Misplaced obsession?

Posted on 24. August, 2006 by Georg Greve

It appears that some people still have difficulties with all this new technology. Take Tom Giovanetti of the IPI, for instance.

The IPI is a group that is sponsored by (and therefore speaks along the lines of interest of) some very large US corporations, trying to make it look like those interests were also the interests of everyone else. I mentioned them before as would-be saviour of Microsoft in the EU antitrust trial, and Tom Giovanetti is their president.

It now seems that by skillfully navigating the set of tubes that is the internet, Mr Giovanetti has found a page with press pictures of me, and could not resist from pointing others to it, apparently because he thinks that having those pictures available for use by the press says something about me.

Personally, I felt I was just being lazy by trying to avoid the repeated questions for print-quality pictures for articles, conference brochures and the like. So I simple made a bunch, put them all online, and let people choose for themselves which fits their purposes best — with the upside that I won’t have to bother anymore. Tom however seems to think that this is some testimony to overexaggerated self-love. To me, that interpretation seems to say more about the interpetor than the interpretee, but be that as it may.

While it is slightly creepy that Tom seems to be missing me so much between WIPO meetings that he needs to search for pictures of me, it is truly hilarious that he would then get so confused by all those tubes that he would link to "my" blog, which is actually the blog of Karstens Gerloff, a former FSFE intern, and still an active FSFE Team member. The fact that it was for the user "gerloff" apparently was too complicated to figure out, so he assumed it must be me. Funny.

Tom: I realise that all this new technology must look very confusing to you, but I’d still appreciate if you did not misattribute statements. So just to clarify: the URL of my blog is http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/.

And no, nothing personal… see you next time at WIPO.

[update]

Roughly two hours after this blog entry went online, someone pointed out that Tom Giovanetti had silently updated the link on his blog. So it is now pointing at my blog for real. Thanks, Tom!

Allow me one final comment, though: On the internet it is extremely bad style to silently change articles or blog entries without clearly marking the changes. Most people would indeed consider it falsification.

That is why updates and changes should be clearly marked — like this one is.

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Ubuntu to be first “Fellowship Ready” Distribution?

Posted on 23. August, 2006 by Georg Greve

From the very beginning, the idea of the Fellowship was to create space for a digital community in which people would work together on various issues related to freedom in a digital society, especially Free Software. Now Lukas Fittl from Austria has just once more demonstrated the point by picking up a task that I had been thinking about recently: Simplifying the udev rules for the Fellowship crypto card, which were still somewhat cludgey from the early days of the Fellowship. Excellent!

The rules he published in his blog are indeed the best version thus far. So let me contribute to the effort:

There is one more USB smart card reader by SCM that works with GnuPG and has the product ID e001. After adding that to Lukas’ configuration, my /etc/udev/gnupg-ccid.rules looks as follows: 

    ACTION!="add", GOTO="gnupg-ccid_rules_end"

    # USB SmartCard Readers
    ## SCM readers (SCR335, SPR532, & Co)
    ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", SYSFS{idVendor}=="04e6", SYSFS{idProduct}=="e001", GROUP="scard", MODE="0660"
    ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", SYSFS{idVendor}=="04e6", SYSFS{idProduct}=="e003", GROUP="scard", MODE="0660"
    ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", SYSFS{idVendor}=="04e6", SYSFS{idProduct}=="5115", GROUP="scard", MODE="0660"

    # PCMCIA SmartCard Readers
    ## Omnikey CardMan 4040
    SUBSYSTEM=="cardman_4040", GROUP="scard", MODE="0660"

    LABEL="gnupg-ccid_rules_end"

 

Trying it on two different machines (both running Debian GNU/Linux "etch"), I can confirm that these rules work for one USB card reader (the one with the e001 product id) and a PCMCIA Omnikey CardMan 4040 here. So the rules look good.

We should check out whether there is other devices that work with the current kernels and versions of GnuPG, so if you have other smart card hardware around, now would be a good time to build a database of supported devices — which would then allow all of them to be used out of the box with coming GNU/Linux distributions.

Because this is the next important step: Having distributions be "Fellowship Ready" in the sense of supporting smart cards out of the box without additional configuration. That will allow more people to take control of their data and privacy easily, and also make it possible to simply plug our smart cards into machines anywhere to have secure remote logins. So this is a very useful initiative.

