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Le password della rivolta

@Open Web

Citta Invisible wrote the following post 3 days ago:

«Io non sapevo nulla di Gezi Park. E’ cominciato tutto da alcuni ragazzi che hanno visto il primo bulldozer – racconta Sebastian da Istanbul – cercare di abbattere gli alberi. Hanno chiamato alcuni amici costringendo gli operai ad andare via. A quel punto sono arrivati i primi poliziotti ma erano solo mille e noi già 50.000. Il sabato successivo eravamo già 250.000». «I media sono pesantemente influenzati dal governo. Durante i primi giorni di protesta hanno preferito mandare in onda documentari sui pinguini… Per questo abbiamo utilizzato i social network. Quando abbiamo capito che la polizia stava schermando i cellulari, gli abitanti vicino al parco per solidarizzare con la protesta hanno aperto i loro wi-fi mettendo alle finestre cartelli con username e password».

#occupygezi #occupy #turchia

Le password della rivolta su Comune-info.
if google got the translation right :like
@Open Web @Friendica Support

Anyone with a better grasp than me of the security details of Friendica want to take a stab at some brief text that can be distributed to people on other networks about why the NSA PRISM "revelation" means Friendica is the place to be? It might bring in a few more converts. #justathought

(and I say "revelation" in quotes, because, duh.)
11 comments show more
... And anybody trying to Google "Red" to find out anything about the project had a real fun week.
And most people have a friend or relative with the skills to setup Friendica or Red Matrix, as it uses the same technology as anybody who set up a WordPress blog or content management system for their small business. Not very many people know somebody that can set up pump.io or Diaspora.
Google backslides on federated instant messaging, on purpose? on Fsf

Skip to content, sitemap or skip to search. by John Sullivan, Executive Director, and Ward Vandewege, CTO Earlier this year, we announced an instant messaging service for our members using Jabber (XMPP). This service is federated, so like email, you can talk to people whose account is hosted somewhere else than the FSF. Your account is, say, johns@...


@Open Web
Tobias doesn't like this.
Feels good to be google free for almost a year now. Fuck 'em.
Excellent speech by Moglen, as usual. A shame they wasted so much time on that piece of shit DreamPlug.
Yes it is a shame that they got diverted into dealing with binary blobs. Probably the thinking behind that was that any binary blob is potentially a security risk, but chasing GPL violations wasn't really within the original remit of the project.
looks like WebID does not depend on CA certificates but rather a client-side certificate exchange.

The WebID protocol specifies how a Service can authenticate a user after requesting his Certificate without needing to rely on this being signed by a well known Certificate Authority

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/





thats sounds good .. maybe I should look at implementing it.

looks simpler than the crazy mess of all those different openid implementations that don't properly talk to each other!




@Open Web
@Lazy Admin
@Commander Zot need a way to handle logins so users don't end up having to log in again and again and again as they travel with mobile devices!
http://linux.conf.au



anyone here in AU going to this?


would love to go but can't afford tix
but am still thinking about a trip to Canberra on the weekend to get to some of the after-events.


@Open Web
@Lazy Admin
@Friendica Meetups
3 comments show more
I only just found out myself ... they were talking about it on Radio National!

so I looked it up .. http://www.makehackvoid.com/community/mhv-makerconf-2013" target="external-link">This looks interesting

but if its only on during the week i probably can't make it
(can't really afford to take days off work right now) .. but if there is still something happening on Saturday I might consider a day trip
oh dear .. something not quite right with bbcode parsing here...
probably not a Friendica problem - more likely due to spraci hacks and old bbcode parsing code.
(I can see it has changed a fair bit on my more up-to-date test Friendica instance)
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/how-to-shut-down-internets-warren-ellis

Turning off the internet is a real hazard, at least for the internet as it's currently implemented.  I think the sensible thing to do is to introduce laws which explicitly make it illegal for anyone to do this - even if they're a government minister or a president.  Nobody should be able to order that the internet be shut down, and expect to get away with it.

@Open Web
Open Wireless Movement on Openwireless




Imagine a future with ubiquitous open Internet. We're working with a coalition of volunteer engineers to build technologies that will let users open their wireless networks without compromising their security or sacrificing bandwidth. And we're working with advocates to help change the way people and businesses think about Internet service.


@Open Web
3 comments show more
I don't know, but it seems to have a significant online presence. The reporting also seems to be relatively sensible and largely free from celebrity gossip/UFO stories/rants by uninformed commentators/jingoism/xenophobia - unlike most other UK newspapers. In the past I also used to read The Times online, but then they rendered themselves irrelevant by going behind a paywall.

Linux Magazin about MediaGoblin and Federation

In this Linux Magazine article about #MediaGoblin they also mention ~friendica ~friendica, but they are linking only to http://friendi.ca

MediaGoblin: Saving the Internet Through Federation on Linux-magazine
A new project for sharing media files might be as important for its philosophy as its features.
@Open Web
5 comments show more
Is it just me, or are all 7,000 intelligent people on the planet already here?
Articles like that really make me wonder what these FSW summits actually accomplish? I mean, how many will it take before people even get on the same page?

Whenever I examine the progress of other projects, I genuinely try to figure out what's going on. The last thing I ever wanna do is totally misunderstand what developers are up to. In fact, AFAIC, that's the only way to cut through any/all BS. :-)

Zimbra?

@Lazy Admin @Open Web

Did anyone of you ever try Zimbra? Since I last looked (which was SOME time ago), CardDAV/CalDAV support was added, and a lot of what it (or some third party addons) is able to do looks like exactly what I want. And there's a free open source version.

Downside: Current version doesn't officially support Debian, and much worse: The installer for the packages is built for Zimbra being the only system on the server, nothing else there. It will install its own MySQL, I think Apache, Postfix etc., taylored to work with Zimbra.

