free software , open source software

If we see free software as a movement, the rest of its properties follows naturally. the first uneasy point about free software for me , was the fact that it does not have clear enough definition. it has some principles but not in much detail. but then again free software is an idea and movement, not a licensing framework.
on the other hand open source is much more prescriptive and the licenses that go under open source are clearly stated.

although many may argue that name "free" is ambiguous and can have two, free as beer and free as freedom, meaning; I see the term "open source" much more unclear. having the source open and available is a must in both cases but it is not enough to make a software an "open source" software.
both of these two aim to extend freedom of user and ease the spread of information.  and they are mostly very similar, but sometimes differences show up in detail of licenses. and I think for practical purposes, like publishing a software in current condition, compatibility and so on, open source gives better possibilities.
however I see more potential in free software, to generate and foster new ideas, and more adaptive to new circumstances. specially I believe that all the softwares we release as free and open source should go under permissive license like MIT which only requires mentioning the name and crediting the original authors and allows all kinds of use and modification, I personally see no point in forcing open source or free licenses to everyone.

>>there is a huge need to standardise these terms! they are extremely confusing and they have so many branches and derivatives(I guess this comes from freedom, anybody can define the license he/she feels right!)

Copying prevention:

-No, I dont like them!
-Yes, They might be effective on temporally preventing copying!

Although being temporally effective does not mean that their good will overdo their harm, or the cost of their implementation.

nowadays physical hardware locks may seem ridiculous but i think that digital and software ones will look as absurd in a few years(even now they are funny and annoying).

I dont know how much of the financial loss in software industries come from copying for personal use, but I think that the copyright enforcement should be directed towards copiers who do it for the purpose of sale and distribution. because I believe that with fair pricing and just licensing, even in the case of propriety softwares, people are willing to pay for their use.

and in the case of professional copying, this kind of copying preventions dont really work, because the mass copier already has or will develop the necessary skills to unlock any copy prevention, as they have done so far.

Software licensing landscape in 2020

Since 2020 is not that far anymore! I dont expect radical changes in licensing in a 6 years period.
however looking at current trends, some  movements towards new types of licensing already started.
boldest change is growth of softwares that recognise and treat cloud or hosted as a new way of computing. it can follow with XaaS(anything as a service) models.
another change is shift from perpetual to different terms of licenses. while traditionally one would buy a software and could use it for ever(if needed!), licenses for shorter terms, with lower prices seem reasonable.
I also see more awareness in users about ridiculous or very permissive(from user side) agreements, and think that this kind of licensing will be replaced by something that user would willingly agree with rather than being forced to.

a nice picture that shows the trend:

table from: "The future of software pricing excellence: An introduction "*

*Mark McCaffrey et.al. The future of software pricing excellence: An introduction

The business of science

Here, politics of science seems to be relevant topic as well. for example in Iran many scientists dont even have paid access to the scientific journals because of sanctions.
This covers not only so called "nuclear physics" related papers, but almost all other areas too. definitely this deepens the digital divide; and this is the case for many countries that dont necessarily think like US.

back to the "business of science", about the case of over simplified educational books; we recently were reading an american book for one of our courses in TLU. teacher already warned us that it may get too obvious sometimes! and he added that "apparently this is the way americans like to do it".
after reading some chapters of the book nearly all of the students agreed that the book could fit in half the pages as it is now, and loose no educational content. then we thought: yes maybe "this is the way americans like to do it"! but after reading "The business of science" part of the wiki, I am thinking perhaps deeper reasons are involved.

same thing happened in Iran about learning aid books for schools, they become almost like a table:
"if question is this, then answer will be that..."
they dont leave any space for student to reason and drive the logical conclusions from the scientific fact. causing the problem of  "educated! people" with minimal reasoning power, unable to adapt solutions to new problems.

GNU GPL

strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats...

Strengths, Opportunities
-GPL like other free licences, provides a platform to make sure that a piece of software is and will be distributed widely and freely.
-GPL implies that source code of the software should be available when this license is used, this makes compatibility in softwares easier to reach and the software becomes transparent in its content and function.
-free licenses try to benefit society rather than individuals.
-every new version of GPL is more covering and compatible with other free licenses.