Thanks to Lukas it appears that Ubuntu might be the first "Fellowship Ready" distribution, and I certainly hope it won’t be the last.

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Technical difficulties all around

Posted on 14. August, 2006 by Georg Greve

It appears that this is a day of technical difficulties. After a thunderstorm seems to have taken out part of FSFE’s infrastructure in Sweden, leaving FSFE with a lost day of email connectivity, I took a look at BoingBoing.net, usually a good source of entertainment. I wasn’t disappointed.

As it turns out, BoingBoing reports that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, now has a weblog. In a place of internet censorship, that alone has a certain sad twist of irony to it. But trying to look at the blog was an even more interesting experience:

Ahmadinejad having a Microsoft moment
Mahmoud Ahmadinejads blog experiencing unexpected popularity.

I guess this could be summarised as

    Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has no problem being dependent on US software, which in turn has no problem failing on him.

and considering all the back-doors and vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, one cannot help but think about 

    > telnet reactor.ahmadinejad.ir
    Trying 217.218.165.150...
    Connected to reactor.ahmadinejad.ir
    Escape character is '^]'.
    nuclear reactor online, weapons of mass destruction at 33%
    > disarm
    disarming weapons of mass destruction
    nuclear reactor online, weapons of mass destruction at 0%
    > shutdown -h now
    nuclear reactor offline.
    have a nice day.
    Connection closed.

 

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Hell-O-Moto, courtesy of Nokia?

Posted on 8. August, 2006 by Georg Greve

Following up on my pledge to never buy routers that are not supported by OpenWRT, FreeWRT, or similar Free Software projects, I wish the same could be done for mobile phones, but I am not yet sure how.

Mobile phones suffer more from shitty software than many other devices, and their flaws are more painful because we interact with them so much. Recently, I wrote about the Hell’O’Moto that I found myself in when buying a Motorola phone. That is a mistake I certainly won’t repeat anytime soon — usually it takes me between 7.5 and 15 years to maybe give such companies another chance.

So I am actually looking into mobile phones again, trying to figure out what to get. While I decided to try Motorola because I was not willing to spend my money on supporting Nokias pro-software patent policy, I now found myself wondering whether to consider their E70 phone. It does have nice hardware design and — unlike the Blackberry, for instance — does not seem exclusively designed to make people dependent on Microsoft Windows.

So I was rather interested when The Register put online a review of the Nokia E70. The review starts very favorably with the hardware, including the battery lifetime, and then comes to the software. Here is what Andrew Orlowski had to say about it: 

     A special circle of Hell needs to be created for the souls behind Nokia's new web browser. [...] The kindest thing to say is that it makes for a great demo, showing off stamp-sized portions of full web pages in their glorious colour. But it's strictly for show. Web, as the browser's called, may as well have been designed by people who have spent the past few years in a time capsule, having only partial descriptions of the web fed through to them in an ancient and forgotten language, with no Rosetta Stone to help.

So it appears that Motorola does not have the monopoly to put its customers into software-induced hell. It seems that once more perfectly good hardware design is invalidated by bad software, which is all the more infuriating considering that in general we could fix this, if they’d let us! But in most cases they try to prevent or at least discourage this from happening — and are not cooperative with people who try to make their products better, effectively helping them to sell more of them.

And by the way, Mr Orlowski, by making it better I did not mean that I wanted to put the proprietary Opera Browser on there that you seem to like so much and that I got the impression you were advertising for quite heavily in your article. I would definitely choose Free Software, and Free Software only. Just so you know. 🙂

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I’ll only buy routers if they (can) run Free Software!

Posted on 8. August, 2006 by Georg Greve

Being in the fortunate situation that I can finally spend some time in Zürich to catch up on issues that were left unattended, like finishing the network infrastructure.

For this, I discovered OpenWRT, a GNU/Linux based firmware for routers that can be used like any other GNU/Linux operating system, including running sophisticated firewalls, Samba or Asterisk servers, Wikis, or whatever else you wanted to put on an embedded box. I also discovered another project called FreeWRT, which seems to be a spin-off of OpenWRT, aiming to support more hardware platforms, but they currently have no release out, so I could not try them.

The existance of these projects has changed my life to the better in a very fundamental way. Finally I can make my routers do what I actually want them to do, and not what some marketing person in some company thought you should want it to do according to their market segment and pricing calculations.

