Most people will know that it's hard for the m68k port to keep up with unstable. Mostly because the hardware is not the fastest anymore, but usually we could work around this problem by throwing more hardware onto it. But there are sometimes non-m68k problems that prevent the port from keeping up like, let's say, no wanna-build access anymore, because all ssh pubkeys have been revoked due to DSA-1571 (OpenSSL).
The problem was mentioned on debian-68k mailing list, starting a discussion about the implications for m68k.
Some weeks after the incidence, the problem still existed and there was some discussion again how to proceed and it was tried to get the keys in again. And luckily there was some progress.

But that didn't last long and finally there was yet another attempt to get wanna-build working again for m68k.
As of this writing, there wasn't any success in getting wanna-build access back and after 2 months since the DSA-1571 incident, m68k is not allowed to build packages from wanna-build, because somebody didn't feel like adding some ssh pubkeys.

Maybe that person is overloaded with other work or such, but this means that this person puts extra workload on other people that are scheduling packages on multiple buildds for about 2 months now, although there is other work to do for the involved porters than acting as a human wanna-build.

I'm very disappointed by those who have failed to update the wanna-build ACLs in a timely manner for this long. And I'm very thankful of everyone who tried to help and especially of Stephen Marenka who acted as a human wanna-build in the meanwhile!

Some years ago, when I hacked on a TDB backend for Evolution Data Server (EDS), I also wrote something about writing some command line tools for accessing my contacts and so on. I've finally gotten my act together and wrote the necessary glue to have addres completion between Gnus and EDS. It's nowhere as feature-complete as BBDB is, but it allows you to complete addresses, at least. Get it from git (gitweb). I'll hopefully expand it a little bit and cut a release fairly soon.

Since the launch of Identi.ca a few weeks ago, I've had a very busy time. Not much sleep, but lots of fulfilling and exciting work. It's invigorating to work on something that is popular and that you believe in. And I'm glad that the Franklin Street Statement so succinctly encapsulates those beliefs. As some people may have read in my previous blog post about the motivations behind creating Identi.ca (see Journal/14 Messidor CCXVI), I was part of a group convened at the FSF to discuss the impact of the growth of software as a service on user autonomy. It was a very loose organization of hackers, activists, and scholars who come from different backgrounds but all share an interest in user rights online. As computing moves into "the cloud" (see cloud computing), what power does the user retain to control their own computing experience? As much of our social lives -- romance, family, work, friends -- becomes Web-enhanced, what can we do to assert our right to manage that data and its use? How can software developers and service providers gauge their own proper ethical behaviour, and how can users of services judge what is and is not acceptable to use? We didn't come up with any easy answers, but we've summarized our thinking in a new document: the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services. In essence, we've tried to point a direction towards what software developers, service providers, and software users should think hard about when thinking about network services. Our group will continue to explore these issues on our new group blog, http://autonomo.us/ . We're going to concentrate on the effects of software services on user autonomy -- people's ability to make their own informed choices about their data and creative works and the software that processes them. It is a realm that as a society -- a cluster of societies -- we're only beginning to understand, and I think that there is still a lot of exploration to do. Autonomo.us includes a wiki where we'll be exploring some of these ideas, and the blog will feature guest submissions about the subject. We're a loose and unofficial group with some smiling benevolence but no sanction from the FSF or any related organization, so we're really going to dig into some of the gray areas of this issue without worrying about making official statements for any one organization. I'm looking forward to the coming months and I hope this issue captures the imagination of the Web's Open Source and Open Content communities. P.S. You can see the FSF press release about the statement and the launch of autonomo.us. tags: autonomy franklinstreet softwareasaservice

Open Service Definition On a related note, one of the first organizations to approach the issue of Open Services has been the Open Knowledge Foundation. Today they've launched the 1.0 version of the Open Software Service Definition (OSSD). I think the OSSD 1.0 is a great step. It's a bar against which we can start measuring Open Software Services. For example, I think that Identi.ca meets the requirements of the OSSD. Other sites, like Wikipedia, are also clearly compliant. Some services that I really like, such as OpenStreetMap and geonames.org, seem to be compliant. But are they? It's good to start this investigation. I think other kinds of services are on their way there. The announcement by Reddit that their code will now be Open Source is a great step for user autonomy in the social news arena. Now, Reddit needs to consider what an Open Content/Open Data policy would mean for their service... or see others implement it on other sites. I look forward to a rich ecology of open software services growing, now that we have a name for it and a clear community of people interested in the topic. tags: autonomy ossd openknowledge

So I am giving a talk this Friday at the University and here is the English introduction to my talk/paper and below is the Portuguese one. It starts at 9 am in Porto Alegre, Brazil and is being streamed. *O Departamento de P s-Gradua o da Antropologia e a Associa o Software Livre.org ...

alex@brithombar:~$ finger tolimar@db.debian.org
[db.debian.org]
uid=tolimar,ou=users,dc=debian,dc=org
First name: Alexander
Last name: Reichle-Schmehl
Email: Alexander Reichle-Schmehl
URL: http://www.schmehl.info/
IRC nickname: Tolimar
Jabber ID: tolimar@jabber.ccc.de
Fingerprint: 46CD D292 0692 D5A2 8F81 2E48 0717 74E0 00D8 CD16
Key block: finger tolimar/key@db.debian.org

alex@brithombar$ gpg --edit-key 00D8CD16
Secret key is available.

pub 1024D/00D8CD16 created: 2002-09-28 expires: never usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
sub 1024g/C5F3F285 created: 2002-09-28 expires: never usage: E
[ultimate] (1). Alexander Schmehl (university) <schmehl@cs.uni-frankfurt.de>
[ultimate] (2) Alexander Schmehl (privat) <alexander@schmehl.info>
[ultimate] (3) Alexander Schmehl (university) <schmehl@informatik.uni-frankfurt.de>
[ultimate] (4) Alexander Schmehl <tolimar@debian.org>
[ revoked] (5) Alexander Schmehl < deleted >
[ultimate] (6) Alexander Schmehl <schmehl@uni-hildesheim.de>
Please note that the shown key validity is not necessarily correct
unless you restart the program.

