Australian Democracy is “Microsoft Compatible”

April 6, 2009 | etbe

Here is the Australian Electoral Commission documentation on how to register a political party [1]. It includes the requirement for “A Microsoft compatible electronic membership list (and paper copy) providing the following information“.

So a prerequisite for registering a political party appears to be the ownership of a PC running Windows. While it may be the case that I could create a plain text file on a Linux machine and append some CR characters to each line, or create a CSV format spread-sheet/database file the most common interpretation of this is likely to be that MS-Office is required.

Such blatant promotion of a software vendor in a government document is unacceptable. Anyone who wishes to use other software for their political activities should be permitted to do so without restriction.

[1] http://www.aec.gov.au/Parties_and_Representatives/Party_Registration/Handbook/application.htm

Censorship, Piracy, and Movie Ideas

March 31, 2009 | etbe

Flame has written a satirical post about the different methods used to try and prevent unauthorised use of copyright movies and the distribution of illegal porn [1]. He has also written an amusing rant about how offended he was by the false advertising of an erotic movie [2].

I think that both these issues need to be addressed at the same time. We need to have an erotic movie about a senator and some movie executives who go on a cruise. It could start with the senator wearing fishnet stockings under his suit while giving a speech about the need to prevent the distribution of pornography and “protect the children“. Then when on the the cruise he meets a young looking woman who likes wearing school uniforms and spends some of his spare time photographing her in artistic poses.

Most of the film would have gratuitous shots of people wearing less clothing than usual and spanking each other (including the senator giving a good impression of Dr Frank n Furter [3]). An element of mystery would also be good – who did the senator sleep with while blindfolded? The finale would have the senator in bed with the movie executives in an analogy of what senators do in real life (except that real life has a lot less spanking).

This plot wouldn’t necessarily imply a movie of Ed Wood [4] caliber. Let’s face it, most Hollywood movies don’t have a plot (the exceptions being those that are copied from successful movies from other times or places).

Disclaimer: This plot idea is strictly a work of fiction and bears no resemblance to any real people (I wouldn’t want my blog to end up in a secretive government blacklist). That said, if you want to imagine that any male politician who gives a speech about “protecting the children” is wearing lingerie while doing so, then go for it (you might even be right).

You Have the Right to Not Search My Bag

March 4, 2009 | etbe

This afternoon I was in a Safeway/Woolworths store (an Australian supermarket chain) and the lady on the checkout asked to inspect my backpack on the way out. The conversation went as follows:
Checkout Lady: Can I inspect your bag?
Me: Sure. – I put my backpack on the counter
CL: Could you open it for me?
Me: It’s OK, you can do it.
CL: I’m not allowed to open your bag, can you open it?
Me: I don’t mind, you can open it.

We iterated over the last two lines a few times, when it became clear that no progress was going to be made I asked “Can I go now?” and left.

It seems rather pointless to demand to search someone’s bag if you are not permitted to open it. Not that they have any power to search bags anyway. I discussed this with a police officer about 20 years ago and was told that store staff can do nothing other than refuse to allow you into their store in future if you don’t agree to a bag search. Stores claim that it’s a condition of entry that your bag be searched, but apparently that was not enforceable. Of course the law could have changed recently, I guess it would only require a terrorist threat related to supermarket products (baking soda can make your bread rise explosively) to get the law changed.

The last time my bag was searched was when leaving a JB Hi-Fi store. I had a brand new EeePC (purchased from a different store) in one hand and a bag in the other. The EeePC was identical to ones that they had on display and they didn’t even ask about it. It seems hardly worth the effort of searching bags when anyone can carry out expensive gear in their hand without being questioned.

How to Support Straight Marriage

January 30, 2009 | etbe

There is currently a lot of discussion about how to protect “marriage“, such discussion is based on the issue of whether Gay Marriage should be prohibited to protect Straight Marriage. Some straight people believe that their own marriage would be better if homosexuals were allowed to get married, some have even declared that they won’t get married until discrimination in this regard is ended. I don’t believe that whether some other people get married will make any difference to my marriage.

I believe that any two consenting adults who are not closely related should be allowed to get married, but I am not going to write about that today. What I will address is some positive steps that can be taken by a government to protect Straight Marriage without regard to Gay Marriage.