While this will make installation much less complex, I'm not sure if I want to rent another VPS only for Zimbra. Unfortunately, their demo server is down at the moment, so I cant' even try out the current version.

Did anybody ever try to install it along other stuff on a server? Or does/did anybody run it at all for home use?
22 comments show more
@Leif Möller Später mal vielleicht. Ich bin, wie gesagt, eigentlich eher positiv überrascht von der guten Performance trotz der geringen Ressourcen.

Regarding backups: There are quite a number of readymade scripts done by the community for that purpose. I even found one that brings its own install routine. Nice. :-)
@Open Web

A nice talk about Unhosted.


SFJS #30 by David Edelhart on YouTube
@Open Web

2012-08-27-Version 0.1 released on Freedomboxfoundation

This 0.1 version is primarily a developer release, which means that it focuses on architecture and infrastructure rather than finish work. The exception to this is privoxy-freedombox, the web proxy discussed in previous updates, which people can begin using right now to make their web browsing more secure and private and which will very soon be available on non-FreedomBox systems.
@Open Web

Diaspora* - Announcement: Diaspora* Will Now Be A Community Project on Diasporafoundation

Diaspora is now being opened up to be community-driven, as we believe it's the best thing to do for the project. The core team will still be around, albeit as simply contributors, and I will help with community devs in the following ways:

Community feature development will be coordinated in a new way. If you want to work on a feature, work on it, announce it, and you'll be highlighted through DiasporaHQ. Those that want to work together on features will be put into teams together, and these teams will communicate back and forth to The goal is to have a democratic system of governance put in place, fueled by developers working on the features they love and want to work on.

Needless to say, there are some very positive implications with this. For a long time, I've wanted to find ways to better work alongside other decentralized socnet projects, such as Friendica. We as a whole need to work together to fight the real enemy here: Big Data, and the slippery slope that entails social silos.

Previously, having a small team of people making all the decisions made reaching out as a third party somewhat problematic. I'm happy to say that this problem has been mitigated.

For all the hard feelings and arguments that have taken place that I have been a part in, I am sorry. However, we as a community should concern ourselves with the elephant in the room: the social web continues to grow more and more constrictive in terms of user rights every day. We have to move away from these centralized systems. We need to put our differences aside, because the web is depending on all of us together.

Naturally, on the Diaspora side of things, we have a lot of things that need to be done. Our user and developer community will ultimately decide these things, and I, as a community custodian, will make my best damned effort to support other networks as well.

I believe in the decentralized social web; and I feel that this shift can become beneficial for everyone.
6 comments show more
Check out this blast from the past... for even moar lulz. ;-)

Why Diaspora will fail -- May 21, 2010
... I mean, it sounds great in principle, but with all of the excitement stirred up over the last week, nobody's bothered to talk about the harsh reality that it's all nothing more than a pipe dream.

...A very well-funded pipe dream.

Take a look at what these kids are selling for a moment -- and yes, I said kids, because that's what they are, kids. There isn't even a product here, just a promise, and it's being made by four fixie-hipster computer science majors at NYU who can't even act mature for the four minutes needed to film the video they somehow thought necessary to sell their "idea" to the masses.

What's this super-amazing, fantastical idea they've come up with? It's a distributed social network that would exist as individual nodes, called seeds, which would be owned and operated by the users of the network. Why seeds, you ask? Well, it might have something to do with a little open source project that's been floating around for a few years now, since this idea is so strikingly similar to one that was tried for the first time, in 2005, with a project called Appleseed...

The Bottom Line

... if you donated money to these guys, you didn't participate in some grand assault against Facebook's foothold on the Internet. You probably paid for an appletini or two (of thousands) that will be consumed over the course of the next few summer months ... as they party their faces off. And why shouldn't they? They only asked for $10,000 in pledges. They've just pulled off a heist worthy of a bad Hollywood movie.
And people wonder why I use the word "$cam" when discussing D*. :-D lolz
• Diaspora Founders To Move On, Handing Over Decentralized Social Network ‘To The Community’
Update: Salzberg points to Diaspora’s Kickstarter page for a full profit-and-loss report detailing how the $200,000 in Kickstarter donations was spent. He and Grippi will indeed be focusing on Makr.io going forward, but in an email he stressed that they still plan to be very involved with Diaspora:
Amazing to think MS sincerely believes that P&L statement will help the D* crew appear less $cam-ta$tic to all those they've conned. :facepalm


• Founders of Diaspora, Intended as the Anti-Facebook, Move On
On Hacker News, a social news site started by Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator, defenders and critics of Diaspora are posting their reactions to the announcement.
Always much lulz to be had when D* becomes the topic of conversation on HN. :-D


• Diaspora's founders turn the social networking site over to community
Diaspora started in New York in April 2010 by four New York University students in the wake of a furious user backlash over new privacy changes enacted by Facebook. Promising to build a new social network that still protected the privacy of users, the students launched a Kickstarter campaign that raised $200,000, including a donation from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

The project later moved to San Francisco, although by July 2011, the money was gone and the project was $238 in the hole. And in November 2011, co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 22, committed suicide.

While Facebook more than survived the backlash (and now has 950 million members), Diaspora's network still numbers only in the thousands, hardly the "Facebook killer" some had predicted. And attention has shifted to another alternative crowd-funded social network called App.net.
First it was D*, now it's App.net. :hahaha

Tim Berners-Lee auf Campus Party

Man kann nur hoffen, dass die Entwickler und vor allem die Auftraggeber dies auch mal so sehen werden.

Campus Party: Tim Berners-Lee schwört Programmierer auf Offenheit ein on Heise

Der Erfinder des World Wide Web sagte geschlossenen Apps auf Smartphones oder Tablets den Kampf an und warb stattdessen für eine offene Web-Plattform für Anwendungen auf Basis von HTML5.
@Open Web
Hoffentlich. Spätestens, wenn die Firmen merken, dass sie für iOS UND Android UND Metro UND Bada UND..., einzeln zahlen müssen, um alle Kunden zu erreichen, statt einmal für HTML5.
Should have sent this to the right places the first time, but it can't harm to read it twice.