Command> adduid
Real name: Alexander Reichle-Schmehl
Email address: tolimar@debian.org
Comment:
You selected this USER-ID:
"Alexander Reichle-Schmehl "

Change (N)ame, (C)omment, (E)mail or (O)kay/(Q)uit? o

You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Alexander Schmehl (university) "
1024-bit DSA key, ID 00D8CD16, created 2002-09-28


pub 1024D/00D8CD16 created: 2002-09-28 expires: never usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
sub 1024g/C5F3F285 created: 2002-09-28 expires: never usage: E
[ultimate] (1). Alexander Schmehl (university) <schmehl@cs.uni-frankfurt.de>
[ultimate] (2) Alexander Schmehl (privat) <alexander@schmehl.info>
[ultimate] (3) Alexander Schmehl (university) <schmehl@informatik.uni-frankfurt.de>
[ultimate] (4) Alexander Schmehl <tolimar@debian.org>
[ revoked] (5) Alexander Schmehl < deleted >
[ultimate] (6) Alexander Schmehl <schmehl@uni-hildesheim.de>
[ultimate] (7) Alexander Reichle-Schmehl <tolimar@debian.org>

Command> save

alex@brithombar$ gpg --send-key 00D8CD16
gpg: sending key 00D8CD16 to hkp server keyserver.noreply.org

It's official, I am revoking my gpg key because after my laptop returned from service[1] I realized is a bad idea to change the passphrase just before a long break away from a routine that would help the brain to cement the new passphrase. In other words, I forgot the passphrase.

So, let's get the revocation certificate printout and revoke that gpg and generate a new one. All is good and fine until you realize that I (capital i) and l (low case L ) look very much the same on paper. Oops!

So, what do you do? How many I/l -s are there in the certificate? Let's find out...


0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ cat template
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: A revocation certificate should follow

iEkEIBECAAkFAkbYOQUCHQIACgkQY8Chqv3NRNquGgCgxdMDrhycNcoJsaeeg7hk
8vVJZzsAnRicsfjcZnUtmLIsys6KK48FbJ4h
=I5o9
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Well, I'm not going to count, I'll remove the header and footer and see from there...

0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ cat template.in tr -d '[a-zA-HJ-Z0-9=]'
II
I
I

Ok, so we have 16 possible combinations, not that many.

0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ for i in l I ; do for j in l I ; do for k in l I ; do for l in l I ; do cat template.in sed -e "s#I#$i#" -e "s#I#$j#" -e "s#I#$k#" -e "s#I#$l#" > $i$j$k$l.mid ; done ; done ; done ; done
0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ md5sum *.mid
eab3a5e312bc0314ac2b3d4536bda2f6 IIII.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 IIIl.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 IIlI.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc IIll.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 IlII.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc IlIl.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc IllI.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc Illl.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 lIII.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc lIIl.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc lIlI.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc lIll.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc llII.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc llIl.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc lllI.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc llll.mid

Oops, that's not ok... I guess I've been replacing some of the characters more than once.

Take 2:
0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ for i in l I ; do for j in l I ; do for k in l I ; do for l in l I ; do cat template.in tr 'Il' '-' sed -e "s#-#$i#" -e "s#-#$j#" -e "s#-#$k#" -e "s#-#$l#" > $i$j$k$l.mid ; done ; done ; done ; done
0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ md5sum *.mid
eab3a5e312bc0314ac2b3d4536bda2f6 IIII.mid
eab3a5e312bc0314ac2b3d4536bda2f6 IIIl.mid
eab3a5e312bc0314ac2b3d4536bda2f6 IIlI.mid
eab3a5e312bc0314ac2b3d4536bda2f6 IIll.mid
7150fa775c83c276223a30d373671333 IlII.mid
7150fa775c83c276223a30d373671333 IlIl.mid
7150fa775c83c276223a30d373671333 IllI.mid
7150fa775c83c276223a30d373671333 Illl.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 lIII.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 lIIl.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 lIlI.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 lIll.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc llII.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc llIl.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc lllI.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc llll.mid

Oops, that's not good either. Doh, sed works on lines.

Take 3:

Make a one line out of the template and try again:

0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ cat template.in
iEkEIBECAAkFAkbYOQUCHQIACgkQY8Chqv3NRNquGgCgxdMDrhycNcoJsaeeg7hk8vVJZzsAnRicsfjcZnUtmLIsys6KK48FbJ4h=I5o9

0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ for i in l I ; do for j in l I ; do for k in l I ; do for l in l I ; do cat template.in tr 'I' '-' tr 'l' '-' sed -e "s#-#$i#" -e "s#-#$j#" -e "s#-#$k#" -e "s#-#$l#" > $i$j$k$l.mid ; done ; done ; done ; done
0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ md5sum *.mid
66ab0a0bed219db8499debabb9a41c0b IIII.mid
e02c1751c4491ce5db1ebe9e64d8eadc IIIl.mid
c96a33f821d3fba84f655aa986084320 IIlI.mid
998c5c4219a5afdd77f82c9fc9818f6f IIll.mid
e08fe6c5380765d12c4f5e4090a7d9c6 IlII.mid
24241b58c231900b02ebb0410183983e IlIl.mid
72040a77e7cca9a91abf2bb0d51c00dd IllI.mid
a02e8645f3593f5c3549b49adef04bc2 Illl.mid
99a1a47c853ed760ef1f58cba7b75916 lIII.mid
c48bf75f30be46ec576a46a1d5664a93 lIIl.mid
717e9dfdc0d3fba973ba66ccb57d69dc lIlI.mid
3e9a2c937fd269d85c09b449b4da17de lIll.mid
4d283333d1d62086328dbc72425a645d llII.mid
542a7c00e99aad5137975581e57a92c9 llIl.mid
ef0e0a2daad7a933b620331a86455c23 lllI.mid
bdf852887308830475a506f8daad9624 llll.mid

That's better. Now let's put those lines back in place:

0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ for I in *.mid ; do cat $I sed -e 's#\(eeg7hk\)#\1-#' -e 's#\(K48FbJ4h\)#\1-#' tr '-' '\n' > $I.good ; done


And revoke that key...

