News

Caution: Videos from the ABC Shop are Defective By Design

Matthew Davidson — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 08:11:31 +0000

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.

Windows Vista: Hollywood Owns Your Computer

Matthew Davidson — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 21:53:24 +0000

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.

Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club in 2007

Matthew Davidson — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 04:29:19 +0000

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.

The proposal about membership dues is basically that instead of collecting $2 per member at each meeting they attend, to levy about the same amount on a quarterly basis. This makes administration easier, and provides members with an incentive to make the most out of their investment and attend as often as possible. Some details have to be worked out before this can be implemented, eg.:

Does this quarterly fee include the current yearly fee, or do we effectively pay yearly for membership and quarterly for attendance?
What do we do about members who join mid-quarter?

Firefox 2 Config Tips

Matthew Davidson — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 21:56:00 +0000

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.

Mailing List Reminder Spam

Matthew Davidson — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 06:49:30 +0000

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.

This is a reminder, sent out once a month, about your
sell-my-stuff.com mailing list memberships.  It includes your
subscription info and how to use it to change it or unsubscribe from a
list.

You can visit the URLs to change your membership status or
configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery
or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

In addition to the URL interfaces, you can also use email to make such
changes.  For more info, send a message to the '-request' address of
the list (for example, d51-request@sell-my-stuff.com-txt-link-abbreviated">d51-owner@sell-my-stuff.com.  Thanks!

Passwords for email@address.obfuscated:

List                                     Password // URL
----                                     --------  
d51@sell-my-stuff.com                    ivcarimo  
http://mail.sell-my-stuff.com/mailman/options/d51_sell-my-stuff.com/email%40address.obfuscated

Patent Threatens Educational Software

Matthew Davidson — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 09:18:33 +0000

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."

OpenOffice.org News

Matthew Davidson — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 23:00:33 +0000

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.

SFD 2006 Coffs Harbour Team Report

Matthew Davidson — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 07:02:35 +0000

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.

Celebrations began on Friday with Cameron Gregg and myself in the town centre, pushing flyers and CDs into the hands of passers-by momentarily blinded by our neon orange Software Freedom Day t-shirts. We handed out approximately 300 flyers, and about 20 CDs. A number of interested people stopped to chat about free software, and a much larger number of people stopped to boast about never having used a computer, some explaining in meticulous detail why they never intend to. We learned a lot.

The day itself started at the indecent hour of 8:00am, when all respectable people should be reading Slashdot in their pajamas and rummaging through the fridge for leftovers. Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club president Max Ward and his wife Marie were on hand to open up our venue at the Professional Centre and within half an hour we had a chain of volunteers hauling the demonstration computers from OpenPC Labs upstairs.

As the our official opening time of 10:00am grew closer, it became apparent that the way the Professional Centre LAN was configured wasn't quite the way it was configured a week earlier, when we visited to test out the network in order to ensure we would have Internet access. Frantic educated guesswork followed until, in classic Hollywood style, the correct numbers were punched in with seconds to spare.

The room quickly filled to capacity, and visitors listened patiently to me running through in turn: the definition of free software, the history of the free software movement, the future of the free software movement, and the very short and inglorious future waiting for the proprietary software world. Apparently I say 'um' a lot when addressing an audience from prepared notes, so I can say with confidence that Richard Stallman need not worry about me; his job is quite safe. By the end of the first question and answer session, what with all the 'um's and so on, it was apparent that my fears that we wouldn't have enough material to keep people entertained for the duration of the day were quite unfounded.

Daniel Billings then wowed the room with a presentation on the use of free software in community groups which was in equal measure a presentation on the use of theatrical skills at free software events. My attempts at taking photos of Daniel at work produced mainly photos of the audience open-mouthed in astonishment. Daniel himself was a blur.

Next came a presentation from Cameron Gregg of Sydney Indymedia and a host of related organisations. After a brief history of Indymedia and the free software that keeps it ticking over, Cameron dropped a bombshell: the launch of a Coffs Harbour Independant Media Centre. He was quickly inundated with eager volunteers.