Mike the Friendican
My name is Mike Macgirvin. I am a software developer.
I'll get to the point.  Help us save the web.
Getting Facebook (and Google) out of our private lives is the most important technical challenge facing the web in this generation. We MUST do this, as the grip of control is reaching further and further where it doesn't belong - and the implications for the future are positively scary for humanity.

The way we must do this is to take back our personal and social communications.

I'VE ALREADY DONE THIS. I started a project two years ago to provide decentralised and distributed social communications. That project is now called Friendica. The project website is at http://friendica.com and code is at  https://github.com/friendica/friendica.

Friendica WORKS today (unlike similar projects which are still struggling at basic communications after two years, and after squandering huge amounts of money). Along the way I've asked people what they needed, I've listened to the community, and we've built an entire open development eco-system around Friendica.

It's time to take it to the next level. In order to do this, I need to devote full time to it and be able to hire a competent visual designer to help implement the vision.  The new project is called simply "Red".  Red is a social network - but at the same time it is unlike any social network that has ever existed.

Like Friendica, it can do anything that Facebook can do - except monitor, and track, and "use" all its members and their activities for marketing.

Like Friendica, Red is a completely open platform that is decentralised and distributed and will run on commodity servers, with all servers treated as equals. Like Friendica it is extensible via themes and plugins/addons. Like Friendica it will be the only distributed social service which offers strong (and non-intrusive) permission control for profiles, web pages, and photos.

But we're going a LOT further than that.

Here's what we're doing...

1. We're changing the out-dated concept of "friends" vs. "not friends".  Relationships in the real world are a continuum between "intimacy" and "total strangers". How we relate to individuals and what we share with them depends on where they fit in that spectrum. This spectrum is built into the Red experience.

2. The distributed social web suffers from the adage "only geeks run servers". We're going to change that. We've got a business model. We will get organisations and individuals to provide enough servers to support everybody on the planet because there's a profit motive. Many sites will offer free service, some will charge for extra features, such as huge numbers of friends and additional photo space. Subscription revenue will pay for running the hardware. Geeks can also run their own servers for family/friends and get it all for free.  The ability to obtain revenue and monetise the service will be built-in to the software. Whether you choose to use it is a personal (or business) choice.

Advertising on the web has gotten us into this situation. To get out of it, we have to draw a line in the sand. No advertising. No monitoring and no tracking. Our credo and reason for existence is that our customers are YOU and your PRIVACY is what we are being paid to protect.  Period.

3. We already know from building decentralised social systems that sites come and go and people move to other servers. We're building MOBILITY into the Red protocols.  You'll download your private key and address book to a thumb drive and be able to  communicate from any device or desktop, through any Red server on the planet - privately, to all your friends and associates. If you can still connect to your old server, we can get everything we need from there and you don't need to download it. Sure, you will also be able to save your posts and photo albums, but what we discovered in practice is that the most important thing about moving between server hubs is the ability to preserve your relationships.  You can pop up at any Red site at any time and still have all your friends.

4. The other thing we learned from Friendica is that one "interface" does not make everybody happy. Neither does one set of features. So along with the Red "look and feel", we are completely revamping the "theme" system to make it easy to build additional applications on top of our decentralised communications infrastructure. You can have dating sites, church social clubs, learning centers and more. You can have desktop apps and mobile/pad apps and web apps. These are all just templates you apply to our/(your) social framework. Also, these can either connect with the rest of the Red "grid", or they can be standalone and offer completely different functionality. Secure and private social communications are provided by a back-end engine, and we'll provide tools so you can build anything you wish on top of it.  We have an existing API which is already compatible with a few dozen third-party clients. We will be adding to this to provide access to our full range of privacy features.

I'm building Red today. I'm also heavily involved in Friendica and keeping it running smoothly.  But look - reality bites some times. I'm a family guy holding a day job. There isn't enough time in the day to pull this off. Everybody developing Friendica is/are volunteers.  The work ahead is monumental. If I'm doing this part time it's going to take 2-3 years.

So I'm looking for crowd funding to allow me to work on this full time. I'm a good project developer, but I also require the assistance of at least one good visual designer who can transform these ideas into a slick web interface. Visual design is something you have or you don't have, and I don't have it - so I need help.

I'd like to fund this project for my own salary and one designer and one capable server for one year - and I believe that by the end of that time we will have the means to be self-sustaining. If I can hire a couple of other people to help out, it will happen quicker. Time is of the essence. We're rapidly losing control of the web to the forces of darkness.

Everything we do is and will be published openly and you can track our progress.

I will be working with one or two crowd sourcing applications to launch an official campaign, but you can donate today - just PayPal mike@macgirvin.com and send this to a friend or three and help me get the word out.

Help us save the web.

Thank you.

Mike Macgirvin




@Public Stream @Open Web @KakSte Announcements
richardfontana/Copyleft.next · GitHub


Copyleft.next is an experimental "-ng"-type version of the GNU General
Public License, version 3. (It is *not* a fork.) Contributions of
patches, ideas, and criticism are welcome. The goal of this effort is
to develop an improved strong copyleft free software license. Needless
to say, no one should actually *use* a development version of
Copyleft.next as an actual license.
...


@Open Web
@Stefan You might try following @fontana on identica for more of an idea.
Its moved to gitorious If I'm right..