By the most objective criteria, death is the greatest obstacle to marriage. To protect someone’s marriage you should first protect them from becoming a widow or widower for as long as possible. Also protecting the lives of children (both biological and adopted) is important for protecting marriage. Here are some of the many ways of preventing needless death:

Don’t start wars except in the most extreme situations. Wars inevitably involve the death of soldiers (some of whom are married) and any war that is anything other than the smallest border incident will involve the death of civilians (married people and children).
Protect the food supply and the environment. When toxic chemicals, heavy metals, or radioactive material are released in the environment it results in a statistical increase in the death rate from cancer.
Increase the funding for medical research. Today there are many medical situations which can be routinely and safely resolved which would have been likely to be fatal 10 or 20 years ago. More medical research will lead to more diseases being cured.
Spread positive technology around the world. Protecting marriage should have a larger scope than your local region, therefore life-saving medicine needs to be affordable in all countries. Patents that prevent this need to be voided in the poorer regions of the world.
Increase the research on car safety. Car crashes are one of the largest causes of death and significant injury in the first world which can be easily reduced. Unfortunately there has been little research on making cars safe for women and children (crash-test dummies for woman and children are to a large extent scaled-down models based on research on men due to the lack of female and child cadavers for research [1]). Also I believe that the majority of car safety research in regard to crash test dummies was done in the US and therefore is biased towards caucasians and afro-americans – I believe that research on other races is needed to give equal protection to all races (caucasian and afro-american races are in a minority in the world).

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it does cover some issues that are current and well known.

Now the next objective way to analyse this issue is to look at statistics related to divorce. It seems that money is an issue related to divorce and therefore protecting the finances of married people is a way of protecting marriage.

The first thing that can be done is to give people more continuity of employment. Being in a situation where you could lose your job at short notice is stressful and has to have a negative impact on a married couple. Recently the supposedly “conservative” Liberal government in Australia was trying to ban Gay Marriage while also introducing legislation to make it easier to lay off employees who have done nothing wrong (based on business issues). Among other things the Work Choices legislation made it more difficult for such employees to take out bank loans (which means that they often pay higher interest rates).

A final issue that causes stress for married couples is the school system (which is broken in many ways). I’m not going to try and cover this in detail here, but I will note that installing flag-poles (as the Liberal government wanted to do) is not the solution to problems with the education system.

Addressing these real issues will take some government funding, but it’s not a lot and a much greater amount of money could be saved by ending the “war on drugs”.

If the people who claim to be protecting straight marriage can address these other more serious problems that threaten straight marriages then I still won’t agree with calls to ban gay marriage. But it would make then seem less hypocritical.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_test_dummy

Other Reasons for not Censoring the Net

November 18, 2008 | etbe

Currently there is a debate about censoring the Internet in Australia. Although debate might not be the correct word for a dispute where one party provides no facts and refuses to talk to any experts (Senator Conroy persistently refuses all requests to talk to anyone who knows anything about the technology or to have his office address any such questions). The failures of the technology are obvious to anyone who has worked with computers, here is an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about it [1] (one of many similar articles in the MSM). I don’t plan to mention the technological failures again because I believe that the only people who read my blog and don’t understand the technology are a small number of my relatives – I gave up on teaching my parents about IP protocols a long time ago.

One of the fundamental problems with the current censorship idea is that they don’t seem to have decided what they want to filter and who they want to filter it from. The actions taken to stop pedophiles from exchanging files are quite different from what would be taken to stop children accidentally accessing porn on the net. I get the impression that they just want censorship and will say whatever they think will impress people.

I have previously written about the safety issues related to mobile phones [2]. In that document I raised the issue of teenagers making their own porn (including videos of sexual assault). About four months after writing it a DVD movie was produced showing a gang of teenagers sexually assaulting a girl (they sold copies at their school). It seems that the incidence of teenagers making porn using mobile phones is only going to increase, while no-one has any plans to address the problem.

The blog www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com has some interesting information on this issue.

Two final reasons for opposing net censorship have been provided by the Sydney Anglicans [3]. They are:

Given anti-vilification laws, could religious content be deemed â€œillegalâ€ and be filtered out? Could Sydneyanglicans.net be blocked as â€œillegalâ€ if it carries material deemed at some point now or in the future as vilifying other religions? If itâ€™s illegal in Vic say, and there isnâ€™t state-based filtering (there wont be), will the govt be inclined to ban it nation wide?
Given anti-discrimination laws, if Sydneyanglicans.net runs an article with the orthodox line on homosexuality, will that be deemed illegal, and the site blocked? You can imagine it wouldnâ€™t be too hard for someone to lobby Labor via the Greens, for instance.

