Academics have called into action against the academic publisher Elsevier, part of the Reed-Elsevier company. The online petition thecostofknowledge.com, has been signed by more than 1.900 academics in the past week. The academics signing this petition will no longer publish in the 2000 Elsevier journals with quality publications like The Lancet and Cell. The criticism of the academics is aimed
BPN 1591: CEO WK: mobile is more profitable than online
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: January 31, 2012
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Yesterday I attended an award ceremony of the Dutch media association of professional and scientific information providers. Part of the program was a speech by Nancy McKinstry, the CEO of Wolters Kluwer. Of course when a CEO of a publically listed company speaks at such an occasion you should not expect news as company information is stock-sensitive.However Ms McKinstry spoke in the framework
When you go to FOSDEM…
Source: freedom bits
Posted: January 30, 2012
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…don\'t forget to pack your résumé.
If you\'re looking for a job working on Free Software/Open Source, or want a change of positions, that is.
At the current point in time I am aware of existing openings for all sorts of profiles, including, but not limited to:
some of them positions we\'ll be looking to fill in our own company, Kolab Systems, some time this year. Some of them are in our company group, some in befriended companies that keep asking me for viable candidates in various areas.
Naturally for Kolab Systems candidates with community experience, connection and participation will be preferred. For some of our partner companies it\'s not that important. Some of these jobs would offer the opportunity to relocate to Switzerland, some of them would offer the opportunity to work from home, most of them are located in Europe.
And while I cannot promise that I\'ll find jobs for everyone, or that I\'ll have your dream job for you, I may just know an interesting place for you and will be happy to pass your résumé along.
So don\'t hesitate to get track me down to have a chat!
BPN 1590 Entertaining Europe in the Electronic Age
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: January 24, 2012
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On January 24th, 2012, Ms Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, addressed the European Parliament Intellectual Property Forum, at the European Parliament in Brussels on the subject of Entertaining Europe in the Electronic Age. Thank you for inviting me to speak on the opportunities for the creative sector in the online age. It\'s an
BPN 1589 No endless bankruptcy for Dutch e-reader manufacturer
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: January 18, 2012
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The Netherlands based Endless Ideas, the company behind the Bebook line of e-readers, officially filed for bankruptcy on January 5, 2012. The company offered in less than two years the e-reader models Bebook Neo, One, Club, Mini, and the recently released Club S. The problem for the company was the worldwide competition, the stay in the middle price range, technical problems and bloating
Now blogging on my book blog at Consentofthenetworked.com
Source: RConversation
Posted: January 18, 2012
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Please note that I have shifted my regular blogging activity over to my book\'s website at consentofthenetworked.com. Click here to subscribe to that blog\'s RSS feed, or subscribe to email updates by clicking on the link under \"follow blog by email\" in the right-hand column.
Non commercial communication: Hackaton for Olympic Games in London UK
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: January 13, 2012
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BPN 1588: The year that was (1): Arab spring
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: December 27, 2011
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BPN 1587 Internet access and use in EU27 in 2011
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: December 14, 2011
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Almost a quarter of persons aged 16-74 in the EU27 have never used the internetFor many people today it seems difficult to live without the internet, however a decreasing, but still non-negligible, part of the EU population has never used it. In the EU27, almost three quarters of households1 had access to the internet in the first quarter of 2011, compared with almost half in the first quarter
A primer for Kolab 3.0 – and ways of getting involved
Source: freedom bits
Posted: December 13, 2011
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After several months of development sprint the new Kolab web frontend has been unveiled for RHEL and UCS. We\'re in fact quite proud of what our team has achieved this year and hope you will agree:
![\"Kolab](\"http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/files/2011/12/roundcubeMain.jpeg\")
The main email view
![\"Kolab](\"http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/files/2011/12/roundcubeOrganizer.jpeg\")
The calendar week view
This new web client is building upon the Roundcube Webmailer, considered the best Free Software web mail applications by many, and all changes made have been provided to the respective upstreams. The Kolab specific modules are being hosted by Kolab Systems.
In case you would like to see for yourself how this new client has turned out, we have set up a test & demo instance. You can request an account by sending email with your name, email & affiliation to sysadmin-main+kolab@klab.cc. If you want, you can also request several accounts in the same way to test calendar sharing and such. But please be aware that this instance is running on a fairly small virtual machine, so speed won\'t be what you see in a full fledged installation. Also this is a test bed for some experiments of ours, which means there may be occasional breakage. If you find something that is broken and remains broken, please file an issue at https://bugzilla.kolab.org.
This web client is now available for customers as part of our standard supported offering, and for those currently using the Version 2.3 Community Release we have a KVM image that you can hook up against an existing instance to give you the interface right away. We would have liked to provide it even easier, and will probably do something in the future, but for the moment we felt that speed was more important than perfection and so wanted to let you have a look at this immediately.
Because OpenPKG has been on the deprecation path for two years now and no future release will use it, there won\'t be the same smooth upgrade possibility. So we felt that one clean break is better than two successive ones over a few years and already did a lot of the cleanup of LDAP idiosyncrasies we had on our radar for some time. This has happened in the 2.4 experimental branch already, but as a result the old web admin interface which was hard-coded against the LDAP schema no longer works. Now of course one could try to hard-code it against a new schema. But then that would be a lot of effort for very little gain.
Knowing that we had reached the end of the line for incremental updates, it was time to jump.
That is why our next community release will be Kolab Server 3.0 as announced last week on our development list. Allow me to give you a little bit of an overview.
There will be a couple of under-the-hood changes for Kolab 3.0, and some very visible ones. A lot of work under the hood has already been prepared or begun on the grounds of the Kolab Enhancement Process (KEP) which has produced some pretty good output so far. These address capabilities in the format, as well as updates to match a technological world that has been evolving fast.
When Kolab started using IMAP as a NoSQL storage data base, this concept was not all that well understood by many people, and IMAP itself had only just begun lending itself to this kind of approach through the ANNOTATEMORE draft RFC. This is what Kolab has been using up and until version 2.3, but since this draft has long expired and has become RFC 5464 – The IMAP METADATA Extension, it is time to finally lay ANNOTATEMORE to rest. With KEP 9, we also introduce per-message meta data based on RFC 5257 – Internet Message Access Protocol – ANNOTATE Extension for which we have some plans that will hopefully become clear after the 3.0 release.
More importantly, we are giving the Kolab XML Format & Specification a fairly comprehensive overhaul based on a wide range of customer experience and also because the RFC process has completed two fairly important RFCs for us this year: RFC 6321 xCal: The XML Format for iCalendar and RFC 6351 xCard: vCard XML Representation. These will be the basis of our new Event, Task & Address book objects.
The entire format will be described in normative XSD, the code generated & provided through an API with language bindings for a wide variety of programming languages, making it easier than ever to write a Kolab client. This effort is led by Christian Mollekopf, who has prepared a KEP for the specification, and provided a good summary on the why\'s and how\'s of this approach, which came out of a community consultation process that took place on the kolab-format mailing list.
![\"\"](\"http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/files/2011/12/KolabServer-Component-Overview.png\")
Kolab Server: Each box can be clustered individually
We also wanted to emphasize further on one of the great strengths of the Kolab Groupware Solution: Scalability. It is possible to set up the Kolab Server in ways that allow for natural high-availability, load-balancing & site reliability with a granularity of performance monitoring and adjustment that allows each individual component to be scaled up or down as required.
