This essay is a summary of my presentation at the workshop Inlaws and Outlaws, held on August 19-20, 2010 in Split, Croatia. The workshop brought together advocates of piracy with participants in the free culture and free software movements.

In Why Software Should Not Have Owners, Richard Stallman explains that, if a friend asks you for a piece of software and the license of the software bars you from sharing, you will have to choose between being a bad friend or violating the license of the software. Stallman suggests that users will have to choose between the lesser of two evils and will choose to violate the license. He emphasizes that it's unfair to ask a user to make such a choice. Over the past few years, pirate parties have grown across much of the developed world. Of course, piracy remains the primary means of distributing media across most of the rest. Advocates of access to information have gathered and organized under the "pirate" banner, representing the choice of sharing with friends over compliance with license terms. The free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) and free culture movements seem to have a confused and conflicted reaction to all this. On one hand, major proponents of several pirate parties are FLOSS and free culture stalwarts and several pirate parties have made FLOSS advocacy a component of their political platforms. Pirate Parties' clear opposition to software patents and DRM resonates with both FLOSS and free culture communities. On the other hand, FLOSS leaders, including Stallman, have warned us about "pirate" anti-copyright policies. Free culture leaders, like Lawrence Lessig, have repeatedly and vociferously denounced piracy, treated even the intimation of an association with piracy as an affront, and systematically distanced themselves and their work from piracy. Should FLOSS and free culture advocates embrace pirates as comrades in arms or condemn them? Must we choose between being either with the pirates or against them? Our communities seem to have no clearly and consistently articulated consensus. I believe that, unintuitively, if you take a strong principled position in favor of information freedom and distinguish between principles and tactics, a more nuanced "middle ground" response to piracy is possible. In light of a principled belief that users should be able to share information, we can conclude there is nothing ethically wrong with piracy. Licenses have the power of the law but they are protected by unjust "intellectual property" laws. That said, principles are not the only reason activists choose to do things. Many political stunts are bad ideas not because they are wrong, but because they won't work and have negative side effects. Tactics matter too. Even though there might not be anything ethically wrong with piracy from the perspective of free software or free culture, it might still be a bad idea. There are at least three such tactical reasons that might motivate free software and culture to not support piracy or participate in pro-piracy movements and politics. First, a systematic disrespect for copyright undermines respect for all licenses which have been of a huge tactical benefit to free software and a increasingly important factor in the success of free culture. Copyleft licenses like the GPL or CC BY-SA have power only because copyright does. As Stallman has suggested, anti-copyright actions are anti-copyleft. That needn't be an argument against attempts to limit copyright. Indeed, I think we must limit and reduce copyright. But we must tread carefully. In the current copyright climate, I believe that copyleft offers a net advantage. Why should others respect our licenses if we don't respect theirs? Looking at the long term, we must weigh the benefits of promoting the systematic violation of proprietary licenses with the benefits of adherence to free software and free culture. Second, piracy is fundamentally reactionary. Part of its resonance as a political symbol comes from the fact that the piracy represents a way that consumers of media can fight back against a set of companies which have attacked them -- with lawsuits, DRM systems, and demonization in propaganda -- for sharing in ways that most consumers think are natural and socially positive. But piracy focuses on reaction rather the fundamental importance of sharing that drives it. As a result, most pirates do not support, or are even familiar with, a principled approach to access to information. As a result, many piracy advocates who speak out against DRM on DVDs will be as happy to use NetFlix to stream DRMed movies for $5 a month as they were to download for free. The best rallying cries do not always translate into be the most robust movements. Third, through its focus on a reaction, a dialog about piracy avoids engagement with the tough questions of what we will replace the current broken copyright system with. A principled position suggests that it is our ethical prerogative to create alternative models. The free software movement has succeeded because it created such a prerogative and then, slowly over time, provided examples of workable alternatives. A principled position on free software did not require that one provide working new systems immediately, but it makes the development of creative, sustainable approaches a priority. Attacking the system without even trying to speak about alternative modes of production is unsustainable. Free software and free culture call for a revolution. Piracy only calls for a riot. Piracy, in these three senses, can be seen as tactically unwise, without necessarily being unethical. By taking a principled position, one can go build on, and go beyond, RMS's comment. On free culture and free software's terms, we can suggest that piracy is not ethically wrong, but that it is an unwise way to try to promote sharing. Without being hypocritical, we can say: "I don't think piracy is unethical. But I also do not support it."