So the Sydney Anglicans seem afraid that their religious rights to discriminate against others (seriously – religious organisations do have such rights) will be under threat if filtering is imposed.

I was a bit surprised when I saw this article, the Anglican church in Melbourne seems reasonably liberal and I had expected the Anglican church in the rest of Australia to be similar. But according to this article Peter Jensen (Sydney’s Anglican Archbishop) regards himself as one of the “true keepers of the authority of the Bible” [4]. It seems that the Anglican church is splitting over the issues related to the treatment of homosexuals and women (Peter believes that women should not be appointed to leadership positions in the church to avoid “disenfranchising” men who can’t accept them [5]).

It will be interesting to see the fundamentalist Christians who want to protect their current legal rights to vilify other religions and discriminate against people on the basis of gender and sexual preference fighting the other fundamentalist Christians who want to prevent anyone from seeing porn. But not as interesting as it will be if the Anglican church finally splits and then has a fight over who owns the cathedrals. ;)

A comment on my previous post about the national cost of slow net access suggests that Germany (where my blog is now hosted) has better protections for individual freedom than most countries [6]. If you want unrestricted net access then it is worth considering the options for running a VPN to another country (I have previously written a brief description of how to set up a basic OpenVPN link [7]).

My Prediction for the iPhone

September 25, 2008 | etbe

I have previously written about how I refused an offer of a free iPhone [1] (largely due to it’s closed architecture). The first Google Android phone has just been announced, the TechCrunch review is interesting – while the built-in keyboard is a nice feature the main thing that stands out is the open platform [2]. TechCrunch says “From now on, phones need to be nearly as capable as computers. All others need not apply“.

What I want is a phone that I control, and although most people don’t understand the issues enough to say the same, I think that they will agree in practice.

In the 80’s the Macintosh offered significant benefits over PCs, but utterly lost in the marketplace because it was closed (less available software and less freedom). Due to being used in Macs and similar machines the Motorolla 68000 CPU family also died out, and while it’s being used in games consoles and some other niche markets the PPC CPU family (the next CPU used by Apple) also has an uncertain future. The IBM PC architecture evolved along with it’s CPU from a 16bit system to a 64bit system and took over the market because it does what users want it to do.

I predict that the iPhone will be just as successful as the Macintosh OS and for the same reasons. The Macintosh OS still has a good share of some markets (it has traditionally been well accepted for graphic design and has always provided good hardware and software support for such use), and is by far the most successful closed computer system, but it has a small part of the market.

I predict that the iPhone will maintain only a small share of the market. There will be some very low-end phones that have the extremely closed design that currently dominates the market, and the bulk of the market will end up going with Android or some other open phone platform that allows users to choose how their phone works. One issue that I think will drive user demand for control over their own phones is the safety issues related to child use of phones (I’ve written about this previously [3]). Currently phone companies don’t care about such things – the safety of customers does not affect their profits. But programmable phones allows the potential for improvements to be made without involving the phone company – while with iPhone you have Apple as the roadblock.

Now having a small share of the mobile phone market could be very profitable, just as the small share of the personal computer market is quite profitable for Apple. But it does mean that I can generally ignore them as they aren’t very relevant in the industry.

Software has No Intrinsic Value

September 16, 2008 | etbe

In a comment on my Not All Opinions Are Equal [1] post AlphaG said “Anonymous comments = free software, no intrinsic value as you got it for nothing”.

After considering the matter I came to the conclusion that almost all software has no intrinsic value (unless you count not being sued for copyright infringement as intrinsic value). When you buy software you generally don’t get a physical item (maybe a CD or DVD), to increase profit margins manuals aren’t printed for most software (it used to be that hefty manuals were shipped to give an impression that you were buying a physical object). Software usually can’t be resold (both due to EULA provisions and sites such as EBay not wanting to accept software for sale) and recently MS has introduced technical measures that prevent even using it on a different computer (which force legitimate customers to purchase more copies of Windows when they buy new hardware but doesn’t stop pirates from using it without paying). Even when software could be legally resold there were always new versions coming out which reduced the sale price to almost zero in a small amount of time.

