Light

I recently needed to send an email to many people¹.

Putting all of them into the BCC field did not work (mail rejected by provider) and when I split it into 2 emails, many did not see my mail because it was flagged as potential spam (they were not in the To-Field)².

I did not want to put them all into the To-Field, because that would have spread their email-addresses around, which many would not want³.

So I needed a different solution. Which I found in the extensibility of emacs and wanderlust⁴. It now carries the name wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers-from-buffer.

You simply write the email as usual via wl-draft, then put all email addresses you want write to into a buffer and call M-x wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers-from-buffer. It asks you about the buffer with email addresses, then shows you all addresses and asks for confirmation.

Then it sends one email after the other, with a randomized wait of 0-10 seconds between messages to avoid flagging as spam.

If you want to use it, just add the following to your .emacs:

(defun wl-draft-clean-mail-address (address)
  (replace-regexp-in-string "," "" address))

(defun wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers (addresses)
  (loop for address in addresses do
        (progn 
          (wl-user-agent-insert-header "To" 
            (wl-draft-clean-mail-address address))
          (let ((wl-interactive-send nil))
            (wl-draft-send))
          (sleep-for (random 10)))))

(defun wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers-from-buffer 
    (&optional addresses-buffer-name)
  "Send a mail to multiple recipients - one recipient at a time"
  (interactive "BBuffer with one address per line")
  (let ((addresses nil))
    (with-current-buffer addresses-buffer-name
      (setq addresses (split-string (buffer-string) "\n")))
    (if (y-or-n-p (concat "Send this mail to " 
            (mapconcat 'identity addresses ", ")))
        (wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers addresses))))

Happy Hacking!

Intro

When you enter the freenet Web of Trust, you first need to get some trust from people by solving captchas. And even when people trust you somehow, you have no way to prove your identity in an automatic way, so you can’t create identities which freenet can label as trusted without manual intervention from your side.

Proposal

To change this, we can use the Web of Trust used in GnuPG to infer trust relationships between freenet WoT IDs.

Practically that means:

• Write a message: “I am the WoT ID USK@” (replace with the

An answer to a reddit-comment by tedemang to the article 1540 Anonymous vs. TrapWire: "We must, at all costs, shut this system down and render it useless".

The problem

Nature only gives me ris-formatted citations, but I use bibtex.

Also ris is far from human readable.

The background

ris can be reformatted to bibtext, but doing that manually disturbs my workflow when getting references while taking note about a paper in emacs.

I tend to search online for references, often just using google scholar, so when I find a ris reference, the first data I get for the ris-citation is a link.

The solution

Cross platform, Free Software, almost all features you can think of, graphical and in the shell: Learn once, use for everything.

» Get Emacs «

Emacs is a self-documenting, extensible editor, a development environment and a platform for lisp-programs - for example programs to make programming easier, but also for todo-lists on steroids, reading email, posting to identi.ca, and a host of other stuff (learn lisp).

It is one of the origins of GNU and free software (Emacs History).

In Markdown-mode it looks like this:

New version: draketo.de/software/mercurial-branching-strategy

This is a complete collaboration model for Mercurial. It shows you all the actions you may need to take, except for the basics already found in other tutorials like

• Mercurial in workflows (official guide, 15 minutes)
• hg init (more graphics and for Windows)
• hg init science (slides 12 to 23)

Adaptions optimize the model for special needs like maintaining multiple releases¹, grafting micro-releases and an explicit code review stage.

Summary: 3 simple rules

Any model to be used by people should consist of simple, consistent rules. Programming is complex enough without having to worry about elaborate branching directives. Therefore this model boils down to 3 simple rules:

3 simple rules:

(1) you do all the work on default² - except for hotfixes.

(2) on stable you only do hotfixes, merges for release³ and tagging for release. Only maintainers⁴ touch stable.

(3) you can use arbitrary feature-branches⁵, as long as you don’t call them default or stable. They always start at default (since you do all the work on default).

Diagram

To visualize the structure, here’s a 3-tiered diagram. To the left are the actions of programmers (commits and feature branches) and in the center the tasks for maintainers (release and hotfix). The users to the right just use the stable branch.⁶

An overview of the branching strategy. Click the image to get the emacs org-mode ditaa-source.

