Data Science and Machine Learning are hot topics at the moment. Many people are considering how to extend their skills into these areas and many solutions have appeared, including full online degrees, free online courses combined with free software and for those who prefer hard copy, a staggering choice of books on the topic. One of those books is O'Reilly's Machine Learning for Hackers by John Myles White and Drew Conway. The book uses R to demonstrate a series of techniques for analysis and prediction. The book offers a great opportunity to simultaneously get an introduction to basic machine learning techniques and also an introduction to the increasingly popular R platform. On page 11 they list all the major R packages needed to run their examples (available on Github). I had a look over this list to see how many could be installed on a Debian system using apt-get and found that about half of them were already present. Five of them and one dependency, however, were not already available so I've whipped up packages for them and they are now in jessie-backports for all users of the current stable release. If you are following the exercises in this book, you can get all the software you need with one convenient command:

$ sudo apt-get install -t jessie-backports \
  r-cran-ggplot2 r-cran-lme4 r-cran-rcurl \
  r-cran-reshape r-cran-xml r-cran-arm \
  r-cran-glmnet r-cran-igraph r-cran-lubridate \
  r-cran-rjsonio r-cran-tm

Thanks to all those who already packaged other parts of R and backported the relevant packages. Note that the RJSONIO package's authors have not provided a valid free software license so it is in non-free. It is there to support people using the book but I would encourage people to use RJSON for any new projects as it does have a valid license.

The FOSSASIA 2016 conference is taking place next month, 18-20 March at the Science Centre Singapore. The FOSSASIA community has also offered to host a MiniDebConf Singapore 2016 and pgDay Asia 2016. With sufficient interest from volunteers and participants, these events could do a lot to raise the profile of free software in the region. Applications from speakers and exhibition tables are still possible using the form. Real-time communications technology at FOSSASIA 2016 We are currently discussing a Real-time lounge and demo area for FOSSASIA, hopefully with a live linkup to the FSF's LibrePlanet 2016 in Boston. FOSSASIA have invited a number of developers to speak about SIP, XMPP, WebRTC and peer-to-peer communications solutions. Hopefully exact attendance and scheduling can be publicised soon. Sponsors needed Bringing leading free software developers to Singapore is not easy and further sponsorship is needed to ensure all the speakers who would like to participate can get there. If you or your organization can help with funding or accommodation please make contact. Google Summer of Code If you want to be selected for Google Summer of Code 2016 and you live in Singapore or a neighbouring country, FOSSASIA could be a great opportunity to meet potential mentors, hack on things together and talk about project ideas. Free software development is a community activity and the more you engage with the community, the more confident mentors are likely to be about selecting you. Questions and contact For general questions about FOSSASIA 2016 and Singapore, please ask the FOSSASIA mailing list. For questions about the MiniDebConf, see debconf-discuss and for pgDay Asia, please join the pgday-asia mailing list or otherwise try pgsql-general or the seasiapug regional list.

Do services like Facebook and Twitter really help worthwhile participation in democracy, or are they the most sinister and efficient mechanism ever invented to control people while giving the illusion that they empower us? Over the last few years, groups on the left and right of the political spectrum have spoken more and more loudly about the problems in the European Union. Some advocate breaking up the EU, while behind the scenes milking it for every handout they can get. Others seek to reform it from within. Most recently, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has announced plans to found a movement (not a political party) that claims to "democratise" the EU by 2025. Ironically, one of his first steps has been to create a web site directing supporters to Facebook and Twitter. A groundbreaking effort to put citizens back in charge? Or further entangling activism in the false hope of platforms that are run for profit by their Silicon Valley overlords? A Greek tragedy indeed, in the classical sense. Varoufakis rails against authoritarian establishment figures who don't put the citizens' interests first. Ironically, big data and the cloud are a far bigger threat than Brussels. The privacy and independence of each citizen is fundamental to a healthy democracy. Companies like Facebook are obliged - by law and by contract - to service the needs of their shareholders and advertisers paying to study and influence the poor user. If "Facebook privacy" settings were actually credible, who would want to buy their shares any more? Facebook is more akin to an activism placebo: people sitting in their armchair clicking to "Like" whales or trees are having hardly any impact at all. Maintaining democracy requires a sufficient number of people to be actively involved, whether it is raising funds for worthwhile causes, scrutinizing the work of our public institutions or even writing blogs like this. Keeping them busy on Facebook and Twitter renders them impotent in the real world (but please feel free to alert your friends with a tweet) Big data is one of the areas that requires the greatest scrutiny. Many of the professionals working in the field are actually selling out their own friends and neighbours, their own families and even themselves. The general public and the policy makers who claim to represent us are oblivious or reckless about the consequences of this all-you-can-eat feeding frenzy on humanity. Pretending to be democratic is all part of the illusion. Facebook's recent announcement to deviate from their real-name policy is about as effective as using sunscreen to treat HIV. By subjecting themselves to the laws of Facebook, activists have simply given Facebook more status and power. Data means power. Those who are accumulating it from us, collecting billions of tiny details about our behavior, every hour of every day, are fortifying a position of great strength with which they can personalize messages to condition anybody, anywhere, to think the way they want us to. Does that sound like the route to democracy? I would encourage Mr Varoufakis to get up to speed with Free Software and come down to Zurich next week to hear Richard Stallman explain it the day before launching his DiEM25 project in Berlin. Will the DiEM25 movement invite participation from experts on big data and digital freedom and make these issues a core element of their promised manifesto? Is there any credible way they can achieve their goal of democracy by 2025 without addressing such issues head-on? Or put that the other way around: what will be left of democracy in 2025 if big data continues to run rampant? Will it be as distant as the gods of Greek mythology? Still not convinced? Read about Amazon secretly removing George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles while people were reading them, Apple filtering the availability of apps with a pro-Life bias and Facebook using algorithms to identify homosexual users.

Two Australians have achieved prominence (or notoriety, depending on your perspective) for the difficulty in questioning them about their knowledge of alleged sex crimes. One is Julian Assange, holed up in the embassy of Ecuador in London. He is back in the news again today thanks to a UN panel finding that the UK is effectively detaining him, unlawfully, in the Ecuadorian embassy. The effort made to discredit and pursue Assange and other disruptive technologists, such as Aaron Swartz, has an eerie resemblance to the way the Inquisition hunted witches in the middle ages and beyond. The other Australian stuck abroad is Cardinal George Pell, the most senior figure in the Catholic Church in Australia. The Royal Commission into child sex abuse by priests has heard serious allegations claiming the Cardinal knew about and covered up abuse. This would appear far more sinister than anything Mr Assange is accused of. Like Mr Assange, the Cardinal has been unable to travel to attend questioning in person. News reports suggest he is ill and can't leave Rome, although he is being accommodated in significantly more comfort than Mr Assange. If you had to choose, which would you prefer to leave your child alone with?