Cisco teaches why open is ALWAYS better than closed

esr
Cisco provides a lesson
In my last blog post, I made a public stink about language in a so-called Declaration of Internet Freedom, which turned out to be some libertarians attempting to expand and develop the ideas in this Declaration of Internet Freedom. Mostly they did pretty well, except for one sentence they got completely wrong: “Open systems and networks aren’t always better for consumers. ”

That’s wrong. Open systems are better, always. Cisco has just provided us with a perfect lesson in why that sentence is completely backwards, and why we can never trust closed-source software vendors not to do evil under the cover of their code secrecy.

For those of you who have missed the news, last a few days Cisco pushed a firmware update to several of its most popular routers that bricked the device unless you signed up for Cisco’s “cloud” service. To sign up, you had to agree to the following restrictions:
When you use the Service, we may keep track of certain information related to your use of the Service, including but not limited to the status and health of your network and networked products; which apps relating to the Service you are using; which features you are using within the Service infrastructure; network traffic (e.g., megabytes per hour); internet history; how frequently you encounter errors on the Service system and other related information (“Other Information”).

So in order to continue using the hardware you bought and paid for and own, you have to agree to let Cisco snoop your browser history and monitor your traffic – a clickstream they would of course instantly turn around and sell to advertising agencies and other snoops. Those terms are so loose (“including but not limited to”) that they could legally read your email and sell that data too.

Disgusted enough yet? Wait, it gets better. The cloud terms of service also includes this gem:
You agree not to use or permit the use of the Service: (i) to invade another’s privacy; (ii) for obscene, pornographic, or offensive purposes; (iii) to infringe another’s rights, including but not limited to any intellectual property rights; (iv) to upload, email or otherwise transmit or make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, spam, junk mail or any other form of solicitation; (v) to transmit or otherwise make available any code or virus, or perform any activity, that could harm or interfere with any device, software, network or service (including this Service); or (vi) to violate, or encourage any conduct that would violate any applicable law or regulation or give rise to civil or criminal liability.

Translated out of lawyerese, this gives Cisco the right to brick your router if you use it to view anything Cisco considers pornography, or do anything that it might consider IP theft – like, say, bit-torrenting a movie. Or even if you send anything it considers unsolicited advertising – which doesn’t have to mean bulk spam, see “any other form of solicitation”?

The sum of these paragraphs is: “We control your digital life. We can spy on you, we can filter your traffic, we can cut off your net access unilaterally if you do anything we don’t like, and you have no recourse.”

And why can they do that? Because there’s a blob of closed-source software in that router that you can’t modify, that only Cisco can modify. You don’t own it, it owns you.

When I wrote yesterday of closed source trapping users at the wrong end of an asymmetrical power relationship, that was abstract. This is concrete – this is the shit getting real. This is why anyone who makes excuses for closed source in network-facing software is not just a fool deluded by shiny marketing but a malignant idiot whose complicity with what those vendors do will injure his neighbors as well as himself.

Now, if you have been following the news, maybe you’ve heard that Cisco backed off from the most egregious language in these terms of service under public pressure. Reassured? Don’t be – because Cisco keeps its control of the software and reserves the right to change the terms of service whenever it likes.

Cisco could change the terms of its service to give it even more sweeping and arbitrary privileges at any time. Or Apple could do that, or Microsoft could. The power relationship remains dangerously asymmetrical; the closed source remains their instrument of control over you.

This is why you should demand open source in your router, open source in your operating system, and open source in any application software that is important to your life. Because if you don’t own it, it will surely own you.

This is also why people who make excuses for or actively advocate closed-source OSs and network software (and yes, Apple/iOS fanboys, I’m looking at you) are not merely harmlessly misguided cultists. They are enemies of liberty – accomplices before the fact in vendor schemes to spy on you, control you, and imprison you. Treat them, and the vendors they worship, accordingly.
link

@Open Web @Public Stream

Lauren Weinstein's Blog: Internet Rights, Internet Wrongs, and Internet War

@Open Web

Lauren Weinstein @ Google+
       
Internet Rights, Internet Wrongs, and Internet War

http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000972.html

Today is the day of the year when we in this country especially celebrate the men who less than three centuries ago, meeting largely in secret and often well-plied with various alcohol-endowed beverages, formally laid out the ideas and documents that represent the United States' foundational constructs.

That concepts such as the Bill of Rights have endured through the evolution of the USA from a slave-owning, agrarian culture to the modern world of smartphones and the Internet, both thanks to (and in spite of) the actions of politicians, courts, and others since then, is nothing short of a practical miracle.

Those Founding Fathers could not possibly have imagined the scope of vast changes that were to come -- with the possible exception of Ben Franklin, who could probably be teleported from 1776 to 2012, would take a few days to orient himself, and then would start both websites and dating.

Yet while they couldn't see the future, they did undeniably know human nature. And human nature hasn't really changed at all since the founding of this nation, or likely since the rise of Homo sapiens or even earlier.

It's not as clear that the same can be said for all of us fighting to preserve freedom and other crucial aspects of the Internet.

In fact, it often appears that we show all of the appreciation of human nature, especially regarding the political realm, that one might expect from your average damp sponge.

And make no mistake about it, the forces allied on the other side of these battles are by and large showing vastly more foresight and effective acumen.

Some of what they're doing seems relatively passive. You get the sense that they can't wait for more of us Internet "old-timers" to drop out of the picture, so that our inconvenient quotes will stop appearing in otherwise glowing press accounts of their arguments for turning the Net into more of a policing mechanism than a bastion of free speech.

More critically though, they know how to play the political game. They lobby extensively. They directly fund those politicians who are aligned with designated "Internet control" objectives. And they spend a lot of time laughing at us.

For they realize that when it comes to achieving our goals in a necessarily political sphere, we are rank amateurs, enormously outclassed.

Arguably the best we've come up with to date was the one-day SOPA blackout, which did push back SOPA/PIPA legislative efforts for the time being, but in reality the push to pass such legislation in other forms, including potentially devastating CISPA and other "cyber-scare" profiteering laws, is continuing with renewed force.

