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While EA seems to have understood how to play the game, the Swedish court (and the European legal system) not only fails to get it, but also came with a lame excuse to reject the pirate bay retrial.

On one side, one of the judges was a member of several copyright protection groups and forgot to mention that before the case. This fact itself should be enough for a reconsideration of the decision, as his interests were too tied up with the case to have a fair opinion. But what bugs me most is the reason (or rather, the excuse) of why they are still determined to make them pay for their “crimes”.

The court found them guilty because, it said, they continued to operate the service even when they knew users were being pointed to pirated material.

So, they’re not keeping any copyrighted material themselves, and they have a clause that takes away their responsibility of whatever material is shared across their networks, but that’s not enough, they should have done something.

Let’s say they did have to do something, now we should apply the same rule to others as well right? What about the weapons industry? They know it’ll be used to kill other people, but they still make it and sell it (much worse than only provide the means). What about the tobacco industry? They know it’s not healthy, they know people will get lung cancer, but they still do it (and quite a lot of it).

What about the recording industry? Yes, the same one that is accusing pirate bay of “harming the artists”, forces artists to sign diabolical contracts where they get all the money and the artists get all the work. Who’s harming the artists in the end?

I completely agree with the court decision, as long as they apply the same rule to everyone. No more firearms (for civilians, at least), no more cigarettes, 50/50 for contracts. Fair is fair.

Since the early days (millions of years ago), the human race is being watched. Not by any sort of god or alien race, but by itself.

During the cave age, human-apes lived in groups. Either on trees or proper caves, they were all together. It was, then, pretty impossible to do something and not being noticed. If you want to enjoy the sunset while all others are working hard on protecting the cave, you’ll be spotted. If you get someone’s else wife for a ride, people would know.

Empires came and went and the only thing they brought as a relief for that was the number of unknown people around you. People would know you on your neighbourhood, but you could go away a few blocks and you’d be a total stranger. Moving cities was even better, but that was nothing that you couldn’t do during the cave age.

Even with the ability of changing homes, during your stay in a particular place, you are being watched. Not all vigilance is bad, though. Some might learn that you like football and invite you for the local team. Others could notice you left your door open and warn you, and even babysit your children.

Whenever you interact with the people, you invariable leave a trace. If a policeman asks your neighbour where have you been, he’ll probably have a good hunch and that will probably help the police to find you. The only thing that matters, really, is if you’re lost (and needs finding) or running away.

The Internet is a much bigger place than any city or country, it’s far easier to go on without being noticed. But, as with real life, people are watching. Sometimes for good, other times for bad, and that doesn’t make the Internet any different than the real world.

If you come to my house, I’ll remember. When you visit websites, your IP and page you visited is logged on their servers. We eventually forget your visit, if you were not that important, or clear old logs from the server, but for a while, you are there.

Being logged in a server is no different than being remembered, and that’s hardly a bad thing. What is bad is what you do with that piece of information. And for that, it doesn’t matter if you’re on the net or at my house, it’s a violation of your freedom for me to use that information solely to my profit. Hiding behind proxies is not the way to go, because that is only pushing your freedom even further away.

So, what is neutrality?

Net neutrality is to give the freedom to people do whatever they want, whenever they want and not cap their ability for profit or legal reasons. This may seem dangerous, if someone is trying to do any harm, the chance they’ll succeed is big, but that is also the case with real life. Suicide bombers,, for instance, always manage to explode themselves and no one can do anything about it.

Well, they can, and that leads us to a much worse scenario: Guantanamo Bay. Caping everyone’s connections and inspecting everyone’s packets because some will abuse is against human rights. The same with locking people in far away prisons without any charge just because there was a hunch that he/she would do something wrong whenever they would.

Society is complex and evil. Freedom comes with a high price: harm. If you start guessing who’ll do the wrong thing and punishing them before they do, you can surely save a lot of harm being done, but also you’ll harm lots of innocent people to a no return point. Your society will be as bad as the quality of your guess.

