If you REALLY hate having customers, require them to buy wireless vouchers

Remember the story about unsuccessfully trying to find internet connectivity at Buenos Aires airport as part of my "genuine Latin American experience"? After the conference in Rosario ended last night, Fernanda Weiden, Alexandre Oliva and myself are currently back at Buenos Aires international airport, waiting for our flight to Porto Alegre.

Wanting to finally put the first pictures of FSFLA online, I hoped to find a way to get one of those vouchers once inside the boarding area. So I fired up the laptop, started Firefox and tried to connect to the net. As expected, this is what I saw:

Notice how this does not allow you to buy internet time online with your credit card or mobile phone bill? And in case you wonder: the "English Version" button of course does not work in Firefox. Amateurs running wild.

While looking for a place to buy the voucher, Alexandre and I had no luck at first, but then found a place that supposedly sold these vouchers and had an actual person there. She (like the web page) did not speak English, but fortunately Alexandre was capable of portunoling our desire across the language barrier.

My Portunol was good enough to understand she wanted to give us a voucher for 2 hours at the fantastic bargain of 30 Pesos. Yup. That is essentially 10 USD. Given that we would be boarding in only 45 minutes, it would be 10 USD for 45 minutes of internet. Fantastic.

Smaller vouchers were obviously not available: They only offered thirty minutes of Windows for 4 Pesos on one of their machines, but would not allow me to connect my laptop to download my email.

This was the moment when I decided it was too much and I would not be giving my money to a business that so obivously hates having customers and was getting ready to leave.

Alexandre however felt it was our duty to make ourselves understood to the manager of the facility, to let him know that we would not be buying any of their services because they made it positively impossible to do so in an acceptable way: who knows whether the 30 Pesos would not have been wasted because the login also did not work in Firefox?

Some more Portunol ensued, in the course of which Alexandre tried to get across that life existed outside the Windows world. The manager only gave him a blank stare and obviously just wanted us to go away.

Alexandre insisted to explain that indeed they were apparently running a GNU/Linux machine as their router (nmap had identified it as Linux kernel 2.4.x), so it was not clear why they should make it impossible for their customers to use GNU/Linux. More blank stares.

Finally we did the manager a favor and left, but not without Alexandre asking him to please relay what we had told him to the technical people.

Honestly: I admire Alexandre for having bothered. Maybe I am getting too cynical, but I am almost sure that nothing will ever come from this. At these times it seems that brain matter is a constant on this planet, only the population increases.

As a result of this, instead of getting work done, the three of us are now waiting for the boarding to begin, so we may have more luck with the internet in Brazil. And the thought of going to Brazil at least lightens my mood a bit.

And obviously this blog entry was posted after my isolation confinement finally ended in Porto Alegre.

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Congratulations, it is an FSF!

It is done. The world has another Free Software Foundation.

As my personal highlight of the 5tas Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre in Rosario, Argentina, the Free Software Foundation Latin America (FSFLA) has just been officially introduced and the bylaws have been signed.

The general assembly of FSFLA elected Federico Heinz as President, Alexandre Oliva as Secretary and Beatriz Busaniche as Treasurer.

The introduction session was a very emotional moment for everyone involved, and I had the fantastic job of welcoming the FSF Latin America in the global network of FSFs, with special warm regards from Free Software Foundation Europe.

Once I get to download the pictures, I will put some online here.

But now it is time to enjoy the closing ceremony of the event, and then go to celebrate the birth of another FSF with all the people here in Rosario.

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Vienna manipulations in the press

The discussion about the obvious manipulation of the Vienna Declaration on ICT and Creativity is spreading: Heise, Germanys largest publishing house for IT and related news published an excellent piece about the Vienna Declarations under the title Microsoft, die "Vienna Conclusions" und der UN-Weltgipfel (Microsoft, the ‘Vienna Conclusions’ and the UN world summit") that explains the situation very well. I hope Heise will provide an English version of this article.

Meanwhile, new details keep popping up. Carina Felzmann, the person who made the pro-DRM comments, not only acted in dual capacity of being in the national parliament of Austria for the ÖVP and representing the lobby and pr company Cox Orange, she was also part of the post-conference drafting committee.

I guess that should not surprise me.

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Another FSF (almost) come to life

These are exciting times here in Rosario, Argentina at the 5tas Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre. Despite (or because of?) the very typical Latin American experience in getting to the event, my keynote on Sunday was a lot of fun. The best part was when I mentioned the soon-to-be-officially-founded Free Software Foundation Latin America and the audience broke out in cheers.

So the last days were spent with many discussions on the organisational and legal issues. Because finding the right approach for themselves will be an issue for the people here, I only informed about FSFE design decisions when asked specific questions — and kept working on email the rest of the day.

