[...] this is a great example of overcoming something that we call "problem A, problem B" paradox.
So you've got a group of people coming together, and they're all trying to solve the same problem (problem A) and they're really passionate about it. And then, you've got this problem B thing, which is that you got a bunch of people with different views.
And they may seem to be conflicting, and it seems like a paradox: the same differences that we need to solve the problem are getting in our way. But if you think about it as a paradox, you can get through it.
You think: OK, we've got all these differences. You have to identify the differences that actually are going to move us forward and those that are getting in our way.
And the differences that are getting in your way, set them aside. Push them off to the side and focus on the ones that are helping you move forward.
Kathryn Jablokow Well, I noticed that at first everybody was saying "Yes, but this is my idea".
And as we got closer and closer together, it became "Yes, and".
Jack Matson

(Quotes from a lecture about "Collaboration skills", part of the Creativity, Innovation and Change course on Coursera) IMO this is an important lesson to learn if you want to work effectively in a community project like Debian.
We talk much about diversity, and the added value of diversity in our project.
But diversity also means that to converge towards consensus is difficult and requires a specific set of best practices. A little thing like saying "Yes and" instead of "Yes but" could be of help. Words definitely matter.

The last few days I have been experimenting with the batman-adv mesh technology. I want to gain some experience to see if it will fit the Freedombox project, and together with my neighbors try to build a mesh network around the park where I live. Batman-adv is a layer 2 mesh system ("ethernet" in other words), where the mesh network appear as if all the mesh clients are connected to the same switch. My hardware of choice was the Linksys WRT54GL routers I had lying around, but I've been unable to get them working with batman-adv. So instead, I started playing with a Raspberry Pi, and tried to get it working as a mesh node. My idea is to use it to create a mesh node which function as a switch port, where everything connected to the Raspberry Pi ethernet plug is connected (bridged) to the mesh network. This allow me to hook a wifi base station like the Linksys WRT54GL to the mesh by plugging it into a Raspberry Pi, and allow non-mesh clients to hook up to the mesh. This in turn is useful for Android phones using the Serval Project voip client, allowing every one around the playground to phone and message each other for free. The reason is that Android phones do not see ad-hoc wifi networks (they are filtered away from the GUI view), and can not join the mesh without being rooted. But if they are connected using a normal wifi base station, they can talk to every client on the local network. To get this working, I've created a debian package meshfx-node and a script build-rpi-mesh-node to create the Raspberry Pi boot image. I'm using Debian Jessie (and not Raspbian), to get more control over the packages available. Unfortunately a huge binary blob need to be inserted into the boot image to get it booting, but I'll ignore that for now. Also, as Debian lack support for the CPU features available in the Raspberry Pi, the system do not use the hardware floating point unit. I hope the routing performance isn't affected by the lack of hardware FPU support. To create an image, run the following with a sudo enabled user after inserting the target SD card into the build machine:

% wget -O build-rpi-mesh-node \
    https://raw.github.com/petterreinholdtsen/meshfx-node/master/build-rpi-mesh-node
% sudo bash -x ./build-rpi-mesh-node > build.log 2>&1
% dd if=/root/rpi/rpi_basic_jessie_$(date +%Y%m%d).img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
%

Booting with the resulting SD card on a Raspberry PI with a USB wifi card inserted should give you a mesh node. At least it does for me with a the wifi card I am using. The default mesh settings are the ones used by the Oslo mesh project at Hackeriet, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post about this mesh testing. The mesh node was not horribly expensive either. I bought everything over the counter in shops nearby. If I had ordered online from the lowest bidder, the price should be significantly lower:

Supplier	Model	NOK
Teknikkmagasinet	Raspberry Pi model B	349.90
Teknikkmagasinet	Raspberry Pi type B case	99.90
Lefdal	Jensen Air:Link 25150	295.-
Clas Ohlson	Kingston 16 GB SD card	199.-
Total cost		943.80

Now my mesh network at home consist of one laptop in the basement connected to my production network, one Raspberry Pi node on the 1th floor that can be seen by my neighbor across the park, and one play-node I use to develop the image building script. And some times I hook up my work horse laptop to the mesh to test it. I look forward to figuring out what kind of latency the batman-adv setup will give, and how much packet loss we will experience around the park. :)

No, not to this 3.11, but to Linux kernel 3.11.

I was aware of the #718533 bug, which happens when you have a software RAID with anything higher than 3.2.0 (mine is RAID 1 with 2 disks). At least that has been my case since I tried to upgrade, hence I was delaying upgrades again and again.

Unfortunately today things went worse when I tried to plug my USB 3.0 device on the system:

Oct 20 17:52:51 busgosu kernel: [20799.672127] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: Timeout while waiting for address device command
Oct 20 17:52:51 busgosu kernel: [20799.876136] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: ERROR no room on ep ring
Oct 20 17:52:51 busgosu kernel: [20799.876148] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: ERR: No room for command on command ring
Oct 20 17:52:51 busgosu kernel: [20800.080148] usb 2-2: device not accepting address 2, error -12
Oct 20 17:52:51 busgosu kernel: [20800.080202] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: ERROR no room on ep ring
Oct 20 17:52:51 busgosu kernel: [20800.080209] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: ERR: No room for command on command ring
Oct 20 17:52:51 busgosu kernel: [20800.080221] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: ERROR no room on ep ring
Oct 20 17:52:51 busgosu kernel: [20800.080227] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: ERR: No room for command on command ring
Oct 20 17:52:51 busgosu kernel: [20800.080235] hub 2-0:1.0: couldn't allocate port 2 usb_device
Oct 20 17:52:53 busgosu kernel: [20801.568169] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: ERROR no room on ep ring
Oct 20 17:52:53 busgosu kernel: [20801.568181] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: ERR: No room for command on command ring
Oct 20 17:52:53 busgosu kernel: [20801.568190] hub 2-0:1.0: couldn't allocate port 2 usb_device

And of course the device didn't show up. As there's not much relevant stuff about this issue on the googlesphere, thought it may have been solved. And turned out that I was right: upgrading fixes this, and now the device works again.

But, hit by the above bug now I have to add a rootdelay=1 to my kernel boot parameters (started testing with 5 but finally seems one second is enough). Fortunately the Ubuntu folks have detailed how to do it ;-)

The last few days I came across a few good causes that should get wider attention. I recommend signing and donating to each one of these. :) Via Debian Project News for 2013-10-14 I came across the Outreach Program for Women program which is a Google Summer of Code like initiative to get more women involved in free software. One debian sponsor has offered to match any donation done to Debian earmarked for this initiative. I donated a few minutes ago, and hope you will to. :) And the Electronic Frontier Foundation just announced plans to create video documentaries about the excessive spying on every Internet user that take place these days, and their need to fund the work. I've already donated. Are you next? For my Norwegian audience, the organisation Studentenes og Akademikernes Internasjonale Hjelpefond is collecting signatures for a statement under the heading Bloggers United for Open Access for those of us asking for more focus on open access in the Norwegian government. So far 499 signatures. I hope you will sign it too.

