~stef/blog/

• Etimology :)
• You can have all kinds of dynamic content on your page, e.g. lightbox handles filegalleries, and disqus could also handle comments. For the sake of my readers I try do not leak visitors info to 3rd parties (I failed earlier, but changed policies since then). So no comments on my blog. But the server storage is read only, no funky dbs or code running.
• It's perfect if you rent some minimalistic vm's or ftp accounts to host your site, a big cms needs much more resources - money. Utterson is a good example on what is possible without a CMS and database storage.
• You write your posts in your favourite editor - not in some textarea or js editor. The formatting is done using textile or markdown or whatever wiki compiler your editor has built-in.
• The whole thing is generated using a self-generating makefile. which keeps the code very small. And here's the generator in ksh (proudly without perl, php, python, etc)! ;) the makefile recognizes if one of it's dependenies changed and regenerates itself accordingly.
• I sure don't worry about automated worms looking for utterson installations. :)

thx: juraj

Utterson is the static blogengine powering this blog. It is based on a bunch of shell-scripts and a self-generating makefile, only basic unix tools have been used (m4, gnu make, ksh93, rsync, ssh, etc). It comes with emacs integration and support for mailing in blogposts automatically via procmail. The engine has been serving this blog for the last 6 months without problems. Only a couple of small changes where necessary since the introduction of utterson, these have been commited to the github repo and are available as a v1.0 download. For more information head over to the README.

ACTA notes

Sok minden történik az ACTA egyezmény körül, nemrég előadást tartottam a metalabban a témával kapcsolatban, alább az angol nyelvű jegyzetem.

background - history

• EU is 21% of the worlds GDP (PPP) while the US is only 20%
• WTO/TRIPs, World Trade Organization, established January 1st 1995, replaced GATT, Trade Related aspect of Intellectual Property rights agreement
• [the following 3 bulletts curtesy of W] Big Pharma is in trouble, Ever expanding marketing and R&D costs, approval costs, duration of approval procedures
• Big Content is in trouble, Disintermediation, Overabundance of material
• Original UN institutions as WIPO, BRIC countries are fed up with maximalists, NGOs have gotten a seat at the table
• Spring 2008, the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Australia as well as a few other countries start to secretly negotiate a trade agreement aimed at enforcing copyright and tackling counterfeited goods (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).
• some leaks appear, complete leak in march 2010, after negotiations in new zealand the eu publishes the first public draft.
• The parliament: Resolution 10th March, voted overwhelmingly 633/13/16 - record of votes (search for "(ACTA) - RESOLUTION") "Parliament considers that the proposed agreement should not make it possible for any "three-strike" procedures to be imposed, in order to protect fundamental rights."

main issues

• Acta benefits a few companies to the detriment of billions of humans.
• policy laundering avoiding any hint of democracy Schlyter (swedish green mep): industrial lobby 90% of the participants in stakeholder meetings, among others: pfizer, daimler, ms, timewarner, google, yahoo, bsa, mpaa, pharma, br american tobacco, br telecom.
• criminal sanctions (ipred) - the commissions negotiator devigne on going beyond the acquis vs the council
  • inclusion of non-commercial activities
  • border measures, search of personal items like phones, mp3 players, notebooks.
• freedom of speech, one MEP talked about suppressing access to radical political sites.
• privacy (monitoring, seizure, deep packet inspection) - Peter Hastinx, EDPS on acta: "Intellectual property must be protected, but it should not be placed above individuals' right to privacy and protection."
• 3rd party liability - Alexander Alvaro from Germany said that "third party liability for internet servers is like making the post office responsible for what is written on the letters it sends".
• censorship (censilia/censursula, blocking)
• access to medicines - Medicines sans frontieres: "We are in danger of ending up with the worst of both worlds, pushing IP rules, which are very effective at stopping access to life-saving drugs but are very bad at stopping or preventing fake drugs."
• other markets, that are dominated by a few big: spare car parts after-market, perhaps even thingiverse
• The opposition to ACTA has support from edri, tacd, ffii, kei, reporters sans frontieres, EuroISPA (business association of eu ISPs)