Table of Contents

• Summary
  • Diagram
• Practical Actions
  • Regular development
  • Feature branches
  • Tasks for maintainers
• Example
  • Initialize
  • Stable branch and first release
  • Further development
  • Hotfix
  • Regular release
  • Feature branches
• Adaptions
  • multiple maintained releases
  • Graft changes into micro releases
  • Explicit review branch
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Where does QA (Quality Assurance) come in?
• Summary

Practial Actions

Now we can look at all the actions you will ever need to do in this model:⁷

• Regular development

  • commit changes: (edit); hg ci -m "message"

  • continue development after a release: hg update; (edit); hg ci -m "message"

• Feature Branches

  • start a larger feature: hg branch feature-x; (edit); hg ci -m "message"

  • continue with the feature: hg update feature-x; (edit); hg ci -m "message"

  • merge the feature: hg update default; hg merge feature-x; hg ci -m "merged feature x into default"

  • close and merge the feature when you are done: hg update feature-x; hg ci --close-branch -m "finished feature x"; hg update default; hg merge feature-x; hg ci -m "merged finished feature x into default"

• Tasks for Maintainers

  • Initialize (only needed once)

    • create the repo: hg init reponame; cd reponame

    • first commit: (edit); hg ci -m "message"

    • create the stable branch and do the first release: hg branch stable; hg tag tagname; hg up default; hg merge stable; hg ci -m "merge stable into default: ready for more development"

  • apply a hotfix⁸: hg up stable; (edit); hg ci -m "message"; hg up default; hg merge stable; hg ci -m "merge stable into default: ready for more development"

  • do a release⁹: hg up stable; hg merge default; hg ci -m "(description of the main changes since the last release)" ; hg tag tagname; hg up default ; hg merge stable ; hg ci -m "merged stable into default: ready for more development"

That’s it. All that follows are a detailed example which goes through all actions one-by-one, adaptions to this workflow and the final summary.

In the mercurial list Stanimir Stamenkov asked how to get rid of intermediate merges in the log to simplify reading the history (and to not care about missing some of the details).

Update: Since Mercurial 2.4 you can simply use
hg log -Gr "branchpoint()"

I did some tests for that and I think the nicest representation I found is this:

hg log -Gr "(all() - merge()) or head()"

This article shows examples for this.

From the #freenet IRC channel at freenode.net:

toad_¹: what can freenet do well already?

• sharing and retrieving files asynchronously, freemail, IRC², publishing sites without need of a central server, sharing code repositories

I wrote some recipes for creating the kinds of slides I need with emacs org-mode export to beamer latex.

Update: Read ox-beamer to see how to adapt this to work with the new export engine in org-mode 0.8.

The recipes as PDF (21 slides, 247 KiB)

The org-mode sources (12.2 KiB)

Below is an html export of the org-mode file. Naturally it does not look as impressive as the real slides, but it captures all the sources, so I think it has some value.

Note: To be able to use the simple block-creation commands, you need to add #+startup: beamer to the header of your file or explicitely activate org-beamer with M-x org-beamer-mode.

PS: I hereby allow use of these slides under any of the licenses used by worg and/or the emacs wiki.

I just read your article on per use payments.

I think there are two serious flaws in per use payments:

(a) Good works of art need to last

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:

• I found a really great book, read it and got entranced.
• It's 20 years later, now. and I want to read the book to my children.

The probes project is a google summer of code project of Steve Dougherty intended to optimize the network structure of freenet. Here I will give the background of his project very briefly:

The Small World Structure

If you want to use the literate programming features in emacs org-mode, you can try this minimal example to get started: Activate org-babel-tangle, then put this into the file noweb-test.org:

Minimal example for noweb in org-mode

* Assign 

First we assign abc:

#+begin_src python :noweb-ref assign_abc
abc = "abc"
#+end_src

* Use

Then we use it in a function:

#+begin_src python :noweb tangle :tangle noweb-test.py
def x():
  <<assign_abc>>
  return abc

print(x())
#+end_src

noweb-test.org

Yesterday I said to my father

» Why does your whole cooperative have to meet for some minor legalese update which does not have an actual effect? Could you not just put into your statutes, that the elected leaders can take decisions which don’t affect the spirit of the statutes? «

He answered me

» That’s how dictatorships are started.«

With an Ermächtigungsbescheid.

I gulped a few times while I realized how easy it is to fall into the pitfalls of convenience - and lose the project in the process.

Update (2015-11-27): The script works again with newer Freenet versions.

Install and setup infocalypse on GNU/Linux:

setup_infocalypse_on_linux.sh

Just download and run¹ it via

wget http://draketo.de/files/setup_infocalypse_on_linux.sh_.txt
bash setup_infocalypse*

This script needs a running freenet node to work! → Install Freenet ←

In-Freenet-link: CHK@rtJd8ThxJ~usEFOaWAvwXbHuPC6L1zOFWtKxlhUPfR8,21XedKU8YbKPGsYWu9szjY7hChX852zmFAYuvyihOd0,AAMC--8/setup_infocalypse_on_linux.sh

The script allows you to get and setup the infocalypse extension with a few keystrokes to be able to instantly use the Mercurial DVCS for decentral, anonymous code-sharing over freenet.