(And yes, we have implemented this kind of setup before. In two separate geographical locations. With all optional components. Built so it can scale up to 100s of thousands of users. Any machine can fail at any point without even disturbing the individual session of the user. It is a thing of beauty of which we are proud. We really wish we could talk about it.)
Naturally we like this aspect very much, but believe it may be possible to do this one better through our client-side technology developed in the recent re-factoring of what to us and our customers is the Kolab Client, and which you might simply know as KDE Kontact. We think this technology has potential beyond the desktop that we would like to explore. To us, it is called Server Side Akonadi.
This should be an interesting experiment, and will hopefully also contribute towards the overall speed, quality and flexibility of Akonadi on all platforms, including the desktop & mobile phone.
This will then be rounded off by the LDAP cleanups which will make Kolab near-fully agnostic towards existing LDAP setups, and of course configuration management updates, of which the most important and most visible will be the new Kolab Configuration API.
Because we need to re-do the web admin in any case, we decided to do it right and make it a RESTful configuration API. This process is already in full swing with a Python backend and the new PHP based web admin being scoped out by Jeroen van Meeuwen and Aleksander Machniak (a.k.a. Alec) based on a draft by Thomas Brüderli. There is even some documentation already. Once we have a version that does at least what the old web admin did, we plan to wrap this into a 3.0-development release including the new web front end. Please note that this will be the starting point for the public 3.0 development cycle, and not a release you should use productively. Because things will break badly in the process of making all the under-the-hood changes described above.
In any case, the new web client will of course be the other major visible change in Kolab 3.0. But of course we are strongly committed towards keeping the interchangeable components approach of the server intact. So we also hope that people will help to make Horde 4 an option for the Kolab 3.0 server.
Meanwhile we\'re getting on with the work, and we hope that some of you will join us. If you\'re looking for something fun and interesting to do, what about any of these ideas?
There is in fact a “formalized” approach in which you can throw your own ideas into the mix. You can find information about it here.
According to schedule, Kolab 3.0 will then see the light of the net in May/June 2012, and your favorite feature could be part of that.
So don\'t just watch. Get involved! 
Netizen Report: Fight for the Future Edition
Source: RConversation
Posted: December 11, 2011
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![\"\"](\"http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/manalbaby1.jpg\" "\\"manalbaby\\"")
Meet Khaled Alaa Abdel Fattah, born last Tuesday to two Egyptian cyber-activists: mother Manal Bahey al-Din Hassan and father Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who is currently in prison. Khaled is named after Khaled Said, the young man whose violent death at the hands of police in 2010 became a symbol and rallying point for activism that brought down the Mubarak regime earlier this year.\"
Little Khaled was born as Internet-driven activism in another part of the world, Russia, is bringing a new generation of young people - many of whom had never participated in a protest before - into the streets to oppose election results that they believe to have been rigged in the ruling party\'s favor. One blogger told TIME magazine that he risked reprisals by United Russia supporters to post flyers around Moscow on the eve of the election, calling on people to vote against them. One flyer said:
\"One day, your child will ask you, Papa, what were you doing when the crooks and thieves were robbing our country blind?\"
People like Alaa, Syrian blogger Razan Ghazzawi who was arrested on the Jordanian border last weekend, and Ali Abdulemam, the Bahraini blogger who has been in hiding since February, are all fighting for a world in which their own children will be able to speak their minds and participate in opposition politics without going to prison. But what about the rest of us? To echo the Russian blogger\'s question:
What are we doing to make sure that our children will even be able to use the Internet to fight for their rights speak truth to power?
The war for freedom and control of the Internet continues to rage. To get the full rundown, check out the latest Netizen Report on Global Voices Advocacy. Since September I have been working with the Global Voices team and several volunteers to publish these twice monthly updates on global developments related to the power dynamics between citizens, companies and governments on the Internet. You can even subscribe to them by e-mail here.
The first Christmas card is in
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: December 6, 2011
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This Xmas card has been forwarded by my good friend Rusy Laddaga from Mexico City. He writes: a photo of a sustainable christmas tree that we just presented. 8,000 LEDs powered by batteries that are charged by 15 bicycles. The 15 bicycles interact with the tree.<!--function OneStat_Pageview(){ var d=document; var sid=\"308456\"; var CONTENTSECTION=\"\"; var osp_URL=d.URL; var
An open thank you letter to Global Voices, on International Volunteer Day
Source: RConversation
Posted: December 5, 2011
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Today is International Volunteer Day, a celebration of the millions of people around the world who give their time, energy and wisdom to projects and causes they care about. Volunteers feed the hungry, care for the sick, comfort the grieving. We live in a world where companies and governments are responsible for producing most of the products and services we need and use. Volunteers prove that there\'s another way to build things - we can write encyclopedias or operating systems, we can report the news, or host a revolution.
Choosing to build a volunteer community was the key decision that made Global Voices possible. Rebecca and I realized that some of the most interesting information we were getting from the developing world wasn\'t coming from professional reporters, but from volunteers, using their blogs to share their perspectives on local and national events with the wider world. Our first action as a community - the manifesto that continues to inform and govern our decisions today - was co-written by volunteers at our first meeting, and rapidly translated into twenty five languages by volunteers.
While there\'s a small team of editors and coordinators for whom Global Voices is a job (as well as a passion - we don\'t pay well enough for anyone to do this for the money!), the lifeblood of our project is our volunteer community. 532 active volunteers are responsible for Global Voices today, part of the 1,904 volunteers who\'ve worked on writing, editing, translating, designing over the seven year life of our endeavour. Volunteers have written more than 58,000 articles on Global Voices, and translated even more. We rely on an even broader community of volunteers - the tens of thousands of bloggers, twitterers and videographers who we feature on our site, the vast majority of whom create not for fiscal gain, but out of passion and dedication - to make our work possible. And we\'re governed by volunteers: our board of directors serve without pay, giving their time because they care about our work and the sustainability of our community.
As co-founders of Global Voices, Rebecca and I are profoundly grateful to everyone who gives their time and energy to make the world more just, fair, knowledgeable and connected. But we wanted to call attention to two volunteers who\'ve taken incredible risks to work with us. Late last week, Razan Ghazzawi was arrested by Syrian authorities when she travelled to Amman, Jordan to attend a workshop on press freedom. Razan is an active blogger and twitter user, and has written for Global Voices and Global Voices Advocacy. She\'s one of several brave Syrians who is willing to work under her own name, despite the dangers of arrest, and we hope for her speedy release from detention.
We also recognize Ali Abdulemam, a Bahraini blogger, activist and Global Voices volunteer. Ali remains in hiding today, because he\'s been sentenced to fifteen years in prison by Bahrain\'s courts, who accused him of plotting a coup. In fact, Ali was sentenced because he\'s been a passionate advocate for online speech in Bahrain, and has been arrested and tortured for his work on Bahrain Online and Global Voices. We are profoundly grateful for everyone who volunteers their time and energy to make Global Voices a reality. We pledge to work with you to make possible a world where no one ever need risk arrest to participate in a remarkable community like ours.
-Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon, Global Voices co-founders and volunteers
BPN 1886: EC Commissioner Neelie Kroes on copyright
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: November 19, 2011
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<a href=\"http://www.onestat.com\"><img border=\"0\" src=\"http://stat.onestat.com/stat.aspx?tagver=2&sid=308456&js=No&\" ALT=\"web roi\"></aOn November 19, Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission, responsible for the Digital Agenda, held a speech at the Forum d\'Avignon in the historical city of Avignon in France on the issue of copyright. Besides the text of the speech,
The Great Firewall of America
Source: RConversation
Posted: November 16, 2011
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Last month the U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk sent a letter to the Chinese government requesting information about its censorship practices. The middle kingdom’s response: a polite middle finger. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu declared that Chinese censorship follows “international practice.”
Her response is specious given that China operates the world’s most elaborate and opaque system of Internet censorship, as I describe in Chapter 3 of my forthcoming book. Yet Congress has been hard at work to bolster its legitimacy, however inadvertently. The reality is that the PROTECT IP Act now in the Senate, and a new House version called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), would bring key features of China’s Great Firewall to America. Read my opinion piece in the New York Times for more details on how these bills would implement technical and legal solutions that would have the unfortunate result of making the Internet everywhere more like the Chinese Internet.
The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on SOPA at 10am on Wednesday morning (a few hours from now). It will be webcast live on the committee website. The video should also be archived there after the event.
Opposition to SOPA is widespread, bipartisan, and international. The Center for Democracy and Technology is collecting links to blog posts, articles, as well as letters of opposition from human rights groups, Internet engineers, law professors, Internet companies, public interest advocates, consumer rights groups, among others. Allan Friedman at the Brookings Institution has an excellent paper explaining how SOPA and PROTECT IP will make the Internet less secure, sabotaging engineers\' long-running efforts to increase the level of security in the global domain name system.
The New America Foundation (where I am a senior fellow) has signed an open letter to the House Judiciary Committee, along with a list of human rights, civil liberties and public interest groups. It argues:
We do not dispute that there are hubs of online infringement. But the definitions of the sites that would be subject to SOPA’s remedies are so broad that they would encompass far more than those bad actors profiting from infringement. By including all sites that may – even inadvertently – “facilitate” infringement, the bill raises serious concerns about overbreadth. Under section 102 of the bill, a nondomestic startup video-sharing site with thousands of innocent users sharing their own noninfringing videos, but a small minority who use the site to criminally infringe, could find its domain blocked by U.S. DNS operators. Countless non-infringing videos from the likes of aspiring artists, proud parents, citizen journalists, and human rights activists would be unduly swept up by such an action. Furthermore, overreach resulting from bill is more likely to impact the operators of smaller websites and services that do not have the legal capacity to fight false claims of infringement.
In Chapter 7 I describe my experience testifying at a March 2010 House Foreign Relations Committee hearing chaired by Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA). Berman happens to be one of SOPA’s key sponsors. While the hearing’s stated purpose was to discuss Google’s decision to halt censorship in China and how the United States can support global Internet freedom, committee members devoted considerable time to chastising a Google executive for failing to sufficiently police uploads to YouTube for infringing content. By their standards, YouTube and other similar user-driven sites clearly fall short of SOPA’s requirements. As I point out in the book, The cognitive dissonance on display at that hearing highlighted an inconvenient reality: politicians throughout the democratic world are pushing for stronger censorship and surveillance by Internet companies to stop the theft of intellectual property. They are doing so in response to aggressive lobbying by powerful corporate constituents without adequate consideration of the consequences for civil liberties, and for democracy more broadly.
The public interest letter details some of those consequences:
Relying on an even broader definition of “site dedicated to theft of US property,” section 103 of SOPA creates a private right of action of breathtaking scope. Any rightsholder could cut off the financial lifeblood of services such as search engines, user-generated content platforms, social media, and cloud-based storage unless those services actively monitor and police user activity to the rightsholder’s satisfaction.
In my op-ed I conclude:
The potential for abuse of power through digital networks — upon which we as citizens now depend for nearly everything, including our politics — is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age. We live in a time of tremendous political polarization. Public trust in both government and corporations is low, and deservedly so. This is no time for politicians and industry lobbyists in Washington to be devising new Internet censorship mechanisms, adding new opportunities for abuse of corporate and government power over online speech. While American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, and weaken the protection of political and civil rights on the Internet.
I am not against copyright or intellectual property protection - I\'m about to publish a copyrighted book. I hope that people will buy it. Its quality owes a great deal to the editors and other professionals whose job it was to help me shape and refine my argument, and to improve my prose. But I don\'t believe that the defense of my copyright should come at the expense of civil liberties. It is a moral imperative for democracies to find new and innovative ways to protect copyright in the Internet age without stifling the ability of citizens around the world to exercise their right to freedom of speech and assembly on the Internet.
So what might Digital Sustainability be?
Source: freedom bits
Posted: November 15, 2011
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There is a group of Swiss parliamentarians who are organized in a group for “Digital Sustainability” for which I\'ve been asked to participate as part of an expert group that consists of practitioners in a variety of fields, including Free Software and Open Standards. But while German Wikipedia at least has an article about Digital Sustainability, most people simply seem to apply the “I know it when I see it” test, which is somewhat less than satisfactory. What can be said is that most people intuitively seem to agree that Digital Sustainability would include aspects such as Free Software, Open Standards, Open Governmental Data, Privacy and a couple of other aspects. But how to define or describe it in a simple and transferable way?
So I recently found myself in a room with several other people trying to understand what we expect from Digital Sustainability and how to express it. In this discussion, after several other attempts, we narrowed it down to three aspects:
![\"Trying](\"http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/files/2011/11/DigitalSustainability.jpg\")
Digital Sustainability: Your digital relationship to society
So what you want for Digital Sustainability is:
In order for something to be digitally sustainable, none of the above three principles may be violated.
Another way to think about it might be to see self-determination as the natural limitation towards how transparent your person should be to others and how much they should participate in your life, based on a principle of reciprocity since this is valid for every individual in society. The agglomeration of all of this then forms a consensus within and throughout society as to what things shall be governed jointly, and with equal participation of all.
So all three aspects need some form of balance, as your right to request influence is linked to the limits you set for your own self-determination. But pushing the limits of your own self-determination eventually causes friction once it comes in conflict with the self-determination of another person. That is when transparency and participation need to help to find a workable balance.
Or, as Richard coined it for the reciprocity principle behind the GNU General Public License: “Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose.”
Naturally this still represents work in progress, so I am not sure it is the answer to all questions in this area. But it seems to meet some of the criteria that I\'d set for such a conceptual definition. Most importantly it is simple, understandable without technical knowledge, and allows to check existing services or situations for violation of these principles, and the result comes out at the right side of what I\'d consider digitally sustainable.
So for me, this seems workable for the moment.
And if you like it, the next time someone asks you what is Digital Sustainability, you can draw them a picture.