- it emphasises on making reuse easy by providing a description, help file or any other mean that is necessary to read and use the code.(for example code can be encrypted but the key should be available to the user)
-modifications for private use is excluded from the hard rules.

weaknesses, threats
-Its emphasis on non proprietary distribution of software, is in its nature limiting. This imposes that software driven from an original piece with GPL license has to have GPL license. It can maximize the pool of freely available software but
-In version 3 it says GPL-protected software “shall not be deemed part of an effective technological measure under any applicable law” ; which is another "limitation" that is not in line with the philosophy of the freedom, although the "technological measure" is somehow tries to limit freedom itself.

patent in pharmaceutical vs license in software

one can patent a chemical structure, this covers chemical or pharmaceutical innovations.
It means that only one that holds the patent is allowed to manufacture, market the drug.
period of the patent can vary for different drugs and in different countries, in most patent laws nowadays, the term of patent is 20 years from the filing date of the application.(wikipedia) since patent requests are filled before the drug is ready to market, the actual duration of the patent while the drug is in market can be less than 10 years. after the patent is expired the drug can be manufactured and sold by others, this drugs are called generic drugs.

Although patenting is possible in softwares as well, it is not a common way of protection for this kind of IP. it is because in software world there is a clear way of protecting the algorithm(which is comparable to chemical structure of a chemical) by generating executable binary code from the source code.
licensing on the other hand is not common in pharmaceuticals. a drug is a physical entity and it is hard to change and copy it for an end user(if we try to map the licensing here).




http://www.news-medical.net/health/Drug-Patents-and-Generics.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_patent
http://ec.europa.eu/competition/sectors/pharmaceuticals/inquiry/jacob.pdf
https://www.ffii.org/Frequently%20Asked%20Questions%20about%20software%20patents
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intellectual-property/

Intellectual Property : continental european vs Anglo-American

 Moral rights
It seems that in anglo-american (I call it american) school of IP, moral rights have less or no importance, while in continental european(european for short) it plays a major role. but many claim that in digital age, these two are changing towards a closer. where at least in many european laws the part of moral rights are getting shallower. specially when they attempt to get to an agreement between several european countries that may have differences in one specific law, the part that is generally sacrificed is moral rights.

 Copy,comment, reuse, edit ..
Although in european IP private copy and use may be permitted, American approach gives more freedom to "fair use" when the benefit of releasing information for public is great.

since american IP had a more utilitarian approach, it has favourable characteristics in the era of fast changing technologies and competitive economies. some also claim that moral rights limits artistic work and creativity by restrains like "the right of integrity". in this sense another difference between these two is their flexibility in reuse and modifying of existing creations.

but still some other, strongly defend moral rights of the author by metaphor of "author and creation as parent and child", which follows very funny arguments about selling one's child and so on!

Author vs entrepreneur

As in case of moral rights, in european school, author as a person has the central stage. however in american school ownership of a work done under employment goes to the employer.

Different media, different rights

In american law copyright protection covers media such as sound recording, film(producer) and broadcasting(performer), directly; in european school these go under  neighbouring rights. 

Reading: Chapter 3 of "Information Liberation"

Against intellectual property

Chapter 3 of

Information Liberation

by Brian Martin

(London: Freedom Press, 1998)

Here is the link to this chapter:

http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/98il/il03.html

"Challenging intellectual property must involve the development of methods to support creative individuals."

-my favourite quote!

This was one of the most comprehensive arguments for and against intellectual property. It answered most of my questions and doubts about this topic. as an example, second argument for IP: "people deserve property rights because of their labour" 

was my main concern thinking about any intellectual creation, "shouldn't author receive something because of his/her labour time and risk he/she is taking?" and even if we just consider effort, time and risk; how to measure this thing after the work is done? there is such measures going on for individuals that work in a company. for example if I work as programmer for a bigger corporation, they pay me based on hours of time I spend there, assuming that the risk is minimal for me, and effort is normal(or if higher, paid more). but still company holds unlimited IP on outcome of my work. nobody calculated time,effort and risk that company itself is taking, all that determines the final benefit of the company is market.

I totally like the idea of need for determining optimum period for promoting intellectual work based on present state of innovation and technological advances.