If you want to help make Free Real-time Communication (RTC) with free, open source software surpass proprietary solutions this year, a great place to start is the FOSDEM RTC dev-room. On Friday we published the list of 17 talks accepted in the dev-room (times are still provisional until the FOSDEM schedule is printed). They include a range of topics, including SIP, XMPP, WebRTC and peer-to-peer Real-time communication. RTC will be very prominent at FOSDEM this year with several talks on this topic, including my own, in the main track.

A quote:

As the Buddha said 2500 years ago... we're all out of our fucking minds. (Albert Ellis)

There have been a few occasions over the last year where people suffering mental illnesses have been the subject of much discussion. In March 2015 there was the tragic loss of Germanwings flight 9525. It was discovered that the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, had been receiving treatment for mental illness. Under strict privacy laws, nobody at his employer, the airline, had received any information about the diagnosis or treatment. During the summer, the private mailing list for a large online community discussed the mental illness of a contributor to a project. Various people expressed opinions that appeared to be generalizations about all those with mental illness. Some people hinted the illness was a lie to avoid work while others speculated about options for treatment. Nobody involved mentioned having any medical expertise. It is ironic that on the one hand, we have the dramatic example of an aircraft crashing at the hands of somebody who is declared unfit to work but working anyway and on the other hand when somebody else couldn't do something, the diagnosis is being disputed by people who find it inconvenient or don't understand it. More recently, there has been openly public discussion about whether another developer may have had mental illness. Once again, there doesn't appear to be any evidence from people with any medical expertise or documentation whatsoever. Some of the comments appear to be in the context of a grudge or justifying some other opinion. What's worse, some comments appear to suggest that mental illness can be blamed for anything else that goes wrong in somebody's life. If somebody is shot and bleeds to death, do you say low blood pressure killed him or do you just say he was shot? Likewise, if somebody is subject to some kind of bullying and abused, does this have no interaction with mental illness? In fact, Google reveals an enormous number of papers from experts in this field suggesting that mental illness can arise or be exacerbated by bad experiences. Although it may not have been clear at that point in time, when we look back at Alan Turing's death today, suicide was not a valid verdict and persecution was a factor. Statistics tell us that 1 in 4 people experience a mental health problem in the UK each year. In the USA it is 26% of the adult population, each year. These may be long term conditions or they may be short term conditions. They may arise spontaneously or they may be arising from some kind of trauma, abuse or harassment in the home, workplace or some other context. For large online communities, these statistics imply it is inevitable that some participants will be suffering from mental illness and others will have spouses, parents or children suffering from such conditions. These people will be acutely aware of the comments being made publicly about other people in the community. Social interaction also relates to the experience of mental illness, people who are supported by their community and society are more likely to recover while those who feel they are not understood or discriminated against may feel more isolated, compounding their condition. As a developer, I wouldn't really like the idea of doctors meddling with my code, so why is it that some people in the IT and business community are so happy to meddle around in the domain of doctors, giving such strong opinions about something they have no expertise in? Despite the tragic loss of life in Germanwings 9525, observing some of these other discussions that have taken place reminds me why Germany and some other countries do have such strict privacy laws for people who seek medical treatment. (You can Follow or Tweet about this blog on Twitter)

Have you started thinking about new year's resolutions for 2016? Back to the gym or giving up sugary drinks? Many new year's resolutions have a health theme. Unless you have a heroin addiction, there may not be anything else in your life that is more addictive and has potentially more impact on your health and quality of life than your mobile phone. Almost every week there is some new report about the negative impact of phone use on rest or leisure time. Children are particularly at risk and evidence strongly suggests their grades at school are tanking as a consequence. Can you imagine your life changing for the better if you switched off your mobile phone or left it at home for one day per week in 2016? If you have children, can you think of anything more powerful than the example you set yourself to help them stay in control of their phones? Children have a remarkable ability to emulate the bad habits they observe in their parents. Are you in control? Turning it off is a powerful act of showing who is in charge. If you feel you can't live without it, then you are putting your life in the hands of the people who expect an immediate answer of their calls, your phone company and the Silicon Valley executives who make all those apps you can't stop using. As security expert Jacob Appelbaum puts it, cell phones are tracking devices that also happen to make phone calls. Isn't that a chilling thought to reflect on the next time you give one as Christmas gift? For your health, your children and your bank balance Not so long ago we were having lunch in a pizza restaurant in Luzern, a picturesque lakeside town at the base of the Swiss Alps. Luzern is a popular first stop for tourists from all around the world. A Korean family came along and sat at the table next to us. After ordering their food, they all immediately took out their mobile devices and sat there in complete silence, the mother and father, a girl of eight and a boy of five, oblivious to the world around them and even each other, tapping and swiping for the next ten minutes until their food arrived. We wanted to say hello to them, I joked that I should beep first, initiating communication with the sound of a text message notification. Is this how all holidays will be in future? Is it how all families will spend time together? Can you imagine your grandchildren and their children sharing a meal like this in the year 2050 or beyond? Which gadgets does Bond bring to Switzerland? On Her Majesty's Secret Service is one of the more memorable Bond movies for its spectacular setting in the Swiss Alps, the location now transformed into a mountain-top revolving restaurant visited by thousands of tourists every day with a comfortable cable car service and hiking trails with breathtaking views that never become boring. Can you imagine Bond leaving behind his gun and his skis and visiting Switzerland with a smartphone instead? Eating a pizza with one hand while using the fingertips of the other to operate an app for making drone strikes on villains, swiping through Tinder for a new girl to replace the one who died (from boredom) in his previous "adventure" and letting his gelati melt while engrossed in a downhill ski or motorcycle game in all the glory of a 5.7" 24-bit colour display? Of course its absurd. Would you want to live like that yourself? We see more and more of it in people who are supposedly in Switzerland on the trip of a lifetime. Would you tolerate it in a movie? The mobile phone industry has paid big money to have their technology appear on the silver screen but audience feedback shows people are frustrated with movies that plaster the contents of text messages across the screen every few minutes; hopefully Bond movies will continue to plaster bullets and blood across the screen instead. Time for freedom How would you live for a day or a weekend or an entire holiday without your mobile phone? There are many small frustrations you may experience but the biggest one and the indirect cause of many other problems you will experience may be the inability to tell the time. Many people today have stopped wearing a watch, relying instead upon their mobile phone to tell the time. Without either a phone or a watch, frustration is not far away. If you feel apprehension just at the thought of leaving your phone at home, the lack of a watch may be a subconcious factor behind your hesitation. Trying is better than reading Many articles and blogs give opinions about how to buy a watch, how much to spend and what you can wear it with. Don't spend a lot of time reading any of it, if you don't know where to start, simply go down to the local high street or mall and try them. Start with the most glamorous and expensive models from Swiss manufacturers, as these are what everything else is compared to and then perhaps proceed to look more widely. While Swiss brands tend to sell through the stores, vendors on Amazon and eBay now distribute a range of watches from manufacturers in Japan, China and other locations, such as Orient and Invicta, at a fraction of the price of those in the stores. You still need to try a few first to identify your preferred style and case size though. Google can also turn up many options for different budgets.