Surveillance and Censorship in India
Source: RConversation
Posted: November 11, 2011
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Chapter 9 of my forthcoming book opens with quotes from an infamous April 2011 BBC interview with RIM\'s co-CEO Mike Lazaridis, in which he ends the interview abruptly after the BBC\'s Rory Cellan-Jones presses him to answer questions about RIM\'s “arguments with the Indian government and various other governments in the Middle East\" over those governments\' desire to gain access to Blackberry messages and e-mails. In August 2010, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia threatened to ban BlackBerry services until RIM agreed to allow a satisfactory level of government access to communications sent through RIM devices within the country. India soon followed suit with its own demands for access. Late last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that RIM has set up a facility in Mumbai \"to help the Indian government carry out lawful surveillance of its BlackBerry services.\" The report further quotes a RIM statement which says that \"we believe the government of India is now applying its security policy in a consistent manner to all handset makers and service providers in India, which means that RIM should not be singled out any more than any other provider.\"
There is a larger problem, however. When it comes to censorship in India, the hardworking folks at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore recently concluded that the Indian government is violating not only Indian laws but also the Indian Constitution in the way it handles censorship demands to companies. What are the chances, then, that the Indian government is not violating its citizens\' rights in similar ways when it comes to demands for user information to RIM and other mobile service providers? CIS\'s Pranesh Prakash compared Google\'s most recent Transparency Report, which reveals the number of content removal and user data requests made between January and June 2011 by the Indian government, and compared that information with an official response to CIS queries on content removal and blocking by the Ministry of Communications & Information Department of Information Technology. Prakash\'s conclusion:
...it would seem that law enforcement agencies are operating outside the bounds set up under the Indian Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure, as also the Information Technology Act, when they send requests for removal of content to companies like Google. While a company might comply with it because it appears to them to violate their own terms of service (which generally include a wide clause about content being in accordance with all local laws), community guidelines, etc., it would appear that it is not required under the law to do so if the order itself is not legal. However, anecdotal evidence has it that most companies comply with such \'requests\' even when they are not under any legal obligation to do so. This way the intention of Parliament in enacting s.69A of the IT Act—to regulate government censorship of the Internet and bring it within the bounds laid down in the Constitution—is defeated.
As I reported in the book, in April 2011, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology issued new rules under which Internet companies are expected to remove within thirty-six hours any content regulators designated as “grossly harmful,” “harassing,” or “ethnically objectionable.” Indian free speech advocates have vowed to challenge the rules’ constitutionality. Google publicly protested the rules in a statement warning that “if Internet platforms are held liable for third party content, it would lead to self-censorship and reduce the free flow of information.” As Prakash put it then, “The Indian Constitution limits how much the government can regulate citizens’ fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression. Any measure afoul of the constitution is invalid.”
More details about surveillance and censorship in India can be found in the India-focused chapter of a new book, Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace, produced by the Open Net Initiative, coming out in December from MIT Press. The India chapter is not currently available online but I discuss India\'s issues in a related chapter titled \"Corporate Accountability in Networked Asia\" (The Citizenlab, one of ONI\'s partners, has made that chapter, along with all of Part I of the book, available online here.) I wrote it late last year and it went into production before the new April 2011 rules came out (academic presses take a long time), but I think the larger point remains very relevant. I compare the role played by companies in facilitating government censorship and surveillance in China to the role of companies in two Asian democracies: South Korea and India. I argue that \"efforts to hold companies accountable for free speech and privacy in authoritarian countries like China will face an uphill battle unless companies in Asia’s democracies are pushed by domestic civil society actors to defend and protect user rights in a more robust manner than is currently the case.\"
The first step is for companies to follow Google\'s lead in being more transparent about how they respond to government demands. Then civil society organizations in democracies, like India\'s CIS, will be equipped and empowered with the information they need to push their governments to stop using companies as an opaque and unaccountable extension of state power. RIM can and must recognize that by being evasive with the public it is standing firmly on the wrong side of history.
Here is the video of Lazaridis\' interview:
BPN 1585 Digital Media - Shifting Landscapes
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: November 10, 2011
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This report of the European Academy of Digital Media Networking Conference Report in Graz on November 10, 2011 was written by Nico Meissner for JMP Screenworks. He gratefully gave permission to copy it on Buziaulane.The European Academy of Digital Media’s Networking Conference 2011 took place in Graz, Austria, on 10 November. This year\'s conference followed the theme \'Digital Media - Shifting
BPN 1884: EADiM ‐ Academic Network Conference 2011
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: November 8, 2011
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Thursday 10th November 2011, 09:00 - 18:00Location: University of GrazDigital Media ‐ Shifting Landscapes: Embracing change, enhancing learning, innovating the future.Programme08:30 - 09:00 Registration & Coffee09:00 - 09:30 Welcome Note by Peter A. Bruck, Richard Vickers, Cai Melakoski09:30 - 10: 45 Best practice in teaching & learningNico Meißner Preparing Students for a Professional
BPN 1583: Dutch digital pioneer Pierre Vinken died
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: November 3, 2011
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On Friday November 4th, 2011 Dr Pierre Vinken died at the age of 83 years. In most obituaries he will be remembered for bringing Elsevier to a merger with Reed. I would like to remember him as the pioneer of the digitisation of information in the publishing industry. In my Dutch languagebook Toen digitale media nog nieuw waren – Pre-internet in de polder (1967-1997) about the Pre-internet
OFE Summit 2011: Creating an Open climate for entrepreneurs in Europe
Source: freedom bits
Posted: October 9, 2011
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During the 2011 OpenForum Europe Summit I had the pleasure and privilege to chair the session on “Creating an Open climate for entrepreneurs in Europe” and the videos of the opening presentations are now online on YouTube, and included below in chronological order:
Fabien Pinckaers, CEO OpenERP is talking about his experience in setting up a Free Software/Open Source business and how his business works not despite, but because of software freedom:
Laura Creighton, VC is talking about some of the systematic issues of promoting innovation and entrepreneurship, and gives some insight as to why current EU funding is so ineffective due to addressing the wrong sector:
Chris Taggart, CEO, OpenCorporates is talking about his approach to increasing transparency in the corporate world for all, and the potential this holds for entrepreneurial activity:
The discussion that followed these presentations was interesting, lively and with good controversial points, which brought out some very valuable insights, in my opinion. Among others:
But these are of course only some points that stuck with me, there were many more.
For more excellent insights during the summit, the Open Forum Europe YouTube channel has the other presentations during the summit, I recommend in particular the ones on Open Data, which are highly pertinent and interesting.
