The situation where Agon (the designated organizer of the Chess World
Championship, and also the Candidates tournament, the prequalifier to
said WC) is trying to claim exclusive rights of the broadcasting of the
moves (not just the video) is turning bizarre.
First of all, they have
readily acknowledged they have no basis in
copyright to do so; chess moves, once played, are facts and cannot be
limited. They try to jump through some hoops with a New York-specific
doctrine (even though the Candidates, unlike the World Championship,
is played in Moscow) about hot news , but their main weapon seems to
be that they simply will throw out anyone from the hall who tries to
report on the moves, and then try to give them only to those that promise
not to give them on. This leads to the previously unheard-of situation where you
need to register
and accept their terms just to get to watch the games in your browser.
You have to wonder what they will be doing about the World Championship,
which is broadcast unencrypted on Norwegian television (previous editions
also with no geoblock).
Needless to say, this wasn't practically possible to hold together.
All the big sites (like
Chessdom,
ChessBomb and
Chess24)
had coverage as if nothing had happened. Move sourcing is a bit of a murky
business where nobody really wants to say where they get the moves from
(although it's pretty clear that for many tournaments, the tournament
organizers will simply come to one or more of the big players with an URL
they can poll at will, containing the games in the standard PGN format),
and this was no exception ChessBomb went to the unusual move of
asking their viewers to download Tor and crowdsource the moves,
while Chessdom and Chess24 appeared to do no such thing.
In fact, unlike
Chessdom and ChessBomb, Chess24 didn't seem to say a thing about the
controversy, possibly because they now found themselves on the other side
of the fence from
Norway Chess 2015, where they themselves had exclusive
rights to the PGN in a similar controversy although it would seem from
a tweet
that they were perfectly okay with people just re-broadcasting from their
site if they paid for a (quite expensive) premium membership, and didn't
come up with any similar legal acrobatics to try to scare other sites. However,
their ToS were less clear on the issue, and they didn't respond to requests
for clarification at the time, so I guess all of this just continues to be
on some sort of gentleman's agreement among the bigger players. (ChessBomb
also provides PGNs for premium members for the tournaments they serve, but
they expressly prohibit rebroadcast. They claim that for the tournaments they
host, which is a small minority, they provide free PGNs for all.)
Agon, predictably, sent out angry letters where they threatened to sue
the sites in question, although it's not clear at all to me what exactly they
would sue for. Nobody seemed to care, except one entity
TWIC,
which normally has live PGNs from most tournaments, announced they would not
be broadcasting from the Candidats tournament. This isn't that unexpected,
as TWIC (which is pretty much a one-man project anyway) mainly is about
archival, where they publish weekly dumps of all top-level games played that
week. This didn't affect a lot of sites, though, as TWIC's live PGNs are
often not what you'd want to base a top-caliber site on (they usually lack
clock information, and moves are often delayed by half a minute or so).
I run a hobby chess relay/analysis site myself (mainly focusing on the games of
Magnus
Carlsen), though, so I've used TWIC
a fair bit in the past, and if I were to cover the Candidates tournament
(I don't plan to do so, given Agon's behavior, although I plan to cover
the World Championship itself), I might have been hit by this.
So, that was the background. The strange part started when
worldchess.com, Agon's broadcasting site,
promptly went down during the first round of the Candidates tournament
today Agon blamed DDoS, which I'm sure is true, but it's unclear exactly how
strong the DDoS was, and if they did anything at all to deal with it other
than to simply wait it out. But this lead to the crazy situation where the
self-declared monopolist was the only big player
not broadcasting the
tournament in some form.
And now, in the trully bizarre move, World Chess is publishing
a detailed rebuttal of Agon's arguments,
explaining how it is bad for chess, not juridically sound, and also morally
wrong. Yes, you read that right; Agon's broadcast site is carrying an op-ed saying
Agon is wrong. You at least have to give them credit for not trying to censor
their columinst when he says something they don't agree with.
Oh, and if you want those PGNs? I will, at least for the time being,
be pushing them out live on
http://pgn.sesse.net/.
I have not gone into any agreement with Agon, and they're hosted in Norway,
far from any New York-specific doctrines. So feel free to relay from them,
although I would of course be happy to know if you do.
Last night I got back from spending around 5 days in the Bay Area for
Spring Break. I stayed in a hostel in downtown SF for three nights
and then I stayed with a friend who is doing a PhD at Stanford. When
initially planning this trip my aim was just to visit somewhere
interesting on the west coast of the continental United States. I
chose the Bay Area because I wanted to get my PGP key signed by some
Debian Developers and that area has a high concentration of DDs, and
because I wanted to see my friend at Stanford. But in the end I liked
San Francisco a lot more than expected to and am very glad that I had an
opportunity to visit.