Copying or competition? Similarity of Invicta (from Amazon) and Rolex Submariner You may not know whether you want a watch that is manually wound, automatically wound or battery operated. Buying a low-cost automatic model online could be a good way to familiarize yourself before buying anything serious. Mechanical watches have a smoother and more elegant second-hand movement and will survive the next Carrington event but may come to grief around magnets - a brief encounter with a low-cost de-gausser fixes that. Is it smart to buy a smart watch? If you genuinely want to have the feeling of complete freedom and control over technology, you may want to think twice about buying a smart watch. While it may be interesting to own and experiment with it some of the time, being free from your phone means being free from other electronic technology too. If you do go for a smart watch (and there are many valid reasons for trying one some of the time), maybe make it a second (or third) watch. Smart watches are likely to be controversial for some time to come due to their impact in schools (where mobile phones are usually banned) and various privacy factors. Help those around you achieve phone freedom in 2016 There will be further blogs on this theme during 2016, each looking at the pressures people face when with or without the mobile phone. As a developer of communications technology myself, you may be surprised to see me encouraging people not to use it every waking minute. Working on this technology makes me more conscious of its impact on those around me and society in general. A powerful factor to consider when talking about any communications technology is the presence of peer pressure and the behavior of those around you. Going phone-free may involve helping them to consider taking control too. Helping them out with a new watch as a gift (be careful to seek advice on the style that they are likely to prefer or ensure the purchase can be exchanged) may be an interesting way to help them engage with the idea and every time they look at the time, they may also be reminded of your concern for their freedom.

Was there a friend or family member who you could only communicate with using a proprietary, privacy-eroding solution like Skype or Facebook this Christmas? Would you like to be only using completely free and open solutions to communicate with those people next Christmas? Developers Even if you are not developing communications software, could the software you maintain make it easier for people to use "sip:" and "xmpp:" links to launch other applications? Would this approach make your own software more convenient at the same time? If your software already processes email addresses or telephone numbers in any way, you could do this. If you are a web developer, could you make WebRTC part of your product? If you already have some kind of messaging or chat facility in your website, WebRTC is the next logical step. If you are involved with the Debian or Fedora projects, please give rtc.debian.org and FedRTC.org a go and share your feedback. If you are involved with other free software communities, please come to the Free-RTC mailing list and ask how you can run something similar. Everybody can help Do you know any students who could work on RTC under Google Summer of Code, Outreachy or any other student projects? We are particularly keen on students with previous experience of Git and at least one of Java, C++ or Python. If you have contacts in any universities who can refer talented students, that can also help a lot. Please encourage them to contact me directly. In your workplace or any other organization where you participate, ask your system administrator or developers if they are planning to support SIP, XMPP and WebRTC. Refer them to the RTC Quick Start Guide. If your company web site is built with the Drupal CMS, refer them to the DruCall module, it can be installed by most webmasters without any coding. If you are using Debian or Ubuntu in your personal computer or office and trying to get best results with the RTC and VoIP packages on those platforms, please feel free to join the new debian-rtc mailing list to discuss your experiences and get advice on which packages to use. Everybody is welcome to ask questions and share their experiences on the Free-RTC mailing list. Please also come and talk to us at FOSDEM 2016, where RTC is in the main track again. FOSDEM is on 30-31 January 2016 in Brussels, attendance is free and no registration is necessary. This mission can be achieved with lots of people making small contributions along the way.

(You can Follow or Tweet about this blog on Twitter) Sites like Twitter and Facebook are not fundamentally free platforms, despite the fact they don't ask their users for money. Look at how Facebook's censors confused Denmark's mermaid statue with pornography or how quickly Twitter can make somebody's account disappear, frustrating public scrutiny of their tweets and potentially denying access to vital information in their "direct message" mailbox. Then there is the fact that users don't get access to the source code, users don't have a full copy of their own data and, potentially worst of all, if most people bothered to read the fine print of the privacy policy they would find it is actually a recipe for downright creepiness. Nonetheless, a significant number of people have accounts in these systems and are to some extent contactable there. Many marketing campaigns that have been successful today, whether they are crowdfunding, political activism or just finding a lost cat claim to have had great success because of Twitter or Facebook. Is this true? In reality, many users of those platforms follow hundreds of different friends and if they only check-in once a day, filtering algorithms show them only a small subset of what all their friends posted. Against these odds, just posting your great idea on Facebook doesn't mean that more than five people are actually going to see it. Those campaigns that have been successful have usually had something else going in their favour, perhaps it was a friend working in the media who gave their campaign a plug on his radio show or maybe they were lucky enough to be slashdotted. Maybe it was having the funds for a professional video production with models who pass off as something spontaneous. The use of Facebook or Twitter alone did not make such campaigns successful, it was just part of a bigger strategy where everything fell into place. Should free software projects, especially those revolving around free communications technology, use such platforms to promote themselves? It is not a simple question. In favour, you could argue that everything we promote through public mailing lists and websites is catalogued by Google anyway, so why not make it easier to access for those who are on Facebook or Twitter? On top of that, many developers don't even want to run their own mail server or web server any more, let alone a self-hosted social-media platform like pump.io. Even running a basic SIP proxy server for the large Debian and Fedora communities involved a lot of discussion about the approach to support it. The argument against using Facebook and Twitter is that you are shooting yourself in the foot, when you participate in those networks, you give them even more credibility and power (which you could quantify using Metcalfe's law). The Metcalfe value of their network, being quadratic rather than linear, shoots ahead of the Metcalfe value of your own solution, putting your alternative even further out of reach. On top of that, the operators of the closed platform are able to evaluate who is responding to your message and how they feel about it and use that intelligence to further undermine you. In some cases, there may be passive censorship, such as WhatsApp silently losing messages that link to rival Telegram. How do you feel about this choice? How and when should free software projects and their developers engage with mainstream social media technology? Please come and share your ideas on the Free-RTC mailing list or perhaps share and Tweet them.

