Comments ... in the pages linked below.
Written in a survey [1] about attitudes towards free software [2].
it isn't immoral (moral = what's the current stance of mainstream society), but it is unethical when solidarity and self-determination are part of your ethical axioms.
In a society where people are used to being forbidden to give bread to a starving child, giving bread you'd otherwise throw away to that child instead could well be immoral.
So only software which allows you to act ethically is ethical - and that's free software. Even better is free software under strong copyleft licenses like the GPL [3], because that protects our right to act ethically for any future versions of the software.
No.
Legitimate doesn't mean "not contrary to existing law". Even in countries where the police is allowed to torture people, torture is illegitimate. At least that's my understanding. It means that something is wrong and should be forbidden.
I believe that people have the right to make unfree software (people also have the right to do tv-shows like "popstars"). I don't think anyone should use that software, though.
I can't force people to adher to my code of ethics without acting against my ethics myself. But I can try to convince them that my understanding of ethics is right.
In many cases yes. But it depends on the case.
If I had to develop unfree software to earn enough to live a more or less comforting life, I'd likely choose to do so. That's why I fight now, so I can earn money ethically later on. Or at least enable my children to do so (more detailed in german [4]).
-> sent to avpolicy@ec.europa.eu [5], markt-d1@ec.europa.eu [6] in reply to "Creative Content in a European Digital Single Market: Challenges for the Future" [7] as published by the european commission.
Thanks to Glynmoody [8] for getting the word out!
Dear European Commission,
Summary: The goal of copyright is to get more money to more authors and more cultural works to more citizens. Due to the changes the free copying of the internet brings, additional protection doesn't help achieve that goal.
The proposal paper goes into many technical details, but loses the focus on the benefit of copyright to the citizens - and what kind of copyright protection is useful today.
Due to this, many of the measures (especially DRM) have to be reevaluated, if they really benefit our society and cultural development, or only try to cement a status which doesn't benefit the citizens in the light of the changes to technology and consumption of cultural works.
Please keep in mind that copyright is no inherent right. Instead it's a state given information monopoly with a simple goal: Increase the quality and quantity of creative works available to everyone.
As such, copyright law grants authors (copyright holders) the right to control who may be in possession of their works, because being able to make money with ones creations helps creating more and higher quality works.
Also it grants middlemen the right to make money from copies by establishing treaties with authors. These middlemen are useful, as long as they offer a major contribution in getting the works to the public and getting money to the author.
And it grants fair use rights to all citizens, which helps spreading the works and enabling more people to enjoy our culture the way they enjoy it most. These fair use rights are being accompanied by flat payments which are given directly to the authors, so creators of creative works money from an additional pool whose size is related to the amount of cultural works people share.
Currently the best balance between these different kinds of rights (copyright of the creator, use rights of the middlemen and fair use rights of the citizens) is changing due to almost costfree copying of digital content.
Now the middlemen often no longer serve as waybuilders between authors and citizens, but as gatekeepers who lock out citizens from our culture. Also they often take a high percentage of the money citizens pay for cultural works, even though their costs for spreading works (and finding good works) were reduced greatly. When a musician gets a few tens of a Euro from each sale of a 15 Euro CD, it's quite clear that the middlemen use up money which then doesn't help the authors create more cultural works.
Traditional (expensive) ways of spreading content are becoming unnecessary by the faster ways of spreading content digitally. But the middlemen control the flow of content from author to citizens (partly by copyright law), and they use their control to draw a major share from the money citizens want to give the author of the works they enjoy.
More: They often also hinder citizens from telling others about the works they like. In the digital world, people can instantly send music they enjoy to their friends, and if their friends like it, they can buy it - or send it onward to other people who might like it more. And once someone gets something she/he enjoys very much, she/he most times wants to give the author money, so the author can create more works she/he enjoys.
By using "illegal downloads", people learn about new works and decide whether they are worth paying money - and recent studies show that those who use p2p networks to download music illegally are also the ones who buy the most music.
Because of this, I think that the paper focusses too much on the "protection of the copyrightholders" and too little on the question, how laws can help making as many cultural goods available to every citizen as possible. So I want to offer some thoughts:
To achieve that goal, copyright always has to strike a balance between different objectives:
1) Authors need money to be able to work full time. So they want as much money as possible for their works. Some kinds of works take far longer to create, but have great cultural value (for example science books and investigative journalism), so authors who spend very much time on research (or similar) need a way to earn enough from their work, even though they have a smaller quantitative output.
2) Citizens want as much culture they enjoy as possible for the money they have available.
3) Authors and citizens need to find each other, so the citizens can find works they enjoy.
4) Cultural works have to be brought from the authors to the citizens and money has to be brought from citizens to authors of works they enjoy (with as little loss as possible). "Bringing works to the citizens" can include polishing the work, so the citizens can enjoy the works more. A book with 10 errors on each page is very hard to enjoy for most people, as is one with glaring errors in the plot. And a CD without coverimage will find far fewer listeners, regardless of the quality of the music.
In earlier times, the balance which brought citizens the highest amount of cultural works they enjoy was to have big middlemen who were able to shoulder the high cost for printing books, recording tapes, pressing CDs and carrying these from country to country (as well as a part of the risk of promoting unknown authors).
Today the cost for spreading cultural works is almost zero (more exactly: We already pay it by paying for our broadband connections) and finding an author I enjoy is easier with a search engine or using resources written by online communities for free, so the best balance is shifted. Due to this, having stronger fair use rights (so people can more easily pass on works and turn others into paying fans of an author) could be a far more efficient way to bring cultural works to everyone while paying the authors.
And stronger protection of "rightholders" (which today more often serve as gateeepers than waybuilders) could backfire quite badly and harm the cultural development of Europe (even today musicians complain, that they only get a very minor share of the money people pay for their works).
And since the cost of spreading a cultural work to people is almost zero (with technologies developed in filesharing communities, even the bandwidth cost drops to almost zero, since every participant contributes some bandwidth for spreading the work), so there is no real reason, why someone who has only 15€ to spare each month should enjoy far fewer cultural works than someone who earns 10.000€ a month.
In earlier times, if a poor person spent 15€ on a book, more than 10€ were needed to pay for producing the book. That was a natural restriction on the number of works he could enjoy. 5€ went to the author he liked best (if the author was very lucky), because he could only pay for at most one book. He couldn't afford to read works from other authors.
Today that same person could read 15 books and pay 5€ to the 3 authors she/he likes best, and the author of the first book would gain just as much money, two others would get money (who wouldn't have gotten money otherwise), and the remaining 12 authors wouldn't lose anything compared to the high-production-cost alternative.
And this clearly shows a glaring error in ever increasing the "protection" of monopolies: Someone who has 15€ to spend on cultural works doesn't get more money to spend if he can't read works for free. So the main question is, how to get the people to give the money they have available to the authors while giving them as much access to cultural works as possible. And since for example in germany about 50% of the citizens have too little money to pay any relevant amount of taxes, this thought is valid for about 50% of the people in germany.
Adapting copyright laws to the current times has to take into account how copyright laws benefit the society. Copyright monopoly rights are being granted by the state (since we're living in a democracy that means: by all citizens) to individuals for the benefit of all citizens. So the goal of any copyright change should be to benefit all citizens.
It's the interest of society, that as many people as possible can enjoy as many cultural works as possible.
Criminalizing most citizens doesn't come close to that goal. And restricting what people can do with works they purchased (DRM), doesn't achieve that, either. Both only protect the middlemen, but neither the authors (or their income from which DRM is effectively financed), nor the citizens. DRM makes spreading cultural works more expensive, so it harms authors as well as citizens. It adds a needless control structure which sucks away money that should go to the authors.
And people like Howard Taylor (the creator of the free webcomic http://schlockmercenary.com [9]) and all the free software programmers out there who make a living with their programming show that many citizens today are mature enough to pay for the things they enjoy, even though there is no gatekeeper forcing them to.
So please leave the "we need more protection" track. What we need is more money for more authors and more cultural works for citizens.
Cementing the current power-structures in creative business despite the changing technological environment doesn't achieve that.
When considering, how a single-market (a market accessible to everyone in the same way) affects the creation and spreading of creative works, the focus should instead be on comparing the different possible approaches how to strengthen the creation and spreading of cultural works and to see which balance between these ways is most efficient. This requires rethinking the support which copyright law gives to the different revenue sources of authors (flat payments on copying devices, income from direct sales, money from middlemen, money from "additional value products" like signed copies, direct donations by fans so they keep producing, and many more) and as such adjusting the balance between state-granted monopoly rights for authors, state granted monopoly exploitation rights for middlemen and fair use rights of citizens to make it fit for the current technological and social situation.
There's one more interesting fact on that topic I want to spotlight: The german group for spreading the money from flat payments on printers and photocopies "VG-Wort"1 [10] now pays Webloggers with money from flat payments, because they acknowledge, that these create a considerable share of currently consumed cultural works. Since most webloggers work without direct payments, this is a major change for the commercial viability of creating works which are freely available to everyone with an internet connection, regardless of the financial situation.
At the same time, projects like Creative Commons2 [11] show, that for a major share of authors of creative works it is most important that noone can misrepresent their content as the creation of someone else, while "forbidding people to pass on the work without making money from it" isn't very interesting (and isn't even useful financially for lesser known authors, because it stops people from spreading the word about the author).