So, judging people for the crimes they have commited won’t change the harm they have done, but will save the lives of people that didn’t commit any crime. Crime is part of the nature. Not human nature, but life itself. It’s not possible to stop it once and for all, it’s not possible to accurately predict when it’s going to happen and the outcome of trying is far worse than not, so don’t even start.

Not only that, but these guess-works give permission to certain people (or groups) to deviate the logic for their own profit. That’s the case of recording companies and the fight against copying and borrowing. That’s the case of idea patents and the inherent inability to think. That’s the case of all major wars since the second world war (and probably many more before that).

Guessing on people’s freedom is evil, not even hideous crimes are that evil.

The long dispute with Cisco has finally come to an agreement. For me, that means two things: first, they’re not trolls sucking money from the big corps for stupid patent infringement, as some might fear. Second, they’re very patient, understanding and sometimes a bit too naive.

Why the fear?

When building embedded systems or when you’re too close to the hardware (such as Cisco) you may take a wise decision to use open source software, as it’s quite likely to be stable and taken care by a good bunch of good people. Even though there are several ways of doing it independently, so your software is not virally infected by the GPL, it’s not always possible and you may have to re-invent the wheel because of that.

It’s not only GPL, patents can also cause a whole lot of damage, and it seems that TomTom has decided to go head first with the Linux community.

So, although the fear is understandable, it’s more of a hysteria than based on actual facts. The FSF hasn’t had much to show on court, and that adds up to the uncertainty of the lawyers, but it’s in cases like the Cisco that they show a much higher maturity that most companies have shown recently, even mature companies like Microsoft.

Richard Stallman

The FSF is not only Stallman. Even though he’s the boss, the organization is a large list of people, sponsors, advisers (and now interns). One thing is to fear what RMS will do when he finds you using GPL in your kitchen scale, but a completely different matter is what the FSF (as an organization) does.

The Cisco case has been going for several years. They offered help, they’ve asked politely, they’ve warned about the potential dangers and so on. A lot has been made before they have actually filled the suit, and they’ve settled it nicely. This shows that they’re not just waiting the next infringement to get you down, they actually care about their (and your) freedom.

The day the FSF starts acting stupid is the day people will drive away. It’s not like Microsoft that you have no option, there’s plenty of options out there, software, licences, partners, advisers, programmers, etc. GNU/Linux is not the decent open source operating system, the BSDs are as good, sometimes better, especially in the embedded case.

The year of Linux

Every year since 1995 is the year of Linux. For me it always was, but I can’t say the same for the rest of the world. Recently, Linux (and other open source software) has played an important role in defining the future of mankind and more and more the Linux community feels that it’s their sweat and blood.

There is a great chance it’ll become the platform of all things in a very short time-frame. Cars, mobile phones, PDAs, netbooks, laptops, desktops, servers, clusters, spaceships. One platform to rule them all and in the darkness bind them, but if they play dumb, their glory might never see daylight.

Lots of people disagree with the new revisions of the GPL license, they feel it bites the hand that feeds it. Many companies feed back open source regularly and that kinda broke the synergy. I personally think that it’s excellent for some cases, but not for all. For instance, development tools should not be restricted, especially when it comes to platforms they can’t reach. Opening the platform is an obvious way around it, but not everything can be exposed and they can’t figure out every implementation detail.

Drivers might also have trouble with GPLv3 for the same reason. Again, there are ways around it, the FSF recently opened a backdoor to develop proprietary plug-ins if they’re blessed, but that might not be suitable for every case.

Solution?

Sorry, not today. Stick to FreeBSD if you can’t cope with GPLv3, find a way to co-exist with the GCC exception and provide the source code of what you have to. If it’s not your core business, you could donate your code to the community and make it GPL too and treat your program as enabling technology, of course, providing your code doesn’t expose any patent or trade secret.