The difference between free software and proprietary software in terms of value is that when you pay for free software you are paying for support. This therefore compels the vendor to provide good support that is worth the money. Vendors of proprietary software have no incentive to provide good support – at least not unless they are getting paid a significant amount of money on top of the license fees. This is why Red Hat keeps winning in the CIO Vendor Value Studies from CIO Insight [2]. Providing value is essential to the revenue of Red Hat, they need to provide enough value in RHEL support that customers will forgo the opportunity to use CentOS for free.

Thinking of software as having intrinsic value leads to the error of thinking of software purchases as investments. Software is usually outdated in a few years, as is the hardware that is used to run it. Money spent on software and hardware should be considered as being a tax on doing business. This doesn’t mean that purchases should be reduced to the absolute minimum (if systems run slowly they directly decrease productivity and also cause a loss of morale). But it does mean that hardware purchases should not be considered as investments – the hardware will at best be on sale cheap at an auction site in 3-5 years, and purchases of proprietary software are nothing but a tax.

A Revolution Done Right

September 15, 2008 | etbe

Amaya writes about the fact that the political process in many countries is extremely flawed and is failing their citizens [1] (although she doesn’t actually express it in that way). She asks how a revolution can be done right.

If we look at the historical record, after the French Revolution came the Reign of Terror [2], after the English Civil War Oliver Cromwell [3] took power – his actions are widely regarded as genocidal, and as for the Chinese and Russian revolutions – it seems that the majority of the population didn’t benefit much (if at all) from them. Generally it seems that the only times that a revolution seems to give a good result is when the situation was really bad before AND when the government failed basic measures such as ensuring food supplies.

The independence for the Indian sub-continent which derived from Gandhi’s work can be used as a counter-example. However the ongoing low-level warfare between India and Pakistan is due to a failure of the process.

It seems to me that the required first step towards changing a rotten political system with a minimum of bloodshed is to improve communications. If the majority of the citizens know what is really happening in their own country, how their standards of living compare with those in other countries, and what deals are made between their government and the governments of other countries then they can attempt to work out the best way to improve things.

The free software community is already doing a good job of facilitating communications. The key areas are to have computers that act on behalf of their users (not using proprietary implementations and Digital Restrictions Management to make them act on behalf of corporations and the state), to support strong encryption with public implementations, to be generally as secure as possible, and to run on the cheapest possible hardware so that everyone gets access.

Update: Corrected the spelling of Gandhi [4] – thanks Rick Moen.

Compassion for Windows Users

August 11, 2008 | etbe

In a discussion which covered some of the differences between Linux and Windows, a Windows using friend asked me if I felt compassion for Windows users.

I feel some compassion for people who have bad working environments. While using an operating system that has poor support for the business tasks does decrease the quality of the working environment, there are bigger issues. For example a while ago I was doing some sys-admin work for a financial organisation. I had to use Windows for running the SSH client to connect to Linux servers, this was annoying and decreased my productivity due to the inability to script connections etc. My productivity was also decreased because of my unfamiliarity with the Windows environment, it seems reasonable to assume that when you hire a Linux sys-admin they will have some experience of Linux on the desktop and be quite productive with a Linux desktop system – while the same can not be said for a Windows desktop. But what really made the working environment awful was the paperwork and the procedures. If a server doesn’t work properly and someone says “please fix it now” and I only have a VT100 terminal then I’ll be reasonably happy with that work environment (really – I wouldn’t mind a contract where the only thing on my desk was a VT100 connected to a Linux server). But when a server process hangs in the same way several times a week, when the cause of the problem is known and the fix (restarting the process) is known it really pains me to have to wait for a management discussion about the scope of the problem before restarting it.

But I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for people who end up in bad working environments such as the one I was briefly in. Anyone who is capable of getting such a job is capable of getting a job with a better working environment while still earning significantly more than the median income. The people I feel sorry for are the ones who work on the minimum wage. I don’t think that the difference between Linux and Windows on the desktop would matter much if you were getting the minimum wage, and people who are on the minimum wage don’t have a lot of choice in regard to employment (I think that all options for them suck).

