A while back, I promised some people that I would answer the campaign questions on -vote despite not being on the ballot. Many things came up to pre-empt me, including a short-lived surprise stint on the Release Team. I am still a bit behind on bug reports and such, but it might be inappropriate to start answering after the official campaign period has closed, so here is a start. J rg Jaspert:

Do you plan on taking on a "2IC" or a team?

I do not. I do not believe that either option is a good idea to begin with, and even if I did, I would not be in favor of undermining the Constitution by making an end run around it in this fashion. Martin Zobel-Helas:

The Debian Project receives quite a number of monetary donations as well as contributions in kind via several umbrella organization like SPI, ffis, debian.ch, etc. a) What do you think are valid goals to spend this money on? b) How would you think is a valid way to thank (hardware) contributors? b) What qualifies a contributor to become a "Debian Partner"? What qualifies a "Debian Partner"?

a) I think that it is important not to spend money on things that only benefit a single person or small group, such as ex-post facto legal defenses, core team travel expenses, or equipment for select persons. I would consider valid expenditures to be only those that directly benefit Debian as a whole. b) Ideally, contributors, whether they be hardware donors or developers or anything else, would be motivated solely out of doing good for the project and community, and not be seeking recognition, praise, power, or favors in return. However, since it is considered acceptable to have other motives, I think it fairly appropriate to display logos and give recognition on the Partners page. b) If I had my druthers, I would reserve the term Partners for those organizations who were fully aligned with us in a common goal. In the absence of such, though, the current usage seems fine. Paul Wise:

How much time do you currently devote to Debian? How will that amount of time change for the DPL term? How will you balance your DPL time and time for other Debian activities.

My time commitment varies due to a combination of external factors and Debian-related motivation. Since I have been slowly scaling back my involvement over the past several years, and unless you assume that the DPL role is inherently demotivating, I would presume to be spending about the same time or more on Debian if elected. I will be orphaning some more packages after squeeze is released, regardless of the outcome of the election. I would definitely not run if I doubted my ability to muster up the time and energy to be a good and effective DPL for the full length of the term.

The following article was contributed by John Cass. Note that John's instructions will also work on other NAS machines running Debian, such as QNAP devices. I had a problem upgrading my Debian kernel to 2.6.32 on the D-Link DNS-323. The upgrade looked like it worked but on reboot I had a hung machine. I tried taking the disk out, putting it in my main machine and remaking the links in /boot to the previous kernel and initrd.img but it turns out that on the DNS-323 both kernel and initrd are actually stored in flash memory (the /boot disk files are where they are built and a useful archive but are not used during the boot process). So I was stuck, and had to make a serial cable in order to find out what was going on. The instructions here and here were very useful and the CA-42 clone cost me 4 GBP on eBay and arrived within a couple of days. A delicate bit of soldering (and installing ckermit on my main machine) and I had a serial connection - I could finally see what was was happening. The upshot was, during the boot process the DNS-323 failed to mount my root partition. This was because the partition was formatted ext3 and the initrd.img had not included the ext3 module. It probably did this because I had deliberately forced mounting it as ext2 in the /etc/fstab (in an attempt to limit the write access to the disk, I want it to stay in standby for a long time but that's another post). (Remark by Martin: this is a known issue with initramfs-tools.) Anyway, having seen this, Martin was able to guide me to getting it fixed:

• First of all, I issued modprobe ext2 to get the ext2 module loaded (luckily this was included in initrd.img).
• Then you can mount the root partition on /root: mount -t ext2 /dev/sda2 /root - it will complain a bit but will work fine.
• Then run /scripts/init-bottom/udev - this moves /dev to within the new root directory.
• chroot /root /bin/sh - shift the root around so we are working from the proper root disk
• mount -t proc none /proc - mount the proc tree
• mount -t sys none /sys - and the sys tree
• nano /etc/fstab - edit this to change ext2 back to ext3 for the root partition
• mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /boot - mount the boot partition if it's a different device (mine is)
• Edit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and add both ext2 and ext3 - this will force their inclusion in the updated initrd.img
• run update-initramfs -u to regenerate the kernel and initrd.img - this will rebuild the files in /boot and it will use flash-kernel to put them into the flash memory
• umount /proc /sys /dev /boot - unmount filesystems
• exit - leave the chroot
• umount /root - unmount the root partition
• reboot

And it should all be working!