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Not-for-profit announcement: Autumn Hackaton
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: September 26, 2011
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Central Working\'s Autumn Hackathon Saturday, 22 October 2011 at 08:30 - Sunday, 23 October 2011 at 18:00 (GMT)London, United KingdomFor more info: http://centralworkinghackathon.eventbrite.com/
BPN 1582 Closing my Hyves account
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: September 22, 2011
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Today I closed my Hyves social network account. And today Vinton Cerf warns for walled gardens in the Guardian.In 2007, I had a long discussion with Xenia Maren Menzies (hi Xenia, do you remember) about the durability of FB. I told her to have an exit strategy in case FB would go bankrupt or in case you had enough of it or, in the worst case, you would die. Who would close the account, was the
TWO MESSAGES
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: September 16, 2011
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<!--function OneStat_Pageview(){ var d=document; var sid=\"308456\"; var CONTENTSECTION=\"\"; var osp_URL=d.URL; var osp_Title=d.title; var t=new Date(); var p=\"http\"+(d.URL.indexOf(\'https:\')==0?\'s\':\'\')+\"://stat.onestat.com/stat.aspx?tagver=2&sid=\"+sid; p+=\"&url=\"+escape(osp_URL); p+=\"&ti=\"+escape(osp_Title); p+=\"§ion=\"+escape(CONTENTSECTION); p+=\"&
BPN 1581 Dutch Senators on IPad
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: September 13, 2011
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The members of the Dutch Senate have gone electronic from Tuesday September 13, 2011. From this day the members will receive all dossiers electronically on their iPad. It is a further step in their document flow. From 1994 the proceedings were published on internet already and since 1997 the Senate has its own website. The introduction of the iPad project will cost 150.000 euro and will pay
BPN 1580 Dutch pioneer of electronic publishing passes away
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: September 10, 2011
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Last Monday, 6 September 2011, Joost Kist passed away. In his last function he was a vice CEO of the Dutch legal and medical publisher Wolters Kluwer. Before that he was a member of the Board of the publishing company Wolters-Noordhoff Samsom. He played an important part in bringing Wolters Samsom and Kluwer together, when Elsevier made a hostile attempt to incorporate Kluwer. So he played a part
BPN 1580 Book closed for e-book pioneer
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: September 9, 2011
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Michael Hart has died on Tuesday September 6, 2011. He was 64 years of age.Michael Hart was a student at the university of Illinois (USA). When he had a job at the computer department of the university in 1971, he was awarded computer hours for his efforts; these he could spent for his ow projects. According to the myth, he went to his room, set up his thinking cap and thought about a project to
BPN 1579: Digital storytelling, a dissection in the Observer
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: August 9, 2011
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It is not my habit to copy articles from newspapers or magazines. But when I spot an article that will be obligatory reading for every digital media student in the coming years, I can\'t resist. So the UK Sunday newspaper Observer has started a series of articles to untangle the web and headed of the series with digital storytelling. The first installment is a worthwhile article. Storytelling:
BPN 1578 E-book\'s 40th anniversary (part 2)
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: July 31, 2011
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A third wave started in 2001, when E-Ink, a development company near Boston (Mass), started to develop a new display technology, which would offer a still screen and a long battery life only page turns would consume energy. By 2006 the first E-Ink based e-readers started to leave the factory. A Philips spin-off Irex Technologies in The Netherlands started to sell the Iliad at a heavy price of
Freedom in the “cloud”?
Source: freedom bits
Posted: July 30, 2011
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It\'s come to the point that I was asked to explain what I consider necessary prerequisites for an open, free, sustainable approach towards what is often called “The Cloud” or also “Software as a Service” (SaaS).
To be honest, it took some time for me to make up my mind on the matter, and I considered many of the inputs that I\'ve seen so far, in particular the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services to be good enough for some time.
Clearly I\'m sympathetic to the fundamental ideas behind Diaspora, ownCloud and so on. In fact, I myself am currently dedicating my life to the creation of a solution that should empower users to take control over some of their most central data – email, calendar, address books, tasks, see “The Kolab Story” – and thus to provide one puzzle piece to this picture.
So yes, I have developed an opinion by now and obviously I see attempts at “openwashing” such as “Open Surface” by Microsoft to be falling dramatically short on several accounts.
So what do I think constitutes a socially acceptable and sustainable approach to “Cloud Computing” or “SaaS”?
I think it may be simpler than what I initially thought. There are two primary points that now seem most relevant to me:
Users must be able to restrict access to their own data, especially by their service provider. Participating in social networks, or enjoying the convenience of having your data available at all times should never have to come at the price of giving up privacy. So users must be given a choice to restrict access to their data as much as they consider necessary or desirable, from fellow users, and their provider. Similarly, they should never lose the right in their data simply because they use a certain service.
Users must be able to switch between providers, or even to host their own data, if they so choose. And they must be able to do so without losing their network.
They should still enjoy the same level of interconnectivity and not be penalized for having switched providers in the form of having to convince all their contacts and friends to switch, as well.
Software such as StatusNet which is powering Identi.ca allows to set up your own instance – this is a step in the right direction.
From these follow a couple of necessary conclusions to get to this point:
Free Software is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition. Without the software being Free Software, the Freedom to leave, but not lose is exceedingly hard to implement. So in my view the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) is strongly preferred, followed by the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 3, but ultimately any Free Software license will do. Implicitly therefore I am also not adverse to allowing companies to differentiate themselves to some level on code, as long as that does not violate the principles above.
In order to allow switching without losing the network, any software in this context should be designed federated and decentralized, based on protocols that allow such interconnectivity as well as re-discovering users that have moved.
In order to facilitate the connection of services and providers, as well as allow for innovation and differentiation, a certain level of freedom to experiment is necessary. So software and services should provide truly Open Standards with ongoing interoperability work through plug-fests and automated test suites which give some indication on how well which services actually interoperate.
In order to have control over data, users first need to understand what they are (or are not) allowing the provider to do, which is typically not the case. Most users have never read the 20 page privacy statements which are written in ways that make telephone books seem an entertaining read. So we need a way to simplify this.
A set of standardized privacy policies, maybe with a simple visualization approach similar to what Creative Commons came up with, would be a very useful step forward here.
And naturally it should be illegal to change privacy policies on users without their explicit consent. They need to know what is changing, and how, and what will be the resulting level of privacy they enjoy – in the same clear, transparent and understandable manner.
Because much of this is fuzzy in the sense of being open to interpretation and evaluation, these will require monitoring, either through existing consumer protection bodies, through antitrust or standardisation groups, an existing or new NGO dedicated to this work, or something else. Off the top of my head I cannot think of a body that has both the mandate and competency to fulfil such a task.
So while I have some ideas, I obviously still don\'t have all the answers.
Share this post: BPN 1577 E-book\'s 40th anniversary (part 1)
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: July 28, 2011
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July 4th is a traditional American holiday, Independence Day. Unique for that day is the 40th anniversary of the e-book. It took e-book from 1971 up to now to become an accepted medium. One can say that the introduction of the Kindle e-reader on November 19, 2007 gave e-book an official status. That is 37 years after its start. What took the e-book four waves to surface? Is it basically culture
VERSCHIJNT EIND SEPTEMBER 2011
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: July 27, 2011
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Titel: Toen digitale media nog nieuw waren: Pre-internet in de polder (19671997)Auteur: Jak BoumansIsbn 97890787 3005 7 Prijs € 37,50 Omvang: 288 pagina’sToen digitale media nog nieuw waren is een uitgave van Media Update Vakpublicaties Wetterwille 10a | 8401 gb Gorredijk | t 0513·466162 | www.media-update.nl | www.toendigitalemedianognieuwwaren.nl | info@media-update.nl
BPN 1576 The twitter of e-learning
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: July 18, 2011
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Recently I attended a conference on micro-learning in the Austrian city of Innsbruck. It is a very intersting subject, when you get deeper into it. To me it is the twitter of e-learning; a worthwhile subject to get into. I was asked to say something about micro-learning and tablet-like devices such e-readers and tablets. For micro learning so far mobile phones and smart phones have been used
1575 Dramatic slowdown in Dutch FTTH - my comment
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: July 2, 2011
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Yesterday, I reproduced the press release by Telecompaper on the dramatic slowdown in Dutch FTTH. At first sight the figures are dramatic. Despite the roll-outs in 205 municiplaities of the almost 418 municipalities nationwide, the figures are down. Causes:- Adverse weather conditions (a lengthy frost period) hit the overall market.- Reggefiber\'s roll-out in Amsterdam also saw a dramatic
BPN 1574 Dramatic slowdown in Dutch FTTH
Source: Buziaulane
Posted: July 1, 2011
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Telecompaper reports:a. dramatic slowdown in Dutch FTTH in 2010; b. Household penetration forecast to reach 14% by 2015The Dutch telecom research organisation Telecompaper has published its fifth annual report on the Dutch FTTH market. A host of new players has entered the market, and FTTH initiatives are underway in no fewer than 205 municipalities, almost half of the nation\'s 418. However
Can\'t believe I\'ve just been HYTTIOAOA\'d
Source: freedom bits
Posted: April 4, 2011
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So there I was. Having spent 10 minutes trying to work my way through one of the worst forms that usability demons have ever conceived of for some legal issues at a certain governmental body, I hit the final “submit” and get an error message that the submission had somehow failed. No idea why, of course, please contact technical support. The following is the actual conversation:
Support: “Can you try again after clearing your temporary internet folder?”