I've been using disk encryption (via LUKS and cryptsetup) on Debian and Ubuntu for quite some time and it has worked well for me. However, while setting up full disk encryption for a new computer on a RAID1 partition, I discovered that there are a few major problems with RAID on Ubuntu.

My Setup: RAID and LUKS Since I was setting up a new machine on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), I used the alternate CD (I burned ubuntu-12.04.3-alternate-amd64+mac.iso to a blank DVD) to get access to the full disk encryption options. First, I created a RAID1 array to mirror the data on the two hard disks. Then, I used the partition manager built into the installer to setup an unencrypted boot partition (/dev/md0 mounted as /boot) and an encrypted root partition (/dev/md1 mounted as /) on the RAID1 array. While I had done full disk encryption and mirrored drives before, I had never done them at the same time on Ubuntu or Debian.

The problem: cannot boot an encrypted degraded RAID After setting up the RAID, I decided to test it by booting from each drive with the other one unplugged. The first step was to ensure that the system is configured (via dpkg-reconfigure mdadm) to boot in "degraded mode". When I rebooted with a single disk though, I received a evms_activate is not available error message instead of the usual cryptsetup password prompt. The exact problem I ran into is best described in this comment (see this bug for context). It turns out that booting degraded RAID arrays has been plagued with several problems.

My solution: an extra initramfs boot script to start the RAID array The underlying problem is that the RAID1 array is not started automatically when it's missing a disk and so cryptsetup cannot find the UUID of the drive to decrypt (as configured in /etc/crypttab). My fix, based on a script I was lucky enough to stumble on, lives in /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/cryptraid:

#!/bin/sh
PREREQ="mdadm"
prereqs()
 
     echo "$PREREQ"
 
case $1 in
prereqs)
     prereqs
     exit 0
     ;;
esac
cat /proc/mdstat
mdadm --run /dev/md1
cat /proc/mdstat

After creating that file, remember to:

1. make the script executable (using chmod a+x) and
2. regenerate the initramfs (using dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-KERNELVERSION).

To make sure that the script is doing the right thing:

1. press "Shift" while booting to bring up the Grub menu
2. then press "e" to edit the default boot line
3. remove the "quiet" and "splash" options from the kernel arguments
4. press F10 to boot with maximum console output

You should see the RAID array stopped (look for the output of the first cat /proc/mdstat call) and then you should see output from a running degraded RAID array.

Backing up the old initramfs If you want to be extra safe while testing this new initramfs, make sure you only reconfigure one kernel at a time (no update-initramfs -u -k all) and make a copy of the initramfs before you reconfigure the kernel:

cp /boot/initrd.img-KERNELVERSION-generic /boot/initrd.img-KERNELVERSION-generic.original

Then if you run into problems, you can go into the Grub menu, edit the default boot option and make it load the .original initramfs.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day:

"Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women - whether engineers, scientist, technologists or mathematicians - who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM". source