I'm now on my way back from The first miniDebCamp and miniDebconf that happened from March 13th to March 19th in Khon Kaen, Thailand. This even was organized locally by a team of very motivated Thai Debian enthusiasts and contributors, such as Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (*the* Thai DD), Neutron Soutmun, Kitt Tientanopajai, and all those whose name I'm not remembering as of now (I hope they won't mind). The even had kinda the structure of DebConfs, with a few days of "Debcamp" to begin. See the full schedule. We were hosted in Khon Kaen University (KKU), one one the most famous universities in Thailand, a small "town in town" in a city with a few hundred thousand inhabitants (dunno exactly). Lodging was done in a hotel located inside the university. Interestingly, the hotel was also hosting youg students participating to "Summer Camps" (apparently training systems to get good school results) gving to all this a very young atmosphere. The hacking lab and talks location was a 30-seat room in the university library, and meals were brought in there very efficiently, with the very specific way that Thai people have to transport each and every kind of meal (in small plastic bags closed by rubber). I arrived only in the 3rd day because I had commitments at home that made it impossible to me to come for the first day. During these days, people have been very busy hacking and participating to the Bug Squashing Party. During that BSP, about 50 bugs have been touched, without about 15 or so closed. Other non Thai attendees were Andrew Lee from TW, Paul Wise from AU, Daiki Ueno and Yukiharu Yabuki from JP. Organizers were expecting some attendees from neighbouring countries such as Laos, Vietnam or Cambodia. Unfortunately, none of them could come, including Anousak Soupavanh, leader of Lao free software localization efforts, who I was very impatient to meet. Transport difficulties, or visa problems, do not make things easy in that part of the world. On Wednesday we had a "DayTrip" as it is common for such event. We went abotu 50 km away from Khon Kaen, to visit a nice place, close to a dam lake, and climbed a hill surrounded by a big temple and a giant Buddha statue. Then we had a wonderful lunch in a fish restaurant in the very specific Thai way to share stuff: everything is on the table and you pick your food here and there, at you rconvenience. Of course, local advice before trying apparently innocent food is always worth it because the fire might be hidden anywhere (for instance in that soja plate which I tried and that set my mouth as a burning hell for 20 minutes). The journey ended by a visit of a great temple in Khon Kaen and, very noticeably by a dinner in a very popular barbecue restaurant in "all you can eat" style for...100Bath (so, about 2.5 euros). Maybe only vegetarian people had more trouble enjoying the meal as it was mostly made of various meat (and sea food). The talk days were very intense, at least in my opinion. Probably because I ended up giving four talks, some of them completely improvised (about IP-over-DNS, which I was using at the hotel and about which many wanted to learn a little bit more, and GPG keysigning processes). It turned out that the GPG talk was well received and, discussing with Paul later on, we agreed that such a talk, mostly meant to explain the DOs and DON'Ts For good GPG keys signing, could be a good idea even for Debconfs. There were also a few talks about local initiatives and efforts to develop (and not only promote) free software. We have no recordings of these talks as we were infortunately missing some video recording installation (maybe next time, Thep) just like the miniConf that was happening in Panama at about the same time was having. Due to local regulation on the university network, we had some limitations with Internet access (some firewalling that for instance was preventing SIP to work properly, which made a video-conference with a japanese user group fail, unfurtunately). The event ended in a round table discussion about ideas to organize something bigger in the future. The local community in Thailand has apparently the energy, maybe ressources and local support to be able to organize a slightly bigger event as first try (somethign like an Asian DebConf or something similar, targeting mostly Asian contributors and about 50-100 people. Thailand seems to be a good target to host such event, with many things being relatively inexpensive (and not only beer!). And they even think about possibly hosting a Debconf at some time in the future (actually, Martin Krafft should also be credited for bringing this idea). That isn't as crazy as it seems and, provided that potential organizers start involving themselves in the current Debconfs, everything seems to be possible. After all, if we look back to 2005, only one person (hello, Safir) was seriously thinking that Debconf could really happen in Bosnia and Herzegovina, right? After this week (followed by 2.5 days of sightseeing in Bangkok for me, plus a small meeting today with local Thai Linux corporate users and IT company owners), I feel like the mood in Asia about Debian development is high and full of potential. The miniconf last year in Taiwan was already a good success, by establishing a good connection between people.....we need to keep that alive and, hopefully, there will be other miniconfs in this part of the world. And, well, if I can be there, I'll be there.