Me: “I am not sure what you want me to do, to be honest. I have a browser, which has a cache, although that should not matter because this was the first time I visited your site. I don\'t believe there is a temporary folder for the internet.” (What I was actually thinking was: “You want me to go through that awful form AGAIN?”)
Support: “You could try restarting your machine and then try the process again with a brand new form. Do not use a saved form. If the problem persists, please provide the reference numbers you are working on.”
Me: “It was a brand new form, but I am not sure what restarting the machine is likely to achieve. Are you perhaps assuming I\'m running Windows?”
Support: “We only know that restarting a computer or trying with a different computer sometimes clears this problem. Possibly, this will help even if you are using something other then windows.”
Note how they know that trying this sometimes clears the problem. So apparently people have been having issues before and not always did the tech support resolve the issue. Go figure.
In any case, I cannot believe I\'ve just been HYTTIOAOA\'d.
Share this post: The Kolab Story
Source: freedom bits
Posted: February 18, 2011
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I\'ve been woefully aware that while I did write about having chosen Kolab as my next challenge, I have consequently failed to communicate the most exciting part of why this became my challenge. So let me try to tell you the Kolab Story.
To understand the Kolab Story it is unfortunately essential to first understand what the situation is, and how others are seeking to address it. For the very largest part of this planet, Microsoft Windows is still the dominating desktop operating system.
While other systems, in particular GNU/Linux, have made huge improvements and are by now more or less the equal where usability is concerned, even the combination with the genuine advantages such as maintainability, efficiency, security, independence, control, investment security have not been enough to change that situation fundamentally, or at least not yet.
The reasons for this are widely known to most people in the field. There are of course all the practices that have been or should be subject to antitrust investigations, such as standards abuse, tying, or pressure on OEMs to favor Windows, which has led to effects such as the one where getting a computer without Windows license will be more expensive than getting the same hardware with Windows installed. So one of the primary reasons for the dominance of Windows, namely that when you buy a new computer, you get Windows, is still as strong as it was a decade ago. And Microsoft does not seem willing to let this one go either, on any platform, as this article demonstrates.
Due to decades of these practices, many software vendors have primarily focused on the Microsoft platform, fulfilling the strategy set by Microsoft around the late 80s/early 90s. The result are thousands of legacy applications around the world which are critical to a company\'s success. Virtually all migration projects to Free Software on the desktop that I know of were struggling with that legacy. This is often combined with proprietary integration between server and client based upon undocumented and/or patented technologies not available to Free Software.
As a result, some migrations have their breaking points in the file server, which is why Samba 4 and the antitrust work that at least partially preceded it is so important; the office application, which is why it is important that OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice continue to flourish; or the groupware.
Groupware, or Personal Information Management (PIM), is a rather vague term. At its core it is usually understood to encompass email, calendar, address book and tasks. Its functionality was arguably the primary driver for the rise of smart phones and continues to be their primary function for many users. On the desktop or notebook it is typically Microsoft Outlook, with Microsoft Exchange on the server.
This is the primary offering of most competing groupware offerings, including those that market themselves as Free Software/Open Source, although rather often they turn out to be Open Core. But even where the label is justified, they primarily focus on the three core offerings of Microsoft Exchange: Microsoft Outlook on the client, web access, and synchronization to the mobile phone.
They typically deliver this cheaper than Microsoft Exchange, which is good for stained IT budgets. Microsoft is however known to dump its price whenever it is strategically useful. But there is another, bigger problem. Microsoft Oulook is focused on the Windows platform. And while the web clients give some level of platform independence even for Microsoft Exchange itself, there are many scenarios where web clients are just not good enough.
So the platform lock-in is in no way mitigated. It may even be increased, as there is yet another data source to migrate if the platform is to be replaced.
So if the goal is to regain some freedom of IT strategy and purchasing decisions, many of the alternatives are almost as unhelpful as remaining with Microsoft Exchange itself.
Enter Kolab.
Imagine you had a client that you could deploy on Windows which gives you the same range of functionality as Microsoft Outlook, but which is also available on other platforms, such as Mac OS X or GNU/Linux. This is precisely what the Kolab Smart Client based on KDE Kontact provides.
As part of the KDE PIM community, many of the protagonists of the Kolab ecosystem have been working on this new client which became possible due to the re-licensing of the Qt Toolkit. It is fully Free Software, and the entire code base is made available through KDE, so all users will eventually get to benefit from this work. But because KDE is not primarily business focused, because most volunteers work on KDE because they no longer want to use Windows, and because KDE has its own release cycles and a focus on development rather than deployment, there are always delays in the availability of these components on Windows. But even on GNU/Linux some users provide the feedback that they do not consider this “business ready and stable” for their purposes.
That is why one of the reasons why the partner network of companies around Kolab Systems along with its development partners KDAB and Intevation exist. We have the people, the experience and the business background to decelerate the rapid pace of development for our customers towards more business friendly release cycles, occasionally catching up to the exciting developments within the KDE community.
Naturally there are many people for who the community packaged versions are all they want and need, and we do what we can to help extend that, but if you want warranties, dependable time lines, guaranteed and defined support levels and the proverbial “one throat to choke”, the Kolab Enterprise Community and Kolab Systems give you just that.
But those are just three platforms. With Kontact Touch (if you\'re curious, check out the screenshots), Kolab can also truly go mobile as a native application. Available already for the N900, Meego and Windows Mobile 6.5, the Kolab Touch Client can go pretty much anywhere Qt goes. As of recently, that includes Android. It also includes the tablet PCs, sub-notebooks and other devices with touch screen. So five is actually something of an understatement.
And yes. If you want to deploy this kind of technology in your company, you can do that now. For reasons of scaling and initial stabilization branching, this option really only makes sense for entities of 1\'000 users and above right now. But it will become more widely and generally available as more and more entities deploy this technology.
Meanwhile the stable version based on the previous technological generation but with some visual improvements to fit modern desktops remains available for GNU/Linux and can be deployed anywhere, and via terminal server can address some of the use cases with Windows on the client.
Although naturally sometimes you really need Outlook. In some scenarios it is inevitable. So you can of course get it via one of three connectors, of which one was recently certified against six different suites of Microsoft Windows and Outlook. As all data will then be stored on a Kolab server, migration of the client is much simplified in comparison to migrating from Microsoft Exchange directly.
And yes. All these clients have full offline capability, keeping the user fully productive even when the network is not. In a world where “always on” has been promised for a long time now, that may not sound like a big deal. In our experience, it is.
Because while the promise of “always on” may come true sometime, somewhere, the reality of users today involves flaky connections on trains, interrupted connections on airplanes, overpriced roaming charges and connections in hotels, and overloaded networks at conferences or public events. Infrastructure fails, and in our view your groupware should be able to compensate for that.
From this perspective, it is also not important whether the server actually goes down for a minute or two for productivity in your company. So in many scenarios your requirements towards high availability of the server are in fact reduced by the offline capabilities of the client.