To celebrate, we asked to some of the "women behind Debian" to share their stories with us. Enjoy! Ana Guerrero Lopez (ana) Who are you? I'm a 30-something years old geek. I'm from Andalusia, Spain but live in France. What do you do in Debian? I work mostly on my packages, in sponsoring new people's packages and in this very blog you're reading now. I also maintain an unofficial Google+ page about Debian. At $PAID job, I work in an internal Debian distribution so from time to time, I get the opportunity to contribute back some of the stuff we do there. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? I started using Debian around 2003 switching from Mandrake. I was a happy Debian user when the Debian Women project started in the summer 2004. When I saw the project announced, I asked myself why I wasn't contributing to Debian and the rest is history... in a couple of weeks it'll be my 7 years DD-versary! If for some reason you want a longer reply to this question, read here. Beatrice Who are you? I am a PhD student with a degree in Biology. I am a computer fan since my first C64 and I am a self-taught computer geek wanna-be. And I am a bug fan - not software bugs, real bugs :) What do you do in Debian? I work on translations - doing the translation work itself, but also reviewing other translators' work and helping in coordinating the translation effort. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? I started using Linux because I liked the idea of an open source operative system based on collaboration and I began reviewing open source software translations. Since my first Linux system was Debian Potato and I sticked to Debian ever since, it only seemed natural to focus my translation work on Debian. Christine Caulfield Who are you? My name is Christine Caulfield. My day job is principal software engineer at Red Hat working on the cluster infrastructure components corosync & pacemaker. Outside computing I'm a musician and sound engineer. I play violin with lots of technology attached, and love avant garde music. What do you do in Debian? I'm not that active on Debian any more due to pressure of time, and maturity of the packages I work on. I currently maintain the, little-used, DECnet userspace packages and the, even less used I suspect, mopd bootloader. I used to maintain lvm2 for a while but dropped that a few years ago. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? My initial reasons for joining Debian were slightly selfish, to find a home for the DECnet project that I was heavily involved in at the time. I was a keep Debian user and people wanted a distribution where the software was easy to set up. DECnet is quite complicated for users to configure, being a totally independant networking stack to IP and so OS support is needed. Debian seemed like the logical place to make this happen. As mentioned above I got quite involved for a time and maintained other packages too. I picked up lvm2 because I was on the lvm2 dev team at work in Red Hat and as it was a new package at that time I seemed a logical choice. Elena Grandi (valhalla) Who are you? I'm a 30-something years old geek and Free Software enthusiast from Italy. What do you do in Debian? I'm currently maintaining a few packages (2 python modules and a python program) as a sponsored uploader; I'm also slowly looking around for other things to do (by preference technical, but not limited to packaging), with the aim to spend more time contributing to Debian. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? For a while I had being distro-hopping between "fun" distributions (the ones that break now and then) on the desktop while using Debian stable on the home server and in chroots. I was already doing marginal contributions to those distributions, where finding stuff that was missing was easy, but my perception as a stable user was that Debian was already working fine and probably didn't really need any help. Then I started to socialize on IRC with some DDs and DMs, and realized that my perception was superficial and that in reality there were dark holes in the depths of the archive where Evil festered and prospered and... ok, sorry, I got carried away :) Anyway, since I was actually using Debian more and more I decided to start contributing: I read documentation, I attended the useful IRC sessions on #debian-women and decided that it was probably best not to add new stuff, but look for things that I used and that needed help. Then nothing happened for a while, because finding stuff that doesn't work is hard (at least on my mostly textual systems). Then one day I was trying to write a python script that needed to verify gpg signed messages; it had to run on my Debian server, so I was trying to use python-pyme and its documentation was painful to use, while I remembered an earlier attempt using python-gnupg that was much more pythonic, but not available in Debian. In a fit of anger I decided to forgo all of my good intentions and actually add a new package: I checked the sources for problems, packaged, sent it to mentors@d-o, got reviews, fixed problems, resent and finally got sponsored and well, everything started. Francesca Ciceri (madamezou) Who are you? I'm Francesca, a 30-something Italian graduated in Social Sciences. What do you do in Debian? I'm a (non uploading) Debian Developer since 2011 and have been DPN editor, press officer, webmaster for www.debian.org and translator for the Italian l10n team. Recently, due to time constraints, I had to reduce my involvement and now only work on two things: writing/editing articles for bits.debian.org together with Ana Guerrero, and creating subtitles for the DebConf talks, in the DebConf Subs team. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? Basically thanks to the sudden abundance of free time - due to an health problem - and the desire to give something back to this wonderful operating system. After that, I found out that Debian is not only a great OS but also a very special community. Today, some of my dearest friends are people I met through Debian. :) Laura Arjona Who are you? I live in Madrid (Spain), and work as IT Assistant in the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). I'm married and I have a 4-years-old son. What do you do in Debian? In 2012 I started to clean spam and to translate Debian web pages into Spanish. I also follow the work of the web and publicity team, I hope I'll get more involved there too. And of course, I'm in Debian Women :) How and why did you start contributing to Debian? I'm using Debian at work since 2007 (servers), and in my desktops since 2010. I like very much that it is a community distro and I wanted to participate. I was already doing translations in other (small) free software projects, so I began here too. The Debian-Women list, the planet, and people in identi.ca helped me to learn a lot and feel part of the community even when I was not contributing yet. M nica Ram rez Arceda (monica) Who are you? My name is M nica Ram rez Arceda and I am an enthusiast of free software and sharing knowledge cultures: for me it's a kind of philosophy of life. I studied Maths a long time ago but ended up working as a developer for some years. Now I'm working as an IT teacher. What do you do in Debian? Debian is a huge project, so you can help in various scopes. Mainly, I work on packaging, fixing wnpp bug inconsistencies in BTS and helping in spam cleaning of the mailing lists. But I also enjoy doing some non-technical work from time to time: the project I am just now involved is organizing, with the rest of Debian Catalan community, a local team to propose Barcelona as the venue for a minidebconf where all the speakers will be women. How and why did you start contributing to Debian? In 2000 I discovered Free Software world and I fell deeply in love with its philosophy. Since then, I've been trying to do my best in different activities, like spreading the word, giving free courses, helping collectives and friends in technical stuff (from installing Debian to developing some helping apps for them)... but two years ago I was looking forward to join a free software project and I decided to try Debian, since it has been my first and only distro in my day-to-day life for about ten years. So, I wanted to give back Debian all what it had offered to me, but.... I thought I couldn't (hey, Debian is for real hackers, not for you little ant!), but I started to adopt some orphaned packages, do some QA uploads, fix some RC bugs, talk with some Debian Developers that helped me and encouraged me more than I expected, I traveled to my first Debconf... And one thing takes you to the other, and on March 2012 I became a DD. Now, I'm glad to see that everything that frightened me is not so scary :-)

Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large areas, depending on the radio technology used. Normal wifi equipment can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several successful examples like Freifunk and Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (see wikipedia for a large list) around the globe. To give you an idea how it work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which can be seen from their dynamically updated node graph and map, where one can see how the mesh nodes automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing. There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway, and that is the main topic of this blog post. I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped to do it as part of my involvement with the NUUG member organisation community, and my recent involvement in the Freedombox project finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family when possible, given that most communication between people are between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook communication patterns). It also allow people to communicate without any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the private communication of citizens, which have become more and more important over the years. So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space Hackeriet at Husmania. They seem to have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called the Oslo Freifunk project, but that effort is now dead and the people behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called meshfx. Unfortunately the wiki site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to the new project. A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks. I came across this video where Hans J rgen Lysglimt interview the speakers about this talk (from youtube): I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols. There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on batman-adv for now. It sure help me to know that the very cool Serval project in Australia is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and less industrialized communities. Check out this cool video presenting that project (from youtube): According to the wikipedia page on Wireless mesh network there are around 70 competing schemes for routing packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software based community mesh networks. The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2 (as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same network. One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your computer. The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up. A good introduction is available from the Open Mesh project. These are the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:

Setting	Value
Protocol / kernel module	batman-adv
ESSID	meshfx@hackeriet
Channel / Frequency	11 / 2462
Cell ID	02:BA:00:00:00:01

The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers. (See a nice post from VillageTelco about "Information about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges! for details.) When these settings are activated and you have some other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :) My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node, but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a firmware supporting batman-adv. If anyone know how to use that old wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know. If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join us on IRC, either channel #oslohackerspace or #nuug on irc.freenode.net. While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research and Innovation called The reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks and elsewhere learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at Gr nerl kka in Oslo. So mesh networks are also interesting for commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I know have closed down the experiment. Perhaps Telenor or others would be interested in a cooperation? Update 2013-10-12: I was just told by the Serval project developers that they no longer use batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based mesh system.

Review: 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	2012
ISBN:	0-316-19280-5
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	563