0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ for I in *.mid.good ; do echo "$I:" && (cat header $I footer) > template && gpg --import -a template ; done
IIII.mid.good:
gpg: CRC error; 73689A - 239A3D
gpg: read_block: read error: invalid keyring
gpg: import from template' failed: invalid keyring
gpg: Total number processed: 0
IIIl.mid.good:
gpg: CRC error; 73689A - 979A3D
gpg: read_block: read error: invalid keyring
gpg: import from template' failed: invalid keyring
gpg: Total number processed: 0
IIlI.mid.good:
gpg: key FDCD44DA: "Eddy Petri or " revocation certificate imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: new key revocations: 1
gpg: public key 67D8E867 is 987014 seconds newer than the signature
gpg: public key 67D8E867 is 987014 seconds newer than the signature
gpg: public key 67D8E867 is 987029 seconds newer than the signature
gpg: 3 marginal(s) needed, 1 complete(s) needed, PGP trust model
gpg: depth: 0 valid: 2 signed: 139 trust: 0-, 0q, 0n, 0m, 0f, 2u
gpg: depth: 1 valid: 139 signed: 667 trust: 138-, 0q, 0n, 1m, 0f, 0u
gpg: next trustdb check due at 2008-10-09
IIll.mid.good:
gpg: CRC error; 239A3D - 979A3D
gpg: read_block: read error: invalid keyring
gpg: import from template' failed: invalid keyring
gpg: Total number processed: 0


Cool!


[1] I know is almost a half a year, but I've been busy and hoping

I read 7 Ways Religion is Detrimental to Science, and thought it would be an interesting read. It was, but I don't think it really made sense. Let's look at the 7 ways they highlighted:

1. Faith and the Scientific Method are Opposites

The article states:

Faith is a belief in an idea regardless of the evidence for or against it.

Actually, that's not true at all, at least for traditional Christianity. (Note that traditional Christianity is not the same as fundamentalism). Marcus J. Borg describes faith in four ways:

Fiducia -- trusting in God. Borg says, "Faith . . . [means] we trust in God as the one upon whom we rely, as our support and foundation and ground, as our safe place."

Fidelitas -- loyalty, or "the comment of the self at its deepest level, the commitment of the 'heart'. Faith as fidelitas does not mean faithfulness to statements about God. . . Fidelitas refers to a radical centering in God."

Visio -- a way of seeing -- "a way of seeing the whole, a way of seeing 'what is'. . . the ability to love and to be present to the moment. It generates a 'willingness to spend and be spent' for the sake of a vision that goes beyond ourselves."

Assensus -- perhaps the closest to what the author meant, is "faith as belief." Borg goes on to add:

The notion that Christian faith is primarily . . . about belief, about a "head" matter, is recent. . . For many, Christian faith began to mean believing questionable things to be true. . . this is the most widespread contemporary understanding of "belief".

This is very different from what faith as assensus meant. . . A deep but humble (and therefore imprecise) understanding of Christian faith as assensus, as involving affirmation of the centrality of God as known in the Bible and Jesus, is very close to faith as vision. It is a way of seeing reality.

As a Christian, I do not find the scientific method to be a problem. I find it to be enlightening in all sorts of matters, including even the history of religion in some instances. Christian faith is not about believing in certain ideas (such as the world being created in 6 literal 24-hour days), though there are those that distort it to be so. Rather, Christian faith is about living your life a certain way, about the meaning of life, about our duties to make the world a better place.

2. People Vote Base on Religious Ideas

The author says that "Stem Cells weren t the first time a body of research didn t get proper funding because some religious wack-jobs." Well, I agree that that was a problem. Non-religious people can vote in odd ways too. I argue that the rejection of stem-cell research goes against Christian teaching; after all, we are to help the least among us, and do not people with Alzheimer's qualify?

I think the author's point should have been "exremists have odd views." Extremists can be atheist, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or other religions. Religion does not have a monopoly on them.

3. Religion Removes the Need For Science

The author says:

When people are content to believe in something that explains why they are here, even if it is wrong, they become less interested in other ideas. Religion often leads people to believe that they have all the answers. Science is self-correcting in that nobody assumes they are absolutely correct.

That is incorrect on several levels. First, science cannot explain why we are here. It can explain some of the mechanics. As an example, let us take for granted that modern scientific thought on the origin of humanity is correct: that there was a Big Bang, that single-celled creatures evolved on earth, and that human life eventually evolved through a complex process of evolution and natural selection. Fine; this does not contradict religion in any way. Science and religion answer different questions. Science answers "how". Religion answers "why". Science cannot answer the question "Why was there a big bang?" or "Did the evolution of humanity serve a larger purpose?"

Moreover, religion should not assume that they have all the answers, either. The canonical Christian Bible was mostly fixed within a few centuries AD. Life in 200AD was a lot different from life today. Part of the reason there are many different groups of Christians is the complexity of applying the stories in the Bible to modern life. The ideas in any given denomination evolve over time, too. I think it would be the height of hubris for anyone, religious or not, to claim that he or she had all the answers. Again, I know that some religious people act that way, but then so do some atheists or agnostics.

4. People Lean on Religion, When They Could Benefit From Science

The author of "7 Ways" cites the quite rare case where a child dies of a curable disease while his/her parents pray, refusing medical care. This is an extreme position that is not shared by the vast majority of religious people. Most religious people are perfectly content to use the latest medical care.

Meditation or prayer does not replace medical care; it supplements it. Scientific studies have even demonstrated its effectiveness.

5. The Church Takes Up Natural Resources

The original author states that "The land that churches take up around the world could be used to build schools, homes, recreational buildings and commercial operations." This is perhaps the most frivolous of arguments. Putting aside the fact that many churches operate schools, churches are often one of the few ways that modern city dwellers have to form a sense of community. They are not just places to engage in religion. They are places to meditate, to get away from it all, to meet your neighbors, to vote.

6. The Church Takes Up Monetary Resources

The original author says "if people donated to scientific advancement like they did to the church, imagine where we would be today." It's not a pleasant picture. Religion, and institutions supported primarily because of the teaching of religion, are the people that feed the hungry after natural disasters, that operate food pantries (our church operates the only one in our community, and it's open to anyone without any questions or talk about religion), that operate schools in disadvantaged areas, that have spread the whole idea of fair trade for third-world artisans, etc.

It is true that acts of evil have been committed in the name of the church, too. It is also unquestionably true that some church groups spend money more carefully than others. As with any donation, people should be careful where they give. Government-operated research studies are not necessarily a good use of money, either.