Fresh up on arxiv.org is a paper by Kevin Heng, Kristen Menou and Peter Phillipps: Atmospheric circulation of tidally-locked exoplanets: a suite of benchmark tests for dynamical solvers. Kristen Menou was at exoclimes 2010 where one of the background topics was how to compare and validate our various models in exoplanetary climates. Earth-based climate modellers have test cases such as Held-Suarez which are used to compare the models, but to date no equivalents are used for exoplanetary models. This work fills that gap for Tidally-locked atmospheres (similar to Zarmina for example, and some 'Hot Jupiters'. I'm particularly interested in the tidally-locked Earth case; it's relevant for my own PhD work. Incidentally, for a good summary of the different ways we test climate models, see Steve Easterbrook's recent blog entry; he's been doing a tour of major modelling centres, learning how they do things. Worth a look. Tags exoplanets, climate, benchmarks

As a follow up on my report from last month about bidi status in openoffice.org 3.3, today was a very good day for bidi in openoffice.org. The short story: two important bugs were fixed for 3.3, and we now have the bidi keyword for IssueZilla system. It began with the fix to a cosmetic bug in the openoffice.org main screen which caused the icons to repaint improperly. While this isn t critical at all, it just looks really bad to have it on the main screen. And I don t want people to get the wrong impression. Thanks you Philipp Lohmann for fixing #97556. The second bug was that AutoFilter isn t working for RTL sheets (regards whether the UI is LTR or RTL). This issue was reported yesterday and got fixed in 24 hours. Thank you Niklas Nebel for fixing #114944. It took us longer to isolate the bug than to get a patch for it. I wish this will happen more (: For closing, and in response to the bidi meta issue, a new keyword was created in the issuezilla: bidi. Till now, there was a bidi sub component in the UI, but this isn t always helpful as sometimes it s better to report against the actual component. The keyword will help us to better tag the issues for easy listing. The thank you list is long, as there were more than a few people behind the scenes today. I ll only mention Netanel, my partner to the Hebrew l10n team.
Filed under: Israeli Community, LibreOffice, Openoffice.org Tagged: bidi, openoffice

Richard Baraniuk gave an interesting TED talk about Open Source Learning [1]. His project named Connexions which is dedicated to the purpose of creating Creative Commons free textbooks is a leader in this space [2]. He spoke about Catherine Schmidt-Jones who wrote 197 modules and 12 courses on music [3], that s a very significant amount of work! He also mentioned the translation of the work into other languages. I wonder how well the changes get merged back across the language divide. We have ongoing disputes in the free software community about whether various organisations do enough work to send patches back upstream, this seems likely to be more of a problem in situations where most of the upstream authors can t even understand the language in which the changes are written and when the changes involve something a lot more subtle than an change to an algorithm. This would be particularly difficult for Chinese and Japanese as those languages seem to lack quality automatic translation. He mentioned Teachers Without Borders [4] in passing. Obviously an organisation that wants to bring education to some of the poorer parts of the world can t have a curriculum that involves $250 of text books per year for a high school student (which was about what my parents paid when I was in year 12) or $500 of text books per year for a university student (which might be a low estimate for some courses as a single text can cost more than $120). Free content and on-demand printing (or viewing PDF files on a OLPC system) can dramatically lower the cost of education. It s widely believed that free content without the ability to remix is cultural imperialism. This is apparently one of the reasons that the connexions project is based on the Creative Commons Attribution license [5]. So anyone anywhere can translate it, make a derivative work, or collate parts of it with other work. I expect that another factor is the great lack of success of all the various schemes that involve people contributing content for a share of the profits, the profits just don t match the amount of work involved. Philanthropy and reputation seem to be the only suitable motivating factors for contributing to such projects. One of the stated benefits of the project is to have computer based content with live examples of equations. Sometimes it is possible to just look at an equation and know what it means, but often more explanation is required. The ability to click on an equation, plug in different values and have them automatically calculated and possibly graphed if appropriate can make things a lot easier. Even if the result is merely what would be provided by reading a text book and spending a few minutes with a scientific calculator the result should be a lot better in terms of learning as the time required to operate a calculator can break the student s concentration. Even better it s possible to have dynamic explanations tailored to the user s demand. To try this out I searched on Ohm s Law (something that seems to be unknown by many people on the Internet who claim to understand electricity). I was directed to an off-site page which used Flash to display a tutorial on Ohm s Law, the tutorial was quite good but it does seem to depart from the free content mission of the project to direct people off-site to proprietary content which uses a proprietary delivery system. I think that the Connexions project could do without links to sites such as college-cram.com. One of the most important features of the project is peer review lenses . The High Performance Computing Lens [6] has some good content and will be of interest to many people in the free software community but again it requires Flash. One final nit is the search engine which is slow and not very useful. A search for engine returned lots of hits about engineering which isn t useful if you want to learn about how engines work. But generally this is a great project, it seems to be doing a lot of good and it s got enough content to encourage other people and organisations to get involved. It would be good to get some text books about free software on there!