Swan Er Hong is a native of Mercury, granddaughter of one of the most influential women in the solar system. Alex, known as the Lion of Mercury, has just died as the story opens, and Swan is mourning. But she's also discovering that something else has been going on, something that Alex had not confided in her. Something that involves an inspector from the asteroids, a scientist from Titan, and a message Alex left in the event of her death, asking Swan to convey something personally to another scientist on Io. And then Mercury is attacked and the situation becomes much more complicated. 2312 is, like most Robinson novels, built on top of monumental world-building. The date is given away by the title; the setting is a solar system full of terraforming, habitats, and explosive human colonization. There are human settlements on every world that could possibly sustain them, including a terraformed Mars and a vast in-progress terraforming project on Venus. Mercury, Song's home, supports the city known as Terminator, a shielded habitat that travels around the planet on rails, pushed forward by the thermal expansion of metal at sunrise. Humans have scattered across the solar system and changed everything they've touched, even the asteroids. Many of those have been repurposed as long-haul shuttles: self-contained habitats on carefully-designed routes on which people live for months or years until they get to their destinations. Parts of this book are gorgeous. One of Robinson's strengths is creating images of the vastness of space, science, and human endeavor that feel plausible and inspiring at the same time. The setting of 2312 frees him to go wild with mega construction projects, and he takes full advantage. Parts of the book inspire the same sense of awe as the Hoover Dam or the Great Wall of China, transplanted into space and backed with neat scientific ideas to ponder. (Even if the more skeptical will note certain human habitation hazards, such as prolonged weightlessness and radiation, are mostly hand-waved away.) Unusually for a Robinson novel, 2312 also features an interesting and vibrant protagonist. Usually I can barely remember Robinson's protagonists five minutes after I finish the book, but Swan is so impulsive, erratic, and emotionally intense that I doubt I'll forget her. Her past is stuffed with outrageous risks and intense creativity: having songbird neurons transplanted into her brain, ingesting extraterrestrial bacteria, designing habitats in the asteroid belt, and creating art on the plains of Mercury. As the story gets underway, she meets the oversized and mellow Wahram; at first, she finds him boring, but then they're thrown together by one of the best set pieces of the book, and both they and the reader discover they work well together. Wahram serves as a straight man and as a stand-in for the reader's opinion, showing Swan all the more clearly in contrast. All this sounds quite promising. Unfortunately, what makes 2312 an ambitious failure rather than an excellent story is the story part. Robinson has built an amazing world, but he doesn't seem to know what to do with it. His economy, at least outside of Earth (and more on that in a moment), is essentially post-scarcity. Few of the characters we meet seem to have any concept of fiscal or practical limitation. They head across the solar system on a moment's notice, take vacations in habitats, or head to favorite spots for the view. It felt like Robinson was trying to write a Culture story. Unlike Banks, however, he struggles with generating a plot. 2312 is, in structure, a murder mystery. The characters witness a crime, survive it, and then intend to investigate it, and the crime appears to grow and link to fault lines in their society. This could have worked, but it has two problems: their society is only barely coherent enough for the reader to perceive the potential fault lines, and Robinson seems to have no idea how to construct a mystery plot. There is no sense of coherence to Swan and Wahram's approach, no sense of a gathering of clues, and very little sense of drama. All of the plot revelations are either dropped in Swan's lap by another character at a convenient moment or generated by Swan refusing to take the plot of the book seriously. The characters do essentially no meaningful investigation on-camera and show almost no investment in the outcome of the plot. When the climax comes, it's all weirdly forgettable. There are also large sections of the book that appear to have nothing to do with the rest of the plot, and that's where the unfortunate interval on Earth comes in. Robinson takes advantage of the scenes on Earth to do a bit of alienation and shows how foreign and strange and stifling Earth feels to someone who grew up outside of its atmosphere. Parts of this work, but he puts the plot on hold to do it. And parts of it do not work at all. The most glaring example is Swan and Wahram's bizarre bit of attempted charity in Africa, which comes across as stunningly high-handed and arrogant. This could be in character, particularly for Swan (who is not long on empathy), but, if so, the book doesn't signal to the reader that it should be read that way. Instead, there are some side (or snide) comments that seem to indicate Robinson knows nothing about the economic arc of Africa from the past twenty years. And when their absurd, botched, condescending charity plan fails for all the obvious reasons, the characters, and apparently the novel, throw up their hands and write Earth off as a stagnant lost cause that can't accept the imposition of a good idea and go back to the plot, never apparently caring about Earth again. Almost as frustrating is the way that these interludes are tied back into the story, which is usually through Swan getting ridiculously lucky on her random encounter rolls. It felt like whenever Robinson needed to make progress in the plot, Swan would just accidentally run into exactly the right person or situation to bring up the next plot point or to have some investigation make sense. (Not that Swan usually figured this out. Normally, the inspector explains it to her.) The author's finger was planted so firmly on the scales that it destroyed my suspension of disbelief and made a mockery of the idea that the characters were actually investigating anything. 2312 is built around a skeleton of a plot, but the lack of engagement with it, the lack of tension and emotion, the way the next developments are generally narrated to the protagonists and the reader, and the repeated use of random encounters to steer it left me without much reason to care. Robinson tries a few twists, but since the story never felt committed to its plot anyway, those twists feel less like planned complications and more like another random veer in the road. It didn't help that the final outcome was more prosaic and forgettable than the book had been implying it would be. There is a lot to like here. I'm very pleased to see Robinson finally write a memorable protagonist, and he's very good at both world-building and set pieces. But it needed a plot, and it needed a more coherent and complete cultural backdrop for its characters. Without both, it fell back into the typical Robinson trap: gorgeous moments separated by a whole lot of boring, and an overall impression of a construction tour rather than a story. There are bits of it I loved and still remember, particularly Song and Wahram in the tunnels of Mercury (which is possibly the best extended characterization Robinson has ever written). But the book as a whole is a mess, and I can't recommend wading through it for the good parts. Rating: 5 out of 10

As I mentioned earlier, the information in the documents released by Edward Snowden show a clear pattern of corporate and government abuse of the information networks that are now deeply intertwined with the lives of many people all over the world. Surveillance is a power dynamic where the party doing the spying has power over the party being surveilled. The surveillance state that results when one party has "Global Cryptologic Dominance" is a seriously bad outcome. The old saw goes "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". In this case, the stated goal of my government appears to be absolute power in this domain, with no constraint on the inevitable corruption. If you are a supporter of any sort of a just social contract (e.g. International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance), the situation should be deeply disturbing. One of the major sub-threads in this discussion is how the NSA and their allies have actively tampered with and weakened the cryptographic infrastructure that everyone relies on for authenticated and confidential communications on the 'net. This kind of malicious work puts everyone's communication at risk, not only those people who the NSA counts among their "targets" (and the NSA's "target" selection methods are themselves fraught with serious problems). The US government is supposed to take pride in the checks and balances that keep absolute power out of any one particular branch. One of the latest attempts to simulate "checks and balances" was the President's creation of a "Review Group" to oversee the current malefactors. The review group then asked for public comment. A group of technologists (including myself) submitted a comment demanding that the review group provide concrete technical details to independent technologists. Without knowing the specifics of how the various surveillance mechanisms operate, the public in general can't make informed assessments about what they should consider to be personally safe. And lack of detailed technical knowledge also makes it much harder to mount an effective political or legal opposition to the global surveillance state (e.g. consider the terrible Clapper v. Amnesty International decision, where plaintiffs were denied standing to sue the Director of National Intelligence because they could not demonstrate that they were being surveilled). It's also worth noting that the advocates for global surveillance do not themselves want to be surveilled, and that (for example) the NSA has tried to obscure as much of their operations as possible, by over-classifying documents, and making spurious claims of "national security". This is where the surveillance power dynamic is most baldly in play, and many parts of the US government intelligence and military apparatus has a long history of acting in bad faith to obscure its activities. The people who have been operating these surveillance systems should be ashamed of their work, and those who have been overseeing the operation of these systems should be ashamed of themselves. We need to better understand the scope of the damage done to our global infrastructure so we can repair it if we have any hope of avoiding a complete surveillance state in the future. Getting the technical details of these compromises in the hands of the public is one step on the path toward a healthier society. PostscriptLest I be accused of optimism, let me make clear that fixing the technical harms is necessary, but not sufficient; even if our technical infrastructure had not been deliberately damaged, or if we manage to repair it and stop people from damaging it again, far too many people still regularly accept ubiquitous private (corporate) surveillance. Private surveillance organizations (like Facebook and Google) are too often in a position where their business interests are at odds with their users' interests, and powerful adversaries can use a surveillance organization as a lever against weaker parties. But helping people to improve their own data sovereignty and to avoid subjecting their friends and allies to private surveillance is a discussion for a separate post, i think.Tags: cryptography, nsa