And there's only so many times we can pull the blackout trick, like a small child threatening to hold his breath until he gets his way.
Such stunts may attract attention the first couple of times -- and even have some impact -- but will be increasingly ignored going forward.

Unfortunately, our efforts seem to be heading toward less effectiveness, rather than more. 

The current "Declaration of Internet Freedom" project ( http://j.mp/P9dLsn [Insight]) appears to be mainly a "feel-good" campaign, unlikely to have any significant positive impact, and already is being loudly ridiculed ( http://j.mp/P9eaek [Forbes]).

What we actually need now, if we are to save the Internet from being morphed from a tool for freedom into a mechanism of restrictions and oppression, is much more akin to a declaration of war than a declaration of freedom.

I don't mean a war of guns and bombs, nor even campaigns of website blackouts or other protests.

I refer to a war played fair and square within the political arena -- a war aimed at helping to elect politicians who understand the Internet and freedom, and who have their brains in the 21st century, instead of the 19th.

A war with the goal of no longer ceding political control of these issues to those parties who very much want to figuratively crush freedom on the Internet under their Testoni dress shoes.

The "weapons" toward our ends in such battles are available, if we are willing to grasp, employ, and deploy them. 

Perhaps the most obvious of these, and one that should likely be the focus of immediate attention, is the much maligned Super PAC. 

We might despise them, but Super PACs are now a fact of life, and are being utilized to the hilt by forces aligned against Internet freedom and related issues.

For us to ignore the power of Super PACs to affect the political process would be foolhardy in the extreme.

I strongly urge that serious consideration be given to the establishment of a Super PAC to not only lobby in the name of protecting freedom and other rights on the Internet, but to also directly promote the election of politicians with sensible views regarding Internet freedoms, technology, and the intersection of these areas with individuals and society at large.

I understand the reluctance that many techies -- myself included -- have felt toward engaging in any such course directly related to the political process. We have been disappointed many times, and the urge to just utter some expletives and turn our backs is strong indeed. 

We must fight this compulsion that would have us avoid the messiness, the pain, the sheer illogic that so often seem to be part and parcel of politics and politicians.

Because if we don't learn to "play the game" the way the big boys do in Washington and other seats of government around the world, we and our ideas will be steamrolled. If we refuse to utilize all legal tools at our disposal to affect the political process in the name of our own goals, we and Internet freedoms will be crushed. 

And that would be catastrophic -- for us, for the Internet, for freedom, and ultimately for the entire world.

-- Lauren --

Lauren Weinstein's Blog: Internet Rights, Internet Wrongs, and Internet War
8 comments show more
I can't often say that I fully agree with esr. I do this time.
You should see the party going on in the comments. ;-)
Image/photo



sorry Mr. Wiggles !!

@Open Web
31 comments show more
well ... yes .. and I don't really see why they would leave, but its their choice.
We could always make it a Goatse.cx mirror.
It's not really about ability to innovate as such. There was plenty of innovation in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. Slave labour could from a laissez-faire perspective be viewed as an innovative solution to the problem of maximizing investor ROI. So innovation can still continue even under terrible conditions.
● The Iroquois Confederacy: Our Forgotten National Heritage
● The Great Law of Peace (Haudenosaunee/ Iroquois/ Five Nations Constitution)
● The Influence of the Great Law of Peace On The United States Constitution
● Great Law of Peace - Wikipedia

● Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy


Iroquois - Words of the World by wordsoftheworld on YouTube


Americas First democracy is from Native Americans by kaminari750 on YouTube


Preamble to the Republic: Condolence, Wampum, and the Language of Peace by SmithsonianNMAI on YouTube
When the United States was founded in 1789, American Indians had nearly 200 years of experience dealing with Europeans. During those years, Native people offered distinct protocols of diplomacy—ceremonies, forms of address, and material culture—that governed relations with the colonial powers. Benjamin Franklin published the record of treaties where these protocols formed the primary construct of negotiation. The oral traditions surrounding and informing the early protocols continue in living memory through elders and ceremonial cycles of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) longhouses. Their material legacy is found in the record of wampum and wampum belts of archeological, cultural and historical value.

At Preamble to the Republic, three representatives from a distinguished traditional family spoke on the history, culture, and meaning of the Great Law of Peace, the clanmother system, and the symbology of the longhouse leadership culture as represented in wampum and other materials.

A venerated elder of the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, Chief Jake Swamp is an internationally recognized spokesperson for the traditions of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) longhouse. Ceremonially released from duties as a chief of the Wolf Clan after nearly forty years, he continues his activism as president of the Tree of Peace Society, a global peace and environment initiative. His wife, Judy Swamp, is a traditional elder of the Mohawk Nation, and his son, Skahendowaneh Swamp, is an installed speaker of the longhouse, educator, and traditional artist.

Native American Celebration Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Flute by kcdvtv on YouTube


500 Nations The Story of Indian Americans Part 1 by asariisechunkh on YouTube


500 Nations The Story of Indian Americans Part 2 by asariisechunkh on YouTube


500 Nations The Story of Indian Americans Part 3 by asariisechunkh on YouTube


500 Nations The Story of Indian Americans Part 4 by asariisechunkh on YouTube

► 500 Nations - Playlist
500 Nations - Wikipedia

"The truth is, we have a story worth talking about. We have a history worth celebrating. Long before the first Europeans arrived here, there were some 500 nations already in North America. They blanketed the continent from coast to coast, from Central America to the Arctic. There were tens of millions of people here, speaking over 300 languages. Many of them lived in beautiful cities, among the largest and most advanced in the world. In the coming hours, 500 Nations looks back on those ancient cultures, how they lived, and how many survived.... What you're about to see is what happened. It's not all that happened, and it's not always pleasant. We can't change that. We can't turn back the clock. But we can open our eyes and give the first nations of this land the recognition and respect they deserve: their rightful place in the history of the world." -- Kevin Costner
6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America: (this is a great read) ;-)
#6. The Indians Weren't Defeated by White Settlers...