So, well, yeah. Each case is a different case, that’s the problem of being in the long tail.

Spam is good for you, at least better than you may think. Spam accounts for three quarters of all emails sent worldwide and some even attached carbon footprint to it (and here one of the reasons why it’s nonsense). But it’s good for you in ways that does not meet the eye very easily and very few people would even consider it as good in the first place.

Not only emails, think on how much regular mail you receive is really worthy and how much is spam, it’ll probably account for three quarters as well. How much of that is really mean, how that really hurts you so bad that you’d put the sender in jail for it?

Sure spam is a nuisance, sure it gets in the way of the real work, but at what cost are we, the society, willing to pay to eradicate such problem? Well, lets take a look on how spam really started…

Local business

You’re a window cleaner and recently moved to Shlobershire in a very quite little village. How would you let people know about your business? You can go on, talking to each one of the local residents but that’s a nuisance, so you print some pamphlets and post through the door of everyone.

Some will read and call you, some will be pissed off but most will just ignore you. You’ll figure out pretty quickly about those that got pissed off (if you live in a small village you know that already), but then you buy them a pint and everything is settled.

What’s the final cost? A few pamphlets, a couple pints and you got two great things: one or two windows to clean and the whole village knowing who you are. This is, by far, the cheapest marketing ever. The rest of us that can’t afford a real marketing campaign have to find ways to promote our business.

With all the fuss about global warming, organic farming and fair competition in business (if there is such thing), we want to promote and use more of local business than big brands. We’re loosing creativity, diversity and quality if we don’t.

ROI

Just like the local business, some people can’t afford big marketing campaigns. Either because they’re poor or because their business is not so legal in every country.

So, why people still send those stupid ill edited loosely formatted emails, even when it’s obvious what they want? Who wants pills, fake degrees or enlarge their penises? Well, apparently some do and the do reply and may well get what they want!

The return of investment is much, much better than most marketing campaigns. Take Microsoft’s campaign with Jerry Seinfield or the “I’m a PC” thing? It was the most expensive piece of crap ever done. Seriously, I prefer spam than that!

The return rate is very low, one reply in millions of email, but if they send billions of emails, go figure.

But that’s clearly bad, isn’t it?

Well, illegal activities are bad, of course. Either on-line of off-line, drug dealing is bad, banking scams are bad, but not all spam is a scam or a drug selling point.

First, people receive so much spam from normal companies (even those that they have explicitly opted-out) including broadband providers, software, telephone and TV etc and etc.

The smaller companies are still sending physical spam and it’s probably working much better than the electronic spam, but that’s the deal: it works and it’s cheap.

Second, what’s really illegal? Downloading a music you haven’t paid for is illegal? What if you will pay later? What if the author allowed you to? Ripping your CDs to MP3 to listen in your car is illegal? You have paid for it already!

Google has become target of many accusations of illegal behaviour because they host a number of websites, videos, personal profiles on social networks. If people started to massively upload child pornography to YouTube, would the Google guys be in jail? I bet my little finger they wouldn’t.

RIAA kills a kitten every time you download (or rip) a CD while governments detain people for years on maximum security prisons without a single charge, what’s really legal?

Pirate Bay scam

I still don’t believe it happened, even though it was on all major journals for a week, but the Pirate Bay guy actually got a jail sentence for owning a website that allowed people to share files. They’re not criminals, they’re not killing people or (more importantly) getting in the way of the course of business (after all, money is more important than peoples lives nowadays). They just set up a list of things.

File sharing is one of the biggest revolutions of the recent internet and more and more people are asking the industry to finally adopt the technique rather than fight it. Whether they like it or not, it will prevail.

What is worse, a few old ladies downloading very old music (unavailable from any shop in the world) or the fear that the recording industry poses on most governments today that allowed such a scam to ever being turn into reality?

One mistake does not justify the other, but many (sane) people are already saying: Stop fighting reality, come back to it, be part of it.

