten me excited about politics again and believing that things are not too far along to make a real difference. They’ve re-lit the fires of freedom in my bones and I am once again optimistic about our country. In the end, not being the perfect party is something I can live with. Politics is never perfect, it’s never clean. But when freedom is the outcome, it can’t be all that bad either.

Why I do not support "Caylee's Law'

2011-07-07T15:24:00.000-07:00

I've been reading about 'Caylee's Law' all day long. For those who haven't heard, Caylee's law is a proposal that would make it a criminal offense (a felony) not to report a missing child within a certain amount of time. The idea, of course, is that valuable time that could have been spent searching for the child is sometimes lost when a parent doesn't notify police of a missing child immediately.

I do not support this law.

The more I read about it, from its name on up, the movement smacks of an end run around the justice system. Most people believe Casey Anthony murdered her child and got away with it and this seems like a way to make sure that, if the situation ever raises its head again, we'll 'at least get them for *something*'. It's a way to make sure that, when the jury process doesn't work the way we want, we have a way to still exact revenge.

Think about this for a moment: let's say you've just murdered your own child. Are you likely to call the police and report them missing or are you more likely to hide the body and remain quiet about it? If you've murdered your child, the last thing you want is police involvement.

Now, let's say you wake up one morning to discover your child missing. You have no idea what happened to them, where they are, or when they disappeared. All you know is that, when you went to bed the night before, they were there and now they aren't. You are, because you have not murdered your own child, fairly likely to call the police and report them missing.

Likely but not certain.

A parent losing a child is a devastating thing. In the moment, the only thing you are thinking about is finding them and you're not thinking rationally or clearly at all. Communication with loved ones is muddied, thought processes are impaired, and there is a chance that you may not call the police Sure, it's a slim chance and one you're probably all sitting there thinking 'no way, I KNOW I'd call the cops!' but how do you know? Unless you've lost a child, you can't know. I don't know. I'd like to think I would but I don't know how I'd react until I am faced with the situation.

The problem was this law is twofold: It's a way to exact revenge when we know someone is guilty but gets away with a child's murder and it will put innocent, emotionally overwhelmed, parents in jail If Caylee's law is passed, it will only add to family heartache, not resolve it.

I urge you to consider what I've written. On the surface, supporting such a law sounds like a rational and caring thing to do. But it's not. It's reckless and irresponsible. It's an emotional response to smelling blood that we were waiting to be spilled but never was. And I say that with the full belief that Casey Anthony got away with murder.

People complain about the justice system not working for the 'little man'. In this case, it did. Whether Casey is guilty or not, the prosecution did a horrible job at proving their case. When that happens, it is a juries job to acquit the accused. Many of the jurors probably believed Casey was guilty too, but they did their job anyway and acquitted her based on evidence and arguments.

This law would lay our entire jury system to waste and I simply cannot support doing that much damage. It sucks that Caylee Anthony is dead and that her mother likely got away with murder. I have the same taste for blood and feel the same rage you do in this case. But the failure wasn't of the justice system here, it was of the prosecution.

In the end, no law or rule is going to fix that. Better, more prepared prosecutors can do that.

Why you should have the right to be Microsoft's (or anyone's) bitch

2011-07-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

There's a big debate in the free software community about this thing called DRM. DRM is actually a misnomer that stands for Digital Rights Management and it's nothing that gives or manages your rights but rather something that restricts them. If you've ever tried to share a song you bought on iTunes or a book you bought on your Kindle with a friend, you've experienced DRM first hand when you were told you weren't allowed to do it.

The Free Software community has always held that things should be, well, free. You should be able to share your music, software and books with your friends because that's just what friends do. You can do it in the real world, so why not allow it in the digital world as well? For the most part, their argument makes sense if you don't consider the unique 'edge' cases where sharing in the real world is significantly different than doing so in the digital.

For the most part, but with a few modifications, I tend to agree with this belief. If I purchase a digital book, why can't I share that book with friends? I should be able to lend you a book for as long as I want and the publisher or Amazon should have absolutely nothing to say about it. The same is true for music and other like content too. But recently, there's a movement within the community to legislate against the use of digital restrictions on content and that's where I think it goes a bit too far.

Those who seek to legally ban the use of DRM are essentially saying 'I support your freedom as long as it lines up the way I think it should'. But that isn't true freedom. It's an illusion of freedom that allows its proponants to stick their chest out and pretend that they're 'fighting for the rights of the people' when, in fact, they're simply being self serving.

Supporting true freedom on the other hand, means support the right of someone to deliberately choose enslavement. If, knowing their are other options out there for the same or similar content, the user chooses to use the restricted option, then that is their choice and restricting or eliminating that choice because you don't agree with it is simply enslaving them in another way. Supporting freedom means supporting things you don't agree with because you realize people have a right to choose their own path.

If the free software movement truly supports freedom, the correct option would be to abandon the silly push for legislation and instead focus on user education and creating usable alternative options that would encourage users to choose the free option over enslavement. Let it be the users choice and, even if they choose to be enslaved for a time, with the right education coupled with their own bad experiences using DRM, they'll come around to our side eventually.

I respect Richard Stallman but I think he is totally wrong in making this a moral or legal issue. People who choose to produce things and restrict their use are not immoral nor or people who choose to use products that restrict their freedoms. What is immoral, however, is trying to mandate that other options be outlawed or not available at all.

Wake up, Richard! It's time for us to move back into the marketplace of reality.

Reviving the Spirit of '76

2011-07-04T12:39:00.000-07:00

The following is an Op Ed piece that appeared in a Texas newspaper. I did not write it but I found it particularly poignant to share on our American Independence Day. -- Anthony Papillion (CajunTechie)

"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the
government fears the people, there is liberty." *-Thomas Jefferson

by R. Lee Wrights

BURNET, Texas (July 2) - Several years ago I wrote an article entitled "Is
the Spirit of '76 dead?" My concern then was that the revolutionary fire
that once burned hot in the hearts of Americans had been reduced to a
smoldering ember. I was afraid that we had lost the necessary desire to
question authority. It appeared to me that Americans had been such poor
caretakers that the tree of liberty was wilting, its boughs sagging
dangerously close to the ground.

This was still on my mind one year ago on July 4 when I began this campaign
for the Libertarian nomination for President of the United States. Our
nation has been dragged into a perpetual state of deadly and costly war. Our
leaders have manipulated every real or perceived threat to instill fear in
Americans. Then, they use this fear they have created to divide us and,
worst of all, con us into surrendering more and more of our liberty for the
vain and empty promise that they will somehow procure our security for us.

This weekend we will inevitably hear pious proclamations and political
pronouncements from prominent figures in the ruling class praising the
wisdom and foresight of our Founding Fathers. Undoubtedly, many will repeat
the words written by Thomas Jefferson: "*We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness.*" But their recitation of these immortal words
will be hollow, bereft of any wisdom or understanding. They'll probably
gloss over, if they mention it at all, the rest of that paragraph: "*That to
secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of
Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People
to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government*..."

"Just powers" and "consent of the governed" are phrases and concepts
modern-day rulers don't want you to understand, and probably don't
understand or believe themselves. Few politicians will tell you that
Jefferson and the Founders were revolutionaries and that the Declaration of
Independence was the written expression and explanation of revolutionary
ideas. When the delegates to the Continental Congress issued this unanimous
proclamation, they knew it wasn't just an exercise in semantics. The
Founders knew these words spoke the beginning of a long and bloody struggle
to free themselves from tyranny.

Make no mistake, this Declaration was not drawn up casually or without due
consideration of the causes and consequences of the action. The leaders of
the American Revolution understood that people are naturally inclined to
leave things as they are, willing to endure many hardships and much
suffering for as long as possible before taking action against oppression. "
*Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not
be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience
hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are
sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they
are accustomed*," Jefferson so eloquently wrote.

But the Founders also understood that there was a point at which people not
only had the right – they had the duty – to change things and to fight if
necessary: "*But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing
invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute
Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such
Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security*." When
Jefferson penned these words he wasn't talking about holding elections.

James Bovard wrote in “Lost Rights: The Destruction of AmericanLiberty*, “Americans need to remember their constitutional birthright and stand up to arrogant government officials who treat them like subjects rather than
citizens.” Mr. Bovard is telling us something we must never forget. Citizens
of the United States, each individually, are the caretakers for those
precious American siblings – Liberty and Freedom.

As I've traveled around the country this past year visiting libertarian
groups, I've been encouraged to discover that the Spirit of '76 has not been
entirely extinguished. While it's still being smothered by the apathy of
many Americans, and arrogant elected officials are still attempting to stamp
out its flame, the fire is still alive, cared for and nurtured by a small
but growing group of freedom-lovers. This campaign can be a catalyst to
rekindle the Spirit of '76 and set a brush fire in the hearts and minds of
all Americans that will engulf and destroy the tyranny and oppression
brought to our land under the guise of fighting foreign and domestic
enemies.

On this Fourth of July I urge everyone to read the Declaration of
Independence aloud to your children, your grandchildren, and your friend's children and
grandchildren. Tell them that the Fourth of July is more than just a time
for going to the beach, eating hot dogs and watching fireworks. Teach these
future caretakers of American freedom that it's about honoring the vision
and sacrifice of those who gave their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor" so
that we might be free by not allowing the flame of liberty die.

* R. Lee Wrights, 53, a libertarian writer and political activist, is
seeking the presidential nomination because he believes the Libertarian
message in 2012 must be a loud, clear and unequivocal call to stop all war.
To that end he has pledged that 10 percent of all donations to his campaign
will be spent for ballot access so that the stop all war message can be
heard in all 50 states. Wrights is a lifetime member of the **Libertarian
Party ** and co-founder and editor of of the free speech
online magazine **Liberty For All **. Born in
Winston-Salem, N.C., he now lives and works in Texas.

Stop begging government, start replacing it!

2011-07-02T03:45:00.000-07:00

Americans have become used to begging our government for what we want. We beg them for lower taxes, better national defense, a fair marketplace, less influence in our daily lives, but it always seems that their answer is a resounding 'NO!'. That's because, as much as we'd like to believe otherwise, our government doesn't serve we the people but rather is beholden solely to huge, multinational corporations.

Begging the government for relief will never work. They are not interested in what you need. They are interested in how they can expand government influence and corporate power. The fact that you are paying taxes more and living closer to poverty doesn't matter. The fact that both you and your wife or husband both have to work and still barely earn enough for basic needs doesn't matter. YOU don't matter.

It's time we stop begging the government for change and begin implementing change ourselves. In the movie "V for Vendetta", the protagonist speaks one of the most memorable and true lines I've ever heard in a movie: "The people should never be afraid of their government; government should be afraid of the people". The problem in our modern day is that government has lost its fear of the people. Politicians know they can lie, cheat, steal, and sell our future to the highest bidder and still be assured they have a pretty good chance at re-election in the next election cycle. We vacillate constantly between Republicans and Democrats hoping that one will fix the problems created by the other.

But they won't. Because they are all part of the same corporate controlled machine.

If we are to bring about real change; "change we can believe in" as Barack Obama loved to say, we have to begin acting in ways we've never acted in before. We have to begin thinking outside of the two party system and doing something that's radical and scary: we have to start replacing the two party corporate whore-mongers with third party options. They have to be shown that we don't buy their lies anymore. The jig is up! We know they're both the same and we want true liberty, not continued promises that never seem to get fulfilled.

In his 1997 essay called "Assassination Politics", Jim Bell theorized that political behavior could be controlled by placing a price on a bad acting politicians head. In such a system, politicians who act against the best interests of the people might find themselves on a prediction list and, soon enough, the wrong end of a bullet.

While Bell's essay is interesting, It has no practical value today. In an atmosphere where most Americans readily swallow the lies their government tells, the trigger of a voting booth becomes a much scarier and much more effective weapon than the trigger of a gun. Kill a politician and you will be labeled a terrorist and new, tighter laws will be passed to control your fellow man. Worst of all, the people will support is since killing is such a heinous act in most cases. Career assassination, on the other hand, provides an even handier and more effective way to get rid of the scum while protecting both yourself and your fellow man from the repercussions that come with Bell's ideas.

The voting booth, when used correctly, is the most effective tool we have. It's more powerful than a gun, more frightening to the elite than the very threat of death itself, and perhaps the only solution that is available to nearly every American. In the voting booth lies our true power and that scares the hell out of politicians.

Notice, however, that I said 'when used correctly'. We don't tend to use the voting booth correctly in this country. Largely, we aren't allowed to. Ballot access laws, media biases, and political propaganda, are all used as a way of keeping us locked into the failed two party system and, because it's almost always been that way, most Americans don't even bother fighting it.

But we must fight. We must break out of the mindset that there are only two options and that we're forced to choose 'the lesser of two evils'. There aren't just two options. We don't have to pick either or; we can demand more. We can demand fair ballots where everyone can be represented equally and people are given a true choice. But to get there, it's going to take work and it's going to take a whole lot of trial and error.

Government doesn't only need to be reduced, it needs to be replaced with people of conscious; people who are not beholden to special interests, corporate favors, and backroom payoffs. We have to stop bouncing between the two parties, stop begging government for our freedoms and favors, and start demanding that those we elected to represent us actually do so. If they don't, then we need to replace them with someone who will; someone from outside of the system.

Stop begging, start replacing.

Can we achieve liberty? Yes! But as long as we stay locked in the two party mindset, we will never find true freedom. The two parties are there solely for the illusion of choice. That illusion, like any illusion, is a smoke and mirrors game where the real function and action is well hidden behind the locked doors of corporate power. Unlock those doors! Kick them down! Choose real choice! Kick the 'business as usual' maniacs out and replace them with people who are truly willing to do the will of the people! No time in history has been better for political reform than the place we stand right now. It's up to us what kind of future our country has.

Are you willing to truly start a revolution?

How I tried (and failed) to use Ubuntu One

2011-07-01T20:21:00.000-07:00

For the last year, I've been following all of the excitement in the blog world surrounding Ubuntu One. Ubuntu One, for those who've had their head buried under a rock, is a Canonical created cloud storage service similar to Box.net or Dropbox. The service gives you two gigabytes of online storage and automatically keeps the folders and files you define in sync between multiple computers. It allows you to easily share your data with anyone on the next with the simple click of a mouse and, best of all, it lets you stream music stored in the cloud directly to your PC or Android device.

Those of you who read this blog regularly know I'm very wary of storing my data in the cloud. Much of my fear was confirmed a few weeks ago when it was revealed that data sync'd with the popular and dominate Dropbox service was transmitted completely unencrypted and only secured 'at some point later' on their server. While I see the attraction of the cloud, I don't think the convenience is worth the risk associated with it.

But Ubuntu One was different. Since it came from an open source company, I thought 'I can probably trust these guys' and I went ahead and set up the client on my machine. My impetus for doing this had a lot to do with the fact that I had just lost a lot of data due to a hard disk crash and I thought Ubuntu One was probably a pretty great way to make sure that didn't happen again.

After configuring my account, I spent a few minutes creating symbolic links in the "Ubuntu One" directory to my /Documents, /Pictures, /Music. and /Projects directories and I was all excited as I waited to watch my (encrypted) data stream to the cloud.

It didn't. In fact, the only thing that happened is that the folders that were symbolically linked were created on the Ubuntu One server, but not a single byte of the data they contained was moved into the cloud.

After waiting for almost two hours, I decided something had to be wrong and went to the forums to see if I could find anyone else having a similar problem to mine. I found a few people and it didn't seem like there was an easy solution except 'make sure you actually added your computer'. Isn't that part of configuring the client? Wasn't that the very first thing I did? Still, I went and unlinked my machine and added it again just in case.

Still nothing.

Back to the forums I went and posted a question basically asking 'WTF? My Ubuntu One is Broke!' and I clearly described my problem, giving all of the necessarily information. That was three days ago and I still haven't gotten a response from anyone.

Looking through the forums, however, I saw lots of problems with the software. I saw people complaining about it crashing on Windows (what doesn't?), people complaining about it not syncing all of their data, and even complaints of data loss while using the service. All around a service that's been out for two full releases now. Why are we still having these problems?

So I disabled Ubuntu One and I installed Dropbox. Dropbox works and works well. Their security may be crap but I can get around that by storing my data in a TrueCrypt container so it's all encrypted on my machine before being sent to the cloud. Dropbox was fast and easy to configure and it worked from the very first moment it was running. So far, I haven't had a single support issue with the software while I see even more issues have arisen on the Ubuntu One forum; more unanswered questions too.

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical (the company that makes Ubuntu) said in a press conference that Canonicals goal was to bring on 200 million new users to the Ubuntu desktop in the next four years. I can say definitively that if one of Ubuntu's selling points to those users is in any way related to Ubuntu One, they are going to massively fail. Two releases into the program and it's still not stable enough for reliable, everyday use. The Windows client, while still in beta and kind of newish, just doesn't work on some machines and it doesn't look like that will change anytime soon. In the meantime, Canonical is pushing forward with new Ubuntu One version for Android, iPhone, and Mac, that will likely suffer many of the same problems.

When I've talked negatively about Ubuntu One on IRC, I was immediately told to shut up. Everyone's system is different! It can't be expected to work seamlessly on every system. Why not? This is not a hardware issue which is where the 'everyone's system is different' argument would actually make sense. Canonical controls the operating system and, to a large degree, everyone's basic operating system is the same. Why can't the company that makes the operating system also make a program that runs reliably on that operating system. It's not like they're having to integrate with some undocumented API or anything. They are simply writing a program to work on their own operating system. That's not rocket science hard.

Personally, I think Canonical has bitten off more than it could chew with Ubuntu One. They were too aggressive with its deployment, too congratulatory of its features, and too inattentive to its problems. If it's going to replace Dropbox on most users machines, it's going to have to offer a compelling and, most importantly, reliable experience to users. Until then, the software will stay in its little corner to be played with every now and then to see how far it's come and then quickly replaced by Dropbox or something else.

Wake up Canonical! 400 million users aren't going to come with broken software! We in the Linux world are constantly telling people how superior the OS is to everything else, about how great the quality of the software written using the open source paradigm is and yet we can't get a simple file syncing program to work right? That gives Linux a black eye and will only drive people quicker into the arms of Apple and Microsoft.

Does Canonical really want to be the reason people choose Apple and Microsoft? I would hope not but a lot is going to have to change if they want to avoid that fate. Ubuntu One is an important factor in that change and, I'm afraid it's being paid way to little attention. Will Dropbox continue to dominate even the Ubuntu desktop when it comes to file syncing?

That is a question that only Canonical can answer. What are your thoughts?

The net neutrality conundrum

2011-06-25T13:12:00.000-07:00

'Network Neutrality' is a hotly debated topic these days. It seems every few months, the concept of net neutrality rears its head when some large ISP enters into talks with a content provider to offer a faster connect to that providers content in exchange for money. It's a good deal for content providers who seek a competitive edge because traffic to their site would be fast while traffic for competitors sites, at least those who didn't pay, would be substantially slower but it's a horrible deal for consumers who may find their favorite websites slow to access and difficult to navigate.

So it's no surprise that Congress and the FCC have taken up the network neutrality discussion and both sides are heavily lobbying lawmakers for legislation that comes down squarely on their side. When the issue first started being discussed, I supported a Congressional network neutrality bill because I thought it was the only way to make sure the Internet playing field was kept fair for both small and large players. On second thought, though, I now realize I was wrong. Pushing for legislation on either side of the issue is actually a red herring and could have very severe unintended consequences.

See, asking Congress to pass legislation to protect freedom and fairness on the Internet is actually giving Congress the authority to control the Internet - or at least the American part of it. We are expressly giving them expanded regulatory control of a network who, by its very nature, is uncontrollable. Though it might be for 'the public good' we are expanding the control government has over our online lives. That might seem like a good thing in this case but what happens then when government acts against the best interests of the people and in the interests of corporations instead? If we've already ceded regulatory control to them via network neutrality, where do we draw the line and how do we stop the landslide once it starts?

Network neutrality could also have negative effects in the physical world too. How many times have you seen ads on television that say 'American Express is the only card accepted here? How many times have you seen local merchants give discounts to people who pay with cash instead of credit cards because they want to avoid the discounts credit card companies impose on their sales? Couldn't it be argued that this is the physical world version of network neutrality? It's showing favoritism to a certain network of people (users of cash or people who hold American Express cards) over their counterparts and offering a reward to those who give the merchant whatever they want.

Couldn't we then argue that, if we demand 'fairness' by legislation on the Internet, we should also demand it in the physical world? Why should such 'protections' extend only to the digital world? Perhaps there should be laws governing 'monetary network neutrality'. See the potential problem? Every extension of government control leads to greater extensions in the future because they have a unique way to find new ways to interpret 'rights' and 'protections' in expanded ways.

So what's the answer then? Nobody wants a slower Internet just because a company didn't pay what amounts to an extortion fee to an ISP. Here's an idea: Instead of pushing for increased government control, we should actually be advocating that the government take a 'hands off' attitude with the Internet and allow the free market to rule on network neutrality. Allow ISP's that want to strike deals with content providers to do so and allow those who want to treat everyone equally to do so. Then, let consumers vote with their dollars as to which ISP's live or die based on their policies. In a free market, freedom wins because the consumer, not the government, is in control. Consumers voting with their dollars have a much more powerful impact on the behavior of corporations than any law ever could and the market is often very brutal to bad actors.

I would argue that the free market is the only way to guarantee network neutrality. Corporations can find ways around laws but it's not so easy to find ways around an angry consumer. Give the customer what they want or die is how the free market works and that's just as it should be. Network neutrality isn't a government issue, it's a consumer one and, thankfully, it's one consumers can solve quite easily.

Urgent Action Request: The detention of Ms. Mansoureh Behkish in Iran

2011-06-23T16:11:00.000-07:00

I know many of you subscribe to Amnesty International's 'Urgent Action Request' mailing list. However, I'm sure there are many of you who don't and so I'm sharing this latest posting here on the blog.

I strongly urge you to utilize one of the contact methods listed in this request. You could help save Ms. Behkish from torture or even death. If you cannot find the time to go out and buy a postcard, I encourage you to use email and reach out to the contact listed here. If you would like a prewritten letter you can send instead of writing your own, please contact me at papillion@gmail.com for a copy of the one I sent.

Here is the appeal:

23 June 2011

UA 196/11 Risk of torture/Risk of ill-treatment
IRAN Mansoureh Behkish (f)
Iranian human rights activist, Mansoureh Behkish, was arrested on 12 June 2011. She is a member of the 'Mourning Mothers' group, which campaigns against human rights violations such as unlawful killings, arbitrary arrests, torture, and enforced disappearances. She is at risk of torture or other ill-treatment.

Mansoureh Behkish, 57, was arrested by men believed to belong to the Ministry of Intelligence when they recognized her in a street in Tehran, at 8pm on 12 June 2011. She is now held in Section 209 of Evin Prison. She was able to make a short phone call to her mother two or three days after her arrest and again on 20 June, but could not talk about the conditions of her detention. Mansoureh Behkish suffers from a neurodegenerative disease called diffuse myelinoclastic sclerosis, or sometimes referred to as "Schilder's disease".

