Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club

As Paul mentioned at our last meeting, the ABC has followed the BBC in crippling their programs with Digital Restrictions Management. The ABC, which has until recently been pretty good at digital distribution, is now selling us copies of programs we already paid for in a form which restricts how we can use these recordings.

Purchasing and viewing these videos requires the "integrated ABC Shop Media Player and its Downloads Manager", which only works on Windows and Internet Explorer. The videos cannot be played on any other software or device. The software is proprietary, so you have no way of knowing what it is actually doing, but among the features the manufacturer boasts of are:

• "Peer assisted content delivery technology". That is, P2P file-sharing technology like BitTorrent, only in this case the sharing is not under your control, and you can't opt out. The ABC Shop's customers are paying to receive this data, but they are not necessarily receiving the data from the ABC Shop; more likely from other ABC Shop customers. You are paying the ABC Shop for a service, even though you are just as much the provider of that service as they are.
• "PDF and Windows Media file control features." You don't have control over the files you pay for, the ABC Shop does. You may have paid for it, but they still own it.
• "A rich reporting and analytics tool that shows downloads as well as advanced metrics such as who has viewed which content, when, and for how long." Big Brother is watching you watching your videos.
  

DefectiveByDesign.org has the full story, and advice on what you can do about it.

Computerworld has an interesting overview of the new feature in Windows that no computer user has ever asked for: the ability for third parties to control what you can and can't do with your computer. This is a particular worry for Australian users, given that circumventing Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) systems is soon to become a crime in itself, regardless of whether you are doing so in order to facilitate another illegal activity (such as copyright infringement) or simply trying to watch a movie you legally acquired.

We've had a couple of proposals on how to shake things up a bit for the Computer Club in 2007. The first is to find a day of the week to meet that is more congenial to more people than Friday. I've put a poll up on the site where you can register your opinion on that issue. We're also thinking of changing the ways dues are collected. If you have any opinions/suggestions about these or other ways we can make the running of the club better fit the needs of current and potential members, please bring them along to the next meeting (the last for this year), or leave them in the comments below.

For anybody who, like me, is running a computer five years or more old, every software upgrade is accompanied by a fear that increased system requirements will render your computer so sluggish as to be practically useless. This list of Firefox 2 configuration tweaks includes a few tips to help you wring another year or two out of your old hardware.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, I have received my first ever piece of spam masquerading as a mailing list reminder.

I've never been to this website associated with the email, much less subscribed to a list. A little bit of investigating shows that although this company has a mailing list server, it has (at the time of writing) no actual lists configured. A quick whois query revealed that the owner of the sell-my-stuff.com domain is a company called NH Web Host (who I won't reward by linking to their site), and the domain administrative contact address is baconda@nhwebhost.net.

You should never put an undisguised email address on a public website, as that email address will be harvested by spam bots, and will shortly receive a greatly increased amount of spam. Whoops.

At our Software Freedom Day event, there was some discussion of the relative merits of two educational software packages: Blackboard, a proprietary software package, and Moodle, it's free software equivalent. I have to admit I've used neither, but among those who have used both, the consensus seems to be that Moodle has the edge in versatility, due of course to the freedoms granted to users in the licensing terms.

It seems now that the company behind Blackboard have decided that they're not prepared to compete in a race they can't win, so they've decided to attempt to get all their competitors disqualified. The US patent office has awarded them a patent "for technology used for internet-based education support systems and methods."

Website Academic Commons reports that not only does this incredibly broad patent endanger products that directly compete with Blackboard, but educators "also need to worry about using a blog or wiki with a class of students. In fact, simple networking protocols, authentication practices, and the like, if undertaken by a school could well be jeapordized by this patent."

Some big news on the OpenOffice.org front: this report from the OpenOffice.org conference held earlier this month reveals plans to integrate the MozillaThunderbird email client and Mozilla Sunbird calendaring application into the OpenOffice.org suite, and to implement a Mozilla-like extensions system to OpenOffice.org. Hopefully this means more than just additional bloat to an already heavy set of applications. If currently core components of OpenOffice.org are sliced off into optional loadable modules, it could be possible to open a particular kind of document in OpenOffice.org and only load those components necessary for working with that document type. That has the pontential to reduce loading time, system resource use, and interface clutter. This would work particularly well with modular document types like XHTML 1.1, which has been designed specifically for this kind of use. It will be nice to see development of Sunbird get an added kick, as well.

The OpenOffice.org documentation team have also launched a template/clipart competition, with some pretty nice cash incentives for contributing your designs to the community.

Software Freedom Day 2006 Coffs Harbour was a stunning success, due entirely to the fantastic team of people who devoted their time and recources. As with the previous year I committed Coffs Harbour to this event with only a vague idea that we'd have the resources to do it, and again the community came through in spades.

Software Freedom Day is nearly upon us. Tomorrow we'll be handing out CDs and flyers from 12 noon around the pedestrian mall on Harbour Drive. Please come along to help spread the word. Let me know if you can make it, so I can arrive with an appropriate amount of CDs and flyers.

The following day the fun officially starts at 10:00am at the Professional Centre, but we'll be setting up from around 8:30am. Again, any help will be greatly appreciated.

Seems like the claim of 140 Software Freedom Day teams worldwide, taken from a conservative estimate a month or so ago and circulated in our flyers and press releases, was a bit premature. Pia Waugh reports that it's looking more like there will be over 200 teams this year, not bad for an event in it's third year. And the country with the most teams? Pascal Klein notes that it's Australia. What is this strange and unfamiliar feeling? Could it be national pride?