7. Religion is A Strong Meme

The author of the original story seems to be responding to a particular brand of Christianity: what Borg calls "literal-factual" religion. There are quite a few people that take that stand. They are sometimes inaccurately referred to as "evangelicals" or the "religious right"; while there is some overlap between the groups, they are not one and the same. The people with the literal-factual view are not representative of the whole.

More interestingly, Borg points out that the literal-factual view was actually a response to the development of the scientific method during the Enlightenment. As the modern idea of truth moved to literal, factual, provable truth, some Christians grew defensive about their faith, and started to look for "scientific" ways to prove that the world was created in 6 days, etc. in an attempt to show the world that Christianity fit their new notion of truth.

That makes a compelling argument that the scientific method is the stronger meme in today's Western world -- so strong that the author of the rant against religion has apparently forgotten the more prevalant -- both throughout history and today -- view of Christianity that is "more than" Science, not at odds with science.

Back in 1997, long before the days of Youtube, there was a film short called Troops. Troops is about 10 minutes long, and an absolutely hilarious piece of work. It's done in the style of Cops, but set on Tatooine in the Star Wars universe. Many people today credit it with kickstarting the fan film genre and inspiring what has evolved into stars of Youtube.

I remember giving a talk at the Air Capitol Linux Users Group (Wichita, KS). I brought with me my laptop, and had downloaded Troops onto it. I played it for the group. This was at a time when being able to play video on a laptop was something new and interesting, and under Linux no less, even more so. Also, at a time when video of this size may have taken a day to download. Everyone there loved it. I think I used xanim to play it (remember that?)

Anyhow, you can still download that same original file from theforce.net. Or, for the less patient, just watch it here:

There seem to be some heat about the new Firefox feature that only allows you to open https urls with untrusted certificate after 5 clicks. The situation is actually worse than what is depicted. Why? Because not only did they put crap to their users, and actually, if they want to, that’s their problem, but they also imposed their crap on embedders. Yes, this means applications such as epiphany, kazehakase, galeon, and others *must* use this crap. I know, there is a browser.xul.error_pages.enabled to disable the error page (note it also disables standard network connection error messages). But, the alternative is not any better: It opens a dialog, with raw HTML in it, allowing to… do nothing. That’s it, you can only acknowledge you’ve been denied access to the so-called untrusted site. The best part is that these applications can’t (or maybe they can, but in several months nobody found how) make the exception dialog work properly: the user will have to enter, himself, the url to add the exception for. And before even reaching the state where you can get the dialog to open from the error page, or even get the buttons to be displayed in the error page itself, you have to add clutter to your application code. For those still wondering what happened to the Gecko platform or whatever you call it (xulrunner, libxul, mozilla-embed, etc.), here is your answer: Gecko evolves with what Firefox needs. If your application needs something else, well, too bad for you. Firefox developers obviously have a big problem taking embedders into consideration when they change the Gecko API, and while it can be fixed afterwards, it’s not a good thing to “tag” a Gecko milestone at the same time as a Firefox release under such conditions. Anyways, what I did in the xulrunner-1.9 package is to forward-port the old interfaces (nsIBadCertListener) allowing embedders to have their own UI for this. While it was certainly far from perfect (and displaying as many dialogs as different errors on a certificate is definitely not something nice), it is still better than something not working at all.

As some of you may know, the Euro 2008 football championships are on in Austria and Switzerland at the moment. I am not a football fan at all, although I won t mind watching a game between two skilled and fairplaying teams (which is becoming a rarity, I heard). But I don t care much about it, unless it negatively affects those who don t care (which includes myself). For instance, last night, after Germany beat Turkey in the semi-finals, a group of hooligans roamed about in Dresden and vandalised Turkish food shops and hurt the people working there (German only). I can kind of understand fans getting overly excited and driving their cars madly through the city, honking the horns at frequencies directly proportional to their cumulative personality disorders (or inversely proportional to their penis size), but violence in reaction to winning? Fuck you, you low pieces of shit. ! Update: there seems to be no information on whether the attackers were German. A foreigner living in Berlin has written in to complain that my blog post casts a negative light onto Germany in terms of hostility towards foreigners, which he disputes. Germany has had to fight that image for decades, and my blog post puts fresh petrol on the fire. I do not intend that. I leave it up to each individual to make up their own mind, and to me, a group of hooligans is in no way representative of an entire nation. End update Quite clearly, there are people on the street who should be locked up. I won t go there though, at least not in this post. Instead, let s talk more about football and its effects, because encouraging this sort of violence is only one of many consequences, which we are forced to tolerate in the interest of the public. Everyone wants football, right? What follows are somewhat related, but otherwise incoherent rants. Enjoy, or stop reading. I m not a misanthrope, I think. There are many other aspects of this football event which make me want to throw up. One of them is the (sight of the) average organism who participates in the craze. Look at them! Monkeys are more intelligent than that! Has evolution taken a 180 degree turn? Of course, you can t blame the individuals, as their brains have been flooded and effectively shut off, so they don t make any trouble when they trott along the path to dumbification. It s the big companies and the media industry, blinded by short sight, do everything in their power to speed up this decline, fueling the consumerism of the stupified morons making up our the populace, just for the paycheck at the end of the day. The UEFA is primarily a huge money-making machine, and if you want more information on that I suggest that you look a bit into the distribution of media rights for the event. Another instance, which has a little more relevance to the normal person on the street is their ticket distribution: people have to pay hundreds of Euros to UEFA a year before the event for a chance to be given a ticket for any random day. The ticket is made out in their name and cannot be transferred. If you can t make the game, you can return the ticket to get you money back after the event. If you don t get a ticket, you ll also get your money back a year later. Interest-free loans, anyone? But hey, I actually don t care about most of that. Let those who want to consume consume, let those who can t entertain themselves watch television, let the UEFA and media people get rich by making people stupid, and let me go about my daily business. We held a small barbeque party some days ago, and I went out to buy a few kegs of beer from a local brewery. That was my first confrontation with the football circus, as the brewery happens to be about half a kilometre from the stadium where a match was on that night. It took me at least 40 minutes until I had argued successfully with five police officers and could pick up the kegs. Swap brewery for any of the other shops in the area, who did not receive any compensation whatsoever, and you ll note how the football circus takes priority over everyone s everyday life, even if you don t give a single flying food for the sport. I love Zurich, and just like most people, taking a stroll along the lakeside, between Bellevue and the Chinese Garden on a sunny afternoon is one of the more delightful ways to spend time in the city and enjoy its beauty unless they are putting up massive public viewing areas everywhere (and make shitloads of noise in doing so), and even dump elevated VIP platforms into the lake to add noise in the view to the noise in the ear. The official entities of Switzerland surely pushed for the event, as it drives tourism and brings money into the country. But were the people actually considered? Could we have done anything against this craze? I bet noone ever asked. I find it very sad how much garbage these fan monkeys produce. Switzerland is well-organised, and there are plenty of garbage cans around, many of which have been put in place specifically for the event, but it s already too much to ask of these low organisms to put the shit left from their consumption into those bins. And I won t even go near the question of how much energy this entire event wastes. Yay entertainment! Yay stupification of the populace! If you have football to celebrate, you don t have to consider the environment, or poverty, or other such annoying issues. Sunday night, the circus will come to an end, and what ll be left is a few days of cleaning and tearing down all the structures. Then this place will finally retun back to normal, and there ll be a little less idiots on the street, at least in the places I frequent. NP: Dimmer: There My Dear

