Software Patents

Why anyone thinks that Software Patents are a good think I can’t imagine. Well the previous Eurolinux petition for software patent-free Europe with more than 400 000 supporters expired. Sign the new petition:
http://petition.stopsoftwarepatents.eu

Web Filtering

The recent news of Google threatening to pull out of china because of the censorship that they are forced to implement is interesting.

I don’t think we can be so high and mighty about countries that filter the Internet. All countries do it it only the amount and subject matter involved, is different. Here in the UK all ISP’s use the Internet Watch Foundation block list. In Saudi Arabia the government filters the external Internet of images of women not fully clothed. Australia is introducing default filtering of the Internet so parents don’t need to set up their own filters.

We in our culture may disagree with these choices, but we should recognise that different cultures feel threatened by information on the internet. There is general agreement in the UK that removing child pornography from the sites you can see is a good thing. We should not simply judge other cultures for their choices. They are making attempts to protect their citizens form information that they feel threatens their society.

I have worked in Saudi and they have built a society that works for the majority. There is no democracy, the King rules, and that is that. But there are other measures of a healthy society. How about maintaining the infrastructure, or treating the sick, on these aspects life for the poor (Saudi nationals only) is pretty good. This is maintained on the oil revenue but that doesn’t mean that we in the west should condemn them for their choices in forming their society.

I do think we can comment on the processes that these block lists are created and maintained. In the west and in Saudi there is a fairly broad consensus of the value of the blocking that is imposed. Though neither would accept the others choice. Do the Chinese people agree with the level of blocking that is imposed on them? I don’t think this is an easy question to answer from our position in the west. But probably if it was put to a general vote I would thing that they would not agree with their governments decision. But then again that isn’t the way that their political system works.

So what we are really saying when we say we don’t agree with the level of censorship is that we disagree with the Chinese political system.

Write to a Lord

As part of the Opn Rights Group Campaign on the draconian provisions of the Digital Economy bill I wrote to Lord Birt, and a random Lord, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie.

Dear Lord

I write to you to encourage you to reject the proposals before you today for disconnecting alleged file sharers from the internet.

Can you honestly say that a careful review of all of your published material if examined carefully by an intellectual property lawyer would not revel 3 instances of possible copyright infringement. Do you think it fair, if on acquisition only, that you should have your access, and that of all your family members removed. Is that fair.

Do you believe that the existing media organisations truly promote innovation and artistic endeavour, in their promotion of artists. Are these organisations the best way to promote innovation and artistic endeavour.

You must reject this draconian and excessive law.

Just look at the incredible uprising of innovation and talent that the creative commons initiative has encouraged.

I work in the Mobile ISP industry and I know that no ISP will test accusations for validity, they will all just pass them on. The big media companies will use the power given to them to impede the progress of all competition, in the same way the internet take down notices have been used to suppress and censor opposing views.

Yours Sincerely
Stuart Ward

Digtal Economy Bill

To call the proposed measures draconian and extreme is I think understating the situation. Is the crime of a breach of copyright by ordinary citizens doing the sort of things we have done for many years, but now we are doing them on the Internet and thus breaking the vastly extended remit of copyright. Is this crime so heinous that it warrants bypassing the court system and long established principal of innocent until proven guilty.

Then add to this the clause from the bill that states that “The Secretary of State may at any time by order impose a technical obligation on Internet service providers,” so now Mandy and his successors can demand ISPs take any other measures that he may consider appropriate without consulting parliament, or even a judge.

Sign The petition
See also Stuart Langridge’s, Wendy M Grossman, and Cory Doctorow’s Comments.

My Karmic experience

Well I upgraded to Ubuntu karmic at the weekend, and mostly it went well. I looked at the Ubuntu Netbook Remix by downloading it and trying it on my Samsung NC10. I thought is quite nice but I think I prefer to use the desktop version and do my own interface tweaks to fit the screen size.

Well this all worked fine until I went into work on Monday. There I can only connect to the office wireless network. This is wpa encrypted and hidden. This is where I hit my first problem. There has been a change in wicd on hidden networks. The display name of hidden networks now displays as “<hidden>”. Which is fine, but I couldn’t get it to authenticate. I suspected the masking of the essid because this essid and the password are used to calculate the key used in wpa.

Enabling the debug option on wicd gave me the following:

2009/11/02 18:54:11 :: enctype is wpa
2009/11/02 18:54:11 :: Generating psk...
2009/11/02 18:54:11 :: ['/usr/bin/wpa_passphrase', '<hidden>', '**********']
2009/11/02 18:54:11 :: Attempting to authenticate...

The password was displayed correctly but I have added a few stars, but the essid is not. Then I found this.

That was ok so all I needed to do was wip out my Hauwei E196 3G modem and I could use that while waiting for wicd to be fixed. Plugged it in but when I tried to dial it wasn’t there. looking at syslog showed that it was continuously connecting and reconnecting. This was also up on launchpad

Well this isn’t really Ubuntu’s fault as the problem is a kernel regression. I am sure it is to do with the way that these dongles start up as CD drives in order to auto run their installation programs on windows.

But it doesn’t help the cause, especially when I am trying to convince mobile networks to support Linux.

Mobile networks should support Linux

Why don’t mobile operators support Linux on their mobile broadband networks.

What would they have to do

List the dongles and distributions that work. That’s all, the community is delvoping everything needed. It all works now.

Perhaps they could add some guides to installing and using dongles on the common distributions. Most distributions use the NetworkManager to manage all network connections. This is supported by default in Ubuntu, SUSE, and Fedora.

From a investment return basis the investment to support Linux is minuscule, the returns will not be major, but could be significant.