The 'Mourning Mothers' group mainly comprises women whose children have been killed, disappeared or detained in post-election violence in Iran since June 2009, but it quickly grew to include relatives of other victims of human rights violations and their supporters. Mansoureh Behkish has lost several members of her family who were executed in the 1980s; since then she has been an activist and has been detained several times before.

Mansoureh Behkish was among 33 women from the 'Mourning Mothers' group arrested during their weekly meeting in Laleh Park, Tehran, on 9 January 2010 and held for several days. On 17 March 2010, she was prevented from traveling to Italy to visit her children and her passport was confiscated. She remains banned from travel abroad.

BACKGROUND INFORMATIONThe 'Mourning Mothers' group was set up by women whose children have been killed, disappeared or detained in post-election violence in Iran since June 2009 but it quickly grew to include relatives of other victims of human rights violations and their supporters. The 'Mourning Mothers' meet in silence for an hour each Saturday near the place and time of the killing of protester Neda Agha-Soltan, who came to symbolize the brutal repression meted out by security forces after the disputed presidential election of 2009. Her death was shown in footage circulated around the world Mansoureh Behkish has not herself lost a child but lost several members of her family in the 1980s and is very involved in the movement.

Mansoureh Behkish, along with other women in the 'Mourning Mothers' group, was first seized during the group's weekly meeting in Laleh Park, Tehran on 5 December 2009. Members of the group were arrested again on 9 January 2010; several of them were beaten and 10 were taken to hospital (see: Iran's 'Mourning Mothers' must be released, 11 January 2010,http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/irans-mourning-mothers-must-be-released-20100111).

On 9 April 9 2011, Leyla Seyfollahi and Zhila Karamzadeh-Makvandi were sentenced in connection with their membership of the 'Mourning Mothers'. They were arrested on 8 February 2010 and appeared before Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran in May 2010 and March 2011. Leyla Seyfollahi and Zhila Karamzadeh-Makvandi were sentenced to four years imprisonment for "founding an illegal organization" and "acting against state security". They remain free pending their appeal.

Mansoureh Behkish was first arrested in December 1981 and held in solitary confinement for three months, while pregnant. She was released on bail to deliver her baby outside prison. After her delivery, she escaped from her home town of Mashhad and went into hiding for more than seven years.

Between 1981 and 1988 Mansoureh Behkish lost five members of her family including a sister, four brothers and a brother-in-law. Starting in August 1988 and continuing until shortly before the tenth anniversary of the Islamic revolution in February 1989, the Iranian authorities carried out mass summary executions of political prisoners, known as the "prison massacre" – the largest numbers since those carried out in the first and second year after the Iranian revolution in 1979. In all between 4,500 and 5,000 prisoners are believed to have been killed, including women.

For the past few years, Mansoureh Behkish has participated in the commemoration of the victims of the 1988 mass executions, some of whom were buried in the Khavaran Cemetery in south Tehran. This event is held yearly by relatives of the dead on or about 29 August to mark the anniversary and demand justice for their loved ones. Hundreds of those summarily executed are buried in the cemetery, many of them in unmarked mass graves. Families of the victims have been under pressure from the Iranian authorities not to hold commemorations at the cemetery or in their homes. On 29 August 2008 Mansoureh Behkish was arrested and held in Evin Prison for three days and summoned several times that year.

Mansoureh Behkish is the main caretaker of her elderly mother.

RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please write immediately in French or your own language:-- Call on the Iranian authorities to release Mansoureh Behkish immediately and unconditionally if, as appears to be the case, she is held solely for the peaceful exercise of her rights to freedom of expression, assembly and association;
-- Call on the authorities to ensure that she is protected from torture and other ill-treatment, and grant her immediate and regular access to her family, lawyer of her choice and adequate medical care;
-- Urge the authorities to remove unlawful restrictions on freedoms of expression, association and assembly in Iran.

APPEALS TO:

Leader of the Islamic RepublicAyatollah Sayed 'Ali Khamenei
The Office of the Supreme Leader
Islamic Republic Street – End of Shahid Keshvar Doust Street,
Tehran,
ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN
Email: info_leader@leader.ir
Twitter: "Call on #Iran leader @khamenei_ir to call for the immediate and unconditional release of Mansoureh Behkish"
Salutation: Your Excellency

Head of the JudiciaryAyatollah Sadegh Larijani
[care of] Public relations Office
Number 4, 2 Azizi Street
Vali Asr Ave., above Pasteur Street intersection
Tehran
ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN
Email: bia.judi@yahoo.com (In subject line: FAO Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani) ORlarijani@dadgostary-tehran.ir
Salutation: Your Excellency
COPIES TO:

Secretary General, High Council for Human RightsMohammad Javad Larijani
High Council for Human Rights
[Care of] Office of the Head of the Judiciary, Pasteur St.,
Vali Asr Ave. south of Serah-e Jomhouri,
Tehran 1316814737,
ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN
Email: info@humanrights-iran.ir (subject line: FAO Mohammad Javad Larijani)Salutation: Dear Sir
Iran does not presently have an embassy in the United States. Instead, please send copies to:
Iranian Interests Section
2209 Wisconsin Ave NW
Washington DC 20007
Phone: 202 965 4990
Fax: 1 202 965 1073
Email: requests@daftar.org
PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY.
Check with the AIUSA Urgent Action office if sending appeals after 4 August 2011.

The Courage to Get Involved

2011-06-15T16:12:00.000-07:00

I've written before about the ongoing warn between corrupt police officers and citizens armed with cameras. While the battle will continue into the foreseeable future, there does seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel. All around the country, ordinary people are finding the courage to challenge corrupt officers and not back down when the officer tries to use the suggestion of force and brutality to intimidate them. Moreover, attorneys, politicians, and organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union are stepping up and standing up against the silencing of photographers.

What is it going to take to bring this war against accountability to a final end? It's going to take brave people from every walk of life who've had enough and won't be intimidated picking up cameras and fearlessly documenting police misconduct. It's going to take professional journalists, citizen journalists, and ordinary citizens who might only carry a cell phone with a camera to loudly and courageously scream "enough is enough!" and take what risks might come in order to exercise and defend their rights.

The video above is from the ACLU of Massachusetts and discusses why it's important for everyone to be involved in this fight. The professionals journalists aren't going to save your freedom; it's something you have to be brave enough to do your self. You must find the courage to get involved.

Damascus Gay Girl's lesson to the online activism community

2011-06-13T20:23:00.000-07:00

For the last few weeks, a large part of the blog reading world, the twitterverse, and Facebook have been laser focused on the blog of Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, a lesbian blogger who went by the name "Damascus Gay Girl" and purportedly living in Syria. In her blog, Amina wrote about the challenges gay people in Syria (and in many other parts of the middle east) face while living in countries that often execute gays and routinely deny even basic civil rights to this growing portion of the population based solely on their sexual orientation.

Days ago, Amina was reported missing by her cousin Rania. According to Rania, Amina went to meet with a local council member, got separated from her companion and was seized by three armed men who were assumed to be from the Syrian security forces. She was taken away in a car and her whereabouts were unknown.

Almost immediately, there was a worldwide outcry. Facebook groups demanding the ruling Baath party reveal her whereabouts were formed, blog posts were written, tweeted, and retweted, and the online activism community was immediately in arms ready to do what they could to help find and free Amina.

The problem was that none of it was true. Not a single word.

On Monday, a man identifying himself Tom MacMaster and posting from Turkey, confessed that he'd made the entire thing up. There was no Amina, no Rania, no kidnapping. It was all a hoax designed to bring attention to the plight of gays and lesbians living in oppressive regimes. He apologized and took full responsibility for the damage he might have caused.

I don't think it's enough. This kind of thing has happened before. Mr. MacMaster wasn't the first to fake a voice and I'm sure he won't be the last. But do the people who do things like he did fully understand the potential gravity of the situations they are creating?

Damascus Gay Girl wasn't real and her security and life were never really in danger, thankfully. But her story could represent any of the thousands of stories gays and lesbians throughout the middle east could tell. While Mr. MacMaster made up Amina, he did not make up the crisis she would have faced if she had in fact been real.

His words emboldened people throughout the region - throughout the world, really, to dare to think that, if Amina could be so brave, they could be too. Those people were real. They weren't the invention of some misguided writer and their real lives were put at risk. What Mr. MacMaster did was unconscionable and thoughtless and could possibly have gotten people killed. That is unforgivable; an apology is simply not enough.

But in a way, I think this hoax did point out one of the inherent weaknesses of online activism: verification. We really are forced to take everyone at their word and, sometimes, people do strange things for even stranger reasons. Mr. MacMaster could have been anyone: a hostile government trying to identify those within the country that sympathized with Amina, a jilted lover trying to get revenge on an innocent woman, or even a propaganda organization trying to sway public opinion one way or another. Online, we often have no way of knowing the truth and the task of finding it is only going to get tougher as technology advances.

So how should the online community react in situations like these? Should we stop responding to every random blog post or tweet from an oppressed person because we fear the may not exist? Should we continue to respond in hopes that one voice might indeed change the world? The answer to that question may well be one we won't be able to answer in the foreseeable future but I think it should give us a moment of pause next time we think of clicking retweet or encouraging others to act based solely on a single voice. Advocating a cause is an admirable thing, but we have to do so with a full understanding of the potential ramifications of where that advocacy may lead. We are sitting behind a computer, safe, fed, and secure. Those who we are advocating for, those we are empowering and encouraging are risking their lives and the lives of their family. If we're wrong in our advocacy, we move on to the next crisis, if they act on our incorrect or fraudulent information they die. Not quite the same thing, is it?

In the end, I'm not saying don't advocate. I have no plans not to continue acting online for others; what's at risk is too important. But I am saying use judgement. just because something seems true doesn't mean it is. There were questionable aspects of Aminia's story that should have led to greater scrutiny but nobody checked them out. Everyone wanted to be supportive and not critical. After it's all said and done, being critical might have saved lives while unquestioned support may have cost them.

Sometimes, it's good to take a moment and assess things. Amina's story was heart wrenching but it was nothing but an illusion; an illustration of the depth of human foolishness. Be careful folks. We're not playing a computer game here. Real lives are at stake; real lives are being lost. Someone could be tortured and killed because of something *you* tweet. Think about that next time before hitting the retweet button or reblogging a post. I personally don't want a death on my hands. I doubt any of you do either.

Be careful. Be vigilant. Keep everyone safe.

REAL Studio: Kicking ass and taking names for this ex Microsoft developer!

2011-06-12T17:04:00.000-07:00

As most of you know, I cut my teeth on Microsoft technology. Since Windows 3.1, I was a Microsoft die-hard even going so far as to earn an MCSE and become a Microsoft partner. As a software developer, one of my favorite things about the Microsoft ecosystem was how easy developing new software solutions were. While most of my colleagues on Unix/Linux were busy banging their heads against the wall writing C/C++ code, I was kicking out software in half the time using tools like Visual Studio and languages like Visual Basic. Sure, I know C and C++, but I really fail to see the use for them in modern consumer software development unless you're writing system level code. So I used whatever was easy, fast, and convenient and that, on Windows, was Visual Studio and Visual Basic.

When I moved to Linux, I immediately faced a productivity challenge. I didn't want to use C/C++, I hated Java, and I didn't know Python very well at all. What was I going to do to push my Linux solutions out as quickly as I had my Windows ones? Of course, I went back to what I knew: C++. For a while, I wrote a lot of C++ code. I hated it, saw it as a waste of my time, but I knew it and it was more productive than learning Python. Of course, I also started learning Python since there was a LOT of code in Linux (and Windows) written in the language. Still, my productivity was not where it should have been.

RealBasic

One day, I was lamenting to a friend of mine about how I missed my days of Visual Studio and really wanted something as easy as Visual Basic .NET on Linux. He brought up a tool he was using called RealBasic and I immediately found the idea very interesting. Here was a language that was easily accessible to an old .NET developer, completely object oriented, and created fully cross platform code! It was like everything I'd been dreaming about for months suddenly came true and I had to know more!

The next day, I visited the RealSoftware website and what I found was amazing. Developers of all stripes, from novice to professional, were singing the praises of this language that I'd never even heard of. They wrote about increased productivity, how cross platform it was, how easy it was to learn, and all of the great things there were doing in half the time using a tool many of them had only picked up a few months earlier Of course, I downloaded the trial and immediately got hooked. Here was a tool that combined the cross platform nature of C++ and Python with the ease of use of Visual Studio. Could anything be better?

RealBasic (now called REAL Studio) offers all of the tools a professional developer needs including an object oriented language, version control, access to almost any database, the ability to develop dynamic web application as well as desktop ones, 'write once' deploy on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and a host of other features that any developer would love.

OK, so what's wrong with it?

For all my enthusiasm, REAL Studio isn't perfect. First, it's not free software (either in cost or as in freedom). The software is proprietary and Real Software does not plan to open source it anytime soon. That will present a problem for free software purist who believe that the entire toolchain has to be open source or the technology is useless. It bothers me a bit because there's no free compiler for REAL Studio that I could use without having to purchase the software.

Next, the price is prohibitive for new developers. If you're writing open source software, you can apply for a Personal Edition license (which normally cost $99) but it only allows you to developer Linux software and does not allow you to cross compile for other platforms. If you're a commercial developer or someone not writing open source on Linux then your cost will start at $99 and go up to $999 for the Enterprise Edition of the software. If you make your living writing software, the prices aren't really that bad but if you're a hobbyist, they might be a problem.

My last complaint is stability. I run a slightly older laptop that has a 1.8Ghz processor and 3GB or memory and running Ubuntu 10.10. It's not horrible but it's not top shelf gear either. Sometimes, while I'm coding, REAL Studio behaves in weird ways. Code completion sometimes takes a while, compiling can be a process that brings my system to an absolute halt. My screen grays out and all I can do is wait for the compilation to finish. If I'm compiling an application that uses a lot of graphics resources (and especially if I'm cross compiling for Windows) that process takes forever and has occasionally crashed my system after eating up all the free memory.

When I first encountered the problem I thought it must be me. Certainly I'm doing something wrong or accessing resources the wrong way. So I asked on the REAL Studio mailing list and the answer I got was "don't use graphics'. What? How can I write a really professional looking program and not use graphics? That was the advice. It seems the REAL Studio community has learned to work around the bugs and annoyances of the language to create the software they want. I'd much rather the company fix the bugs instead of taking the 'work around' route but that seems to be both the corporate and community stance right now on at least some of the bugs that are out there.

To be fair, I know that many companies don't fix non-critical bugs in their software and expect users to simply work around them. But I don't really consider a bug that crashes a computer a non-critical bug and I don't think we should have to work around that. I've not upgraded to the newest version of REAL Studio yet (2011r1) but I suspect that the bug is still there as it's been there for at least a few versions prior. Perhaps I'll try it out and report back in this post.

My overall impression

Overall, I really like REAL Studio. I think it allows everyone from novice to professional to be productive and opens up software development to people who otherwise would be shut out of a great process. I'd like to see a few changes but that's more in the way the compiler works and they are working on moving to the LVVM compiler so those might just take care of themselves.

So, whether you're a new developer or a seasoned professional, I'd recommend REAL Studio to you. Start out with the Personal Edition, see if you like it, then upgrade. I guarantee you'll have very few regrets.

Me? I'm still learning Python and eventually want to move all of my development to it. But for now, productivity is king and REAL Basic rules productivity for me.

The war between bad cops and citizens with cameras continues

2011-06-06T03:23:00.000-07:00

Law enforcement and government officials have never been fond of citizens with cameras. It seems these dangerous, camera toting vigilantes always show up at the most inopportune moment and often capture footage that an officer, or officers, would probably rather not be filmed. The right of a citizen to record police while they're doing their job has been hotly debated over the last few years with all but the most backwards of courts and states supporting the absolute right of the citizen to record video of public servants as they discharge their duties - especially in public places like roadsides, parking lots, and other widely visible places.

As you might expect, most police officers don't really have a problem being videoed or photographed as long as the person with the camera doesn't get in the way. Recording the police at a distance that allows them to do their job and doesn't put them in danger is OK; getting up close and personal with the cop and camera while things are going nuts isn't. It's a pretty easy to understand guideline. Cops probably find a busybody with a camera annoying, but most won't do anything about it since the camera operator isn't breaking the law and neither is the cop.

But sometimes, the cops do break the law and that's where things get interesting.

Several citizen videos have surfaced over the last few years of police officers doing some very bad things. I'm not talking roughing up the local drug dealer here either; I'm talking things like stealing from suspects, assault, rape, and even murder. For obvious reasons, these cops would rather their escapades not fall into the hands of an ordinary citizen because, once it's out of police control, there's not much the cops can do to cover up the crime. And, yes, unfortunately, many times these crimes, as heinous as they are, are indeed covered up by the department.

Take, for example. the recent Memorial Day shooting of a man in Miami Beach, Florida. 35 year Narces Benoit and his girlfriend were driving by a police stop around 4:00am Monday morning when Narces noticed that the police were approaching the car with their weapons drawn. Finding it interesting and newsworthy, Benoit pulled out his mobile phone and began recording the encounter. Four minutes later, the incident ended with a hail of bullets being fired into the car, leaving the suspect dead.

Unfortunately, for Benoit, the action wasn't quite over yet. When officers noticed him recording they immediately started yelling for him to turn the camera off and came towards him aggressively. Notice that they did not say 'this is evidence, we need it' as a cop should do in these cases, they wanted him to STOP RECORDING. Suspicious, yes, but it doesn't end there.

Benoit ran to his car where his girlfriend sat in the drivers seat ready to leave. Moments later, he raises the camera to show an officer appearing at the drivers side with his gun trained on the couple, demanding that they turn the camera off and get out of the car. Once they exited the car, Benoit had the forethought to secret away the memory card from his phone to protect the video before the officers threw he and his girlfriend to the ground, took his mobile phone and smashed it then brought the pair to a mobile command center to be interrogated and, eventually, released.

Absolutely crazy? Yes.
Common procedure with bad cops? Yes.

Unfortunately, this kind of behavior has become commonplace as more and more people carry video equipped mobile phone and high definition pocket video cameras. When cops break the law, the likelihood that someone will have a video camera pointed at them has increased and, as a result, the aggression bad cops show towards these citizen journalists has increased as well. Video routinely 'disappears' from confiscated devices, phones are smashed on the sidewalk, and citizens are intimidated into silence by cops who believe they are above the law and that their departments won't do anything in response to a citizen complaint against them.

So what should you do if you see something happening with police that you feel needs to be documented? Most importantly, you should learn your state laws governing recording other people. Specifically, become familiar with the states wiretapping laws. In all but a handful of states, videotaping the police is an absolute right and not a crime. The states in which it is a crime usually prosecute videographers using the states antiquated wiretapping law that says that, in order to record someone, all parties must consent. Since the police obviously didn't consent, the videographer is violating the law. Of course, I don't know of anyone who would consent to being recorded during the commission of a crime but perhaps I just don't understand the law.

Of the states that have used wiretapping to prosecute videographers who film police, the rules on what you can record vary widely. Some states allow you to video record but not audio record since the law specifically references audio recording. Others make no distinction between the two and videographers can be arrested and face serious jail time (up to 6 years in some jurisdictions) for pulling out the camera.

Deciding to use your video camera is a tough choice. Choosing not to do so may mean that bad cops continue to get away with crimes for years, going undiciplined and allowed to further terrorize the populace. But deciding to do so could put you in both legal and physical danger and should not be taken lightly. In the end, speaking to a good lawyer or your states ACLU as well as understanding the physical risks involved can go a long way. Ultimately, the decision should be made carefully and thoughtfully and you should always act and speak to an officer with respect and in a non-aggressive tone. You want to document an officers crime or wrongdoing, not become part of it.

In the end, the police will have to accept the new reality that they will be videoed and those videos, if they are of criminal or unethical activities, will eventually make it online or even to court. But the police agencies and state legislatures must also accept that they cannot allow bad cops to suppress free speech in order to cover up their crimes. A badge is not a license to become a common street thug and it's an insult to every good, hard working, man and woman who wears the uniform to allow bad behavior to go unpunished or to protect 'the brotherhood' when outright crime is being committed.

The war against filming police is just beginning. Several cases are slowly working their way to the Supreme Court where a ruling there will help turn the tide one way or the other. Until then, know your rights, choose wisely, and just do the right thing. The law may not always be on your side but that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong.

Linux programming editor of choice: Emacs

2011-06-03T13:53:00.000-07:00

In yesterdays post, I wrote about Crimson Editor, a Windows based programmers editor that I've come to truly love over the years. Today, we're going to tackle Linux editors and, I have to say, picking a favorite editor for Linux was a really tough choice. There are so many choices, most of them really good and almost all of them free and open source.

Over the last few years, I've used a variety of editors on Linux, from Vi to Eclipse, I've gone through them all. For a while, I was even trying to use gEdit and Nano! Admittedly, since I've moved to Linux full time, my choice of editor has stabilized since I had to find something in which I could actually work comfortably and that, like on Windows, got out of my way and only helped when I needed it to.

Enter Emacs

Emacs is an old editor. Originally written by Free Software Foundation founder Richard M. Stallman in 1976 and updated constantly since, Emacs has found a home in almost every Unix (and now Linux) programmers toolbox. It's extensible, configurable, easy to use and offers everything a professional programmer would want in an editor:

Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML
Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users.
Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts.
Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface.
A large number of extensions that add other functionality, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, and more. Many of these extensions are distributed with GNU Emacs; others are available separately.
Many other features that serious programmers will find indispensable

Of all the editors I've used on various kinds of systems, Emacs is perhaps the best yet. It's simple, configurable, and well supported. Currently in version 23 and

with a lifespan of over 30 years, Emacs could very well be the longest lived in use editor on the planet. There's a passionate community of users behind it and it really has taken a life of its own. I think that's a testament to how incredible the software really is.

Of course, there's all this goodness comes at a cost. Yesterday, I did a 'good/bad' comparison of Crimson Editor. Today, because my list of 'bad' is so short, I'm simply going to dispense with the list and post it outright:

The only thing wrong with Emacs is that it has a learning curve..

Seriously. That's it. I can't think of anything else negative about it. And the learning curve really isn't that steep either. A competent computer person can learn Emacs in less than a week and can become productive almost immediately.

Something else that should be noted is that the software is also cross platform. You can run it on almost any system including Windows, Mac, Linux, and (of course) Unix. On each system, it runs basically the same, has the same commands, and only has minor UI differences.

Lastly, the software is light. If you read my article yesterday, you know I hate bloated editors. One of the reasons I really like Crimson Editor is because how easy it is on system resources and Emacs is even better. It sits there, with all that raw power, waiting for your command while your system barely even knows it's there.

So that's it! If you're looking for a great programming editor for Linux, you can't beat Emacs. Check it out and see for yourself if you're not almost immediately more productive. In the end, isn't that a programmers greatest desire? Just to be more productive?

Windows programming editor of choice: Crimson Editor

2011-06-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

Nothing can make or break a developers productivity like a bad text editor. Done right, a good editor can help a developer work twice as fast and be more productive. Done wrong, it can bring development to a crawl and drag the entire process into a muck of configuration, testing, and more tinkering.

We all know about the bad editors out there. If you write code for a living, you've probably keep your own personal list of editors you'd rather not use. In the next two articles, however, I want to sing the praises of editors on both Microsoft Windows and Linux that just get it right. They work, get out of your way, and help you in surprising ways just when you need it. Since many of you out there are Windows users, we'll start there.

