The Guardian reported this week that rights holders will have to obtain a court order before punishing persistent offenders by reducing or cutting off their internet connections. This is an important step in the right direction. For too long, rights holders and their agents have been able to make allegations without fear of repurcussions, even though loss of internet access can be a terrible problem for customers, especially as more government services move online. In the US, we ve even seen rights holder agents acting against legitimate publishing by TV production companies these groups really are out of control! There are still unanswered questions about who pays when an allegation is made, with the cost usually being left with the customer, either directly (through having to pay the ISP an admin fee for the allegation) or indirectly (through higher ISP fees). Hopefully the courts would rule fairly on who should pays the costs in each case. The next step would be to prohibit things like Karoo s Three Strikes as unfair terms in consumer contracts.

Thomas Dukleth writes in:

Remember to vote for your choices in the final Koha foundation forming election before the poll closes on the 25th. Turnout in the final Koha foundation forming election is lower than in the previous preliminary poll at this point. This is the poll which determines our actual choice. The previous poll was more of a survey to discover interests and inform the process of how to conduct the final election. The links to the ballot are as follows. English:
http://opensource.web2learning.net/limesurvey/index.php?sid=88794&lang=en
French:
http://opensource.web2learning.net/limesurvey/index.php?sid=88794&lang=fr Pages linked from the Koha Wiki foundation forming options page, short link http://bit.ly/4AjYin , and discussions which we have had on the Koha mailing lists should inform you of the options.

Go vote! In other news, there s a bugfix release of koha-3.0.4.

I ve been mouthing off about Ubuntu again, after the forthcoming release parties were advertised in some pretty inappropriate places, lamenting:

Ubuntu has taken a voluntary-sector aim-for-100%-free distribution, built a private-sector free-and-non-free distribution and gets more love and free marketing from free software supporters than its parent, or than the whole-community events.

However, I did surprise someone by ending with

The silver lining is that most Ubuntu improvements are free software and are/can be contributed back to the free software world.

That s in part because Ubuntu finally made some progress on the Mailman colour mismash bug I tried to fix 5 years ago which is still unfixed in GNU as far as I know. So I think that as long as much of Ubuntu is free software, its contributors will still be doing some good work. I hope a mailman bgcolor/CSS patch is taken by other distributions soon.

So after Royal Mail shut down useful community websites causing MP comments on the idiocy of Royal Mail, I was rather surprised to get this little thing in the post today: That s a postmark advert for Celebrating 50 years of POSTCODES 1959-2009 . So this is what Royal Mail does with some of the money it makes from its claimed monopoly on postcode databases: it spends it on ink to celebrate postcodes in the bit where they can t sell adverts. After the postcode-takedown, I suggested deleting postcodes from all our co-op s websites. Instead, another member has persuaded me to contribute to something like free the postcode, which I first saw on CycleStreets blog. As well as slapping its customers, Royal Mail is also currently taking on its workers who are campaigning for sustainable jobs and against the recent increase in bullying and harassment cases. I already send most of my letters, invoices and so on electronically since our three nearest post offices closed last year. I ve noticed Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op switching to DPD and Terry Lane suggesting more online use. Are those good approaches? How are you adapting to the postal delays? Have you put your postcode into free the postcode or a similar site?

Our co-op uses the git revision control system pretty extensively, both directly and through etckeeper. With more workers, we re keeping more shared copies of our git repositories. So inevitably, we ran into permissions problems. Thanks a lot to Moser for pointing out the git repo-config core.sharedRepository true option. I ve also had a bit more of a look around git config (because repo-config is an alias for that) and wonder about the logAllRefUpdates and whitespace settings. Anyone have favourite values for these or other cooperative git tips?

A board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 14 Oct) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted only yesterday, containing a proposal to hold a debian domain. The proposal says SPI Inc. will support a transfer of said domain to a registered non-profit organization in Taiwan which surprises me after the reply I had about Transferring to another non-profit that I d say that any transfer to a non-US non-profit is likely to be impossible. Oh and what happened to the contributing membership expiry resolution? I thought that was coming back this month. I see that there wasn t a SPI September 2009 meeting log summary sent to spi-general, probably because I wasn t there. I ll go do that now.

Sean Kenny emailed us to tell us about an event in Bristol: This week s Freeskilling is called Who needs Microsoft? and we are meeting at the Better Food Co. Cafe, St Werburghs @ 7pm Tues 13th Oct. Ben Smith will be giving a talk about how you can replace Microsoft Windows and all the very expensive and security flawed software that goes with it, with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). This will save you lots of money and is more ethical into the bargain! For more info, go to http://thegurinet.doesntexist.com/ Only thing I m disappointed about is that it s centred on replacing Microsoft, but that s still the starting point for most people.