#5. Native Culture Wasn't Primitive...

#4. Columbus Didn't Discover America: Vikings vs. Indians...

#3. Everything You Know About Columbus Is a Calculated Lie...

#2. White Settlers Did Not Carve America Out of the Untamed Wilderness...

#1. How Indians Influenced Modern America...


Historians think the Iroquois Confederacy had a direct influence on the U.S. Constitution, and the Senate even passed a resolution acknowledging that "the confederation of the original thirteen colonies into one republic was influenced ... by the Iroquois Confederacy, as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the constitution itself."

But as Ben Franklin noted in a letter...
"It would be a strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears insoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for 10 or a dozen English colonies."

Image/photo

Join, or die (or plagiarize from the Indians).
In 1987, Cornell University held a conference on the link between the Iroquois' government and the U.S. Constitution. It was noted that the Iroquois Great Law of Peace "includes 'freedom of speech, freedom of religion ... separation of power in government and checks and balances."
Para los amantes de las letras latinoamericanas, Amazon tiene algunas ofertas muy buenas:

- Olor a Madera y Silencio www.amazon.es/dp/B0083CWS5M
- De cuando conoci a Salas www.amazon.es/dp/B0083UTQ22
- Cerro Santa Lucia www.amazon.es/dp/B0083D6ABE

a 89 centavos de euros 

Excelentes opciones para las vacaciones ;)

#libros #americalatina #latinoamerica #ñ #español #letras #literatura

@Book Club @TV show(s) @Writers And Authors @Open Web

html5 forms

http://people.opera+1138 +1138 a.com/brucel/demo/html5-forms-demo.html

looks like still only Opera supports all that html5 forms stuff.

tried it in a few other browsers:
some of it (but not all of it) works in Chrome ..  a little (less) works in Firefox and none of it works in IE9




@Opera @Open Web
looks like that link got screwed up by tinymce when posting
(seems to do some wierd things when I add mentions or tags) .. might remove it and just have a normal textarea.

http://people.opera.com/brucel/demo/html5-forms-demo.html
5 comments show more
It depends upon what the relevant copyright laws say constitutes "fair use", but my guess is that people at Google have neither the time nor the inclination to investigate individual infringement claims so probably if it looks plausibly like it might be a copyright violation then it's likely to get taken down.
Where "taken down" just means removed from Google's search index. But as they say - if it's not on Google it didn't happen.
Bueno, aqui comenzamos un nuevo grupo #hispanohablante en torno a esta #red #social para discutir todo sobre ella, con total #libertad

Que comience la #fiesta! 

@Club Literario @Let's Talk @New Here @Open Web @Local Friendica @Linux-Group #facebook #diaspora #friendica

#pregunta #bug #sugerencia Por que no funcionan correctamente las menciones "@" ? Y solo a traves del directorio se tiene acceso a los otros contactos, no podria agregarse una especie de "linea temporal" como en #identica o #twitter ? Lo mismo que para los #tag o #busqueda #buscar
wäre schön wenn das projekt bald fertig wird :-D
bin gespannt auf das ergebnis.

Image/photo
http://www.syncany.org

#syncany @Open Web
5 comments show more
@Myrddin Lailoken "wer lesen kann ..." ;-)

Syncany

Syncany is an open-source cloud storage and filesharing application. It allows users to backup and share certain folders of their workstations using any kind of storage, e.g. FTP, Amazon S3 or Google Storage.

While the basic idea is similar to Dropbox and JungleDisk, Syncany is open-source and additionally provides data encryption and more flexibility in terms of storage type and provider:

Data encryption: Syncany encrypts the files locally, so that any online storage can be used even for sensitive data.
Arbitrary storage: Syncany uses a plug-in based storage system. It can be used with any type of remote storage.

Even though Syncany is still under heavy development, it already supports a wide variety of different storage types:

Local Folder: uses any local folder as storage. This could be any mounted device, network file systems (NFS), or any virtual file system based on FUSE.
FTP: uses an FTP folder as remote repository.
IMAP: uses an IMAP folder as remote storage. Stores file chunks as e-mail attachments.
Google Storage: uses a bucket in the Google Storage service as repository.
Amazon S3: uses a bucket in the Amazon Simple Storage Service as remote storage.
Rackspace Cloud Files: uses a Cloud Files container as remote storage.
WebDAV: uses one folder in a WebDAV as remote storage.
Picasa Web Albums: encodes the file chunks in images, and uses a Picasa album as repository.
Windows Share (NetBIOS/CIFS): uses a Windows share as data repository.
Box.net: uses a Box.net folder as data storage.
SFTP/SSH: uses an SFTP folder as data storage.
more to come ...

Events - sharing, listing, searching

what is planned with events support in Friendica?

I noticed that there is some events functionality but not sure if people can yet share the actual events. (either directly or via a linked status item)

I'm keen to set up some way (that is easy for anyone) to share actual event data across sites (also with city/venue/etc info to help people find public events that might interest them in their area - something to make "social" *really* more SOCIAL!) 

@Open Web @Lazy Admin
7 comments show more
I think it looks rather nice see. I have this in quattro above the network/personal tab

Image/photo

and this is the events overview

Image/photo

There is also a DAV addon in working, which looks nice so far (early development phase)
pulled it from the git .. looks promising .. it has some of those extra fields I want here.

at the front end I'd probably prefer a listings view showing them more like normal posts but in order of the event dates .. but maybe the user could have both options.

webdav/iCal is definately a nice feature too! (wishing there might one day be a client that could do locations for venues or even tags!)
11 comments show more
Hmmmm
  • Smartphones
    ** iPhone & iPod touch
    ** Android
  • Computer
    ** Windows
    ** Mac
  • Tablets
    ** iPad
    ** Android-Tablet
Hmmm habsch nid
Schon durch. Und hat auch nicht wirklich lange gedauert. Viel Neues war meiner Meinung nach nicht dabei, aber es bringt alles noch mal kurz und knackig auf den Punkt. Nur den gefühlten 10 "Seiten" langen Auszug aus Wikipedia zum Thema "Arabischer Frühling" hätte man sich sparen können.