You can’t fight them, help them!

I can’t imagine a world where we wait people to deliver a pamphlet to hand-cuff them, or where someone is jailed for listening music in his player’s speakers. Unfortunately, we’re not that far from it.

Why spam works? Because there isn’t any other way for those people. Yellow pages? Who reads them? Journal advertisement? Banners? People got used to them and can ad-block automatically. Our brains are trained to ignore them, it’s just not effective any more.

Some companies say they can provide a much better ad experience for the users by spying their lives closer than their lovers. I would object that approach…

There are many (free) systems for local business, but none of them seem to cut it. Maybe because people are always trying to get money in return (weird world, isn’t it?) and end up putting paid ads bigger, colourful and in the front page, and let the real local business somewhere between marriages and obituary.

I have no idea how a system would get rid of spam once and for all and it’s not my cup of tea to think about it, but I’m sure there are many people that could tackle this problem, they just need a bit of money (from the government) and time. It’s not a matter of filtering emails, it’s a matter of removing the need to send them in the first place!

If governments are really worried about spam, let them be creative and help freedom, privacy and good relationships rather than the totalitarianism we’re seeing around the world.

A new world is rising, new machines are taking life much faster than most governments would like and the digital hand-cuffs are showing that none of them understand a bit of what’s going on. All blinds, living in their caves watching the shadows on the wall. Whoever cry wolf is right for no one knows what wolf really is and where is it. Technology is like children, the more oppressed they are, the more you loose control over them.

Einstein didn’t go to the US because he liked the land of freedom, he moved because he hoped (in vain) that they would know how to use wisely the technology he knew how to build. He knew that others would be able to build it and it was just a matter of time before any bomb was actually available. Holding it back was not the answer and he knew it.

I just hope people figure it out sooner rather than later, or 1984 will seem like a pretty boring fairy tale for our children…

Apparently, users are so dumb that they don’t even know what opt-out means, so Microsoft just wants to be really sure anyway…

Dear Windows Live User,

We are contacting you regarding your communication preference settings for Windows Live and MSN.

Currently, your settings do not allow Microsoft to send you promotional information or survey invitations about Windows Live and MSN. We would like to communicate important product updates to you, so if you would like to change your settings, please visit your account profile here to change your preferences.

Sincerely,
The Windows Live Team

Note: You can also change your Account settings by going to your browser and typing in: http://account.live.com. After logging-in to your account, look for ‘Additional options’ and click ‘Marketing preferences’. Then uncheck the top preference box and click ‘Save’.

Microsoft respects your privacy. To learn more, please read our online Privacy Statement.

Microsoft Corporation

Thanks for the fun, Rodrigo

Almost 10 years ago, MySQL became a great open source database, part of the LAMP platform (Perl, not PHP) and had everything to compete with the big players in the next few years.

It was then that they have done major releases, with a huge set of new features each, almost once a year. The community was happy using, developing and integrating with other products. But it was around 2005 that the things started going bad…

Back in 2005, when I was still in the loop, I have to say that I wasn’t impressed with the progress that the database had. I wasn’t also impressed with the new view the board gave to big companies (such as Yahoo!) on what was a good bet and what wasn’t.

After release 5.0 (still the production release, irrespective of what Sun says) there wasn’t a major development until Sun acquired MySQL and only then they’ve released 5.1 which they better shouldn’t.

In the old days, MySQL became famous by not implementing foreign keys and transactions, something that every other database had, because of speed issues. That decision became the core of the company and allowed other storage engines (such as InnoDB and BerkeleyDB which had those features) to be integrated, making it very easy to plan your database, using only the features you needed where you needed.

Who’s to blame?

I’m not sure it has something to do with Oracle buying InnoDB and Sleepycat (and now buying Sun, which owns MySQL). Even with all the politics of Oracle slowly buying MySQL in pieces, I don’t believe it’s the whole story. I see much more of an internal conflict and a lack of vision (probably for the lack of guts to keep taking weird decisions and succeeding) than anything else.

