I am still trying to understand the benefit to local residents of hosting APEC in Sydney. Sydneysiders have been effectively told that they won’t be welcome in their own city for over a week - so thoughtfully extended by two days by our good friend George W. Bush (God bless his soul!).

What have we got in return? With the CBD strangulated and transport crippled, there are certainly no economic benefits. In fact, The NSW Business Chamber of Commerce estimates a loss to the NSW economy of between $300 million and $1 billion.

For ordinary workers, we got just one measly day off, in return for over a week of inconvenience. I don’t understand how people of privilege such as John Howard and Jeff Kennett can refer to ordinary Australians in such disparaging (and ironic) terms as ‘the Chardonnay set‘. As far as I am (and evidently much of Sydney is) concerned, there is no benefit from this exercise, either in the short- or longer- terms. And no, I don’t count ‘international prestige’ or any such wankiness as a real benefit.

Has it been worth it, to bend over backwards for someone so stupid that even other world leaders laugh at him?

Can somebody please prove me wrong? All I see at the moment is a giant white elephant (particularly given the security blunders), but surely there must be more to it than that.

By the way, has anybody else noticed that the official APEC 2007 Web site does not work properly in Firefox? Probably because their ‘exclusive technology partner’ (read: government-authorised monopolist) is our good friend, Microsoft. What else would you expect from a mob that rules the words ‘Linux‘ and ‘Unix‘ to be ‘inappropriate language‘? I have tested this myself, and it does appear to be deliberate: you can’t even fool it with simple alterations like adding spaces or dashes between the letters.

LotD:  Chinese stock market regrets switching to Windows Vista

George Orwell’s classic allegory, Animal Farm, presents many perspectives on human behaviour and society. One of these is how people can be led and manipulated through the control of information. In the story, the Seven Commandments formed a de facto constitution for the Animalistic society. Since only a handful of animals could read, the rest were dependent upon what they were told was written. Gradually, the writing was cunningly altered to the benefit of the pigs above all other animals, and the populace was taught to not trust their recollections of what was written in the past.

What made this subversion possible was the inability of most animals to read. The two animals that could read (aside from the pigs) chose not to do anything about what they saw. Amongst other things, the right to access and read information is an important cornerstone of democracy.

This is where open file formats come in. As our lives become increasingly defined by electronic records, there needs to be a way for independent viewing and auditing. Paper is easily read, but computer files require software to decypher them. Imagine if you needed special (and expensive) glasses just to read the letter that you yourself wrote only a few years ago.

There has been a fair amount of discussion in the press regarding the OpenDocument and the so-called ‘Open’ XML formats. The primary focus of this reporting thus far has been on the political and technical facets. This is slowly changing, as the importance of long-term data preservation and freedom of information become apparent to ordinary folk.

The BBC has published a report on the problem, and discusses how the UK National Archives are attempting to deal with it. Alas, it appears that they have opted for a short-sighted approach, relying on virtualisation of older operating systems and applications, through a direct partnership with Microsoft. With this approach, the format decoders/viewers (not to mention the operating system and software performing the virtualisation itself) remain closed in source and specification, and one must deal with a cumbersome virtual machine just to view a document.

Where is the guarantee that files can be read hundreds of years from now, just as we can do today with paper documents such as the historic Magna Carta? How does this partnership benefit me, an ordinary citizen who might wish to view ten- (or even two-) year-old public documents that are only available in a proprietary electronic format?

It’s both sad and frustrating to see that history is yet again repeating itself. Whilst the contents of the Domesday Book can still be read nearly 1000 years after completion, the digital BBC Domesday Project was rendered virtually unreadable a mere 16 years later.

Thankfully, there are efforts to create an infrastructure for long-term preservation and management of digital documents. To start with, there are open formats such as OpenDocument and PDF. The Australian National Archives have long been supporters of OpenDocument, to the extent that they are standardising upon it. Putting their money where their mouths are, they are building a completely open source (GPL, no less) data managment system that anybody can use or improve to suit their needs. Michael Carden gave a great talk [Ogg video] at this year’s linux.conf.au about this technology, known as Xena [PDF]. Whilst their UK counterparts seem to have forgotten that access to data is not just a privilege for those able to make exclusive agreements with purveyors of lock-in technologies, the Australian National Archives have been striving to ensure that nobody is left out of the digital revolution.

Four legs good, two legs… better? Let’s prevent this subversion from happening.