Today I received a Dell PowerEDGE T105 for use by a client. My client had some servers for development and testing hosted in a server room at significant expense. They also needed an offsite backup of critical data. So I suggested that they buy a cheap server-class machine, put it on a fast ADSL connection at their home, and use Xen DomU’s on that for development, testing, and backup. My client liked the concept but didn’t like the idea of having a server in his home. So I’m going to run the server from my home. I selected a Dell PowerEDGE tower system because it’s the cheapest server-class machine that can be purchased new. I have a slight preference for HP hardware but HP gear is probably more expensive and they are not a customer focussed company (they couldn’t even give me a price). So exactly a week after placing my order I received my shiny new Dell system, and it didn’t work. I booted a CentOS CD and ran “memtest” and the machine performed a hard reset. When it booted again it informed me that the event log had a message, and the message was “Uncorrectable ECC Error” with extra data of “DIMM 2,2“. While it sucks quite badly to receive a new machine that doesn’t work, that’s about the best result you can hope for when you have a serious error on the motherboard or the RAM. A machine without ECC memory would probably just randomly crash every so often and maybe lose data (see my previous post on the relative merits of ECC RAM and RAID [1]). So I phoned up Dell (it’s a pity that their “Packing Slip” was a low quality photocopy which didn’t allow me to read their phone number and that the shipping box also didn’t include the number so I had to look them up on the web) to get technical support. Once we had established that by removing the DIMMs and reinserting them I had proved that there was a hardware fault they agreed to send out a technician with a replacement motherboard and RAM. I’m now glad that I bought the RAM from Dell. Dell’s business model seems to revolve around low base prices for hardware and then extremely high prices for extras, for example Dell sells 1TB SATA disks for $818.40 while MSY [1] has them for $215 or $233 depending on brand. When I get the machine working I will buy two 1TB disks from MSY (or another company with similar prices). Not only does that save some money but it also means that I can get different brands of disk. I believe that having different brands of hard disk in a RAID-1 array will decrease the probability of having them both fail at the same time. One interesting thing about the PowerEdge T105 is that Dell will only sell two disks for it, but it has four SATA connectors on the motherboard, one is used for a SATA DVD player so it would be easy to support three disks. Four disks could be installed if a PCIe SATA controller was used (one in the space for a FDD and another in the space for a second CD/DVD drive), and if you were prepared to go without a CD/DVD drive then five internal disks could probably work. But without any special hardware the space for a second CD/DVD drive is just begging to be used for a third hard disk, most servers only use the primary CD/DVD drive for installing the OS and I expect that the demand for two CD/DVD drives in a server is extremely low. Personally I would prefer it if servers shipped with external USB DVD drives for installing the OS. Then when I install a server room I could leave one or two drives there in case a system recovery is needed and use the rest for desktop machines. One thing that they seem to have messed up is the lack of a filter for the air intake fan at the front of the case. The Opteron CPU has a fan that’s about 11cm wide which sucks in air from the front of the machine, in front of that fan there is a 4cm gap which would nicely fit a little sponge filter. Either they messed up the design or somehow my air filter got lost in transit. Incidentally if you want to buy from Dell in Australia then you need to configure your OS to not use ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification [2] as the Dell web servers used for sales rejects all connections from hosts with ECN enabled. It’s interesting that the web servers used for providing promotional information work fine with ECN and it’s only if you want to buy that it bites you. But in spite of these issues, I am still happy with Dell overall. Their machine was DOA, that happens sometimes and the next day service is good (NB I didn’t pay extra for better service). I expect that they will fix it tomorrow and I’ll buy more of their gear in future. Update: I forgot to mention that Dell shipped the machine with two power cables. While two power cables is a good thing for the more expensive servers that have redundant PSUs, for a machine with only one PSU it’s a bit of a waste. For some time I’ve been collecting computer power cables faster than I’ve been using them (due to machines dying and due to clients who want machines but already have spare power cables). So I’ve started giving them away at meetings of my local LUG. At the last meeting I gave away a bag of power cables and I plan to keep taking cables to the meetings until people stop accepting them.