I agree that IP is not the only way production and distribution of ideas can work, even dont say that it is the best one(or close to be good), but in case of a society without IP, given example is university research and publications, there is a fundamental change in Infrastructure of the society necessary. since in universities people dont earn from monetizing their ideas but they get funds from government and industry which that shapes corse of their research. although this is a problematic manipulation in their freedom, it is still very difficult to map and implement into other areas such as art and literature.

another point that caught my eye, was that all of the successful examples of no-IP, were happening in an IP dominant world. we have a world that things are working mostly based on IP and then we have small islands of free from IP areas such as universities or open softwares. we dont know how all these things will function if we remove IP totally.(still this does not mean that I suggest that it wont work, but may not work the same way that we see in these islands now)

A hacktivism case "Deportation class"

A hacktivism case


On June 20 2001, Lufthansa(the german airline)'s website was attacked. some 13,000 people participated in a DDOS action against the airline's homepage and more than one million hits were sent to lufthansa webpage and services went down for several minutes.
the main reason for this attack was Lufthansa's participation as carrier, in forced deportations of asylum seekers. the poor condition in which these transportations were held caused at least death of two passengers.
Lufthansa later claimed that the company was required by law to allow the use of its flights for deportations. The demonstrators also claim they never intended to totally disrupt Lufthansa and it was only an 'activist demonstration'.
After several years(more than 3) German court found that DDOS actions were a valid form of political protest!(which is cool!) one reason for that can be that while the site itself was rendered briefly inaccessible, the actual corporation, its ability to fly planes, maintain normal operations, and communicate internally and with the media remained, for practical purposed, unaffected.[2]


resources :

1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/01/lufthansa_ddos_attack/

2. Molly Sauter, "Towards a New Framework for the Ethical Analysis of Activist DDOS Actions"

the hacker ethic found in today's world

hacker ethic, yesterday...today


I see all the free knowledge spreading communities around the web, as part of hacker ethics.
wikipedia, stackowerflow and all the open source tools and drivers that are made everyday. and there are people working on them actively, developing tools and answering questions and solving problems.
in this sense the hacker ethics is alive and moving forward. it may has changed a lot during recent years, but it is still natural as hackers are front line technology users and developers they should adopt to changes in the world. I also feel some new waves of hacker activity coming along with copy right and intellectual property issues. too much restriction on data sharing, monopolies on publishing and data privacy issues seem growing.

Jargon File

my digging in Jargon File


I was mostly fascinated with the different language use rather than a single word. perhaps because I used to work in language processing and had some experience on web data collection.

it was interesting to see how much original hacker language has impacted current web and youth language. actually about youth, I am not sure if youth language entered hacker language or other way around. because it is always youth speciality to play with language and make up new words and expressions. impact of programming logic on the way hackers communicate is a big one too.
this is my(!) impression in Jargon file:
foo bar
or

foobar: n.
[very common] Another widely used metasyntactic variable; see foo for etymology. Probably originally propagated through DECsystem manuals by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1960s and early 1970s; confirmed sightings there go back to 1972. Hackers do not generally use this to mean FUBAR in either the slang or jargon sense. See also Fred Foobar. In RFC1639, “FOOBAR” was made an abbreviation for “FTP Operation Over Big Address Records”, but this was an obvious backronym. It has been plausibly suggested that “foobar” spread among early computer engineers partly because of FUBAR and partly because “foo bar” parses in electronics techspeak as an inverted foo signal; if a digital signal is active low (so a negative or zero-voltage condition represents a "1") then a horizontal bar is commonly placed over the signal label.

when I was younger and I was doing my master in computational linguistics, I used to look for all sorts of regular expressions in web. very often I would find my answer with an example using "foobar"! I always wondered why foobar appears everywhere! and what does it mean. I even imagined that maybe there is a real place called "foo bar" ...

