I was impressed by http://unicodesnowman.com/, and I'm always forgetting sequences for hearts, so I present:
Hearts for all!
After 4 flights, about 15,000 miles, a beach, some To a and cheese and lots of geeks, I'm able to update my Places I've Been map by adding Nicaragua to it.
I was speaking at DebConf12, entitled Bits from the Release Team. In case you missed it, it's been recorded by the wonderful DebConf video team and is available in high and low quality. It was great to catch up with people again, and do quite a bit of work on Debian itself, mostly on the Wheezy release. I even found an hour to take a basic Spanish class, although I'm fairly sure I've forgotten most of it by now.
As usual, there were a number of Collaborans present, and it was good to meet them. I suspect I'll be seeing a few more at GUADEC in a weeks time.
My photos are available, should anyone be interested.
Neil McGovern asked me to add an additional feature to the BTS to
support tracking the current status of attempts at fixing a bug. In
past releases, we've used the nice commenting feature of
bts.turmzimmer.net to keep track of what is going on in a particular
nasty RC bug, who is working on it, and what needs to be done next (or
if everyone can just ignore the bug).
This feature should probably have already been in the BTS to start
with, but now it is. In addition to the existing summary feature,
where you can nominate a message or text to be the summary for a bug,
there is an 
outlook command, which tracks the current status of the
bug, and behaves in exactly the same way:
outlook 12345 not good
outlook 54321 0
thanks
I'm totally stymied by #54321.
Today, OFCOM issued a press release entitled "New measures to protect online copyright and inform consumers". According to the announcement, internet users will be encouraged to download music and films through legal channels under the measures.
Ofcom has published a draft code for consultation that would require large internet service providers (ISPs) to inform customers of allegations that their internet connection has been used to infringe copyright. There does seem to have been a number of concessions made, which is welcome, but I do still have a number of concerns.
The code 'only' covers ISPs with more than 400k fixed lines - BT, Everything Everywhere, O2, Sky, TalkTalk Group and Virgin Media. This covers about 93% of the UK retail market. If an allegation of copyright infringement is made, the ISP would need to write to the customer with notice that an infringement has occurred, and in a new change, the number of copyright infringement reports connected to their account. If more than three letters are received in a year, anonymous information may be provided on request to copyright owners showing them which infringement reports are linked to that customer s account. The copyright owner may then seek a court order requiring the ISP to reveal the identity of the customer.
Two more changes have been implemented:
an appeal on any grounds must be determined in favour of the subscriber unless the copyright owner or internet service provider shows that a) the apparent infringement was an infringement of copyright, and b) the report relates to the subscriber s IP address at the time of that infringement.This is good as it puts the burden of proof on the copyright owner, although it still uses IP addresses which is problematic. For example, New York Judge Gary Brown has ruled IP addresses are insufficient evidence to identify pirates, and has provided a lengthy and thoughtful explanation in his ruling. There has also been a consultation published on the how to share costs costs. The suggestion is fairly simple:
"Copyright Owners should bear all of the costs incurred by Ofcom, the majority of costs incurred by the appeals body, and 75% of the costs efficiently and reasonably incurred by Qualifying ISPs in carrying out their obligations."This has the risk of driving up internet access prices as ISPs have to recover the costs of these notifications. Additionally:
"Under the Order, subscribers will have to pay a 20 fee to make an appeal against a report of infringement, which will be refunded in the event the appeal succeeds; the remaining costs of determining an appeal will be met by the Copyright Owner who submitted the CIR which has been appealed."I disagree with the concept of having to pay for an appeal in this way. If accused, someone should be able to refute the argument without cost. This will introduce a barrier to entry, and even if it is refundable is something I believe should be avoided. Finally, the exact costs of implementing this have been set out. It looks like the Copyright Owners would have to pay 60p per letter (with the ISPs shouldering the remaining 20p), a similar split around capital costs - which are the ones that are actually significant. Taking the above, it seems that in total that content owners will have to shell out 15M to use the DEA scheme. The cost seems to be more or less fixed which could encourage content owners to send out frivolous accusations. There's an iterative process which will run to determine the estimated number of notifications, and if eventually the Content Owners don't agree with the pricing, they will have elected not to take advantage of the provisions of the Initial Obligations Code, as they have not been able to make binding commitments to fund CIR processing. So, in summary, this is something to keep an eye on. It certainly hasn't gone away, it's due to start in March 2014. The revised draft code and consultation, which closes on 26 July 2012, can be found here, and the sharing of costs consultation runs until 18th September 2012, found here.
I've recently book my places at a few conferences, so just to confirm:
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I'm on my way back from the Anti ACTA demo in London, at which I was asked to speak. I was good to see a number of people attend. I bumped into the wonderful Bridget Fox too!
Here's my speech:
As I was travelling here on the train, I found myself thinking: why am I here?