Announcement After a very long work, over the course of 4 months, I have finished packaging the first RC1 of OpenStack. This comes on time, just 9 days before the official Havana release. Please do try this RC1 before the official 2013.2, code name Havana, is released, and hopefully uploaded to Debian. All of the packages are available from Debian Experimental, keeping Grizzly in Sid. However, there is also some private repositories that I maintain, holding Wheezy backports: deb http://havana.pkgs.enovance.com/debian havana main deb http://archive.gplhost.com/debian havana-backports main The first repository holds the packages maintained within the Alioth group. These are built directly from my Jenkins machine, on each git push. The 2nd repository is holding backports from Sid to Wheezy for the packages that I don t actively maintain (though a lot of them are in the Python module team, in which I do a lot of packaging and updates as well). A few numbers A few numbers about this now. I had to work on 145 source packages: at least backport them to Wheezy, and push them in the GPLHost archive repository above. This generates 360 binary packages. Out of these, I maintain 77 source packages within the Alioth OpenStack group, generating 209 .deb files. That s a lot of stuff to deal with (and I feel sometimes a bit dizzy about it). While OpenStack is a big jigsaw puzzle to solve for the users, it is even more for someone who has to deal with all the (sometimes buried in the the code) Python dependencies. I hope others will come and join me in this packaging effort, since over the time, there s more and more work to be done, as the project grows. Note that most of the work is unfortunately done on packaging (and updating) the Python dependencies, working on the packages themselves is done last, at the end of the cycle. Other things not packaged (yet) Before the release (and the forthcoming Hongkong summit on the 5th of November), I hope to be able to finish packaging TripleO. TripleO is in fact OpenStack on OpenStack, which works with nova-baremetal. I have no idea how to test or install this, though it sounds like a lot of fun. There are 6 source packages that need to be done. Also, pending on the FTP masters NEW queue, is Trove: Database as a Service. I hope this one can get through soon. There is, also, Marconi, which is an incubated project for a new message queuing service, which probably will replace RabbitMQ (I m not sure yet what it does, and I will be happy to hear about it at the summit). Lastly, there s Ironic, which will at some point, replace nova-baremetal. That is, it does cloud computing over bare metal, without virtualization. All of these new projects are still in an incubation stage, and are not part of the official release yet. Though, I have learned over the course of this past year, that with OpenStack, it s never early enough to start the packaging work. Thanks to my sponsor! Please note that all of this wouldn t be possible without eNovance sponsoring my packaging work. A big up to all of them for supporting and loving Debian! You guys rox. Also a special thanks to Mehdi / Sileth, for his work testing everything with the Tempest functional tests and the CI platform.

Review: Grimspace, by Ann Aguirre

Series:	Sirantha Jax #1
Publisher:	Ace
Copyright:	March 2008
ISBN:	0-441-01599-9
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	312

Sirantha Jax is a jumper: a person with the rare genetic ability to jump spaceships through the shortcut dimension of grimspace. It's a science fiction idea with a long pedigree. It creates a separate in-group for the characters to belong to, a society with its own rules, and sets up tension with the rest of the institutions of the world. In Aguirre's version, jumpers can provide the transition but direction in grimspace has to be done by a pilot, and the jumper and the pilot develop a deep psychic bond. Jax had been jumping with her husband piloting, but on their last trip their ship crashed, killing everyone on board except her. As Grimspace opens, Jax is in a treatment facility that's much more like a prison. In theory, they're trying to figure out whether she's still able to (and safe to allow to) jump. In practice, something quite a bit more sinister is going on, a fact that the reader senses early but only learns more about after Jax is helped to escape. Scarred, deeply depressed, and nearly suicidal, she's pulled into the subversive plans of a small ship of renegades who are trying to break open the Corp monopoly on grimspace travel and their tight hold over every jumper. But she's not sure whether she trusts them, or whether she cares enough about their crusade to truly join in. Grimspace follows well-trod SF paths of special cadres of pilots and navigators, lawless corners of space with local warlords, and rebellion against smothering centralization, but its first-person protagonist and point of view have more in common with urban fantasy. It's written in first-person and, at times, nearly stream of consciousness from Jax's perspective, and Jax displays plenty of profanity, acidic commentary, and emotional angst. If her special ability were shapeshifting or magic instead of jumping spaceships, one could easily see her as the typical burned-out urban fantasy detective. I liked that. It's a fun point of view when it's written well, and it felt fresh when applied to a science fiction background instead of the more typical fantasy. That said, Grimspace has a rather rough start. Jax isn't sure what's going on at first and also isn't sure she cares, and I thought that carried over to the reader's experience. The first section of the book is rough and jagged, with staccato bursts of character introduction, world-building that doesn't quite cohere, and an extended stop on a very odd outback planet that felt to me like a repurposed stage from a western. Part of the early problem is that Jax and the reader are being intentionally kept in the dark about the real goal of this group, but part of the problem is also that none of the characters start off as very likable. That includes Jax, who is a complete mess and who is both scared and despairing to the point of being almost nihilistic. The world-building unfortunately does not carry the reader through that part of the story, and at about eighty pages in I wasn't sure I was going to like this book. It does, however, get much better. For one, Jax calms down and starts making emotional connections with the rest of the crew, and that lets her demonstrate skills as a fearless problem solver. For another, while the goal of the group of people she's fallen in with isn't exactly deep, it does make sense and it does slowly become a cause the reader (and Jax) can believe in. The frenetic pace of introduction and discovery also slows down, the cast stabilizes, and the surroundings get a bit less weird (and a bit more conventional for a science fiction novel). I didn't care for the alien baby subplot I rarely do but the rest of the story slowly pulled me in. One thing Aguirre did extremely well was surprise me. There are several points later in the book where Jax gets put in a fairly typical high-stress position and does something very atypical in reaction to it, twisting the story into a shape quite a bit unlike what I had been expecting. That made Jax feel like a true free agent, establishing her independence and her desire to control her own life, and that appealed to me. Aguirre also palms one card exceptionally well, setting up an ending that I thought was the best set of scenes in the whole book, and that had me thoroughly engrossed. One can see the bones of the urban fantasy heroine inside Jax's character, but they're fresh and interesting in an SF world, and they work better than I would have expected. There is a romance, in fitting with the urban fantasy inspiration, and it didn't quite work for me, but Aguirre also builds in a reason why it might not make sense and makes it spiky and fragile without being too cliched. By the end of the book, I was, if not entirely persuaded, at least willing to go along for the ride. And that's the best summary of Grimspace, I think. Parts of it don't make a great deal of sense, and parts of it are quite choppy. But I liked Jax once she starts getting a handle on her trauma, the other characters grew on me, and the plot surprised me in some interesting ways. It's not the smoothest or most polished SF novel I've read, but it has a lot of energy and an unusual genre mix. I think I'll stick along for the ride. Followed by Wanderlust. Rating: 7 out of 10

