Search Results: "ag"

24 February 2010

David Welton: Google execs convicted

In an update to an earlier article I posted, it appears that the Google executives in question have been convicted: http://www.corriere.it/salute/disabilita/10_febbraio_24/dirigenti-google-condannati_29ebaefe-2122-11df-940a-00144f02aabe.shtml (in Italian) They were convicted for having failed to block the publication of a video showing some teenagers picking on and hitting another minor with Down's syndrome. It will be interesting to see how Google reacts. Apparently, the court believes that Google is criminally responsible for videos its users happen to post, which means that they would, in theory, have to personally review every video submitted to determine whether they are going to be infringing on someone's rights because of its content? Update: Here's a New York Times link: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/02/24/business/AP-EU-Italy-GoogleTrial.html
Update 2: "cate" posted a link to Google's official response: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/serious-threat-to-web-in-italy.html Also, it's really incredible to read the comments here (in Italian): http://vitadigitale.corriere.it/2010/02/processo_vivi_down_google_cond.html Most of them are against this ruling, but a significant number think it's a good thing, which just goes to show that you can't put all the blame on politicians for Italy's woes: someone is voting for them, after all.

23 February 2010

Mike Hommey: Mind blowing news

The Firefox logo, the very reason why Iceweasel exists, is now free as in speech. Its use is still limited by trademarks, but it is free. The news is not entirely official, but apparently the change has occurred a year ago, and the license text for the branding hasn t been changed accordingly. Waw.

Thorsten Glaser: Rant about PGP keysigning problems

Update: This wlog entry uses aggressive tone because I somehow needed to vent frustration from using some of the tools. I should probably provide some constructive critics, too... but this is a rant. Be warned. Keysigning is useless. I boot up a suitable live GNU/Linux system, install signing-party, take the trouble that is to set up caff, transfer my secret key from the secure box, sign. I think caff providing the keys in a different order than they're given on the command line sucks and just run caff once per key. I did even start Postwreck. But no, people just don't accept any mail from "EHLO grml" systems, and I still cannot control my reverse DNS despite having a static IPv4 address (and IPv6, which looks to be unused). People also pretend I'm on dial-up. Great! I will no longer participate in any (mass) PGP keysigning but will continue to do so on a per-person basis. Probably sign but one uid, either apply common sense and upload it to t h e keyserver, or mail the entire signed key to one address. By the way, how crazy is it that I need to use the deprecated $CONFIG 'mailer-send' to pass an envelope-from to the mailer? It also suffers from the same delusion as e.g. nmudiff, namely that my Debian box is a fully set up workstation able to send out eMail and configured correctly. At least, it, unlike a number of others, does not assume I use mud (Mutt). grml Oh, and caff does a protocol violation (by always sending out GnuPG/MIME and not offering the standardised Inline OpenPGP), I think people just don't care about such. (There is a notation people can use to signal they want PGP/MIME, Inline PGP which is called "partitioned" or both (and which order of priority) but, alas, despite Inline PGP being the only one useful for the MUAs without integratin, and being more widely spread than that PGP/MIME crap, the followers of the latter do some (FSF-style?) kind of vendor lockin by not speaking anything else. Anyway. I'm all for X.509 except there seems to be no sane CA (Startcom is... trouble, even with Opera; CAcert.org is dying). I'll just buy a certificate (not from Verisign though) for www, and roll my own again (I can do it, I have experience with that actually). On an unrelated side note, still waiting for an OpenSSL patch for that recent TLS extension... ObRant: password policies, be they required characters or any kind of length restrictions, suck. People I will eventually end up with less secure passwords on such systems, because even if some of mine may appear to be derived from some kind of dictionary (what language that is I'd be interested in, though...) they aren't, and I have my schemes. You got to have them with a gazillion of passwords used. And I probably will forget them more often (and sending them via eMail is also not a solution). Unrelated notice: mksh R39c with bug fixes coming RSN. (Updated 24.02. because I was, rightfully, told the language, and the title, were too strong. I also would like to excuse for going so low as to write an ad-hominem attack, which I've since redacted.