Women as "different people"

Yes internet made it easier to spread feminist ideas, to publish abuses and challenges ...
but internet did this for almost anything. what ever you want to say, now with internet it is easier to share it with others. but what was greatest effect of internet in women's lives that actually changed something? I am not sure!...
what I know is that computers and internet made it easier for women to work and earn money, which then boosted their confidence and satisfied their need for doing something different than household work. the same opportunity that it brought for people with physical disabilities.
housewives had a chance to be financially independent, an important step to step up against abusive and aggressive environment.

some times ago, I read an article about a mobile app that was kind of map that user could tag it. the idea was that women tag their experience of sexual (mis)behaviour on that location. for example you could see on the map that one particular district was crowded with tags of verbal abuse or so on..
it was very interesting app not only because it informed women to avoid places or be careful and ready to defend themselves but also it made everyone aware of such behaviours and even local citizens and police were more careful.

having that app in mind I did some google search on similar apps, and I was very amused by the results!:
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/domestic-abuse-apps,news-19477.html

Random Thoughts

So! I read the week 5 of ethic and law. two main questions till now:
-why hacker ethics is compared to capitalism only and not to any other ideology?
-what was the internet age's role in the whole "different people's" integration?

1. informative to others:they are not that different after all, 
2. informative to themselves:information that made their life easier,like the Estonian website that tells about accessibility facilities around the country 
3. hiding screen: it made it possible to participate without showing the difference to others
4. it opened new possibilities to work and be effective without a lot of physical activity, nowadays for many jobs we just need to have a brain!

social cohesiveness and reaching ubicomp

social cohesiveness (or caring) in reaching ubicomp

in short I think it is important. I actually I have not thought about it before reading the Pekka's paper.
I dont know what kind of role it can have in "reaching ubicomp" but it has a big role in sustaining the ubicom society.
to me it seems that the importance of cohesiveness is more in making a sustainable social plan. maybe it wont directly affect the initial performance but in a long run the health and cohesiveness of a society will have a big impact on its performance.
when people dont have the old social and emotional contact with each other the way they used to have, it  is easy to lose the whole social relatedness and it can be very helpful to have an strong cohesiveness to begin with.

Internet availability in Iran

Internet availability in Iran

It was an interesting process to dig up the data supporting this post! every resource would claim different set of numbers! it was controversial and doubtful that how each organisation came up with its report! the main problem seems to be the unclear data collection methods and difficulty to access some sources.
unfortunately the data I found is from four years ago, but it can give some rough overall idea to the reader.
in 2010 access to internet in urban areas were ~19% and in rural areas down to 4%.
out of 20.3 million families,4.3(21.4%) million had internet access from their own homes, which 94% of them were living in cities.
35.2% of all households in Iran had computers at home. which is 91.5% of urban households and 12% of rural.
comparing to the studies from 2008, within two years, the amount of home internet access and families with computer increased respectively 3.2 and 5 percent.
58.1% of internet users where men and 41.9% women. which are 16.6% of male population and 12.7% of females.
from older than 6years internet users , 59.8% had university degree of some kind.

reference: 
http://www.alef.ir/vdcepp8zejh8epi.b9bj.html?14wml

Digital divide in Iran 

in my perspective

in Iran digital divide is most visible in different age groups. younger generations have constant contact with computers and online world while their parents may not even own an e-mial account !

this is not a big practical problem for older generation, since it is totally possible to live a normal life without using internet or computers(it actually depends on the job, but still possible to live your personal life easily). 

due to strict filtering and low bandwidth, even internet users dont use online connections as a serious means of instant communication, for example friends wont use messenger or facebook chat to fix a meeting point or deciding where to go for dinner. they rather use phone calls for serious purposes.

in this aspect younger and older generations behave similar to each other. what makes the gap between them is the use of internet and computers for free time activities and connectivity to the rest of the world.

while parents watch news on tv with limited access to the different sources, their children have the opportunity to see the world trough many different lenses, have live feeds from people inside the event and read different opinions on it.

in this sense I can say that knowledge makes the biggest divide between the two generations. but kind of knowledge that changes and shapes ones ideology rather than knowledge with immediate practical usage.

getting in contact with bigger external world which is quite different from what they used to, in Iran, changes and shapes ideas, expectations and worldview of youth making an even bigger gap between them and their previous generation. 

about  "Inside Echelon" 

Echelon is the system of international communications surveillance.

biggest network of Echelon seems to belong to US and his alliance. it covers all the communication means (except physical ones like a messenger): telephone, email, fax, telegraph ,pages..

this does not mean that somebody reads every email or listens to all the phone calls, but it is rather selective: there are lists of interested people to keep under surveillance and a set of keywords/concepts to filter the huge amount of daily communications.

nowadays the task of choosing relevant intelligence from ocean of data exchanged every second is done automatically. computers with tremendous processing powers do the job of information retrieval. after several automated step, a human may look at the extracted data and decide if it is valuable or not.