LotD:  Mexican ‘world’s richest person’

There appears to be much confusion amongst the press and the general populace regarding the One Laptop Per Child Project, which I blogged about earlier. This article in the Murdoch press, for example, has stimulated some of these misconceptions. They stem from the false assumption that the OLPC is a computing project. "Don’t these kids deserve food, water, clothing and shelter first?", some people ask.

The fact is that the OLPC is far more than a simple computing project. It is an education project, or more broadly, a development project. The computer is merely the tool to enable education and creativity. How can one learn when a textbook costs more than an average weekly wage? Imagine if you could interact with your textbook, in the form of games and exercises. Imagine if you could learn to write your own software for this device, and distribute it to help others in your community. You can create your own artworks, write your own novel or make your own music. Wireless mesh networking allows the distribution of data between computers, and even the sharing of one Internet connection across a villiage. For many households, the keyboard lights will be the only form of artificial lighting. The possibilities are effectively limitless.

The point that I am trying to make is that it is not the computer that is important, it is what you can do with it that truly matters. The computer is an enabler, a tool that allows people to ultimately create their own livelihoods and futures. There’s no point in keeping people dependent on handouts. Let’s encourage them to stand on their own feet.

Back in the developed world, I was able to attend a panel discussion for NSW ICT for the forthcoming state election. Pia made some good analysis of the event. In summary, the representative for the Liberal Party was completely and utterly useless when the question turned to open standards and FLOSS. Moreover, both sides (Labour and Liberal) would seemingly deliberately confuse open standards and open source when questioned about them. The key when questioning such people is to not mention open standards and open source together. Force them to address the issues separately, or they will conflate the two. The City of Munich was disparagingly referred to several times as an extreme case. What disturbs me is that there was specifically strong emphasis on NSW as a procurer and consumer of ICT, rather than as a producer. So while projects like the OLPC can promote local education and industry, the NSW government wants to keep us dependent upon foreign providers.

There was enough at LCA to be excited about to give you heart palpitations. If I was forced to single out one thing, it would have to be the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC).

One of my primary interests has been the interactions between people and technology, and I have long felt that there has been scant attention payed to how this operates in developing countries. Sustainable development is a vital goal, and an important part of this ongoing process is the use of appropriate technology. This can range from bare hands and rudimentary tools to complex computational and engineering infrastructure. The key is to select what is most applicable in a given situation.

So-called ‘developed’ regions of the world might be able to accommodate expensive, disposable and inefficient technologies and methodologies. This has guided policy, R&D, production, distribution and use within this part of the world. The playing field is entirely different in developing regions, and so solutions need to be crafted with their needs in mind.

You can’t expect to successfully shoehorn a solution designed for Sydney onto Mogadishu, or even onto Maningrida. To date, however, most approaches try to do just that. This only works to an extent, if at all. In many cases it would be better to rethink things from the ground-up to come up with something more appropriate. This doesn’t mean that you’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Successful designs often base themselves upon existing policies, technologies and ideas, and then proceed to modify or redesign parts to fit their goals. The OLPC is a prime example of such an endeavour.

Whether it is successful or not is another matter. That remains up to the governments which purchase and distribute them, and the communities which accept them. The greatest challenge of the OLPC isn’t technical, it’s socio-political.

The penguins are on the march in India. It’s wonderful to see the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu taking their future development seriously by adopting free software on a wide scale. My parents are from Tamil Nadu, and most of their families still live there. Some of them have been involved quite considerably in educational and computing projects, which have unfortunately been based around Windows. This doesn’t help anyone in the long term (apart from the vendors controlling the lock-in), so it is terrific to see them working towards some autonomy and freedom.

P.S. As of today, I am a quarter of a century old. Howzat?!

Update: On the converse, we have absolutely appalling conduct in the so-called ‘developed’ world. How can a democracy function when the mechanisms of government are hidden behind proprietary data constructs? Is it truly wise to hand the keys to public information over to corporations that have zero accountability to the populace? Even their so-called ‘open’ formats aren’t really open at all.

This is quite disturbing:

A 2006 Gallup survey of American public opinion found that "many Americans harbour strong bias against U.S. Muslims".

• 22% say they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbour.
• 34% believe U.S. Muslims support al-Qaeda.
• Only 49% believe U.S. Muslims are loyal to the United States.
• 39% advocate that U.S. Muslims should carry special ID

The fact that such a large percentage of the population harbours resentment against Muslims may explain much of America’s aggressive Middle East policy from Israel to Iraq. It’s a lot easier to play with the lives of millions of people if you don’t think of them as civilised human beings, but terrorist supporters.