Before I start, let me issue this one caveat: I understand most Windows developers use Visual Studio. That's a given. But Visual Studio costs a lot of money and doesn't really allow you do code in "any language you want". Of course, it's also not open source. So, for the sake of these reviews, I'm going to ignore it. The two picks I've made are both open source and completely language agnostic. Using my picks, you can start writing code today, not pay a penny for any of your development tools, and aren't locked in to a small set of languages. If all you want to hear about is how great Visual Studio is and how it works for everything, move on. You're going to be sorely disappointed. Oh, and I'm also going to ignore Eclipse because I personally can't stand it and it's a bloated pig written in Java.

One more caveat: I don't use Windows anymore. As of last year, I've switched to a completely Linux based environment. That means there might be something better than Crimson Editor available now that wasn't available then. Seriously though, I doubt any of them will combine the speed and power Crimson offers into anything more attractive.

Now, let's talk about my favorite editor on Windows Crimson Editor.

Crimson Editor is a little editor I discovered way back in 2004 and have stuck with it ever since. While the developer hardly ever revs it, it's perhaps one of the most feature rich editors out of the box I've ever used.

The Good

This editor is amazing. While it's always been a free (as in beer) program, it's now open source and has an active community of users behind it which may turn into something amazing at some point. The Crimson Editor users I've met tend to be very enthuesed about it and are always talking about ways to improve it.

The editor supports a bunch of widely used languages including C/C++, Perl, Python, PHP, Java, and even supports many less widely used ones like Tcl/Tk, Fortran, Classic ASP, Pascal, LateX, and Matlab. While most of us probably won't ever use those languages, it's nice to see the developer put a little forethought into who his users might be instead of simply scratching his own itch.

Let's start with Macros. Macros are one of the great features of Crimson which allow you to save typing time by defining shortcut keystrokes for the things you do often. For example, you could define a macro to automatically update your git repository when you save revisions to your code or perform a complex compile with multiple command line flags without having to type it all again and again.

The software also features (and I really like this feature) the ability to have multiple files open at the same time in a nice, convenient, tabbed interface. This comes in handy when you're working with complex applications where you're constantly having to reference other source files as you work. Keep everything open and accessible and switch about as needed.

Next, we come to one of my favorite features: the code splitter. Using the code splitter, you can divide your screen in half and display different parts of the same document in each half. That comes in super handy when you're doing complex coding where you find yourself scrolling up and down to reference variable names or function documentation, parameter lists, or names. Not a huge feature but one I think adds a nice touch to an already awesome editor.

Of course, no programming editor would be complete with an advanced find and replace feature or an FTP client. The built-in FTP client is worth noting because, like a few other editors, it allows you to directly edit remote files on your server. You don't have to download them, edit, then re-upload. The software takes care of that all in the background for you and you never are exposed to what's going on.

There are a lot of other features that are worth mentioning and you can find a complete list of them here. But for now, let's talk about...

The Bad

Honestly, there's not a lot of bad I can say about Crimson. But if I had to think of something, at the top of my list would be the rev history. For the most part, development on the editor seems to have stopped. Since 2004 the editor has only received one rev (2008) and none since then. I don't know if the developer lost interest in it or had other obligations but it looks like we might be seeing the end of the line for Crimson very soon. Thankfully, it seems another group of developers have taken the Crimson code and started a project called Emerald Editor which promises to be a cross platform version of the original Crimson but, unfortunately, nothing's been done on that project either since 2008.

I'd also like to have seen better support for version control built into this editor. Even though it's old, people were using things like Subversion and CVS in 2004 and I'm surprised that it doesn't support it. FTP only is kind of a crappy alternative to the much better system they could have implemented.

Code folding would have been a nice feature as most editors, even in 2004, seems to have started supporting it and language syntax help (like Eclipse has) would have been nice too. There are simply times when you're using some obscure language method and you'd rather not break your concentration and go to the docs to figure out how to use it. Having the IDE give you doc would have been sweet.

Overall, I believe Crimson is still a viable and strong editor even at its advanced age and lack of care. It's not going to offer you the strong tools and configuration that editors like Eclipse do, but it's a great, lightweight editor for those of us who don't want to install a full Eclipse environment just to write some PHP, Python, or C code. I used Crimson for many years and while I found myself sometimes wanting something more powerful, it really wasn't that often and the desire wasn't really enough to make me switch to something heavier.

All in all, I'd still recommend Crimson for someone who's not in a corporate coding environment or needs the advanced features a heavier editor offers.

Why do I hate Eclipse so much?

I don't! I actually have used Eclipse quite a bit and find it a very comfortable and configurable editor to use. I just don't think it really meets the needs of most non-corporate programmers. Eclipse shines when you're working on enterprise level software, working in teams, or doing any number of other things that corporate coders do. For a lone coder or a very small team, I think it's a bit overkill.

I also don't like how 'heavy' Eclipse. I don't like software written in Java because I think it is simply a waste of system resources. While Eclipse isn't as bad as some of the other Java based crap I've had to use, it still suffers from all of the system drain that all other Java software does. Had it been written in a more sensible language like C/C++, this would not have been an issue at all. In fact, I've long questioned why they wrote it in Java. The answer I've always gotten was 'we wanted it to be cross platform'. Is C++ not cross platform? Java was just a bad idea.

So I don't hate Eclipse but I really like Crimson Editor on Windows. If you're a lone coder, I'd strongly encourage you to check it out. You won't be disappointed and I personally wouldn't mind if you grabbed the source and rev'd it for us either. That might be a great way to contribute to the community.

Tomorrow, we'll review my favorite editor for Linux. Hint: it's NOT gEdit or Kate!

The problem with eBooks

2011-05-30T17:44:00.001-07:00

I love reading. Since I was a child, nothing has given me more happy memories or flights of fancy than reading has. So when eBooks started to come to the market, especially with more affordably priced readers like the Nook or Kindle, I almost couldn't contain my sheer excitement as I lined up to hand over my money to the sales clerk and assure a piece of reading history.

The ebook experience has been, for the most part, amazing. The idea that I could fit hundreds of my favorite books on a digital device that took up less room than a single physical book enchanted me and I quickly built quite an impressive digital library. I was a happy camper. Then, one day, I wanted to lend one of my ebooks to a friend the way I'd done countless times over the years with paper books. That's when I first experienced the dark side of digital books and it nearly completely ruined the value of ebooks for me.

Digital Rights Management (which is really a misnomer since the technology actually restricts your rights) is a technology who's sole goal is to allow publishers to control how you use your ebooks. DRM is used to control other digital goods like music too but the goal is always the same: to control how you use content that you purchased. It's *your* property but you do not have control over it. Instead, you are granted a license to read or listen to the content but not to share it with anyone else for almost any purpose.

eBook publishers have gone to great lengths to take away your right to share your favorite books with your friends. Amazon, the biggest ebook seller in the United States has finally allowed Kindle users to loan their books to friends but that comes with all sorts of restrictions that really make it not worth doing in the end. For example, you can only loan your book out for a specific length of time and only a specific number of times. If the person being loaned the book can't read it in that set time, too bad, they don't get another shot even though there's no *real* reason for this restriction since you don't have access to the book while it's on loan.

The most concerning thing to me is that our children are getting used to these restrictions and, while you and I might remember the joy of loaning a book to a friend, there will be a time in the very near future where they won't. An entire generation will eventually grow up almost entirely on ebooks complete with all the restrictions and they won't even know to fight them because that will be all they've ever known.

That's why it's so important to fight DRM on ebooks today. We don't want the right to copy books endlessly and put them up on file sharing sites to deprive authors and publishers revenue. We gladly pay for our books. We just want ebooks to be treated like what they are: a digitized version of a physical product. There is no reason for digital products to carry any more or less restrictions than their physical counterparts and it's time those of us who value both our shared reading community and our freedoms to stop greedy publishers from needlessly restricting our rights just to increase profits.

I personally have decided to purchase ebooks that respect my rights and from booksellers that do the same whenever possible. I encourage you to do the same because what we're fighting for is much more than our right to share books. We're fighting for the future of the freedom to read and use the products we purchase in any way we want. When we purchase a physical book, we own it. We aren't purchasing a license to read it. We wouldn't accept draconian restrictions on our physical possessions, why are we accepting them on our digital goods?

To those who serve: thank you

2011-05-30T13:07:00.001-07:00

I've never worn a soldiers uniform or had my metal tested on a battlefield. I've never been shot at, tortured, or held in a foreign prison for years because of my allegiances. I've never had to entertain the thought that the last conversation I had with my family might well be the last conversation I will ever have with them. And I've never had to stand at the side of a dying friend and watch the life drain out of them in some foreign country I'd never heard of before I was sent there to fight.

I've never had to do any of those things because there are men and women, many who are far younger and all of whom are far braver, than myself have chosen to take my place. They've chosen to put on a uniform that makes them a target for every madman and dictator on earth. They've chosen to put themselves in harms way, to accept that the may never return home to their kids, spouses, and friends, because they heard the call of duty to my country and were brave enough to say "yes" to that call. They have chosen to put the needs of the many above their own needs and to defend their country and its way of life knowing that it may cost them their own lives.

I've often asked myself if I could wear the uniform and, I have to say, I don't know that I could. Could I willingly charge into certain death to protect an ideal that I may not always understand or even agree with? Could I be the loyal battlefield comrade, the leader, the one who makes a life or death decision if even only for myself? No, I don't think I could. I'm simply not that brave. I don't have that much guts.

I don't always agree with the actions our government or our military take but I *always* support those who answered the call. Because of them, I don't have to put my life on the line every day or wonder if I will see my family again. Because of them, I don't have to test my courage and find it lacking and I don't have to wonder if my country, my home, is safe. I don't have to worry because they have chosen to worry for me. They have chosen to take my place.

For that, brave men and women, I say "thank you" from the bottom of my heart. My gratitude goes to you as does my admiration and support. You are who I can hope to be. You show the best our country has and you are appreciated.

My Joplin

2011-05-29T23:24:00.001-07:00

I live about 20 miles away from Joplin Missouri. Close enough where going to the movies, going out to eat, or going shopping, often meant jumping in the car and heading to Joplin. While I didn't go as often as I'd liked, it was enough where I felt comfortable referring to "we" when talking about the city. To some degree, I felt a sense of camaraderie with the city and it felt like a city that offered most of what I wanted without all of the problems or hassles. Not to mention, the people there, in typical midwest style, are incredibly nice and inviting.

I've shopped at Walmart on 15th Street, gone past Academy Sports, eaten at Pizza Hut and bought drinks at Fast Trip. All of those businesses, along with a good part of the rest of Joplin, no longer exist after the tornado came through on Sunday. I have memories of Joplin that won't go away but the city changed forever on Sunday and I'm not sure it will ever be the same.

The spirit of Joplin is still there though. It's shown on the faces of workers digging through the rubble who aren't expecting to find anyone alive underneath but keep digging like they do. It's clear in the voices of both victims and survivors - some of whom who've lost everything, including loved ones, as on by one they call local radio station <a href="http://www.1310KZRG.com">KZRG</a> and pour their very souls out to the DJ's who've quickly gone from being our entertainers and reporters to being our brothers and friends. Yes, Joplin is alive, though it's hard to see through the piles of rubble and destruction strewn around the city.

Some don't understand why I'm so involved with relaying information about conditions in a city I don't live in and don't really have a tight connection to. All I can say to them is this is my Joplin and I feel connected to it. I feel a profound sense of loss and grief at the destruction. No, it's not the same grief or loss those who live there feel, but it is my own personal sense of loss. Perhaps I can best explain it by referencing the loss people around the country felt when New Orleans was hit by Katrina. Most had no connection to the city other than perhaps a visit or the music that came out of it. Still, the loss was there. That's how I feel about Joplin.

At the same time, though, I also feel a sense of hope. People in this part of the country are strong. The go through adversity and come out better and stronger in the end. They aren't stopped by the temporary detours life throws at them and, believe me, Joplin *will* come back. It's already started. Repairs and rebuilding are happening throughout the city. The high school is being repaired. The hospital is nearly functional again and is accepting patients, restaurants are open and people are shopping at Northpark Mall. The city survived and, while it's limping because of its wounds, it's standing on its own and starting to take its first steps.

Joplin isn't going anywhere. It's people aren't going away. It will come back stronger, better, more determined, than ever before. Setbacks will happen, but they won't stop our city. Not by a long shot.

So remember this city. Don't forget about it when the media leaves or when the interest of the nation goes elsewhere. We'll still be here because, in the end, the spirit of Joplin really is what powers this city. And that spirit cannot be destroyed by a strong wind.
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Should you buy the Google laptop?

2011-05-20T16:49:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago its yearly I/O developer conference, Google announced that it was finally going to release a general consumer device based on the ChromeOS. For those of you who don't know, ChromeOS is Google's experiment at creating an operating system that is nearly completely web based. In ChromeOS, the web browser (Chrome) is the desktop and most (if not all) of your applications live on the web.

Two companies, Samsung and Acer, will manufacture the initial ChromeBooks, as Google is calling them, and they will be fully optimized for living on the web.

General specs for the notebook are:

* 11.6" HD Widescreen CineCrystalTM LED-backlit LCD
* 3.19 lbs | 1.45 kg
* 6 hours of continuous usage 1
* Intel® AtomTM Dual-Core Processor
* Built in dual-band Wi-Fi and World-mode 3G (optional)
* HD Webcam with noise cancelling microphone
* High-Definition Audio Support
* 2 USB 2.0 ports
* 4-in-1 memory card slot
* HDMI port
* Fullsize Chrome keyboard
* Oversize fully-clickable trackpad

Notice that the specs say nothing about hard drive size or memory. Why? Because they don't matter. Since everything you do on these devices are on the web, memory requirements and hard disk space are really inconsequential.

Is the ChromeBook right for me?

Deciding whether the ChromeBook is right for you is really a matter of looking at how you already use your computer and determining if what you do could be easily shifted to the web without loss of productivity.

Most people use their computers for pretty basic things: email and chat, web browsing, watching videos, creating documents, managing photos, and listening to music. That's about it. Sure, some users will do 'heavy lifting' on their systems like writing software or editing video and audio but the majority of users do the six things listed above nearly exclusively. For those users, the ChromeBook is an excellent alternative to a traditional PC and provides an automatic backup of their work without the hassle that comes with backing up a regular PC. And, because everything is stored in the cloud, the data is accessible anywhere there's an Internet connection.

As for applications, cloud based software has become very nice. From editing documents to manipulating videos or doing email, web applications are available today that easily meet or exceed the needs of most users. And with the coming of HTML5, the new standard in HTML, these applications will get a tremendous boost in functionality and become even better as developers and manufacturers push us deeper and deeper into the cloud.

That said, this won't be the computer for everyone. Some power users won't be satisfied with doing everything in the cloud and there's some things that, even while they're technically doable, just don't work well within cloud based software. Video editing is an example. Even the most advanced web based video editor doesn't really even come close to a basic on-system one and the technology isn't likely to change that any time soon.

There's also the question of what happens when there's no Internet? Google says it's building in a fail-safe that will allow you to work offline but that's just for using the apps. Your data, which is safely tucked away on Google's server on the Internet, will be wholly locked away from you. Hardly a good situation for a business professional who suddenly finds she can't access the presentation she's giving in 30 minutes because there's no Internet where she's working.

Of course, there's always the privacy issue. Google knows a lot about us just by analyzing the things we do on their services now. Many of us use Google services for blogging, email, sharing videos, listening to music, hosting our websites, handling out financial transactions, documents, and, of course, plain old search. Do we really want to hand over even more control of our data over to a company with a questionable agenda? I'm not comfortable with it and I know a lot of other people who aren't comfortable with it. Are you willing to let Google know just about everything about your life?

Is there another option?

If you're like me, you have a love/hate relationship with the cloud. I love how convenient it makes accessing my data from anywhere. I can edit a document at home, walk over to my local Starbucks or McDonald's and continue right where I left off without missing a beat. And it doesn't matter if I'm using different computers at each location because my data is centralized in the cloud and easily accessible.

At the same time, I'm concerned about handing my data to a corporation. What will they do with my data? Will they sell it? Profile me? The truth is, I don't really know. I only have their 'promise' to be good to go on and we all know corporations always keep their promises, right?

My growing concern with cloud services has prompted me to begin investigating alternatives over the last few months and, I have to say, I was quite surprised by what I found. For only a few hundred dollars (including the cost of a computer and an Internet connection), I could move the cloud indoors and bring all of the convenience that services from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others offer right into a closet in my home.

By setting up a basic web server in my home (which takes 5 minutes most of the time), I can set up a little 'mini-cloud' for me and my family and friends where my data con be accessed from anywhere but I retain full control and have zero privacy worries.

Now, why go through all this trouble when you can just go buy a laptop from Google and have it all done for you?

A few reasons:

First, the Google laptop doesn't really cost any less than a regular laptop does. At about $350, you can go and buy a fully functional laptop that lets you do a lot more than the Google system does and doesn't rob you of your privacy.

Second, what Google is doing isn't really for your benefit or anything that's so difficult that you couldn't do yourself; maybe even better. Make no mistake, the software that Google is offering you is not free. It doesn't cost you money, true, but it does cost you something. That cost is allowing Google to have full control of your data. Using freely available software you can download off the Internet, you can keep control of your data and not rely on anyone but yourself.

So, all-in-all, am I saying don't get a ChromeBook? No. I'm saying consider your options. ChromeBook will appeal to a broad segment of the computer buying public. Why? I don't really know, but it will. But whether ChromeBook is the right fit for you is something only you can decide. At $350, though, it's a decision you should make very carefully.

ChromeBooks go on sale on June 15th.

How to promote Ubuntu in rural areas

2011-05-17T15:29:00.000-07:00

So I've been thinking a lot over the last few days about different ways
to promote Ubuntu within rural areas. I live in a rural area and
I can tell you that Ubuntu (or even Linux in general) is hardly known
here at all. Just about *everything* is Windows and people look at you
like you're from another planet when you say you don't run Windows.

"Oooh, you're a Mac user, huh? My sister has one of those!" is the
response I commonly get. Then I go through the complicated explanation
that there are other operating systems besides Windows and Mac and the
next question is "So...it's a version of Windows? Like Windows Ubuntu Vista?"

Obviously, this is an education problem here. I worked in Walmart
electronics for a few years and I can't tell you the money I saw people
waste on Windows and Windows software. Money that I knew they couldn't
afford but needed the software to get school work done or finances, or
other 'must have's'.

So I'm trying to put together an initiative to help introduce people to
Ubuntu and I'm turning to the community for help.

What can we do to help introduce new people to Ubuntu? I'm talking more
than just "go download the iso and see what you think" or handing them a
CD and giving them a "good luck" smile. I want to get my hands dirty. I
want to really push the benefits of Ubuntu to rural communities,
municipalities, and businesses.

Ideas? Thoughts? Anyone wanna participate?

Why you don't reward bad businesses

2011-05-15T01:15:00.000-07:00

Libertarian candidate, author, and entrepreneur Arvin Vohra describes the libertarian stance on bailouts.

Why Android (and other tablets) aren't selling well

2011-05-14T14:41:00.000-07:00

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Haung spoke with CNET, the popular Internet news site, earlier this week to discuss tablets and why they aren't selling well. Haung's comments focused mostly on Android tablets but I think they could expanded to include the entire tablet market with the exception of the Apple iPad, which I believe sells mostly on hype.

Haung claims that there are basically four things hurting tablet sales: point of sales, sales location expertise, consumer marketing, and price. While I certainly wouldn't deny any of those four points are true, I think he's missing a few others that affect tablet sales even more:

First, most people don't really see a need for a tablet in their lives. They already have a desktop PC, laptop, iPod, and Kindle, so what is a compelling reason for adding yet another device that replicates much of the functionality of devices they already own to the mix? People see tablets as cool but, let's face it, after the initial newness wears off, many of these devices will be relegated to the shelf where they will never be used again. There's no 'killer app' for tablets yet that makes owning one compelling.

You can tweet from the train at work on your shiny new Motorola Xoom? So can I from my cheapo Blackberry Curve and it's even less bulky than a tablet. Facebook? News sites? Video? Yep, I can do that from my Blackberry too or, if I want a bigger screen, I have a laptop that weighs just a little more than a tablet that I can bring with me very little hassle. Nothing compelling there. Games? I don't play them much. But, if I did, I have a laptop, a desktop, a Zune, a Nintendo 3DS, and a Blackberry all of which are very capable of playing games. Nothing really 'killer' there for tablets.

You know where tablets would shine? In hospitals, nursing homes, offices, and places where people constantly move around a building or a location. But that's not the average consumer. That's not 'Joe and Jane Sixpack' and that's who's going to drive tablet sales mostly.

Next, I think we're experiencing 'consumer tech fatigue'. We are literally being deluged with new 'must have, cutting edge' products every single day. Gaming machines, laptop, handhelds, and netbooks, are all stuff that we just 'couldn't live without' and would 'change everything' until we realized we could and they didn't. Now we're being told the exact same marketing story about tablets and consumers just aren't ready to jump into a new arena of 'the next must have device'. At least not until there's a real reason to and so far there's not.

Adding to that fatigue is the fact that users simply don't know which one to buy. The iPad is impressive but then so is the Xoom and Galaxy. And consumers know that, whatever they buy, they will be presented with new, better, upgraded, versions within a year and be expected to jump on the bandwagon yet again.

It's all just too much for the average consumer and it's one of the reasons I think a lot of people are simply opting not to play the game at all. Besides, give it two years and something will come along to replace tablets just like tablets came along to replace those 'OMG you have to have it!' netbooks we all bought a few years ago.

Lastly, and this is something Haung brought up in his comments, is price. Tablets are expensive for the little they do. It's almost impossible to get a tablet for under $400 and, with the price of gas, food, and other goods, most people aren't going to bite that price point. Looking cool doesn't and having the latest tech doesn't matter when dad's out of work and mom is stuggeling to make her paycheck stretch enough to feed the family.

Prices have to come down and come down hard before the 'average' consumer is going to jump on the tablet bandwagon. It's just not a compelling enough experience to justify spending that much money these days.

Of course, I could be totally off base here. 'Joe and Jane Sixpack' may not even be within the target market of the tablet makers. Maybe they're all after the urbanites who are so obsessed with being cool that they'll pour money into anything that comes along and promises to increase their status among their friends. Maybe the 'average' consumer doesn't matter at all and it's all about hooking the 'early adopters' and 'first movers'. But, if that's the case, I think tablet makers are missing a huge market that could double or triple in the next two years if they played their strategy right. But, before the market moves, there's got to be a lot of change and it has to happen fast.

Tablets are cool. They're convenient and easy to carry around. I'd really look cool at the coffee shop pulling out a Xoom or an iPad. I just can't figure out why I really *need* one though.

An experiment in distributed community based data backup

2011-05-11T14:42:00.000-07:00

For the last few years, I've been looking for cheap and reliable ways to back up large amounts of data. While the cloud based solutions seem tempting, I kind of wanted something with a little more redundancy and more cost effective. So today starts a new experiment that I think it both simple and cheap: distributed community backup via Bittorrent.