Every once in a while someone asks how they can use the Debian installer to access their system on disk to run commands, for example to write the kernel and ramdisk to flash again. This is particularly useful on headless NAS devices. So here's how to do it:

1. Start the Debian installer.
2. Remove the SSH key from ~/.known_hosts because the installer will always generate a new key.
3. Connect to the installer with SSH: ssh installer@...
4. Follow the installer until you reach the partitioner, then choose "go back".
5. Open a shell (look for Execute a shell towards the end of the menu).
6. Run the commands below (the example assumes that /boot is /dev/sda1 and / is /dev/sda2.

My relationship with Puppet is one of love and hate. I am forced to use it simply because there is no better tool around, but I hate it in so many ways that I don t even want to start to enumerate (hint: most have to do with Ruby, actually). Today I decided to put an end to one thing that has been driving me insane: the fact that puppetd (the client) and puppetmasterd (the server) use the same working directory, /var/lib/puppet. Since I consider and would like to treatthe machine on which puppetmasterd is running just another puppet client, I was running into funky issues related to SSL certificate confusion, obscure errors, and SSL revocation horrors. The following hence assumes that you have installed or are planning to install puppetd on the machine running your puppetmaster, and that you have two fully-qualified domain names for the machine. For instance, I run puppetmaster on vera.madduck.net, and puppetmaster.madduck.net is an alias for the same machine. I ll use these names in the following as examples. The following may be Debian-specific, as I am solely using the puppet and puppetmaster packages for my experimentation and verification. Your mileage may vary, but the concept shall be the same.

1. Stop everything:

   /etc/init.d/puppetmaster stop
   /etc/init.d/puppet stop
   
   

   (also verify that you have not instructed cron to restart these services)
2. Rename the working directory:

   mv /var/lib/puppet /var/lib/puppetmaster
   
   

   and amend /etc/puppet/puppet.conf accordingly:

   [main]
   #  
   vardir=/var/lib/puppetmaster
   ssldir=$vardir/ssl
   #  
   [puppetmasterd]
   certname=puppetmaster.madduck.net
   #  
   
   

   I am doing this in [main], planning to override it for puppetd later, because puppetd is the only program which makes sense to be separated from the rest. Since only the puppetmaster needs a special certificate name, that is set specifically in the [puppetmasterd] section. If you use apache2 or nginx in front of your puppetmasters, make sure to amend the SSL file locations in the virtual host definition and restart (!) the service. You can verify that the configuration has been amended by making sure that there is no output from the following command:

   # puppetmasterd --genconfig   grep -q '/var/lib/puppet/' && echo SOMETHING IS WRONG
   
   

3. Now restart puppetmaster:

   /etc/init.d/puppetmaster start
   
   

   and verify that it starts. If your puppetmaster previously ran under a different name, it will create itself a new certificate and sign it. Since the client will get its own working directory (and thus a new SSL certificate), you want to remove all records of the old certificate:

   # puppetca --list --all
   + puppetmaster.madduck.net
   + vera.madduck.net
   # puppetca --clean vera.madduck.net
   
   

4. Change the configuration file to tell puppetd about its working directory:

   [puppetd]
   server=puppetmaster.madduck.net
   vardir=/var/lib/puppetmaster
   ssldir=$vardir/ssl
   #  
   
   

   This you can verify with the following command, which should not print anything:

   # puppetd --genconfig   grep -q '/var/lib/puppet[^/]' && echo SOMETHING IS WRONG
   
   

5. Now install puppet, or (re)start it if it s already installed:

   # /etc/init.d/puppet stop
   # puppetd --no-daemonize --onetime --verbose --waitforcert 30 &
   info: Creating a new SSL key for vera.madduck.net
   warning: peer certificate won't be verified in this SSL session
   info: Caching certificate for ca
   info: Creating a new SSL certificate request for vera.madduck.net
   # puppetca --list
   vera.madduck.net
   # puppetca --sign vera.madduck.net
   notice: Signed certificate request for vera.madduck.net
   notice: Removing file Puppet::SSL::CertificateRequest vera.madduck.net at '/var/lib/puppetmaster/ssl/ca/requests/vera.madduck.net.pem'
   # fg
   info: Caching certificate for vera.madduck.net
   info: Caching certificate_revocation_list for ca
   [ ]
   # puppetca --list --all
   + puppetmaster.madduck.net
   + vera.madduck.net
   # /etc/init.d/puppet start
   