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning.html
• [2] http://cnx.org/
• [3] http://cnx.org/member_profile/Catherine
• [4] http://www.teacherswithoutborders.org/
• [5] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

* No, we don t have moksha packaged yet. Sometime ago, Nirav forwarded me query regarding Utkarsh (my project where our goal was to provide complete Gujarati interface in OS) who got CD long time back but facing some issue. Last week, I decided to help and finish this pending task and went to place we decided. It was small laptop (ie EEE PC) for guru of group called, OM Parivar. I installed Ubuntu and customized it for Gujarati interface and required software. Second time, I went to Guruji s place for small training and I was wondering how fast man of 82 years can learn! He was very happy to see me helping and so I m converting more person to Linux. I also explained why I m using Linux and we even discussed about some Free Software philosophy. Next time: Keep Debian Installer with USB boot handy

On January 30, 1998, Wired.com gushed about the ethical underpinnings of the free software movement. The movement was growing:

Netscape's bold move last week [was] to free the source code of its browser is a prime-time endorsement for no-cost, build-it-yourself software.

The free software movement was in its second decade. In the first decade, corporations learned to tolerate it. In the late '90s, a transition was underway. Red Hat was one of the first companies ostensibly founded on free software principles. But as free software grew, some were concerned that its name was holding it back. The article explains with a link to a page within gnu.org:

But "free software" is an ambiguous term - there is a difference in meaning between the cultures of PC-based proprietary systems and the Net-centric UNIX worlds.

Michael Stutz, the author of the piece, surveyed the writing of Eric S. Raymond and interviewed luminaries like Bob Young, Russell Nelson, and Marc Andreessen. The article is about the creation of a new term for the freely-reusable code produced by the free software movement.

As proponents of free software often point out, while this software can be free-of-cost - that is, gratis - the real issue is about freedom, or human liberty. So it is really freed software.

Yes, that's right -- freed software. The emphasis is in the original. Most of us know the names Eric S. Raymond and Russ Nelson as people involved early-on in the Open Source Initiative. I guess January 1998 is before they decided on the "open source" name. Today, the community is divided into people who think it's important to say "free software" and the rest who call it "open source." We'd all agree with the following statement from the article:

"Freed software is a big win for society in general," said Russell Nelson.

And that's today's random page from the history books.

[Nothing related to Debian here, move on if you don't care about my recurring obsession with the end of the world, Cassandra pains, or Big Phat Living Room Revolution yearnings].

Although I am still looking for a community of anarcho-primitivists that want to accept me joining their frugal living, and simply slip off the social construct, the system, the fucking face of earth, call it what you will, I could find some comfort in my favourite feminist blogger's take on the subject of my midlife crisis regarding ecology, capitalism, patriarchy, child bearing, overpopulation, meat consumption and all the rumination of consuming thoughts that (still) make my life miserable and have kept me running away from human contact for a year.

[Emphasis mine]

At what point does human culture depart from the Natural? With the invention of computers? TV? Cars? The cotton gin? Electricity? Taco stands? Gunpowder? The printing press? Written language? Shoes? Crop cultivation? Yurts? The wheel? Did humans become unnatural when the good old days of picturesque, endless agrarian toil, feudal oppression, unchecked disease, ignorance, and death from dysentery at 35 turned into the bad new days of urban post-industrial capitalism where a pound of fair-trade organic coffee costs $12.99 and your email inbox is full of spam?

ah. Everything humans do, or have ever done, is natural. We can t do anything else. The idea that modern culture is un-natural is nostalgic and inaccurate. Living off the grid in a yurt is good in some absolute sense, whereas driving an SUV from a suburban bungalow to the stripmall is bad ? Come on. This a romantic, but misguided view. The cosmic reaction to a 20 Ford Expedition is the same as to a sanctimonious Prius: bupkis. The universe doesn t give a fuck about you or your lifestyle choices. It doesn t give a fuck about the economy, oil spills, or civil unrest in Blargistan. It doesn t give a fuck about katydids. Eventually our whole planet will be erased from space, and the galaxy won t bat an eye. The inevitable extinction of our species (imminent, according to research here at Spinster Laboratories) via the exhaustion of available resources is as natural as a fresh-picked peach. As Andre 3000 and other dude philosophers have observed, nothing is forever.