The idea is indeed as simple as it sounds: create an encrypted archive of your data then upload it into the Bittorrent system. Don't try to hide what it is or be stealthy, just let people know what you're doing and ask them to help by seeding the file. Eventually, if everything works out, you've got a few hundred people seeding your backup and, if you experience a crash, you can easily go and retrieve your data.

Security is accomplished through using strong encryption with a good password. I encrypted my data with a 65 character random string of numbers, letters, and special characters using the AES-256 symmetric algorithm built into GnuPG. Protecting my data was as simple as typing a single command then the password twice (I pasted it). My data should be secure and I have no worries.

The only drawback I can see is that this might not work well for changing data. If my data changes, I have to recreate the torrent and ask people to download the and seed the new file. But I'm looking for ways to make this easier and it might not pose as big of a problem as I think it might.

All-in-all, it's easy, cheap (free!) and pretty secure. What are your thoughts?

Want to participate? Click here to download my data!

This years "Linux Sucks" talk

2011-05-10T19:26:00.000-07:00

Again this year, Bryan Lunduke gave his famous yearly 'state of Linux' talk called "Linux Sucks" at Linux Fest Northwest. It's been a tradition that, every year, Bryan reviews where Linux was last year and how far its come since. The talk is both entertaining and eye opening for any Linux enthuesiest or developer.

What's the verdict this year? Some things on Linux still suck while others have gotten a lot better. The platform still is lacking in the video and editing space but excels in other areas. The solution? Lunduke proposes that the Linux community embrace paying people for their work, start buying software and really supporting their favorite open source projects by contributing money to their development. Additionally, Lunduke makes the case as to why Linux users need to embrace proprietary software to some degree (which I don't agree with at all) and discusses what's needed for open source and Linux to have long term, commercial viability.

Overall, this was an incredible talk and one I look forward to every year. Lunduke is a realist who's able to combine humor with hard truth to inspire the Linux community like few others are able to do.

I hope you enjoy the talk as much as I did.

BEWARE: the audio is HORRIBLE!

Microsoft to buy Skype

2011-05-09T22:31:00.001-07:00

In a not too unexpected move, it's all but certain that Microsoft Corporation and internet telephony giant Skype have closed a deal worth an estimated $8 billion dollars to sell Skype to the Redmond based software company. The last few weeks have been filled with speculation about who out of three possible suitors may end up in control of the worlds most popular VoIP company. Potential candidates included Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

While little is known about the deal, it's expected that the two companies will announce the acquisition sometimes tomorrow morning. Even more unknown is the impact that Microsoft ownership will have on Skype or how it might effect Skypes movement into the SIP and Linux spaces. It's all but certain though that development on the Linux client, which has lagged behind the Windows version since its introduction, will receive even less attention or might even be discontinued under Microsoft ownership.

This marks the third time Skype has been acquired in the last few years including what amounted to a disastrous attempt by online auction company eBay to monetize and integrate the service with their site. Ebay sold the service to a holding group a few years ago at the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars.

~~More tomorrow~~
(edited as there is no need for details. They are all over the internet).

My renewed interest in RedHat

2011-05-04T11:25:00.001-07:00

Over the last few months, I've written quite a bit about my growing concerns with Canonical (makers of Ubuntu Linux) and what I think amounts to their ignoring community in their search for increased market share. Most of what I've written has been negative as I've not seen very much good come from the situation. But today, I realized something good had indeed come from it and I was missing a *huge* opportunity by focusing so closely on the Ubuntu debacle.

When I first began exploring Linux back in the early 2000's, I began with what was then the darling of the community: RedHat. At the time. RedHat was a small company struggling to make a name for itself while striving to make a superior product that people would want. Today, RedHat is a behemoth: a billion dollar company that dominates the Linux business world and who's future looks amazingly bright. The company offers a host of business focused products ranging from server software to cloud platforms and just about everything in between. RedHat is also a near perfect open source company running as transparently as possible on *both* the development and business sides and they have an amazing partner community that I think rivals the Microsoft Partner Network.

So I'm taking a second look at RedHat. While Canonical goes after disenfranchised Windows users with its new releases, RedHat focuses on business. Sure, they have a desktop version too in Fedora, but RedHat is totally serious about business. Open source *and* business focused? How could I not love a company like that?!?

If you run an IT company that creates and sells Linux based solutions, I encourage you to take a look at RedHat too. You'll be surprised what they're accomplishing with their passion and focus and you might just never look back at where you are now.
Check out their site at:

www.redhat.com

Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

50 Facebook Pages Deleted. Was it politically motivated? Malicious?

2011-04-29T10:34:00.001-07:00

I just received the following email from Demand Progress concerning a
breaking story that Facebook might be acting in concert with
government, intelligence, and private agencies to censor unpopular
speech on the site. while the exact details are still unknown, I'm
just passing this information along.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "David Segal, DemandProgress.org" <info@demandprogress.org>
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:19:25 +0000
Subject: 50 pages deleted
To: Anthony Papillion <papillion@gmail.com>

Anthony,

BREAKING NEWS: A range of Facebook users, from political dissidents to
technology bloggers, are reporting the sudden blocking of their pages.
Facebook provided no prior warning, nor was there a clear process
established to restore access to the blocked pages.

Will you fight back? The best way to get Facebook's attention is to make
the story go viral on their own site:

[1][fb]If you're already on Facebook, [2]click here to share with your
friends.

More than 50 blocked pages were political in nature, and several users
have had their pages maliciously blocked through fraudulent claims of
intellectual property violations. This news follows Facebook's disturbing
assertions that it's willing to work with government censors in places
like China, and that the company is worried that it sometimes provides
"too much" free speech.

[3]Will you click here to demand that Facebook stop censoring political
speech?

Astounding. And this disregard for civil liberties is nothing new:
Facebook has consistently dodged hard questions about free speech. Last
year they refused to attend a U.S. Senate hearing on "global Internet
freedom" and the company won't join the tech industry's Global Network
Initiative, which promotes human rights and free speech.

[4]Will you demand that Facebook start respecting civil liberties and end
the censorship? Just click here.

Thanks for fighting for free speech.

-- The Demand Progress team

P.S. Please help this go viral so we get Facebook's attention. You can
forward this email, or use these links:

[5][fb] If you're already on Facebook, [6]click here to share with your
friends.
[7][fb] If you're already on Twitter, click here to tweet about the
campaign: [8]Tweet

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Anthony Papillion
Lead Developer / Owner
Get real about your software/web development and IT Services
(918) 919-4624

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A fully open source company

2011-04-28T03:15:00.001-07:00

As many of you know, I've used Microsoft products most of my professional life. Beginning way back in DOS days and carrying right on through to Windows XP and Vista, I was a Microsoft man through and through. I even became a partner in an effort to deepen my relationship with the company. But, even in my most "go go Microsoft" days, I've always loved freedom and I've never seen Microsoft as a path to freedom. A path to enormous boatloads of cash, yes, freedom no.

So over the years I started using open source tools whenever I could. I liked the idea that I didn't have to worry about infringing on patents or sharing the tools I used with others. I liked the camaraderie open source provided. Not to mention I loved the free price tag that came with it all too. But still, year after year and release after release I kept pumping money into the Microsoft Machine: I'd buy the latest version of Office, Visual Studio, Windows, and I'd diligently encourage my customers to do the same.

Then, I started to notice how Microsoft dealt with competitors and, specifically, Linux. They didn't compete, the attempted to destroy through a combination of patents, lies, and other trickery. On a landscape where they weren't *technically* better, they worked to silence their competitors legally. Being a freedom lover, I was disgusted and, last year, I moved my entire consulting company away from Microsoft products (including Windows) and on to Linux and other open source software. For the last year, everything my company has done has been Linux focused and, I have to say, I feel *really* good about it.

Today, I'm happy to announce a huge next step: we're going to release our first major software package written for Linux on Linux in July. The software will be an electronic medical records package similar to the OpenEMR product we sell now. But out goal and focus with the project is to release an aesthetically pleasing, user friendly, piece of software for Linux. Eventually, the software will be cross platform with a Mac version being released in September and a Windows version by the beginning of the year. Right now, we are totally focused on the Linux release right now.

I feel good about this step for a number of reasons. First, it takes my small consultancy fully into a deeper commitment to Linux. Second, it allows us to make a significant and real contribution to the Linux software ecosystem. Third, it allows us to demonstrate in a real way that Microsoft is wrong; that Linux *is* ready for real business desktop use. That is perhaps the best part...at least in my mind.

I'm betting my future success on Linux and open source. I believe in freedom and I reject the lie that only a "tightly integrated stack of Microsoft software" can do well in the general marketplace. Good software will thrive - wherever it lives.

Now, all I have to do is hang on for the ride.

Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Testing posting audio content

2011-04-20T15:47:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone! If all goes well, there *should* be an audio file attached to this post that you can listen to. If you can't listen to the file without downloading it, please post to the comments section below and let me know.

Thanks!

Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

Canonical takes another step against the Community

2011-04-19T16:49:00.001-07:00

In a posting to the Sounder mailing list earlier today, Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical announced that the long running mailing list would be shuttered. The decision followed a recent heated political discussion on the list and a proposal to close the list the Community Council by Alan Pope.

Even though the Sounder list might seem like an insignificant (and out of place) part of the community, I see this as yet another step that Canonical is taking against the very community that's made Ubuntu so successful. With the debacle that is Ubuntu's switch to Unity already polarizing users and driving many away and now the closing of a social list, it's slowly becoming obvious that Canonical is taking a step away from the happy community project that could take over the desktop and taking one towards corporatism. The community, unless it tows the corporate line, doesn't really matter to them anymore and that's truly sad since it's that very community that helped put the company where it is today.

Personally, I'm feeling more and more torn within the Ubuntu ecosystem. As a developer, I'm thrilled to see the company focus more on growing the business and making Ubuntu more suitable for business (though I'm convinced Unity will derail this effort). But as a user, I'm saddened to see that my voice is no more heard by Canonical than it is by Microsoft or Apple. I am, to them, just a user. They know what's best for us.

I fear Ubuntu is about to meet a fate worse than death: abandonment. By ignoring the community the company is risking losing the community. There are other options out there and some of them are pretty damn good. So users leaving Ubuntu to a more community focused distro (read: Debian) don't need to sacrifice anything to stay cutting edge and relevant. Gone or the days where it was Ubuntu or you might as well go back to Mac or Windows. We have choices now and I'm afraid Canonical is about to see their users start to explore those choices. The company, once the darling of the Linux world, is quickly losing the community's good will and, once that's gone, there's no turning back.

So, while the final chapter in this story is yet to be written, I fear that chapter may be nothing more than a eulogy of what could have been.

Fare thee well, Ubuntu. You will be missed.
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®

OMG! OMG! OMG! iFans Unite! Steve Jobs has a biography coming out!

2011-04-12T00:25:00.000-07:00

This won't be a surprise to any of the Apple or Steve Jobs fans out there (aren't the one in the same?) but it looks like there's finally going to be a biography of Apple leader Steve Jobs. The book, appropriately called "iSteve: The Book of Jobs", is due out sometimes in early 2012 will be written by Walter Issacson and published by Simon & Schuster. Issacson is noted for writing biographies on Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin.

It's reported that the biography is being written with the full cooperation of Jobs who is currently battling a resurgence of pancreatic cancer and is currently on leave from his job as CEO of Apple.

Bitcoin: A step towards a new anonymous currency

2011-04-03T20:21:00.000-07:00

For the last week and a half, I've been playing around with an exciting new form of digital currency called Bitcoin. The idea of Bitcoin is very simple: to create a distributed, peer to peer based, digital currency that cannot be controlled by a government and is completely anonymous and untracable. So far, Bitcoin has acheived this goal in spades.

While you might think that working in anonymous digital currency would be incredibly complex, Bitcoin makes it very easy. When you want to receive a payment via Bitcoin, you generate a unique Bitcoint address. The address isn't tied to you in any real way and is completely anonymous to the person paying you. For example, for this post, I generated a new Bitcoin address in case anyone wants to make a donation to me (yeah, I know, selfish pandering). That address is 17NLM4KhYpiTjTjwhWQ9TbmyQ8d12knYSu. As you can see, nothing in this address provides any personally identifiable information and, likewise, whoever pays me will use a similarly anonymous address thereby abstracting us from each other and making our transactions completely untraceable - even by the people doing business with each other!

Bitcoins can be paid to anyone who accepts them and that includes many businesses and service people around the world. But you can also transfer your Bitcoins into whatever real world currency you use in the non-digital world and buy things from anyone even if they don't accept Bitcoin. You can even pay Bitcoins to your Paypal or bank account and have access to the cash almost immediately (except with bank account which take a few days processing time).

All that sounds pretty incredible, doesn't it? It is! But one of the most interesting things about Bitcoin is that it allows users to perform financial transactions in an untracable and anonymous way. Additionally, since it's not linked to any 'real world' fiat currencies (think the US dollar, controlled by the Federal Reserve as an example), it can't be easily manipulated, controlled, or seized. Additionally, Bitcoin transactions and funds are protected using strong encryption so it's pretty much immune to being hacked and stolen, unlike their counterparts held in banks.

Lastly, and perhaps most interesting of all, Bitcoin is a commodity and there are several exchanges that actively buy, sell, and track Bitcoin. In much the same way a stock might ebb and flow in value, Bitcoin value flucuates from day to day as well. For example, today a Bitcoin is worth $0.77 USD which may go up or go down tomorrow. Many people purchase Bitcoins as investments, betting that they will go up in value at which time they can sell them and make a profit, similar to the way a stock trader holds and monitors their favorite stocks hoping to make money when they sell.

I'm quite excited about the opportunity Bitcoin offers for those of us who want to explore alternative currencies or distance ourselves from state control of our monetary system. Without control, it can't be manipulated and arbitratily contracted or expanded. Without control, it provides a way for citizens and not the government to control their currency in any way they choose to.

Without control, there is true freedom.

To find out more about Bitcoin, visit the Bitcoin website at www.bitcoin.org. If you do not want to download the software to your PC, use the online Bitcoin wallet at www.mybitcoin.org

Why I'm starting to truly love #Python

2011-03-19T03:39:00.000-07:00

I've been busy the last two weeks putting the finishing touches on everything TweetFree: TweetFree Relay Server, TweetFree Network Server, and TweetFree Mobile have all kept me crazy busy and working in two or three languages all while learning some new concepts like oAuth. I have to say, it's been quite a ride.

The amount of code I've had to write wasn't bad for what it accomplishes. In fact, the mobile client probably ended up containing more code than either the Relay or Network server but that's probably because I did a lot of crap I didn't have to since I'm not very familiar with Java (which is what the mobile client is written in).

But here's the real reason for this post: I want to say I am falling in love (and I mean toe curling, cuddling together, long term relationship type love) with the Python programming language. If you've not tried the language yet, you might not understand why I'm so head over heals in love with it but let me give you an example:

When I originally wrote TweetFree Netork Server, I did so in PHP because that's the web language I am most comfortable in. The code was OK, but when I was dealing with Twitter's oAuth, it got a little tricky. Overall, the Network Server ended up being a little over 360 lines of code.

Tonight, I decided to see how Python would handle it so I fired up my text editor and starter to write. I'll be the first to say that I am NOT a Python programmer and generally have to look almost everything up. But even at my semi-novice level, I was able to rewrite the entire server in about 30 minutes with only 110 lines of code. And we're not talking hard to read, obfuscated code here, we're talking code that probably is a little to 'chatty' and could be optimized even more.

Can you see now why I'm in love with Python? Readability also comes into play to. Let me give you one more example:

Let's say we have a HTML form that passes a username, password, and group name through a POST request. To prepare those for use in PHP, I'd generally use the following code:


$username = striplashes($_POST['username']);
$password = stripslashes($_POST['password');
$grp      = stripslashes($_POST['group']

That takes the POST variables and sticks them safe local variables that have been properly escaped and are ready to use in my script. No, it's not difficult code at all and it's easy to understand for even a novice PHP programmer. But look at the same Python code:


myForm = cgiFieldStorage()
username = myForm["username"].value
password = myForm["password"].value
grp  = myForm["group"].value

Yes, there's an extra line of code, but it's not too much and I think the readability of the code went way up.

Am I ready to switch all my web development to Python now? Not yet. But I am rather intrigued with this powerful language that keeps the simple stuff simple and makes the hard stuff easy.

What can the open source community learn from Microsoft?

2011-03-16T14:11:00.000-07:00

If there's one unifying thread that runs throughout the open source community it seems to be the almost universal disdain of Microsoft. While there are no doubt very valid reasons for such hate, I think it prevents the community from not only competing effectively with Microsoft but also using the company's own resources to our advantage.

Regardless of our opinion of Microsoft's business practices, security problems, or its executives, one thing we can all agree on is, by its sheer size, market penetration, and near ubiquity within the business world, the company not only exploits technology trends but drives them. In their effort to be 'everything to everyone everywhere', exploiting trends also means having the ability the accurately predict trends months, and sometimes years, before they occur. Microsoft has spent billions of dollars doing market research, focus groups, and customer interviews in their constant effort to better understand the markets they operate in and anticipate what their customers are going to need in future.

That's where I think the open source community can truly benefit and it's something we're missing out on in a huge way.

Let's be honest for a moment: with very few exceptions, the creators of most open source technologies suck at both marketing and understanding trends. For the most part, open source seems to be a constant game of 'catch up' where, when a technology becomes popular, an open source version of it appears. Sure, that's not *always* the case and there has been a good bit of innovation within the community but, for the most part, it's always chasing proprietary technology.

In order for us to really compete, we have to get better at not only providing technology users (customers) need today, but anticipating what they're going to need tomorrow and making sure that technology is available when that time finally comes.

This is where Microsoft can help. The company has thousands of whitepapers and case studies, gigabytes of video discussing future technology trends, hundreds or thousands of pieces of marketing material, and volumes of other things that we can use to our advantage. By tapping into Microsoft's business research, we can gain valuable insight into what our customers are going to need and use the collective power of our community to deliver better, more stable, solutions that can truly compete with their proprietary cousins.

There's an old saying that says "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" that I think applies here. Microsoft is no friend to the open source community but they can be an asset to it. It's time we move past the blind hate and disgust and learn to derive value from their considerable resources.

Open source is moving out of the 'scratching your own itch' phase and into an area where we're being seen as a serious option by both large and small businesses. But we won't ever get the traction we need by playing catch up. Microsoft will continue to dominate the market if for no other reason than they successfully anticipate trends and deliver solutions that address those trends quickly. It's not enough to have better solutions; we have to deliver those solutions to the customers who need them when they need them. Telling someone "our solution will be better in a few years" won't win converts or business.

Microsoft has presented the open source community with incredible resources. It's time we stop denying the value of what they provide and start to exploit it.

Rethinking openness in the face of oppression and murder

2011-03-14T14:35:00.000-07:00

As most of you who read this blog know, I'm a true-blue believer in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). I believe that having the right to modify the programs you own is a fundemental right of software ownership and that denying a user that right is downright unethical. I really do believe that,but a project I'm currently working on has me seriously weighing the benefits of open vs closed in specific circumstances.

In 2009, during the Iranian presidential election protests, the Iranian government decided to try to quell the protestors communication by blocking social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. The entire world responded and programmers jumped to creating software solutions to get around the blocks and restore protesters access to these vital communication tools. For my part, I developed a small PHP script that I dubbed "TweetFree" and released it into the wild after announcing it on Twitter.

TweetFree provided a distributed way for people to post to Twitter via the concept of a relay network. The idea was that anyone could run a TweetFree server and the protestors would access the various servers set up around the world to post their updates to Twitter, thereby bypassing the government blockage of the service.

Of course, the software was open source. When I wrote it, I thought 'If I don't open source this, people aren't going to trust it and it won't be used'. And, by the nature of PHP being an interpreted plain text language as opposed to a compiled one, open sourcing the code was a natural thing to do and an easy decision.

Now, two years later, I'm rewriting TweetFree in Real Software's RealBasic (a fully compiled language) and I'm seriously considering not open sourcing the software. Yes, I can hear the outraged gasps of the FOSS community but please put the pitchforks up while I explain my reasoning.

Open source code is fantastic. It allows anyone to modify the code to suit their specific needs instead of relying on a vendor who may or may not be responsible to their needs. Maybe YOU as a user aren't a programmer but you can always hire one to modify the software to your needs.

While that makes incredible sense in the consumer software space, I'm not so sure it works quite as well in human rights work within an oppressive and murderous regime. In fact, the main strength of open source within the consumer community actually makes it a liability within the human rights field.

Let's consider Iran as an example here. In 2009, Iranian government IT teams were all over social networking sites and blogs trying to find out where people were posting updates from and who they were. If they found these people, they were arrested, brutalized, and, sometimes, killed. One of my biggest fears during the protests was that the government of Iran would download and modify TweetFree and set up a rogue server to track and trap protesters into giving up their IP addresses. So, shortly after it was posted to the net, I made the heartwrenching decision to pull the code from the Internet in order to protect protesters lives.

Fast forward a year and a half and I'm again seeing a need for software like TweetFree. But this time, I'm more wary about open sourcing the code and I'm wrestling with the ethics of users right to modify the code versus the absolute requirement to protect the lives of those who use the service to raise their voice. In the end, I believe the need to protect lives outweighs the need to modify software. Not being able to modify software might be an inconvenience, but it's not going to get you raped, tortured, or murdered; falling victim to a rogue server that tracks you will. Not that tough of a decision is it?

Still, I believe that, for nothing more than the sake of maintaining trust, openness is important - especially in this type of enviroment. I'm going to address that by making the code inspectable by anyone who wants to inspect it. I'll even compile the code for you while you wait just to show you that the hash signatures between what I'm showing you and what you're running are the same. I'll do whatever it takes to make sure users understand that there is nothing 'spooky' or secret about the software, but I'm not going to release the code into the wild.

I'm sure this will cause some controversy among the free software purist who will say that all code, regardless of the enviroment, must be free. But as a socially focused developer, my first priority is not to cater to my own or anyone elses ideologies. My first priority is to protect the lives and safety of the people who use the tools I create. That outweighs everything. That outweighs all ideologies. That is, to borrow a line from Star Trek, the Prime Directive.

So as TweetFree Relay nears its release in the next few days, I want to encourage those of you who shy away from running any non-free code to seriously rethink your position. Your contribution to the network is desperately needed and you can make a real difference in the lives of oppressed people around the world. Don't let a technical ideology get in the way of doing a good thing. Don't let personal bias or the opinion of a bearded guru deter you from stepping in and changing the world.

The opportunity is before us and it has no ideology. It simply demands that we do the right thing.

Linux Tip of the Day: Generating a secure password

2011-03-07T23:26:00.000-08:00

If you're like most people, you find it incredibly difficult to generate truly random and secure password. Good passwords should be at least 8 characters long, contain numbers and letters and a good mix of both uppercase and lowercase letter. Think about that for a moment and you'll see why many people use really easy passwords the includes their names, pets and spouses names, or important dates.

Linux users have a great tool for generating secure passwords called 'pwgen'. Using pwgen, you can generate completely secure password of any length by typing a simple command.