This is obviously not the case for the web client itself, which typically runs on the Kolab Server itself, but can also be put on another server, potentially in a DMZ. The currently shipped client is based upon the Horde framework, other options are likely to become available within the year.
The web client is typically used as the backup option because the native clients are generally so much more powerful. And anyone who has ever browsed the Android store to see comments like “This just adds a short cut to the web page. Uninstall.” should be aware that we see a transformation of the web towards more data-centric protocols interpreted in the best way for the form factor at hand by local applications, whether they are deployed through HTML5 or otherwise.
That is why Over-The-Air (OTA) mobile synchronization is so important, it makes the data available on the smart phone without network delays and in the most useful way for the user. So thanks to the integration project we did with our development partner Libertech, version 2.3 of the Kolab Server comes with built-in ActiveSync support which is routinely tested against Meego, Android, iOS, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry (with connector).
And this is only a part of what is routinely deployed with support, e.g. the client also comes with strong cryptography and signatures for email (both S/MIME or OpenPGP) on any of the platforms mentioned above. But trying to cover it all would be too much, so a second part to this article is probably in order one or the other days.
Meanwhile there are also plenty of community projects for other Kolab components and connectors, such as the Mozilla SyncKolab extension for Thunderbird & Lightning, the native Android plug-in or a Free Software Outlook plugin. And users of Evolution can also give the new Kolab plug-in a spin. Feedback of your experience with any of these would be greatly appreciated on kolab-users@kolab.org.
Because Kolab is so highly modular and built upon standard components we all know, it can be integrated into virtually any pre-existing environment and hooked up with a great number of other technologies. Over the years, our partners have developed and deployed customer solutions with a great number of different additional modules and components.
So while this is only part of the picture, maybe it helps you understand why all the great things Kolab can do and become for me is something I got truly passionate and excited about.
What the Free Software community has in the Kolab Groupware Solution is technology that can be a game changer on desktop and server. So I hope that at least some of you will participate and become part of this change – as a user, developer, contributor, advocate or otherwise.
More information, as always, is available at http://wiki.kolab.org and http://www.kolab.org, which a team of volunteers is currently looking at rebuilding. Your help is welcome.
And if you want to talk business, come and join us at CeBIT!
Share this post: Back here for WSIS 2015 prep and follw up.
Source: TIGblogs - Event - World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Phase Two
Posted: November 28, 2010
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I am back here after a break. Decided to get involved foe the WSIS 2015 prep and follow ups. Indian youths have a role to play and this time our voice will be heard.
All boys dream of being knights, don\'t they?
Source: freedom bits
Posted: April 28, 2010
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Some weeks ago I received news that the embassy in Berne had unsuccessfully been trying to contact me under FSFE\'s old office address in Zurich. This was a bit odd and unexpected. So you can probably understand my surprise to be told by the embassy upon contacting them that on 18. December 2009 I had been awarded the Cross of Merit on ribbon (“Verdienstkreuz am Bande”) by the Federal Republic of Germany. As you might expect, my first reaction was one of disbelief. I was, in fact, rather shaken. You could also say shocked.
Quick Wikipedia research revealed this to be part of the orders of knighthood, making this a Knight\'s Cross. Can you hear the whinnying of the horses, the clinking of armour and the sound of steel on steel? So where does the tapping of keyboards and blinkenlights enter into this?
According to the rationale, the Cross of Merit was awarded for my work for Free Software and Open Standards, starting from my being speaker of the GNU Project, including my very first speech, my work on the Brave GNU World, over driving the creation of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), to the work done around the Open Document Format (ODF) and the work for Open Standards in general with a variety of hats. The initial proposal originated in the Foreign Ministry from what I heard, which has been a champion for Free Software and Open Standards, especially the Open Document Format (ODF) for years, resulting in one of the most efficient and strategically sound IT environments of all German ministries.
So this is the most important message: By awarding this Cross of Merit, the Federal Republic of Germany recognises the importance of both Free Software and Open Standards. After Matthias Ettrich was already awarded the Medal of Merit in November 2009 for his work on KDE, this sends another strong message of support for Free Software and Open Standards and for the importance of the work carried forward by associations such as the Free Software Foundation Europe. This work, by the way, is an ongoing process, and it needs your support. So if you can, please join the Fellowship right now.
But there is another, more intimate meaning to this for myself, and an inherent challenge.
A born Helgolandian, the German FAZ credited this background in a very kind article for my strong emotional ties to freedom, always keeping an eye on the horizon. Most of my childhood was however spent in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. And as a truly free hanseatic citizen, one does not accept any foreign masters, which established the tradition of the Hanseatic Refusal.
So, why did I choose to accept the Cross of Merit?
There is possibly enough of a Helgolandian in me to not accept the traditions of the Pfeffersäcke of the Hanse. As you might not be aware, Helgoland was one of the primary hideouts for the pirates that plundered the ships of the Hanse, heavily laden with pepper and other goods. These Likedeelers, the “equal dividers” as they called themselves, had a much more participatory society than essentially feudal cities such as Hamburg which ultimately caught up with Klaus Störtebeker, decapitating him in the Hamburg harbour. Naturally I do not expect to fare a similar fate for my little act of rebellion against hanseatic tradition.
Despite the above I would even maintain that my acceptance constitutes “Hanseatic Acceptance” because the city of Hamburg is – seemingly ignorant of its having acted as the cradle to the Open Document Format (ODF) – as heavily Microsoft dominated as few others. At the time of the great battle around MS-OOXML, an image that once more brings up associations of blood, gore, and treachery, it has pained me greatly to see the role Hamburg played in the subversion of Open Standards and standardisation process at the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the German standardisation body (DIN).
Hamburg truly has allowed itself to become the “Proprietary and Locked-In City of Hamburg” when talking about matters of Information Technology, whereas cities like Munich have become champions for freedom. Sadly, at the current point in time, there is more freedom to be found outside of Hamburg than there is to be found within.
The award is based on values of freedom and independence, and originates with people in the government who have done more for these values than the government of Hamburg. So I shall kindly thank for the award, accept it in the name of everyone who has come before me on the path of Free Software and Open Standards, and remain my own master, as the city of Hamburg should have done.
Because only Free Software truly is Sovereign Software.
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And the challenge is… Kolab!
Source: freedom bits
Posted: March 7, 2010
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The veil is finally lifted. After months of discussions and four months of preparation in Osnabrück, including a fight for dear life in the snow during the Battle of Osnabrück alongside my new comrade in arms from Scotland, Paul Adams, my reincarnation is finally complete.
Little more than a week ago we launched Kolab Systems AG, the new home of the Kolab Groupware Solution. Why Kolab? Because despite its being in production for several years, I am convinced its design is still well ahead of any other solution in the market. It is purely Free Software and unlike other solutions it already has a strong and vibrant ecosystem involving various of the best Free Software communities, not the least KDE and Kontact, the primary Kolab client. But Kolab also integrates with other clients, scales extremely well, and provides end-to-end security and privacy by design.
In short: Extremely interesting technology, fantastic people to work with, a strong community and many new and exciting business opportunities were what ultimately led me to take up this challenge over others that were offered.
So after spending the past decade working for the freedom of our community and society in general through software that enables society and economy, after helping multiple entrepreneurs over the years to set up their Free Software business in ways compatible with community principles, I will now myself join the ranks of those that walk the paths created and maintained by organisations such as Free Software Foundation Europe and make this freedom practice for our partners and customers.