Yes, yes, when people use the word natural what they really mean is free of chemical additives and maybe some of the assorted hippie concepts that go with that narrative. Barter economies, home furnishings made from bamboo, vegan cookbooks, living in the country. While I would argue that it is just as natural for people to put chemical additives in things as it is to not put chemical additives in things, I admit that it is appealing to fantasize that the source of human misery is an unnatural isolation from Nature, and that doing yoga on an organic rubber mat and drinking organic spinach smoothies will put me back in sync with the cosmos.

But alas, I m already in sync with the cosmos, and so are you. In other words, this is it. This is what we ve become, and this is what we get. Which is not to say that a person can t fantasize about a verdant paradise full of songbirds and polar bears and Bengal tigers, untouched by human influence. Only, that world isn t a world we could actually live in. The minute you add contented children, lazy from a carefree day at the swimming hole, eating ripe plums on the porch at sunset to that scenario, natural history changes, and it s right back to our scorched-earth dystopia. Our giant brains use up resources, it s as simple as that.

As long as we re still here, though, we might as well try to make the best of it.

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2010/06/19/heads-up-art-week-starts-on-monday/

Though the comfort is somewhat ephemeral, because deep inside, I know she's wrong, I know another way is feasible, but I have given up already, I have very well come to terms with extiction, I get an enormous pleasure from the thought of the very well deserved human mass suicide-by-cop^Wnature, and in fact, I trust and hope it will save me personally from facing the hard times ahead, as I am a damn coward, paralized by fear, hopeless about the flock ever getting it (is it so hard, really?), while doing as much as I can but completely overwhelmed by the need of changing a world everyone seems to like just as it is. I can certainly empathize with much more disturbed ways of airing similar anguish, among many other examples, such as The Unabomber, or The Weather Underground. I don't even want to go there as I know violence all too well and it is not fun to be on the receiving end. But I see the screaming desperation behind the motives of acts I am not at the liberty to discuss here. I wonder if consumption of resources in the form of books will numb the disorder or make it worse and what sort of medical arrangement the stablishment has for it. As you click away the previous links will mean nothing to you because a)it is Wikipedia after all, and b)you probably don't even understand what the problem of eating animal corpses is, humans are omnivores after all, and what is all this nonsense about dropping language altogether.

WTF, there was no comfort after all, and I am still a nutjob.

(update: yesterday's version was using http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ReleaseTeam as reference, while http://www.debian.org/intro/organization is the one that's up-to-date. Those watching the current traffic in debian-release can probably realize the huge *thank you* deserved by the entire release team for the work they're doing. So, how about spamming the release team members with (private!) "thank you" messages when they unblock a package of yours? And (even more difficult) also one when they don't unblock your package...but spent time reviewing it and more time to explain you why they prefer not unblocking it... In any case, thank you, Neil Maulkin, Adam adsb, Dann dannf, Felipe faw, Jurij trave11er, Luk luk, Mehdi mehdi, Pierre MadCoder, Julien jcristau (doh, French Cabal!)...and Martin zobel (who's apparently forgotten on the page). Not to forget Adam adsb and Phil phil for managing stable releases....and the Wise Release Wizards (vorlon, aba, luk, HE). Hat off, guys (only guys there, yet another place for d-w to show up).

Those watching the current traffic in debian-release can probably realize the huge *thank you* deserved by the entire release team for the work they're doing. So, how about spamming the release team members with (private!) "thank you" messages when they unblock a package of yours? And (even more difficult) also one when they don't unblock your package...but spent time reviewing it and more time to explain you why they prefer not unblocking it... In any case, thank you, Neil Maulkin, Adam adsb, Dann dannf, Felipe faw, Jurij trave11er, Luk luk, Mehdi mehdi, Pierre MadCoder, Julien jcristau (doh, French Cabal!). Not to forget Adam adsb and Phil phil for managing stable releases....and the Wise Release Wizards (vorlon, aba, HE). Hat off....

Quite a few things have happened recently in the Debian/ARM land

ARM and Canonical have generously provided us with bunch of fast armel machines. Four of these are now as buildd's, bringing the total of armel buildd's to 7. In other words, armel should no longer lag behind other architectures when building unstable packages.

One of machines, abel.debian.org has been setup as a porter box. It is faster (around 3x) than the older porterbox (agricola). All Debian Developers have access to the porterboxes.