So the first question to be answered is not "how can we ensure that the copyright protection holds in the light of current technology", but "which balance of monopoly protection, fair use rights and direct state-support of authors (like the sponsoring of theaters in germany) is most efficient in achieving the goal to enable as many citizens as possible to have access to as many cultural works as possible in the changed technological environment". Detailed questions about monopoly protection schemes and such (and which of them benefit our society today) only make sense once this basic question has been answered for the current situation.
And "Copyright is the basis for creativity" isn't an answer to that question, because it a) is clearly wrong. People created at all times, while copyright law is only a few hundred years old, and b) doesn't answer, how copyright law benefits European citizens - and how that benefit changes with digitization where every act of viewing is in fact a copy.
Best wishes, Arne Babenhauserheide
PS: Some additional notes:
on differing content and goals: The content of the article shows a nice overview of problems of the current licensing system between companies, while the 'Strategy for "Creative Content Online"' talks of goals (DRM, filesharing prevention) which aren't more than brushed by the content.
on the focus of the paper: Important topics like user/created content are only named but missing the simple point, that most of these works are simply illegal today. Companies can clear their licensing with each other - they don't necessarily need new rights for that. But most citizens can't. They can't just sit together and decide to only buy media licensed under specific terms, because the companies can almost completely control the supply. Ordinary citizens are the ones who need clearer laws. And in a democracy, they are the ones for whom laws should be made.
on "financial incentives for creatives": As psychological studies show [12], creativity is best fostered by giving creatives enough money to live a comforting live, but the hunt for as much money as possible can stifle creativity instead of strengthening it. So strengthening a single-minded market-driven revenue model for a state-given monopoly doesn't help create creative works of higher quality.
on the justification of copyright itself: You can also find related thoughts about the reasons for having certain kinds of copyright (in german) at http://draketo.de/licht/politik/geistiges-eigentum-sinn-des-urheberrecht... [13]
on DRM systems: DRM-systems establish a control inside peoples computers which isn't in turn legitimated and controlled by the state. As such it takes the role of the police without being authorized by the state (which in turn is being authorized by the citizens). To force citizens to accept this additional foreign-control on their actions, middlemen abuse the monopolies granted by copyright law, because these give them the right to establish new rules on how their content may be consumed. That way the DRM restrictions are being established with powers granted by the state, though they aren't legitimated by democratic processes. They even undermine fair use rights. Also any DRM system breaks the premise, that people are free to act, as long as they are willing to face the legal consequences. While I am free to ignore speed limits when I'm on the way to the hospital because my daughter is bleeding to death on the backseat, but might lose my drivers license afterwards (what's a drivers license compared to the death of a daughter?), a DRM system would keep me from taking that decision and would force me to let my daughter die, because my car simply wouldn't drive faster than allowed. That way DRM systems break the premise of the responsible citizen, but since any democracy requires responsible citizens as its basic premise, this leads our whole legal system ad absurdum. So DRM shouldn't be supported by laws. Also fair use laws need to be protected against DRM restrictions. These restrictions are forced on people by using the monopoly granted by copyright law, and they keep people from exercising their fair use rights, granted by the same copyright laws.
on "culture industry": A culture industry isn't useful for society by definition. It is only useful, if it helps getting more and more enjoyable cultural works to everyone (or at least the vast majority of citizens - including those who earn only very little money). Only in that case is it warranted to give it any additional legal support.
on "market as regulator": Using the "market" to regulate the behavior of the middlemen with the power of the consumers doesn't work, because copyrighted works are monopolies by law and the market only works without monopolies. Creative works can't directly compete against each other, because people have no way of getting an equivalent alternative since every creative work is unique.
on forcing people to pay: Today almost noone is forced to pay for any digital goods, because almost everything is available for unpaid download somehow (sometimes illegally). That people still pay for the creative works they enjoy shows clearly, that most people want to pay authors for the goods they enjoy. That's something which is deeply engrained in our psyche: If someone gives us something, we want to give something back. Due to these two effects, it's quite clear that building bigger and bigger restrictions into legally bought content only harms the people who want to give the authors money. It would be far more useful to establish a system which enables people to securely and effortlessly give a few Euro to someone else - or even just a few cents. A "one click donation" which every EU citizen could use, could give authors of creative works far more support than any "harmonization of restriction management systems".
on me: I am a stakeholder, as I am at the same time a music and book customer, a hobby free software programmer and a hobby writer who publishes under free licenses (on http://draketo.de [14] and http://1w6.org [15] ). I learned about the music genre I enjoy the most (Filk) when I downloaded some tracks in a filesharing network many years ago and I now own more CDs of that genre than of any other genre - and every year I add three or four CDs to my collection. If there had been any effective fair-use-prevention-measure in place back then, I still wouldn't know my favorite kind of music and I still wouldn't buy more than one CD every two years or so.
Comment to LimeWire ID theft case [16].
That means, people who spread child porn were caught because they used public p2p networks (where law enforcement can find them), and instead of thanking LimeWire that they were able to catch a criminal because he was lured in the open (instead of selling the material invisible via the postal service), politicians blame LimeWire for the existence of the material which had existed in the dark long before Gnutella made sharing easy and public.
These people don't become criminals because of LimeWire.
But they get caught because they use it and don't realize that everyone can find what they share and track them down - including the cops.
As soon as the crime is bad enough that the cops inquire at a court to get the data of the criminal internet user, that user can easily be tracked down. It's far less effort than stopping someone from sending illegal material via the postal service.
So LimeWire and public p2p help the cops.
That ID theft case is even weaker. It is as if we'd ban cars because some people forget to lock them - or ban wallets because some people lose them (including their ID). The main difference is that you have to actively disable security to lose your ID via LimeWire while your wallet just slips out.
Somehow I smell other motivations than stopping crimes here...
-> A comment on The Importance of Managing Your Online Reputation [17].
I read your article, and I found the points you make very interesting, though not only in a positive way.
You tackle the “we have a network others can see” from the active side: “How can I make sure my employer likes what he sees?”.
But there's also the other side: We use the web for communicating with people, and this communication is being pulled into the open, and everything we do online is being instrumentalized to draw information about us.
This also means that no communication over a public channel can be done for the sake of the communication itself, and so the channel becomes more and more useless for any creative communication (as opposed to just exchanging preconceived and unchanging ideas).
This might sound hard, but it stems from two concepts:
When we want to act creatively, we are most efficient, when we do it for the sake of the activity itself. -> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html [12]
When people know that they are being watched, they act differently (sadly I have no link on this).
Another issue is an adaption of the “unclear prophecy” problem: If people know that their online activity is being measured, they will change their behaviour to please their intended future employer, and so a measurement doesn't give you estimations about the person which are relevant to the job. Instead it only measures one parameter: “How good are you at conscious social network building?”
And for many jobs that skill is almost irrelevant.
So using public communication for calculating a score of some kind runs into a paradox as soon as people know that they are screened, and it harms normal communication. Due to that I hope, that more and more people will realize that unscreenable but efficient communication is important.
For example a network similar to identi.ca / twitter could be built on jabber with decentral buddy-lists, which can't easily be read out as massively as twitter, and the really paranoid could completely switch over to freenet as their news communication provider: http://freenetproject.org [18]
A reply to a comment on slashdot named Can we fight the trend? [19]:
There was a trend to having only proprietary software (by former free software being enslaved in the job contracts its creators took) and to having the hacker community die out.
That trend was reversed by GNU with the invention of the GPL and the GNU System.
And today millions of people use free software and we have organizations like the EFF and FSF who work for a free software society.
- That huge success story in about 4 minutes: infinite-hands.draketo.de [20]
More people than ever before use free software, and it becomes an integral part of out society as more and more government offices (e.g. in germany: Munich) and companies adopt it.
Today we have a trend to having only nonfree culture (by the laws being turned upside down and politicians being bought) and members of the free speech community to give up.
What I learn from history is:
That trend can be reversed, too, and our society might become a free culture society, just like it slowly becomes a free software society, even though most people will only realize it in hindsight.
"Do you still remember the times, when every office had Windows in it?"
"Only barely, but do you still remember the times, when we feared lawsuits when we accessed the predecessors of the culture pool?"
"Sure! Those were the times. Now, let's get writing again. Don't want to let our fans wait for the next storyarch, do we?"
The ones who profit from unfree media will give a fight this time, though.
And that they choose to go semi-criminal shows, that different from the proprietary software vendors back when GNU was invented, the unfree media companies are already losing, and they know it.
a comment to: Embattled ACTA Negotiations Next Week In Geneva; US Sees Signing This Year [21]:
I didn't yet manage to get really safe information on what ACTA actually does (that's a marker for 'this is dangerous' in itself), but what I see on wikileaks sounds horrible:
"The deal would create a international regulator that could turn border guards and other public security personnel into copyright police. The security officials would be charged with checking laptops, iPods and even cellular phones for content that "infringes" on copyright laws, such as ripped CDs and movies."
- http://wikileaks.org/wiki/ACTA_trade_agreement_negotiation_lacks_transpa... [22]
'Check my laptops content'???
What about my electronic diary, then?
Without a clear judges sentence, noone is allowed to look at my private files, and should they remove that restriction, they can as well remove all privacy.
And it gets worse:
"The guards would also be responsible for determining what is infringing content and what is not."
and worse:
"Mr. Fewer and Mr. Geist said, once Canada signs the new trade agreement it will be next to impossible to back out of it.