What has gone so wrong with the political system that politicians pass laws - the DMCA, the DEA, SOPA, PIPA, ACTA. Laws that look attractive on the surface, but are so deeply flawed. Why have they stopped listening?
But, they haven't stopped listening. They're falling in to a trap set by big businesses with vested interests. The ones with money to influence policy, the lobbying firms, the corporate hospitality arrangements. They hear that the economy is bumbling along the bottom. That many businesses are struggling, and these are hard problems to solve. And suddenly a shining beacon is held out - support our creative industries and all will be well. No one is interested in this new fangled Internet thing anyway. Well, apart from the people stood here today! People like you, and me. People like Julian Huppert - we helped take a motion to the Liberal Democrat Conference to repeal the damaging parts of the Digital Economy Act. The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe will vote against ACTA, and in three major committees it has already been rejected it. Something has changed. The people who represent us are starting to hear our stories. How we will not put up with censorship, interference and snooping. And let me tell you this. The big industries are scared. Shady back room negotiations so that they may be able to slip it past the public. Thanks to you, this won't work anymore. We have a voice, and it's here today. It's not too late to stop damaging our freedoms. Go visit your elected representatives. Tell them why we need to stop these bad laws. Help them understand that it's not ok to pass these. Write about it, tell people, shout in the streets! We know ACTA is bad. Let's tell the world.
The government is currently consulting on open standards, and I have responded on behalf of Collabora. We believe that efforts to avoid vendor lock in, and to open up government from the extra expense this occurs is to be applauded. I have previously blogged about my decision to purchase Microsoft Office for Cambridge City Council, and the reasons why there was only one vendor.
The consultation runs until the 4th June due to a potential conflict of interest which was revealed last month, and so everyone has time to influence government and ensure that government is more open to everyone who wants to access it. It's really easy to respond, so doing so is important. Make sure your voice is heard before it's too late.
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Today I tried to install Debian Wheezy on a Lenovo X220, in preparation for the upcoming release.
It generally went well, with just a couple of incompatabilities:
One of the things that Collabora does is work with other open source projects to improve things for open source software in general.
I was chatting with Michael Meeks of SUSE fame and we had a chat about my recent decision to buy Microsoft Office 2010 for the city council.
One of the overriding problems with the comparison was the lack of support for macros within OpenOffice and I was glad to hear about improvements being made in that area. However, there was still an issue. Doing improvements like this cost lots of time, and therefore for a commercial open source company, money.
A question arises as to who can pay for this. A district council has limited funds, and can't devote it to (essentially what equates to) a large search and development software engineering task. Companies themselves won't want to take the risk that comes with the large development without a buyer, as once the work is done, it is open source so is harder to monetize.
In the mean time, millions of pounds of public money is being siphoned into a private company, and vendor lock in continues. An easy out for a councillor can be to say "Central Government should pay" but given the current state of the economy, I can't see is happening in the immediate future.
However, there is a consultation on Open Standards that's currently accepting submission until May, and if that insisted on ensuring that open standards are adopted throughout the UK, it may help unlock this chicken and egg problem.
C G
If you're happy with your ekey, blog your praise
C
If you're happy with your ekey, blog your praise
F C
If you're happy with your ekey, then your blog will surely show it.
G C
If you're happy with your ekey, blog your praise
maulkin@cheshire:/usr/share/doc/ekeyd$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail 4096Thanks to my eKey.
Yay! Debian is in the Google Summer of Code!
If you have any better ideas, please submit them at http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2009.
The monthly board meeting of SPI will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 18 March) at 20:00 UTC. Members may have seen that the meeting announcement was posted, but a bit late and with a misleading subject line. This month, the record-keeping looks like it will catch up to present-day, with a small hole still from Neil McGovern s time as secretary. The current treasurer and secretary have also posted their reports before the meeting only the president is missing this month.
There s some bank house-keeping and another new associated project under discussion: OpenWRT. There seemed to be a little confusion about whether it had been waiting for a legal opinion or not and some controversy about whether SPI recognises a liaison or a decision-maker.
Once again, I may still be travelling and without a stable network connection during the meeting, or I might have made it home by then. Either way, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted.
A bit of an unusual situation with drivel - I'm taking over maintenance from Neil McGovern and I've updated various parts of the package during that process. However, to avoid swamping Neil in wishlist [l10n] bugs during the time taken for the BTS etc. to switch over, I'm not sending a call for updated translations at this time, even though most of the current translations are out of date. Neil McGovern noticed me using drivel for my blog entries at the recent Debian UK BSP for Lenny and as he isn't using it anymore, suggested that I might want to take over maintenance. It's always better to have a package maintained by a regular user of the program.
As requested at FOSDEM, please find below the new shiny design for lenny t-shirts.
Next.