Tiago Bortoletto Vaz: Creative retaliation


Canada responds to historic Olympic hockey game loss to US: (source)

Mike Hommey: Green is beautiful

buildd status for xulrunner mostly green This is it! xulrunner now builds and successfully runs the checks and xpcshell-tests on all release architectures, including arm, mips, powerpc and sparc, that were all failing 2 weeks ago. 2 patch pulled from upstream, 5 patches written and sent upstream, and several more as not quite successful attempts. What puzzles me is that e.g. the arm issue in the test suite has been known upstream for a year, yet Firefox was released on maemo (arm) without it being fixed. I mean, it only took me a few hours (if you don t count the time lost waiting for the builds to end), starting with no specific knowledge of arm, and even less of jit compilers. Anyways, this all means work on 1.9.2 can go on.

Russell Coker: Divisive Behavior

Past Sins Sam Varghese wrote an article about Matthew Garrett s LCA talk The Linux community: what is it and how to be a part of it [1]. In page 2 Sam quotes Martin Krafft as asking about how Matthew s behavior had changed between 2004 and the present, Sam cites some references for Matthew s actions in 2005 to demonstrate. I think that this raises the issue of how far back it is reasonable to go in search of evidence of past behavior, something that I think is far more important than the specific details of what Matthew said on mailing lists many years ago and whether he now regrets such email. If someone did something that you consider to be wrong yesterday and did the same thing five years ago you might consider it to be evidence of a pattern of behavior. If someone s statements today don t match their actions yesterday then you should consider it to be evidence of hypocrisy. But if someone did something five years ago which doesn t match their current statements then in many situations it seems more reasonable to consider it as evidence that they have changed their mind. Then of course there is the significance of what was done. Flaming some people excessively on some mailing lists is something that can be easily forgiven and forgotten if Google doesn t keep bringing it up. But as a counter-example I don t think that Hans Reiser will be welcome in any part of the Linux community when he gets out of jail. For the development of the Linux community (and society in general) I think it s best to not tie people to their past minor mistakes. While it is nice when someone apologises for their past actions, the practical benefits of someone just quietly improving their behavior are almost identical. A particular corner case in this regard is the actions of young people, anyone who was born after about 1980 will have had great access to electronic media for their entire life and will have left a trail. Most people do a variety of silly things when they were young, the older members of the Linux community were fortunate enough not to have electronic records remaining where Google could find them. Back to Matthew, I think that if he is to be criticised about such things then evidence that is much more recent than 2005 needs to be used. Cultural Differences Sam quotes Matthew as claiming that the Linux community was largely a Western, English-speaking one, those who participated in it necessarily had to adapt to the norms of this group . I don t believe that there is a single Linux community. There are a number of different communities that are formed around free software, which have significant amounts of overlap. I don t believe that there s any reason why a Chinese or Indian Linux mailing list should conform to the same standards as those of an American list. But there will be a trend towards meme propagation through people who are associated with the Linux communities in multiple countries every time you meet Linux people in another country you are helping to reduce the cultural differences in the Linux community. Someone from China or India who joins a LUG in Australia will have to adapt to some of the norms of Australian behavior in the same way as an Australian who migrates to China or India would have to adapt to some local norms. On page 4 of the discussion Matthew disagrees with Sam s interpretation [2], maybe Matthew s opinions on this matter are closer to mine than the way Sam describes them. Is Division Inherently Bad? I believe that the word divisive is overused. The only way to avoid division is to have everyone agree with the majority, but sometimes the minority will be right. Note that I am using the word minority to refer to any group of people who happen to disagree with the majority, among other things that includes people who vote for a political party that isn t one of the two biggest ones. An entirely separate issue is that of the treatment of minority groups , one of the most divisive events in history was the US civil war it s good that slavery is outlawed but unfortunate that a war was required to gain that result. On page 4 of the discussion Matthew says to Sam Your writing is influenced by members of the Linux community, and in turn it influences the Linux community. The tone of it is entirely relevant to the behavioural standards of the community [2]. If a community can be easily divided then the real problem probably isn t the person who triggered a particular division. Also there is the issue that even if you could get a general agreement that certain issues shouldn t be discussed in certain ways then with the wide range of cultural attitudes and ages of participants you have to expect someone to raise the issue you don t want raised. Of course it s impossible to objectively determine whether a division is productive or not, so it doesn t seem at all viable to have any expectations regarding outsiders not being divisive. Sometimes you just have to deal with the fact that the Internet contains people who disagree with you. It seems to me that the most divisive issues we face involve people who mostly agree on contentious issues. If someone entirely disagrees with you then it s easy to ignore them (if you even have a conversation with them), but if they are someone that you communicate with and they are almost right in your opinion then there s the potential for a big argument. Probably the best way to minimise division in the community is to have the first people who get involved in a dispute take a Rogerian approach [3]. Failing that a good approach is to respond by writing an essay. When an issue is made popular by services such as Twitter that give little explanation then everyone rushes to the barricades. It seems to me that the unreliability of some blogging platforms is part of the cause of the problem in this regard. I ve just given up on writing comments on Blogger, I m not going to write a good comment only to have it eaten by blogger. There are lots of blogs that have problems which discourage the population from writing anything other than a one-sentence response. The Good that can come from Disputes On page 5 of the discussion there is a comment from Anirudh the Indian student who was criticised by Sam (which ended up inspiring part of Matthew s talk and leading to more disputes) [4]. Here is the start: I am the person who wrote the ill thought-out post that drew criticism eight months ago. There has been some discussion about that, so I wish to say something.