The new buildds have allowed us to enable more suites. Thanks to Philipp Kerns work, armel builds now experimental, lenny-volatile, lenny-backports as well as unstable/non-free. Especially if you are using stable Debian, access to backports and volatile should make life happier :)

Finally, the next big thing is Hardfloat ARM port, effort being lead by Konstantinos Margaritis. This doesn't mean that the armel port is going away. Majority of ARM cpus sold are still without FPU, so the softloaf port (armel) will still have a long life ahead. Meanwhile, the armhf port will provide a more optimal platform for people with bleeding edge ARM cores (ARMv7 + vfp). Some people have been unhappy with the new proposed new port, and various alternatives have been proposed. However, armhf is currently the only solution being actively worked on.

Update: thank canonical too

Linux 2.6.35 has been a fairly interesting release from an ASoC point of view, with several notable framework enhancements:

• Support for keeping audio paths through the CODEC up during system suspend, primarily intended for use with devices where the Linux system is one of several independent systems running on the device and the other systems (like the cellular modem in a phone) can maintain useful audio paths even when the Linux system is inactive.
• Enhancements to the jack detection infrastructure, including the addition of notifiers on jack status changes (allowing better integration of physical jack detection with electronic methods) and snd_soc_dapm_force_enable_pin() (which allows DAPM managed supplies such as microphone biases to be forced on). For example, jack status change notifications can be used to enable microphone detection via bias current sense only when a microphone is physically present.
• Support for knot and continuous PCM rates in the core.
• SMDK6410 5.1 audio support, TI SDP4030 audio support, and basic support for playback on the 1133-EV1 PMIC module for Freescale i.MX31ADS systems (currently limited by the support for the SSI interface on the i.MX31).
• Support for DaVinci integrated voice CODECs, Philips UDA1345 CODEC, SuperH FSI2 interfaces, TI OMAP4, TWL6040 CODECs, WM9090 audio subsystem.

Even though I am late with this post, it is nice to say that I am writing here from this year s DebConf10, in NYC. Today (well, yesterday) was the day of the Cheese and Wine party and I think that it was cool, at least for the moments that I were there. This post, though, isn t technical in any sense. I only talks shortly about my impressions of the community, as this is my first DebConf ever (despite the fact that I have been using Debian since the late nineties). I was very pleased to have met Bdale Garbee. I saw him the other day arriving with Keith Packard, but I just didn t want to disturb them at that point. We only talked for, say, 2 minutes, and his was one of the nicest receptions that I had here. And there were some other people that were equally easy to approach, nice to talk with and, to my surprise, knew my name after some brief moments (yes, this does make a difference, especially when you are in a strange country, when you don t know anybody with whom you have worked for some years). Being involved in the organization stuff, one would think that Jimmy Kaplowitz would be so busy, but he was so kind. I had longer conversations with T ssia Cam es, Tiago Vaz (as always) and some other people that I had not yet had the pleasure of meeting in person. In particular, Daniel Baumann (who apparently is now crazy about our FISL and wants to drink all Guaran that he can get ), Chris Lamb and Ot vio Salvador and his mom. Those people are so cool and it is nice to discuss some legal issues among different continents in the lounge of their building at late night. Too bad that I am allocated to the other building. I am forgetting many other people (hey, it is 2 am here in NYC), but I would feel guilty if I had not mentioned at least three people more: Martin Michlmayr, Phil Hands, and Reinhard Tartler (who is uploading lame to the debian repository, as the patents regarding it are expiring or expired already). Thanks! P.S.: I just created an account on flickr that I hope to populate with some photos that I took here. And even with a nice squirrel.

Stefano raised again the issue of providing some kind of Debian membership to people that contribute to Debian in unusual ways (not involving deep purely technical skills), like doing translation, documentation, marketing, design, etc. Each time this discussion comes back, people seem to think that we need another membership status for them. But what for? It s true that the name Debian Developer is suboptimal for non-programmers. But it s also suboptimal for most DDs, since most of us don t strictly develop software: we just maintain packages, mainly developing meta-data around the upstream source code. Debian Developer is how we call our full-fledged project members. Do we want to classify those non-programming contributors as second-class citizens? If not, we need to make them Debian Developers , not some strange other name. Of course, there s the issue of security and trust. Debian Developers have upload rights on all packages, and access to the project s machines. And it s a bit strange to trust non-programmers with that level of power. On the other hand, we have many Debian Developers that are mostly inactive, became DDs half a decade ago, and have the same access rights. Worst, it s possible that they remember how to use dput, having used it before! And 95% of DDs (me included) should probably not be uploading the libc, even if they can. Why should they be more trusted than active non-programming contributors that probably would be quite scared by the idea of breaking something? Overall, I think that this issue is actually a non-issue. We should:

• Acknowledge that, when a non-programming contributor has made notable contributions to Debian (proven by the advocacy of current members) and passed the relevant parts of the Philosophy and Procedures check, it should be made a Debian developer.
• Orthogonally, acknowledge that we have a problem with security due to the size and the volunteer nature of the project, and address it independently. For example, shell accounts could be disabled after 3 months without connecting to Debian machines (and be re-enabled by the DD on http://db.debian.org/). And upload rights could be limited to non-core packages (and extended by the DD on http://db.debian.org/ too). It s not about adding intermediate levels of membership, just about giving the possibility to developers to add a safe-guard against themselves.

I'm going insane in this country - the accents, the jaywalking, the food, the money, the poverty in the heart of Manhatten... suddenly I appreciate the UK much more. So I have purchased an electric kettle, and set it up in the Carman basement, for the moment. I have also splashed out on a teapot, and one mug. (So far I haven't found any other mugs in the place, so bear that in mind if you wish to join me - $2.49 from the homeware store across the street.) I have brought two boxes of Twinings tea from the UK, and in the unlikely event that it runs out there are some brand names I recognise in the Westfield Market. In the spirit of US philanthropy, I intend to donate this equipment for the betterment of Columbia University when I leave.

The hacklab is so cold I'm going to lose some of my toes to frostbite. Today I spent most of my time trying to track down the DHCP problem. Phil Kern suggested it might be due to the output of Columbias DHCP server which certainly sounds plausible but without tools such as strace I'm rather at a loss as to how to figure out what exactly is going on. If anyone would like to look at the source to the Minix DNS caching thingy which is where the hang actually occurs, I would appreciate it. Other than that I also ported iconv, gettext, and grep.

So an email went out to Debconf-announce with all this and MORE information but it is worth highlighting the talks/events as they are great. We look forward to having you in New York City! ********************************************************************************************************** exciting schedule highlights
- Have a look at the DebConf10 schedule,
there are a lot of really interesting things planned, both during Debian Day and DebConf
itself. We have a great line-up of speakers, and other events that are
sure to make this DebConf one to remember! A couple notable events that we wanted to highlight: Be sure to come to the DebConf Welcoming Plenary in the evening of Debian Day. This opening plenary will be the first thing that kicks
off DebConf and will be brief, important, and fun. General information
about DebConf, important logistical bits, and prizes(!) will be
had. Also, this gives you a chance to ask some questions before we get
started. Be there at 7:30pm in Davis Auditorium on August 1st! The much anticipated Cheese and Wine party will be happening in the
evening on the 2nd. This will be your chance to see what mixture of
fermented, cultured and alcoholic things your stomach can handle! Also exciting to mention is Eben Moglen who will be speaking on the
3rd during DebConf at 9:30am about Freedom and Privacy in the Cloud
and how we (yes us!) here at DebConf, can be the silver lining. If you
don t already know Eben Moglen
he is Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and founding Director of the Software Freedom Law
Center. Since 1993 he has served pro bono publico as General
Counsel of the Free Software Foundation. Moglen was part of Philip
Zimmermann s defense team when Zimmermann was being investigated over
the export of PGP. As counsel to the FSF, Moglen was charged with
enforcing the GNU General Public License (GPL) and later became
heavily involved with drafting version 3 of the GPL. Also in the evening of the 3rd at 7:30pm we will be treated to not
only a screening of the brilliant and beautiful and (award winning!)
film Sita Sings the Blues in
Pupin 301, but also a Q&A afterwards with the acclaimed animator Nina
Paley! She will describe how the process of making this film caused
her to question the wisdom of copyright monopolies in the arts. The
film is under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license, and her
distribution mechanism is unique as Paley consciously adopted the
methods of the free software movement to distribute the film. The
discussion with the artist after the screening will explain in depth
how and why, and discuss what Paley and QuestionCopyright.org are
doing next to encourage more artists to try the Free route. After the film, at 9:00PM the Columbia University Astronomy
Department will host a guided stargazing event, which includes use
of several different optical telescopes on their roof. There will be
astronomers on hand to answer any questions about the stars,
telescopes, or any other topics of scientific interest. There are many talks that are going to be exciting at Debian Day, even
for Debian Developers! One track will be showcasing general Free
Software themes and issues, and many of these talks will be really
interesting to Debian Developers, so be sure to check out the schedule and come On Debian Day we are excited to have the Honorable Gale Brewer speak at 4pm. She is part of the New York City Council and was the
former Chair of the Committee on Technology in Government, current
Chair on Committee on Governmental Operations and will discuss the
ways that government can foster freedom in technology. Its both
exciting and a privilege to have her speak at DebConf! day trip
This year, the day trip is going to be a blast, a crazy adventure at
the bizarre and fun Coney Island! Explore the historic RussianBrighton Beach! Ride the Cyclone rollercoaster, 82-years old this
year! Swim in the ocean! See the circus sideshow! Eat delicious food
or if unlucky, not so good food. Or do none of the above and just hang
out with your friends outside and have a good time. At the end of the day we are going to go to a unique cultural event:
the Brooklyn Cyclones baseball game where we will have the chance to
watch our beloved DPL humiliate himself as he throws out the first
pitch, in his Debian kilt! Don t like baseball, or sports? Don t worry, neither do we, but the point really isn t the baseball game,
the point is hanging out with all your closest Debian friends and
having a good laugh as Zack tries really hard not to trip, also a good
chance to experience some local culture and to relax after a hard day at the beach. free things in the city
There are an amazing number of free events happening in New York City during the summer! If you are looking for something to do, we ve
compiled a list of various events from a number of different locations
for you to easily view in one spot.