There Are No Limits. There Are Only Plateaus...



@Open Web @friendshostfriends

Martin Farrent

Self-hosting is a political skill

Here's one way to lose the battle for a free and open web:

Bow to the fallacy that people invariably choose simplicity.

Facebook, Google+ and even Diaspora will always win the simplicity battle, and simplicity will always be their prime advantage. Self-determination is inevitably more complex than timid acceptance of someone else's rules and paradigms. If you're waiting for the day when digital self-determination becomes as easy as signing up to be exploited and censored, you can wait a million years.

We need to make self-hosting easy - but it will never get there. In terms of ease, it will never compete with the commercial alternatives. It will remain a skill and an inconvenience.

A skill like cleaning your teeth. Tying your laces. Learning to ride a bike. People DO these things. They accept a measure of inconvenience when they see the necessity. And ultimately, it's the necessity we need to convey.

As exemplified by millions of geeks on Facebook, computer skills aren't at the bottom of it at all. You can be capable of writing your own platform in assembly - and yet dumb enough to post your most intimate thoughts on Diaspora or Facebook. Conversely, you can be barely able to install ownCloud on a shared host - and yet stubbornly succeed at it, because Dropbox gives you the creeps.

First and foremost, digital self-determination is a political skill.
10 comments show more
I don't think you can make the installation process any easier, except perhaps in those cases where people deliberately find it hard for PR reasons, or people try to install to incompatible hosts - some verbose output about missing dependencies or misconfiguration might help there.

I don't think we can go much further on the software side. I can install Friendica, including installation and configuration of all addons - including setting up the DNS and getting API keys from third parties - in 20 minutes. Sure, I'm ridiculously experienced now, but I've known people do it for the first time in 35 minutes.

There's only one more place we can go - we need a hardware solution.

Keith Fernie had Friendica running on a plug months ago, and I've had it running from a LiveCD. We know it can be done...but nobody has plugs yet, and a LiveCD is a stupid idea (where are you going to keep the DB on a LiveCD?).

At this point, I think all we can do is keep encouraging people to host their own, to host their friends, and to carry on being pragmatic.

Yes, everybody is encouraged to host your own, but it's no coincidence that the most vocal proponents of self-hosting also run public servers (or create public server specific addons/how-tos).
Well, ya heard it here first folks... ~friendica ~friendica's gonna totally pwn FB any day now! (hardware permitting of course) :graveside

So the only question now is: will you be ready to move when that time comes? Hmmmm?
:cloud9 awaits... *every time Katy says "California" think "Friendica" people*  ;-)

Fight For Internet Freedoms NOW!

We are now at a moment, a crossroad in history and time, where the decisions we make about the #Internet, and its importance to our lives and #freedoms, will have lasting effects for many years, decades, or perhaps far longer.

Will the Internet be sucked completely into the pit of oppression, censorship, and greed, or will we have the moral fortitude to say, "No! Not to our Internet. Not to what we worked so long and hard to achieve in the name of freedom, humanity, and community."
@Open Web
Lauren Weinstein @ Google+

Saving the Internet, Ourselves, and the Future

http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000963.html

Since its birth as the U.S. Department of Defense ARPANET research project, the Internet has faced various threats -- some technical, some in the policy realm, and some purely political.

Recently we've seen the SOPA and PIPA legislation. Make no mistake about it -- the Hollywood content giants have not given up on their desires to reshape the Internet in their own traditional images.

We now face CISPA and its cyber-scaremonging, with cyberwar profiteering threatening to undermine decades of privacy protection legislation.

Everything in the vast repertoire of mankind is finding its way onto the Net in various guises, from wonders sublime and beautiful, to horrors of the most crass and demeaning.

But there is also blatant exploitation by those who see the Internet and its technologies merely as a "gold rush" to be exploited, the best interests of the community at large be damned -- organizations explicitly entrusted with the well-being of the Net sometimes joining the dark side in the enablement of obscene profits.

Our overall unwillingness -- especially as technologists -- to "play the game" the way the "big boys" play has allowed entities with less than admirable motives to gain sway over many aspects of the Net.

In the U.S., net neutrality and service quality have languished as a few dominant ISPs have reached their pinnacles through exploitation of original monopoly grants, cherry picking deployments of broadband, and outright lying to communities -- not to mention outright political chicanery to help kill off effective competition.

We have allowed relatively minor issues such as arguments about Web cookies to become political pawns, diverting us while governments plan and deploy vast schemes to control and censor the Internet, turning the Net from a tool that could greatly enhance individual rights, into a mechanism to muzzle and control.

Fear that efforts to find new, innovative ways to solve the Net's problems might not succeed, have resulted in a continuing panicked embrace of organizations and policies of demonstrated failures, creating ever broadening wedges between the wide variety of Internet stakeholders around the planet.

And now, as the United Nations (UN) and International Telecommunications Union (ITU) contemplate a horrific takeover of many aspects of the Internet, we reap what we have sowed through our long complacency and unwillingness to use all tools at our disposal to fight for Internet freedoms. (http://lauren.vortex.com/VintCerf-ITU-Testimony-05-31-12.pdf - [Vint Cerf Congressional Testimony])

We may yet still have time to turn the tide for many of these issues. But every day the odds loom larger against us, and the image of Don Quixote stabbing uselessly at windmills is increasingly difficult to banish from one's mind.