I don’t have much sympathy for adults who use Windows at home. I have to admit that there are some benefits to running Windows at home, mainly that the hardware vendors support it better (few companies sell PCs with Linux pre-loaded) and there are some commercial games which are in some ways better than the free games (of course there are more than enough free Linux games to waste all your time – and some games are best suited to a console). Linux has significantly lower hardware requirements than Windows (my main machine which I am using to write this blog post is more than three years old and has less power than any other machine on sale today apart from some ultra-mobile PCs), so any long-term Windows user can install Linux on one of their machines which lacks the resources to run the latest version of Windows.

The only Windows users for whom I have much sympathy are children. When I was young every PC came with a BASIC interpreter and everyone shared source code. Books were published which taught children how to program in BASIC which included fairly complete example programs. For the cases where proprietary software was needed the prices used to be quite low (admittedly the programs were much less complex – so pricing is probably in line with the effort or writing the code). Now it seems that computers are often being provided to children as closed systems that they can’t manipulate, the web browser has replaced the TV.

I believe that Linux is the ideal OS for a child to use. There is a wide range of free educational programs (including kturtle – the traditional Logo turtle) and there are also a range of free powerful programs which can be used by any child. Few parents would buy Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator for a child to play with, but anyone can give a child a $100 PC with GIMP and Inkscape installed. They might as well give 3yo children access to the GIMP – it will be less messy than fingerpainting!

I expect that some parents would not consider Linux for their children because they don’t know how to use it. Fortunately Linux is easy enough to use that a child can install it without effort. Some time ago the 11yo daughter of a friend who was visiting asked if she could play some computer games. I gave her a Fedora CD and one of the PCs from my test lab and told her that she had to install the OS first. Within a small amount of time she had Fedora installed and was playing games. While the games she played were not particularly educational, the fact that she could install the OS on a computer was a useful lesson.

It seems to me that children who are raised as Windows users are less likely to learn how computers work or be able to control them properly. I expect that on average a child who is raised in such a manner will have fewer career options in today’s environment than one who properly understands and controls computers.

The New OLPC

May 21, 2008 | etbe

TED has a post about the design of the new OLPC [1].

I never liked the previous OLPCs [2], for my use a machine needs a better keyboard than the tiny rubber thing that they had. I understand why they designed it that way, for use in places where it would be an expensive asset it is necessary to make it resistant to water and dust to the greatest possible degree. But in a first-world country where a computer is a cheap item, having a better interface makes sense. I’m sure that I could have plugged a USB keyboard into a OLPC, but having a keyboard integrated as well as an external keyboard is just kludgy.

The new design of the OLPC with two panels (at least one of which is a touch-screen – I hope that both are) is very innovative. With the keyboard displayed on a touch screen there are much greater possibilities for changing alphabet (teaching children to write in multiple languages is a good thing). Of course a touch-screen keyboard won’t allow proper touch typing, but it should still be possible to plug in a USB keyboard – with the additional benefit that it could use both panels to display data when an external keyboard is used.

One of the new uses of an OLPC machine is to play two player games with the players sitting opposite each other. The next logical extension to this idea is to have a multi-user OLPC machine so that two people can use it at the same time (a machine that can run copy of a program that compares to the GIMP can surely run two programs to display electronic books or read email). A large part of the design of the OLPC is based around the needs for children in the developing world, in such cases one computer per home is likely to be common so it would be good if two children could do homework at the same time (or if a parent could check email while a child studies).

Finally the new design is much better suited to reading documents, while they show a picture of a book being read in two panes (similar to the way that paper books are read) I think that a more common use will be to display book text in one pane while using the other pane for writing notes. That would mean that instead of having a full-sized (by OLPC standards) keyboard on the touch-screen they would have to use a small keyboard (maybe with a stylus) or an external keyboard. It is awkward and distracting to hold open a paper book with one hand while writing notes with the other, using one half of an OLPC to write notes while the other half displays an electronic book would be a significant advantage.

The potential utility of the new OLPC design for reading documents is significant enough to make me want to own one, and I expect that other people who have similar interests to me will have similar desires when they see the pictures. While the OLPC isn’t really designed for the use of people like me, it’s unnatural for me to use a computer without programming it – so I expect that the new hardware developments will encourage new developers to join the OLPC project.

etbe – Russell Coker

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