• [0] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/06/13/ecc-ram-vs-raid/


• [1] http://www.msy.com.au/


• [2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3168.txt

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When it comes to research and writing, anthropologists are notorious for being slow as molasses. It takes, on average, 9 years to finish grad school and then another 3-6 years before you write and publish your first book. Such is the sometimes frustrating pace of academia. But sometimes it is worth the wait as this new book, Two Bits, the Cultural Significance of Free Software by the anthropologist of science and technology Chris Kelty, makes clear. I am pretty intimate with the details of the book as ck was one of my dissertation committee members. I have read earlier versions and was fortunate enough to teach the final version to a small group of graduate students last spring. While there have been previous books on the subject of open source or peer-to-peer production more generally, this is the first book to delve deep, analytically and historically, into the cultural significance of free software. And the best part is that ck managed (I am not sure how but he did) to convince Duke University Press to release the whole book under a CC license. So download it to your heart’s delight and if you find it useful, do order a treeware copy (as you can’t beat that for easy and comfortable reading). For the developers out there, I would suggest starting with the introduction, which provides an initial overview of some of the main themes he develops and then I would dig into part two where the historical chapters reside and then loop back to the theoretical chapters in part one or continue to part three. Trust me, these will fascinate and surprise even those geeks with a relatively deep historical sense of this world. In fact, my very favorite academic piece on free software exists in these pages: and is the chapter on the history of the actual conflict between James Gosling and Richard Stallman that led to the creation of the GNU General Public License. Here is a small excerpt to whet your appetite:

In brief the controversy was this: in 1983 James Gosling decided to sell his version of EMACS a version written in C for UNIX called GOSMACS to a commercial software vendor called Unipress. GOSMACS, the second most famous implementation of EMACS (after Stallman s itself ), was written when Gosling was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. For years, Gosling had distributed GOSMACS by himself and had run a mailing list on Usenet, on which he answered queries and discussed extensions. Gosling had explicitly asked people not to redistribute the program, but to come back to him (or send interested parties to him directly) for new versions, making GOSMACS more of a benevolent dictatorship than a commune. Gosling maintained his authority, but graciously accepted revisions and bug-fixes and extensions from users, incorporating them into new releases. Stallman s system, by contrast, allowed users to distribute their extensions themselves, as well as have them included in the official EMACS. By 1983, Gosling had decided he was unable to effectively maintain and support GOSMACS a task he considered the proper role of a corporation.
[ . . .]
Indeed, the general irony of this complicated situation was certainly not as evident as it might have been given the emotional tone of the debates: Stallman was using code from Gosling based on permission Gosling had given to Labalme, but Labalme had written code for Gosling which Gosling had commercialized without telling Labalme conceivably, but not likely, the same code. Furthermore, all of them were creating software that had been originally conceived in large part by Stallman (but based on ideas and work on TECO, an editor written twenty years before EMACS), who was now busy rewriting the very software Gosling had rewritten for UNIX. The once proud hacker ethic that Labalme mentions would thus amount not so much to an explicit belief in sharing so much as a fast-and-loose practice of making contributions and fixes without documenting them, giving oral permission to use and reuse, and losing records that may or may not have existed hardly a noble enterprise.
[. . .]

The story is a lively one, punctuated with some great e-mail “moments,” and gives you a play-by-play sense of how it is that free software become so entangled with the law and how the unwritten norms that guided sharing were violated to then become transformed, explicit, and written. The other chapter that will also fascinate those who want a deeper sense of this history is on UNIX and its role in creating the technical and collaborative conditions necessary to secure the explosion of free software years later. The story of the norms of sharing source code is, not by accident, writes Kelty, also the history of the UNIX operating system. This connection has been made by others but not shown in any historical detail as it is done in this book. For those interested in more anthropological issues, the first few chapters is where this type of more conceptual theorizing is at. Chris Kelty introduces the master trope of his book: the recursive public which is an idea that feeds into a longer academic debate, inaugurated by Jurgen Habermas, on the role of publicity, dialogue, and circulation of ideas and texts in cementing a democratic sphere. Many others, such as Charles Taylor, Michael Warner, and Nancy Fraser have since refigured and rehashed the meaning publics and public debate but there have been few ethnographies on the topic. It is here where Chris Kelty intervenes most forcefully to conceptualize publics in explicitly ethnographic terms and in an arena technology and the Internet which is often left undertheorized by cultural theorists. There is a lot more in the book (the third section examines some of the various political modulations of free software, such as Connexions and Creative Commons) but instead of saying any more, I will just leave you with his definition of a recursive public and again urge you to check out the book for yourself!

A recursive public is a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives.

After some time and various patches there's a new version of xscreensaver that fixes a lot of issues with 5.05 and XineRama. Thanks to all that submitted patches: Bas Zoetekouw, Vincent Crevot, Lionel Elie Mamane and Daniel Dickinson for the desktop file. The deb files are available here along with the dsc, changes, diff.gz and orig.tar.gz files. If you don't use i386 then do:

dget --build \
http://debian.rivco.info/xscreensaver/5.05-3/xscreensaver_5.05-3.dsc

This weekend I finally picked up my German bow from Devon after it got damaged earlier this year (picture hidden behind this link to protect the squeamish). The repair was done to an amazingly high standard, with the join literally invisible modulo the brass pins on the top. I stayed with my grandparents, which was delightful as well as educational - I think I’ve located the source of my affection for cats. Curiously, I think I saw Ian Jackson on the train opposite me on the way back, but I don’t think he recognised me. I should probably wear more Debian t-shirts.

Ten years ago, most of us wouldn't have dreamt we'd be managing terabits of storage, tens of megabits of bandwidth, arrays of network-distributed services. The height of a programmer's worry would likely be choice of UI toolkit or finding the right way to indent code, and the height of consumer concern deciding which room to put the new computer in. Now the problems associated with managing large networks are becoming real for everyone, right down to the consumer level. Stupendously large amounts of computing resource are available at an instant. Your household probably has more than a terabyte of storage already. Issues such as single sign-on are going to hit home over the next year, as networked computing and entertainment devices profilerate. Features such as Apple's Time Machine will be increasingly vital — software that makes traditionally gnarly sysadmin tasks consumer-friendly. The rebranding of .Mac into "Mobile Me" is also a step in this direction. The impact on developers As software developers, we also have to cope with the effects of this resource-richness. For small sums of money we can get access to large computing clusters, geographically redundant hosting services. Our programs have left the desktop and found their new home on the web. System administration issues loom large upon us, security concerns lurk auspiciously in the corners of our minds. Although the cost of infrastructure has dropped radically, other costs remain high and are going to stay that way. System administrators are not only grumpy, they demand high wages. Commercial software license fees spiral out of control: traditional per-CPU licensing models make little sense when you can quickly bring up tens of machines. The cost in power is already troubling large companies, and there's no reason to suspect the problems won't ripple down. Help is at hand from a variety of technologies. If they don't yet make massive resource management trivial, they at least make it possible. Some of these also inhabit the weird territory of being both the source of a problem and a solution at the same time: virtualization, for example. Distributed revision control systems Distributed revision control is a technology whose time has finally come in popular circles, thanks in part to Linus Torvald's Git system. DRCS has several important impacts on today's developer:

• Branching and, importantly, merging become much cheaper, allowing agile and flexible iterations of development.
• Loosely connected and geographically diverse development becomes much easier. Even within a single organization it is not uncommon to find teams spanning countries, time zones. Complex multi-site VPN setups aren't necessary when a few SSH keys can do the job.
• Revision control becomes packaging on the cheap. Like it or not, the mere tagging of a source tree has now become a valid option for releasing software.