First day of hackweek did not really go as planned. I had to spend too much time on tasks which I did not now I will have to do in advance. I've started with releasing Weblate 1.7. As a part of that I update SUSE Studio images with Weblate. Unfortunately this turned out to be more challenging than usual as with new version the build script always failed but without any obvious error. After some time, I've realized that it just does not show whole output, so the last (and most important) lines are missing. Then it was easy to spot that the problem is in Whoosh version and it's just matter of providing newer version. After fixing the image, I could finally focus on Weblate's issue tracker and resolved few issues and questions. I've also improved some of the in application documentation and links to documentation or other resources. Meanwhile I could also setup translation hosting for monkeysign, happy translating!

Filed under: English SUSE Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!

Weblate 1.7 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements, especially in translation speed and many new features. Full list of changes for 1.7:

• Please check manual for upgrade instructions.
• Support for checking Python brace format string.
• Per subproject customization of quality checks.
• Detailed per translation stats.
• Changed way of linking suggestions, checks and comments to units.
• Users can now add text to commit message.
• Support for subscribing on new language requests.
• Support for adding new translations.
• Widgets and charts are now rendered using Pillow instead of Pango + Cairo.
• Add status badge widget.
• Dropped invalid text direction check.
• Changes in dictionary are now logged in history.
• Performance improvements for translating view.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Ready to run appliances will be soon available in SUSE Studio Gallery. Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others. If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you. Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far!

Filed under: English SUSE Weblate 1 comments Flattr this!

This is a quick bug-fix release of my collection of POD formatters. When I fixed a problem with the latest Pod::Simple and added some tests, I had assumed that the behavior of Pod::Simple with invalid POD would always be the same. Unfortunately, for the particular invalid POD that triggered the bug, versions of Pod::Simple from Perl 5.16 and earlier didn't produce any errors. That caused the test case to fail everywhere since it didn't find the error section it expected. This release now skips those specific tests on older versions, while still ensuring that no unexpected exceptions or warnings are thrown. It also fixes a documentation bug I noticed while working on other things. You can get the latest release from CPAN or from the podlators distribution page.

Until now qcontrol has mostly only supported only ARM (kirkwood) based devices (upstream has a configuration example for the HP Media Vault too, but I don't know if it is used). Debian bug #712191 asked for at least some basic support for x86 based devices. The mostly don't use the QNAP PIC used on the ARM devices so much of the qcontrol functionality is irrelevant but at least some of them do have a compatible A125 LCD. Unfortunately I don't have any x86 QNAP devices and I've been unable to figure out a way to detect that we are running on an QNAP box as opposed to any random x86 box so I've not been able to implement the hardware auto-detection used on ARM to configure qcontrol for the appropriate device at installation time. I don't want to include a default configuration which tries to drive an LCD on some random serial port since I have no way of knowing what will be on the other end or what the device might do if sent random bytes of the LCD control protocol. So I've implemented debconf prompting for the device type which is used only if auto-detection fails, so it shouldn't change anything for existing users on ARM. You can find this in version 0.5.2-3~exp1 in experimental (see DebianExperimental on the Debian wiki for how to use experimental). Currently the package only knows about the existing set of ARM platforms and a default "unknown" platform, which has an empty configuration. If you have a QNAP device (ARM or x86) which is not currently supported then please install the package from experimental and tailor /etc/qcontrol.conf for you platform (e.g. by uncommenting the a125 support and giving it the correct serial port). Then send me the result along with the device's name. If the device is an ARM one please also send me the contents of /proc/cpuinfo too so I can implement auto-detection. If you know how to detect a particular x86 QNAP device programmatically (via DMI decoding, PCI probing, sysfs etc, but make sure it is 100% safe on non-QNAP platforms) then please do let me know.

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (86.18 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Package Tracking System^U Distro Tracker Marko Lalic implemented quite a few interesting features in the last weeks of the Google Summer of Code (support of teams most notably). Unfortunately he didn t deploy (yet) the latest changes on pts.debian.net. Given the good work he made over the summer, I marked him as successful in his GSOC. Hopefully he will stick around and continue to contribute, he promised to try to handle some mass renaming that we agreed upon. Effectively, after much bike-shedding, I decided that the software would be called Distro Tracker . Once those last-minute cleanups are done, I plan to request tracker.debian.org to Debian System Administrators. This means that it will be deployed in parallel to the current PTS at least until we re at feature parity in the new codebase. The new codebase should be much more easy to get started with, so I should do some promotion and invite people to contribute to it possibly by writing some short how to get started documentation. I started by creating a dedicated wiki page: http://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/distro-tracker
Misc packaging I got two REJECTs from ftpmasters this month (one for galette, one for dolibarr). I took care of fixing the various issues in galette and the package has been promptly accepted afterwards. For dolibarr, I mentored the upstream maintainer about the various problems and got him to fix it. It took a bit more time and the package is thus still in NEW. I packaged wordpress 3.6, and then wordpress 3.6.1 (security update). python-django also had multiple security updates this month, I took care of one or two uploads but Luke Faraone dealt with most of them (including backports to Squeeze!). I packaged Publican 3.6.1 and uploaded dh-linktree 0.4 to fix a FTBFS issue introduced with Perl 5.18. Of anecdotal importance, but I also filed bug #721849 after seeing how much energy was spent to ensure debian/rules didn t contain an improper copyright statement. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

No comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Here in the US, the Affordable Care Act is finally going into effect, with accompanying drama. I managed to get signed up today at healthcare.gov. After not having health insurance since 2000, I will finally be covered starting January 1 2014. Since my income is mosty publically known anyway, I thought it might be helpful to blog about some details. I was uninsured for 14 years due to a combination of three factors:

1. Initially, youthful stupidity and/or a perfectly resonable cost/benefit analysis. (Take your pick.)
2. Due to the US health insurance system being obviously broken, and my preference to avoid things that are broken. Especially when the breakage involved insurers refusing to cover me at any sane level due to a minor and easily controlled pre-existing condition.
3. Since I'm not much motivated by income levels, and am very motivated to have time to work on things that are important to me, my income has been on average pretty low, and perhaps more importantly, I have intentionally avoided being a full-time employee of anyone at any point in the past 14 years (have rejected job offers), and so was not eligible for any employee plans which were the only reasonable way to be covered in the US. (See point #2.)

So, if you're stuck waiting in line on healthcare.gov (is this an entirely new online experience brought to us by the US government?), or have seen any of the dozen or so failure modes that I saw just trying to register for a login to the site, yeah, it's massively overloaded right now, and it's also quite broken on a number of technical levels. But you can eventually get though it. Based on some of the bugs I saw, it may help to have an large number of email addresses and use a different one for each application attempt. It also wouldn't hurt to write some programs to automate the attempts, because otherwise you may have to fill out the same form dozens of times. And no, you can't use "you+foo@bar.com" for your email; despite funding the development of RFC-822 in the 80's, the US government is clueless about what consititutes a valid email address. But my "favorite" misfeature of the site is that it refuses to let you enter any accented characters, or characters not in the latin alphabet when signing up. Even if they're, you know, part of your name. (Welcome back to Ellis Island..) I want to check the git repository to see if I can find the backstory for these and other interesting technical decisions, but they have forgotten to push anything to it for over 3 months. The good news is that once you get past the initial signup process, and assuming you get the confirmation mail before the really short expiration period of apparently less than 1 hour (another interesting technical choice, given things like greylisting), the actual exchange is not badly overloaded, and nor is it very buggy (comparatively). I was able to complete an application in about an hour. The irony is that after all that, I was only able to choose from one health insurer covering my area on the so-called "exchange". (Blue Cross/Blue Shield) I also signed up for dental insurance (it was a welcome surprise that the site offers this at all) and had a choice of two insurers for that. The application process was made more uncertian for me since I have no idea what I'll end up doing for money once my current crowdsourced year of work is done. The site wants you to know how much income you'll have in 2014, and my guess is anywhere between $6000 (from a rental property) and about what I made this year (approx $25000 before taxes). Or up, if I say, answered the Google pings. The best choice seemed to be to answer what I made this year, which is also close to what I made last year. So, I'll be paying around $200/month for a combination of not very good health insurance, and not very good dental insurance. There is around $750/year of financial aid to people at my guesstimated 2014 income level, which would drop that to $140/month, but I will let them refund me whatever that turns out to be in a lump sum later instead. For comparison, I am lucky to spend rather less renting a three bedroom house situated in 25 acres of woods.. It's strange to think that all of this is an improvement to the system here in the US, especially given all the better options that could have been passed instead, but it seems that it probably is. Especially when I consider the many people around me who are less fortunate than myself. If you'd like a broader perspective on this, see Tobias Buckell's "American healthcare was already socialized by Reagan, we re just fighting about how to pay for it".

XMir's been delayed from Ubuntu 13.10. The stated reason is that multi-monitor support isn't sufficiently reliable. That's true, but it's far from the only problem that XMir still has:

• It's still broken on some single-monitor systems

Some machines have display corruption. There are writes to freed memory. To be fair, some of the behaviour that's been seen has been down to underlying bugs in the Xorg drivers that were never triggered under normal use but are hit by XMir. Others are down to implicit assumptions made in the drivers that XMir happens to violate. The problem is that there doesn't appear to have been enough room in the schedule to deal with these interactions, presumably because nobody accounted for the inevitable "This thing we thought would be easy turns out to be difficult" part of the project.


• The input driver bug still isn't really fixed

I've mentioned this bug before. It's now marked "Fix released" which is kind of true but not really. Mir now tells XMir that the VT is changing before the VT is changed, but it doesn't wait for that to complete before switching the VTs. Until XMir is scheduled and runs, it's still receiving input events. In most circumstances that window is small, so there's no real risk of triggering it accidentally.

There's one corner case where it might still cause problems. Simply running isn't enough - XMir has to make progress through its event loop. That'll only happen if the X server is processing its wakeup events, and it's possible to effectively stall that by submitting a sufficiently awkward drawing request to the server. The X server will appear to freeze, and if the user then attempts to work out what's going on by switching to a VT and logging in, those input events will still be going to XMir. It's left as an exercise to the reader to construct ways to take advantage of this.

This can't happen in Xorg because the VT switch is blocked until the input devices have been released. Mir could have done the same, but doesn't because of a conscious design decision - in the Ubuntu Phone world, clients stop doing things when they're told to. Ubuntu Desktop is expected to behave the same way.

This is an unfortunate situation to be in. Ubuntu Desktop was told that they were switching to XMir, but Mir development seems to be driven primarily by the needs of Ubuntu Phone. XMir has to do things that no other Mir client will ever cope with, and unless Mir development takes that into account it's inevitably going to suffer breakage like this. Canonical management needs to resolve this if there's any hope of ever shipping XMir as the default desktop environment.


• It's still missing features

XMir doesn't support colour profiles. XRandR properties aren't exposed, so there's no way to control TV output encoding or overscan. There's still no hardware cursor support. Switching to XMir now would reduce functionality without providing any user-visible gain.

It's clear that XMir has turned into a larger project than Canonical had originally anticipated, but that's hardly surprising. There's only one developer with previous X experience working on it full-time, and the announced schedule provided no opportunity to deal with unexpected problems. As if that weren't enough, there's obvious conflict between Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Phone when it comes to developer time and required functionality. The one hardware vendor who's willing to take a public stand has demonstrated that they have no interest in supporting XMir, despite Canonical assuring people that they were already engaging in productive negotiations with GPU manufacturers.