This appears to be consistent with other studies:

The Media and Society Research Group of Cornell University conducted a survey in November of Americans with respect to their attitudes towards Muslims. Nearly half (44%) of respondents favoured restricting the civil rights of Muslims in some way.

Such attitudes often stem from ignorance. It is exceedingly easy to dehumanise a race/religion/culture if you know nothing about them:

A survey commissioned and published by National Geographic shows that a large majority of young Americans between the age of 18-24 are geographically illiterate.

Less than 15% of the subjects could locate Iraq or Israel on a map. Only 17% could locate Afghanistan, even though the survey was carried out after the war. 11% could not locate the U.S. on a map.

Now, I am not posting this to pick on Americans. In fact, I feel that at least to some extent these results also apply to Australia and other Western countries (e.g. the UK). We like to think of ourselves as ‘enlightened’ societies, yet the ignorance many people appear to exhibit is astounding. There is much in the way of misinformation and FUD being spread around, intentional and otherwise. The solution, I feel, is education. For instance, I bet that the average Australian knows very little about Islam: its beliefs, its history and the cultures surrounding it. It is all to easy to judge people and events by our own values, the principles by which we were raised. People need to understand that what may look like ‘common sense’ to them is in fact a cultural construct, and that other cultures may see things differently. This diversity is what makes the world interesting, and this abundance of different views is what has propelled human development since the very beginning.

Those who like to argue that Islam is a backwards religion or that its people celebrate an anachronistic culture ought to investigate the 1001 Inventions Web site:

A unique UK based educational project that reveals the rich heritage that the Muslim community share with other communities in the UK and Europe.

1001 Inventions is a non-religious and non-political project seeking to allow the positive aspects of progress in science and technology to act as a bridge in understanding the interdependence of communities throughout human history.

Pia has very eloquently indicated the divide between religion and culture, and in doing so I feel she has demonstrated how truly close many world religions are in their core beliefs and values.

Another year, another Software Freedom Day…

Scrub that. That sounds far too mundane.

Software Freedom Day rocked!!!

*ahem*

I could not attend last year (since it coincided with my mum’s birthday), but this year I dived in head-first as an official helper on the A/V Team. I was assigned to do video editing and encoding, which basically entailed cropping the beginning and end off the recorded presentations and then encoding to Ogg (Vorbis and Theora) format. I had a wicked rig set up in the UNSW Law theatre that we were using for the talks, consisting of two laptops and a DV camera. The DV camera was originally intended to serve as a backup to a DVD camera we had set up elsewhere, but due to some technical glitches it rose in importance. I ended up being solely a cameraman, since we weren’t able to read our recorded DVDs on the day (it later turned out to be a simple matter of finalising the disc).

Although it was tiring keeping an eye on the camera for the entire day (through all of the talks), I must say that I enjoyed myself immensely. Pia did a fantastic job of organising and co-ordinating the event, not just in Sydney but also globally (as President of Software Freedom International). Silvia had the A/V Team well organised, and despite some minor setbacks I think we are well-prepared for LCA 2007.

What impressed me most was the speech by Senator Kate Lundy. She proved that it wasn’t orchestrated in an interview with James Purser a few days later. She truly understands what free software is about, and she does not fall into the common traps of seeing free as gratis, or open source as only having a cost benefit. She’s set up her own Joomla-based web site, and she uses Audacity to record her audio.

It’s striking to see how Senator Lundy differs from her former nemesis (while she oversaw the Communications and IT shadow ministry), Richard Alston. That is a man who was labelled ‘The World’s Biggest Luddite‘ by several international news outlets during his tenure. It is shameful to see how underappreciated she is in her party. Would it not best serve the interests of the country to have a (shadow) minister who actually knew something about their portfolio? Maybe so, but that would interfere with the politicking

Klepas pointed us on IRC to a brilliantly-done film explaining the concept of Trustworthy Computing. It concisely and clearly demonstrates why so many of us in the FLOSS world prefer to call it Treacherous Computing.

Unfortunately, the producers decided to make the film available as a Sorenson-encoded Quicktime file. I find it amusing that people who oppose digital restrictions are using such a highly-proprietary video format. Fortunately for us, there is a DivX/MP3 version (still not as good as Theora or even XviD, but it’ll do) available at Google Video.

Once you have finished viewing it, head on over to Against-TCPA for more information.

I must nominate Hotel Rwanda as my Movie of the Year. I know that it was officially released last year, but it only came to Australia this year. I rank it right up there with two of my other favourite movies, The Killing Fields and Hotaru no haka (Grave of the Fireflies).