If you don't already have pwgen installed and you happen to be using a Debian based system (like Debian or Ubuntu) you can install it by typing in the terminal

sudo apt-get install pwgen

Once the software is installed, you can generate a secure password of any length by typing something similar to

pwgen 8 1

That command will generate a single eight character password with a complete mix of numbers and both upper and lower case letters.

It's very easy to use and pretty intuitive. Now, you have no excuse to use insecure passwords again!

Report on Day 3 of the RARv3 free software project

2011-02-21T19:58:00.000-08:00

For last last two days I've been staring blankly at my hex editor trying to make sense of the meaningless jumble of ASCII text I suspect might be the contents of the text file stored in the sample archive. In reality, it might be anything: the text I suspect, some sort of file integrity information, anything. But, right now, I'm operating under the assumption that it's the contents of the file.

I need to figure out the structure of the file and the type of encryption (if any) is used for the data it contains.. Obviously, I know the first 4 bytes of the file identifies it as a RAR archive. Right now, that's all I know as far as structure goes.

As for encryption, it's a tough job. Since I know the exact text contained in the archived file, I'm taking the time to symmetrically encrypt a file using different algorithms and then visually compare the text. Of course, there's always the chance that the text is asymmetrically encrypted to someone's key (probably either the RARLABS key or maybe even one of the developers keys). Add to that the fact that it might not even BE strong encryption. It might be some home grown soft encryption thing that's easily broken. Right now, I have no clue.

So the work continues. For the foreseeable future, unless I have a grand epiphany on encryption schemes, I'm going to be working on finding the structure of the file and the encryption scheme. That's where you'll find me, toiling the time away.

More soon...

Canonical (Ubuntu) gets ready to screw another partner

2011-02-21T15:41:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, Ununtu Linux maker Canonical shocked and irritated the community by announcing that they would be switching from the long-time default GNOME desktop to their own "used to be for netbooks only" Unity desktop. Then, they announced that they were ditching the grandaddy of display servers, X-Window, for an upstart one called Wayland. Now, in what appears to be a very important but less ire-inspiring decision, the company announced that it would only include the Banshee Music Player as the default media player in the upcoming 11.04 release IF they either dropped their Amazon.com music store link or paid Connonical 75% of the revenue they earned from it.

I believe Conicalness's decision to treat the Banshee project (which is owned by Novel) in this manner can only be interpreted two ways:

1. Canonical is trying to eliminate a competitor to their own music store (The Ubuntu One Music Store).

or

2. Canonical is attacking the GNOME project financially since nearly all of the revenue earned by the Banshee project from their Amazon store goes to the GNOME Foundation.

Either way, it's a dispicable move and it's one that raises serious questions in my mind about Connonical's business practices. While I understand they absolutely have the right to include whatever software they want in their distribution, this feels *very* Microsoftish in the way they're doing this.

One of the absolute foundations of open source is the free market. Everyone is on a level playing field and customers will naturally gravitate to whoever has the best service or product. it also means that open source software is a constant game of 'one-upsmanship' where competiting project are always seeking to outdo each other and be the best. In *that* market, the customer always wins.

Contrast that to the way proprietary companies like Microsoft operate. In the proprietary business model, it's not about who's best; it's about locking in customers and holding them hostage. This is the *exact* same thing Canonical is doing with Banshee and the music store issue. If Banshee is the best music player available, isn't it in the best interest of Ubuntu users for Canonical to include it? Also in the best interest of Ubuntu users would be to allow Banshee to keep the music store and for Canonical to compete head to head in making the best music store experience it can for its users.

It's time for Mark Shuttleworth to stop acting like Steve Ballmer or Steve Jobs and start acting like an open source community member who's leading an open source company. My prediction is that if Shuttleworth continues his push to alienate projects, he's going to find both himself an his company standing alone in what amounts to giant vacuum that looks remarkably like that of Apple or Microsoft.

Freedom In the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing

2011-02-20T22:40:00.000-08:00

A Speech given by Eben Moglen at a meeting of the Internet Society's New York branch on Feb 5, 2010

It’s a pleasure to be here. I would love to think that the reason that we’re all here on a Friday night is that my speeches are so good. I actually have no idea why we’re all here on a Friday night but I’m very grateful for the invitation. I am the person who had no date tonight so it was particularly convenient that I was invited for now.

So, of course, I didn’t have any date tonight. Everybody knows that. My calendar’s on the web.

The problem is that problem. Our calendar is on the web. Our location is on the web. You have a cell phone and you have a cell phone network provider and if your cell phone network provider is Sprint then we can tell you that several million times last year, somebody who has a law enforcement ID card in his pocket somewhere went to the Sprint website and asked for the realtime location of somebody with a telephone number and was given it. Several million times. Just like that. We know that because Sprint admits that they have a website where anybody with a law enforcement ID can go and find the realtime location of anybody with a Sprint cellphone. We don’t know that about ATT and Verizon because they haven’t told us.

But that’s the only reason we don’t know, because they haven’t told us. That’s a service that you think of as a traditional service - telephony. But the deal that you get with the traditional service called telephony contains a thing you didn’t know, like spying. That’s not a service to you but it’s a service and you get it for free with your service contract for telephony. You get for free the service of advertising with your gmail which means of course there’s another service behind which is untouched by human hands, semantic analysis of your email. I still don’t understand why anybody wants that. I still don’t understand why anybody uses it but people do, including the very sophisticated and thoughtful people in this room.

And you get free email service and some storage which is worth exactly a penny and a half at the current price of storage and you get spying all the time.

And for free, too.

And your calendar is on the Web and everybody can see whether you have a date Friday night and you have a status - “looking” - and you get a service for free, of advertising “single: looking”. Spying with it for free. And it all sort of just grew up that way in a blink of an eye and here we are. What’s that got to do with open source? Well, in fact it doesn’t have anything to do with open source but it has a whole lot to do with free software. Yet, another reason why Stallman was right. It’s the freedom right?

So we need to back up a little bit and figure out where we actually are and how we actually got here and probably even more important, whether we can get out and if so, how? And it isn’t a pretty story, at all. David’s right. I can hardly begin by saying that we won given that spying comes free with everything now. But, we haven’t lost. We’ve just really bamboozled ourselves and we’re going to have to un-bamboozle ourselves really quickly or we’re going to bamboozle other innocent people who didn’t know that we were throwing away their privacy for them forever.

It begins of course with the Internet, which is why it’s really nice to be here talking to the Internet society - a society dedicated to the health, expansion, and theoretical elaboration of a peer-to-peer network called “the Internet” designed as a network of peers without any intrinsic need for hierarchical or structural control and assuming that every switch in the Net is an independent, free-standing entity whose volition is equivalent to the volition of the human beings who want to control it.

That’s the design of the NET, which, whether you’re thinking about it as glued together with IPv4 or that wonderful improvement IPv6 which we will never use apparently, still assumes peer communications.

OF course, it never really really really worked out that way. There was nothing in the technical design to prevent it. Not at any rate in the technical design interconnection of nodes and their communication. There was a software problem. It’s a simple software problem and it has a simple three syllable name. It’s name is Microsoft. Conceptually, there was a network which was designed as a system of peer nodes but the OS which occupied the network in an increasingly - I’ll use the word, they use it about us why can’t I use it back? - viral way over the course of a decade and a half. The software that came to occupy the network was built around a very clear idea that had nothing to do with peers. It was called “server client architecture”.

The idea that the network was a network of peers was hard to perceive after awhile, particularly if you were a, let us say, ordinary human being. That is, not a computer engineer, scientist, or researcher. Not a hacker, not a geek. If you were an ordinary human, it was hard to perceive that the underlying architecture of the Net was meant to be peerage because the OS software with which you interacted very strongly instantiated the idea of the server and client architecture.

In fact, of course, if you think about it, it was even worse than that. The thing called “Windows” was a degenerate version of a thing called “X Windows”. It, too, thought about the world in a server client architecture, but what we would now think of as now backwards. The server was the thing at the human being’s end. That was the basic X Windows conception of the world. it’s served communications with human beings at the end points of the Net to processes located at arbitrary places near the center in the middle, or at the edge of the NET. It was the great idea of Windows in an odd way to create a political archetype in the Net which reduced the human being to the client and produced a big, centralized computer, which we might have called a server, which now provided things to the human being on take-it-or-leave-it terms.

They were, of course, quite take-it or leave-it terms and unfortunately, everybody took it because they didn’t know how to leave once they got in. Now the Net was made of servers in the center and clients at the edge. Clients had rather little power and servers had quite a lot. As storage gets cheaper, as processing gets cheaper, and as complex services that scale in ways that are hard to use small computers for - or at any rate, these aggregated collections of small computers for - the most important of which is search. As services began to populate that net, the hierarchical nature of the Net came to seem like it was meant to be there. The Net was made of servers and clients and the clients were the guys at the edge representing humans and servers were the things in the middle with lots of power and lots of data.

Now, one more thing happened about that time. It didn’t happen in Microsoft Windows computers although it happened in Microsoft Windows servers and it happened more in sensible OSs like Unix and BSD and other ones. Namely, servers kept logs. That’s a good thing to do. Computers ought to keep logs. It’s a very wise decision when creating computer OS software to keep logs. It helps with debugging, makes efficiencies attainable, makes it possible to study the actual operations of computers in the real world. It’s a very good idea.

But if you have a system which centralizes servers and the servers centralize their logs, then you are creating vast repositories of hierarchically organized data about people at the edges of the network that they do not control and, unless they are experienced in the operation of servers, will not understand the comprehensiveness of, the meaningfulness of, will not understand the aggregatability of.

So we built a network out of a communications architecture design for peering which we defined in client-server style, which we then defined to be the dis-empowered client at the edge and the server in the middle. We aggregated processing and storage increasingly in the middle and we kept the logs - that is, info about the flows of info in the Net - in centralized places far from the human beings who controlled or thought they controlled the operation of the computers that increasingly dominated their lives. This was a recipe for disaster.

This was a recipe for disaster. Now, I haven’t mentioned yet the word “cloud” which I was dealt on the top of the deck when I received the news that I was talking here tonight about privacy and the cloud.

I haven’t mentioned the word “cloud” because the word “cloud” doesn’t really mean anything very much. In other words, the disaster we are having is not the catastrophe of the cloud. The disaster we are having is the catastrophe of the way we misunderstood the Net under the assistance of the un-free software that helped us to understand it. What “cloud” means is that servers have ceased to be made of iron. “Cloud” means virtualization of servers has occurred.

So, out here in the dusty edges of the galaxy where we live in dis-empowered clienthood, nothing very much has changed. As you walk inward towards the center of the galaxy, it gets more fuzzy than it used to. We resolve now halo where we used to see actual stars. Servers with switches and buttons you can push and such. Instead, what has happened is that iron no longer represents a single server. Iron is merely a place where servers could be. So “cloud” means servers have gained freedom, freedom to move, freedom to dance, freedom to combine and separate and re-aggregate and do all kinds of tricks. Servers have gained freedom. Clients have gained nothing. Welcome to the cloud.

It’s a minor modification of the recipe for disaster. It improves the operability for systems that control the clients out there who were meant to be peers in a Net made of equal things.

So that’s the architecture of the catastrophe. If you think about it, each step in that architectural revolution: from a network made of peers, to servers that serve the communication with humans, to clients which are programs running on heavy iron, to clients which are the computers that people actually use in a fairly dis-empowered state and servers with a high concentration of power in the Net, to servers as virtual processes running in clouds of iron at the center of an increasingly hot galaxy and the clients are out there in the dusty spiral arms.

All of those decisions architecturally were made without any discussion of the social consequences long-term, part of our general difficulty in talking about the social consequences of technology during the great period of invention of the Internet done by computer scientists who weren’t terribly interested in Sociology, Social Psychology, or, with a few shining exceptions - freedom. So we got an architecture which was very subject to misuse. Indeed, it was in a way begging to be misused and now we are getting the misuse that we set up. Because we have thinned the clients out further and further and further. In fact, we made them mobile. We put them in our pockets and we started strolling around with them.

There are a lot of reasons for making clients dis-empowered and there are even more reasons for dis-empowering the people who own the clients and who might quaintly be thought of the people who ought to control them. If you think for just a moment how many people have an interest in dis-empowering the clients that are the mobile telephones you will see what I mean. There are many overlapping rights owners as they think of themselves each of whom has a stake in dis-empowering a client at the edge of the network to prevent particular hardware from being moved from one network to another. To prevent particular hardware from playing music not bought at the great monopoly of music in the sky. To disable competing video delivery services in new chips I founded myself that won’t run popular video standards, good or bad. There are a lot of business models that are based around mucking with the control over client hardware and software at the edge to deprive the human that has quaintly thought that she purchased it from actually occupying the position that capitalism says owners are always in - that is, of total control.

In fact, what we have as I said a couple of years ago in between appearances here at another NYU function. In fact, what we have are things we call platforms. The word “platform” like the word “cloud” doesn’t inherently mean anything. It’s thrown around a lot in business talk. But, basically what platform means is places you can’t leave. Stuff you’re stuck to. Things that don’t let you off. That’s platforms. And the Net, once it became a hierarchically architected zone with servers in the center and increasingly dis-empowered clients at the edge, becomes the zone of platforms and platform making becomes the order of the day.

Some years ago a very shrewd lawyer who works in the industry said to me “Microsoft was never really a software company. Microsoft was a platform management company”. And I thought Yes, shot through the heart.

So we had a lot of platform managers in a hierarchically organized network and we began to evolve services. “Services” is a complicated word. It’s not meaningless by any means but it’s very tricky to describe it. We use it for a lot of different things. We badly need an analytical taxonomy of “services” as my friend and colleague Philippe Aigrain in Paris pointed out some 2 or 3 years ago. Taxonomies of “services” involve questions of simplicity, complexity, scale, and control.

To take an example, we might define a dichotomy between complex and simple services in which simple services are things that any computer can perform for any other computer if it wants to and complex services are things you can’t do with a computer. You must do with clusters or structures of some computational or administrative complexity. SEARCH is a complex service. Indeed, search is the archetypal complex service. Given the one way nature of links in the Web and other elements in the data architecture we are now living with (that’s another talk, another time) search is not a thing that we can easily distribute. The power in the market of our friends at Google depends entirely on the fact that search is not easily distributed. It is a complex service that must be centrally organized and centrally delivered. It must crawl the web in a unilateral direction, link by link, figuring out where everything is in order to help you find it when you need it. In order to do that, at least so far, we have not evolved good algorithmic and delivery structures for doing it in a decentralized way. So, search becomes an archetypal complex service and it draws onto itself a business model for its monetiztion.

Advertising in the 20th century was a random activity. You threw things out and hoped they worked. Advertising in the 21st century is an exquisitely precise activity. You wait for a guy to want something and then you send him advertisements about what he wants and bingo it works like magic. So of course on the underside of a complex service called search there is a theoretically simple service called advertising which, when unified to a complex service, increases its efficiency by orders of magnitude and the increase of the efficiency of the simple service when combined with the complex one produces an enormous surplus revenue flow which can be used to strengthen search even more.

But that’s the innocent part of the story and we don’t remain in the innocent part of the story for a variety of uses. I won’t be tedious on a Friday night and say it’s because the bourgeoisie is constantly engaged in destructively reinventing and improving its own activities and I won’t be moralistic on a Friday night that you can’t do that and say because sin is in-eradicable and human beings are fallen creatures and greed is one of the sins we cannot avoid committing. I will just say that as a sort of ordinary social process we don’t stop at innocent. We go on, which surely is the thing you should say on a Friday night. And so we went on.

Now, where we went on is really towards the discovery that all of this would be even better if you had all the logs of everything because once you have the logs of everything then every simple service is suddenly a goldmine waiting to happen and we blew it because the architecture of the Net put the logs in the wrong place. They put the logs where innocence would be tempted. They put the logs where the failed state of human beings implies eventually bad trouble and we got it.

The cloud means that we can’t even point in the direction of the server anymore and because we can’t even point in the direction of the server anymore we don’t have extra technical or non-technical means of reliable control over this disaster in slow motion. You can make a rule about logs or data flow or preservation or control or access or disclosure but your laws are human laws and they occupy particular territory and the server is in the cloud and that means the server is always one step ahead of any rule you make or two or three or six or poof! I just realized I’m subject to regulation, I think I’ll move to Oceana now.

Which means that in effect, we lost the ability to use either legal regulation or anything about the physical architecture of the network to interfere with the process of falling away from innocence that was now inevitable in the stage I’m talking about, what we might call late Google stage 1.

It is here, of course, that Mr. Zuckerberg enters.

The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.

Because he harnessed Friday night. That is, everybody needs to get laid and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, “I will give you free web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time”. And it works.

That’s the sad part, it works.

How could that have happened?

There was no architectural reason, really. There was no architectural reason really. Facebook is the Web with “I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?” It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts.

And it shouldn’t be allowed. It comes to that. It shouldn’t be allowed. That’s a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at “spying all the time”. They are not technically innovative. They depend upon an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn’t any other business model for them. This is bad.

I’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists, we should fix it.

I’m glad I’m with you so far. When I come to how we should fix it later I hope you will still be with me because then we could get it done.

But let’s say, for now, that that’s a really good example of where we went wrong and what happened to us because. It’s trickier with gmail because of that magical untouched by human hands-iness. When I say to my students, “why do you let people read your email”, they say “but nobody is reading my email, no human being ever touched it. That would freak me out, I’d be creeped out if guys at Google were reading my email. But that’s not happening so I don’t have a problem.”

Now, this they cannot say about Facebook. Indeed, they know way too much about Facebook if they let themselves really know it. You have read the stuff and you know. Facebook workers know who’s about to have a love affair before the people do because they can see X obsessively checking the Facebook page of Y. There’s some very nice research done a couple of years ago at an MIT I shouldn’t name by students I’m not going to describe because they were a little denting to the Facebook terms of service in the course of their research. They were just scraping but the purpose of their scraping was the demonstrate that you could find closeted homosexuals on Facebook.

They don’t say anything about their sexual orientation. Their friends are out, their interests are the interests of their friends who are out. Their photos are tagged with their friends who are out and they’re out except they’re not out. They’re just out in Facebook if anybody looks, which is not what they had in mind surely and not what we had in mind for them, surely. In fact, the degree of potential information inequality and disruption and difficulty that arises from a misunderstanding, a heuristic error, in the minds of human beings about what is and what’s not discoverable about them is not our biggest privacy problem.

My students, and I suspect many of the students of teachers in this room too, show constantly in our dialog the difficulty. They still think of privacy as “the one secret I don’t want revealed” and that’s not the problem. Their problem is all the stuff that’s the cruft, the data dandruff of life, that they don’t think of as secret in any way but which aggregates to stuff that they don’t want anybody to know. Which aggregates, in fact, not just to stuff they don’t want people to know but to predictive models about them that they would be very creeped out could exist at all. The simplicity with which you can de-anonymize theoretically anonymized data, the ease with which, for multiple sources available to you through third and fourth party transactions, information you can assemble, data maps of people’s lives. The ease with which you begin constraining, with the few things you know about people, the data available to you, you can quickly infer immense amounts more.

My friend and colleague Bradly Kuhn who works at the Software Freedom Law Center is one of those archaic human beings who believes that a social security number is a private thing. And he goes to great lengths to make sure that his Social Security is not disclosed which is his right under our law, oddly enough. Though, try and get health insurance or get a safe deposit box, or in fact, operate the business at all. We bend over backwards sometimes in the operation of our business because Bradly’s Social Security number is a secret. I said to him one day “You know, it’s over now because Google knows your Social Security number”. He said “No they don’t, I never told it to anybody”. I said, “Yeah but they know the Social Security number of everybody else born in Baltimore that year. Yours is the other one”.

And as you know, that’s true. The data that we infer is the data in the holes between the data we already know if we know enough things.

So, where we live has become a place in which it would be very unwise to say about anything that it isn’t known. If you are pretty widely known in the Net and all of us for one reason or another are pretty widely known in the Net. We want to live there. It is our neighborhood. We just don’t want to live with a video camera on every tree and a mic on every bush and the data miner beneath our feet everywhere we walk and the NET is like that now. I’m not objecting to the presence of AOL newbies in Usenet news. This is not an aesthetic judgment from 1995 about how the neighborhood is now full of people who don’t share our ethnocentric techno geekery. I’m not lamenting progress of a sort of democratizing kind. On the contrary, I’m lamenting progress of a totalizing kind. I’m lamenting progress hostile to human freedom. We all know that it’s hostile to human freedom. We all understand it’s despotic possibilities because the distopias of which it is fertile were the stuff of the science fiction that we read when we were children. The Cold War was fertile in the fantastic invention of where we live now and it’s hard for us to accept that but it’s true. Fortunately, of course, it’s not owned by the government. Well, it is. It’s fortunate. It’s true. It’s fortunate that it’s owned by people that you can bribe to get the thing no matter who you are. If you’re the government you have easy ways of doing it. You fill out a subpoena blank and you mail it.

I spent two hours yesterday with a law school class explaining in detail why the 4th Amendment doesn’t exist anymore because that’s Thursday night and who would do that on a Friday night? But the 4th Amendment doesn’t exist anymore. I’ll put the audio on the Net and the FBI and you can listen to it anytime you want.

We have to fess up if we’re the people who care about freedom, it’s late in the game and we’re behind. We did a lot of good stuff and we have a lot of tools lying around that we built over the last 25 years. I helped people build those tools. I helped people keep those tools safe, I helped people prevent the monopoly from putting all those tools in its bag and walking off with them and I’m glad the tools are around but we do have to admit that we have not used them to protect freedom because freedom is decaying and that’s what David meant in his very kind introduction.

In fact, people who are investing in the new enterprises of unfreedom are also the people you will hear if you hang out in Silicon Valley these days that open source has become irrelevant. What’s their logic? Their logic is that software as a service is becoming the way of the world. Since nobody ever gets any software anymore, the licenses that say “if you give people software you have to give them freedom” don’t matter because you’re not giving anybody software. You’re only giving them services.

Well, that’s right. Open source doesn’t matter anymore. Free software matters a lot because of course, free software is open source software with freedom. Stallman was right. It’s the freedom that matters. The rest of it is just source code. Freedom still matters and what we need to do is to make free software matter to the problem that we have which is unfree services delivered in unfree ways really beginning to deteriorate the structure of human freedom.

Like a lot of unfreedom, the real underlying social process that forces this unfreedom along is nothing more than perceived convenience.

All sorts of freedom goes over perceived convenience. You know this. You’ve stopped paying for things with cash. You use a card that you can wave at an RFID reader.

Convenience is said to dictate that you need free web hosting and PHP doodads in return for spying all the time because web servers are so terrible to run. Who could run a web server of his own and keep the logs? It would be brutal. Well, it would if it were IIS. It was self-fulfilling, it was intended to be. It was designed to say “you’re a client, I’m a server. I invented Windows 7, It was my idea. I’ll keep the logs thank you very much.” That was the industry. We built another industry. It’s in here. But it’s not in. Well, yeah it is kind of in here. So where isn’t it? Well it’s not in the personal web server I don’t have that would prevent me from falling…well, why don’t we do something about that.