Multiple monitor support may be the single most obvious feature where XMir is lacking, but it's not the only one. Technically and politically, this code is a long way from being ready for prime time. Without significant community contribution, Canonical need to focus on prioritising it appropriately rather than expecting a tiny number of developers to perform miracles. Or, alternatively, they could just drop XMir entirely and focus on Unity 8.

comments

This week's lesson on the Arte y cultura en circulaci n: crear y compartir en tiempos digitales course talks about piracy and the circulation of culture, a topic that over time has been debated over and over. And a topic, yes, that can always lead to interesting discussions. This time, we are requested to choose one among ten ideas among the media groups' discourse on what piracy is and means for the "cultural industry". There are tons of material written already on several of those ten lines (i.e. piracy disincentivates creativity, or two that can be seen as two faces of the same argument, If a consumer can have free access to cultural products, he will stop spending his money on them and Every time a consumer has access to an illegal copy, the industry loses a sale), and some are quite obvious (i.e. Piracy makes job positions be lost... Just look at the amount of people the unauthorized distribution industry feeds! Or possibly, Piracy is a prosper industry that gives money to people distributing illegal products Of course, that is true. The problem is, what causes said products to be illegal to begin with? Should they be so?). Some other ideas talk about harsher penalties and ways to punish illegal copying in order to drive actors out of that sector (and into the... void?) So, I chose item #4: Cultural products have a high cost because their production is complex (and a tag could be made, linking complex with expensive). I think this item can lead to a long discussion as to what does this complexity and cost mean. Some cultural products do require quite a bit of investment, yes. Others don't. How do content producers make the jump to produce expensive works? If I am a new programmer/artist/writer/screenplayer/whatever, most likely, my products will be not very complex or expensive. I will start small. And if I excel at my work, somebody will look at me and, in some way, become my patron, my sponsor. Being a sponsor might mean that, based on the results of my good work, I could get hired as a software developer at a large company, or an editorial company would buy the patrimonial rights of my book/music (be it for a fixed fee or for a percentage of sales), or whatever. But the leap is not made quantically A newcomer to the cultural scene will at first, most likely, have a hard time selling his products. At first, it takes convincing just getting people to take a shot at looking at your work ( Hey, please take a look at my program and tell me what you think about it! , Would you be interested in listening to my latest song? And those two are by far ahead of the first attempts where the interactions would more likely be Turn off that $#^#!^ computer, it's well past bedtime or stop murdering that guitar, I'm having a headache ). Maybe the toughest part is to get people to agree to read/hear your work. And there, you start into a continuum Selling your CDs while performing on the street, then getting to play to a bar, then getting somebody to want to produce (maybe even "discover"!) you. Publish some short stories in your school magazine, then in a "From our audience" section in a larger magazine, then a collective book, your self-published book, yet-unwritten books by contract... The same story over and over again, in each different field. Ok, yes, but... This logic succession still leaves space for the Important Producers with the Mighty Big Pockets for the most wanted/largest productions, right? And were unauthorized distribution (piracy) to be the norm (as it currently is, dare I say), wouldn't they stop producing an important portion of cultural works? I'd be tempted to say so. However, a different actor comes into play. When Mighty Big Pockets comes into play, they no longer worry only about getting money from each cultural creation, but from all derived uses of it. And the cultural creation industry (when seen as an industry) goes very much hand in hand with the advertising, marketing industries They end up blending with each other. So, the biggest best sellers will most likely have a hit from illegal copiers. Books are still a great business, but hey An even better business is (usually) movie making. And when you make a movie out of a great story, you will surely link some advertising into it (or at the very least, push advertising/product pushing campaigns to go after it). And there, illegal distribution actually helps the money circle to grow stronger. In the early 1990s, the link between dinosaurs and carbonated drinks was a top seller (because Pepsi was a Jurassic Park sponsor). Although I have always loathed the madness around the World Cups (and basically anything that involves football of any kind), I can perfectly remember several of the theme songs for most of the world cups played during my lifetime. So, in short... No. Illegal distribution does marginally little harm to the money income to the cultural business, at any level. And where it does get some direct harm, it increases the money flux given the auxiliary channels.

Matt Palmer wrote an insightful post about the use of the word professional [1]. It s one factor that makes me less inclined to be a member of professional societies. The TED blog has an interesting article about Wikihouse which is a project to create a set of free designs for houses to be cut out of plywood with a CNC milling machine [2]. The article also links to a TED talk by Alastair Parvin of the Wikihouse project which covers many interesting things other than designing houses. An XKCD comic has one of the best explanations of bullying I ve ever seen [3]. If you aren t familiar with XKCD then make sure you hover your mouse over it to read the hidden text. The Fair Phone is a project to develop a smart phone starting with conflict-free resources and with fully free software (not like a typical Android build) [4]. It s an interesting project and the price and specs seem within the normal range so you re not paying a huge premium for a conflict-free phone. Unfortunately they only have one model with a 4.3 display, if they had a competitor for the Galaxy Note then I d be interested. Patrick Stokes wrote an insightful article about why I m entitled to my opinion is a bogus argument [5]. Jim Daly wrote an interesting TED blog post interviewing Rishi Manchanda about Upstream Doctors who look for the root causes of medical problems rather than just treating the symptoms [6]. Brian Krebs wrote an insightful article about the value of a hacked email account [7]. If you are trying to convince your users to use better passwords then this should help. Ron Garrett wrote an insightful series or articles on morality hooked on the premise of whether it s wrong to torture kittens [8]. Part of his conclusion is that people who believe it s wrong to do such things tend to be more capable of working in large groups and forming a productive and efficient society. The TED blog has an interesting post by Karen Eng summarising Andreas Raptopoulos talk about using autonomous drones to deliver parcels in parts of the world that don t have usable roads [9]. Delivering parcels (which would start with medical supplies but would presumably move on to commercial transport) by drone is apparently really cheap. Being cheaper than building roads isn t going to be difficult but it seems that they are going to make it cheaper than paying people to deliver parcels even if the roads were built. The main web site about this project is www.matternet.us, they are hiring electrical engineers. Here is the link for Andreas TED talk [10]. The TOR blog has an interesting article by Emily Asher-Perrin comparing the different houses of Hogwarts [11]. It s an insightful article about personality attributes and gives more information than is available in the movies (I d read the books if I had time).

• [1] http://hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2013/05/14/a-modest-vocabulary-proposal.html
• [2] http://blog.ted.com/2013/05/23/how-to-print-out-your-own-house/
• [3] http://xkcd.com/1216/
• [4] http://www.fairphone.com/
• [5] http://theconversation.com/no-youre-not-entitled-to-your-opinion-9978
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/n2rvo94
• [7] http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/06/the-value-of-a-hacked-email-account/
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/nczyspd
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/kxu8dxp
• [10] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqcX3AM5oh8
• [11] http://tinyurl.com/o4sbt3l