Market segment

Although numbers of Linux users are are small they are quite often influential. Accurate numbers of Linux users are hard to come by, as most users will have purchased a system with Windows installed and upgraded their system to Linux. There are well supported estimates that rate Linux desktop usage at around 2%. These numbers are biased toward the large amount of usage in North America as as such probably underestimate the true number.

Still 2% represents a seizable segment of the market to ignore.

3

The support pages mostly don’t mention Linux, only giving instructions for setting up dongles for use with Windows variants and Apple MAC. A search for Linux on three.co.uk shows only one hit.

The 3 Linux users have discussed their issues on open forums.

Vodafone

Vodafone support the betavine project. The key element of this has been the Vodafone Mobile Connect client. This is small application that manages the establishing connections and sending and receiving SMS messages.
This client can be used to connect any compatible modem to any operators network.

O2

There is no official support from o2, but there is user generated help on their forum pages to help users 1 2 3

T-Mobile

There is no official support for Linux on T-Mobile. Though they were selling the Xandros Linux version of the Asus eee netbook with there web and walk offering.

T-Mobile supplied dongles for this review of using using 3G mobile broadband on Linux that was published in Linux Format

Splashtop

Splashtop is a fast booting Linux distribution that is stored in ROM on the motherboard. It is being shipped with many laptops and PC motherboards. This allows a user to use the laptop for some quick email or web activity without waiting for the full OS to boot. Typical boot times for splashtop are around 2 seconds.

Users of these laptops would expect network connectivity from the splashtop environment, and it will work. But it would be good to assure customers of support.

The netbook revolution

Asus started the netbook revolution with the eee PC, and although Asus have abandoned Linux, but the idea of a small computer running a Linux based
operating system is developing. Especially with the use of lower powered CPUs like ARM. Freescale are calling these smartbooks.

FOSS is coming to phones

Nokia has recognised the importance of FOSS in that it spent €264 million acquiring Symbian only to immediately open source the entire software and
release it under the LGPL licence.

Google is putting significant resources into their android project. Although there is only one android phone (the G1 offered by T-Mobile) this is set to be joined by many more soon. Already the application store for android is showing that the open model can deliver new innovations like access to spotify.

The Google OS announcement

Everyone seems to be going crazy about the new Google chrome operating system. Most of the reports are either saying that it will replace Microsoft, or will only replace Linux as a niche OS offering.

I take a completely different view on this. The important thing is that Google have the business mussel to make sure that there is a choice of OS on computers in the major retailers. When there is a choice of operating systems there will be unstoppable pressure for retailers to offer other choices. This is where the other Linux distributions will get their opportunity. And once the choice is put in front of the non-technical public MS wont have a chance. The range of choices and the speed of development will leave any closed development offerings behind on presentation and functionality, especially if there is a price differential for the Microsoft option.

Microsoft have bought back the netbook market with reductions in price for Windows XP, and probably lots of unethical, or illegal deals with OEM’s. Linux offerings on netbooks have largely disappeared, and the only offering is Windows.

The Electronic Police State

I came across this item on slashdot, pointing at a review of state surveillance rankings. The press release ranked the countries like this:

Here are the 52 states and their rankings:
1. China
2. North Korea
3. Belarus
4. Russia
5. United Kingdom: England & Wales
6. United States of America

But the slashdoters downloaded the raw data and analysed it like this:

1. China, with a score of 3.47
2. UK Englad/Wales, with a score of 3.18
3. US and Singapore tied for 3rd place, with a score of 3.12
5. France and Germany tied for 5th place, with a score of 3.06

And as for Israel and Russia — they are tied for 11th place, with a score of 2.82

But this is really just about what information is stored about citizens. What is really important is the oversight and control of who gets access to this.

A lesson on takeing my own advise

When others have problems installing software, or are getting a strange error message, I always tell them to put the exact text of the error message into Google and they are assured of finding the answer to their problems. Well I should take my own advise.

I was rebuilding my MythTV server. I originally built it with gentoo, but I hadn’t been keeping it up to date, but it had been running very reliably. So I decided to rebuild it with mythbuntu.

The install went very smoothly, then it crashed with some enormous traceback in the boot sequence. It looked like some sort of disk problem. I first suspected the lvm setup I had. There are 3 drives, the first had partitions for /boot swap, and the root partition / the rest of this drive was part of a lvm extent along with the next 2 drives to make enough space for the /media partition where all the recordings would go.

I spent a day installing various things and reinstalling, verifying the CD’s I had burned. Before I finally put the likely looking error message into google which pointed me to this post. Then rebuilt the system back to mythbuntu, fired up my trusty system rescue CD added the blacklist modules. All went perfectly after that.

The following week I was up in Yorkshire helping Jen’s Mum prepare for her move, and thought I would upgrade my nc10 to the beta of Ubuntu 9.04. There are a couple of relevant fixes I wanted to get, and ok it is beta, but this machine is not that critical to me yet. The live mode seemed to work and I couldn’t find any major issues, so I set the install running.

When it came to getting updates, I plugged into her router, but no connection. I then spent most of a day, swapping cables, ports, rebooting with the live CD, all to no avail. I thought I had blown the ethernet port, or messed up the routers dhcp settings. I couldn’t even get the interface up with a fixed IP address.

I had ignored the strange error from ipconfig when I tried to allocate a fixed IP address.

:~$ ipconfig eth0 192.168.0.16
SIOCSIFADDR: No buffer space available

But when I finally put this error into google, I cam up with this. A very specific break with some specific ethernet connections, and a very specific range of kernel revisions.

So the moral is…

Software Patents

The ugly specter of software patents in Europe seems to be rising again. I urge you all to write to your MEP and sign the petition.