What do we need? We need a really good webserver you can put in your pocket and plug in any place. In other words, it shouldn’t be any larger than the charger for your cell phone and you should be able to plug it in to any power jack in the world and any wire near it or sync it up to any wifi router that happens to be in its neighborhood. It should have a couple of USB ports that attach it to things. It should know how to bring itself up. It should know how to start its web server, how to collect all your stuff out of the social networking places where you’ve got it. It should know how to send an encrypted backup of everything to your friends’ servers. It should know how to microblog. It should know how to make some noise that’s like tweet but not going to infringe anybody’s trademark. In other words, it should know how to be you …oh excuse me I need to use a dangerous word - avatar - in a free net that works for you and keeps the logs. You can always tell what’s happening in your server and if anybody wants to know what’s happening in your server they can get a search warrant.

And if you feel like moving your server to Oceana or Sealand or New Zealand or the North Pole, well buy a plane ticket and put it in your pocket. Take it there. Leave it behind. Now there’s a little more we need to do. It’s all trivial. We need some dynamic DNS and all stuff we’ve already invented. It’s all there, nobody needs anything special. Do we have the server you can put in your pocket? Indeed, we do. Off the shelf hardware now. Beautiful little wall warts made with ARM chips. Exactly what I specked for you. Plug them in, wire them up. How’s the software stack in there? Gee, I don’t know it’s any software stack you want to put in there.

In fact, they’ll send it to you with somebody’s top of the charts current distro in it, you just have to name which one you want. Which one do you want? Well you ought to want the Debian Gnu Linux social networking stack delivered to you free, free as in freedom I mean. Which does all the things I name - brings itself up, runs it’s little Apache or lighttpd or it’s tiny httpd, does all the things we need it to do - syncs up, gets your social network data from the places, slurps it down, does your backup searches, finds your friends, registers your dynamic DNS. All is trivial. All this is stuff we’ve got. We need to put this together. I’m not talking about a thing that’s hard for us. We need to make a free software distribution device. How many of those do we do?

We need to give a bunch to all our friends and we need to say, here fool around with this and make it better. We need to do the one thing we are really really really good at because all the rest of it is done, in the bag, cheap ready. Those wall wart servers are $99 now going to $79 when they’re five million of them they’ll be $29.99.

Then we go to people and we say $29.99 once for a lifetime, great social networking, updates automatically, software so strong you couldn’t knock it over it you kicked it, used in hundreds of millions of servers all over the planet doing a wonderful job. You know what? You get “no spying” for free. They want to know what’s going on in there? Let them get a search warrant for your home, your castle, the place where the 4th Amendment still sort of exists every other Tuesday or Thursday when the Supreme Court isn’t in session. We can do that. We can do that. That requires us to do only the stuff we’re really really good at. The rest of it we get for free. Mr. Zuckerberg? Not so much.

Because of course, when there is a competitor to “all spying all the time whether you like it or not”, the competition is going to do real well. Don’t expect Google to be the competitor. That’s our platform. What we need is to make a thing that’s so greasy there will never be a social network platform again. Can we do it? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, if you don’t have a date on Friday night, let’s just have a hackfest and get it done. It’s well within our reach.

We’re going to do it before the Facebook IPO? Or are we going to wait till after? Really? Honestly? Seriously. The problem that the law has very often in the world where we live and practice and work, the problem that the law has very often, the problem that technology can solve. And the problem that technology can solve is the place where we go to the law. That’s the free software movement. There’s software hacking over here and there’s legal hacking over there and you put them both together and the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts. So, it’s not like we have to live in the catastrophe. We don’t have to live in the catastrophe. It’s not like what we have to do to begin to reverse the catastrophe is hard for us. We need to re-architect services in the Net. We need to re-distribute services back towards the edge. We need to de-virtualize the servers where your life is stored and we need to restore some autonomy to you as the owner of the server.

The measures for taking those steps are technical. As usual, the box builders are ahead of us. The hardware isn’t the constraint. As usual, nowadays, the software isn’t really that deep a constraint either because we’ve made so much wonderful software which is in fact being used by all the guys on the bad architecture. They don’t want to do without our stuff. The bad architecture is enabled, powered by us. The re-architecture is too. And we have our usual magic benefit. If we had one copy of what I’m talking about, we’d have all the copies we need. We have no manufacturing or transport or logistics constraint. If we do the job, it’s done. We scale.

This is technical challenge for social reason. It’s a frontier for technical people to explore. There is enormous social pay-off for exploring it.

The payoff is plain because the harm being ameliorated is current and people you know are suffering from it. Everything we know about why we make free software says that’s when we come into our own. It’s a technical challenge incrementally attainable by extension from where we already are that makes the lives of the people around us and whom we care about immediately better. I have never in 25 years of doing this work, I have never seen us fail to rise to a challenge that could be defined in those terms. So I don’t think we’re going to fail this one either.

Mr. Zuckerberg richly deserves bankruptcy.

Let’s give it to him. For Free.

And I promise, and you should promise too, not to spy on the bankruptcy proceeding. It’s not any of our business. It’s private.

This is actually a story potentially happy. It is a story potentially happy and if we do it then we will have quelled one more rumor about the irrelevance of us and everybody in the Valley will have to go find another buzz word and all the guys who think that Sandhill Road is going to rise into new power and glory by spying on everybody and monetizing it will have to find another line of work too, all of which is purely on the side of the angels. Purely on the side of the angels.

We will not be rid of all our problems by any means, but just moving the logs from them to you is the single biggest step that we can take in resolving a whole range of social problems that I feel badly about what remains of my American constitution and that I would feel badly about if I were watching the failure of European data protection law from inside instead of outside and that I would feel kind of hopeful about if I were, oh say, a friend of mine in China. Because you know of course we really ought to put a VPN in that wall wart.

And probably we ought to put a Tor router in there.

And of course, we’ve got bittorrent, and by the time you get done with all of that, we have a freedom box. We have a box that not merely climbs us out of the hole we’re in, we have a box that actually puts a ladder up for people who are deeper in the hole than we are, which is another thing we love to do.

I do believe the US State Department will go slanging away at the Chinese communist party for a year or two about internet freedom and I believe the Chinese communist party is going to go slanging back and what they’re going to say is “You think you’ve got real good privacy and autonomy in the internet voyear in your neighborhood?” And every time they do that now as they have been doing that in the last 2 weeks, I would say ouch if I was Hilary Clinton and I knew anything about it because we don’t. Because we don’t. It’s true. We have a capitalist kind and they have a centralist vanguard of the party sort of Marxist kind or maybe Marxist or maybe just totalitarian kind but we’re not going to win the freedom of the net discussion carrying Facebook on our backs. We’re not.

But you screw those wall wart servers around pretty thickly in American society and start taking back the logs and you want to know who I talked to on a Friday night? Get a search warrant and stop reading my email. By the way there’s my GPG key in there and now we really are encrypting for a change and so on and so on and so on and it begins to look like something we might really want to go on a national crusade about. We really are making freedom here for other people too. For people who live in places where the web don’t work.

So there’s not a challenge we don’t want to rise to. It’s one we want to rise to plenty. In fact, we’re in a happy state in which all the benefits we can get are way bigger than the technical intricacy of doing what needs to be done, which isn’t much.

That’s where we came from. We came from our technology was more free than we understood and we gave away a bunch of the freedom before we really knew it was gone. We came from unfree software had bad social consequences further down the road than even the freedom agitators knew. We came from unfreedom’s metaphors tend to produce bad technology.

In other words, we came from the stuff that our movement was designed to confront from the beginning but we came from there. And we’re still living with the consequences of we didn’t do it quite right the first time, though we caught up thanks to Richard Stallman and moving on.

Where we live now is no place we’re going to have to see our grandchildren live. Where we live now is no place we would like to conduct guided tours of. I used to say to my students how many video cameras are there between where you live and the Law school? Count them. I now say to my students how many video cameras are there between the front door to the law school and this classroom? Count them.

I now say to my students “can you find a place where there are no video cameras?” Now, what happened in that process was that we created immense cognitive auxiliaries for the state - enormous engines of listening. You know how it is if you live in an American university thanks to the movie and music companies which keep reminding you of living in the midst of an enormous surveillance network. We’re surrounded by stuff listening to and watching us. We’re surrounded by mine-able data.

Not all of that’s going to go away because we took Facebook and split it up and carried away our little shards of it. It’s not going to go away cause we won’t take free webhosting with spying inside anymore. We’ll have other work to do. And some of that work is lawyers work. I will admit that. Some of that work is law drafting and litigating and making trouble and doing lawyer stuff. That’s fine. I’m ready.

My friends an I will do the lawyers part. It would be way simpler to do the lawyer’s work if we were living in a society which had come to understand it’s privacy better. It would be way simpler to do the lawyer’s work if young people realize that when they grow up and start voting or start voting now that they’re grown up, this is an issue. That they need to get the rest of it done the way we fixed the big stuff when we were kids. We’ll have a much easier time with the enormous confusions of international interlocking of regimes when we have deteriorated the immense force of American capitalism forcing us to be less free and more surveilled for other people’s profit all the time. It isn’t that this gets all the problems solved but the easy work is very rich and rewarding right now.

The problems are really bad. Getting the easy ones out will improve the politics for solving the hard ones and it’s right up our alley. The solution is made of our parts. We’ve got to do it. That’s my message. It’s Friday night. Some people don’t want to go right back to coding I’m sure. We could put it off until Tuesday but how long do you really want to wait? You know everyday that goes by there’s more data we’ll never get back. Everyday that goes by there’s more data inferences we can’t undo. Everyday that goes by we pile up more stuff in the hands of the people who got too much. So it’s not like we should say “one of these days I’ll get around to that”. It’s not like we should say “I think I’d rather sort of spend my time browsing news about iPad”.

It’s way more urgent than that.

It’s that we haven’t given ourselves the direction in which to go so let’s give ourselves the direction in which to go. The direction in which to go is freedom using free software to make social justice.

But, you know this. That’s the problem with talking on a Friday night. You talk for an hour and all you tell people is what they know already.

So thanks a lot. I’m happy to take your questions.

Day 1 of a Free Software Project

2011-02-20T02:37:00.000-08:00

In yesterday's post I discussed a project I was taking on to create a free software program to read/write RAR version 3 archives. Since the version 3 format isn't documented publically, there are currently (at least to my knowledge) no free software tools available to manage these files. Creating such a tool will require reverse engineering the file format, documenting it, and writing the software itself.

Last night, I began gathering the tools I'd need to begin the work. Not surprisingly, all of the tools I needed are either available as free or open source software so getting everything together was a pretty straightforward process.

TOOLS:

- The GNU/Linux 'strings' program that searches a target file and lists all of the readable strings it finds in it.

- The 'file' program, which tries to identify the format of an unknown filetype. Yes, I already know the filetype in the case, I still wanted to use the tool to see if it might identify the file in some weird way that might give me a clue as to how the data in it might be organized (it didn't).

- The 'Jeex' hex editor. This tool allows me to look directly at the binary content of the file and view it in several different ways, apply structures to it so I can test any ideas I have about file organization, etc.

- The GCC C compiler. This is the standard GNU C compiler which I will use to actually write the software code for the tool. After careful consideration, I'm also looking at potentially using REAL Studio, which implements a version of the BASIC programming language, to write the code but I'm struggling with the wisdom of using a non-free program to create a free program. Ethically, I would be imposing the requirement that anyone compiling the program from scratch use the REAL Studio tool and I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that. I'll probably stick with C but I'm waiting to hear back from the Free Software Foundation on using the non-free tool before I make my final decision. Writing actual code is still a bit down the road.

- Several RAR files. In order to make my analysis easier, I had a friend who uses Windows create several sample RAR files for me. Six to be exact. Because I know the exact contents of these files, I can easily pick out that content while analyzing the RAR file in a hex editor. Here are the details of the six RAR files I'm using:

1) One file contains nothing but a short text file that has a sentence in it.

2) One file contains the same text file with the same content but under a different name.

3) One file contains both text files. This will allow me to look for repeating pattern and make finding the content area of the RAR file a little easier.

4) The next three files are the binary equivilant of the text files so I'm not going to detail them here.

In each case, I know the exact content of the unarchived file and its uncompressed file size. Knowing this allows me to have some idea of where data begins and ends (not exact, but it's a lead).

So let's take a look at one of the RAR files in the hex editor. We're going to pick the file that has two text files that are exact in every way except their names.

By looking at the screenshot above, a few things become very obvious:

1) The very first thing in the RAR file (as we might expect) is a header identifying it as a RAR file. This header is either 3 or 4 bytes long depending on if the ! after the RAR indicates anything (I don't think it does).

2. We can see that there is a part of the file after the header that contains some unknown information followed by the name of the first file in the archive, some random looking characters, then another file name and some more random looking data. If we look at the 'random' data after the file names, we can see it's exactly the same in both areas. This probably is the data within the file in some sort of encrypted format. It could be other file information but I doubt since it's exactly the same in both places.

3) After the second set of 'randon' data which matches with the first set, we see some other random data. I have no idea yet what this is or what it might be.

So, as you can see, I'm really just starting with this journey and I've not gotten very far in a day. But I do have some idea of where I'm going (I think). Since I've never reverse engineered a file format before, I could be totally off but I think my analysis is pretty solid so far. It's not a deep analysis so, if I'm wrong here, I'm likely going to be screwed once the deeper inspection starts.

So there you have it. My work for the day. Hopefully, as I move forward, I'll have more interesting things to share but at least it's a start!

An interesting new free software project

2011-02-19T02:13:00.000-08:00

So I've long been a user of both free and open source software but, admittedly, haven't actually contributed much back to the community. For the last few days I've been reading an awesome book about The Free Software Foundations founder Richard M. Stallman called "Free as in Freedom" and it's really set the fire to contribute back to the community burning in my belly.

So I'm taking on my first independent free software project and I'm looking for fellow hackers who want to take the journey with me.

The project is fairly straightforward but surprisingly complex: to reverse engineer the RAR version 3 file archiving format and create a free software tool to manipulate those files (create, extract, etc).

I've been searching the net for a few hours now and I'm noticing that there's precious little in the way of documentation available for version 3 so this will prove to be an interesting challenge indeed.

Interested in coming along on the journey? Get in touch!

Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook: The biggest threat to privacy since the NSA

2011-02-12T18:10:00.000-08:00

How can Time Magazine name someone who is hell-bent on eliminating your privacy as their "Person of the Year"? It might be hard to believe but that's exactly what they did when they gave the coveted title to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg last year.

Zuckerberg has publicly stated that 'privacy doesn't exist' and that the 'illusion of privacy needs to go away'. A quick glance at a few random public profiles on the social network would make one believe that many of Facebook's 500 million plus members have totally bought into Zuckerbergs lie. Facebook is a dangerous example of how ordinarily rational individuals quickly set aside their most deeply held belief in privacy and proprietary in order to be part of the 'cool crowd'.

As an avid Facebook user, I see the value of the service in many contexts. If you're keeping up with friends, family, and colleagues, the service definitely make it easier and a lot more fun to do so. But that's not how most people use Facebook. Most people throw open the doors and accept every friend request they receive whether they know the person or not. It becomes a game of who has the most friends instead of having anything to do with meaningful connections.

While that 'come one, come all' attitude might not be such a bad thing, it has to be balanced with a certain amount of common sense; something many Facebook members don't seem to have or at least choose not to use. With a friends list of total strangers, these people will post the most intimate details of their lives in excruciating detail. We can learn when someone last had sex, when they have their period, when they're going on vacation, and sometimes how long they'll be away from their unattended house, allowing a opening for an enterprising burglar to do his thing while they're away.

None of these things are Mark Zuckerberg's or Facebooks fault of course, it's just a function of people 'sharing' with their 'friends'. But the site actively promotes allowing more and more open access to your information. New features that reveal personal information are often turned on with very little announcement and the onerous is on the user to turn it off, and sharing information about your friends with fun applications that often harvest that information is not only easy, it's encouraged by Facebook.

The service also provides an incredible opportunity to create fairly sophisticated profiles of users. By visiting someone's profile, you can learn the movies, products, and people they like. You can learn their marital and parental status, their age, and where they live. Sure, all those things could be turned off but that wouldn't be fun! Using nothing more than a very simple script, Facebook (or anyone else who might have the desire to do so) can easily learn just about anything they want about you and they can (and do) sell that information to marketers who use it to inundate you with advertising, both online and off.

Make no mistake, you are not Facebook's 'customer' or 'member', you are their product. They are selling you to whoever wants to buy you and the price doesn't seem to be all that high.

So how do you protect yourself from such intrusion? Well, the most obvious advice would be 'don't use Facebook' but that's not reality. Most people don't really see how huge the threat to their privacy is when they use the service so convincing them to completely shut their account down is nearly impossible.

The easiest way to protect yourself is to limit the amount of information you provide to Facebook or its partners. Don't put your real phone number into the service (your friends either have it or can message you for it), don't allow games and other applications to have access to your personal information or your friends list, and practice being more conscious about what you share in status updates instead of mindlessly posting without giving it a second thought.

Mark Zuckerberg is not a friend to Facebook members and using Facebook is always about agreeing to compromise your privacy in exchange for a dubiously useful service. It's time we kicked Facebook to the curb for something that acts in a more responsible and ethical way. Until we do, though, let's not feed the monster as it rapes our privacy.

At least let's make it a bit of a challenge for them.

Sometimes's it's fun to just share a dorky video

2011-02-06T16:58:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, a video doesn't have to mean anything at all. Sharing a fun and dorky video is half of the experience. Sure, this video is kind of silly, but it sure gets your attention!

Aftermath of Oklahoma Snowstorm

2011-02-02T12:19:00.000-08:00

The snowstorm that covered a nearly 2,000 mile swatch of the country early this week left its mark on NE Oklahoma. With eighteen to twenty inches of accumulation in some places, this may be the largest blizzard Oklahoma has seen in decades.

Being from Louisiana, I've not seen a lot of blizzards so you can imagine how excited I was to experience only the second one of my entire life. While I didn't brave the snow and winds to get video during the height of the storm, this video shows the aftermath in a neighborhood that has not yet been cleaned by the city.

It also looks like the snow might stick around for a while since forcasters are predicting temperatures of 5-10 degrees and wind chills of up to 25 below until Friday.

Fixing the OpenShot "Missing libh264 and libmp3lame" error in Ubuntu

2011-01-30T16:39:00.000-08:00

OpenShot is a fantastic and simple Linux video editor. The software provides many of the features more advanced video editors do along with a simple interface that allows you to work quickly. No, you're not going to create the next Hollywood blockbuster on OpenShot, but if you're producing videos for YouTube or editing family videos, this might just be the software for you.

If you're using the stock installation of OpenShot, you're probably familiar with the software telling you that it's missing libh264 and libmp3lame, making rendering video of almost any kind impossible. Thankfully, there's a simple fix that you can implement in about 5 minutes.

1. Open the Synaptic Package Manager and search for libavformat
2. Install the following software:
libavformat-extra-52
libavformat-unstripped-52
3, If OpenShot is already open, close it and start it again.

You should now be able to render your videos in full H.264 glory!

The PATRIOT Act is up for Renewal. Did you know?

2011-01-18T12:18:00.000-08:00

I just got this in email and thought I'd share it with you guys. I know everyone's view on the PATRIOT Act varies but, whatever you believe, you have a right to know.

EMAIL:

Did you hear that the PATRIOT Act is up for renewal? No? You're not alone: Apparently US intelligence services can still keep a secret.

Since it was passed almost a decade ago, some of the most noxious portions
of the PATRIOT Act have burrowed their way deep into our legal system. A
year ago, President Obama signed a bill extending three provisions of the
original PATRIOT Act; last week Congressman Mike Rogers (R-Michigan)
introduced legislation to extend them again.

[1]Will you click here, and urge your elected officials to oppose the
reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act?

Together, the extended provisions make a mockery of our civil liberties:
They let government officials spy on whomever they want, for any reason,
without ever letting them know or giving them a chance to challenge the
order in court.

Enough is enough: Will you join us in demanding that Congress finally let
these provisions expire?

[2]Just click here, and we'll automatically send a message to your
senator, representative, and President Obama.

Thanks for joining us in the effort to reclaim Americans' civil liberties.

-- The Demand Progress team

References

Visible links
1. http://act.demandprogress.org/go/29?akid=101.74059.Rkl4Vd&t=1
2. http://act.demandprogress.org/go/29?akid=101.74059.Rkl4Vd&t=2

Chris Floyd's 'The Good Corporal'

2011-01-11T01:23:00.000-08:00

Earlier tonight, I discovered a new site called 'Boiling Frogs', brought to us by FBI whistle-blower and critic Sibel Edmonds. Ms. Edmonds was a translator for the FBI until her firing in March of 2002 after she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleging serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence which, she contended, presented a danger to the United States' security. Regardless of your opinion of Ms. Edmonds, the site is definitely worth checking out.

On November 2nd, 2010, the site republished a poem by Chris Floyd called 'The Good Corporal' that I found particular touching and appropriate considering the current political climate towards whistle-blowers and information leakers. I thought the poem was poignant enough to share with you so, here it is, reprinted below in its entirety.

The Good Corporal

Good corporal, good corporal, now what have you done?
You’ve laid out the dead in the light of the sun.
You’ve opened the door where the dark deeds go on,
Where the fine words of freedom are broken like bones.

Good corporal, good corporal, you tell us of crime
Done in the name of your country and mine.
Of torture and murder, corruption and lies,
In a land where no echo will carry the cries.

Good corporal, good corporal, now who do we blame
For the horrors you bring us, for this undying shame?
Should we lay all the guilt on the grunts with no name,
Or the high and the mighty who rigged up this game?

Good corporal, good corporal, don’t you know the fate
Of all those who speak the hard truth to the State
And all who trouble the people’s sweet dreams?
They’re mocked into scorn and torn apart at the seams.

Good corporal, good corporal, what have you done?
You’ve laid out the dead in the light of the sun.

© 2010 by Chris Floyd

The real reason why the US Department of Justice subpoenaed Twitter over Wikileaks

2011-01-08T13:34:00.000-08:00

Last month, the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena to Twitter demanding user information for several accounts connected to Wikileaks. As you might expect, the list includes Wikileaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange, but it also includes several public Wikileaks supporters as well which begs the question "just what is the DoJ looking for?"

The Wikileaks saga has proven to be one of the most important disclosure related events since Daniel Ellsberg blew the whistle on government wrongdoing in 1971. Then, like now, Ellsberg was declared a villan by the US government but is widely credited with being a hero today for exposing decisions about the Vietnam war that were crucial to US interests. Whether Julian Assange will be vindicated as a hero of our modern age or not is yet to be seen but I think it's becoming obvious that, hero or not, the government is intent on stopping Assange from exposing any more of their dirty deeds.

The worrisome thing to me is that I don't really believe much of the government actions against Assange, Wikileaks, and its supporters has anything to do with Assange himself or the disclosures being made through the site. The government knows very well it can't charge a foreign citizen with treason and they know they can't create a retroactive sedition law and apply it to Assange. This entire dog and pony show is designed not only to get Assange to shut up, but to create a chilling effect throughout the activist community and send the message to anyone who would dare oppose the US government that they better watch out.

In the end, whether what Julian Assange did was right or wrong is irrelevant; the effect will be the same: next time someone finds something the government is doing wrong they will think twice before saying anything. Next time someone thinks about going to a rally to protest government corruption or waste, they will think twice about it. Stopping Assange is a bonus, but not the main point.