I am very grateful to Sam Varghese. I say this with utmost sincerity. Read the rest, it s educational. I m sure that there are others who have had similar learning experiences but who don t want to write about them. I m sure that there have been many disputes which would appear to the casual observer to have resulted in no good at all, but which would actually have resulted in people learning things and amending their behavior. The issue of Age Car rental companies generally don t do business with men who are less than 25 years old. Life insurance policies don t offer reasonable rates to males between the ages of about 16 and 25. This is because the insurance companies have good statistical data on the results of the typical actions of people at various ages and know that young men tend to be at a high risk of earning a Darwin Award. The same combination of hormones and life experience that makes a young man a danger on the road will also tend to make him get involved in flame-wars on the net. If we could figure out how to influence teenagers into being less anti-social then it would be a great achievement. The current young people will become older and more sensible soon enough but will be replaced by a larger number of young people who will do the same things. As things stand I don t expect the next cohort of young people to learn from Anirudh.

Adnan Hodzic: Jahorina

Every winter I just get incredibly damp and depressed Wilt Well this year, I ve found an ultimate remedy + stress reliever since I m all jumpy around DebConf11 decision coming around this Saturday Fingers Crossed So to whoever has the same problem during winter take your board/skies (whatever your fix is) and hit the mountains! This weekend I went to Bosnian Olympic mountain Jahorina; couple of days later stress free, depression free and ready for new challenges, in the meantime I ll let pictures talk for themselves Wink
My friend and I
Black and white in colors
Ready to go down the slope
Camera can t display this beauty
Notice how close the clouds are
This image is my current wallpaper
On our way to sky Smile
Road to our cottage
Our little cozy cottage
Board ninja

22 February 2010

Gerfried Fuchs: t-prot testing

The t-prot package might need your help: There is a discussion going on with the upstream developer how to proceed with respect to a hopefully helpful change in its behavior. There are several options how to address this, one of them would involve using the Getopt::Long module instead of Getopt::Mixed. Given that the benchmarks of upstream rather speak for sticking with Getopt::Mixed we would like to ask you for help: Please test this version of t-prot (for your safety: detached gpg signature for the version) and compare it to the packaged version 2.15 that I just upload into unstable (it is installable without anything else also into (old)stable or testing). Your feedback on this is truly appreciated, please send it until the start of next week (Monday evening/Tuesday morning) to "t-prot (AT) tolot.escape.de". Much thanks in advance!