   

   Do yourself the favour and check that it s all working.
6. Optionally, you can now clean up the client stuff in the server s working directory, for instance like this (it worked for me, but this is the sledgehammer approach):

   # /etc/init.d/puppetmaster stop
   # cd /var/lib/puppetmaster
   # tar -cf /tmp/puppetmaster.workingdir-backup.tar .
   # find ../puppet -type f -printf '%P\n'   xargs rm
   # /etc/init.d/puppetmaster start
   
   

7. If you stopped cron before (and your puppet recipes have not since restarted it):

   /etc/init.d/cron start
   
   

All done. I wish puppet, or at least Debian s puppet packages would do this by default. Please let me know if the above conversion works for you. Then I might start working on an automated migration. NP: Genesis: Selling England by the Pound

Just a kind thank you note to the gThumb authors for completely breaking my workflow by re-inventing the paradigm used to save imported pictures. Until now, all my pictures landed in a predictable location, using a predictable filename pattern that was easily searchable. Not anymore. Now, files land into my home directory, according to some recursive folder pattern that further complicates searching for files and requires a few more clicks to accomplish. Dammit! Couldn't you at least make this configurable, so that those of us who prefer to retain the old paradigm can?! Note: re-inventing an application's paradigms is always a very bad idea. If you're a software developer who is reading this, please keep it in mind and go scratch your itch to change the world somewhere else. Thank you. Post Scriptum Many thanks to Damon Lynch for pointing me to his own professional picture importer called Rapid. This is an extremely configurable importing tool and, lo and behold, Damon even offers builds for Ubuntu via his PPA! Still, the consequence of this mess is that migrating to Rapid means that I'll be loosing gThumb's simple but extremely efficient editing tools. To me, one strength of gTthumb was this unique combination of picture importing with basic editing tools. Now, I'm forced to split these interconnected tasks, simply because someone chose to completely rethink gThumb's paradigms. I'm of course aware of Gimp's existence, but repeated attempts at mastering it made me conclude that it's entirely the wrong software for my needs and essentially overkill. By contrast, gThumb offers just enough tools to enable someone to crop images to useful sizes and to adjust color balances in easy steps; it does the job without hassle, which is not the case with Gimp. Thinking out loud, it is precisely on days like these that the urge to create my own Linux distribution keeps on coming to mind. Retaining consistent paradigms in the desktop environment and applications that I use, not to mention maintaining the number of duplicate libraries to a bare minimal, has been a constant struggle and, noticing how some developers' urge to re-invent the wheel every other day, using whatever new programming language of the day, persistently takes precedence over keeping system resource consumption to a bare minimum and over preserving user sanity, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that Free Software has veered way too far into the bazaar and urgently needs a copious amount of cathedral to make it usable for mere mortals again. Some dpkg-based distribution where the only scripting language allowed is Bourne shell and the only programming languages C or C++ comes to mind. Of course, this would also require porting popular application from e.g. Java, Python, etc. which would be a colossal amount of work. Still, I think that the time has come for this to happen. As an added bonus, this would make applications usable again on embedded devices with spartan CPU, RAM and storage resources, so this project could generate huge benefits to the embedded Linux industry. Based on my experience at my previous jobs, I have a rather clear picture (pun intended) of what needs to be done and of who I would hire to make it happen. What I'm missing are investors. Who's with me?

The most common criticism of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is the lack of transparency. Before the nations disclose the terms of the agreement under negotiation, we are unable to gain an idea of the big picture, let alone voice our opinions and push for changes. Our politicians don t want us to know. We rely on leaked documents for our information. This is backwards in a world where a state should represent its people. This smells foul to me. There are undoubtedly some good reasons for the treaty, and if we can contain worldwide, large-scale trade of counterfeited goods and medicine, then that would be a net benefit to us all. However, we must not allow certain governments to succomb to the pressure of (commercially-motivated) lobbyists, to extend that pressure onto other nations using trade as a means of pressure, and to slash our freedom as if it were an inconvenient obstacle in their way. Only if the terms under negotiation become publicly available, and the public is given a voice, then we can help our governments in entering an agreement that is in the interest of its people, rather than a threat to us. It is hardly surprising that total capitalist nation USA are the strongest opponents of transparency, because the public might delay or even prevent the treaty. I was also not surprised to see South Korea and Germany in the list of supporters of secrecy either. It is interesting to see that the leaders of Singapore, Belgium, Portugal, and Denmark also seem to believe that these negotiations should be withheld from the public. Does anyone know about Switzerland? I tip my hat to New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, and Austria for their support of transparency.