While all of that may be generally acceptable, I’d much rather get hardware with a good and sane default operating system and function set, but with the freedom to modify it to what I actually want, if I so choose.

And after I now found that freedom, I certainly won’t go below it in the future, which translates into a very clear and simple message:

    From now on, I will only buy routers that are supported by OpenWRT and/or FreeWRT — or a similar Free Software project!

In fact I hope that other people will pick make this pledge their own and also put it up on the web, making sure that routers that do NOT offer you this freedom simply won’t be selling very well.

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FSFE submissions to IGF: Sovereign Software and Free Software Essentials

Posted on 3. August, 2006 by Georg Greve

Last night the deadline for submissions to the first meeting of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) ran out — and just in time I finished my last submission on behalf of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).

Still feeling a little groggy from the sprint over the finish line, I think some of you may find the papers interesting. You can find them online at http://www.intgovforum.org/contributions_for_1st_IGF.htm, they are online somewhere in the middle of the documents:

    […]
    Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)

    • Sovereign Software [ pdf ]
    • Free Software Essentials Reference Sheet [pdf]

    […]

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SELF Kick-off Conference in The Hague

Posted on 10. July, 2006 by Georg Greve

Education and science are central issues for Free Software. So when Free Software Foundation Europe was approached by Wouter Tebbens from the Internet Society in the Netherlands for a project on education in and about Free Software and Open Standards, I was immediately happy to help with the project draft and consortium assembly. This was almost one year ago.

Today Jonas Öberg and I are representing FSFE at the SELF kick-off conference in The Hague, NL. Even though I am still suffering from a flu I picked up at the WIPO PCDA, this is a positively exciting event.

SELF stands for ”Scientific Education and Learning in Freedom” and will be working the next two years with funding by the European Commission to build a Free Software portal and platform with Free educational material on Free Software and Open Standards.

As a first step, we will work to identify what already exists and is available under Free licenses. Secondly we will identify the gaps to then work to fill them with courses and documents that can be used by teachers, professors and students around the world.

The ISOC is recording the entire conference, although I do not yet know where and how they will be putting it online afterwards. You might want to check out thee SELF project page for more information.

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WIPO PCDA2: Process derailed, future unclear

Posted on 30. June, 2006 by Georg Greve

Although I could not attend the last day in person, from this article on IP-Watch it appears that the Development Agenda process has apparently been derailed by yesterdays breakup [1, 2] as a reaction to the proposal of the chair.

As our first analysis showed, that proposal appeared to contain none of the priority items of the Development Agenda, and is largely identical to the activities supported by the United States and the European Union. But many countries did not appear to have the time and resources to perform such analysis, also since some of their more experienced negotiators were participating in the WTO negotiations, which were running in parallel.

In effect, some of the Central and Eastern European Countries, some Arab states, and parts of the Africa group seem to have been split away from supporting substantial WIPO reform by the proposal. But the Friends of Development showed no inclination to yield to the massive pressure put on them. Faced with a “accept some shiny glass marbles, or be called names and get nothing” choice, they chose nothing, so that negotiations could continue in the future.

According to IP-Watch, that is what many member states, including a representative of a European Union member state said: The negotiations are expected to continue. And if it weren’t for the Kyrgyz representative, the chairs proposal would be off the table now, but apparently Kyrgyztan decided to adopt the orphaned paper, and it is now yet another proposal in the mix of all the proposals that were put forward so far.

Only the next WIPO general assembly should show how and in which form this process may continue.

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WIPO PCDA2: Free Software: Feedback to our work, and perspectives

Posted on 29. June, 2006 by Georg Greve

Besides the highly controversial plenary discussion, which seems to have led to a stalemate at the current point in time, there were some very interesting points at this PCDA meeting in relation to the work FSFE has been doing at WIPO and elsewhere. Not only is Free Software much more prominent in WIPO discussions than it has ever been before, some groups apparently feel the need to work against it now.

ICC Paper

One group that has taken up this job was the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), which distributed a policy paper on “Open Source”, which was curiously called “Logiciels Open Source” in the French translation. The paper started with an almost correct factual description of Free Software, and even has one occurence of GNU/Linux.

There are however some subtle imprecisions, which are serving to hook their position into. Naturally, they call Free Software “Open Source” consistently, and point out that there is a confusion between a group of licenses, and a development model, both of which are occasionally referred to under this label. From this mistaken identity between Free Software and a software development model, the paper then touches upon Open Standards, which are defined as “publicly available technical specifications.”