But still, it is exciting to witness how people are getting together to build something that everyone feels about strongly. So I thought I should share two pictures with you. This is the roundtable where people spent all morning working on the bylaws:

And this is the public review session of the legal details in the afternoon, to which all conference participants were invited, and many people did participate and give feedback:

So tomorrow is going to be the big day.

I’m almost as excited for my friends here as I was when we started the Free Software Foundation Europe.

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And the price for DRM promotion goes to…

Thanks to someone who pointed out the member list of the creativwirtschaft.at I have been able to check out where the rather uncritical view of Digital Restriction Measures (DRM) came from.

As you can see for yourself, most of the members are small or medium sized companies, or groups of companies, that have nothing to do with DRM. Then I found a rather familiar name that explained it all: IFPI.

The IFPI represents the interests of the rights-holding industry and is closely affiliated with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) — the very same organisation that is so eager to sue children in the United States.

The board of IFPI consists of representatives of EMI, Universal, Warner and drumroll Sony BMG. Yes, the very same company that has infected the computers of its customers with a self-installing, hidden rootkit that threatened the security and data-integrity of the machines it was installed on. Fortunately the EFF — along with several others — is now taking them to court.

Did I mention that this rootkit contained source code that was taken illegally from Free Software programs under the GNU General Public License (GPL)? So in order to preserve their distribution monopoly on music they’ve show themselves quite willing to ignore the copyright of software authors.

These are the very same people that Courtney Love described as the true pirates in her speech that you can find transcribed on salon.com.

It all makes more and more sense.

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The next Vienna Conclusion: So it WAS Microsoft that asked to delete Free Software

The ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) features a report in its futurezone.orf.at section about the Free Software censorship described in my blog entry "The Vienna Conclusion: Sponsorship+Politics=Influence".

They describe the situation, quote the rapporteur of the panel, Ralf Bendrath, that he was somewhat surprised to see the conclusions of the expert panel modified, and concluded that since this was the only substantial change it was very questionable.

In the comments you also find a statement by the chairman of the conference, Prof Peter Bruck who attacks the ORF for their "misleading and manipulating" report. According to him, everything is fine, because there was a blog on which this had been discussed.

When checking out the blog, you find five (!) entries, two of which are procedural. Of the remaining three, one is a statement that does not refer to the "Digital Righs & Creative Commons" panel in any way, one is a argument-free pro-DRM statement by the "Cox Orange" PR company (whose site is entirely unusable because of Flash) in the name of creativ wirtschaft austria. If anyone can tell me who they really represent, please let me know.

The last statement is by Thomas Lutz in the name of Microsoft, in which they spread the typical anti-Free Software propaganda:

p5/2. Digital Rights/Creative Commons While we largely agree on the point that more choices should be given to creators and users (and the subsequent conclusions on Creative Commons or Wikipedia) we explicitly disagree on the notion that "increasingly, revenue is generated not by selling content and digital works, as they can be freely distributed at almost no cost, but by offering services on top of them. The success of the Free Software Model is one example" and propose to delete this text part completely, as it contains only an one-sided perspective on the ICT industry. The rationale for this is, that the aim of free software is not to enable a healthy business on software but rather to make it even impossible to make any income on software as a commercial product.

 

This is so obviously stupid and nonsensical that it seems pointless to comment on it: Just another monopolist trying to uphold their monopoly by preventing freedom of markets — which is what Free Software really aims at.

More interesting: This is the proof, Free Software was removed on request of Microsoft.

Given this was a conference with hundreds of high-level participants and discussing a rather hot topic, do you wonder why are there only five entries in this blog? Do you wonder why noone tore the Microsoft propaganda apart? There is an easy answer to this: Noone on the panel ever knew this blog existed. I just learned this now.

In fact: in Vienna everyone wondered where the chapeau had come from, whether it was possible to work on it, what would be the outcome of the conference… it was all entirely intransparent to us. Any claims to a transparent and participatory process collapse when looking into them just a little bit.

Furthermore, Microsoft was not willing to make these statements in the panel. They were at the conference, but gave the "Digital Rights & Creative Commons" panel a wide berth. They did not dare to say this in public, knowing full well it would not hold up to the daylight of reason.

All the panelists were quoted in the publication with name and picture, and the text in question was presented as an outcome of our panel.

So where exactly did the manipulation and misrepresentation take place?

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The Latin American experience

This trip is taking longer than it should.

The connection was crappy as they get: Swissair to Zurich, Iberia to Madrid, and then on to Buenos Aires. Including the two 2-3 hour waiting sessions, the slightly delayed 13hrs flight to Buenos Aires and all that, the trip has probably taken 24hrs total. So when I came out of the arrival gate in Buenos Aires, I was happy to have pretty much completed my trip. Prematurely, it turned out.