All these trends lower the barrier to entry, increase collaboration and agility of development. You can the value of this as more software tools become free. Selling such tools is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, the advantages of sharing enable the developers at the sharp end to get their jobs done quicker. However, such increased agility and, well, messiness leave other problems to solve, which the next two technologies address. Virtualization Hardware-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, call it what you will. The ability to create what we used to call entire machines, pick them up and move them around the network is revolutionary, and it's something that will have a real impact on regular developers. The benefits are at several levels.

• Agile infrastructure — a ready supply of new machines makes it a lot easier and cheaper to test different scenarios, architectures, and to separate concerns. If things go wrong, throw away the image and start over. It's all about cutting the administration load.
• A packaging solution — the new macroeconomics of software distribution mean that distributing entire machine images which communicate exclusively via the network is now a feasible way to distribute your software. We must adjust to the notion of distributing appliances, not code. We may mourn the lost crafts of creating RPMs or installers, but let's face it, it's now a waste of time.
• New business models — your application can now be delivered as a black-box appliance, circumventing compatibility issues, or as a service, with virtualization part of the solution to scaling.

Configuration management Computing is a zero-sum game, and despite our increased ability to create and distribute software, problems still exist. We just pushed them to the next level. In good part, this next level is the problem of configuration management. We now have networks and clusters of (virtual) machines, software so agile we need six decimal places to describe its revision levels, and network and authentication paths that are starting to tangle. How do we manage that? One thing developers crave is repeatability. That's why we love our makefiles, autoconf, Ant, rake and so on. It's the one time even the most imperative-minded programmer writes declarative code. We like to say "let the world be like this." Our new sprawling world lacks this feature, and the best of our old toolkits — .debs, RPMs — address things only at the level of packages in a single environment. So developers must look to the world of operations, a territory we probably thought we needn't enter. In this world the new "make" is called Puppet. You write recipes to describe how things ought to be, and Puppet will make it so. I've been spending some time digging into Puppet, and feel excited by the confidence it's giving me. Now my applications exceed single source trees, and single machines, it gives me the means to tie the whole together. This article was going to be solely about Puppet, but that will have to wait now for another time. It's likely you'll have played with virtual machines and distributed revision control, but have you tried Puppet yet? Give it a spin, and let your mind wander over the benefits for your organization and development approaches. Conclusions
For developers and users alike, our world is changing. Hardware, connectivity and increasingly software is becoming cheap or free. The solidity of the old things we put value on — real things you can touch like disks — is eroding. What really matters is our data, our creations, and their communication. If they don't quite yet exist in a universal "cloud" yet, they're certainly getting frisky. As vendors provide solutions for consumers to manage their new domestic infrastructure, developers must look to network-aware toolkits and operations techniques to manage and get the best from their emergent infrastructures. Also on this topic:

• In search of agile infrastructure for web applications (June 2006)
  

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So my Esc key broke today. Maybe due to high humidity last night -- the laptop was generating a lot of spurious lid open events earlier. New keyboard ordered, etc, nothing too unusual given the crummy nature of laptop keyboards (Fujitsu's in specific). The interesting thing though, is that even though I've remapped Caps Lock to generate Escape for now, this threw my typing off to an amazing extent. I don't just have trouble typing ^]:wq in vim. I have trouble typing arbitrary sentences in programs that don't use escape at all. Why? I don't touch type the way people are taught to in school, with fingers on the home keys. I touch type the way you learn to by typing a lot, ad-hoc, until your hands learn exactly how to type the common things you throw at them. This includes being able to type ^]:wq as fast as I can type "joey". My home keys are, approximatly:

Tab Q S X Space       Down . ; ' Enter

(Space and Down are covered by my thumbs.) This might seem a bit weird, but as a programmer, I hit tab a lot, and, enter lots of semicolons, periods, and quotes. As a human on the WWW, I scroll down a lot. As a command-line user, Enter is a key I hit a lot. That's my guesses why my fingers go there. This wasn't planned, it evolved. In fact, I have other home key locations, that are used for other activities too. Now that I'm typing in a lot of text here, my WPM has increased a lot, because my hands have moved closer to the center of the keyboard. Something like this.

      W E F V    J I O  

Although every time I've checked, it's been a slightly different set of keys. My hands know where they are, and seem to make pretty good guesses about where I'll want them in the next word and pick a different "home row", depending. Also, if I'm scrolling around a lot, my left hand switches to:

                      Left Up Right

Point being that this is all very dynamic, and unconcious, and very adapted to this exact keyboard. Learning a new keyboard will take me days of fumbling, that are reminiscent of someone describing switching from QWERTY to DVORAK. And, it turns out that even moving a single key like Esc is close to switching to an entire new keyboard. Needing to reach down to Caps Lock for Esc threw everything else off subtly, even when I wasn't typing that key. Clearly this is not the best way to type. It's just my way. :-/

Rethinking annotate: I was recently reminded of Bonsai for querying vcs history. GNOME runs a bonsai instance. This got me thinking about 'bzr annotate', and more generally about the problem of figuring out code. It seems to me that 'bzr annotate', is, like all annotates I've seen pretty poor at really understanding how things came to be - you have to annotate several versions, cross reference revision history and so on. 'bzr gannotate' is helpful, but still not awesome. I wondered whether searching might be a better metaphor for getting some sort of handle on what is going on. Of course, we don't have a fast enough search for bzr to make this plausible. So I wrote one: bzr-search in my hobby time (my work time is entirely devoted to landing shallow-branches for bzr, which will make a huge difference to pushing new branches to hosting sites like Launchpad). bzr-search is alpha quality at the moment (though there are no bugs that I'm aware of). Its mainly missing optimisation, features and capabilities that would be useful, like meaningful phrase searching/stemming/optional case insensitivity on individual searches. That said, I've tried it on some fairly big projects - like my copy of python here:

time bzr search socket inet_pton
(about 30 hits, first one up in 1 second)...
real    0m2.957s
user    0m2.768s
sys     0m0.180s

The index run takes some time (as you might expect, though like I noted - it hasn't been optimised as such). Once indexed, a branch will be kept up to date automatically on push/pull/commit operations. I realise search is a long slope to get good results on, but hey - I'm not trying to compete with Google :). I wanted something that had the following key characteristics: * Worked when offline * Simple to use * Easy to install Which I've achieved - I'm extremely happy with this plugin. Whats really cool though, is that other developers have picked it up and already integrated it into loggerhead and bzr-eclipse. I don't have a screen shot for loggerhead yet, but heres an old one. This old one does not show the path of a hit, nor the content summaries, which current bzr-search versions create.