Communications capabilities hardly even dreamed of decades ago are now commonplace. Even the masters of classical science fiction mostly had a blind spot to coming technological magic like smartphones and other personal communications devices.

To see so much of what we have jointly created being put at risk today, for the sake of government suppression and the almighty dollar, is frankly nothing short of being quintessentially depressing.

And yet, one does what one can, and I've endeavored to be scrupulously honest in the process. Over the years my various attempts at commentary and analysis have at one time or another upset just about all points on the spectrum. Perhaps this means I've struck an appropriate balance in the long run. Perhaps it means I struck out entirely. All I've ever tried to do in these regards is call the issues as I see them, suggest where I thought matters were awry and how they might be improved, and let folks make their own judgments.

But as the saying goes, all that plus a dollar will buy you a cup of cheap coffee these days.

That aspect of the future is still ultimately under our control, today.

I grew up along with the Internet, and I like to think helping it in my own small ways -- watching it evolve into the technology infrastructure and communications foundation of the world.

We are now at a moment, a crossroad in history and time, where the decisions we make about the Internet, and its importance to our lives and freedoms, will have lasting effects for many years, decades, or perhaps far longer.

Will the Internet be sucked completely into the pit of oppression, censorship, and greed, or will we have the moral fortitude to say, "No! Not to our Internet. Not to what we worked so long and hard to achieve in the name of freedom, humanity, and community."

Quixotic or not, the quest for the best possible Internet for everyone is an effort in which I've been honored to be engaged. To lose this battle, this war, is potentially to lose so much else that will matter to your children, and to their children, and potentially to many more generations yet to come.

If we lose the Internet, we lose ourselves.

Take care, all. And thanks.

-- Lauren --
12 comments show more
It was 1991...

Wow @Mike, these blasts from the past keep going further & further back in time. Do you & either Stallman or Torvalds (or both) know each other on a first name basis? o.O
@mike
I remember trying to install Netscape 2 on my '386 back then .. no go .. 2MB was not enough ram to use it (and I remember saying how ridiculous it was to expect the average person to have that much ram!)

so for browsing I used lynx till about 1995 .. and I complained endlessly about sites not using alt on images used in navigation!
(when I got a new pentium-based pc with 16MB ram!)

This was also why there were hardly any images on my website back then!
Watching Diaspora users saying Goodbye to pistos-diaspora users.

It was a relief at first - Diaspora is the bane of my life, and it's not like Pistos has left the entire concept of a socnet behind; Libertree is here instead - but quickly, it's become really rather sad.

Can you imagine people saying Goodbye to each other because they bought a new brand of telephone that won't connect to people using their old brand?

But also, you know that can't happen on the free web, right?

Join a real network, that uses documented protocols - it doesn't have to be Friendica, even email will do - and you can carry on talking to people whatever supplier they choose to use.

How can they not see this? How can they voluntarily lock themselves into another walled garden when they joined Diaspora to escape walled gardens in the first place?

@Public Stream @Open Web
39 comments show more
In terms of promotion there are some things which could be done.

- Make podcasts about using or installing Friendica and send them to Hacker Public Radio.
- Contact Randal Schwartz and try to get someone talking about Friendica on FLOSS Weekly.
- Make YouTube screencasts about installing or using Friendica.
- Create ready to use ISOs for common platforms, such as Raspberry Pi, Dreamplug, etc
- Have a media relations plan which links to all of the above, ready for whenever the next Facebook scandal occurs.
- Contact groups who are concerned with privacy or which have been censored on Facebook.
@Bob Mottram there are all great suggestions. I can start research groups that have encountered trouble on Facebook, and see if I can contact them.

Friendica -- "The Internet IS Our Social Network."

Questions: But why does that matter? Why is it important? Why should we care?

Answer: Because, dear friends, ...the Internet Can Save the World & #Friendica IS helping to make that happen. ;-)
... This is the golden age of global communications, a time when ordinary people almost anywhere in the world have or will likely soon gain the capability of dealing directly with counterparts in other countries, other cultures, with an array of different lifestyles and circumstances.

The question is, how long will this freedom be permitted to exist?

When people have the easy and inexpensive means to communicate directly, especially in informal settings and about the everyday aspects of life, they usually discover that they have much more in common than they perhaps expected. This seems true whether we're using written communications, or audio and video links like Skype or #Google+ Hangouts -- working our way ever closer toward a full "virtual presence" that makes our common humanity impossible to ignore.

And frankly, I believe that such capabilities genuinely worry some governments around the world, for whom maintaining a certain level of "us vs. them" sensibilities is considered crucial to their control regimes...

... I spend much of my time considering the ways in which the wonders of the Internet could be wrecked, or blocked, or subverted. But it's also important that we consider the vast potential the Net holds for improving the world in the most relevant and important of ways.

Not just in terms of science and research, though those are great. Not just in regard to commerce and the global economy, though these are crucial.

But also in terms of the basic fact of fundamental human communications, of being able to as freely and openly as possible discuss with other mere mortals around the planet the nature of our lives, hopes and dreams, our loves, and yes, our fears as well.

Personal communications capabilities of these sorts, enabled by technology in general and the #Internet in particular, have more potential to save the world in the long run than do all the governments on the globe.

--Lauren--
 = Pure Awesomeness! 8-)

@Public Stream @New Here @Open Web
4 comments show more
@Oliver Fear not. All (both public & bots alike) must constantly be reminded that the fight for freedom shall never die! ;-)
quality discussions .. I agree .. and some open discussions too (something facebook does NOT do well at all - about time for that to come back - its the REAL side of "social"!)

How Government Will Dictate Your Search Results

The Google testimony at the Leveson inquiry made it especially obvious that celebrities or people in positions of authority want and expect to be able to say "remove X from the internet" and for search engines to then meekly comply.  Frustration was expressed over having to do this for each individual URL.

http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000960.html

@Open Web
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