First I did not think much when I did not see Enrique right away. In my experience, pickups at Latin American airports are on time in about 50% of the cases. So I sat down and waited. But knowing that this is Latin America, I also sent a brief text message to Alex, asking him to send an email to the people here that I had arrived and was waiting at the airport now.

Since there was no wireless network and the tiny 1-PC internet access point would not let me connect my laptop, I sat down and processed some old email that was stored on my machine. After doing that for almost an hour, I started to suspect that something was wrong.

Some communication with Alex turned up that indeed I should take the bus to Rosario because Enrique, who was supposed to pick me up, had already left for Rosario after picking up Alexandre Oliva at the airport. They could not have left more than half an hour before I got out of the gate and were now well underway.

Given my recent experience with the Austrian government, I am tempted to ask how much Microsoft paid to desert me at Buenos Aires airport, but that is too paranoid. In any case, I’ll beat thank them personally myself tonight.

A quick inquiry at the bus company later I knew that there was no space on the next bus, so I found myself sitting at Buenos Aires airport, no money, no idea where to go, in desperate need of a shower and with no way to reach the others. Fantastic.

Around this time Alex SMSed me the number of hotel at which Fernanda apparently waited for me — obivously in vain as there was no way for me to actually get to the hotel. I didn’t even know the hotels name, in fact. When calling the number it turned out I could not get past the receptionist because his phone appeared broken. Alex confirmed by text message that the phone indeed seemed broken, I can only assume he also tried calling him.

While trying to figure out what to do next and wondering whether I should simply take a hotel in Buenos Aires and enjoy some time here, I first took care of the immediate needs: find ATM & internet. The first part was easy. Long live Maestro, the travellers’ friend!

The second part was a little more tricky. The internet cafes were deadly afraid of letting me connect my laptop (see above), and the only wireless lan was in the boarding area… so I would have needed a boarding pass.

After some studying of the airport architecture I finally found a place where my laptop did pick up on the wireless network. Only to find out that the only way to connect to the network was by voucher — and vouchers were only sold in the boarding area. The person setting up that network should be put in a dark, isolated room with his network as the only connection to the outside world — and no vouchers, obviously.

Either way: I decided that there was no point to pursue the internet thing further for now. Back to the busses. After 10 minutes of hope it turned out that the next bus at 12:30 was also completely full, which is around the time that Federico called me. So we decided I should take a taxi to downtown Buenos Aires where the large bus hub is located.

Arriving there around 13:20, I saw one bus leaving for Rosario at 13:30. With some improvised communication and running up and down some stairs — did I forget to mention I am travelling with a 25kg large metal Rimova suitcase? — I finally managed to get myself a ticket and grab the next bus at 13:30.

When Federico called again, I gave the bus driver my mobile phone so the two could figure out I was indeed on the right bus (relief on my side) and I learned that my ETA was 17:30. Just in time for my keynote at 19:00 tonight.

So as I am typing this I am sitting all the way in front on the upper deck of that very same bus, stopping at every lamppost along the way, but actually enjoying the experience. In moments like these I really do like my job. And if you have never been to Latin America, this little story may have given you an idea of the authentic experience.

Either way, I’ll finish preparing for my keynote now and hope to put this online before giving it tonight. Also they just started the movie: Double Jeopardy. Hm. It is subtitled, I might use it to learn a little Spanish.

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Living in the airport

Sometimes I can really relate to the movie "Terminal" with Tom Hanks. It is now 16hrs after I touched down in Hamburg, coming back from the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis. Guess where I am sitting right now. Yup. Hamburg Airport for a change.

The past hours were filled with unpacking all my stuff from Tunis, doing the past-travel paperwork, doing some official paperwork/signing for Carlo Piana, our lawyer in the Microsoft vs European Union antitrust case, doing laundry, picking up one batch and depositing another at the dry-cleaner, replying to some email, packing my large monster suitcase and getting back to the airport. Oh, and catching a little bit of sleep in the middle of all that, of course.

Conference tourists call this back-to-back conferencing, and it is not exactly pleasant. In this case it is hard to avoid, however, because tomorrow I have my keynote at the 5tas Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre in Rosario, Argentina.

The prospect of seeing my friends in Latin America again lets me look at the long flight with a peaceful mind however. Some of them, like Enrique Chaparro, I haven’t seen in over a year and am looking forward to seeing them again.

Also, I am very excited about being able to witness the first general assembly of the Free Software Foundation Latin America. This is a great and very happy occasion.