These movies deal with incredibly disturbing subject matter: the effects of war on a civilian population. Each movie took its own approach to the topic, but they all masterfully captured the despair and suffering that people go through. What I also like about these films is that they have dealt with incidents which were either ignored or forgotten by people in other countries. Hotel Rwanda covers the Rwandan genocide of 1994, The Killing Fields is set in the Khmer Rouge dominated Cambodia of the 1970s, and Grave of the Fireflies is about Japan during World War II.

Hotel Rwanda and The Killing Fields both deal with civil war. Who cares about that? After all, it’s not in my backyard. Most of the countries in Africa are in some sort of war, yet the West currently seems more concerned with Pope John Paul II’s funeral or Prince Charles’s wedding. In the case of Cambodia, Vietnam (with diplomatic support from the USSR) turned out to be the Good Guys (funnily enough), invading the country and deposing the Khmer Rouge with popular support (despite their misgivings about the Vietnamese). The USA, Thailand and China actively worked to support the Khmer Rouge. Did we hear about any of this on television? Is it in any school history books? Nope, it’s as (self) censored as the Japanese occupation of Korea is in Japan.

The Rwandan genocide was yet another shameful event in world history. The United Nations and economically developed countries had the power to intervene and halt the bloodshed, yet they didn’t. The US had been in Somalia only a couple of years prior, but I guess Rwanda wasn’t important since it it didn’t lie on any major shipping lanes. The UN itself, France and other countries also deserve much of the blame.

Grave of the Fireflies is somewhat different, yet the same. Firstly, it is animated. This is no children’s movie, however, even if the two protagonists are children. I don’t think more impact could have been achieved if it were a live action film. Grave of the Fireflies covers yet another ignored event in world history: the effects of World War II on the Japanese population. It is natural to ignore the aggressors (or even applaud their suffering), particularly ones as brutal as the Japanese in WWII, but it is important to remember that they are just as human as everyone else. Many Germans consider the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a war crime, but did you know that the firebombing of Tokyo caused more damage and loss of life than the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which BTW were dropped on non-industrial residential areas)? I won’t get into the debate over whether such attacks were truly necessary (it was a war, after all), but we shouldn’t forget the human suffering which took place as a result, regardless of whom it is.

… well, sort of, anyway. Allow me to explain.

Today, we had a news submission about the BSA’s new scheme to teach children about the ‘evils’ of software piracy. To make this ‘learning’ (or should I say ‘indoctrination’) more fun for the kiddies, they got a mascot. Take a good look at it, what do you think it is?

It’s a ferret… supposedly.

When I first read that the BSA was using a ferret, I thought that we should call it a rat instead, since BSA is filled with dirty low-life rats. Then I hopped over to the site and had a look at it for myself. I swear, it looks like a weasel! A drugged-up homie weasel!

On a whim, I fired off an e-mail to Mike Magee at my favourite IT news site The Inquirer. If you’re not familiar with The Inq, think of it as The Register without the hubris. Indeed, Mike was the founder of The Reg, and he told me that he still owns 23% of it. Here’s part of the e-mail I sent to Mike:

The Business Software Alliance has received US Justice Department funding of $200,000 to ‘educate’ children about software piracy. More info at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19677-2003May6.html

What I’m wondering is why this organisation, which boasts some of the richest companies in the world as its members, is receiving US government funding?

Another point of interest is the mascot of this new Playitcybersafe.com initiative. It is _supposed_ to be a ferret. To me it looks like a weasel. A seriously drugged-out, homie weasel. A weasel may be the perfect choice for the BSA, but is a drugged-out homie character really the best choice to encourage children not to steal? I would say it does the exact opposite. You can see this weasel at

http://www.playitcybersafe.com/images/kidshome_ferret.gif

And here’s part of Mike’s response:

Many thanks for the nice letter. And for the tip. The BSA is up to all sorts of tricks and we’ll certainly cover this one.

A few hours later… BANG! Weasel Watch is born! Some excerpts:

HEAVILY SUBSIDED TRADE organisation the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has received $200,000 funding from the US government to promote a software piracy scheme aimed at children.

But that has raised questions about why the Justice Department has chipped into the scheme, seeing as the BSA is already subsidised, in fact paid for, to the tune of millions, by some of the richest IT companies in the world.

and

In fact the BSA Weasel, pictured above, looks like it’s either drugged up or it’s about to bite someone’s ankle, don’t you think?

SCORE!!!