Through this definition, the paper differentiates between “Open Source Standards” and “Open Standards” and emphasises that a preference for Open Standards does not mean preference of one software development or licensing model over another.

The main point of the paper was however to explain to the governmental representatives that it was not adequate to prefer Free Software for public procurement. This is partially based on the common misinformation strategy to distinguish between “commercial” and “Open Source” software to insinuate that by preferring Free Software, governments were discriminating against certain companies, or working to destroy the ICT industry.

As far as funding for research is concerned, the paper makes a strong point to please release it under non-Copyleft licenses so it can then be propertised into proprietary software.

In short: The paper rather slyly presents the current Microsoft position, which is equivalent to their second line of defense, based on claims of “technological neutrality”, ignoring that political choices for Free Software are not primarily technological choices.

Federalist Society

A much more aggressive approach was taken by the Federalist Society, a conservative US group, which distributed a booklet titled “Are Intellectual Property Rights Human Rights?”. This paper seems to serve a dual purpose: To spread misinformation and to create fear of NGOs for the purpose of fundraising in conservative US industries who, if they are to believe this paper, will think that Hannibal is standing before the gates of Rome.

The paper consistently calls everyone who is not unthinkingly advocating more, stronger and more harshly enforced monopolies an “IP skeptic” who is part of the “New International IP Agenda.” The NGO’s behind this agenda are described as well-funded, well-organized, and smart. Examples of NGOs in this paper include the Free Software Foundation Europe, among others. While the well-funded is probably far more adequate for the also mentioned CPTech, and I am not sure whether FSFE can be described as part of an “IP Agenda”, I guess this is a sort of compliment.

But it gets better. The paper describes much of the work of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and its allies from the viewpoint of a conservative US organisation, which is extremely interesting. Here are some examples:

The Software Patent Debate in the European Union

This part is very interesting for various reasons. Firstly, it introduces the matter in the following way: 

     In early 2002, the European Commission proposed a directive to harmonize laws among EU member states regarding the patentability of computer-implemented inventions. Among other things, the original draft of the directive would have permitted broader patentability of software than is currently available under the laws of EU member nations.

Why is this interesting? Because it says two things: Europe currently HAS software patents, and the directive would have BROADENED the patentability of software. While this is what we’ve always said, it is nice to hear our adversaries confirm that we indeed understood the situation correctly — contrary to what some politicians still claim, who insist on “computer implemented inventions.”

The paper goes on: 

     Opposition to the directive is led by the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure ("FFII"), the Free Software Foundation Europe ("FSFE"), and the Greens/ European Free Alliance in the European Parliament.

So they apparently know who we are. Interesting.The description that follows is a summary of some of the arguments that we’ve been using, described from their perspective, of course, to make them seem weak. It is somewhat involuntarily funny to see them portray it as unfair that the EU parliament debate portrayed the US patent system as dysfunctional, knowing that even large US corporations like IBM and Microsoft are increasingly voicing concerns about its dysfunctionality.

The paper describes the EU parliament decision of 24 September 2003 as a day of victory for FFII, FSFE, and the EuroLinux Alliance, to then enter into an interesting description of what happened in the Council in May 2004: 

     Rather than accepting the Parliament's amended language, the Council voted to reject the Parliament's anti- software patent position in May 2004. The Council largely stripped the directive of the Parliament's amendments and re-opened the door to software patents.

Remember: This is a conservative US organisation that is in favor of software patentability, and has nothing to win by confirming our description of what happened in May 2004. This really speaks for itself.

After some more description of the historic events, this section of the paper then closes with the sentence “Their will be felt for years to come.” This sounds like good news.

World Summit on the Information Society

Another major item in the paper is the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), during which the Free Software Foundation Europe has been extremely active, not the last through my co-coordinating the international working group on Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks (PCT) which also dealt with Free Software and Open Standards issues. So I do indeed feel a little complimented when I read their evaluation of our impact on the WSIS: 

     Although the WSIS Principles do not explicitly endorse a particular software model, they do promote increasing awareness among all stakeholders of the possibilities offered by different software models, including proprietary, open- source and free software, in order to increase competition, access by users, diversity of choice, and to enable all users to develop solutions that best meet their requirements. [...] In fact, those advocates have been instrumental in shaping the criteria for considering the various software models to include all areas in which open software advocates believe they have an inherent advantage over proprietary software [...] it is clear that they are shaping the discussion and having a considerable impact.