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - issue 22

RCBW - #22 With a mini-rush in the week-end, I'm now back on track to the weekly schedule of RCBW; here are this week's squashes: About this week highlights:

Russell Coker: Net Neutrality

Martin Krafft advocates a model of Internet access where advertisers pay for the Internet connection [1]. The first problem with this idea is the base cost of providing net access which in most cases is wires to the premises. Every service that involves a cable to someone s house (Cable TV, Cable/DSL net access, or phone service) has a base minimum monthly fee associated with the expense of installing and maintaining the cable and whatever hardware is at the other end of the cable. For DSL and basic phone service the pair of wires ends at an exchange and takes a share of the DSLAM or a telephone exchange. It seems that the minimum monthly cost for any wire that goes to the house in Australia is about $20. So if an advertiser makes $0.20 per click (which I believe to be higher than the average price for Google Adsense clicks) then the user would have to be clicking on adverts more than 3 times a day. This might be viable if an ISP runs a proxy that inserts adverts into all content (which technically shouldn t be that difficult). But modifying content in-transit to introduce adverts is something that the net-discrimination crowd can only dream about. 3G net access has the lowest per-user costs. Based on current data costs it seems possible for an ISP to run a 3G service with bills for users as low as $15 per annum if they don t transfer much data. Recouping $15 might be easy but it s also a small enough amount of money that most users won t mind paying it. What we really need is to have more competition in the 3G ISP business. When I investigated this issue last month I found that there are few 3G Internet providers in Australia and the cheapest is Dodo at $139 per annum with a 15G limit [2]. With a bit more competition I m sure that someone would offer a really cheap plan for 1G or 2G of data access in a year. Martin complains about users paying twice as users pay to access the network (which is like paying a taxi to get to the market), so that they can visit sites where advertisers make money showing ads to the visitor . But if the advertisers were to pay then there would be a lot of inefficiency in determining how much each advertiser should pay which would result in extra expenses and therefore providing the service would cost more. I don t think that paying for a taxi to get to the market is a bad thing, personally I prefer to save money and use a bus or tram. I think that the best analogy for this is comparing using your own choice of a bus, tram, taxi, etc to get to the market or having the market operator provide taxis for everyone and then make everything really expensive to cover the significant costs of doing so. Finally there is the issue of video transfer which uses up a lot of bandwidth. According to both industry rumor and traceroute there is a significant mirror of youtube content in Australia. This means that youtube downloads will be cheap local transfers not expensive international transfers. I expect that most multi-national CDNs have nodes in Australia. So for Australia at least video transfer would not be as expensive as many people expect. I think that to a large extent the concept of having content providers pay to host the content has been tried and found to fail. The Internet model of you pay for your net access, I pay for mine, and then we transfer data between our computers without limit has killed off all the closed services. Not only do I think that net-discrimination is a bad idea, I think that it would also turn out to be bad for business.

Tim Retout: Plugging the Debian GNOME bug weekend

This weekend I've been messing about with gstreamer pipelines so that I can spam the world with YouTube videos. Go me! Let's see if it shows up on Planet Debian. <object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/pjUUaAQaa8I&amp;hl=en_GB&amp;fs=1&amp;"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/pjUUaAQaa8I&amp;hl=en_GB&amp;fs=1&amp;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425"></embed></object> Next weekend I'll be teaching my brother how to triage Debian GNOME bugs. :)

21 February 2010

Martin Michlmayr: Debian Installer 6.0 Alpha1 available

The Debian installer team today announced the alpha1 version of the installer for Debian squeeze (6.0). This release adds a lot of new features but I just wanted to highlight the ARM related enhancements. With this release, Marvell's Kirkwood platform is supported. Specifically, the installer supports the following devices: QNAP TS-110 and TS-119, QNAP TS-210, TS-219 and TS-219P, SheevaPlug and OpenRD. In addition to Kirkwood support, Wouter Verhelst added support for the Intel Storage System SS4000-E.

Colin Watson: Catching up

I did a bit of catching up on my Debian backlog over the last week or so. Among the things I got round to: So nothing really earth-shaking, and as ever openssh could use some attention, but I feel a bit better about my backlog now. I do still have a critical bug in makepasswd to fix, and a sponsored upload of parrot; those are the next two things on my to-do list.