A short break for lunch followed (we were by now well behind schedule) and on our return we were treated to a short presentation by Peter Rake on using gThumb to manage digital photographs. The phrase "colourful local identity" doesn't come close to doing justice to the legend that is Peter Rake. Several people expressed surprise that he wasn't a fictional character after all, and the majority of attendees were thus greatly reasurred by this evidence that free software isn't just for introverted computer nerds.

Anne Hellou from the Coffs Harbour Education Campus then treated us to a sneak peek at the way they are using Moodle to deliver online training, which elicited some horrifying war stories from audience members who have had the misfortune to be forced to use a similar proprietary product in the past. These were not related to any technical inferiority of the proprietary product, but to the restrictions imposed by the vendor on how the product could be used. Moodle is obviously not encumbered by any such restrictions. You couldn't ask for a better illustration of the benefits of software freedom in education.

David Chapman runs OpenPC Labs, a local business providing free software support and an Internet cafe near the Coffs Harbour Jetty area (he's often asked "is this the new version of Windows?"). Unfortunately he lost one of his planned presentations to schedule slippage, but managed to fit in a demonstration of the use of WINE to run legacy Windows applications. Not only did he demonstrate Internet Explorer running on GNU/Linux, but he managed to run three different versions of Internet Explorer on the one machine, something that I am told is difficult or impossible on the operating system IE was written for.

David also gave us a quick demo of Inkscape, the vector drawing application that, in tandem with the GIMP, was apparently one of the most popular apps on the demonstration systems during the day.

With very little time left, I raced through a presentation I had prepared on the nascent "free culture" movement. Utlimately, all I really needed to do to get the message across was to quote the Free Software Foundation's Eben Moglen: "In the twenty-first century, there will be no such thing as an unpublished poet, which is good, because in the twentieth century there was damn near no such thing as a published poet."

As a final treat, Hugh Evans demonstrated XGL and Compiz, leaving us all speechless with a mixture of surprise, mirth, and motion sickness.

Thank You

This event exceeded all expectations and was more fun that can possibly be decent and seemly in this day and age. Gratitude is due to too many people to name, but special effort should be made to recognise the generosity of:

Linda Ward of the Professional Centre, who stepped in at the 11th hour when we found ourselves without a venue and provided us with the best such venue on the Coffs Coast.
David Chapman of OpenPC Labs who, for the second year in a row, completely dismantled his shop and reassembled it on the other side of town, so that we could have a wide range of demonstration systems running Mandriva, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Gentoo.
Our volunteers, particularly Max and Marie Ward who were invaluable in preparing the venue and "nerd-herding" throughout the day.
All our speakers, particularly Daniel Billings, who also arranged a table of merchandise from ELX, and was a one-man publicity whirlwind.
The dynamic and beautiful Allison Davidson of Alma Technology, whose quietly efficient organising (as a number of people observed on the day) made it all possible, and proved you can sometimes find great women behind even quite average men.

Lessons Learned

Never try to organise something like this if you suspect grey hair doesn't suit you.
Separate "newbies" and "nerds" tracks would make the experience less taxing for attendees. Effectively organising two meetings would have been too much to arrange this year, but next year, who knows...?
Pre-publicity is an issue; getting the local press to cover anything that isn't a sporting event is an uphill battle.
We didn't get the message out to local educational institutions well enough, and participation from local IT businesses remains limited to those already working virtually exclusively with free software.

Software Freedom Day 2007 Coffs Harbour

This year's event was an order of magnitude bigger and more enjoyable that last year's, so the bar for 2007 is already set very, very high indeed. With a number of people already volunteering to be on the team for the organisation of SFD 2007 things are looking very exciting.

See you in 2007!

Matthew Davidson

SFD2006 Coffs team contact, vice-president Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club, free software user.

Two more sleeps!

Matthew Davidson — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 03:11:35 +0000

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.

There are at last count over 200 teams celebrating Software Freedom Day 2006 worldwide, 15 of which are based in Australia - the highest number of teams in any single country!

Software Freedom Day Taking Off

Matthew Davidson — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 23:20:23 +0000

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?