Here are the results of the Koha Foundation Desires poll. More than 75% of respondants support the Koha foundation/association doing these things:- 1. ensure the ongoing shared governance of the project = 32 out of 35 = 91.43%
2. owning koha.org = 16 out of 18 = 88.89%
3. secure the Koha name = 31 out of 35 = 88.57%
4. Kaitiaki (guardianship) role = 29 out of 35 = 82.86%
5. be owner of the copyright = 27 out of 35 = 77.14% More than half want to see it do something about each of these six:- 6. user/developer conferences/user group meetings = 24 out of 35 = 68.57%
7. funding non sexy but highly necessary jobs such as revamping and optimising old code = 24 out of 35 = 68.57%
8. networking local associations (such as KUDOS, KohaLA) = 12 out of 18 = 66.67%
9. managed democratically by its member (Association more than Foundation) = 11 out of 18 = 61.11%
10. promote OSS solutions in libraries = 21 out of 35 = 60%
11. further development of features = 19 out of 35 = 54.29% Less than half want these five tasks:- 12. usability/ accessibilty studies = 16 out of 35 = 45.71%
13. opensearchportal for all koha installs = 12 out of 35 = 34.29%
14. translations/localisation = 10 out of 35 = 28.57%
15. provide open source solutions for all tasks a library does daily = 10 out of 35 = 28.57%
16. back up your library technically. Local company/volunteers would do the rest = 9 out of 35 = 25.71% Minority activities:- 17. selling an idea to libraries = 6 out of 35 = 17.14%
18. deployment/adoption in developing countries = 5 out of 35 = 14.29%
19. foster new businesses = 4 out of 35 = 11.43%
20. sure up old ones that might be in dire straits = 3 out of 35 = 8.57% You can see the names given by the voters and who voted for what in the Koha Foundation Desires poll online. I hope we ll see the other, wider survey response before the general meeting in a couple of hours. The agenda for it is on wiki.koha.org. If you re involved with koha, I hope to see you there!

High-speed internet links are something that makes FOSS development much easier, but I m still having reliability problems with my ADSL. A fringe benefit of moving to a more open Linux-based router is that I can see what s going wrong in more detail. But now I have to gamble nearly two hundred pounds in order to get the service providers to continue trying to find the bug! Sorry for the length, but let me explain how bad broadband in rural England is just now Outside the big cities with their cable networks, Company A owns the lines, Company B provides the services and we buy those services from reseller Company C. Sometimes the same company is A and B or B and C, but never all three. Most of the companies who are B won t be C themselves - in other words, they don t sell retail, but they nearly always seem to have a main or preferred retail partner. Company A is nearly always OpenReach, part of BT Group, the telephone monopoly privatised back in the 1980s but still somehow keeping its landline monopoly. Why is that allowed? Company C has been The Phone Co-op for me for the last few years. Back in February, I changed how I bought my services, combining phone and broadband into one purchase. They d been two purchases mainly because I switched my ADSL from Pipex to the co-op at a different time to switching my line to them. As I understand it, this change had the side effect of changing Company B from OpenReach to Opal Telecom. Opal are the provider business behind TalkTalk, hardest to use Broadband ISP 2009. Since the change, I ve been suffering unexplained disconnections, especially in the early evenings and at weekends. I m pretty sure it s Opal s equipment to blame for two reasons:- Firstly, this wasn t happening until Opal became Company B, while Companies A and C are the same as before (when I had a stable but unspectacular 4Mbps connection). Secondly, since changing my router, I can see LCP TermReq being sent by Opal s PPP peers. Opal insist their equipment isn t sending TermReq messages. My Netgear router disagrees, but I can t seem to get anyone to take its pppd debug logs seriously. So, I ve complained to my supplier (Company C), they ve pretty straightforwardly passed it to Company B and I ve jumped through all the bloody silly hoops like using only wired connections to the router (yay, wires across the house), plugging the router into different phone sockets (yay, more wires across the house) and disconnecting everything from the phone sockets so Company A can run some voltage test (yay, uncontactability - just as well other software.coop workers can cover for me). Now the next step is for some phone engineer to call. For this to happen, I have to agree that I will pay GBP 164 if a fault is found on my phone network instead of theirs. If I don t, they will give up trying to find the fault. I don t really see why this is necessary: surely if there was a line fault, it would have shown itself on the old service? Also, the router says the line has no fault and the SNR and Attenuation are both fine but not great. Unlike most people, I ve already had my house phone network tested with professional equipment (yay for network engineers in the co-op trying to avoid the painful state of British broadband bugfixing), but I m still left betting hundreds of pounds on the phone engineers not pointing the finger at my network. What choice do I have? I ve read elsewhere about people giving up on ADSL and switching to mobile internet because then they have only one company to deal with. I can see some attraction in that, but I live in a village with poor mobile service and I suspect the forthcoming T-Mobile/Orange and T-Mobile/Three link-ups will soon make that less straightforward too. A confusopoly is probably more profitable to telephone companies. Do most people bet a couple of hundred pounds to get their broadband fixed? How many broadband faults get ignored at that point? Why don t the retail company Cs have access to enough Company B systems to lead the fault-finding instead of only being able to pass it on to people who seem to give replies that contradict the logs and won t talk directly to customers? Is fixing this A-B-C three-companies-pass-the-buck system a necessity for Digital Britain? Why isn t the government intervening to end the OpenReach monopoly outside the big cities?