It’s time for recommending five films again. I’ve also decided that I may reserve the last of the five for films I watched prior to starting these series. So here we go:

• Au revoir les enfants (Goodbye, Children): just watch it, really. (France, World War II, children in a school run by priests, but there’s a part I’m not telling you.)
• El bosque animado: a superb film that every Spanish person should watch. Magic comedy & drama set up in rural Galicia. Amazing Tito Valverde.
• eXistenZ: yet another one by David Cronenberg, involving futuristic video games this time. Quite a good see, but predictable ending?
• Billy Elliot: the kid who wants to dance ballet. Predictive and linear, but I just loved it, as I expected — maybe you will too. The scene where Billy says goodbye to Michael just completely and utterly broke my heart, probably because I identified so much with Michael.
• Now, Voyager: Bette Davis plays an ugly duckling, that obviously transforms into an awesome swan. Superb. Oh, and Bette Davis.

There is a bit of discussion on Planet Debian on dbus and HAL and how to handle the daemon restarting. Basically, our "hardware abstraction" layer is actually more like a policy layer: the kernel provides the real hardware abstraction, but its access control features are not fine grained enough, and there is no revocation of privileges. Right now, there are two systems in use: X11 for keyboard/video/mouse, and dbus/hal for the rest. X11 has no problems with access control, because any process that wants to talk to the X server is owned by the user sitting at that terminal, and when that user logged off, the X server got uninteresting for us. For other hardware, that model doesn't entirely work. KVM is unique in that it only affects one user, and there is a clear definition of that user going away. To summarize my desired policies:

Sound

is similar, but I often log out in the evening and have something playing while I fall asleep, so the policy on the sound device is that access is prolonged even after logging out.

USB drives

should be accessible to the user that plugged them in, and stay with them, even after they logged out, until they are disconnected. I'd like to have block level access to them and run my file system drivers in user space (so I can format a pen drive without administrative access to the machine). That does not apply to all USB drives, though, so I'd like to be able to "recognize" certain volumes and handle them differently, not so much as a security but as a safety measure.

Smart cards

should be like KVM, really. No one but me should ever be able to talk to my cards, because causing a DoS is just so easy — enter the wrong code three times, and I have a big problem. Obviously, that is part of the security that my card provides (if you want to upload Debian packages in my name, you have to steal my wallet and get my PIN right in the first three attempts).

USB phone handset

I'd like that phone to be able to receive calls anytime, even when no one is logged in, and the currently logged on user should be able to make a call (but not over my account).

Specialty hardware

like the JTAG adapter hanging off USB on my box need a different policy too.

Any of these (except for the smart card) might mean that the device could be connected and used for a very long time, longer than I can sit at the console. Unlike humans, who get only mildly annoyed if the display closes and applications need to be restarted, there are serious data consistency issues if connections break and need to be rebuilt — and the policy needs to allow for rebuilding the connection securely. If we want to allow for handing over a resource to a new instance of the server or the client, then the protocol needs to be aware of this, as we need to synchronize server and client state after a connection breakdown. It might be possible to create a session management layer for certain services (analogous to X11 toolkits that transparently handle rebuilding the widgets on restart without bothering the application about it), but it'd probably be difficult to do without a full protocol redesign, as data loss is simply not as acceptable as when talking to a human who can pick up the pieces and go from there.

So I am giving a talk this Friday at the University and here is the English introduction to my talk/paper and below is the Portuguese one. It starts at 9 am in Porto Alegre, Brazil and is being streamed.

*O Departamento de P s-Gradua o da Antropologia e a Associa o Software
Livre.org convidam:
*_*
Palestra com a antrop loga Gabriella Coleman*_
professora da New York University (NYU) *Quando:* Sexta-feira, dia 13 de junho, s 9h
*Onde:* Audit rio do ILEA, Campus do Vale - UFRGS
*Entrada:* Gratuita
*Transmiss o web: *tv.softwarelivre.org *
_Revolu es Silenciosas:_*
*O Ir nico Surgimento do Software Livre e de C digo Aberto
**e a Constru o de uma Consci ncia Legal Hacker* A palestra oferece uma an lise antropol gica e hist rica do
surgimento da comunidade de software livre e de c digo aberto,
procurando mostrar como, ao longo de duas d cadas, hackers e
entusiastas do software livre garantiram para si um dom nio de
autonomia legal para a produ o de software. Em uma poca
marcada por profundas transforma es no regime de Propriedade
Intelectual, a comunidade de software e de c digo aberto se
organiza cultivando uma acentuada consci ncia das transforma es
no mbito legal. O objetivo da palestra o de demonstrar como e
quando se cruzaram as trajet rias parcialmente independentes das
transforma es nas leis de propriedade intelectual com a
consolida o do “movimento” de software livre, para se tornarem
hist rias insepar veis voltadas disputa pelo futuro das
tecnologias - especialmente o computador pessoal e a Internet.
Com este foco, ser discutida uma nova pr tica social de
produ o de tecnologia que fornece uma nova vis o de mundo
insurgente e que desafia as justificativas neoliberais que
animam a expans o das leis de propriedade intelectual. Nesta
discuss o, ao inv s de oferecer hist rico abrangente, ser o
apresentados exemplos selecionados da hist ria do movimento de
software livre e da globaliza o das leis de propriedade
intelectual, com vistas caracteriza o da pr tica de produ o,
distribui o e utiliza o de Software Livre e de C digo aberto
nos Estados Unidos.