There is no question in my mind this is once more going to be a huge amount of work, which is why I fully expect to find lasting happiness:
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man\'s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
– Albert Camus
The downside is that we\'ll see how much time I\'ll find for writing. I promise I\'ll try.
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I love Free Software
Source: freedom bits
Posted: February 11, 2010
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![\"I](\"http://fsfe.org/campaigns/vd2010/vd-i-love-fs-468x60.png\")
…and hope that if you are not yet a Fellow of the FSFE, you will join now.
Share this post: DiploFoundation is opening applications for the IGCBP 2009
Source: Marouen Bloggin\' his Life
Posted: January 23, 2009
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Like each year, Diplofoundation is looking for new interesting and interested people to take part in their Capacity Building Program for Internet Governance. You can find more details in this link . Keep in mind that the deadline is : 11 February 2009...
HUMAN RIGHTS
Source: TIGblogs - Event - World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Phase Two
Posted: May 10, 2008
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Human Rights as thought when created should only be profitable to the whole world...but the way the world is living nowadays is really shamefull , discouraging , hopeless , and RISKY...
This coming 60th anniversary of the Human right should let all wise people around the whole world know... in all sphere of decision to question themselves ...deep in their consceous : is it this actual world, where Invasions-Spoluation-Colonialism-civil wars-decease-hunger-asylium-poverty-repression-racism-xenophoby-pedophily-tortures-dictatures..etc., why HUMAN RIGHTS WERE CREATED ?????
If not ...means their is VERY BIG FAILURE ...in the way of Operating and Supervising Human Rights.Its sorryful that the world should wait 60 years before being able to crosscheck failures in something that was implicating people\'s life... Just to have an idea of the meaning of it ...let we suppose to be at the place of people who are in refugee camps....or people who are in Jails illigally....or people who are living in occupied terrtories...;WHAT HUMAN RIGHT STANDS FOR THEM.???
They are Humans...as far as they are living in the same world like all of us....so, They should HAVE RIGHTS....AS FAR AS ITS HUMAN RIGHTS...
If millions of people are still suffering actually in the world ...coz of lack of Human Rights...means the goals or targets why wise people created United Nation after Second world War...are not reached....So UNITED NATINS HAS FAILED TOTALLY TO HIS MISSION...while the very correct and logic solution....is to Dismissed UN ,And to rebuild a NEW INSTITUT ...where all nations will be represented...all ethny will be respected...all religions will be recognised...all culture will be honored.... It can goes throught coz, that new institution will avoid all previous mistakes of done by UN.....
why not even to creat in each nation a concil that only wise and respected people....and each concil will choose his or her represent that will stand for his country in the New Institution....
Coz the actual biggest MISTAKE OF UN IS HIS PARTIALLITY...for some people UN talk very very loud; for others Nothing is done....That is the Main thing that can creates frustruation and violence...the other problem of UN is: very few nations are truely represented...thats not FAIRE AT ALL....Africa has 53 countries how many countries is at UN...??? That idea of permanent and unpermanent Membership IS NOT FAIRE AND IS ILLOGIC...coz the world has really past the context where some can be permanent ...the others not.....coz \" a shared something for everybody, ..what ever it can be should be for everyone....\" The day some people will have more rights than others, that day, discriminated people will show their unhappyness...and in their own style....who should tell them to stop ?....Favourited people ??? or poeple in the same position ?? A FAIRE WORLD SHOULD BE FAIRE FOR EVERY NATION....AS WELL AS ISRAELIANS THAN PALESTINIANS...
Now if we think keeping our eyes closed in such discriminations, creating fake resolutions evryday,diabolising islam any moment,keeping UN with his limited number of member with VETO can solve the problems....we are faking ourselves..and if in 60 years UN cannot change nothing in how the world is moving....for sure terrorism and violence have to be supported for long again....who will be reached ??? no body can tell !!!
Its quite time now to change vision ...to build a very peacefull world where HUMAN RIGHTS WILL BE LIVED LIKE WHAT IT REALLY MEANS...
Its just aims ...how wise people did to creat UN ...plenty more wise can do it to creat something far better than UN....its matter of Courage and Will ...and as a member of TIG ..I really Hope the TAKING IT GLOBAL WILL INVOLVE IN THAT very hard and important Challenge..
Google propose aux ONG de leur servir de vitrine
Source: APC Blog - FR
Posted: April 9, 2008
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Google veut mettre en application son célèbre slogan Don\'t be evil. La firme américaine a présenté mardi dans les locaux du Haut-Commissariat des Nations unies pour les réfugiés (HCR), à Genève, une nouvelle version de son logiciel Earth, destinée aux ONG.
Forum mondial de justice économique 2008
Source: APC Blog - FR
Posted: February 27, 2008
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Le Global Economic Justice Forumsest terminé à Dhaka la semaine dernière sur une note optimiste, aprèstrois jours intensifs de séminaires et audiences publiques qui avaitpour but de provoquer un dialogue sur les différents enjeux reliés à lamondialisation et de renforcer la lutte pour la justice économique auBangladesh et ailleurs. Lire l\'article avec photos au complet.
Les entrepreneurs dinternet prennent les devants en milieu rural
Source: APC Blog - FR
Posted: February 20, 2008
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Sans Internet haute vitesse, difficile de faire des affaires pour unePME, de travailler à la maison en tant que travailleur autonome. Et pasbesoin de vivre en région éloignée pour subir ce désagrément. Il existeaussi à une quarantaine de kilomètres de Montréal. Face àlindifférence des grands des télécommunications, dautres fournisseursde service font leur apparition. [Article complet]
Logiciels: la libre Afrique de l\'Ouest?
Source: APC Blog - FR
Posted: February 19, 2008
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L\'utilisation des logiciels libres pour l\'Afrique de lOuest représenterait une opportunité de réduire la fracture numérique avec le Sud. Cette optique galvanise les développeurs qui librement innovent. Ils en sont récompensés chaque année par la Rencontre africaine des utilisateurs de logiciels libres.
Comment lAmérique latine comprend la gouvernance de linternet
Source: APC Blog - FR
Posted: February 13, 2008
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Des groupes dAmérique latine et des Caraïbes se sont rencontrés en novembre dernier à Rio de Janeiro. Leur but? Débattre des idées à avancer au deuxième Forum sur la Gouvernance de lInternet et définir les priorités en termes d\'Internet pour leur région. Un compte-rendu des principaux axes sur lesquels ils ont planché.
Charte de la communauté telecentre.org
Source: APC Blog - FR
Posted: February 11, 2008
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Plus de 90 personnes venant de 61 organisations de 42 pays ont pris part à la création de la charte de la communauté Telecentre.org
Concluyó el eLAC: ¿qué rol se deja a la sociedad civil?
Source: APC Blog - ES
Posted: February 8, 2008
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La II Conferencia Ministerial para la Sociedad de la Información acaba de culminar, y con ella se inicia un nuevo proceso regional, en base a la recién acordada plataforma de acción eLAC 2010. Algunos logros, muchos tironeos, y un gran cansancio es el saldo de esta semana de actividades. El proceso de negociación fue irregular, y la sociedad civil ha criticado con fuerza las modificaciones realizadas al borrador del mecanismo de seguimiento, que relegan a las OSC al papel de observadores, y no garantizan la calidad multisectorial del proceso.