I read the news about the launch of Ubuntu User by Linux New Media AG with some sadness. I believe that free software is stronger because of the informal cooperation between different distributions that usually do different jobs. It lets us see what s growing in our neighbour s garden. I m a debian developer, but I don t subscribe to many debian-specific products or services because I like the broader view. Also, at a generally-economically-weak time when some more general publications seem to be dying and restarting, concentrating on the Ubuntu users seems like it probably won t be a big enough audience to sustain a title. The temporary loss of readers could also push other multi-distribution magazines over the brink. Now, I use and support Ubuntu systems from time to time (among others), but it feels like Ubuntu attracts this sort of anti-social single-distribution concentration more often than any other current one. Its users seem even more fixed on it than Gentoo s users, which is almost the opposite of what I expect from a distribution which claims Ubuntu and Free Software are about collaboration and working together . So why does this happen? Are any sociologists researching whether there are really narrower horizons among Ubuntu users than others? Have any Ubuntu community leaders questioned the lack of collaboration with Free Software in launching an Ubuntu-only magazine in a recession?

I ve seen a couple of the conversation-spams described in Misspelled nemesis club: A new twist on spam? It looks like they exploit the typically weak moderation practices of many software discussion mailing lists. Do you think they are human-powered? Are they caught out if you set default_member_moderation (new list member postings are moderated) or equivalent in the list software? Google and Yahoo Groups seem to be suffering worst. Do they even have such an option? I ve also caught some strange behaviour on one of the SMTP servers we run for a customer. Does anyone know what virus or worm or other nasty authenticates but gives itself away by sending RCPT TO:<MISSING*EMAIL*ADDRESS> to SMTP servers?

Away from the Yagooglive search engines, there have been some recent changes in the search space. Bing launched a while ago, but I ve only just read from Anglian LUG that Bing is badly biased, returning pretty poor results for openoffice, vista and windows searches. In the following discussion, Bev mentioned Quintura which looks like an interesting newcomer, but it s so heavily javascript-requiring that I m not going to use it every day. It made me think of a cross between Clusty and the now-dead SearchMe. The other big noise lately has been the Wolfram Alpha but most of my search requests seem too esoteric for it. As you may guess from the above, I m still using Clusty as my main search engine (when something isn t in my bookmarks or the ODP). What s your favourite non-Yagooglive search?

I ve done a bit of investigating ethical Free Software T-Shirts here in the past. Even when they re available, it seems a bit odd to buy a fairtrade t-shirt and then get it in plastic wrap and/or on a plastic hanger in a plastic bag. I also wonder about why and how it s fairtrade, a sort of look behind the label desire. Now Boxes of Fairtrade t-shirts are to be trialled in Midcounties Co-op stores - will it succeed and will we start to see more of this sort of packaging for ethical products? A cardboard comeback?

We were called in to help someone with a failing file upload feature on a PHP website. It turned out that we d recently upgraded their server to debian 5.0 and the mime_content_type() PHP function was no longer available. This isn t a serious bug really, because the function has been deprecated (old PHP lives forever, but not so function definitions) for some time. Debian bug #491033 gives the details. We put together a fairly quick fix using shell_exec() to call the file command (with the usual checks to avoid someone poisoning the shell - which shouldn t happen because it s only called on uploaded temporary filenames, but why risk it?). We could have used finfo_file but that s not yet packaged for debian, so is it worth the cost of having unpackaged PHP classes around?