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

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

• [1] http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/36850
• [2] http://discuss.itwire.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=18319&start=28
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument
• [4] http://discuss.itwire.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=18319&start=28

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

• [1] http://madduck.net/blog/2010.02.20:charge-advertisers-for-the-last-mile/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/15/cheap-net-access-australia/

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

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

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

In ancient Rome, the Imperial cult was the worship of the Roman emperor as a god. It came to be at roughly the same time as Christianity. In the cult of the emperor, Caesar was revered as a deity. According to Harvey Cox, This was what we might today call a civil religion it had its holidays, processions, and holy sites throughout the empire. Adherence to it was required of all of the emperor s subjects, wherever they lived and whatever other deities they also worshiped. It was the religious and ideological mucilage that held the far-flung empire together. Perhaps you see where this is going. There was a certain group that found the imperial cult, well, repugnant. They felt their own goals bringing their god s peace and justice to the world were incompatible with this sort of devotion to a human institution, and the very institution that had killed their leader at that. Their reaction went like this:

Regarding worship of the emperor, Christians responded with an unequivocal no. They claimed that Jesus Christ was God s kyrios ( anointed one in Greek), but since kyrios was one of the titles attributed to Caesar, they refused to participate in the imperial cult. They were willing to pray for the emperor and for his health, but they stubbornly refused to pray to him or offer ritual tribute. They recognized that one could not be a follower of Jesus while also honoring a rival to the loyalty their faith in him and his Kingdom required; therefore, not even one pinch of incense on the imperial altar. This defiance of the political religion of the empire, which led their critics to brand them subversive, landed many of them in arenas with salivating lions. Harvey Cox in The Future of Faith

Now, you may be wondering, why am I asking if anyone still worships the emperor of a long-extinct empire? I maintain that this practice is still alive and well, just under a different name. I have been interested in some of the debates about American institutions that choose to perform neither the national anthem nor the pledge of allegiance. Many of these institutions are Mennonite, and their reason for not participating in these two particular acts mirrors that of the early Christians refusing to worship Caesar: namely, their goal is to bring about God s peaceful and just kingdom on earth, and no country, no human institution at all, can ever command greater loyalty than that cause. Moreover, the American national anthem is a particularly violent one, celebrating the taking of life right there at the beginning. Not completely compatible with the ethics of a church trying to bring about a more peaceful world, right? It is from that basis that many Mennonites, and our institutions, do not perform the national anthem or say the pledge of allegiance. For myself, when the national anthem is being performed, I will stand out of respect for those around me for whom the moment is important, but I do not sing. I am deeply appreciative that the United States, like many other countries, makes it legal to do this. I am heartened by the fact that I do not risk a confrontation with the lions over my religious stance today. Goshen College, a Mennonite institution, recently decided to go back on a century of history (which goes back farther than the anthem itself, which was only adopted in 1931) and will now be performing the anthem, followed by a prayer, before select sporting events. And by so doing, they fail both to act in accordance with the way of Christ, and to be a patriot. They fail to act for peace and justice by playing an anthem that supports and glorifies war and violence. And they fail to be patriotic. Patriotism and nationalism are different things. It s easy to be nationalistic to get up there and sing a song that everyone wants you to sing. It is far more difficult to be patriotic. Being patriotic in the United States means using the freedoms we have to improve our country. Goshen ought to use its freedom to not observe the national anthem as a way to try to draw a line in the sand against violence, to suggest that our anthem fails to adequately recognize the character of the American people and who we want to be, and to suggest a better alternative. After all, those people who are venerated today as patriots anyone from Martin Luther to Thomas Jefferson to Martin Luther King stood up to their fallible human governments to seek positive change. Instead of a route both religious and patriotic, Goshen College has chosen one that is neither. I am deeply disappointed that 300 phone calls have apparently cowed their leadership. What have we come to when our ancestors braved the lions, and we give up our principles over the fear of bad publicity? Ah, Goshen, perhaps you are thinking that you could spare a few pinches of incense for Caesar after all?