what can be done

• Written declaration 12/2010 was initially signed by MEPs Roithová (EPP) / Castex and Lambrinidis (S&D) / Alvaro (ALDE). list of signatories.
• never allow similar un-democratic legislative process, since we have arrived in the lisbon treaty the EP has co-decision powers, these are democratically elected, while the commision not. We need to help the MEPs to discover and protect their new powers. Demand to start from scratch, not accepting a draft that has been 2 years in secret preparation.
• get india/brazil/china/russia to comment and act on acta (india commented last tuesday, in an EP public hearing)
• convince MEPs sign written declaration 12, generally educating them about acta, showing that people care.
• community work: transcribing, cleaning, analyzing, translating, documents, leaks.
  • telecomix (pads+irc+twitter+wikis+small tools)
  • lqdn (wiki+co-ment+pads+twitter)
  • euwiki.org, pippi longstrings (not public yet), itsyourparliament.eu, custom tools!
  • develop tools that circumvent any kind of control, become a ciphernaut today!
  • support: LQDN, telecomix, eff, ffii, edri, your MEPs, wikileaks!
• make more videos like: cleanternet

assorted links

• La Quadrature du Net - ACTA dossier
• telecomix/werebuild.eu
• acta on co-ment.com
• wikification of the actaleak in march
• diff between leak and publication after NZ negotiations
• chapter-by-chapter clean-up of the leak and publication
• automated chapter-by-chapter diff of leak and publication
• pippi longstrings analysis of the NZ publication
• Michael Geist on acta
• EFF on acta
• Ante Wessels from ffii on acta in vienna
• The European Greens/EFA on acta

In Barcelona I showed off my timecloud widget. Then someone /* thx: a ;) */ asked if it is possible to add tagclouds to the European database of laws, eur-lex. This was the birth of bonobo.

Bonobo is a greasmonkey script which automatically retrieves the tagclouds for all legislative text available in HTML. All you need is the Greasemonkey Firefox plugin and bonobo. According to wikipedia this script might also work on other browsers than Firefox.

If you have both greasemonkey and bonobo installed, start browsing here for example.

Bonobo gets the tagcloud information from a back-end server, which retrieves, caches and converts the legislative texts to tagclouds. Like Bonobo this back-end server is also part of a set of tools trying to cut through the fog of legislation. If you're interested in the code (AGPLv3) visit the project on github.

Please bear in mind, that this back-end server is running in a quite unstable environment. It might happen, that you're not served your tagclouds. If anyone can donate some spare hosting for this service, that would be awesome. It would really feel at home on a Debian server. ;)

I have some other ideas queued already for further developments, check this project github page regularly.

a Versenyügyi biztos a netgeneráció  kapcsán 2 millió munkahelyet jósol: [update]: és gyorsan még egy videó a hölgytől, ezúttal a könyvek digitalizálásáról, a szerzői jogról és az az orphan works problémakörről (via EUXTV) akinek van rá 46 perce, itt megnézheti a teljes beszédet.

Technology Bill of Rights

1. Any individual shall be able to choose anonymity when posting to Internet sites
2. No network provider may constrain or restrict access to the Internet in any way, shape, or form other than agreed-upon access speeds
3. No individual shall be held liable for effects of malware or malicious code unknowingly run on a personal computer
4. A company that produces and sells closed source software for use on computers shall be responsible for the security of that product, and a user has a right to seek damages in the event of a failure to secure their product
5. Any software or hardware used to conduct or support laws and public policy shall be open-source
6. Any media content legally purchased by an individual shall be available for private use on any device, at any time

Brazil komment:

WE Are Currently Living In a historical moment which will define and shape digital rights and information freedom on the internet for generations to come. It's one of those rare moments where the issue is black and white and where the two opposing camps can be identified without over-simplifying the issue. On one side, there are those fighting for the information revolution's culture of sharing, co-operation and the public commons. On the other side is a powerful, industry cartel who would stomp out the commons to salvage proprietary information that they can buy and own.

Németországból egy idevágó, provokatív filmecske: "Terrorista vagy"

Du bist Terrorist (You are a Terrorist) english subtitles from alexanderlehmann on Vimeo.

[update: reposted]

Jquery UI v1.7 came out yesterday. The new timecloud v1.2 already supports this upgrade.  Enjoy.

Good news everyone. A fresh timecloud release is awaiting you. Stuff that changed:

• you can embed multiple timeclouds in a page
• lot's of bug fixes
• updated to the latest versions of jquery (1.3.2), jquery-ui (1.6rc6), sparkline (1.4)

Head over to the project page or directly to the downloads while it's fresh. If you're inclined you're welcome to the git repo as well.

