comment

EME in standards would mount enormous pressure on all free systems

→ comment to On EME in HTML5 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.

If you do what you love doing, it becomes what you are good at

comment to You’re Not Meant To Do What You Love. You’re Meant To Do What You’re Good At. 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.

Richard M. Stallman stands for Free Software

→ 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:

I hope French Filesharers turn to Freenet

→ Comment to France Starts Reporting ‘Millions’ of File-Sharers by Torrent Freak.

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

I’ve been running it for years now, and it got better and more secure every year.

The Four Freedoms of Free Culture: Avoid Cultural Slavery

→ comment to The Four Freedoms of Free Culture on QuestionCopyright.org.

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. Now I also allow cc by-sa for text.

Instead I use the GPLv3, for my site (draketo.delicensing) as well as for a free roleplaying book I write (1w6.org — 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.

writing together – collaborative editing is easy

→ comment to The next wave in scholarly word processors?

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).

Killing the head of a terrorist organization doesn’t stop it

→ A comment to The Effectiveness of Political Assassinations.

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.

Internet, community cloud foo and control of my own data

Why?

What I miss in the internet is the notion of being able to control what my apps access for data.

Why can’t a chat application just connect to a neighborhood- or community-server, and why can’t the activity-stream come from the people I know — and query only their systems, like jabber does?

Almost all geolocation services should be implementable over direct friend-to-friend connections like jabber, and I don’t really see why my local identi.ca program can’t also get the news from my local jabber contacts.

The internet means unlimited copying. What we make of it depends on us

Comment to is the web too good for us on a BBC blog:

But the web was not really free in the beginning. While its structure was open for everyone and websites bloomed and blossomed by copying code and design from others, the content of sites stayed closed by copyright.

There were many thoughts of freedom in the original web, but the structure gave more freedom than the law, and the easy copying inside the new medium still didn't reach the slow legal body of our offline communities.

Howard-Taylor: A rising figure

A comment to The newspaper said it, so it must be true:

You already made the "I get paid for doing a free webcomic" rise, now next part is... ?

Some ideas:

Mercurial for two Programmers who are (mostly) new to SCM

Written in the Mercurial mailing list

Hi Bernard,

Am Dienstag 03 Februar 2009 20:19:14 schrieb ... ...:
> Most of the docs I can find seem to assume the reader is familiar with
> existing software developemnt tools and methodologies.
>
> This is not the case for me.

It wasn't for me either, and I can assure you that using Mercurial becomes
natural quite quickly.

british telekom wants to block accounts just for using Gnutella or BitTorrent

-> a comment to BT to cut off file sharers 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.

On Forums and trolls

written in the Phex Forum.

"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."

How Drupal will save the world - Simplicity for beginners, complexity for experts - get in quick

Written in reply to: How Drupal will save the world.

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:

  • A newssite, needed mostly taxonomy.
  • A personal site, needed book and taxonomy, as well as themes.

LimeWire Interview - badmouthing their own technology

Comment to the LimeWire-Interview on Slyck.

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."

Swarming, Torrent and Gnutella

In Reply to:
http://www.computeractive.co.uk/personal-computer-world/features/2193584...

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

p2p-networks help law enforcement catch hard criminals

Comment to: Local man faces court on child pornography charges by heraldstandard.com

As I see it, the only way the authorities did track him was due to his use of p2p-networks.

At the moment, technology makes it relatively easy for the police to track hard criminals in p2p-networks, but it also allows people to do small infringements rather safely (just like people don't stop at red traffic lights when there is no car in sight),

So I'd think the current state quite ideal.

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