As a citizen of the US, it appalls me, but doesn't really surprise me, that our government would use such strong-arm tactics to cover-up wrongdoing. We tout ourselves as a nation who values justice, honor, and truth. Yet it seem that every time our government is caught doing something wrong, the immediate response isn't to eradicate the wrong but to persecute the person or group that exposed it.

This isn't the America we were taught we lived in when we were in school. This isn't the 'flag waving, freedom loving' country we tell the world we are.Then again, maybe we never were any of those things. Maybe it's all be a big lie all along.

Regardless of what becomes of Julian Asaange and the Wikileaks community, I believe the most important thing is that activist and supporters not be intimidated. Speaking truth to power can be scary and it can be dangerous. But as long as there are good people who are willing to put it all on the line because they really believe in freedom, they really believe we *can* be better, then they must continue to stand up and not let their voices be silenced. It doesn't matter if that happens in Iran, Iraq, North Korea, or the United States. Truth is truth and, in the end, truth will win out against oppression every single time.

The story of the near fall of a diabetic.

2010-12-15T15:06:00.000-08:00

On November 11th, 2010, I took my first steps on a journey that would change my life. After being bitten by a dog on my diabetic feet, I allowed an infection to form and tissue to die which almost ended up costing me my toe.

Thankfully, due to a fantastic doctor and good antibiotics, that hasn't happened yet but, nearly a month later, I am still fighting infection and dealing with a near quarter inch deep crater in my foot. Most, if not all of this could have been avoided had I taken better care of myself, eaten right, and kept my blood sugar levels down. But Diabetes wasn't something I paid that close attention to and it nearly costs me my toe.

This video discusses my experience and provides a warning to others dealing with diabetes. Don't play around, it's *much* more serious than you might think.

Email Security in the new Surveillance Society

2010-12-12T13:15:00.000-08:00

For over two decades, email has been a routine part of our modern lives. Who would consider sending out a quick one line 'Haven't heard from you lately, how are you?" by postal mail anymore when just about everyone in the industrialized world has an email address? For many people, myself included, email has nearly totally supplanted postal mail as their de facto method of communication. On any day, I probably send and receive more than 100 emails while my outgoing postal mail is down to one or two items a week and my incoming is nearly only commercial.

With our incredible reliance on the technology, it might surprise you that email hasn't changed very much since it was developed nearly four decades ago or that it is one of the biggest threats to your personal security and liberty on the Internet today. Bigger than hackers. Bigger than viruses. Bigger than the entire criminal underworld combined.

Email works much the same as our traditional land based mail systems do. When you drop a letter in the mail in Florida destined for a friend in Wisconsin, that piece of mail will pass through multiple mail processing hubs as it makes its way to its final destination. You might trust your local postal staff not to read your mail and you might even trust the postal staff at the office in Wisconsin, but what about the multiple, unknown, stops your letter will make as it travels? Do you trust the people who work at those locations?

From the moment you press the send button, your email begins a magical journey that will carry it through tens (or even dozens) of machines in a totally unencrypted and unprotected form. Anyone at any of the machines your email passes through on the way to its destination can easily intercept and read your mail and you'd never know it happened. The email would still reach its destination as planned and you and Aunt Sallie would successfully plan the demise of this years cookie baking champion.

Who would want to read your email though? I mean, you're exchanging baking recipes, jokes, occasional 'important' but not terribly sensitive information. You're not some CIA spy working in Siberia trying to catch an international arms dealer. As it turns out, you don't have to be. There are several groups that might have an interest in intercepting and reading your mail: the government in an effort to 'catch terrorists', your ISP (for various reasons), your email provider, someone trying to analyze the data in your email for marketing purposes, the list goes on and on and on. Unfortunately, the list also grows every day. Email is the last great wide open privacy farm. Nobody thinks about protecting it and people share incredibly sensitive information using it.

Let's define 'reading' a bit.

You've seen me use the term 'read your email' several times in this article and you might be thinking 'really, Anthony, someone is going to sit down and personally go through thousands or millions of email messages every day? I don't think so!" You'd be right. They automate it. Because email contains absolutely no encryption or security at all, it's easy to automate scanning it for keywords. If you use the popular email service GMail you're already familiar with this. Notice how if I make a joke in my email to you about Viagra, GMail is suddenly showing Viagra ads on the left of the email? It's because they've used special software to 'read' your email for keywords and picked up that we were talking about Viagra. GMail uses the technology to help their marketing, but it could easily be used to scan for anything they wanted.

That's one form of reading your email. But there's another, even more sinister and more direct way.

Let's discuss the Government

The United States, as well as several other governments around the world including UK, New Zealand, and Australia, have admitted over the last several years to routinely monitoring overseas communications. That includes phone calls, emails, faxes, etc. From recent research, we have strong reason to suspect that a few of those governments may have tuned their surveillance to even include domestic communication that that's where your email to Aunt Sallie comes in.

The software governments use to scan email is similar to that used by GMail except immensely more sophisticated. Because governments are seeking (called 'minining') intelligence information, their processing is more fine tuned and the analysis that goes on is much more extensive. Government analysis seeks to find patterns, keywords, and trends in your messages. For example, is a specific phrase used a lot in multiple, otherwise unrelated emails? That might indicate something. Were you frustrated by the recent election and said something in passing about 'just getting rid of them all'? That might indicate something too. We don't know how extensive government analysis is but, because of it's purpose, you can bet it's intense.

In the end, if your email is interesting enough to trip enough triggers, it might end up on the desk of some nice intelligence analyst who will read it personally. If he finds it interesting, he might ask your Internet mail provider to forward him all of your email communications for a while and he'll read those until he's satisfied that you're just another ordinary citizen.

For brevity (what's that?) I'm not going to go into the other parties who might want to read your email. The point is that there's virtually no protection against anyone who really wants a crack at your private communications. Your email is like a house with no locks. Private as long as nobody decides to take a peek inside.

Installing the locks...

With all this talk about how insecure email is, you probably think that protecting it from prying eyes must be a Herculean task or else everyone would do it. Here's another surprise: it's not.

Protecting your most private communication from anyone's prying eyes is incredibly simple and the tools you need are freely available. The process involves both you and the person you're communicating with simply encrypting your mail both ways using something called a public key.

Don't worry, it's not as complicated as it might sound. It's all automated!

Public Key Encryption is a reliable and, if used correctly, unbreakable way to protect your emails from unauthorized access. It involves both you and the person you're exchanging emails with to exchange 'public keys' which is information that anyone can have - it simply allows someone to encrypt email to you. YOU keep what is known as your 'private key', which is used to decrypt mail sent to you and to do other functions.

The process can be done in most email clients (Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, AppleMail, etc) automatically after a five to seven minute setup. After that, as long as you're encrypting mail to your recipients and they to you, no one will ever know what you're saying ever again.

If it's so easy, why isn't everyone using it?

Good question! Laziness!

While setting up and using this technology is very simple, it does require you to set it up and it does require some extra work when you start to encrypt mail to new people (you have to add their public key to your 'keychain'). It's not a lot of work but it's more than most people want to do just to send an email - especially if they have nothing to hide.

Exactly! I have nothing to hide, why would I worry who reads my email?

Are you ashamed about sex with your spouse? Can I come over and peek through the windows next time you guys are romantic? The truth is, you don't have to be doing anything wrong to deserve or want privacy. In fact, it's the innocent who require and should demand the most privacy. If you're not doing anything wrong, why should someone be reading your emails? Personally, the fact that there's possibly some guy I don't know sitting in some analysis room reading YOUR private emails makes me mad as hell. You deserve privacy and YOU exerting your right to it makes a stronger case for all of us privacy loving netizens.

Alright, where can I find out more?

There's not a lot your have to do to get started. If you're a Windows user, first make sure your computer is virus and spyware free (I assume you know how to do that) then head over to http://www.gpg4win.org/download.html, download, and set up the software. Go through the steps in this article to set the software up and generate your public/private key, and get the keys of those you communicate with. With that, you are totally secure!

Happy, safe, computing!

Replacing Skype with SIP in a few easy steps

2010-11-30T18:46:00.000-08:00

I've been a Skype user for a long time. For about 4 years, I've been loyal to Skype and had no real reason to move away from the service. It worked well, it was fairly reliable, and it was a pretty much an enjoyable experience. But recent events have forced me to take a hard look at my need for Skype and, if it could be replaced easily and, better still, with open source software.

The first event that made me take a hard look at Skype was finding out (late) that they had granted the Chinese government eavesdropping privileges on some of their users. While Skype might say this was 'following the law of the countries they operate in', I see it as an absolute violation of privacy. The second, and a bit less compelling, was my total migration to Linux and the fact that Skype just doesn't work well there at all.

So off I went looking for a solution. My requirements were pretty simple:

1. It had to be SIP compliant
2. It had to allow incoming phone to PC calls
3. It had to allow outbound PC to PC and PC to Phone calls
4. It had to be open source or from a company that respects openness
5. It had to be cheap.
6. Google Voice needed to work with it

I first looked at Gizmo5. I've always liked Gizmo and I really like what Google has done with it since they bought the company in 2009. Still, Gizmo has never really worked well for me so I wanted to avoid using their software if possible. Then I remembered Gizmo5 was a SIP service AND that Google Voice allowed me to forward inbound calls to my free Gizmo number.

So, for the first time in almost a year, I logged into my Gizmo5 account and grabbed my free SIP phone number. I then logged into Google Voice and added that number to my account and told the service to forward calls to it whenever they arrived. Easy as pie.

Since I'd been using the Ekiga SIP softphone for a while on my Linux desktop, I figured I'd stick with something I knew and went to the website and downloaded and installed the software. Next, I went into Ekiga and set up a new SIP service using the SIP information that Gizmo5 provided to me on their website. Within 3 minutes, I had my cell phone in hand, placing a test call to my Google Voice number and seeing it ring on my desktop Ekiga SIP Phone!

It was amazingly easy to replace Skype inbound calling with Ekiga and SIP but now I needed to allow outbound calling as well. As luck would have it, both Ekiga and Gizmo5 allow outbound calling at extremely competitive rates - as cheap or cheaper than Skype. Ekiga charges around $0.02 a minute to call the USA while Gizmo5 comes in around $0.01 per minute for the same service. It ain't free, but it's pretty darn close. In the end, I'll probably go with Gizmo's calling service since it's the cheapest. Technically, I could forgo outbound calling entirely and just use Google Voice. But I like the idea of doing everything from one application and who can argue with $0.01?

Lastly, I faced my biggest hurdle in migrating from Skype: contacts. While it's really nice to think I can do all this cool stuff using the software I've chosen, the fact remains that most of my contacts are on Skype. Expecting them to all move to SIP is unreasonable so I have only two options:

1. Run a dual Skype/Ekiga desktop switching to the right client for my needs at the moment.
2. Convince my contacts to move to SIP
3. Wait for Skype to allow inbound SIP calling to Skype contacts.

I'm hopeful that option 3 is well on the way to becoming a reality since Skype is working on attracting business customers, many of whom are very reliant on SIP for their internal phone networks. Option 1 will probably be my choice for now since I'm not likely to convince many people to jump through the hurdles I did tonight. Still, it's a nice thought and I am nearly completely free of proprietary Skype.

As you can see, setting this up really wasn't hard at all. All you need are a few pieces from different places and you can easily move almost totally away from Skype.

Ah, the smell of freedom.

Does Windows need a software center like Unbutu has?

2010-11-26T17:11:00.000-08:00

Finding software in Ubuntu Linux is a pretty painless task. There are basically two main ways people do it (with a few others that are harder and seldom used): through the new Software Center or through the Synaptic Package Manager. Whether users choose to use the Software Center or Synaptic, finding and installing software is as painless as clicking the program, searching for a term, and double clicking to install. Uninstalling is just as easy.

The same process on Microsoft Windows, by comparison, can be much more complex. Users have an infinite amount of sources for software from retail outlets to niche online stores, competing download sites, and even personal sites where software created by the site owner is hosted for download. Sometimes, just finding the software is more than half the battle, then there's installing and uninstalling it which can be an even bigger pain in the ass.

This problem doesn't just plague Windows though. Mac has had the same problem for a long time until, recently, Apple decided to do something about it by opening a desktop app store similar to the one they run for the iPhone and iPad devices. Brilliant idea! Allow users an infinite choice of free and paid software applications, but consolidate their location from multiple sites down to a single one. Regardless of what you might think of Steve Jobs and his need for iron fisted, white knuckled, control of Apple users, the idea of having a single place to go for all your software is very attractive. Ubuntu is seeing huge success with the Software Center and Apple has seen an extremely positive response to their announcement of an desktop app store.

Where is Microsoft? Why are they not feverishly working on a similar thing for Windows users? Not only is an in OS app store a great win for the user experience, but it's a fantastic way for a company to generate additional revenue by taking a cut of every app sold in the marketplace. Microsoft has seen solid success with the Windows Phone Marketplace; why have they not extended the technology to the desktop? It would be very easy. Just add it to Windows 7 as an additional program or even integrate it with the built in search functionality. It's something that could be deployed in a matter of weeks and Microsoft could easily leverage existing technology to make this a stellar experience for Windows users.

An in-OS app store makes sense from any angle you look at it: users win, developers win, Microsoft wins, everyone is happy. There's no compelling reason for the company not to jump on this idea like a hungry dog running to a bowl of fresh food. This is their chance to be innovative, to be an aggressive mover in the user space, to really push the user experience forward.

If they wait much longer, it won't matter. Everyone else will have an app store and, once again, Microsoft will show up late to the party with their homely cousin Betty as their date.

Is Ubuntu slowly shutting out older hardware?

2010-11-05T09:23:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth announced that the company was abandoning the popular GNOME desktop in favor of its own Unity solution. Just as the dust from that announcement was starting to settle, Shuttleworth dropped another bomb on the Linux community in a blog post yesterday announcing Ubuntu's imminent move away from the X.org display server to upstart Wayland.

Display servers, as the name implies, are responsible for rendering what you see on your screen, including the desktop itself. While X.org has long been a standard in the Linux/Unix world, Wayland offers some tantalizing new possibilities as to what can be done on the desktop. By combining Wayland and Unity and abandoning X and GNOME, Ubuntu will be able to offer the excitingly rich user experience to their users that users of other operating systems have enjoyed for years.

But that new experience could come at a cost to both Ubuntu users and Canonical itself.

By combining Unity and Wayland, Canonical is, in one huge swoop, cutting free a fairly large group of users who use graphics cards that can't handle the type of technology, called OpenGL, on which these two systems heavily rely. Most affected are users of laptop computers where graphics technology often lags several years behind the desktop counterparts, but many desktop users who use older hardware, or anything with nVidia or ATI chipsets, could well find themselves out in the cold as well.

Personally, I'm torn about this issue. While I understand that Canonical is a for-profit company who must survive and that the changes they're making to Ubuntu are moving it forward into a more polished and commercial place, I find it somewhat frustrating that the company has made several rapid fire decisions that will affect such a large group of users within six months to a year or two.

One of the beautiful things about Linux is that it can be used to give life to old hardware. Laptop and desktop computers that couldn't even dream of running Windows Vista or Windows 7 can usually happily run Linux and some can even provide a desktop effects environment that rivals or surpasses Microsoft's offerings. This move, I fear, is going to change that and many users of older hardware, myself included, will be forced to either purchase new gear or leave Ubuntu for something else, like Linux Mint or Fedora.

There is a bright point in this story though: while Ubuntu will be moving away from GNOME and to Unity with their April 2011 release, the move to Wayland will be much more gradual. Wayland is still a young project with a long way to go before it is even a minor contender to X and that's something Shuttleworth acknowledged in yesterdays blog post about the move. The move might take four to five years or, depending on Wayland's progress, it might never happen (unlikely). Eventually, though, we're going to see Ubuntu move away from X.org and towards what could be an exciting new display server, if your hardware can support it.

Lastly, I find it quite exciting that Canonical is pushing the envelope so hard in improving the Linux user experience. We've focused on everything else to the degree that Linux, and particularly Ubuntu, is a fully usable and advanced system able to compete with both Mac and Windows toe to toe. The only thing missing by some accounts is software and graphics. In my opinion, while this could be a double edge sword, this takes a step in the right direction in both of those areas.

My money is on the long term success of Unity and Wayland. It's exciting, it's sexy, it offers a lot of possibilities. I guess we'll just wait and see...

Open source marketing sucks. Here's how to fix it.

2010-10-28T10:31:00.000-07:00

There's no doubt that the open source model of developing software is superior to ones where code is kept in secret rooms and people get fired if any of it gets leaked to the public. The open source model provides a way for everyone, not just developers within a company, to participate in the design of the software. Average, ordinary, users have every bit as much say in a well run open source project as the project leader does and, sometimes, perhaps even more. This model of community based software development has given us some amazing products: OpenOffice, Linux, Android, and countless others who might never have seen the light of day had it not been for a vibrant community.

It is perhaps because of the sheer brilliance of this community, and the great products they are able to produce, that it is equally sad and frustrating to see how badly they suck at marketing. From the names of the product themselves to the guerrilla marketing tactics used to get the word out, almost everything screams 'armature, toy project' which, in most cases, couldn't be further from the truth.

We in the open source community love to talk about how Microsoft and other companies like them have 'won' the market through dirty tricks. Some of that might be true, but not all of it. Microsoft won the market through absolutely brilliant, mostly well thought out, targeted marketing. For every bit of technological ineptness Microsoft has shown in product design, they have made up for it by three times in their marketing. Apple is another good example of great marketing at work. There's nothing particularly innovative or absolutely mind blowing about almost any Apple product. But you'd think there was based on the drooling fans that line entire city blocks to buy their latest products.

What both Apple and Microsoft have figured out and what I don't think the open source community has is that having a good product is only part of the equation. In some cases, it's not even that important. What is important is how your consumers perceive you. Microsoft is perceived as a company that is serious about business. They can be counted on to provide every possible IT system most offices could ever need. They have marketed themselves as a trusted advisor for businesses and businesses have responded to that in a huge way. Consumers, as an outgrowth of their offices, schools, and other points of contact, have bought into the marketing too in the 'if it's good enough for X big company, it's good enough for me, the little guy' mindset.

Apple's marketed itself as the hip, innovative, scrappy company that can be turned to for entertainment. If you want serious fun, you want Apple. Their products, we're told, are innovative, cutting edge, and sexy. They even have a cult like leader in Steve Jobs who's willing and ready to lead the masses to the Mecca that is everything 'i'.

Where do you see that in the open source community? Nowhere. You have a bunch of believers largely telling other believers how great open source is and exchanging high-fives over their latests cool code hack. We talk among ourselves about how great Linux is but where are the cool commercials? Where are the splashy magazine ads? Where are the snazzy conferences with people who don't smell like they haven't taken a bath in six weeks? Where is the coolness of it all?

The fact of the matter is, of everything that can be done by the community, public relations and marketing generally isn't one of them. Not on the levels that Microsoft and Apple do. Usability studies, psychological analysis of consumer buying trends, focus groups, all that goes into creating an incredible marketing campaign cost money. It's almost impossible to get people to pony up $10 towards supporting a piece of software they use every single day. Do you really think you're going to raise the $2-$3 million dollars a kick ass PR campaign is going to costs from the community?

As I write this on the morning of October 28 – 3 days before the end of the month, a very well known and widely used Linux project; one that is almost essential to the proper functioning of the desktop, is proudly proclaiming on their website that they are 'running on $269 from the community so far this month!'. That's right, they didn't even hit three hundred bucks for the month. Far, far, short of the millions they'd need for a serious PR push if that would be their goal.

Thankfully, while I believe real money is going to be the only key that will really push open source software into the collective mindset, I also believe there are a few things that the community can do in their marketing efforts to help their pet projects along:

Stop talking geek to users. Users don't care about the technology behind your product. They care if it can do something cool or it it came give them a bit of street cred amongst their friends, and, maybe, if it helps them do something at work. Proudly touting that your product is 'built on the latest Qt release using Python 3” doesn't mean anything.

Stop talking standards as you battle Microsoft. Sure, Microsoft Office might break every standard known to man and you product might be 100% compatible with the established international standards set forth by some standardization body nobody but geeks have heard of. Cool deal. It's meaningless to Joe Consumer when his boss and colleagues who use Microsoft Office can't read the report that's due today and he spent all night laboring over in OpenOffice. Standards matter when the products the majority of users use in their day to day lives conform to them. Otherwise, nobody cares.

Stop talking in silly 'it's free as in beer' terms and telling people 'you even have the freedom to change the SOURCE CODE! You can't do that with Windows!' Want to know why you can't do that with Windows? Because most people don't want to...or even know how. I'm a professional software developer and do you know how many times I've dug into the source code of a product and changed anything in the last ten years? Twice. If a product doesn't do something I need it to, it's usually easier for me to go out and find another one that does. I'm an altruistic guy but I also need to work on, you know, stuff that puts food on my table. I don't have time to spend two weeks integrating a BASIC feature that should already be there into a product. I need my software to work now. Quit telling me I can change the source code. It doesn't matter to most people.

Start focusing on the cool stuff – not the geek cool stuff but the real people cool stuff. Linux being open source and free isn't cool. Showing somebody something like Compiz running with full blown effects is. OpenOffice running on the desktop isn't cool. But showing how Bob saved the day by producing his companies latest brochure in a few days without spending a penny is. Users are real people. Geeks are ideologues. Speak normal and show them what's cool.

Break things until you win. Like we've already talked about, Microsoft breaks standards and conventions in almost every single product they have. Still, they have the market share so they can pretty much do anything they want. To compete with them, we're going to have to play their game, beat them, then move users to a better place. Quit focusing on what Microsoft is doing wrong and do it wrong yourself while you tout price, reliability, and availability. Bring the users over then move in the right direction. Being 'wonderful' when nobody really cares or uses your products isn't really a victory.
Get some better product names. This is my last and maybe one of the most important points in this entire post. What the hell is with open source developers and product names? Am I to believe that the absolute best name a massive collection of people who are passionate about their office suite could come up with is OpenOffice.org? That's not a product name, that's a website. LibreOffice? Do most users know what the hell 'Libre' even means? Naming is one of the keys to setting the tone for your product. I'm an open source developer and even I think the names are stupid. Stop sucking at it.

With all that said, it might seem like I see the open source landscape as almost hopeless. I don't. I believe there is a massive glut of people waiting anxiously for something better than what they have to come along and who don't realize that it already has. I think the community is doing a tremendous disservice to a huge section of the consumer market by sticking to some of the conventions they do when winning the market should be everything that it's about. It should be our laser focus.

We constantly complain about companies like Microsoft and Apple holding their users hostage. I believe we are accomplices to that because we haven't clearly and aggressively led users to their freedom. We've sat around and bitched to each other and whined about how Microsoft's unfair practices have kept us down. It's a classing 'fight the power' move and it's not working. We have the power to free users from their bondage, we have the power to lead them to the promise land of technology, and I believe we're wasting it on stupid crap that doesn't mean anything to most people.

So here's my challenge to the open source community: stop thinking like geeks and think like users. It might give you a whole new view of the tech you're creating.

