Category Archives: English

FOSDEM 2012, panel on Application stores

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For the 3rd year in a row, I’m going to FOSDEM, the most awaited European Free Software event that takes place every year at the Université Libre of Brussels (how appropriate: the free university in the land of (not free) beer!)

This year though, I will not only attend and chat at the booth, I will also discuss the topic of application stores in the Legal DevRoom, Saturday afternoon, with Giovanni Battista Gallus, Bradley M. Kuhn, and Richard Fontana. Here’s the abstract:

So-called “app stores” are becoming a popular means of distributing software, particularly for mobile devices. However, the rise of app stores has been accompanied by tensions with free software/open source legal norms. Companies controlling official app distribution channels for their platforms typically place restrictive terms on both users and developers in ways that may be difficult or impossible to harmonize with requirements and expectations around FLOSS licensing. Moreover, there is a perception that noncompliance with FLOSS licenses is prevalent in app store distribution. This panel will explore some of the problems arising out of the intersection between app stores and FLOSS, under EU as well as US law, and will discuss possible solutions.

So if you’re interested, come and join us at 17.30 in room AW1.125!

Android 4.0 at the Chaos Communication Congress

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Coming at the CCC, I thought I should take some extra caution. One of the things I did was to add a lock-screen password on Android 4.0 (that I updated from manually about a week ago). Yesterday morning, I figured this was mostly annoying. So I decided to remove it and I kept the simple “slide” lock icon.

Then this night, around 3 or 4 a.m. I wanted to check my emails at the #28C3 party, there was a sheet of paper with the name of a wifi network and a password. I thought, well, that’s great. How stupid I was.

I connected to this network and did some emails for about 20 minutes. As the night goes on, the phone went out of battery. When I got home and plugged the phone to restart it something unexpected happened. The phone was displaying the lock screen, asking for a password; not the SIM code.

I don’t have the password. The former password I use doesn’t work. And there aren’t any options available to me to fix it (apparently, former versions used to suggest to reset the password with an email to the Google account). I am not root on this phone, it’s not in debug mode, etc.

Basically, I got locked out of my own phone. It looks like I just got owned.
Bug report: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=23697

Edit: Fixed with fastboot

root@synclavier:/home/hugo/Tech/android/android-sdk-linux/tools# ./fastboot-linux-i386 devices
31320E7E6C1F00EC	fastboot
root@synclavier:/home/hugo/Tech/android/android-sdk-linux/tools# ./fastboot-linux-i386 oem unlock
... OKAY

It has erased everything on the phone, but at least I can use it back.

Add Duck Duck Go as a search engine in Gnome Shell

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Take one of the xml for DuckDuckGo in the OpenSearch standard, here’s mine:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<ShortName>DuckDuckGo</ShortName>
<Description>Encrypted Duck Duck Go with encrypted Google Suggest</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon">https://duckduckgo.com/favicon.ico</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="https://duckduckgo.com/?q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" template="https://encrypted.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url rel="suggestions" type="application/x-suggestions+xml" template="https://encrypted.google.com/complete/search?q={searchTerms}&client=ie8&mw={ie:maxWidth}&sh={ie:sectionHeight}&rh={ie:rowHeight}&inputencoding={inputEncoding}&outputencoding={outputEncoding}"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

and save as /usr/share/gnome-shell/search_providers/duckduckgo.xml for instance on Debian Wheezy. Now, refresh Gnome Shell (by doing alt+f2, ‘r’) and whenever you search for someting in the Shell’s Activity overview, you have the possibility to search the Web with DuckDuckGo.

ACTA: this is the kind of nonsense we’re dealing with.

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The ACTA has thrown a lot of nonsense at us, citizens, for the last four years now. Not only the policies the agreement wants to impose are absurd from economic, social and cultural standpoints (if you’re aiming at any kind of progress or well-being); but also the whole process that we’ve been trying to deal with is made of such non-sense that it’s hard to make the citizens’ voice heard (and even less to make the citizen’s voice count — you know: free speech and democracy).

Lately, the European Parliament legal service has refused to provide a public analysis on ACTA, although it was aksed to do so by the European Parliament (people we elected to represent us at the EU level). The reason?

“Important trading partners of the EU, such as the United States, Canada, Japan, Korea and Switzerland are contracting parties to the ACTA agreement. Disclosure of the parts of the legal opinion under consideration dealing with questions 1, 2 and 3 would seriously interfere with the complex ratification procedures of the ACTA agreement and the EU’s relations with the other contracting parties, as it might prejudice the ratification procedures by these countries.”

(source, the excellent Ante on FFII ACTA’s blog)

So, let’s sum up.

The legal service won’t publish their analysis because it might influence the ratification process of other parties to the agreement; that means other than the EU.

So the EU Parliament will vote on ratification on a treaty without public analysis, because such an analysis would have influenced the US. Brilliant, if not sad.

For a quick analysis on how ACTA endangers Free Software growth, please read ACTA: threats to Free Software. Your comments on that are strongly welcome.