After looking into the problem with jquery 1.3+ and timecloud widget, the issue seems to be, that the culprit was my upgrade of jquery-ui to 1.6rc6 up from the 1.5 branch. The slider widget was heavily rewritten if i understand this mailing-list thread correctly.

My guess is, that there is a discrepancy between different versions of  jquery and the slider widget. The timecloud widget will work with jquery 1.3+, but without correctly working sliders.

i'll need to dig deeper to work this out.

seems like those two don't like each other yet - as far as the slider controls are a concern. sorry folks, in the mean time stick with jquery-1.2.6.

cheers,

s

Nothing to hide

I have been lucky to visit the 25th Chaos Communication Congress between the 27th and 30th December. It was sold out the very first day, good seats, power outlets and free switch-ports were rare and well-guarded. :)

The lectures all were very inspiring, if you had a wired net-connection, you could also watch the talks in other rooms. Below is a short list to most lectures i saw either way. If you care there is a bunch of torrent files indexed on the pirate bay. Please note that all quotes below are not verbatim, they are notes quickly taken during the lectures.

quotes

• Fnord news show "good indicator for e-gov adoption is the loss of data"
• rfid talk: "never force technology onto users"
• Bre Pettis: "smoke is how robots express love", "school is dead",
• cisco ios "international ... sign: (_ x _)"
• la quadrature du net - netzpolitik.de
  • "law is code, ammendmends are patches. if a patch arrives 1 day before voting and and more than 800 patches need to be vetted it is very bad project managment."
  • the term "illegal software" raises interesting issues what about free software? if i alter it will it change from legal to illegal?
• not soy fast
  • patents: monsanto bought a lot of seed producers for soy, corn, cotton, etc. "protecting" IPR.
  • "hunger is not the result of scarcity of food, it is instead the result of an uneven distribution at the world level..." amartya sen. nobel prize winner.

visit

• hackerspaces

privacy

• onioncat with anonymous services - never leaving the tor network - .onion addresses.

robots

• Formica swarm robots: very cool robots, lot's of potential
• about://Asimov/robot/laws...

politics

• neusprech - newspeak in german
• Der elektronische Personalausweis - towards a commercial surveillance architecture / in german.
• e-voting and crypto - no silver bullet?
• wikileaks using onioncat to anonymize usage

crypto

• new stream ciphers: great to see some fresh approaches
• md5 collisions

security

• storm: p2p botnet owned.
  • opendht
  • python dht - entangled
• dect owned - used in many places.
• NFC phones hacked
  • An rfid tag presents a free "tourist info" telefon number, but a premium charged call is made instead.
  • Sticker attack:: putting your own sticker over an other rfid tag.

  quis custodiet ipsos custodes: who will watch the watchers

Thanks a lot everyone! It was great!

After some further development yesterday came v1.1 and now today v1.1.1 with some additional fixes. Head on over to the shiny new project website and grab your copy while it's hot. There are also some updated examples

• Tikiwiki subversion activities (also on screenshot),
• view your delicious tags in real-time

Hint: try to scroll the view with your mousewheel. If you're using this widget, please let me know, thanks! enjoy! update: fixed link to subversion example. updated: links to demos.

JQuery Timecloud v1.0

Lately I have been trying to visualize a couple of things around me. One of the results is this JQuery Timecloud plugin producing somewhat nice looking animated tagclouds.

In the screenshot below I processed the Subversion logs of the Tikiwiki project and plotted the number of changes (commits) by developers over time.

As you can see below, the timecloud widget provides a similar interface to the Google Finance timeseries. In the top you have an overall view of all time activities, here you can zoom the timeframe and pan the selection.

Underneath there is a zoomed in view of the currently viewed timespan.

The first button starts/stops the animation, where the time frame is automatically advanced to the next day, thus creating an impression of moving through time. With the second button you can step forward by one frame, dunno if this is really necessary, it might be removed later.

HINT: If you set the timeframe in the overview to cover the whole dataset, you will be able to see an all encompassing tagcloud, but won't be able to animate it.

If you're interested head over to to the project home and have fun!

Cheers,

s

[UPDATE] In the download package there is an example which let's you visualize your delicious tags in such a tagcloud, unfortunately it needs a PHP enabled webserver to run.

[UPDATE2] a live example can be found here and one  for your delicious tags

[UPDATE3] the project home moved to ohloh.net, all references updated. development and versiontracking  is still at github.

[UPDATE4] demos found a new home.