It is good to hear we did not waste our time during the WSIS. Indeed, the conclusion says: 

     [...], its proponents have put their issues on the agenda of international organizations including WIPO, the WTO, and the U.N.

So we’re definitely having an impact, and everyone who has supported our work over the years should feel good about this.

But the paper also highlighted one particular weakness that has been at the core of many political attacks against Free Software in the past years. Here is what they say about “Open Source”: 

     Although the term open source means somewhat different things to different people, a generally accepted semi-official definition is maintained by the Open Source Initiative.

This sums up the problem of the “Open Source” terminology rather well, and in its result I have indeed experienced a political weakening of Free Software in all the major political arenas I’ve been working in over the years.

The way forward

To counteract that problem, I took half a day to write a small “Free Software Essentials Reference” paper, which is online in HTML and PDF format.

The times where Free Software just somehow needed to increase the amount of people that were talking about it, regardless of the consequences, are long gone, if they ever existed. Today it is no longer a question that Free Software is serious, it is also no longer a question that it is commercial. At the same time, the success of Free Software is increasingly dependent on our political strength, and ability to protect ourselves from the misinformation spread by others.

Naturally the software itself will always play a central role, but for that it is irrelevant how we refer to it. So my call to everyone who cares about Free Software (even if you currently call it Open Source, FOSS or FLOSS) is simple: Even if you think Richard Stallman is a unfriendly individual, ultimately Free Software is much bigger than him — and much bigger than any of us. So help us keep it strong on the political field by avoiding to play into the hands of those who wish to see us weakened.

An easy way to do that is to consciously use the term Free Software.

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WIPO PCDA2: Silence in the plenary

Posted on 29. June, 2006 by Georg Greve

It is a very unusual occurence if the chair opens the floor for comments, and there is no reaction for several minutes. A room full of more than 150 delegations in silence is a very strange experience, especially since they are usually not shy to take the floor, and always have something more to say. Yet, this is exactly what happened when the plenary was reopened after 16:00 today, although with some delay due to continued informal discussions.

So how did this silence come about? The chair opened the session, described his perception of the situation, and told the plenary that he did not know how to proceed from here on — and thus invited proposals how to move forward.

Only after the chair explicitly said that he was asking people to restate their positions, if that is still where they stood, and more or less invited Chile to make a start, did the flags go up. No surprises here: All delegations were more or less reaffirming their statements during the explosion in the morning.

After a good lot of discussion, Nigeria tried to bring in a new proposal along the lines of working on all items, but determining a set of criteria by which to sort them into things that can be done immediately, and others that might need more time or resources than those available at the moment. This immediately triggered a response by the US delegation to say that they would only accept the paper of the chair. Not surprisingly, since that is largely identical with their preferred selection, as the table in my earlier blog entry has shown.

Mexico then suggested to move things into informal mode again, and that is what happened. The observers and several governmental delegates waited for a reopening of the plenary. But after the clock hit 18:00, the secretariat came back to announce that there would be no more plenary today.

Indeed, they did not even seem to know whether there would be plenary tomorrow, or when it would start. So the delegations may simply spend all day talking in informals, trying to come to some sort of conclusion to bring to the general assemblies.

Only time will show whether this deadlock can be resolved, but right now some scepticism does seem warranted.

More Information

The work we do at WIPO is a team effort, and we often help each other out with information, and in spreading information effectively, when necessary. The quoted comparison table for instance was based on information Jamie Love got from the US delegation, and a compilation of EU statements by Gwen Hinze, which I put into a visibly accessible form.

So as I am currently in the train back to Zürich, I won’t be able to give a first-hand account of the meeting and its results, also you might be interested in some more perspectives. So here are my further reading recommendations:

  • Gwen Hinze of EFF is blogging and will be putting her extremely helpful transcripts online, as usual:
    www.eff.org/deeplinks
  • Pedro de Paranagua Moniz is blogging at:
    www.culturalivre.org.br
    www.a2kbrasil.org.br
  • And finally: William New’s IP-Watch has apparently angered somebody at WIPO, even though he tries to maintain a carefully neutral, balanced journalistic approach. He has however found himself confronted with much less helpful policies this time. This should not silence him, however, so here is the link:
    www.ip-watch.org
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