Words Myte Bite

(updated) What the ACTA does for you.

I offered to write up some details on the ACTA: Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

However I find that the case is well written on the EFF web site.

A little web search that says “What does the ACTA do” will turn up a raft of useful short links.

It attacks the Internet and Free Libre Open Source Software, fail to act, watch your future retract!

It closes the society you live in for the benefit of the “Entertainment Industry”, who are at the table for this international meeting which is out to criminalise what are called IP infringements.

IP is really three separate things, Trade Mark, Copyright and Patents.

As they have different names why deal with them within the same space?

Why negotiate such document in secret?

What other agendas are being played to?

To read this document:

http://ec.europa.eu/trade/creating-opportunities/trade-topics/intellectual-property/

Remember this is one spin, the other is that this is an attempt to close up your society, turn off the internet as you know it, stop Free Software (that is free as in freedom to use for any purpose as opposed to copyrighted and shared for no cost).

If that happens prepare to see less choice, less diversity and less opportunity to tinker.

Write to your politicians, send them two letters one Original to HQ  of Seat of office with copy to local party office and tell them both where the original went and copy went. Be amazed. Politicians are people to, and you can always suggest that pirate party is going to get the votes you talk about. Be a person of influence.

Have fun!

I have the best dog food, why won’t they eat it mammy?

Recent negative comments about SELinux and people turning it off had me musing as to what was going on. It reminded me of my early adoption of Free Software (back before there was a term which gets abuse that is Open Source).

Basically SELinux was blocking access to some programs, and some of those who didn’t know how to work with SELinux to create the path so that their application had some protection form  SELinux turned it off. This hit the “HOWTO” space, it was given as an answer to questions, it was on mailing lists, and turning off SELinux got a bad rap. I am not going to defend this action, I am going to comment on it.

The problem is one of users knowing what to do.  Since 2004 when brown became the colour of a lot of desktops the barrier to entry to using GNU/Linux has dropped quite a lot. Basically if you can format a hard drive you can get it installed, almost regardless of which distribution you use.

To sum the problem up, the users and part time administrators had no idea how to deal with this barrier so they removed it.

Who was to blame:

Was it the users who did not know how to use it or find the “correct help” to resolve the problem?

Was it the developers who made SELinux?

Was it the packagers who incorporated SELinux in the distribution in question?

Depending on where you stand you can blame any or all of the above.

I am going to propose that the problem is not that you can blame, but that anyone would see the user behaviour as something to be a blame issue.  Instead I propose that the barrier to entry to using SELinux was so high that the community failed.

What happened here is that people had no idea how to get from Not Working to Working with their computers, and that is actually the problem.

This can only be fixed when people start to think about all aspects of software, documentation and packaging. So I suggest that if you see something that screams “WHO DID THAT” ask yourself instead how could it not happen again?

A note to some people who have been following this blog (yay rss)

Not been posting recently very pre and post occupied, not able to get enough thoughts together for a single post.

Some people (you know who you are) have given me a lot of support, thanks.

Hopefully I can adjust the balance back to being blogtastic.