Wikileaks: a citizens best friend for government accountability

2010-10-23T13:10:00.000-07:00

Over the course of the last year, the popular leak website Wikileaks has released over a million secret US military documents that detail everything from the mundane work our soldiers do to some of the atrocities they've committed. For its part, the US government is trying to squelch the site using the 'national security' argument claiming that the leaks are putting our 'men and women in uniform' at risk.

Personally, I applaud the work that Julian Assange and the Wikileaks team have done to hold the US and other governments accountable for their actions. For too long, governments have hidden under the blanket of national security while committing some of the most vile acts known to man. Rape, torture, and the outright murder of innocent civilians are all things that the government believes would 'compromise national security' if the knowledge of them came to light. Those who dare question such obviously faulty logic and patent lying are quickly labeled 'unAmerican' or smeared because they don't care about the men and women in the field.

Bullshit.

I care about our soldiers. I am thankful every single day that they choose to put their lives on the line to protect my safety and ensure that future generations will grow up in at least a somewhat free country. But killing innocent people, raping non-combative women, torturing potential informants for information has nothing to do with protecting my freedom and safety and I'm deeply offended that the government believes the American people are so collectively stupid that we will continue to believe the lies as long as they keep feeding them to us and demonizing those who question or confront them.

In an age where we're flooded with brainless prattle like 'you're either for us or with the terrorists', it's refreshing to see men and women of conscious standing up and boldly confronting that which is wrong, unethical, and immoral. I believe they are every bit as much of a hero as the battlefield soldier who braves enemy fire to pull his wouned comrade to safety or the young Private that runs into hostile territory to accomplish the mission with no thought to his own safety.

I refuse to accept the 'we'll take care of you, you don't need to know the details' doctrine anymore. We do need to know. We need to know when our government, as our representatives to the world, is murdering innocent people, torturing people to madness, and running secret detention facilities where who-knows-what goes on. Yes, Mr. Gates, President Obama, Senators, we do need to know that. More importantly, we have a right to know and no amount of 'national security' foliage that you use to hide your actions is going to take away that right or lessen our determination and dedication to the truth.

So this is my personal 'thank you' to Jullian Assange and Wikileaks for the incredible work you do in exposing the truth. The government might war against you but the people are standing strong at your side.

Keep up the great work!

Fragmentation: What Steve Jobs and Apple got right

2010-10-21T16:52:00.000-07:00

In a recent quarterly earnings call, Apple CEO Steve Jobs spent more than five minutes trashing competitors Research in Motion, makers of the popular Blackberry devices, and Android, a smartphone system designed and maintained by search giant Google. Though the remarks he made were prepared, that did little to hide the seething rage and disdain that Jobs holds for his two toughest competitors. Jobs' remarks were angry, inflammatory, provocative, and absolutely dead on the mark.

The IT community, a community in which 'How much do we hate Steve Jobs today?" seems to have become a popular game, was, as you might imagine, driven to madness. Attacking RIM and the Blackberry were bad enough, but attacking Google and Android? That's just too far! What the slobbering fanboys missed in the Jobs message, however, was the fact that nearly everything he said was true.

The main thrust of Jobs' message was focused on the fragmentation that Android has brought to the mobile application market. Most device manufacturers don't run the stock version of Android provided by Google. They run a modified version, tailored to either their specific tastes or the whims of the carriers they service. Add to that the fact that some manufacturers are considering running their own version of the Android marketplace and you can see a situation developing where users will have so much choice that they will be crippled. Where do users go for apps and what app stores are particular applications listed in are becoming the million dollar questions for Android users. Ultimate freedom has become ultimate chaos and it doesn't seem to be getting any better.

Now, let's compare this fragmented approach with that of Apple. There is one application store and only two targets for developers to hit: the current release of iOS and the one immediately previous to it. A single company controls both the operating system and hardware so developers know exactly what type of environment their software will be running in and what kind of services and resources will be available to it.

From the users standpoint, it's near paradise: one place to go for all applications. It doesn't matter who your carrier is (AT&T right now but more coming soon) or if you're in the US, UK, or somewhere else, it's the same store, If you find a cool app in the store that you want to tell a friend in another country about, chances are good that it will be available to them too and, if it is, it will run the same on his iPhone or iPod Touch as it does on yours.

No moving targets for users or developers. No fragmentation.

We in the open source community love to talk about choice; how, when users are given a variety of choices, competition and the free market thrive. I prefer to think of the perfect solution as 'choice within reason'. There is absolutely no good reason for a particular phone maker to have their own app store when the Android Marketplace is already there and insanely easy to use. There's no reason why developers should have to submit to and wait for approval from multiple app stores just to get their software on users handsets. Allowing users the freedom to choose what applications they want on their handset makes sense. Allowing them to choose which app store to use doesn't.

Users don't care about openness, they just want software. The sad fact is that, as much as we'd like to think they do, most users don't really care if a handset is built on open technology. Ask the average Android user 'is this whole Android thing open?' and they will return a nice, blank stare. We're fooling ourselves by pretending the majority of users actually care about 'handset freedom' and the ability to browse and modify source code. Geeks care, users don't.

Steve Jobs has it right: the false flag of 'open' versus 'closed' in the mobile space is really just a cover for fragmentation. Apple offers a superb user experience from an integration standpoint, Android, not so much. When I pick up an iPhone, I know pretty much what's going to be on it, where things are, what the interface is going to look like. On Android, I have no clue. Those things are totally up to the manufacturer.

What would be so evil about Google standardizing the system or saying "only one Android store"? Would that be the end of civilization? Would that make Android "not" open? It wouldn't matter one bit. Not a single user would complain and most wouldn't even notice. Developers would jump for joy because they would know exactly what they were developing for instead of the sludgy pile of mush that is Android today. It would help the platform in enormous ways and would not effect usability a single bit. In fact, it would help usability too because, regardless of the Android device you used, you'd be fairly familiar with the interface and features.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't become and Android hater or an Apple fanboy. But the fragmentation of Android is something that drives me nuts as a developer and the integration of Apple calls to me. I dream of a day of developing an application and not worrying so much about where it's deployed and on what hardware, Hate him as you may, Jobs is an absolute genius at crafting the user experience. When he calls something 'sexy', he's usually right and at the very least I know exactly what I'm getting with an Apple product from both the user and developer perspective.

Am I going out and buying a Mac? Probably not. But I certainly thank Steve Jobs and Apple for bringing sexy back to the tech industry and for making an experience for their users like no other.

Protecting your privacy while you search and browse the Internet

2010-10-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

Did you know that every time you visit a website, your privacy is violated? Not only does your Internet provider know where you've been, but every single site you visit keeps a log with identifying information. :Law enforcement, hackers, and various other interested parties can use those logs to piece together everything from evidence of a crime to a fairly complete and accurate psychological profile based on where you've been, how long you stayed, and what you clicked on next. It's a privacy nightmare.

In my last post on privacy, I discussed some ways to mitigate the privacy violating policies of many popular sites like Google, Facebook, and MySpace. Unfortunately, that advice can only go so far as just about every single website you visit is going to keep a log of that visit. And, while most don't keep these logs for long, there's no real way to determine how long they do keep them or what they do with them.

I'm a huge proponent of using good security. I believe you should protect your privacy even if you have nothing to hide; perhaps especially if you have nothing to hide. That's why I've been using StartPage.com as my primary search engine for a while now and it's why I recommended it as an alternative to Google in my last post. But as I use the service, things just keep getting better. This morning is a good example of that when I discovered proxied browsing through StartPage.

Normally, when you click on the link for a search result, your browser is transferred to whatever site you clicked on. Your ISP logs that visit, the search engine you used to find the site logs that visit, and, of course, the site logs that visit, all associated with your unique internet address. Proxied browsing through StartPage allows you to securely click on a search result, visit the site, and never leave a trace that you've been there.

When you use StartPage's 'proxy' links, the service acts as your agent and inserts itself between whatever website you're going to and you. From your ISP's point of view, you've only visited StartPage, from the target websites' point of view, it is only being visited by StartPage. No record of your visit is EVER recorded anywhere - not even by StartPage. It's SSL encrypted so your browsing session can't be snooped on, no cookies are stored on your computer, and no records are kept. It's the perfect secure browsing solution.

As fantastic as the service is, it's not without its faults. In many cases, you won't be able to submit web forms because they require certain information about you that StartPage isn't willing to offer up. You'll also take a slight speed hit since your browser isn't actually loading the target page itself but waiting on StartPage to fetch it and feed it back to the browser. Overall though, the service is zippy and useful and I haven't experienced any problems using it with most of the websites I visit regularly.

Using proxied browsing through StartPage is easy. Do a search like normal and, instead of clicking the result link, click the "Proxy" link under the result. That will open the target website in proxied mode and you are completely protected. You can click links on the site, even be transferred to other site by links and you're still protected.

If you're noticing a trend in these security post, you're probably right in your observation: security requires a little extra work. You'll have to change the way you do things sometimes because, unfortunately, the most convenient way to do things on the Internet is usually the least secure. That's by design, don't be fooled. Take a little extra time and effort to protect yourself and you can rest at night knowing that your privacy has not been violated.

It is well worth the extra work and you're actually making society better for all of us by doing it.

Day One: Is this the beginning of the end (of soda) for me?

2010-10-12T23:09:00.000-07:00

When I was 12 years old, I had stomach problems. When my mother took me to the doctor, we found out that I was drinking too much Coke and the doc said I was on the verge of developing an ulcer. Naturally, my mother cut back (not out) my Coke consumption which lasted about two weeks. After that, my previous love affair with my brown, fizzy, master, continued. I wasn't drinking as much Coke as I had been, but I still was taking in a lot of Coke.

The affair continued for years, unabated, until last year when I turned 35 and was diagnosed with Diabetes. That meant no more sugary drinks or foods and I had to find a substitute for my first liquid love. Thankfully, all sorts of diet drinks waited in the wings, all calling my name and offering me different and exciting taste possibilities. Most, if not all of the drinks I was interested in, were not sweetened with sugar but with a sugar substitute called Aspartame (also sold as Equal and NutriSweet and contained in almost 6.000 foods and also marketed under the new name AminoSweet as of 2007). Aspartame promised me a solution I could live with: I didn't have to live a sweetless life and I could take care of my Diabetes at the same time.

Sweet!

Then, I began doing research and what I found scared me. I started by watching the film Aspartame: Sweet Misery, A Poisoned World which discusses the dangers of the chemical and the back room deals that were done to get it approved in the 1970's. I also spent a lot of time on Google looking at both sides of what turned out to be a huge controversy: is Aspartame safe or not? It turns out it probably isn't.

So last year, I decided to give up diet drinks completely and cut what I believed to be a deadly poison from my body. Even while thinking that Aspartame might be responsible for everything from my eyesight problems to my Diabetes, I only lasted two weeks and went back to drinking diet, Aspartame laden, soft drinks. I slowly came to realize I was truly addicted.

So here we are at the end of 2010 and I'm once again resolving to rid my life of this horrible chemical. But this time, I'm doing it sensibly. Instead of cutting all soft drinks from my diet, I'm simply going to remove the ones that contain Aspartame. I'm probably addicted to multiple chemicals in these drinks so slowly coming off of them while eliminating their most dangerous chemical sounds like a good idea. I'm starting to wean myself from soft drinks by doing two things:

1) I'm reducing the total amount of soft drinks I consume a day dramatically. On average, I was drinking about six liters of diet drinks a day. I'm immediately reducing that to only two.

2). I'm totally eliminating Aspartame from the drinks I buy. Tonight, that meant buying a 2 liter of Diet RC Cola. It doesn't have Aspartame and taste pretty damn good at the same time.

The two points above are my starting point. My goal is to completely eliminate soft drinks from my diet within 3 months, replacing them with natural, healthy, water. No doubt, this new road is going to be hard. Not only will I be battling several simultaneous addictions, but I'm also giving up something I truly enjoy. But I'm determined to live a healthier, more natural life, as well as lose some weight and this is the first step in that direction.

So this is Day One. The first step. I'm ready for this. I'm also worried about how hard it might be. In the end though, I have absolutely no doubt it will be worthwhile. My health is worth the sacrifice.

I'll keep you all posted.

Privacy in the age of Google and Facebook

2010-10-12T02:12:00.000-07:00

It used to be that managing your privacy was simple. If you didn't want someone to know about the private parts of your life, you didn't discuss it. In those days, the only privacy issues you had to worry about were nosy neighbors and gossiping friends. And once an event had occurred, there really wasn't a way for those who hadn't experienced it first hand to go back and review it with the same intensity of those who were there.

Of course, those times are long gone. The introduction of Google, Facebook, FourSquare, and other services has forever changed the landscape of privacy. Now, it's possible to learn almost anything about you by spending an hour in front of a computer. Using only the three services anyone mentioned above, they can find out your political and religious affiliations, what you ate for supper, where you shop, how close you are with family, where you work, and, often, where you live and how much time you spend there.

If they want to dig further and spend more time, they might be able to find who the last girl you dated was, when you and your wife last had sex, when she had her last menstrual cycle, and what your opinion of the last movie you saw was. Using that information, even a fairly unsophisticated person with decent research skills can create a fairly accurate and wide reaching profile of who you are and what your preferences are. Or, they might use it to find out if you might be a security risk to a company, or if you fit for employment within an organization.

The information that can be found about you is almost limitless and, with a bit of creative software programming and the tools for accessing your personal data most of these services provide, anyone can use that information to extrapolate other, more intimate information that you might not have publicly shared. Things you might not want others to know. Things that might be embarrassing or damaging to your career, marriage, or family.

We live in an age where it seems like the technologies we use everyday are engaged in a literal war with us for our privacy. Do you need to look up information? Google will do it for you but it's going to cost you an entry about you in their database. Want to let your friends and family know where you are? Use FourSquare but your data is going to be mined and analyzed in ways we don't fully understand or even know. Almost everything we do in our daily lives involves technology that is hell bent on tracking, logging, and cataloging us for later analysis. For the last decade, the United States government has spoken about a program called Total Information Awareness. It's here and it wasn't developed by the government. It was developed by companies offering cool new services and, instead of fighting for our privacy at every turn, we willingly gave it up to them

With all the technology that seems devoted to invading and eliminating our privacy, it might seem to some that the battle for it might be futile. People like Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the popular social networking site Facebook, have even declared privacy dead and the idea of living a private life antiquated. In their future, we will all be connected all the time with everyone knowing our every move, thought, and action simply by scanning our Facebook or Twitter profiles. But, the truth is, privacy isn't dead - even to those who say it is. Ask any of them if they wouldn't mind installing cameras in every room of their house that broadcasts everything that happens there and you'll quickly see lines being drawn and exceptions being made. Would Mark Zuckerberg allow us, his loyal fans, to watch him take a shower? Have sex with his girlfriend? Probably not. But it's not just in times like that where privacy matters, it's anywhere I simply want to be left alone and remain anonymous and unaccosted.

So the question could be asked how can you protect your privacy while still using tools like social networking, location based services, research tools, and the like? You can't. Remaining completely anonymous while doing even mundane things on the Internet is nearly impossible. But there are a few things you can do to maintain a small shred of privacy while still enjoying the interesting tools technology brings us.

1. Only friend people you really know. Ever notice how some people have thousands of friends on Facebook or Twitter? Do you think they really know all those people? Probably not. But all of those strangers see everything they post. Some of them may not even be real people but software programs designed to harvest private data. Friending only people you know in real life makes sure you're provided with some real world, non-loggable, privacy.

2. Use the privacy tools services give you. Social networking and location services are all about connecting people. But most of us don't want our ex-girlfriend who tried to kill us three times being able to track our every move. Sites like Facebook allow you to manage, often in granular detail, who sees our updates. You can even segregate people based on their relationships to you so one set of people see some of the updates while others don't.

3. Don't check-in regularly. Services like FourSquare make us want to reach for our mobile phones every time we walk into a place. Even though we know there's a good chance that nobody we know will actually be at that same location, we obsessively and obediently check-in, logging our exact location and posting it to the Internet. In addition to giving friends a glimpse into your life and habits, it also arms those who would invade your privacy or even break into your home or stalk you, with valuable information for them to use. By checking out a users location history, it's easy to figure out their daily routine or know when they're going to be somewhere for an extended amount of time. Vary your check-ins. Resist the urge sometimes.

4. Don't use Google. Yes, I know I've just committed a mortal sin and will burn in the ninth level of hell for all eternity for my transgression against the all knowing one. But privacy experts worry about Google more than just about any other service on the Internet. Google knows what our interests are, our health history, who we email and chat with, where we shop, and even our exact location. While there's no hard evidence that the company has ever deliberately misused any of this information, it would be incredibly easy for them to do so by writing a few lines of software code.

Unfortunately, replacing Google is probably the hardest thing on this list to do because using their services is both convenient and habitual. 'To Google' has even broken into the lexicon and their superiority is so ingrained in us that many people never even consider the alternatives. They are out there. StartPage.com, a search service that searches Google, Yahoo, and other big search engines for you while keeping you completely anonymous, is a good place to start. They're even working on an anonymous email service that will provide secure, non-logged email accounts that aren't data mined to death.

5. Educate yourself about the privacy policies of the websites you entrust your data to. Any site that collects personal data must have a privacy policy. These are often long, complicated, documents that are written with so much double speak and with so many exceptions that it's hard to make heads or tails of them. Read them. Know what the site or service is going to do with your data and, if you don't understand something, email and ask about it. Get clarification on what happens to your data, who owns it, and how it's going to be used, BEFORE you sign up to the site. Once you sign up, providing your name and other information, you're logged. Don't jump in without knowing the limits of how they use your data.

Some of you might claim that the advice above is a bit paranoid and it well might be. But the fact is that, if we are to keep our privacy, we must be proactive about guarding it. Companies invade our privacy for the sole goal of making money. Is it worth losing your privacy just so you can send an email and say you use a cool service to do it? Is convenience worth becoming a statistic in their massive, growing databases? I don't think it is.

Lastly, the argument could be made that our ISP is going to log everything we do online anyway and, to some degree, that's true. We can mitigate that some by using secure, encrypted, connections (called SSL) to sites that allow it. But this will only protect the data traveling between our computer and the site. It won't protect us from the site logging our information or our ISP logging that we've visited the site. Still, it's another tool to help us maintain some measure of privacy and it should be used whenever possible.

The bottom line is that it's your job to protect your privacy. You must be proactive, a bit paranoid, and, more than anything else, willing to buck the trend of 'popular' services. Maintaining privacy is possible. Not being an entry in a database is possible. It's just going to take a little bit of work. In the end, it's work that's well worth it.

Downloading images from a website in Python

2010-10-08T17:23:00.000-07:00

From time to time, you might find yourself needing to sift through a website and grab images from it. While this isn't terribly difficult in any language (except, maybe, Perl and Java), it's amazingly easy in Python:


import urllib2
import re
from os.path import basename
from urlparse import urlsplit

url = "http://www.yahoo.com"
urlContent = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
# HTML image tag: 
imgUrls = re.findall('img .*?src="(.*?)"', urlContent)

# download all images
for imgUrl in imgUrls:
try:
imgData = urllib2.urlopen(imgUrl).read()
fileName = basename(urlsplit(imgUrl)[2])
output = open(fileName,'wb')
output.write(imgData)
output.close()
except:
pass

As you can see, the code above is incredibly simple. All it does is connect to the URL specified in the 'url' variable, searches for the HTML '<img>' tag using standard regular expressions and downloads whatever file is specified in the 'src' parameter. Earthshaking code? No. Useful? Yes!

The code could be made better if you added the ability to also parse URL's that were on the page and follow those to continue parsing. That way, you could point the program to a URL and have it automatically explore associated URL's and grab images from their sites too. Still, even as it is, it's pretty useful.

** Thanks to the folks at ActiveState for this Python recipe!

Book Review: I, Cyborg

2010-10-06T01:00:00.000-07:00

Dr. Kevin Warwick is perhaps the most interesting person you will ever meet. In the truest sense of the words, Dr. Warwick has successfully integrated robotics and other physically enhancing technologies into both his life and his body. He has, indeed, become a cyborg, and he's not done yet!

"I, Cyborg" is a book that will capture your imagination from the first page and not let go until you sadly read the last paragraph. In the book, Dr. Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading, discusses experiments in cybernetics, brain enhancement, and life extension technology, some of which have had surprising results. You will be continually surprised at how relevant an extremely high tech book written in 2004 is to the science we're exploring today and you're sure to be left with wonder at how little progress we've actually made in life enhancement through technology over the last six years.

Overall, the book is really an exploration of Dr. Warwick's self-experimentation with crossroad detours into broader topics including bioethics and just how far we can push the human body through technology before we hit a virtual wall. The book definitely answers many questions, but, I think, raises just as many at the same time.

All-in-all, while I've just gotten deep within the book myself, I think it's a fantastic read and recommend it to you if you're even remotely interested in human technological enhancement.

Ubuntu 10.10: Nothing new here, move along please

2010-10-05T02:41:00.000-07:00

Last night, I decided to bite the bullet and see what all the fuss around the upcoming release of Ubuntu 10.10 was all about. So I pulled out my external hard drive and installed the software, expecting to see enormously huge leaps and bounds in the progress of the OS. What I got instead was a mildly disappointing waste of my time that will make sure I won't be upgrading my os until the next LTS release in 2011.

Ubuntu 10.10, for all the typical hype Canonical puts behind these new releases, really doesn't add anything that would benefit a typical desktop user and, especially, a power user. In the desktop edition of the software there are six changes:

1. GNOME has been updated to the latest version
2. Evolution Mail has been updated to a new, faster, version
3. Shotwell has replaced F-Spot as the default photo management software
4. The sound indicator now has play, pause, forward, and back buttons
5. The software center has an updated look and feel
6. Gwibber has been updated to work with the new Twitter oAuth system

None of these things are going to matter to the average user and, I believe, the switch to Shotwell from F-Spot is actually a step BACK for the distro. But, with the way Canonical is pimping this release as the greatest thing since sliced bread, many novice users probably won't take the time to find that out. Instead, they will rush to upgrade their systems in a glassy eyed greed for new features that aren't there. Of course, that upgrade will come with tons of new problems that will need to be worked out by updates over the next few weeks and months and some users might be left with an entirely non-functioning system just because they wanted the latest and greatest upgrade which is, at best, a snorefest.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the importance of interface upgrades. I know that one of the things that makes Ubuntu so popular is that it looks so damn good. It can just about go head to head with Windows 7 and compete on look and feel and that's a very good thing. But why do we need an entire release just to implement the six features listed above? Does Microsoft wait to implement new, non-integral, parts of the OS until there's a new version of Windows out? Of course not! Canonical pushes these silly do-nothing upgrades to give users the appearance of movement and cutting edge. In the end, you end up with a slightly disappointing release like 10.10, one which I'm going to skip for the time being.

What I'm more excited about is the next LTS release - ~~11.10~~ 12.04 I believe. It seems that the LTS releases are where the magic usually happens in Ubuntu and I suspect that 12.04 is going to be no different. I expect a lot of movement on the GNOME desktop, huge improvements to the Software Center, tons of work on Ubuntu One, and a lot of new hardware support. That's been the case with other LTS releases and I hope that continues to be true here.

Overall, I'd suggest skipping the 10.10 release and waiting for either 12.04 or 12.10 before doing an upgrade. Right now, there's just nothing really that exciting to see.