In a situation similar to what happened in the Softwood Lumber trade dispute, Canadians could face hefty penalties if it does not comply with ACTA after the agreement has been completed."
Ouch!
That doesn't sound like a treaty between nations, but more like some big players conspiring to create law which binds all others, and that clearly is antidemocratic.
So a big question looms: What can we do against ACTA?
Ways to act I found:
ArneBab:
2016: Hackers can now steal the #slowblood scanning biometric data from Android phones.colortext:
Today advertisers answered a tweet with a link to a story about the possibility to steal fingerprints remotely [25] from Android phones with a blatant advertisement for their “superior” “proprietary” technology. When I ridiculed their advertisement, they threatened me. Let’s call them colortext and their brand #slowblood.12
I was annoyed at the ad, but I decided to answer with a smile:
2016: Hackers can now steal the #slowblood scanning biometric data from Android phones.
They answered
(Tech) cannot be compromised or recreated unlike fingerprints.
And that’s quite a claim, so it just called for a counter:
2017: CCC hackers log into Merkelphone with a 30€ bioprint of remotely copied #slowblood data.3
and added
you get snide remarks for your blatant self-advertisement of proprietary tech.
…and for “can’t be compromised” ← that is a HUGE claim.
to which they first answered with a twinkle
…-letting people know there’s a superior alternative ;)
but after I replied
or was this an offer to send the hackers your security system so they can test it?
…(in that case I would take back my criticism)
they went on to threaten me:
You are tweeting lies and using our trademark without consent.
I felt a sudden pang of fear. Still I answered
[…] are you threatening me for using the same hashtag as you?
2018: #slowblood developers at colortext realize that 2016 and 2017 were in the future back in 2015
But despite the irony in the text my heart was thumping hard. That threat is a serious one. I reported it to twitter:
A few minutes later their tweets were gone — but I had expected that and taken screenshots. I’m writing about it, because I consider their actions unacceptable behavior - and because my heartbeat isn’t completely back to normal yet. Their harassment works, so they have to be called out for it.
Note: Different from the rest of my page this image is not GPL licensed because it contains text from them as proof of their actions. Their individual lines do not constituate a creative effort, but the combined text might reach the threshold of intentional creative [inappropriate word omitted].
In notification view which includes a few additional tweets (dear twitter, this is a bug!):
I will not name them here because they later threatened me with a trademark violation. The name is in the pictures because I’m pretty sure that if they use their brand as hashtag, the hashtag is fair game on twitter. In this text I’ll instead use the names colortext for the company and and #slowblood for the tech. ↩
I don’t have anything against their tech. It might be brilliant and provide security for years to come, or it might just be another fad. Their way to advertise it as the solution to all the security problems is what irks me. It’s still a marker which is tied to your body, so you cannot change it in case it is copied. As such, its security properties are questionable: If it is copied once, you as person cannot use the method again until there are new sensors which cannot be fooled by copies of data from the old sensors. For its security properties you have to rely on constant improvements in the sensors -- but this offers no advantage over copied fingerprints from the android. The only advantage I can see is that you can’t steal these prints in real-life resolution by handing someone a glass water. You might now think that they actually had a point, but sadly that security property is completely irrelevant to the article on which the advertisers replied, because the article showed that fingerprints where copied in the resolution measured by the sensor. There would be no advantage at all from switching from fingerprint to #slowblood, so what they did is just bad advertising -- and sending out threats when they were called out for their bad style. ↩
They did not spot the implication in here that the german chancellor would use their tech in 2017. I intentionally gave them that lead to turn this around in a fun way but they seem to have missed it. ↩
There was a talk of Ian Rogers from Yahoo! who explained how labels did a hell of many horrible missteps in fighting p2p and in trying to push DRM, how Yahoo now offers a free music service, and how music software terribly lags behind the music scene. http://www.netribution.co.uk/2/content/view/1317/182/ [33]
But....
The context he talks about already exists. Just have a look at Amarok:
- Context: http://amarok.kde.org/d/en/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=1375 [34]
- Wikipedia: http://amarok.kde.org/d/en/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=1381 [35]
- Lyrics sites: http://amarok.kde.org/d/en/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=1378 [36]
- and an integrated store where you don't have to buy to listen:
And all that in a free software program, so noone dictates any rules upon you.
I don't know about you, but I definitely get excited by it!
I just watched the short film Ambition [37] from ESA, and I still have tears in my eyes.
The film is awesome. In few spots it could have profited from a tighter editing of the text (I lost suspension of disbelief twice), but overall the story is great - and what an ending!
In the making of [38], the simulation artist of the film Lukasz Sobisz said
“shooting myself in the foot a bit, I’m very surprised you need something like this at all now. Mankind sends a probe into space to catch a comet and land on it. And we need a great director, film and actors to convince people this is interesting.”
and I disagree with that notion: If you’re paid by the public, you should communicate your work so people can relate to it. The film succeeded spectacularly.
It is not just about interest. I had that before. It is about touching peoples hearts. A dry description alone cannot do this. But together, an idealistic project and art can reach something deep inside, inaccessible for everyday interaction. This is where magic happens.
I wish there were a german dubbed version to show my kids.
It’s been a long time since I watched something and all of a sudden felt tears rolling down my cheek. To the folks at ESA, the film crew, the editing team and the artists: Thank you.
Ambition The Film: This is where magic happens → http://t.co/l4rlq20y0B [39] —Thank you @ESA [40], @PlatigeImage [41], @LordMockingbird [42] and @AisFranciosi [43]
— A. Babenhauserheide (@ArneBab) October 25, 2014 [44]@Scirens [45] @esa [40] It’s been a long time since I watched something and all of a sudden felt tears rolling down my cheek. Thank you.
— A. Babenhauserheide (@ArneBab) October 25, 2014 [46]PS: EuGH just ruled that embedding does not affect copyright [47]. Thanks to this decision I am allowed to share the film with you.
An answer to a reddit-comment [48] by tedemang [49] to the article 1540 Anonymous vs. TrapWire: "We must, at all costs, shut this system down and render it useless" [50].
Do you think, joining anonymous really helps there? That’s fleeting power, but I don’t see alternative structures being set up. This just exposes all those who want to support the cause. In front of cameras, connected to a surveillance system which records every action…
On the short term to keep secure digital communication, use freenet over your existing internet connection. If possible in darknet-mode, connecting only to your friends → freesocial.draketo.de [51]
On the mid-term get a flourishing local community in your neighborhood, ideally with community operated internet like a meshnet - and get someone from your community elected as mayor → /r/darknetplan [52]
And make sure you all have access to alternative media sources. Maybe provide printed copies of good blog posts to your local baker.
On the somewhat longer term, fix the democratic system, so the rich ones cannot completely rig the votes by deciding whom they give their money, so he can run for election.
On the long term, fix the economic system, so we don’t automatically get that huge imbalance in power, once the system runs without major disruption for more than 20-30 years.
Remember that what you are going up against is the very instrument the oppressive elements of our state want to use to oppress us. That instrument will monitor you, and they will try to use that data to oppress you - and to cast you in a bad light, so they can convince your neighbors that they need more cameras against those vandalizing youths (without telling them that those youths are the same ones who come over for coffee during the next summer-festival).
Australia gets mandatory data retention — with unchecked access by roughly any local or federal police agency and “Any other agency the Attorney General publicly declares”. (So much for separation of powers)
And they can use that in court.
→ » Australia: Now is the time to go dark [53] « ←
Dear Australians: This is what we have been talking about the past 10 years. The tech for confidential communication might still be cumbersome to use, but you now need it.
If you want to use Freenet [18] for that, I’ll gladly help you set it up. Find me and other volunteers in the Freenet support chat [54].
→ » Freenet support chat [54] « ←
If you don’t get an answer right away, just keep the browser window open: we will see your question when we read our backlogs. If you’re still in the channel when we enter, we can answer you.
-> A reply to bashing [55] against Defective By Design [56].
I was a rabid MacUser 5 years ago.
Then I learned about DRM, TPM and privacy. And I left Apple because they put in TPM chips into developer machines.
Today I'm a happy GNU/Linux user and I contribute from time to time to Gentoo, KDE and Mercurial.
(my way from Apple to GNU/Linux:
- http://bah.draketo.de/ [57] (Broken Apple Heart in German)
- http://draketo.de/english/songs/light/broken-apple-heart [58] (in english)
)
So DBD isn't only talking to the converted. Without actions like theirs, I wouldn't be a free software user today.
They just don't reach every average Joe with a single campaign. But who could? With a few hundred people?
What they can achieve is that once an average joe gets into problems with DRM, there's a chance that he won't think “surely I made a mistake. I'll just buy the stuff again” but “weren't there people who said that Apple tries to take my freedom? Seems they were right. I won't fall for DRM again!”
And they can reach critical thinking people, who realize they should also think about their freedom when they buy a new device.
in reply to You do know you can't rely on Gmail, right? [59]
You're citing some of the reasons why I dislike SaaS, but there's one more:
Whenever I use a SaaS application, I trust someone whom I really can't reach, and I trust him without being able to exert any kind of control.
He wants to use my data for marketing purposes? No problem - I won't ever find out, since I can't check the physical disks last accessed flag. So what about that being illegal? If I can't find out about it, why should he care? I won't ever be able to sue him.
