I am aware that I am likely to get the "luxury version" of Tunis, and unlike Tunisian people won’t have anything to fear from speaking my mind — also because that is what "THE FAQ" says.
I still have to say it feels weird to go to a country where journalists get imprisoned for doing their job, where the Böll Foundation is forbidden to meet with a local Non-Governmental Organisation for "security reasons" and where the alternative Citizens Summit is apparently being stopped by making sure they don’t get the space they rented.
It fits into this picture that while WLAN is apparently readily available for Windows notebooks only: I’ve been told the infrastructure was supplied by Microsoft, who as the main sponsor had its own, broken DHCP implementation installed. So now only similarly broken implementations of that standard can get IP addresses without problems.
My PCT Working Group co-coordinator, Francis Muguet, had to reboot into WIndows, complete DHCP handshake once, and then was able to get the same IP address under GNU/Linux. I’ll have to find a solution for myself, I guess, as I obviously do not have Windows installed on my notebook.
Speaking of Windows installations: After the Cybercafe in Geneva at WSIS 2003 ran pretty much exclusively on Free Software, the original setup in the conference center now was exclusively Microsoft Windows, even though the agreements said it should be 50/50 or dual-boot.
With some grassroots activism this seems to have been fixed at least to some extent by now, but it remains to be seen how many machines will actually run Free Software — and how many will just be running Windows because that is what people are addicted used to, and because they will never know that an alternative exists.
Overall, that software policy seems to fit the overall situation of the place, though.