« Real Life Infocalypse »
DVCS in the Darknet. The decentralized p2p code repository (using Infocalypse)

Update (2013-01-23): The new org-mode removed (org-make-link), so I replaced it with (concat) and uploaded a new example-file: org-custom-link-completion.el.
Happy Hacking!

1 Intro

I recently set up custom completion for two of my custom link types in Emacs org-mode. When I wrote on identi.ca about that, Greg Tucker-Kellog said that he’d like to see that. So I decided, I’d publish my code.

The python startup time always nagged me (17-30ms) and I just searched again for a way to reduce it, when I found this:

The Python-Launcher caches GTK imports and forks new processes to reduce the startup time of python GUI programs.

Python-launcher does not solve my problem directly, but it points into an interesting direction: If you create a small daemon which you can contact via the shell to fork a new instance, you might be able to get rid of your startup time.

To get an example of the possibilities, downl

New version of this article: draketo.de/politik/generation-of-cultural-freedom.html

I am part of a generation that experienced true cultural freedom—and experienced this freedom being destroyed.

We had access to the largest public library which ever existed and saw it burned down for lust for control.

I saw the Napster burn, I saw Gnutella burn, I saw edonkey burn, I saw Torrentsites burn, I saw one-click-hosters burn and now I see Youtube burn with blocked and deleted videos - even those from the artists themselves.

Kanban for emacs org-mode.

Update (2020): Kanban moved to sourcehut: https://hg.sr.ht/~arnebab/kanban.el

Update (2013-04-13): Kanban.el now lives in its own repository: on bitbucket and on a statically served http-repo (to be independent from unfree software).

Update (2013-04-10): Thanks to Han Duply, kanban links now work for entries from other files. And I uploaded kanban.el on marmalade.

Some time ago I learned about kanban, and the obvious next step was: “I want to have a kanban board from org-mode”. I searched for it, but did not find any. Not wanting to give up on the idea, I implemented my own :)

The result are two functions: kanban-todo and kanban-zero.

“Screenshot” :)

TODO	DOING	DONE
Refactor in such a way that the
	let Presentation manage dumb sprites
return all actions on every command:
Make the UiState adhere the list of
Turn the model into a pure state

Update 2021: Fixed links that died with Bitbuckets hosting.

I just found the excellent pydoc-info mode for emacs from Jon Waltman. It allows me to hit C-h S in a python file and enter a module name to see the documentation right away.

In this text I want to explore the behaviour of the degrading yet redundant anonymous file storage in Freenet. It only applies to files which were not subsequently retrieved.

Every time you retrieve a file, it gets healed which effectively resets its timer as far as these calculations here are concerned. Due to this, popular files can and do live for years in freenet.

→ Comment to “apple supports a number of opensource projects. Webkit and CUPS come to mind”.

Apple supports a number of copyleft projects, because they have to.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. — Brian Kernighan

In the article Hyperfocus and balance, Arc Riley from PySoy talks about trying to get to the Hyperfocus state without endangering his health.

TL;DR: Inserting a file into Freenet using the key KSK@<password> creates an invisible, password protected file which is available over Freenet.

Often you want to exchange some content only with people who know a given password and make it accessible to everyone in your little group but invisible to the outside world.

Until yesterday I thought that problem slightly complex, because everyone in your group needs a given encryption program, and you need a way to share the file without exposing the fact that you are sharing it.

Then I learned two handy facts about Freenet:

• Content is invisible to all but those with the key
  <ArneBab> evanbd: If I insert a tiny file without telling anyone the key, can they get the content in some way?
  <evanbd> ArneBab: No.

• You generate a key from a password by using a KSK-key
  <toad_> dogon: KSK@<any string of text> -> generate an SSK private key from the hash of the text
  <toad_> dogon: if you know the string, you can both insert and retrieve it

In other words:

Just inserting a file into Freenet using the key KSK@<password> creates an invisible, password protected file which is shared over Freenet.

Concise and clear.

In patent law, copyright and property there are two pillars: protection and control.

Protection

• Property: No person shall take that from me.
• Copyright: No person shall have the same without my permission. A monopoly.
• Patent Law: No person shall create something similar without my permission. An even stronger monopoly.