Michael Banck: 21 Feb 2010

Application Indicators: A Case of Canonical Upstream Involvement and its Problems I always thought Canonical could do a bit more to contribute to the GNOME project, so I was happy to see the work on application indicators proposed to GNOME. Application indicators are based on the (originally KDE-driven, I believe) proposed cross-desktop status notifier spec. The idea (as I understand it) is to have a consistent way of interacting with status notifiers and stop the confusing mix of panel applets and systray indicators. This is a very laudable goal as mentioned by Colin Walters:
"First, +5000 that this change is being driven by designers, and +1000 that new useful code is being written. There are definite problems being solved here."
The discussion that followed was very useful, including the comments by Canonical's usability expert Matthew Paul Thomas. Most of the discussion was about the question how this proposal and spec could be best integrated into GTK, the place where most people seemed to agree this belongs (rather than changing all apps to provide this, this should be a service provided by the platform) However, on the same day, Canonical employee Ted Gould proposed libappindicator as an external dependency. The following thread showed a couple of problems, both technical and otherwise: What I personally disliked is the way the Cody Russel and Ted Gould are papering over the above issues in the thread that followed. For examples, about point one, Ted Gould writes in the proposal:
Q: Shouldn't this be in GTK+?
A: Apparently not.
while he himself said on the same day, on the same mailing list: "Yes, I think GTK/glib is a good place" and nobody was against it (and in fact most people seemed to favor including this in GTK). To the question about why libappindicator is not licensed as usual under the LGPL, version 2.1 or later, Canonical employee Cody Russell even replied:
"Because seriously, everything should be this way. None of us should be saying "LGPL 2.1 or later". Ask a lawyer, even one from the FSF, how much sense it makes to license your software that way."
Not everybody has to love the FSF, but proposing code under mandated copyright assignments which a lot of people have opposed and at the same time insinuating that the FSF was not to be trusted on their next revision of the LGPL license seems rather bold to me. Finally, on the topic of copyright assignments, Ted said:
"Like Clutter for example ;) Seriously though, GNOME already is dependent on projects that require contributor agreements."
It is true that there are (or at least were) GNOME applications which require copyright assignments for contributions (evolution used to be an example, but the requirement was lifted), however, none of the platform modules require this to my knowledge (clutter is an external dependency as well). It seems most people in the GNOME community have the opinion that application indicators should be in GTK at least eventually, so having libappindicator as an external dependency with copyright assignments might work for now but will not be future proof. In summary, Most of the issues could be dealt with by reimplementing it for GTK when the time comes for this spec to be included, but this would mean (i) duplication of effort, (ii) possibly porting all applications twice and (iii) probably no upstream contribution by Canonical. Furthermore, I am amazed at how the Canonical people approach the community for something this delicate (their first major code drop, as far as I am aware). To be fair, neither Ted nor Cody posted the above using their company email addresses, but nevertheless the work is sponsored by Canonical, so their posts to desktop-devel-list could be seen as writing with their Canonical hat on. Canonical does not have an outstanding track record on contributing code to GNOME, and at least to me it seems this case is not doing much to improve things, either.

Guido G nther: Libguestfs: Virtual Machine Image Swiss Army Knife

I've finally updated the libguestfs Debian packages to 1.0.84 getting them back in sync with upstream. Download instructions are on the pkg-libvirt's wiki page. Fetching files from a vm image with guestfish is as simple as: 
guestfish --ro -a lenny-base-clone.img -m /dev/debian/root download /etc/passwd /tmp/passwd
After hacking around #561991 by running debirf as root we now do pass the testsuite again. The new version includes fuse support as well as the hivex tools to manipulate windows registries. The source for the Debian package is available at git.debian.org. The next step will be to split out the appliance so we can fetch that one via http and upload libguestfs to contrib.