So an email went out to Debconf-announce with all this and MORE information but it is worth highlighting the talks/events as they are great. We look forward to having you in New York City! ********************************************************************************************************** exciting schedule highlights
- Have a look at the DebConf10 schedule,
there are a lot of really interesting things planned, both during Debian Day and DebConf
itself. We have a great line-up of speakers, and other events that are
sure to make this DebConf one to remember! A couple notable events that we wanted to highlight: Be sure to come to the DebConf Welcoming Plenary in the evening of Debian Day. This opening plenary will be the first thing that kicks
off DebConf and will be brief, important, and fun. General information
about DebConf, important logistical bits, and prizes(!) will be
had. Also, this gives you a chance to ask some questions before we get
started. Be there at 7:30pm in Davis Auditorium on August 1st! The much anticipated Cheese and Wine party will be happening in the
evening on the 2nd. This will be your chance to see what mixture of
fermented, cultured and alcoholic things your stomach can handle! Also exciting to mention is Eben Moglen who will be speaking on the
3rd during DebConf at 9:30am about Freedom and Privacy in the Cloud
and how we (yes us!) here at DebConf, can be the silver lining. If you
don t already know Eben Moglen
he is Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and founding Director of the Software Freedom Law
Center. Since 1993 he has served pro bono publico as General
Counsel of the Free Software Foundation. Moglen was part of Philip
Zimmermann s defense team when Zimmermann was being investigated over
the export of PGP. As counsel to the FSF, Moglen was charged with
enforcing the GNU General Public License (GPL) and later became
heavily involved with drafting version 3 of the GPL. Also in the evening of the 3rd at 7:30pm we will be treated to not
only a screening of the brilliant and beautiful and (award winning!)
film Sita Sings the Blues in
Pupin 301, but also a Q&A afterwards with the acclaimed animator Nina
Paley! She will describe how the process of making this film caused
her to question the wisdom of copyright monopolies in the arts. The
film is under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license, and her
distribution mechanism is unique as Paley consciously adopted the
methods of the free software movement to distribute the film. The
discussion with the artist after the screening will explain in depth
how and why, and discuss what Paley and QuestionCopyright.org are
doing next to encourage more artists to try the Free route. After the film, at 9:00PM the Columbia University Astronomy
Department will host a guided stargazing event, which includes use
of several different optical telescopes on their roof. There will be
astronomers on hand to answer any questions about the stars,
telescopes, or any other topics of scientific interest. There are many talks that are going to be exciting at Debian Day, even
for Debian Developers! One track will be showcasing general Free
Software themes and issues, and many of these talks will be really
interesting to Debian Developers, so be sure to check out the schedule and come On Debian Day we are excited to have the Honorable Gale Brewer speak at 4pm. She is part of the New York City Council and was the
former Chair of the Committee on Technology in Government, current
Chair on Committee on Governmental Operations and will discuss the
ways that government can foster freedom in technology. Its both
exciting and a privilege to have her speak at DebConf! day trip
This year, the day trip is going to be a blast, a crazy adventure at
the bizarre and fun Coney Island! Explore the historic RussianBrighton Beach! Ride the Cyclone rollercoaster, 82-years old this
year! Swim in the ocean! See the circus sideshow! Eat delicious food
or if unlucky, not so good food. Or do none of the above and just hang
out with your friends outside and have a good time. At the end of the day we are going to go to a unique cultural event:
the Brooklyn Cyclones baseball game where we will have the chance to
watch our beloved DPL humiliate himself as he throws out the first
pitch, in his Debian kilt! Don t like baseball, or sports? Don t worry, neither do we, but the point really isn t the baseball game,
the point is hanging out with all your closest Debian friends and
having a good laugh as Zack tries really hard not to trip, also a good
chance to experience some local culture and to relax after a hard day at the beach. free things in the city
There are an amazing number of free events happening in New York City during the summer! If you are looking for something to do, we ve
compiled a list of various events from a number of different locations
for you to easily view in one spot.