Now, MySQL is going down the same drain InnoDB and Sleepycat went, but with a twist: the source code is still GPL. Sun screwed up MySQL in a way I thought it wasn’t possible, Oracle will do it much more efficiently, even if they still play as good guys, it is definitely the end.

Don’t take my word only, my good friend and MySQL guru Jeremy Cole is taking himself out of the loop to avoid the useless politics. Steven (Computerworld) also cannot see how any of the involved companies will get anything in return of this deal.

Is there a light at the end?

Could Monty’s fork become a new MySQL without all the fuss? Could he, the odd guy with odd ideas, put MySQL on the map again? I do hope so, but that will cost MySQL the hall of fame. They’ll need to start over again and eventually fail once they’re there again and restart…

It’ll be fun to watch, at least MySQL had a GPL license which always ease forks and future development. Long live the open source revolution!

UPDATE:

Two excellent articles about the same issue from The Register and Ars Technica.

Recently I had to implement a very simple feature that would cross the barrier between a few components. As any good software, the communication between the components is done via public interfaces, and that case wasn’t an exception.

Unfortunately, some core interfaces would need to be changed and I knew I was looking for trouble. Nevertheless, I started it anyway and, in the beginning, it was not as bad as I thought. Lots of changes, of course, but nothing too complex. But the devil is in the details…

Each refactoring pointed out to another refactoring needed, which, if I implemented the first I’d either need to do the second or have to hack it, so I did it. What happened is that it didn’t stop in the second, it went on and on. Each refactoring uncovered another and another. In the end, the state of the program and the unit tests were hardly stable.

I’ve reached a cycle, where refactoring A would break B, B would break C and C would break A again in a different way. The snake was biting its own tail…

That taught me some very important lessons:

1. Sometimes a simple refactoring can cost you the week and still have to be rolled back. In this case I believe I couldn’t have done differently, I had no way to know how bad it was before actually start poking around the code.
2. When you face this situation, the best thing you can do is take notes on your changes and roll back. Trying to fix it, especially when you’ve changed quite a lot of unit tests, is recipe to disaster.
3. Examine your notes and decide which refactoring need to be done first. It’ll probably be backwards to what you had to do in the first refactoring. When in doubt, start from the last and go up the stack.
4. Never do more than one refactoring at a time. When faced with this situation, stop, take notes, roll back and do the last refactoring first. Test everything and commit before you start the next step.

The last item is especially true when more developers are actively changing the code. This will give them time to adapt their changes to yours and adapt your changes to theirs.

Those lessons I’ve learned, I believe, are irrespective of the version control you use. I know that GIT has some pretty impressive conflict resolutions when merging your code but I doubt it’ll successfully merge high-level concepts (such as object orientation principles and design patterns). If you can’t tell if the test is right or wrong, how could the version control?

I’ve been testing a few options to replace Exchange+Outlook without losing functionalities users are used to.

Until now my best solution is this one. Please let me know what do you think and what you are using.

Tools:

Google Apps as mail server

Mozilla Thunderbird as Mail client

Mozilla Sunbird as Calendar client

Add-ons:

Google contacts to synchronize contacts

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/7307

Lighting to add Sunbird to Thunderbird

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2313

Directions:

Install Thunderbird and create your email account with the instructions from Google help page: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77662

To set up your Thunderbird client to work with Gmail:

1. Enable IMAP in Gmail. Make sure you click Save Changes when you’re done.
2. Open Thunderbird, and select Tools > Account Settings.
3. Click Add Account.
4. Select the Email account radio button and click Next. The Identity screen appears.
5. Enter your full name in the Your Name field. Enter your Gmail address (username@gmail.com) in the Email Address field, and click Next. Google Apps users, enter your full address in the format username@your_domain.com
6. Select IMAP as the type of incoming server you are using. Enter imap.gmail.com in the Incoming Server field.
7. Set the Outgoing Server to smtp.gmail.com and click Next.
8. Enter your full email address (including @gmail.com @your_domain.com) in the Incoming User Name and Outgoing User Name fields, and click Next.
9. Enter a name for your email account in the Account Name field, and click Next.
10. Verify your account information in the dialog box, and click Finish.
11. Select Server Settings from the folder list below your new account.
12. Update the Port value to 993.
13. In the Security Settings section, select SSL from the Use secure connection options.
14. Select the ‘Check for messages at startup’ checkbox and the ‘Check for new messages every 10 minutes’ checkbox.
15. Click Outgoing Server (SMTP) in the folder list.
16. Select the smtp.gmail.com (Default) entry from the list and click Edit. The SMTP Server page appears.
17. Enter smtp.gmail.com as the Server Name and set the Port to 587.
18. Select User name and password and enter your full email address (including @gmail.com or @your_domain.com) in the User Name field.
19. Select TLS from the Use secure connection radio buttons and click OK.
20. Click OK to save your changes and exit the Account Settings dialog.
21. Check our recommended client settings, and adjust your client’s settings as needed.
22. Install Sunbird.
23. Install Ligthing.
24. Restart Thunderbird.
25. Now in your Thunderbird you can see your Calendar as well.
26. Open the Calendar tab and under the “home” Calendar, click with the right button of your mouse and select “New Calendar”
27. Select On the Network and click Next.
28. Select the CalDAV format option.
29. In the Location field, enter [ https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/ [ your Google Calendar email address ] /events ] and click Next.For example, if the email address used to access your Google Calendar is calendarfriend@gmail.com, the Location field should contain https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/calendarfriend@gmail.com/events
    Be sure to use https in your URL, as an http address will not work.
30. Enter a name and select a color for your calendar.
31. In the pop-up screen, enter the following information:Username: This is the complete email address you use with Google Calendar (including the part after the @ sign). If you’re using Google Apps, be sure to enter your Google Apps email address.
    Password: This is the password you use to sign in to Google Calendar
32. Click OK.
33. Your Google Calendar will now appear in the Calendar tab of Mozilla Sunbird, and Sunbird will sync any changes to and from Google Calendar.
34. Now got to Thunderbird add-on tab and install Google Contacts add-on
35. Restart Thunderbird
36. Configure Google Contacts to synchronize with the server and that’s it.

Recently the whole family has been engaged in a complete greenification and organification. We prefer regional organic food (fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy products) than regular ones. We recycle everything we can, even if that means a car trip to the recycling centre every now and then.

But the recent trip to Scotland made us to want a new car, and the new car we wanted wasn’t green at all: the Toyota’s Rav4. It took me a while to have courage to actually buy one, but in the week I was listing them to get one on the local Toyota dealer, I saw a talk by Prof. David MacKay at ARM and changed my mind…

Besides being one of the key world figures on information theory, inference and learning, he’s also pushing hard on sustainable energy. His talk was great and it was then I figured out how much difference you can make with little things. Not getting planes unless you really have no other choice, changing your car to something greener and buying food from local markets does make a big difference.

It was then that we bought a Toyota Prius. I have to say that I’m impressed. Not only it runs on battery for quite a while, but the petrol engine is super effective, only turns on when needed and doing 60mpg (21 km/l) at constant speeds. Not only that, but the amount of gadgets and technology they put in those cars is amazing.

I’m not saving the world, I know, but does help a lot. If those cars were more common, if the globalization used more internet and less aeroplanes, and if people ate more local food, maybe we could reduce the energy footprint and than sustainable energy could be viable.

One thing is for sure, people do need to change their attitude towards life and comfort and be prepared to live more and complaint less.

Would you give away your genome to research? It’s a bit tricky to define what kind of research and who will have access to it to do what…

I would kindly give mine, if it was licensed GPLv3.

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