20 February 2010

Roland Mas: FusionForge news, February 2010

This is getting old news, and others have blogged about them before I did, but here's my summary of the recent activity in and around FusionForge. The early February meeting was a success, and gathered about twenty people on the first day and a dozen or so on the second day (not planned initially). My impression is that there was a healthy mix of FusionForge hackers, FusionForge users, and people from other forge communities (Codendi, NovaForge, and even one representative from nFORGE, from South Korea). I'm not going to repeat all that was said then, especially since the proceedings are online. Beyond the technical points, I'll just advertise PlanetForge again, since everyone present agreed we had lots to share and that this site would be a good and relatively neutral place. If you're into forges, I recommend joining us in that community. On the purely FusionForge front, news are good too. Most of the major pieces we want to see in the next release (which is probably going to be called 5.0) are in place. The last blocker we had was the merge of the rework of the default theme for better accessibility and easier maintenance and customisability (most of the theming now happens in CSS). This merge has been completed this week, and although there are still a few rough edges, it's mostly done. We'll try to fix most of these rough edges soonish, then start a stabilisation branch towards 5.0, so more experimental work can start again on trunk. For the impatient and the curious, there's a list of new features on the fusionforge.org homepage, and the site is now running code from trunk. Of course, we're eager to get testers for that, which is why I prepared snapshot packages. They are currently stuck in NEW on their way to the official Debian experimental repository due to the renaming of the source package and the introduction of plenty of new binary packages, but they can already be obtained from my unofficial repository at people.debian.org. The packages are built for Debian unstable, but they seem to run just fine on Lenny if you grab mediawiki from backports.org (only required for the Mediawiki plugin, of course), and libnusoap-php and php-htmlpurifier from Debian testing (they don't drag any extra dependencies). I'll end this note by reminding people of the announcement I did three months ago: as of this week, Debian Etch is no longer officially supported security-wise, and so neither is GForge 4.5. As far as I know, I was the last person doing that, and my incentives have gone away on the day Etch ceased to be supported, since it was also the day the Adullact forge finally migrated from Etch with GForge 4.5 to Lenny with FusionForge 4.8. If you're still using 4.5, well I think you should be aware of that. That more or less wraps it up for now. The next announcement is likely to be about a release candidate

Torsten Landschoff: Watching TV with vlc on Linux via T-Home Entertain

For quite a while we are receiving TV via Internet. The original reason is that I got at most 2 MBit/s via ADSL due to line noise, but VDSL supports 25 MBit/s on the same line. Of course, you couldn t order the DSL line without also getting a phone flat rate and IPTV. Most of the channels are encrypted and can only be received with the original Media Receiver , which is a proprietary (and Microsoft) solution. But at least, I can watch the public service broadcasts using these playlists for VLC or mplayer.

Martin F. Krafft: Charge advertisers for the last mile

ISPs fight a raging war over net neutrality because their infrastructure cannot keep up with the increasing demand (or rather supply) of content. Therefore, ISPs want to charge the users premiums if they wish to use certain services on the Net. For instance, since videos are usually large in size, one would have to purchase e.g. the platinum package to be able to access video hosting sites. It would be a serious loss of freedom if they won, and the Internet would never be the same. Let s turn that idea around: since sites that use advertising make money off every visitor, they are really the ones that should pay the ISPs so that they can improve their infrastructure. The same applies to sites that make money off visitors in other ways. At the moment, users pay to access the network (which is like paying a taxi to get to the market), so that they can visit sites where advertisers make money showing ads to the visitor, which might actually let them to pay a manufacturer for a product the end user pays twice, and the advertisers take in money, leeching off the ISPs investing into their infrastructure. I think that the advertiser and not the consumer should pay the ISP to keep the infrastructure afloat improve it even. The manufacturer should then pay the advertisers for displaying the ad, and the user consumes if s/he chooses to and everyone only pays once, for services they want. This will help improve competition among providers, which should always be the goal. If my ISP would start to record the volume of HTTP traffic I produce for each target site, charge the targets appropriately (they could start with a couple at first), and I d get free connectivity in turn, I d be quite happy. The ISP wouldn t have to look at the contents at all for that. I don t yet know what to do if the target sites choose not to pay up. ISPs could block them, or throttle or deprioritise traffic, but either of those might simply lead to an exodus of users, just like premiums would. As usual, this just needs to be done by many ISPs in concert. Are you listening?

Luca Falavigna: My first GNOME patch


Yesterday I was sponsored my first GNOME patch! OK, it s small, very small but I m happy anyway :)
Kudos to Scott Balneaves for making that possible!

Martin F. Krafft: Making money off ethics

The coffee place around the corner from where Penny and I lived for the past two months Caff Mode offers to make your food using free-range eggs for NZ$1. Free-range eggs are more expensive than normal ones, but the price difference is not one dollar. Therefore, the cafe makes a profit every time a customer makes the right choice. I went in this morning to ask them about it, and the guy taking my coffee order admitted stale-mate. When I suggested that the cafe should use free-range eggs exclusively, he agreed. Let s hope that he lets those making that decision know, and that the cafe soon stops making money on ethical choices.

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