Yesterday a silly oversight in the packaging of udev in Ubuntu/Lucid produced a breakage that consistently makes dpkg barf. Here's a simple command line recipe to recover from it. In your terminal application, type: sudo sed -i 's#copy_exec /lib/udev/firmware.sh#copy_exec /lib/udev/firmware#' /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/udev && sudo dpkg -a --configure && sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude safe-upgrade ...then press enter. You should be able to resume normal operation right after. PS: as suggested by others, I revised the above snippet to use sed locally, since not everyone has patch installed.

Tomorrow, Penny and I head off back home, and two months of living in NZ come to an end. (did you hear that, pleaserobme.com?) Maybe I ll find the time to write about my impressions of living on this side of the planet, and being immersed in Kiwi culture while going after my daily routine and trying to work as much as I could. But there is one thing that should not wait: Thank you, Catalyst IT for giving us workspaces! For the better part of 6 weeks, you gave us our own room, monitors, keyboards, mice, and connectivity. And more than that: you welcomed us, let us participate in sessions, invited us to your parties, received our parcels, sent out letters, and generally provided us with a great environment to work. This was certainly well above what we had dreamed of. At times, I was forced to stay into the middle of the night 12 hours time difference with Europe is not always easy and spent waking hours in your building alone. Thank you for your trust! Catalyst is a fully New Zealand owned company who deliver critical open source business systems to some of NZ s largest organisations, and organisations worldwide. Catalyst was also a major enabler of LCA2010, and a sponsor of Kiwi Foo Camp, both events that I had the privilege to attend. Let me know when you re in my part of the world. ;) NP: The Mamaku Project: Karekare

Shortly after I wrote my last article about ACTA and the lack of transparency, I was delighted to find out that a report of the recent negotiations in Mexico has been leaked. I find it a bit disconcerting that our politicians, who are theoretically supposed to represent our interests, are writing documents that can leak to the public, when they should have been available to the public from the start. The document and the coverpage are available for direct download. Michael Geist has a first analysis

A brief report from the European Commission authored by Pedro Velasco Martins (an EU negotiator) on the most recent round of ACTA negotiations in Guadalajara, Mexico has leaked, providing new information on the substance of the talks, how countries are addressing the transparency concerns, and plans for future negotiations. (read more )

NP: Dimmer: Degrees of Existence

Dear lazyweb: I am in search of a mailing list for discussion on matters related to digital identity and privacy in the information age. Unfortunately, my (limited) searching has not unveiled results, mostly because many mailing lists have privacy agreements or somesuch, polluting the results with pointers to those. If you know such a list, or you don t but you are interested in the topic, don t hesitate to drop me a line. I will then either let you know when my search was successful, or subscribe you when I have created a list to fill the void. NP: Sola Rosa: Solarized

A few days ago, I woke up to the fact that Google has become yet another MSN. The stupid opt-out policy of their latest gadget, Google Buzz, means that I can no longer entrust Google with anything. In case it wasn't obvious to the idiots at Google, no, I do not want every single person that ever sent me a random e-mail to suddenly get automated access to whatever on-line content I'm producing; I want to choose who will get access to what and be able to change my mind about what any particular individual will get access to at any given time. Most of all, I want this to be opt-in by default. That is, unless I explicitly enabled access to some specific content to a specific individual, the assumption shall be that nobody has access to anything that I produce. Alas, it seems too much to ask from Google. So now I'm looking for a reliable no-frills webmail service that is too boring to ever get under the radar of any media content giant. First, it was Hotmail no more, now it's Google no more. I also have another simple request: that the selected e-mail address can include hyphens and periods. If anybody knows of any such simple and reliable on-line webmail service, please drop me a line via this blog article's comments. Thanks!