Sure, most people are nice and law-abiding, but I prefer not to rely on everyone being honest who has access to my data on some remote server.
Sure, I can use encryption for the data I upload, but any data generated on the server will be open for the admin - regardless of the security scheme on the server, because the admin could just fake that.
So it's always back to trusting people, and I prefer not to trust others too far (nor to little).
So your company keeps its company secrets in gmail accounts? How long will it take for Google to find it, if they chance to become a competitor in the field?
If you use gmail without GnuPG encryption [60], you can just as well give your data directly to Google.
And the same holds true for every other SaaS solution. You can't ever trust the remote server.
It also holds true for all unfree software, by the way. You can't look inside it (or get someone else to do that), so you can't know what it does. Do you really dare to trust it?
→ comment to On EME in HTML5 [61] by Tim Berners-Lee, taking a social angle to the problems of DRM via EME in web standards.
Dear Tim,
The previous commenters already addressed every technical comment I wanted to add. There is only one aspect I still feel missing here:
If you give EME your blessing, the social pressure on all free software communities to add proprietary blobs in their shipped browsers will rise enormously, because otherwise the proprietary developers will accuse them of not following the standard.
With that weapon in their box, I could even see copyright cartels taking to legal tools to force free software distributions to include their proprietary blobs — because following standards is seen as so important in Europe that programs can be excluded from government tenders when they do not follow specified standards. And while EME does not specify any CDM as part of the standard, that is very easy to hide in the argumentation.
Yes, that would be irony: the ones who always fought against standards suddenly using their interpretation of the standard to expunge programs which do not follow their interests.
But is it actually implausible?
Consider the pressure Microsoft put on the city of Munich to kill off the LiMux project. How much easier would this have been, if some CDMs didn’t and couldn’t run on the free system?
Please stick to the vision of the web and keep EME out of the standard. I can decide not to use an app, and every user can clearly recognize the app as not-the-web. With EME users will instead say that Linux is broken, because it does not play their internet videos. And when confronted with non-playing videos, the site owners will say "your browser does not follow the standard". That argument is in a different league than the current "we bought a non-standard third-party tool which does not support your setup".
in reality the utopian world of people voluntarily paying full price for content does not work — Tim Berners-Lee
This started to work for music once big platforms started to provide DRM-free music which was easy to pay for.
Instead of EME, the web needs a standardized way to pay for content conveniently. Then most people will pay — as they already do for music — because its much easier to simply buy the work and they have much more important things to do with their time than searching for a gratis copy which doesn’t actually give them anything extra. The only use of DRM in HTML is forcing inconvenience on all law-abiding users.
Instead of binding that much energy in a battle about preserving or destroying the freedom of the web, I’d wish the w3c would focus its efforts on a standardized, convenient way to pay.
PS: Also see the Response to Tim Berners-Lee's defeatist post about DRM in Web standards [62] by defective by design.
Written in reply to: How Drupal will save the world [63].
I experienced the same with modules (having to search for hours), and I think I know at least two ways to make Drupal more accessible to newcomers.
A bit of background: I just setup my third Drupal page and I find new modules even now. The pages were of three slightly different but very similar types:
But even though the pages where quite different, I find myself reusing most modules.
And it took me hours to hunt them down.
To make the modules more accessible to newcomers, they should be more organized.
One way to organize them would be, to give them another sorting done by type of page I want to use them for (usecase). A blog, for example, needs different modules, than a newssite. But there will be much overlap.
Then users could simply check "I want a blog. Which modules do I need?"
Still they'd have far too many to choose from and the choice needs to be simplified for first-time users. To do that, users should be able to sort modules by popularity
Ways to sort by popularity:
The second way to make Drupal more accessible would be to create rich compilations. That means: Don't just offer a "general drupal, search your modules by hand" download, but also some specialized precompiled versions, best with adapted config already included.
Some ideas for downloads:
These should then be the downloads a visitor first sees, to make the Drupal site a site for users.
Examples:
- All parts of the design on these sites are licensed under free licenses (one of them being the GPL). -
These two ideas still give experts the full power of Drupal, but enable newcomers to get a site running quickly.
If you like the idea, please feel free to contact me: http://1w6.org/contact [64]
A comment to The newspaper said it, so it must be true [66]:
You already made the "I get paid for doing a free webcomic" rise, now next part is... ?
Some ideas:
→ Comment to France Starts Reporting ‘Millions’ of File-Sharers [67] by Torrent Freak [68].
I hope they all turn to freenet. There’s scance chance of getting many user-addresses there, and it can provide a service similar to torrents and decentral tracker in one, but anonymously and safe from censorship.
→ http://freenetproject.org [18]
I’ve been running it for years now, and it got better and more secure every year.
The really paranoid can use it in darknet-mode: Only connect to people they know personally. Then it gets really hard to find out that you use freenet.
But even in Opennet, it’s extremely hard to find out what you share or download. Freenet is built for the needs of dissidents in repressive regimes and to avoid any kind of censorship, so it delivers sufficient privacy and anonymity for filesharers.
A word of warning, though: Compared to well-seeded torrents, freenet is slow. That’s the price of anonymity and privacy. But nowadays it’s fast enough for fansubbed anime and beats many weakly seeded torrents :)
Maybe then the media companies will learn that the way to make money with entertainmant is to make it good and personal enough that people want to give them money to make sure they keep producing more great stuff. They could learn from Howard Taylor and Schlock Mercenary [9].
→ comment [69] to You’re Not Meant To Do What You Love. You’re Meant To Do What You’re Good At. [70] by Brianna Wiest, who arguments that the skills of people are "a blueprint of their destiny". For support she describes experience with people who try to do something they do not actually enjoy doing.
This whole argument sits on the assumption that skills develop somehow on their own.
Skills develop, because you use them. So if you do what you love doing (note the nuance!), then — except in rare cases — this becomes what you are good at.
And the real joy from daily work is in how it fulfils the values we value. What we value differs between people. For some it is money, for some it is respect and for some it is following the paths they chose themselves.
In addition we live in a society where less and less people are needed for the tasks which actually have to be done — Food. Shelter. Health. Education. — because productivity rises by 2% every year. That means it is doubling every 35 years, so with every generation we need 50% less people in the tasks which have to be done. But new tasks are found which help society and if many people pursue their passions, it is more likely that some people already have the required training when a given skill turns out to be very helpful to society.
The article takes a mistake — people trying to do something they want to have done but what they don’t actually love to do — and then uses this as basis for an argument that people should only do what they are good at. Which is not related to the problem described. It uses flawed reasoning to argument for something very problematic.
A society in which all people have to do only what they are good at is one without personal choice. It is an inhumane dystopia.
Consider the endgame: Your skills are measured at the age of 5. Then you get to learn what you are good at. And later do that.
And yes, with all-encompassing, constant and retroactive external evaluation of every choice in life we are moving there. It’s why people are so obsessed with their CVs these days, while 30 years ago many more followed their passions, regardless of what society thought.
You cannot expect to earn money with something you are not good at. But as a society we need to give people the space to experiment with things they are not yet good at to make it more likely that there are people who have the skills needed for the niches which open tomorrow. Otherwise we will have to pay far more people for doing something they are not good at, because no one will ever have developed the necessary skills.
The only skill you can be good at without doing what you love is a skill which someone else chose for you.
Should you do what you’re good at, or rather do what you love? Should you use your talents or follow your passion?
To answer this question, let’s look at actual research instead of gut feeling.1 Is a talent how good you are at doing something? Then it is a function of training time. Is it how fast you move forward? Then you likely already learned from other tasks many of the things you need for your task at hand.
If you’re not competing in top sports or pitting your skills against others every day in objectively measurable competitions where the winner takes it all (so you would have to be the best to earn anything), you can learn to be really good at most everything, if you put your mind to it. But you have to put your mind to it and train. Research showed that even the level of skill that top athletes and musicians possess is a direct function of the amount of training they put in (on logarithmic scale: double the training to become better by one measurable unit [71]).
That’s why I consider telling people to follow their talents instead of their passion to be cynical, though disguised as trying to help people find happiness. To paraphrase: “You are born with fixed talents. Your only choice in life is to use these or to be unhappy.” This isn’t just patronizing and invalidates the very idea of free will. It is also wrong.
The more realistic (and positive) guideline is to do what you love doing, and to work towards becoming great in what you love doing. Which is not the same as doing what you would love to have done: the hero is not the one who loves standing on the tribune but the one who loves doing what’s right despite hindrances. Training is hard, but if you make it a habit, it can become natural:
»The shift from deliberate to natural is powerful and transformational.«
— Thomas Oppong in To Get More Creative, Become Less Judgemental [72]
You can learn to become really, really good in almost anything you decide to do. It’s unlikely that you’ll become world champion if you start into a new skill at the age of 40, but you can come pretty close to the champions with a tenth of the training they put in. If you always did what (others said) you were good at till the age of 40, you still have a choice: When you reach 50 you can be very good at something you chose, or world class at something others chose for you.
But keep in mind that you’ll still need something to eat. If that what you love doing cannot keep you and your family fed, then you will have to settle for something less — for example using what you’re already good at in such a way that you love doing it and finding joy in some aspects of what you do. Those who told you what to do might have had good reason for that (but then, they might still have been wrong).
(also see The 4 things it takes to be an expert [73] or the book Thinking Fast and Slow from Kahnemann)
The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance [71], K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer, Psychological Review, 1993 ↩
I'm a KDE user and quite excited about KDE 4, but I think the progress of Gnome is very promising, too.