Tributes:

• Alex Handy
• Ars Technica
• Benjamin Keresa
• Bradley Kuhn
• Cory Doctorow
• Ana Guerrero Lopez, Donald Norwood and Paul Tagliamonte (official Debian blog)
• Debian News
• Docker
• Jordan Novet in VentureBeat
• Linux Journal
• LWN.net
• Reddit
• The Guardian
• USA Today
• Youtube

(You can Follow or Tweet about this blog on Twitter) Over the last week, people have been saying a lot about the wonderful life of Ian Murdock and his contributions to Debian and the world of free software. According to one news site, a San Francisco police officer, Grace Gatpandan, has been doing the opposite, starting a PR spin operation, leaking snippets of information about what may have happened during Ian's final 24 hours. Sadly, these things are now starting to be regurgitated without proper scrutiny by the mainstream press (note the erroneous reference to SFGate with link to SFBay.ca, this is British tabloid media at its best). The report talks about somebody (no suggestion that it was even Ian) "trying to break into a residence". Let's translate that from the spin-doctor-speak back to English: it is the silly season, when many people have a couple of extra drinks and do silly things like losing their keys. "a residence", or just their own home perhaps? Maybe some AirBNB guest arriving late to the irritation of annoyed neighbours? Doesn't the choice of words make the motive sound so much more sinister? Nobody knows the full story and nobody knows if this was Ian, so snippets of information like this are inappropriate, especially when somebody is deceased. Did they really mean to leave people with the impression that one of the greatest visionaries of the Linux world was also a cat burglar? That somebody who spent his life giving selflessly and generously for the benefit of the whole world (his legacy is far greater than Steve Jobs, as Debian comes with no strings attached) spends the Christmas weekend taking things from other people's houses in the dark of the night? The report doesn't mention any evidence of a break-in or any charges for breaking-in. If having a few drinks and losing your keys in December is such a sorry state to be in, many of us could potentially be framed in the same terms at some point in our lives. That is one of the reasons I feel so compelled to write this: somebody else could be going through exactly the same experience at the moment you are reading this. Any of us could end up facing an assault as unpleasant as the tweets imply at some point in the future. At least I can console myself that as a privileged white male, the risk to myself is much lower than for those with mental illness, the homeless, transgender, Muslim or black people but as the tweets suggest, it could be any of us. The story reports that officers didn't actually come across Ian breaking in to anything, they encountered him at a nearby street corner. If he had weapons or drugs or he was known to police that would have almost certainly been emphasized. Is it right to rush in and deprive somebody of their liberties without first giving them an opportunity to identify themselves and possibly confirm if they had a reason to be there? The report goes on, "he was belligerent", "he became violent", "banging his head" all by himself. How often do you see intelligent and successful people like Ian Murdock spontaneously harming themselves in that way? Can you find anything like that in any of the 4,390 Ian Murdock videos on YouTube? How much more frequently do you see reports that somebody "banged their head", all by themselves of course, during some encounter with law enforcement? Do police never make mistakes like other human beings? If any person was genuinely trying to spontaneously inflict a head injury on himself, as the police have suggested, why wouldn't the police leave them in the hospital or other suitable care? Do they really think that when people are displaying signs of self-harm, rounding them up and taking them to jail will be in their best interests? Now, I'm not suggesting this started out with some sort of conspiracy. Police may have been at the end of a long shift (and it is a disgrace that many US police are not paid for their overtime) or just had a rough experience with somebody far more sinister. On the other hand, there may have been a mistake, gaps in police training or an inappropriate use of a procedure that is not always justified, like a strip search, that causes profound suffering for many victims. A select number of US police forces have been shamed around the world for a series of incidents of extreme violence in recent times, including the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, shooting Walter Scott in the back, death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and the attempts of Chicago's police to run an on-shore version of Guantanamo Bay. Beyond those highly violent incidents, the world has also seen the abuse of Ahmed Mohamed, the Muslim schoolboy arrested for his interest in electronics and in 2013, the suicide of Aaron Swartz which appears to be a direct consequence of the "Justice" department's obsession with him. What have the police learned from all this bad publicity? Are they changing their methods, or just hiring more spin doctors? If that is their response, then doesn't it leave them with a cruel advantage over those people who were deceased? Isn't it standard practice for some police to simply round up anybody who is a bit lost and write up a charge sheet for resisting arrest or assaulting an officer as insurance against questions about their own excessive use of force? When British police executed Jean Charles de Menezes on a crowded tube train and realized they had just done something incredibly outrageous, their PR office went to great lengths to try and protect their image, even photoshopping images of Menezes to make him look more like some other suspect in a wanted poster. To this day, they continue to refer to Menezes as a victim of the terrorists, could they be any more arrogant? While nobody believes the police woke up that morning thinking "let's kill some random guy on the tube", it is clear they made a mistake and like many people (not just police), they immediately prioritized protecting their reputation over protecting the truth. Nobody else knows exactly what Ian was doing and exactly what the police did to him. We may never know. However, any disparaging or irrelevant comments from the police should be viewed with some caution. The horrors of incarceration It would be hard for any of us to understand everything that an innocent person goes through when detained by the police. The recently released movie about The Stanford Prison Experiment may be an interesting place to start, a German version produced in 2001, Das Experiment, is also very highly respected. The United States has the largest prison population in the world and the second-highest per-capita incarceration rate. Many, including some on death row, are actually innocent, in the wrong place at the wrong time, without the funds to hire an attorney. The system, and the police and prison officers who operate it, treat these people as packages on a conveyor belt, without even the most basic human dignity. Whether their encounter lasts for just a few hours or decades, is it any surprise that something dies inside them when they discover this cruel side of American society? Worldwide, there is an increasing trend to make incarceration as degrading as possible. People may be innocent until proven guilty, but this hasn't stopped police in the UK from locking up and strip-searching over 4,500 children in a five year period, would these children go away feeling any different than if they had an encounter with Jimmy Saville or Rolf Harris? One can only wonder what they do to adults. What all this boils down to is that people shouldn't really be incarcerated unless it is clear the danger they pose to society is greater than the danger they may face in a prison. What can people do for Ian and for justice? Now that these unfortunate smears have appeared, it would be great to try and fill the Internet with stories of the great things Ian has done for the world. Write whatever you feel about Ian's work and your own experience of Debian. While the circumstances of the final tweets from his Twitter account are confusing, the tweets appear to be consistent with many other complaints about US law enforcement. Are there positive things that people can do in their community to help reduce the harm? Sending books to prisoners (the UK tried to ban this) can make a difference. Treat them like humans, even if the system doesn't. Recording incidents of police activities can also make a huge difference, such as the video of the shooting of Walter Scott or the UK police making a brutal unprovoked attack on a newspaper vendor. Don't just walk past a situation and assume everything is under control. People making recordings may find themselves in danger, it is recommended to use software that automatically duplicates each recording, preferably to the cloud, so that if the police ask you to delete such evidence, you can let them watch you delete it and still have a copy. Can anybody think of awards that Ian Murdock should be nominated for, either in free software, computing or engineering in general? Some, like the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering can't be awarded posthumously but others may be within reach. Come and share your ideas on the debian-project mailing list, there are already some here. Best of all, Ian didn't just build software, he built an organization, Debian. Debian's principles have helped to unite many people from otherwise different backgrounds and carry on those principles even when Ian is no longer among us. Find out more, install it on your computer or even look for ways to participate in the project.