I was reading xkcd by clicking on the random link when I noticed that the same cartoons were coming up again and again. I was wondering if this was Confirmation bias on my part or a duff random number generator on the server's part. Randall Munroe is a science geek, and I figured what he would do is test this idea... One python script and 12,000 (approx) requests later, I had a file full of numbers and started trying to remember some statisics. I threw together a quick bit of python to work out the mean and standard deviation (its here). The mean value is 97.4155602788 and the standard deviation is 171.040683155. If they are uniformly distributed from 1 to 361, the expected mean would be 104.211323761 and the standard deviation would be 181.0. So I was lost in thought for a while. However, the following quick check threw some light on the difference.

>>> data = [int(x) for x in open('numbers.data')]
>>> for x in xrange(0, 361):
...   if x not in data:
...     print x
... 
0
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360

So comics numbered about 338 don't appear. And recomputing the mean and standard deviation for 1 to 337 gives a mean of 97.2830920561 and a standard deviation of 169.0, which is about the mean and standard deviation the data gives. I'm now waiting for someone who actually knows stats correcting me in where I went wrong. The conclusion? I suffer from confirmation bias :-(. For those who like pretty pictures, here is one, courtesy of the Google charts API and pygooglechart: code here

Once again, the monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 16 Sep) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted and there s a proposal for an extra bank account and two projects up for association: Path64 and OSUNIX. The big change for current members is the proposal for contributing membership expiry:

Any contributing member who does not cast a ballot in an annual Board member election shall be considered to be inactive and downgraded to a non-contributing member.

Yet another demonstration of how member ballots are not secret yet. Even if they re not secret like they should be, is it a good idea to feed the ballot data to the membership process? Should Further Discussion be added to the SPI board election, to give members a way to abstain? Should this dramatic change proposal be considered this meeting when it wasn t mentioned in the meeting announcement?

A quick reminder about the meeting about forming a Koha foundation in a few hours. The agenda and information links are on the wiki. I d really like to see everyone invoved in koha development there, or you could leave comments here for me to take to the meeting. Someone will link a summary and the transcript from the wiki after the meeting.

There will be an EU crackdown on websites selling consumer electronic goods which is entirely understandable when 203 out of 369 sites appeared to break the law. (first seen on BBC News) If you re a shop owner, the good site and bad site examples are pretty good, while local trading standards offices advise on selling online. If you re a buyer, see my guide on How to Check Web Shops for Basic Security. Why is it so bad? Do companies not understand the law? Do they not bother to check the law? Do they deliberately decide to ignore it? Don t customers prefer law-abiding web shops, or are low prices attractive enough to overcome that?

With the vrms meme raging on Planet Ubuntu, I noticed some people still have sun-java6 installed. I ve been using openjdk-6 since Hardy, and everything I use works fine with it (e.g. Vuze, Catan, Eclipse, FreeMind, and even Facebook s photo uploader thing). Given the Ubuntu Tech Board s remove sun-java6 from the archive Agenda item, it s possible sun-java6 (being redundant and orphaned) would go away in Ubuntu Karmic (sun-java5 is already gone because Sun will drop support for it in October, and sun-java6 is not far behind). I ve heard some noises about openjdk-6 not working for people, but I haven t actually seen any direct technical evidence of something working in one and not the other. Seeing as Jaunty s OpenJDK was certified by Sun, it would be very interesting to find failures, as this would indicate that Sun s certifications are missing something. Looking for examples of failures in Google, I couldn t find anything with obvious test-cases that failed with openjdk-6. I suspect I m just not trying hard enough, but I m curious what other people have run into. Test for yourself:

sudo apt-get purge sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre sun-java6-bin sun-java6-plugin
sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk icedtea6-plugin

(Don t forget to restart your browser.)

This isn t a problem which many companies have to deal with. It s simple for lots of them: ignore things like climate change except when laws or public relations (or employee relations?) require otherwise. As far as the company is concerned, the aim is to make money. Not so for the third sector. One of the cooperative principles is to work for the sustainable development of our communities through policies approved by our members (taken from Statement on the Co-operative Identity). I think climate change is real, a threat to sustainable development and can be minimised by human action. But have I got policies approved by TTLLP members about it? Nope. There s usually something more urgent to work on. Not so for the co-operative group. They re supporting The Wave in London on Saturday 5 December 2009 with subsidised transport and more. Will you be there? What do you think of it? If you re a young people , you can also make your views known at Play to Stop - Europe for Climate (the EU and MTV - together at last!).