Gnome and KDE both innovate, and both push limits, and both will learn from each other.
KDE learns from Gnome and uses the Telepathy definition.
Gnome learns from KDE and switches to WebKit which originates from khtml.
Both work together under the hood of freedesktop.org
And both are moving ever faster to replace proprietary systems.
So hey, I might be a KDE user and I might care most about KDE, but Gnome and KDE are both important, because being two projects they can move in different ways, find together again and move out again and that way cover far more ground than a single project could.
I want many people to use KDE and Gnome users want many people to use Gnome.
Lets move out, then, and create guides for our users and create many great things which bring them to the respective desktop, and while we try to create a better experience than the other free desktops, we might suddenly see, that we just surpassed any non-free desktop together.
Then we can sit down, celebrate a big free software party and begin outpacing the respective other one again.
And while doing so, we can still keep contact, share ideas and work together, and we will make a difference.
- written at: http://blogs.gnome.org/desrt/2007/08/07/im-excited-about-the-future-of-g... [74]
→ A comment to The Effectiveness of Political Assassinations [75].
Another answer why this doesn’t work is really simple: Consider that you were in a terrorist organization. You work with people in secrecy, but the ones you know are close to you, because they know your most intimate secrets.
Short: You fight alongside friends (though probably assholes by most ethical standards).
Now someone kills one of your friends.
He is shown around in the media and people say how evil he was.
Now imagine not wanting revenge. Quite hard, isn’t it? A religious or power-play argument just got personal.
If it helps, imagine that the one who got killed was your father, sister or beloved one.
If it’s still hard to imagine why killing a leader is counterproductive, try to imagine that someone raped and killed your 14 year old daughter. Then he got celebrated in the media as hero. Would you manage to not start a personal war against him but to calmly go to a lawyer and accept to hear that your daughter incited him to his acts by dressing like a whore?
If this sounds unrelated: It’s the same emotional reaction, just pulled into our own cultural context. Terrorists believe that they fight for a just cause (at least if they aren’t only in it for the money). So any killing just strengthens their will to fight all out.
The only reason why killing a leader could stop the group is that the leader may be the only one whom all inside the group know and who can coordinate it. But naturally he has lieutnants who also know all, and if one of those dies, he gets replaced.
So please fight terrorism in way which works: Making sure that terrorists have no support in the general population. This naturally means that you must not be openly hostile to them.
Ask first “Why do they hate us?”, and then try to change that.
Written at: http://musicmanager.last.fm/contact/ [76]
Hi,
I licensed all my works under free and open licenses which permit any kind of commercial copying and reuse, but which don't permit taking away rights from the listeners.
I'd like to upload the files to last.fm, but I can only do so, if I can be sure, that no additional restrictions will be placed on the users (no DRM). Else I would violate the license agreement.
These are the terms under which I work together with other artists, so there's no way around that.
I can upload the files, but I need to know that all users will retain the following rights to my files:
Are these rights safe with you?
Best wishes,
Arne
Answer: no.
Comment to the LimeWire-Interview on Slyck [77].
Their words, my comments (from three years of reading in and discussing on the Gnutella Development Forum (GDF):
"Gnutella has had a 2 GB file size limit, while BitTorrent excels at delivering truly enormous files."
-> That's just blabber, but it now explains, why LW wasn't that quick in closing the 2GB limit, even though the way to do it has been around for more than two years (and was posted to the Gnutella Development Forum where Gnutella developers discuss).
There is no underlying technological hurdle for sharing files with a size of more than 2GB, except for the one which LimeWire doesn't want to fix so that they can use it as an excuse to include BitTorrent.
Also Gnutella already does completely decentral swarming, and does it since more than two years ago.
The only real advantage of BitTorrent is, that it has torrent-sites where users meet and comment, but you can do the same for Gnutella (for example like http://freebase.be [78] ).
And that the other p2p-clients don't have it.
"A Gnutella program connects to peers randomly, and broadcasts searches into its neighborhood. It can't find a file outside this neighborhood. Enter the Mojito DHT, a revolutionary new technology we've developed for LimeWire. In a distributed hash table like Mojito, the peers don't connect randomly--they organize themselves into a navigable tree. Imagine one computer has the only copy of a rare file, and another on the far side of the network wants it. With Mojito, they'll be able to find each other."
-> Except that this neighborhood is about 400,000 computers and there've been plans for years to extend it to 1 Million while reducing network traffic.
The only thing which hindered that is, that LimeWire didn't manage to get their program keep 100 connections without too much impact on performance.
And with the performance of Gnutella (traffic of only 7kB/s up and down for a fully connected ultrapeer, less then 1kB/s for a Leaf) increasing the network size wouldn't have created many problems.
-> A bit deeper: http://draketo.de/english/p2p/light/why-gnutella-scales-quite-well [79] - if you like it, please digg it...
Still, Mojito will be a great complement to Gnutella, because it can be used to search for files and hosts _by hash_. If you want _exactly that file_, then you use mojito (aka Kademlia) and a hash string. If you want to search by keyword or tag, then you use Gnutella.
And it will help LimeWire, because other Gnutella clients won't have it at once, so they will be in front. Gnutella is an open protocol, so they need to look at all times like they are front row, else some other Gnutella client will take over their users.
I don't know, why they badmouth their own technology, but as you've seen I have some suspicions.
written in the Phex Forum [80].
"Let them walk against a hill of politeness, and then let them slide off. Have a ban-request as forcepunch somewhere near, if they try to break the hill despite explicitely having been warned."
I try to avoid giving them a chance to justify growing angry. If they shout despite having no justification, and if they don't stop after being asked to disable their capslock (always assume the best), I try to just warn them that they'll be banned if they go on (never had to - and there was just one case where I decided to ignore a provocation instead - see our Polar Skulk forum) and just request a ban, if they don't stop.
Every post in any forum in here (not just Phex) will be read by other people, and if the tone of the posts grows too angry, angry people and trolls will flock here, because they see that provocation makes someone angry in here.
And I know, that trolls come anyway, but a hill of calmness seems to me like the best way to reduce the number of those who actually post.
And my mood is much better, when I read my own calm posts than when I read a post where I let my temper flare up.
- Arne Babenhauserheide
One Guide to rule them all,
One Guide to find them,
One Guide to reach them all
and into calmness bind them.
-> An answer to a distro battle at linuxhumor [81]. This is an example of a text which was hard for me to write in a calm tone. I think I mostly succeeded, but parts of the emotions on both sides still bleed through… take it as an example, how hard it is to stay calm in a heated situation - and how important.
Please keep your own language in check, and don't pull Stallman in here, when he isn't needed. He's got more important things to do than helping your argumentation.
If you look at what I wrote, you'll see I did never say "Your distro is bad" or anything similar.
I just said: "Your advertising is a good deal too blunt."
Why do you answer to other people who say things intended to offend you?
Or to put it differently: Why didn't you react to my post with backup information, why Ultumix is good and where it helps to convert people, cutting out the advertising language so it can be read as information?
I see that you're pissed off by Ubuntu (I don't like the "one distro to find them, one distro to ..." mindset (you told about) either, but I doubt that all Ubuntu people have it. I'm not active in Ubuntu, so I don't know much about the internals (I don't even know what LoCo means - I assume Local Coordinators or so), I just installed it for my wife, because my Gentoo might be a bit too much for her (this changed in the meantime. She now has a Gentoo, too :) )).
You're pissed off, and that's OK. I think if I had walked your way, I might be pissed, too. But it doesn't help you spread your Distro to other people.
Get a grip on your emotions - get a sandbag and hit it when you're just a bit too pissed (I do that from time to time, and unless you tested it yourself, it might be hard for you to see how very good it feels to just let out the anger at that 15kg sandbag). But stop, before your knuckles bleed :)
We are writing here, so it is possible to just sit back and have a break, which makes it easier to get a grip on oneself. At the same time we're just reading what others say, which makes it easier to misinterpret what others say, so keeping our own emotions in check (or letting them out where they don't hurt anyone but your knuckles) gets more important.
And I know I sound like a pseudo-wise great grandfather now. That isn't intentional. I'm learning my way in life myself, and I might just be wrong about it (and also about anything else I think I know), but I write it anyway, because I made some errors myself, and I want to help others not to walk into the same trap. And if what I see right now is only a necessary transition to even better ways to live, then I can at least help others reach that transition with less hardship than I had.
I just read your article on per use payments [82].
I think there are two serious flaws in per use payments:
As you stated correctly, I define myself partly through the media I "consume".
This does mean, that I want to have the assurance, that I can watch a great movie again a few years in the future.
Imagine this scenario:
For per use payment, someone must monitor, how often I use a work of art, and that means, someone must have data on my behaviour, which isn't in the least compatible with personal data protection.
Also, to enable per use payments, you need DRM: Digital Rights Management, which needs to be spelled "Digital Restrictions Management" to account for its effect on end-users, because it restricts me from looking a second time at a file which I already have on my computer.
Without DRM you can't control my use of a document I downloaded to my computer, because it is on my territory which only I control.
With DRM the control of my computer switches to the manufacturer of the DRM, who restricts my useage and only allows me certain actions.