FOSDEM is nearly here and Real-Time Communications is back with a bang. Whether you are keen on finding the perfect privacy solution, innovative new features or just improving the efficiency of existing telephony, you will find plenty of opportunities at FOSDEM. Main track Saturday, 30 January, 17:00 Dave Neary presents How to run a telco on free software. This session is of interest to anybody building or running a telco-like service or any system administrator keen to look at a practical application of cloud computing with OpenStack. Sunday, 31 January, 10:00 is my own presentation on Free Communications with Free Software. This session looks at the state of free communications, especially open standards like SIP, XMPP and WebRTC and practical solutions like DruCall (for Drupal), Lumicall (for Android) and much more. Sunday, 31 January, 11:00 Guillaume Roguez and Adrien B raud from Savoir-faire Linux present Building a peer-to-peer network for Real-Time Communication. They explain how their Ring solution, based on OpenDHT, can provide a true peer-to-peer solution. and much, much more....

• XMPP Summit 19 is on January 28 and 29, the Thursday and Friday before FOSDEM as part of the FOSDEM Fringe.
• The FOSDEM Beer Night on Friday, 29 January provides a unique opportunity for Real-Time Communication without software
• The Real-Time Lounge will operate in the K building over both days of FOSDEM, come and meet the developers of your favourite RTC projects
• The Real-Time dev-room is the successor of the previous XMPP and Telephony dev-rooms. The Real-Time dev-room is in K.3.401 and the schedule will be announced shortly.

Volunteers and sponsors still needed Please come and join the FreeRTC mailing list to find out more about ways to participate, the Saturday night dinner and other opportunities. The FOSDEM team is still fundraising. If your company derives benefit from free software and events like FOSDEM, please see the sponsorship pages.

I'm currently in Paris for TADHack, an opportunity to collaborate on a range of telephony APIs and services. People can also win prizes by doing something innovative with the platforms promoted by the sponsors. This has been a great opportunity to raise awareness of the RTC Quick Start Guide, introduce people to DruCall and JSCommunicator and identify other opportunities for business and technical collaboration. If you are in Paris, it is not too late to register and participate, please see the TADHack web site for details.

WebRTC continues to gather momentum around the world. Over the next week, Paris will host a TADHack event on WebRTC (12-13 December) followed by Europe's most well known meeting of the WebRTC community, the annual WebRTC Conference and Expo, 16-18 December. 2015 has been a busy year for WebRTC developers, in the browser, on the server-side and even in documentation, with the online publication of The RTC Quick Start Guide. These efforts have all come together to create a stable foundation for many implementations in 2016. Demo The JSCommunicator demo video shows just how convenient WebRTC can be, looking at the first customer-facing WebRTC deployment on Wall Street, a project I put together back in 2014: This solution was implemented entirely with free, open source software integrated with a traditional corporate PBX. The project involved significant innovation to bring together a new technology like WebRTC with a very established corporate telephony infrastructure. For example, the solution makes use of the reSIProcate Python scripting to add the Avaya UUI headers to the SIP signaling, so it can integrate seamlessly with all existing Avaya customizations and desktop CRM software. Is this something you can imagine on your organization's web site or as part of your web-based product or service? DruCall module for Drupal - WebRTC without coding If you run a Drupal CMS or if you would like to, the DruCall module provides a very quick way to get started with WebRTC. On a Debian or Ubuntu server, you can automatically deploy the entire Drupal stack, Apache, MySQL and all module dependencies with $ sudo apt-get install -t jessie-backports drupal7-mod-drucall JSCommunicator, the generic SIP phone for web pages If you don't want to do any JavaScript development, JSCommunicator may be the way to go. JSCommunicator is a completely generic solution that can be completely re-branded just by tweaking the HTML and CSS. All phone features can be enabled and disabled using the configuration file. WebRTC plugins for CRM solutions As part of Google Summer of Code 2014, Juliana Louback created a WebRTC plugin for the xTuple enterprise CRM and ERP suite. The source code of the DruCall and xTuple plugins provide an excellent point of reference for developing similar plugins for other web applications. Both of them are based on JSCommunicator which is designed to embed easily into any existing HTML page or templating system. Get involved To find out more and discuss RTC using free software and open standards, please join us on the Free-RTC mailing list.