It appears that my flight is starting to board now, so I better get going. Argentina, here I come.

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Life after WSIS?

It is probably too early to summarise everything that took place in and around the WSIS, in particular its statements and activities. Thinking about a first summary, there are a couple of things that come to my mind, though.

Firstly, this summit was definitely at least in part a human rights summit. The Civil Society plenary had to deal with numerous protests of Tunisian GONGOs (see "Leaving Tunis") that complained bitterly about the planned Citizens Summit, which was essentially shut down by the Tunisian government. Their main argument was that since Tunisia was a place of law, not everyone could do as they please and do strange things like meet and talk. Interesting perspective.

Also, the European Union member states and European Commission apparently had to pull some strings to bring the Human Rights in China (HRIC) representatives into the WSIS, because China tried to block this to the very last minute. In a meeting organised by the European Commission with Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner on the Information Society, Sharon Hom, Executive Director of HRIC, delivered a very energetic and powerful account of how human rights are systematically violated in China and how Northern companies are willfully supporting that policy. In the discussion that followed she was then attacked harshly by the Tunisian GONGOs again — and apparently some employees of the companies Ms Hom criticised.

But while human rights are fundamental, they were not the only issue. Of all the issues, Internet Governance certainly got most attention by the media and participants; even if that was in many cases owed to misconceptions about the DNS system as well as naive approaches at regulating spam and cybercrime.

With the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the United Nations now created a forum in which governments, industry and non-governmental organisations shall come together to discuss regulations on spam, cybercrime and similar issues. As all these inherit a significant risk of de-facto mandating proprietary software and establishing anything from systematic imbalances to outright monopolies, FSFE probably has no choice but to enter into that forum and make sure that digital freedom and Free Software are a part of the considerations.

As far as Free Software was concerned, the summit was not exclusively joyful, either. If there were interesting statements and initiatives, they happened in the side-events of Civil Society, or were local initiatives. The Free Software censorship by the Austrian government was a good example of the difficulties we encounter in the higher levels. We were able to keep the door open for Free Software and educate some representatives about it. But the WSIS is not over, now it will enter the followup and implementation phase. So we will need to work that these activities choose, or at least not exclude, Free Software.

With all these things going on we will need to intensify our UN efforts. Unfortunately, the large companies have their own agendas and prefer to go to these conferences themselves or not contribute at all, and the smaller ones don’t have a direct benefit and often can’t afford it. The burden of sustaining these activities therefore rests mainly with the Fellowship: So I hope many more people will join and thus allow us to continue this work.

To my regret, I was unable to find the 100 dollar laptop, although I went looking for it. But at least I discovered the very cool SchoolNet Nambibia project. Also, the WIPO reform panel was fun.

Also, it was good to see all the people again with whom I have been working for the past years throughout the World Summit. Unfortunately for most of them I did not get to talk half as much as I would have wanted, and some I knew to be there I did not see, at all.

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Spammed by Kofi Annan?

Being on dozens of mailing lists with several email addresses that have been in use since the mid-90s and a column that has been translated in up to 10 languages — most of which I do not speak, some of which I can’t even read, like Korean, Japanese or Chinese — that has been published in magazines and web sites around the world, I can definitely compete in the global "who gets the most Spam?" olympics.

And sometimes that can be fun in a weird sort of way.

Just having a stop-over in Milano, Italy on my trip back from the United Nations World Summit (WSIS) in Tunis, my "biological spam filter" hesitated for a microsecond to delete the following mail "by" Kofi Annan with the subject "Business partner needed."

Not only is this strangely funny because these kinds of Spam mails usually are referred to as "Nigerian Scam," and although Kofi Annan is not from Nigeria, he most certainly is African (Ghana, AFAIK), it also is interesting in a "how low can you possibly sink" kind of way.

Seriously: Who would fall for such a scam? And who would then sink low enough to actually participate in it? Stupid and immoral seem to lie close together if this one is actually successful.

I KOFI ANNAN, secretary-general of the united nations, would like to ask your partnership in reprofilling funds over $250m in excess ,the funds would be coming via a string of selected banks in Europe and Asia. The funds in question were generated by me during the oil for food program in Iraq. I have been getting scandals/ controversy in this regards, you can read more on the links below- http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/apr2005/anna-a05.shtml http://www.canadafreepress.com/2003/main042803.htm You would be paid 5% as your management fee. please do not write back directly to me via my official email address as all further correspondence should be sent to my private mail box. As soon as you indicate your interest i will give further details, remember to treat this mail and transaction as strictly confidential. I will wait to get your urgent correspondence via my private mail box- KOFI ANNAN, SECRETARY- GENERAL kofiannan005@walla.com www.un.org 
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