Naturally the DRM-master is then able to monitor and control my use of digital works, but the price for this is giving my personal domain into the hands of someone who isn't necessarily trustworthy (or would you trust microsoft with your new anti-microsoft book, just to name an example?).
There's a quite nice read on the dangers of going through with your proposal on the web, and the prospect is even smaller than yours - it's only about keeping people from passing on books (for which you also need DRM), but it shows what will likely happen, when you the technics for realizing your idea are deployed:
→ Right to Read [83]
And there is another one. Since your scheme needs DRM to enforce per use payment, this one might also be interesting to you: Can you trust your computer?
→ Can You Trust [84]
(and please keep in mind that even today a physics book costs up to 150€, even though it costs far less than that to produce it and students don't have much money, so pay per read wouldn't magically lower prices).
So, while pay per use sounds nice and fair from a distance, it grows into a maze of trouble when you take a closer look.
Best wishes,
Arne Babenhauserheide
Organize! … That’s the thing that has a chance of preventing all of this, and of saving the most lives when that fails. — Yonatan Zunger [85]
I’m not sure it is a good idea to reply to this article. I am doing it anyway, because it’s already on record that I read this article. Likely even at what pace I read it.
Thank you for this article, Yonatan Zunger. This is frightening, but in an important way. And organized well enough that the essential ideas stick. Important ideas.
With images of cute animals. Added with reason.
→ What “Things Going Wrong” Can Look Like [85] ←
Reading deeply recommended.
-> written in reply to Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation [86] on techdirt [87].
This shows painfully how power is shifting currently:
So the simple root of the problem is that money gets concentrated on a few people, and any self-respecting (intelligent) democracy would have to make sure that money can't accmulate too much like that.1
But guess who doesn't want laws which prevent or revert overboarding money concentration.
This is a conflict which a democracy cannot avoid. It checks whether a given democratic system can stand the test of time.
You can find a deeper discussion of the problems money concentration causes for democracy in a German article on this site [88]. ↩
→ a comment to 10 Hackers Who Made History [89] by Gizmodo.
As DDevine says, Richard Stallman is no proponent of Open Source, but of Free Software. Open Source was forked from the Free Software movement to the great displeasure of Stallman.
He really does not like the term Open Source, because that implies that it is only about being able to read the sources.
Different from that, Free Software is about the freedom to be in control of the programs one uses, and to change them.
More exactly it defines 4 Freedoms:
(0) The freedom to run the program in any way you want (compare this with Windows, which does not let me start it in a virtual machine, because “the hardware changed”).
(1) The freedom to access the source and change the program (compare this to Starcraft 2 which I can’t use in a LAN-party without having everyone connected to the internet).
(2) The freedom to copy it and give it to others (compare that to all these iApps, which I can’t even backup easily for my own use).
(3) The freedom to distribute my changed versions.
This is Free Software as defined by the free software movement which was initiated by Richard Stallman and which made successes like Google possible by giving them a stepping stone to build upon: Free Software users stand on the shoulders of giants.
Open Source on the other hand is often being used as name for products which don’t even fullfill freedom (1) completely. That’s why the GNU project did not take part in the first Google Summer of Code: Google required contributors to say that they work on Open Source. In the second Summer of code that was changed, so projects can now correctly identify themselves as Free Software Projects, and GNU has been taking part in the Google Summer of Code since then.
PS: But still it’s great to see Stallman in this list!
In Reply to:
http://www.computeractive.co.uk/personal-computer-world/features/2193584... [90]
Hi,
I just wanted to add, that swarming is included in Gnutella since 2003 or something, and that it already achieved everything back then that the "new trackerless torrents" achieve today.
If you want easy to read information which doesn't need a coder to understand it, just have a look at Gnutella For Users: A guide to the changes in Gnutella for non-programmers.
http://gnufu.net [91]
→ comment to The Four Freedoms of Free Culture [92] on QuestionCopyright.org [93].
Thank you for spreading the thought of freedom in culture!
I currently don’t use creativecommons licenses on my site, because they have no source protection (you can’t exercise your right of modifying, if the work is hidden inside some non-source container, like autoscrolling flash).
Update: I changed this in 2015 when cc by-sa became one-way compatible with GPLv3 [94]. Now I also allow cc by-sa for text.
Instead I use the GPLv3, for my site (draketo.de [14] — licensing [95]) as well as for a free roleplaying book I write (1w6.org [15] — german).
My reason for using free licenses in all my hobby work is simple: When a cultural work becomes part of my life, any restriction on using that work takes away a part of my personal freedom.
That’s why freedom is essential for all cultural works that matter.
Becoming part of my life means that I identify with it, that it means something to me. If there’s a really cool song I listen to all day, then it becomes part of my life.
If I then can’t change and share it, when my tastes change, that part of my life is locked and my freedom taken away. Works which don’t mean something to me can’t take much of my freedom away. But if a cultural work means something to someone out there — to anyone — then it has to be free to avoid stealing that one fans freedom.
So any unfree cultural work is either useless (doesn’t mean anything to anyone) or it’s a tool for cultural slavery (stealing our freedom).1
And I think Stallman is simply afraid. In Software he has the confidence that his work will be improved by others. In culture he doesn’t. I think that’s part of his life, and the only way to change that is to show that free culture is a success for political movements, too.
It’s hard to allow your child to spread its wings and fly on its own, and I think that for him, his manifests which spawned the free software movement are his children.
At the same time, though, a cultural work which doesn’t get written doesn’t have the potential to help people progress. So if an unfree work helps people throw off other shackles, then the net gain for freedom might be positive. Just always keep in mind, that being unfree has a cost for every user of the work – which includes all your fans. If your work is unfree, it is worth less than if it were free licensed. ↩
If you do not want to have a child right now, but you want to have a fulfilled heterosexual sex-life, pregnancy is a risk which can hit anyone, however careful he or she is to avoid it. This is an answer I gave someone who equated unintentional pregnancy with questionable morals.
According to "How effective are condoms against pregnancy?" [96]:
If you use condoms perfectly every single time you have sex, they’re 98% effective at preventing pregnancy. But people aren’t perfect, so in real life condoms are about 82% effective — that means about 18 out of 100 people who use condoms as their only birth control method will get pregnant each year.
Other means of birth control are around 70-91% effective, with the sole exception of the implant which has 99% effectiveness, so even if people are perfectly hygienic and careful, there will be many pregnancies: if you are perfectly hygienic and careful for 10 years, there will be around one pregnancy per couple (on average).
Even with the implant or perfectly used condoms you’ll have 1-2 pregnancies for every 10 couples within 10 years.
That means calling people unhygienic or careless who get pregnant or whose partner gets pregnant is false argumentation.
Reality is: A pregnancy is an always present risk if a man and a woman have sex, whatever you do to prevent that. Getting pregnant when you did not want to get pregnant is bad luck. You can be careful, but you cannot rule it out completely.
There is however an actually questionable moral code, but not the one of people who get pregnant unintentionally. The questionable code is the moral code of those who condemn people who got pregnant; the code of those who wrongly equate being hit by chance with moral inferiority.
If you find yourself condemning people for things which can happen to almost everyone, please look at the actual situation and reconsider that stance. You are not your moral code. If you find it to be wrong, you can change it, and you will find that you stay yourself and even become more rooted in your own self, because you then choose for yourself how you want to be.
People who decide whether they want to have a child should have the right to take that decision without interference from moral accusations. Their decision is an important one, so they need to be able to think clearly to find the best way forward. Moral accusations cloud the mind of both the accuser and the accused.
From the Gentoo Forums [97]:
I agree that spreading a positive
message is good, but I've always
been nervous to send thank you
notes out to people I've never
met.
Worse, I don't want to potentially
overload an inbox with a mes-
sage that isn't going to help all
that much. Hopefully it would be
received in a positve way.
I try to remember to send "thank you"s from time to time.
Just remember that all these people are doing this in their free time, and one of the pillars of motivation is feedback and knowing that what you do is important.
For example I recently (two months ago) sent a mail to the developer of TortoiseHG [98] in which I wrote him, that to me his Program is a revolution for version control systems, because it allows version control even for users who don't know much about their system (and added an example where I managed to use his program to work in a DVCS together with a mostly computer illiterate Windows user - and get going in just 15 minutes).
I could almost feel the happy beaming in his reply where he said even this alone would make it worth all the effort he spent on it.
And I remember my own almost unbelieving joy at having people tell me that the pen-and-paper roleplaying system I write [15] is the best system for their one-shots. It brightens up the whole day and makes me smile much and easily :)
Naturally contributing often feels even better (people who join in, are one of the highest compliments to the project), but when that isn't possible (we all have limited time-budgets), a friendly mail - or better still: A friendly public post which will also lead others to the program - is a great way to help your favorite project!
And if it already gets very much positive feedback, you could look at all the other projects you enjoy and see if one of them could get a bit more feedback. We live through diversity, and every little program adds its share.
Especially for people who get little feedback, such a message helps very much. If nothing else, it helps the developer to see that his work has an important impact. And if the feedback is unexpected, that's even better. People who gets tons of feedback might get used to it, but people who get very little feedback can really flourish - or at least enjoy a happy smile for a few hours and think fondly of what they accomplished and look forward to doing more.
PS: And if the project offers the option, giving a donation helps a lot, too. In a fair world the people behind those projects should be able to do them full-time [99]. We can make the world a little fairer.
To Why I Steal Movies… Even Ones I'm In [100] by Peter Serafinowicz.