There are a diverse range of free software solutions for accounting. Personally, I have been tracking my personal and business accounts using a double-entry accounting system since I started doing freelance work about the same time I started university. Once you become familiar with double-entry accounting (which doesn't require much more than basic arithmetic skills and remembering the distinction between a debit and a credit) it is unlikely you would ever want to go back to a spreadsheet. Accounting software promoted for personal/home users often provides a very basic ledger where you can distinguish how much cash goes to rent, how much to food and how much to the tax man. Software promoted for business goes beyond the core ledger functionality and provides helpful ways to keep track of which bills you already paid, which are due imminently and which customers haven't paid you. Even for a one-man-band, freelancer or contractor, using a solution like this is hugely more productive than trying to track bills in a spreadsheet. Factors to consider when choosing a solution Changing accounting software can be a time consuming process and require all the users to learn a lot of new things. Therefore, it is generally recommended to start with something a little more powerful than what you need in the hope that you will be able to stick with it for a long time. With proprietary software this can be difficult because the more advanced solutions cost more money than you might be willing to pay right now. With free software, there is no such limitation and you can start with an enterprise-grade solution from day one and just turn off or ignore the features you don't need yet. If you are working as an IT consultant or freelancer and advising other businesses then it is also worthwhile to choose a solution for yourself that you can potentially recommend to your clients and customize for them. The comparison Here is a quick comparison of some of the free software accounting solutions that are packaged on popular Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora:

Product	Postbooks	Tryton	GnuCash	LedgerSMB	HomeBank	Skrooge	KMyMoney	BG Financas	Grisbi
GUI	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Web UI	Y	Y	N	Y	N	N	N	N	N
Multi-user	Y	Y	N	Y	N	N	N	N	Y
File storage	N	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	Y	N	N
SQL storage	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	N	Y	Y	Y
Multi-currency	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y		Y
A/R	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y		Y
A/P	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y		Y
VAT/GST	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	N	Y		Y
Inventory	Y	Y	N	Y	N		N		N
Linux	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Windows	Y	Y
Mac OS	Y	Y
Technology	C++, JavaScript, Node	Python	C	Perl	C			Java
License	CPAL	GPL3	GPL2	GPL2

The table doesn't consider Odoo (formerly OpenERP) because the packages were considered buggy and are not maintained any more, it is replaced by Tryton. Compiere and Adempiere are other well known solutions but they haven't been packaged at all. Features in detail While the above list gives a basic summary of features, it is necessary to look more closely at how they are implemented. For example, if you need to report on VAT or GST, there are two methods of reporting: cash or accrual. Some products only support accruals because that is easier to implement. Even in commercial products that support cash-based VAT reporting, the reports are not always accurate (I've seen that problem with the proprietary Quickbooks software) and a tax auditor will be quick to spot such errors. The only real way to get to know one of these products is to test it for a couple of hours. Postbooks, for example, provides the Demo database so you can test it with dummy data without making any real commitment. User interface choices If you need to support users on multiple platforms or remote users such as an accountant or book-keeper, it is tempting to choose a solution with a web interface. The solutions with desktop interfaces can be provisioned to remote users using a terminal-server setup. The full GUI solutions tend to offer a richer user interface and reporting experience. It can frequently be useful to have multiple windows or reports open at the same time, doing this with browser tabs can be painful. File or database storage There are many good reasons to use database storage and my personal preference is for PostgreSQL. Using a database allows you to run a variety of third-party reporting tools and write your own scripts for data import and migration. Community and commercial support When dealing with business software, it is important to look at both the community and the commercial support offerings that are available. Some communities have events, such as xTupleCon for Postbooks or a presence at other major events like FOSDEM. Summary My personal choice at the moment is Postbooks from xTuple. This is because of a range of factors, including the availability of both web and desktop clients, true multi-user support, the multi-currency support and the PostgreSQL back-end.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about Software Freedom Conservancy's fundraiser. Various questions come to my mind: Is this the only way to achieve goals such as defending copyright? (There are other options, like corporate legal insurance policies) When all the options are compared, is Conservancy the best one? Maybe it is, but it would be great to confirm why we reached that conclusion. Could it be necessary to choose two or more options that complement each other? Conservancy may just be one part of the solution and we may get a far better outcome if money is divided between Conservancy and insurance and something else. What about all the other expenses that developers incur while producing free software? Many other professionals, like doctors, do work that is just as valuable for society but they are not made to feel guilty about asking for payment and reimbursement. (In fact, for doctors, there is no shortage of it from the drug companies). There seems to be an awkwardness about dealing with money in the free software world and it means many projects continue to go from one crisis to the next. Just yesterday on another mailing list there was discussion about speakers regularly asking for reimbursement to attend conferences and at least one strongly worded email appeared questioning whether people asking about money are sufficiently enthusiastic about free software or if they are only offering to speak in the hope their trip will be paid. The DebConf team experienced one of the more disappointing examples of a budget communication issue when developers who had already volunteered long hours to prepare for the event then had to give up valuable time during the conference to wash the dishes for 300 people. Had the team simply insisted that the high cost of local labor was known when the country was selected then the task could have been easily outsourced to local staff. This came about because some members of the community felt nervous about asking for budget and other people couldn't commit to spend. Rather than stomping on developers who ask about money or anticipate the need for it in advance, I believe we need to ask people if money was not taboo, what is the effort they could contribute to the free software world and how much would they need to spend in a year for all the expenses that involved. After all, isn't that similar to the appeal from Conservancy's directors? If all developers and contributors were suitably funded, then many people would budget for contributions to Conservancy, other insurances, attending more events and a range of other expenses that would make the free software world operate more smoothly. In contrast, the situation we have now (for event-related expenses) is that developers funding themselves or with tightly constrained budgets or grants often have to spend hours picking through AirBNB and airline web sites trying to get the best deal while those few developers who do have more flexible corporate charge cards just pick a convenient hotel and don't lose any time reading through the fine print to see if there are charges for wifi, breakfast, parking, hidden taxes and all the other gotchas because all of that will be covered for them. With developer budgets/wishlists documented, where will the money come from? Maybe it won't appear, maybe it will. But if we don't ask for it at all, we are much less likely to get anything. Mozilla has recently suggested that developers need more cash and offered to put $1 million on the table to fix the problem, is it possible other companies may see the benefit of this and put up some cash too? The time it takes to promote one large budget and gather donations is probably far more efficient than the energy lost firefighting lots of little crisis situations. Being more confident about money can also do a lot more to help engage people and make their participation sustainable in the long term. For example, if a younger developer is trying to save the equivalent of two years of their salary to pay a deposit on a house purchase, how will they feel about giving money to Conservancy or paying their own travel expenses to a free software event? Are their families and other people they respect telling them to spend or to save and if our message is not compatible with that, is it harder for us to connect with these people? One other thing to keep in mind is that budgeting needs to include the costs of those who may help the fund-raising and administration of money. If existing members of our projects are not excited about doing such work we have to be willing to break from the "wait for a volunteer or do-it-yourself" attitude. There are so many chores that we are far more capable of doing as developers that we still don't have time for, we are only fooling ourselves if we anticipate that effective fund-raising will take place without some incentives going back to those who do the work.