Right now, your government is probably engaged in the discussion of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). You are likely not aware of that because your government has been actively keeping these negotiations and details surrounding them secret. Your government does not want you to know about a treaty that has far-reaching negative effects on your freedom, as well as your basic human rights. If you did know, you might speak up and make it difficult for the drivers of ACTA to smoothly push their interests past you. The red light should light up in your head right now! The goals of the trade agreement that is being negotiated are multifarious, but essentially seem to centre around challenges related to intellectual property, and copyright in the digital age, even though it is sometimes claimed that the agreement serves primarily to contain trade of fake Prada bags and Rolex watches. In reality, ACTA is about content producers like movie studios, who try everything to prevent you from copying their work without paying for it even if you cannot actually purchase the work, because of e.g. technical measures designed to prevent certain people from legally obtaining content, or simply because the media companies are greedy and consider it PR-savvy to delay the release of a given work in certain countries until after people have had a chance to pay a lot of money to the cinemas. In theory, a creative work goes out of copyright 50 or 75 years after its author died, depending on whether the creativity can be attributed to a person or a corporation, respectively. Therefore, 50 or 75 years after creation, it gets increasingly hard to monetise a work that has not been reinvented in that period of time. Sounds plausible to you and me, but this sort of stuff frightens companies like Disney, who seem powerful enough to simply have the law changed. That is not how things should work. The media producers are failing to control the Internet, and hence they want to turn it into something more like cable TV, which they do know how to control. ACTA aims to make copyright infringement a criminal offence. ACTA wants to make it possible for a government to cut you off the Internet because someone thinks you did something bad they don t actually have to prove it though, accusation is enough. Similar efforts have already failed all over the world, e.g. in France and New Zealand. That s a sign, not a reason to try again. ACTA wants to set in stone that you have absolutely no rights when you cross borders. This is largely already the case border officials can pretty much do with you whatever they want now it s supposed to be made official, and legally binding. ACTA will create a culture of surveillance and suspicion. ACTA is designed to break the Internet, among other things. But worst of all: I am just speculating because we are not supposed to know the details. The best current source of information on ACTA seems to be Canadian law professor Dr. Michael Geist, who has been collecting content and linking to articles consistently since the ACTA negotiations commenced 2 3 years ago. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also has comprehensive resources available. It s even more important today than before to put an end to this secrecy. Don t let your government enter secret agreements that affect you and your life, refusing to talk to you about it beforehand, and probably refusing all responsibility afterwards. Talk to your politicians and ask questions that cannot be answered with stock replies. If you have specific contact addresses for politicians, please let me know so I can add them. Colin Jackson helped me with this article at Kiwi Foo Camp. He also takes an issue with the secrecy around ACTA.

I found out yesterday that my university s Microsoft Exchange Server account stopped forwarding my mail on 8 December 2009. As a result, mail accumulated there and remained unseen. Dear examiners, paper authors, supervisors, sponsors, participants, and peers who responded to my calls and cries related to my PhD thesis. I am terribly sorry that you were subjected to this. You replied usually within a few days, but I still sent you reminder after reminder in the weeks to follow. You must have thought that I was a real dork. Please forgive me. I really appreciate your patience! I filed a ticket with my university s IT service provider, which got closed the next day with it should now work again . That wasn t going to cut it for me, so I reopened the ticket, asking for an explanation. Next, I received an apology with a bit of speculation. After a bit of research, it seems that the reason was to be found in the inconsistency of being an external staff member (i.e. an e-mail address outside of the Active Directory domain), but still having an account on the server. On 8 December 2009, the server was upgraded with a service pack. This caused Exchange to go a little manic on the housekeeping. After all, why would anyone ever want to forward their e-mail elsewhere, and still have an account? Well, I certainly don t want an account, and yet I have to have one: Microsoft has bought their ways into the university and spread their germs all across, I need credentials to be able to access shared files, print, browse the library, or search the phone book. However, considering that UL s Outlook Web Access instance does not let users of decent browsers search their mailboxes (a premium feature reserved for users of Internet Exploder), one cannot manipulate more than a page-full of e-mails at a time, bounce messages, or do many of the other operations that make dealing with large amounts of e-mail possible, and because Exchange mail if it doesn t get lost in the first place sucks in so many other ways, I certainly prefer my mail to be handled by a real mail server with a proper mail filter (writeup in progress). Maybe the Exchange service pack was simply designed to get rid of outcasts like me who don t buy into the low-Microsoft-quality vendor lock-in? We ll never know, thanks to the proprietarity of their software (and the fact that the university service provider apparently does not keep logs of changes). NP: AC/DC: Back in Black