I think there’s a very simple reason why EMI remotely encumbers a channel: It’s a battle about control.
The battle about who will control where, when and how people can enjoy works of art [101].
That battle goes against the fans (who want to enjoy stuff and pay for it on their own terms) and the artists (who want people to enjoy their stuff and pay for it).
It benefits those who want to pull money out of the revenue stream (which goes from fans to artists) even though the almost free distribution via the internet makes them mostly obsolete.
And online piracy isn’t theft. It’s unauthorized copying which, as Peter Serafinowicz very nicely explains, can even help the artists make more money. The fans get more, the artists get more, only one loses: The one who wants to take freedom from fans and artists alike.
-> a comment to BT to cut off file sharers [102] from TechWatch.
I can read this article in two ways:
1) They took part in sharing/downloading that music file
2) They just had a bittorrent or Gnutella program running.
1 is unlikely, because not every fourth internet user will have downloaded that song.
And if 2 is the case, BT should be sued to its knees.
Having a Gnutella program is not illegal, and blocking access to Gnutella means vastly reduced service.
It's as if they'd take away your flat, because someone saw you using a kitchen knife.
The same is true for BitTorrent which for example gets used by millions of people to download GNU/Linux distributions without creating too much traffic on the servers.
It's what you do with your tool that might be illegal, but having the tool is perfectly legal, and when BT blocks it, they are unduly worsening the service for their customers.
Best wishes,
Arne
-> a comment to
Wikipedia, Notability, and Open Source Software [103] by ubunTARD [104].
2010-03-23
Update: I just got unblocked by henrik [105] who also sent me an excuse for the way the whole process was handled: “…The block was partly an individual misjudgment, but also a result of the systemic culture and some poorly thought out policies. If you're interested, I'd be happy to discuss it in more detail…”. And that restores a lot of my faith in the wikipedia community — thank you very much for your excuse, henrik!
Also they are currently discussing [106] on the incidents board how to avoid similarly overboarding blocking like that in the future.
Just as an inside notice from the discussion: I joined the first deletion discussion [107] when I got note of it (I don't know anymore through which channel) and when it got closed, I joined the second one [108] and got heavily frustrated when people tried to turn “he sent the developers a berliner bratwurst” into “the magazine which published his article is a first source” (which would mean it wouldn't count as source for “notability”).
In that discussion I was mostly alone, and I could only talk there, because I've been a wikipedia user since 2004, and I casually corrected smaller errors in articles whenever I happened to see them while looking something up. I was one of the many small contributors who might not write largescale articles all the time, but who do their share to improve the quality of the articles.
Most others couldn't join up, because the discussion was marked as “semi-closed”, so only longtime users could contribute. And the major contributor to the previous discussion was blocked for meatpuppetry, along with the developer of dwm [109] (additional info [110]) who didn't even cast a vote but only provided sources (reason: “mass ban the meatpuppets” — the dwm developer was unblocked afterwards by others).
After spending hours on refuting their claims, I got frustrated enough that I stopped discussing — and I posted that to identi.ca -> http://identi.ca/arnebab/tag/dwm [111]
Subseqently I got blocked from editing on wikipedia “indefinitely” (except on my talk page) for “canvassing” (since when is ‘they want to delete dwm’ equal to ‘come all here and vote for keeping dwm for the following reasons…’?) and for quoting policy which says that you shouldn't contribute to a deletion discussion if you don't know much about the topic — and that I think that Psychonaut isn't in a position to judge free wm’s.
-> Threat of blocking [112]
-> Blocked and my reply [113]
In my view the policy that you must not speak about the deletion attempt outside wikipedia or risk a ban is even worse than nondisclosure agreements: “You must not speak about this public discussion, or you get banned for meatpuppetry and canvassing.”
I am now pissed off bad enough, that I won't go appealing for an unblock. If the powers-that-be in wikipedia don't see themselves that the block is unjustified, then the power structures in there are such that any contribution I do is on the mercy of moderators who abuse policy for harassing free software since they are not stopped by the ones who don't agree with their doing.
Every public resource run by volunteers faces the danger of falling into the hands of dedicated abusers, and wikipedia is no exception. But it is exceptionally vulnerable, since the ones who contribute content are normally not interested in the necessary day-to-day maintenance, so writers and maintainers are strongly seperated, but the maintainers get most of the power, because they are the ones who get informed of actions which concern articles they are interested in — and because they have the connections inside wikipedia.
But as if that wasn't bad enough, I think there's a third and easily overlooked group: Those who don't write full articles, but do fact checking when they come upon an article on a topic they are knowledgeable about and that way improve the general quality of wikipedia a lot (unstructured peer review). These don't take part in discussions, but mostly use wikipedia as a source, and so they don't want to spend hours on reading some new policy. Instead they generally trust that Wikipedia lives up to it's goal of collecting the sum of human knowledge in encyclopedic articles - and they do their share to help achieve that goal.
They aren't seen as huge contributors, since every one only does some few changes each year, but together they make a huge difference.
I'm mostly a member of the last group (and to some degree article author) — I'm almost sure you expected that :)
And I think that anti-canvassing rules (“don't tell people that the project they feel strongly about is in problems on wikipedia”) and overboarding deletions chase away a major part of these casual editors (don't ask for a citation - this is gut feeling and my own thoughts: “Why should I spend 5 minutes on correcting a few errors in an article on a topic I know much about, when the article could be gone in 5 months time?”).
The article authors might come regardless of the rules and try to add the topic they know much about. But the casual editors will likely be gone for good (and won't ever become authors).
And that would create a major change in the community, cutting wikipedia off from the normal people on the web. And you can imagine how that would affect the value of wikipedia to these people (the vast majority) and its resistance against being misused by some few people to further personal goals.
Besides: Who Writes Wikipedia [114] suggests, that even the main authors are mostly casual contributors, so the effects of alienating casual users would be even worse than I write above: Wikipedia would lose it's source of information.
PS: I didn’t join in the Appeal to delete anyway [115]. Luckily it got refuted. Clearly.
→ a comment to You call it privacy invasion, I don't [116] from Flameeyes.
What you state is a strong version of the “I’ve got nothing to hide” argument. If you’re interested in a thorough debunking, there is a very good article in the chronicle about that: Why Privacy Matters even if you have nothing to hide [117].
In short: It’s about an imbalance in knowledge. The danger is less 1984 (that only applies to the weak nothing to hide argument which assumes evildoing from others), but rather Kafkaesque: Other people take decisions about you without telling you how they reach those decisions. Since you do not know their sources (and often do not even know that they took a decision), you cannot correct misinformation about you. And the more those decisions from others affect you, the more you lose control over your life.
The good usecase for information would be that you explicitely request to get advertisements for certain types of wares. Or for wares which are similar to a list of wares you explicitely select. Then you know the data from which the others take decisions about you, and you can change it.
-> an answer to Blog posts are no replacement for documentation [118] by flameeyes.
Hi flameeyes,
I kinda know your problem: It's far easier to write a number of Blog posts than to write a structured book up front - and I think two major parts of that are, that a weblog provides many more "Yes, I've done it!" moments than a book and that a blog has a much lower barrier to entry.
I rather know it from the other side, though: I wrote a (german) roleplaying ruleset in a wiki, and I got very little feedback and often slacked.
My solution to that was to switch to Drupal which provides a book-style structure with (automatic) blog-style news. I now write articles which can stand for themselves but which are automatically organized by section and keyword.
I also do that for my personal page, but I think the RPG is a much better example (my personal pages are organized by content type/topic (song, poem, story, technical article, ...), while the RPG articles are more connected):
On the righthand side you see the book navigation. the equivalent on my main page about programs would for example be:
A similar structure should be useful for your documentation of programs. You can even first write an uncathegorized blog post and later sort it into its place (and also move it around freely afterwards) - for example when you realize that you write more about the topic.
That way you can start with writing something about a new program, and give that program its own cathegory when you see that you're writing about it more often.
Another advantage of this is, that I began to check every single text, if it's interesting to read (cathegory pages with only a few lines of text can easily be set to not appear on the frontpage - it's simply one checkbox to untick :) - once they grow into articles in their own right, they can then be "republished" to the frontpage with updated publish-date, so they appear as new posts).
→ comment to The next wave in scholarly word processors? [123]
What I’d like to see is more people using version tracking systems.
With these you have a discussion which can be merged easily when it gets branched. I use it for anything I do, and I could use it together with an only-windows-and-GUI user with ease, installing TortoiseHG for both and Lyx for him (LaTeX made easy – you don’t have to see the sources).
Just right click in a folder, call synchronize and pull and your work gets merged.
For publishing to the web and to PDF I’d use Emacs org-mode or Markdown with Markdown to LaTeX:
org-mode: orgmode.org [126]
markdown: daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ [127]
Maybe with markdownify for pages which already are HTML:
Besides: A simple Mercurial [131] repository with URLs as document identifiers would allow forking the web :)
-> the_gdf just got spam from a raving christian. Since I am a moderator there, I got that spam and rejected it. But because I was in a good mood, I felt compelled to answer :)
- insert random ravin' lunatic the-world-is-going-to-end talk -
*gg*
Have fun!
Me, instead, I'll rather go with the 6th world of the inkas - they were there earlier than your book.
The alternative is to just believe in science: Ecologists told us 30 years ago
"We're destroying our environment. if we keep doing this, 30 years from now the earth will warm and we'll have weather catastrophies, epidemies (through warmer climate) and much more".