In many travel-related web sites for airlines and hotels, there is some attempt to sting the customer with an extra fee by performing a currency conversion at an inflated exchange rate. Sometimes it is only about five percent and this may not appear to be a lot but in one case a hotel was trying to use a rate that increased the cost of my booking by 30%. This scheme/scam is referred to as Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC). Sometimes the website says that they are making it "easy" for you by giving you a "guaranteed" exchange rate that "might" be better than the rate from your bank. Sometimes a hotel or restaurant in a tourist location insists that you have to pay in a currency that is not the same as the currency on your booking receipt or their menu card, this is also a DCC situation. Reality check: these DCC rates are universally bad. Last time I checked, my own credit card only has a 0.9% fee for currency conversion. Credit card companies have become a lot more competitive but the travel industry hasn't. Airbnb often claims that they want to help the little guy and empower people, at least that is the spin they were using when New York city authorities were scrutinizing their business model. Their PR blog tries to boast about the wonderful economic impact of Airbnb. But when it comes to DCC, the economic impact is universally bad for the customer and good for Airbnb's bosses. Most sites just turn on DCC by default and add some little opt-out link or checkbox that you have to click every time you book. Airbnb, however, is flouting regulations and deceiving people by trying to insist that you can't manually choose the currency you'll use for payment. Fortunately, Visa and Mastercard have insisted that customers do have the right to know the DCC exchange rate and choose not to use DCC. What are the rules? Looking at the Visa system, the Visa Product and Service Rules, page 371, s5.9.7.4 include the statement that the merchant (Airbnb) must "Inform the Cardholder that Dynamic Currency Conversion is optional". The same section also says that Airbnb must "Not use any language or procedures that may cause the Cardholder to choose Dynamic Currency Conversion by default". When you read the Airbnb help text about currencies, do you think the language and procedures there comply with Visa's regulations? What does Airbnb have to say about it? I wrote to Airbnb to ask about this. A woman called Eryn H replied "As it turns out we cannot provide our users with the option to disable currency conversion." She went on to explain "When it comes to currency converting, we have to make sure that the payments and payouts equal to be the same amount, this is why we convert it as well as offer to convert it for you. We took it upon ourselves to do this for our users as a courtesy, not so that we can inconvenience any users.". That, and the rest of Eryn's email, reads like a patronizing copy-and-paste response that we've all come to dread from some poorly trained customer service staff these days. Miss H's response also includes this little gem: "Additionally, if you pay in a currency that s different from the denominated currency of your payment method, your payment company (for example, your credit or bank card issuer) or third-party payment processor may apply a currency conversion rate or fees to your payment. Please contact your provider for information on what rates and fees may apply as these are not controlled by or known to Airbnb." and what this really means is that if Airbnb forces you to use a particular currency, with their inflated exchange rate and that is not the currency used by your credit card then you will have another currency conversion fee added by your bank, so you suffer the pain of two currency conversions. This disastrous scenario comes about because some clever person at Airbnb wanted to show users a little "courtesy", as Miss H describes it. What can users do? As DCC is optional and as it is not clear on the booking page, there are other things a user can do. At the bottom of the Airbnb page you can usually find an option to view prices in a different currency. You can also change your country of residence in the settings to ensure you view prices in the host currency. This allows you to see the real price, without the DCC steal. People have been able to email or call Airbnb and have DCC disabled for their account. Not all their telephone staff seem to understand these requests and apparently it is necessary to persist and call more than once. In the long term, the cost savings outweigh the time it may take even if you spend 20 minutes on the phone getting it fixed. Whatever you do, with any travel site, print a copy of the information page showing the price in host currency. After doing that for an Airbnb booking and before making any payment, send a message to the host quoting the total price in their currency and stating DCC is not authorized. If Airbnb does wrongly convert the currency, send a letter to the credit card company asking for a full refund/chargeback on the basis that the transaction in the wrong currency was not an authorized transaction. It is important to ensure that you do not agree to the payment using Verified-by-Visa or Mastercard Securecode and do not pay with a debit card as these things can undermine your chances of a successful chargeback. The chargeback rules are very clear about this. On the Visa website, the Guide for the Lodging Industry describes all the chargeback reason codes. On page 46, reason code 76 is described for cases such as these:

• Cardholder was not advised that Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC) would occur
• Cardholder was refused the choice of paying in the merchant s local currency

If you feel that Airbnb's web site was not operating in compliance with these rules, while many other web sites have made the effort to do so, why shouldn't you demand a correction by your bank? Once enough people do this, don't be surprised if Airbnb fixes their site.

I recently had a problem with a program behaving badly. As a developer familiar with open source, my normal strategy in this case would be to find the source and debug or patch it. Although I was familiar with the source code, I didn't have it on hand and would have faced significant inconvenience having it patched, recompiled and introduced to the runtime environment. Conveniently, the program has not been stripped of symbol names, and it was running on Solaris. This made it possible for me to whip up a quick dtrace script to print a log message as each function was entered and exited, along with the return values. This gives a precise record of the runtime code path. Within a few minutes, I could see that just changing the return value of a couple of function calls would resolve the problem. On the x86 platform, functions set their return value by putting the value in the EAX register. This is a trivial thing to express in assembly language and there are many web-based x86 assemblers that will allow you to enter the instructions in a web-form and get back hexadecimal code instantly. I used the bvi utility to cut and paste the hex code into a copy of the binary and verify the solution. All I needed was a convenient way to apply these changes to all the related binary files, with a low risk of error. Furthermore, it needed to be clear for a third-party to inspect the way the code was being changed and verify that it was done correctly and that no other unintended changes were introduced at the same time. Finding or writing a script to apply the changes seemed like the obvious solution. A quick search found many libraries and scripts for reading ELF binary files, but none offered a patching capability. Tools like objdump on Linux and elfedit on Solaris show the raw ELF data, such as virtual addresses, which must be converted manually into file offsets, which can be quite tedious if many binaries need to be patched. My initial thought was to develop a concise C/C++ program using libelf to parse the ELF headers and then calculating locations for the patches. While searching for an example, I came across pyelftools and it occurred to me that a Python solution may be quicker to write and more concise to review. elfpatch (on github) was born. As input, it takes a text file with a list of symbols and hexadecimal representations of the patch for each symbol. It then reads one or more binary files and either checks for the presence of the symbols (read-only mode) or writes out the patches. It can optionally backup each binary before changing it.