The first thing that I liked was how easy it seemed to be to find
people interested in the same kind of tech stuff that I am. I spent
my first afternoon in the city exploring the famous Mission district,
and at one point while sitting in the original Philz Coffee I found
that the person sitting next to me was running Debian on her laptop
and blogs about data privacy. We had an discussion about how viable
OpenPGP is as a component of a technically unsophisticated user s
attempts to stay safe online. Later that same day while riding the
subway train, someone next to me fired up Emacs on their laptop. And
over the course of my trip I met five Debian Developers doing all
sorts of different kinds of work both in and outside of Debian, and
some Debian users including one of Stanford s UNIX sysadmins. This is
a far cry from my day-to-day life down in the Sonoran Desert where new
releases of iOS are all anyone seems to be interested in.
Perhaps I should have expected this before my trip, but I think I had
assumed that most of the work being done in San Francisco was writing
web apps, so I was pleased to find people working on the same kind of
things that I am currently putting time into. And in saying the
above, I don t mean to demean the interests of the people around me in
Arizona for a moment (nor those writing web apps; I d like to learn
how to write good ones at some point). I m very grateful to be able
to discuss my philosophical interests with the other graduate
students. It s just that I miss being able to discuss tech stuff. I
guess you can t have everything you want!
One particular encouraging meeting I had was with a Debian Developer
employed by Google and working on Git. While my maths background sets
me up with the right thinking skills to write programs, I don t have
knowledge typically gained from an education in computer science that
enables one to work on the most interesting software. In particular,
low-level programming in C is something that I had thought it wouldn t
be possible for me to get started with. So it was encouraging to meet
the DD working on Git at Google because his situation was similar: his
undergraduate background is in maths and he was able to learn how to
code in C by himself and is now working on a exciting project at a
company that it is hard to get hired by. I don t mean that doing
exactly what he s doing is something that I aiming for, just that it
is very encouraging to know the field is more open to me than I had
thought. I was also reminded of how fortunate I am to have the
Internet to learn from and projects like Debian to get involved with.
Moving on from tech, I enjoyed the streets of San Francisco, and the
Stanford campus. San Francisco is fantastically multicultural though
with clear class and wealth divisions. A very few minutes walk from
the Twitter headquarters with its tech bros , as the maths PhD
students I met at Stanford call them, are legions of the un- and
barely-employed passing their time on the concrete. I enjoyed riding
one of the old cable cars through the aesthetically revealing and
stark combination of a west coast grid system on some very steep
hills. I was fortunate to be able to walk across the Golden Gate
Bridge on a perfectly clear and mist-free day.
Meeting people involved with Debian and meeting my old friend at
Stanford had me reflecting on and questioning my life in the desert
even more than usual. I try to remind myself that there is an end
date in sight and I will regret spending my time here just thinking
about leaving. I sometimes worry that I could easily find myself
moving to the big city London, San Francisco or elsewhere and
letting myself be carried by the imagined self-importance of that,
sidelining and procrastinating things that I should prize more highly.
I should remember that the world of writing software in big cities
isn t going away and my time in the desert is an opportunity to
prepare myself better for that, building my resistance to being swept
away by the tides of fashion.
About one month has passed and here is the usual updated of TeX Live packages for Debian, this time also with an update to biber to accompany the updated version of biblatex. This will be (probably) the last upload before TeX Live 2015 gets frozen in preparation for 2016. After the freeze there will be some time of piece, and updates will got to experimental with the new binaries.
From the list of updated and new packages I want to mention that biblatex has been updated together with biber, and most biblatex styles should already by updated to work with the new biblatex, too.
From the new packages one has in particular caught my attention: 
A new release of 
My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
about the battery. The scripts are merged into the upstream
battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way. Will have to test a
bit more before I make a new release.
I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
and graphing.
If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
battery, check out the battery-stats package in
Last week was quite equally split between refactoring and bug fixing. As we're getting closer to 4.6.0 release more people give feedback on it and some corner case issues are being discovered.
However the biggest challenge was strange bug that was reported long time ago - it affected only Italian translation on Windows server. After lot of debugging, I've realized that trying to encode 
For the tenth time running, Debian has been selected as a mentoring
organization for the 
As part of its diversity outreach initiatives, Debian will be participating in
the upcoming 12th round (May - August 2016) of 
After some serious thinking, I've decided not to nominate myself
in the Debian project leader elections for 2016. While I was doing
that, I wrote the beginnings of a platform, below. I'm publishing it
to have a record of what I was thinking, in case I change my mind in
the future, and perhaps it can inspire other other people to do
something I would like to happen.
Why not run? I don't think I want to deal with the stress. I already
have more than enough stress in my life, from work. I enjoy my
obscurity in Debian. It allows me to go away for long periods of time,
and to ignore any discussions, topics, and people that annoy or
frustrate me, if I don't happen to want to tackle them at any one
time. I couldn't do that if I was DPL.
NOT a platform for Debian project leader election, 2016
Apart from what the Debian constitution formally specifies, I find
that the important duties of the Debian project leader are:
Like 
What happened in the