In this years, main target of Echelon systems are  economic and commercial intelligence used for so called ""the economic well-being" of the country.

it seems to me that second major use of this intelligent nowadays is spying on their own citizens! having social and political movements and their leaders under control is one main reason for that.
what they gather is half important as what they use this information for. if gathering information on social or trades union leaders follows actions to limit or disable social movements, in long run it can be harmful for the society's development.

An Internet fraud

of my experience

I used to live in Munich just before I come to Estonia and it is extremely difficult to find a flat there, specially being foreigner and not knowing german.
Getting help from an agency is kind of difficult because you dont speak german and they are very busy! there are some websites that both individuals and agencies put their offers with photos and descriptions and so on, very much like city24 here.
I was desperately searching for a flat (for quit long actually ) when I encountered this scam. I believe that there were many more fishy offers in there, but I didnt write to the offers that were too good to be true ,in the first place.
 it was a normal flat, nothing was strange about it, price was normal, photos were ok and address existing..
I wrote to him in english because it is better that you show you dont know german from the beginning rather than pretending to know, in german people's eye! (I guess they consider writing in german as a written confirm that you know german, and if in practice you dont, it is a lie to them!)
And.. he wrote back in english! it was a very good sign that someone replied and better that he speaks english(better: is willing to speak english!) I was very excited about it and I wrote back ..
after a few emails(maybe 2-3) he said that he has this flat in munich abut he lives somewhere else(I dont remember exact location) and he wants to rent this flat which is fully furnished and bla bla, he wrote whole story of his life that why he is there and what is this flat and so on.
finally he said that he needs to send the keys to me because he cant come personally to sign the contract and he asked me to transfer the deposit amount to him.
I was so desperate that I could do what ever he said if the he would give his bank account, but he asked to use some weird money transfer method. the money he was asking was not a huge amount 700 euros or so.
compared to the scams I read in the scambaiting websites, this one was really believable and well designed. still the part that he wrote a whole life story was strange.

Review the scambaiting websites:

Scam-O-Rama

&

WhatsTheBloodyPoint

the first thing that I am itching to mention is that the websites are not user-friendly at all!

they are very difficult to read and follow.

they try to inform people on recent scams  and possibly contact scammers pretending to be clueless to keep them busy or scam them back!

I actually am not sure how much time, a playing victim reply can take from scammer..they are sending hundreds of copies of the same email to different people. and answering an email from a mugu shouldn't take them long.

 I think these websites can be helpful to inform users and show the scammers that the new scam is also known widely, if updated by newest scams of the day.

taking money from scammers, could be still ethical(or at least not as bad!), if there was a way to identify previous victims and pay their money back from it.

but when scamming back, we don't actually know if this particular scammer has ever succeeded to scam anyone yet. punishing him with scambaiting, will be punishing someone just because of attempting to do something and the method of punishment is still questionable.

I think I dont agree with scambaiting to stop scams, I would suggest a more organised attempts to find and stop them using legal methods.  

The blocking system,

we were asked to try and play with a blocking tool and report on it, but unfortunately I could not get them for my OS, then I decided to share my experience with filtering in a wider range.

I come from Iran and we have overall filtering on our internet. It has been there for long and it develops and changes depending on the current situation : political, social , …

basically we had two types of filtering:

- total filtering of a website, like youtube is filtered altogether and independent of the content of the video you would like to watch it is impossible to assess it. Facebook, many photo sharing and video, audio sharing and news fall also to the same category.

- content based(better to call it keyword-based) filtering: the general website is accessible but specific pages and content is not.

Although the whole concept of filtering is absurd (at least in the context of free society), the first method works better to fulfill its purpose. Many funny cases happens when filtering is done based on some words or concepts because of imperfect content monitoring technologies.

The interesting fact about this filtering is that it is been reviews and revised based on user's suggestion (well I am not sure how well this system works, but:) when you try to open a forbidden page, a webpage appears telling you that this is a forbidden content and suggests you other pages!(not based on the original page, but it suggest a list of possibilities like entertainment, news …) and there is also a possibility to report a mistake, so you can say that this page is filtered without any reason and the content is fine and you ask them to revise it.