Well, now it's 30 years later and we have weather catastrophies, epidemies and much more.
Also more than 30 years ago left wing economists warned us "if we keep distributing money unevenly and letting big companies run free, our economy will crash again".
Well, it's more than 30 years later, and guess what? They were right. We now have a worldwide economic crisis.
Oh, and more than 14 years ago, people tried to tell the american government "If you keep bulding up terrorists to fight against russia, these will turn around at some point and attack you". Then, 7 years ago people (including me) said "if you attack afghanistan, you will help the terrorists to find new cannon fodder and that way strengthen terrorism".
And now it's 7 years later, and the taliban and "international terroristst" are stronger than ever.
So get up from your book and look at the world. If we don't act, we let people turn our world into our own hell, so don't waste your time but act to save our world!
I don't care what your god says will happen after our dead, but if he really created this world he will be damn pissed at YOU for letting it get destroyed - and I assume that you do care about that.
And here's a little hint: Every creator god is likely to see it the same way, so even if you are wrong and some other religion which believes in a creator god is right, the only way to be on the safe side is to help keep our planet alive.
And if there is no god, then my children will thank me for helping to save their future.
That said: Don't ever spam the_gdf again or my lawyer will be happy to get a chance to sue you. You've been warned.
Which also means: Noone but me read your mail, and noone will, since it isn't going to get through.
I hope you enjoyed my answer :) I got slightly angry at the end, which I take as a warning to ignore these kinds of emails completely from now on.
Links:
[1] http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/F8DG25Q
[2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[3] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
[4] http://www.zwillingsstern.de/lizenzen#einschraenkung
[5] mailto:avpolicy@ec.europa.eu
[6] mailto:markt-d1@ec.europa.eu
[7] http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/other_actions/content_online/index_en.htm
[8] http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=2713&blogid=14#tsb
[9] http://schlockmercenary.com
[10] http://vg-wort.de
[11] http://creativecommons.org
[12] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
[13] http://draketo.de/licht/politik/geistiges-eigentum-sinn-des-urheberrechtes-und-staatlich-garantierter-monopolrechte
[14] http://draketo.de
[15] http://1w6.org
[16] http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3834341/LimeWire+ID+Theft+Case+Raises+P2P+Concerns.htm
[17] http://emergentbydesign.com/2010/02/06/the-importance-of-managing-your-online-reputation
[18] http://freenetproject.org
[19] http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=619225&cid=24253203
[20] http://infinite-hands.draketo.de
[21] http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1071
[22] http://wikileaks.org/wiki/ACTA_trade_agreement_negotiation_lacks_transparency
[23] https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta
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[25] http://www.techworm.net/2015/08/hackers-can-remotely-steal-any-number-of-fingerprints-from-android-smartphones.html
[26] http://www.zwillingsstern.de/files/2015-08-06-chromasecurity-threatens-arnebab-for-irony-01-cropped-nogpl.png
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[28] http://www.zwillingsstern.de/files/2015-08-06-chromasecurity-threatens-arnebab-for-irony-03_0.png
[29] http://www.zwillingsstern.de/files/2015-08-06-chromasecurity-threatens-arnebab-for-irony-04.png
[30] http://www.zwillingsstern.de/files/2015-08-06-chromasecurity-threatens-arnebab-for-irony-05.png
[31] http://www.zwillingsstern.de/files/2015-08-06-chromasecurity-threatens-arnebab-for-irony-06.png
[32] http://www.zwillingsstern.de/files/2015-08-06-chromasecurity-threatens-arnebab-for-irony-06_0.png
[33] http://www.netribution.co.uk/2/content/view/1317/182/
[34] http://amarok.kde.org/d/en/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=1375
[35] http://amarok.kde.org/d/en/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=1381
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[37] http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/Videos/2014/10/Ambition_the_film
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[39] http://t.co/l4rlq20y0B
[40] https://twitter.com/esa
[41] https://twitter.com/PlatigeImage
[42] https://twitter.com/LordMockingbird
[43] https://twitter.com/AisFranciosi
[44] https://twitter.com/ArneBab/status/525957682352893952
[45] https://twitter.com/Scirens
[46] https://twitter.com/ArneBab/status/525948526673412097
[47] http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=143224&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=480769
[48] http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/yc1o1/anonymous_vs_trapwire_we_must_at_all_costs_shut/c5u7xd9
[49] http://www.reddit.com/user/tedemang
[50] https://rt.com/usa/news/anonymous-trapwire-optrapwire-surveillance-870/
[51] http://freesocial.draketo.de
[52] http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan
[53] http://www.caleupe.com/writing/australia-now-is-the-time-to-go-dark/
[54] https://webchat.freenode.net/?randomnick=1&channels=freenet
[55] http://ostatic.com/blog/defective-by-design-is-defective
[56] http://www.defectivebydesign.org/
[57] http://bah.draketo.de/
[58] http://draketo.de/english/songs/light/broken-apple-heart
[59] http://blogs.computerworld.com/you_do_know_you_cant_rely_on_gmail_right
[60] http://gnupg.org
[61] https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/02/on-eme-in-html5/
[62] https://defectivebydesign.org/blog/response_tim_bernerslees_defeatist_post_about_drm_web_standards
[63] http://www.lullabot.com/articles/how_drupal_will_save_world#comment-2168
[64] http://1w6.org/contact
[65] http://gute-neuigkeiten.de
[66] http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/index.php/2009/02/11/the-newspaper-said-it-so-it-must-be-true/
[67] http://torrentfreak.com/france-starts-reporting-millions-of-file-sharers-100921/
[68] http://torrentfreak.com/
[69] https://medium.com/@ArneBab/this-whole-argument-sits-on-the-assumption-that-skills-develop-somehow-on-their-own-9cd0e3c766bc
[70] https://medium.com/personal-growth/youre-not-meant-to-do-what-you-love-you-re-meant-to-do-what-you-re-good-at-4e8e6b8e929d
[71] https://www.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice%28PsychologicalReview%29.pdf
[72] https://medium.com/@alltopstartups/to-get-more-creative-become-less-judgemental-14413a575fa9
[73] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA
[74] http://blogs.gnome.org/desrt/2007/08/07/im-excited-about-the-future-of-gnome/#comment-274
[75] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/the_effectivene_1.html
[76] http://musicmanager.last.fm/contact/
[77] http://www.slyck.com/story1545_LimeWire_Interview
[78] http://freebase.be
[79] http://draketo.de/english/p2p/light/why-gnutella-scales-quite-well
[80] http://forum.phex.org
[81] http://hehe2.net/linuxhumor/howto-convert-a-friend-to-linux/#comment-454
[82] http://writ.lp.findlaw.com/hilden/20070108.html
[83] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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[85] https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/what-things-going-wrong-can-look-like-400f84a0cc3a
[86] http://techdirt.com/articles/20100302/0354498358.shtml
[87] http://techdirt.com
[88] http://www.zwillingsstern.de/licht/politik/zu-grosse-vermoegensungleichheit-zerstoert-jede-demokratie
[89] http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/09/10-hackers-who-made-history/
[90] http://www.computeractive.co.uk/personal-computer-world/features/2193584/closer-look-bittorrent
[91] http://gnufu.net
[92] http://questioncopyright.org/four_freedoms_for_free_culture
[93] http://www.zwillingsstern.de/QuestionCopyright.org
[94] http://www.zwillingsstern.de/english/free-software/by-sa-gpl
[95] http://draketo.de/licenses
[96] https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/condom/how-effective-are-condoms
[97] http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-5810213.html#5810213
[98] http://tortoisehg.sf.net
[99] http://www.zwillingsstern.de/light/english/motivation-and-payment
[100] http://gizmodo.com/5539417/why-i-steal-movies-even-ones-im-in
[101] http://www.zwillingsstern.de/light/english/generation-cultural-freedom#fn:control
[102] http://www.techwatch.co.uk/2008/06/27/bt-to-cut-off-file-sharers/
[103] http://ubuntard.com/2010/03/wikipedia-notability-and-open-source-software/
[104] http://ubuntard.com/
[105] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:ArneBab#March_2010
[106] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive605#Dwm_Deletion_Proceedings_and_User:Blueboy96
[107] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Dwm
[108] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Dwm_(2nd_nomination)
[109] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Anselmgarbe&oldid=346953541
[110] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anselmgarbe
[111] http://identi.ca/arnebab/tag/dwm
[112] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:ArneBab#Civility_and_assuming_good_faith
[113] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:ArneBab#ani_notice
[114] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
[115] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2010_March_13#Dwm_.282nd_nomination.29
[116] http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2013/05/you-call-it-privacy-invasion-i-don-t
[117] http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/
[118] http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2009/10/27/blog-posts-are-no-replacement-for-documentation
[119] http://1w6.org/deutsch/regeln
[120] http://1w6.org/stichwort/deutsch
[121] http://draketo.de/deutsch/freie-software/licht/mercurial
[122] http://draketo.de/licht-lumo-light
[123] http://ptsefton.com/2010/08/07/the-next-wave-in-scholarly-word-processors.htm
[124] http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/
[125] http://www.lyx.org/
[126] http://orgmode.org
[127] http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
[128] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
[129] http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/
[130] http://milianw.de/projects/markdownify/
[131] http://mercurial.selenic.com