The St Denis siege last week and the Brussels lockdown this week provides all of us in Europe with an opportunity to reflect on why over ten thousand refugees per day have been coming here from the middle east, especially Syria. At this moment, French warplanes and American drones are striking cities and villages in Syria, killing whole families in their effort to shortcut the justice system and execute a small number of very bad people without putting them on trial. Some observers estimate air strikes and drones kill twenty innocent people for every one bad guy. Women, children, the sick, elderly and even pets are most vulnerable. The leak of the collateral murder video simultaneously brought Wikileaks into the public eye and demonstrated how the crew of a US attack helicopter had butchered unarmed civilians and journalists like they were playing a video game. Just imagine that the French president had sent the fighter jets to St Denis and Molenbeek instead of using law enforcement. After all, how are the terrorists there any better or worse than those in Syria, don't they deserve the same fate? Or what if Obama had offered to help out with a few drone strikes on suburban Brussels? After all, if the drones are such a credible solution for Syria's future, why won't they solve Brussels' (perceived) problems too? If the aerial bombing "solution" had been attempted in a western country, it would have lead to chaos. Half the population of Paris and Brussels would find themselves camping at the migrant camps in Calais, hoping to sneak into the UK in the back of a truck. Over a hundred years ago, Russian leaders proposed a treaty agreeing never to drop bombs from balloons and the US and UK happily signed it. Sadly, the treaty wasn't updated after the invention of fighter jets, attack helicopters, rockets, inter-continental ballistic missiles, satellites and drones. The reality is that asymmetric warfare hasn't worked and never will work in the middle east and as long as it is continued, experts warn that Europe may continue to face the consequences of refugees, terrorists and those who sympathize with their methods. By definition, these people can easily move from place to place and it is ordinary citizens and small businesses who will suffer a lot more under lockdowns and other security measures. In our modern world, people often look to technology for shortcuts. The use of drones in the middle east is a shortcut from a country that spent enormous money on ground invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and doesn't want to do it again. Unfortunately, technological shortcuts can't always replace the role played by real human beings, whether it is bringing law and order to the streets or in any other domain. Aerial bombardment - by warplane or by drone - carries an implicitly racist message, that the people abused by these drone attacks are not equivalent to the rest of us, they can't benefit from the normal procedures of justice, they don't have rights, they are not innocent until proven guilty and they are expendable. The French police deserve significant credit for the relatively low loss of life in the St Denis siege. If their methods and results were replicated in Syria and other middle eastern hotspots, would it be more likely to improve the situation in the long term than drone strikes?

One US presidential candidate has said a lot recently, but the comments about making a database of Muslims may qualify as the most extreme. Of course, if he really wanted to, somebody with this mindset could find all the Muslims anyway. A quick and easy solution would involve tracing all the mobile phone signals around mosques on a Friday. Mr would-be President could compel Facebook and other social networks to disclose lists of users who identify as Muslim. Databases are a dangerous side-effect of gay marriage In 2014 there was significant discussion about Brendan Eich's donation to the campaign against gay marriage. One fact that never ranked very highly in the debate at the time is that not all gay people actually support gay marriage. Even where these marriages are permitted, not everybody who can marry now is choosing to do so. The reasons for this are varied, but one key point that has often been missed is that there are two routes to marriage equality: one involves permitting gay couples to visit the register office and fill in a form just as other couples do. The other route to equality is to remove all the legal artifacts around marriage altogether. When the government does issue a marriage certificate, it is not long before other organizations start asking for confirmation of the marriage. Everybody from banks to letting agents and Facebook wants to know about it. Many companies outsource that data into cloud CRM systems such as Salesforce. Before you know it, there are numerous databases that somebody could mine to make a list of confirmed homosexuals. Of course, if everybody in the world was going to live happily ever after none of this would be a problem. But the reality is different. While discrimination: either against Muslims or homosexuals - is prohibited and can even lead to criminal sanctions in some countries, this attitude is not shared globally. Once gay people have their marriage status documented in the frequent flyer or hotel loyalty program, or in the public part of their Facebook profile, there are various countries where they are going to be at much higher risk of prosecution/persecution. The equality to marry in the US or UK may mean they have less equality when choosing travel destinations. Those places are not as obscure as you might think: even in Australia, regarded as a civilized and laid-back western democracy, the state of Tasmania fought tooth-and-nail to retain the criminalization of virtually all homosexual conduct until 1997 when the combined actions of the federal government and high court compelled the state to reform. Despite the changes, people with some of the most offensive attitudes are able to achieve and retain a position of significant authority. The same Australian senator who infamously linked gay marriage with bestiality has successfully used his position to set up a Senate inquiry as a platform for conspiracy theories linking Halal certification with terrorism. There are many ways a database can fall into the wrong hands Ironically, one of the most valuable lessons about the risk of registering Muslims and homosexuals was an injustice against the very same tea-party supporters a certain presidential candidate is trying to woo. In 2013, it was revealed IRS employees had started applying a different process to discriminate against groups with Tea party in their name. It is not hard to imagine other types of rogue or misinformed behavior by people in positions of authority when they are presented with information that they don't actually need about somebody's religion or sexuality. Beyond this type of rogue behavior by individual officials and departments, there is also the more sinister proposition that somebody truly unpleasant is elected into power and can immediately use things like a Muslim database, surveillance data or the marriage database for a program of systematic discrimination. France had a close shave with this scenario in the 2002 presidential election when
Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has at least six convictions for racism or inciting racial hatred made it to the final round in a two-candidate run-off with Jacques Chirac. The best data security The best way to be safe- wherever you go, both now and in the future - is not to have data about yourself on any database. When filling out forms, think need-to-know. If some company doesn't really need your personal mobile number, your date of birth, your religion or your marriage status, don't give it to them.