Control

• Property: I decide what happens with this.
• Copyright: I decide what happens to everything which is the same. Takes another ones property. → a monopoly¹.

“Some years ago, I had a look at freenet and wasn't really convinced, now I'm back - a lot has changed, it grew bigger and insanely fast (in freenet terms), like it a lot, maybe this time I'll keep it. Especially regarding B.S. like SOPA, PIPA and other internet-crippling movements, freenet seems like a good idea after all!”
— sparky in Sone

So, if you know freenet and it did not work out for you in the past, it might be time to give it another try: freenetproject.org

def censor_the_net():
  "wealth vs. democracy via media-control"
  try: SOPA() # see Stop Online Piracy Act 
  except Protest: # see sopastrike.com 
    try: PIPA() # see PROTECT IP Act 
    except Protest: # see weak links 
      try: OPEN() # see red herring 
      except Protest: 
        try: ACTA() # see Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement 
        except Protest: # see resignation⁽¹⁾, court, vote anyway and advise against
          try: CISPA() # see Stop the Online Spying Bill 
          except Protest: # see Dangers
            try: CETA() # See Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement
            except Protest:  # see ePetition 50705
              try: TTIP() # See Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
              except Protest: # see TTIP-Protest erreicht Brüssel and Wie wir TTIP gestoppt haben
                try: TISA() # See Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA)
                except Protest: # see Unter Ausschluss der Öffentlichkeit
                  try: JEFTA() # See Wie TTIP und wieder hinter verschlossenen Türen
                  except Protest: # see deep concern und TTIP auf Japanisch verhindern und Ein Kniefall vor Japan? und JEFTA Leaks
                    try: Article11And13() # See Die Zensurmaschinen und das Leistungsschutzrecht kommen in die Zielgerade der EU-Gesetzgebung 
                    except Protest: # see Stop the censorship-machinery! Save the Internet!
                      try: FreiwilligeRasterung() # See Mit Hashabgleich und TPM 
                      except Protest: # see nur für gute Menschen and „eine neue Zensursula-Kampagne“ and „Wenn Privatsphäre kriminalisiert wird, werden nur Kriminelle noch Privatsphäre haben.“
                        try: TERREG() # See TERREG-Verordnung
                        except Protest: # see discord.savetheinternet and TERREG-Sharepics and Uploadfilter auf Steroiden and new online censorship powers
                          try: Chatkontrolle() # See Nachrichtendurchleuchtung
                          except Protest: # see KI Anzeige wegen Sexting and Wiretapping Children and Deutscher Anwaltsverein and Strategic autonomy in danger and Kinderschutzbund gegen anlasslose Scans verschlüsselter Nachrichten and droht unsere Strafverfolgung…lahmzulegen and das verdächtige Bild
                            try: CETA_in_Gruen() # See Ratifizierung im Galopp 
                            except Protest: # see ???
                              if destroy_free_speech_and_computers(): # (english video)
                                from __future__ import plutocracy 

while wealth_breeds_wealth and wealth_gives_power: # (german text and english video)
  # see wealth vs. democracy via media-control (german)
  censor_the_net() 

As the i2p people say, anynomity is no boolean. Freenet allows you to take it a good deal further than i2p or tor, though. If you do it right.

• Worst case: If all of Apple would want to find you, because you declared that you would post the videos of the new iDing - and already sent them your videos as teaser before starting to upload them from an Apple computer (and that just after they lost their beloved dictator), you might be in problems if you use Opennet. You are about as safe as with tor or i2p.

• Best case: If a local politician would want to find you, after you uploaded proof that he takes bribes, and you uploaded the files to a new safe key (SSK) and used Freenet in Darknet-mode with connections only to friends who would rather die than let someone take over their computer, there’s no way in hell, you’d get found due to Freenet (the file data could betray you, or they could find you by other means, but Freenet won’t be your weak spot).

Steve Jobs managed to make a user interface which feels very natural. And that is no problem in itself. Apple solved a problem: User interfaces are hard to use for people who don’t have computer experience and who don’t have time to learn using computers right.

But they then used that solution to lure people into traps they set up to get our money and our freedom.

→ a comment to 10 Hackers Who Made History 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:

As I pledged¹, I just donated to freenet 50€ of the money I got back because I cannot go to FilkCONtinental. Thanks go to Nemesis, a proud member of the “FiB: Filkers in Black” who will take my place at the Freusburg and fill these old walls with songs of stars and dreams - and happy laughter.

It’s a hard battle against censorship, and as I now had some money at hand, I decided to do my part (freenetproject.org/donate.html).