One of my favorite conferences is HOPE, which I have missed the last 2 times as I was away from NYC, so I am glad I am around this year. I find it especially valuable when there is some controversy brewing in the air, as there is with Wikileaks, Adrian Lamo, and Manning. I am also giving a talk, description below, with a fabulous postdoctoral researcher, Finn Brunton, who works on spam! But we will be talking about pleasure, trickery, and exploitable media for activists. Our talk is late, like really late: 11:00 PM on Saturday night. At first I was a bit annoyed at the scheduling but then I figured, when will i ever give a talk at 11:00 PM?

Following a brief lecture on Project Chanology, the question will be posed: how can we harness the power of lulzy virality, of pleasure, of trickery, of spectacular trolling for purposes above and beyond sharing the wisdom of Advice Dog? It ll start with a brief look at great activist media in the past, from Guernica and the picture of the whole Earth to projects by the Yes Men - how they spread ideas and helped people get informed, organize, and act. What makes the creation of lulzy memes different? Learn about how to create exploitable forms and rapid variations, and mechanisms for bringing the best stuff forward. Can we make media memes with goals beyond lulz, and teach activists who ve never heard of 4chan to make them too? Part lecture, part workshop, this will feature cameos by Rageguy, Pablo Picasso, V, alt.pave.the.earth, Kathe Kollwitz, Courage Wolf, Stewart Brand, Sarah Palin, Batman, Goya, Philosoraptor, Adolf Hitler, Trollface, Shepard Fairey, Joseph Ducreux, David Cameron, lots of Spartan warriors, and lots and lots of (trollish) cats.

One of my favorite conferences is HOPE, which I have missed the last 2 times as I was away from NYC, so I am glad I am around this year. I find it especially valuable when there is some controversy brewing in the air, as there is with Wikileaks, Adrian Lamo, and Manning. I am also giving a talk, description below, with a fabulous postdoctoral researcher, Finn Brunton, who works on spam! But we will be talking about pleasure, trickery, and exploitable media for activists. Our talk is late, like really late: 11:00 PM on Saturday night. At first I was a bit annoyed at the scheduling but then I figured, when will i ever give a talk at 11:00 PM?

Following a brief lecture on Project Chanology, the question will be posed: how can we harness the power of lulzy virality, of pleasure, of trickery, of spectacular trolling for purposes above and beyond sharing the wisdom of Advice Dog? It ll start with a brief look at great activist media in the past, from Guernica and the picture of the whole Earth to projects by the Yes Men - how they spread ideas and helped people get informed, organize, and act. What makes the creation of lulzy memes different? Learn about how to create exploitable forms and rapid variations, and mechanisms for bringing the best stuff forward. Can we make media memes with goals beyond lulz, and teach activists who ve never heard of 4chan to make them too? Part lecture, part workshop, this will feature cameos by Rageguy, Pablo Picasso, V, alt.pave.the.earth, Kathe Kollwitz, Courage Wolf, Stewart Brand, Sarah Palin, Batman, Goya, Philosoraptor, Adolf Hitler, Trollface, Shepard Fairey, Joseph Ducreux, David Cameron, lots of Spartan warriors, and lots and lots of (trollish) cats.

I had a constructive meeting with my Member of Parliament yesterday, in which he agreed to push this critique of the Digital Economy Act (the dire nonsense that Lord Mandelson forced through in the dying seconds of the previous UK parliamentary session, apparently at the behest of the copyright exploitation industry, who will presumably now owe him a few lucrative consultancies)If you're wanting to do something similar, feel free to use the content, or use it for inspiration, or just use the one-page PDF version if that's helpful to you in explaining the worthlessness of this law.Note, I know there are many other points that could be made, but I was restricting myself to one side of A4 (just) -- MPs cannot be expected to read more it seems.