Freedom Dreams

ADFA update: We managed to persuade quite a few people to download firefox 3. Yay for the 8 million.

Anyway, something else that came up when discussing ADFA with people was the school blacklist (she thought free software wasn’t real freedom since it followed the blacklist). Now, from the start ADFA has been very clear that it doesn’t have a major problem with the school blacklist.

Forced censorhip is a problem - computer owners should have control over what they can and can’t visit. But, in the case of school, it is schools PCs, so it is up to them to have control. People have full access to the internet at home, and it is obvious that the school is not attempting political censorship. All the most important political sites are allowed - human rights grouops, wikileaks, wikipedia etc.

Actually, an EFF site was blocked at one point, but that was accident. This brings me onto the main point of this blog - do corporate firewalls work? What is their purpose? to stop people from doing stuff that is not related to their work? A reasonable thing to do I would expect.

However, my thoughts are this - the firewall undoubtabley causes hinderance to actual work. Many sites are blocked that could be useful, youtube. I have actually seen a teacher get rather annoyed at the fact thta he could not show a youtube video. Yes, there is a system to act for stuff to be unblocked, but that takes time. No use if you want a page for your research for that lesson.

Then, there are the particular annoying things of our school firewall. Firstly, blogs are blocked simply for being Journals and Blogs. Surely many blogs will contain useful information about modern culture and technology and should not be mass blocked like this.
Secondly there is the NEW URL block. ANy url the system has not seen before will be temporarily blocked, until it is moderated. This is S T U P I D. Guilty until proven innocent. Again, it is only supposed to be temporary (sometimes refresh thrice and it works, sometimes wait an hour), but it is actually a considerable ammount of time when looking for that piece of information you want. Moreover, it looks the same as the other block messages, so people don’t realise it just hasn’t been proven innocent yet. Couple this with increased New Url failures from network slowness, and you have one big shipment of inconvenience.

And to what end? Can you ever stop people doing what they are not supposed to? It is still relatively easy to find games, videos, chat and proxys - the school has limited manpower and can not control all traffic! If anything, the sense of battle against what is blocked makes people more likely to find time-wasteful sites that they can access.

So, my question is, if the blacklist to be lifted, what problems would you have? Well, an imidiate transition would cause problems, because of the spirit of war created by having it there in the first place. But what if it was done gradually? (Perhaps start with getting rid of the stupid NewUrl rule) Time wasting in lessons would not really be any easier, and teacher would be their to stop it anyway. And if not teacher is supervising? - well, they should be! And if they don’t, even with the balcklist, people will find ways to waste time.

So, there you have it, I no longer see the point of blacklists at all. Even though in this case I do not find it unethical, i do find it a stupid pain in the derrière.

I have just got back from the first ADFA meeting. Things didn’t go quite as well as I had hoped. Surprisingly the head of sixth form seemed quite open to the idea, and when I mentioned free software, he asked if that was like Mozilla Firefox (yay, for firefox’s marketing). I was worried that he would have preconceptions due to something I did concerning the school website a few months ago.

However, I found that the place that I faced discrimination was with my peers. Fewer people turned up than I expected - only five - which would in itself be okay for a first meeting, but according to a friend, people are scared of joining the group, as they think it is somehow related to my creations of improper websites. It is not in the slightest!

How am I to overcome this prejudice? I wonder if I simply say tell them its not related, will I sound stupid and will they believe me? I think the fact that me and the IT technician have dual booted pcs without the knowledge of the teachers doesn’t help - people think we are up to no good with them. Maybe I should make a sign to say what they are, and what the importance is.

The meeting itself went reasonably well - five people were there, Joe, Andy, Matthew, Wallaa and myself. I briefly explained what digital freedom was about - although, I asked Wallaa if my explanations were good, and she said bluntly, No. In the same vein, I asked what people thought of the website and she said it had too much information on one page. I guess that is true - I have tried to stop it from getting too long, but obviously not enough - creating a short, snappy homepage would be a great place to start making the site more friendly.

One of the main things we talked about was the apathy problem - people don’t care about computers, or at worse try to get away from them. Apparently, apathy is a general problem, Wallaa is having trouble getting people to join the charity committee, so I think ADFA is getting double helpings. We really need to work out how to make it matter people; how to get people interested. Maybe the five debians pcs, plus a notice, are a good way to do it. Maybe I need to talk to more teachers about it, overcome the we-might-get-in-trouble-like-he-did-with-that-website prejudice by showing beyond doubt that ADFA is all allowed.

So, where do I take ADFA from here? Well I think that poster about the debian pcs is a good idea (one I only thought of whilst writing this blogpost), and tomorrow is Firefox Download Day - perhaps I can get a few people to try firefox and set a world record at the same time.

So, welcome to my new blog. I have a nice new layout and everything. And my own domain name, with some very nice hosting (which i have also moved adfa, with my archive of stuff to follow).

It should also be the proper start of ADFA, with our first meeting on Monday (hopefully the head of our sixthform doesn’t object, I haven’t spoke to him about it yet :|). Hopefully we’ll have some people there, especially since one of my friends has been sending out e-mails to people, asking them to look at the website. I think that could probably do with a bit of a rewrite - it needs to be as understandable to new people as possible, but I’m not a good judge of that, since I know it all so well.

I would also hope for this to be a new beginning in general. I want to do more for software liberty, and other parts of the fight for freedom. I don’t feel so great about that, since I just installed Windows XP (the second time I ever have done) albeit in a VM. Pesky software - in this case Sibelius. My brother “needs” it for school, it doesn’t work in Windows proper, and at least this way the host OS is relatively free. Yes, I know there are alternatives, but as far as I know, none of them provide support for Sibelius’ file format. Although, I don’t know for sure.

Maybe that is something to look at. Maybe I should do something about those apps that I find people need, but there is no free software one that meets their needs. There seem to be a few that people use at school - omnigraph and Sibelius. I know there are similar free software programs, but they don’t quite compare. Since some stuff has already been done, this effort should be within my abilities, especially the omnigraph one.

So yeah, I should be starting some interesting stuff, and hopefully I’ll get results. I really need to look through some of my old blog posts and notes to make a full list.

I’m fed up. Now, I originally planned to avoid blogs about fed-up-ness, but this is for interesting reasons. Firstly, the first time fed-up-ness. GParted is being stupid. Not only is it taking an age, but its doing steps it doesn’t need to. I thought it picked the shortest way of getting to the new configuration, but obviously not. It is literally taking hours. Partly my stupid fault, partly inevitable hard-drive slowness.

Then theres the long term fed-up-ness. I’m feeling a bit disheartened about my fight for freedom, and have been doing for a bit. It seems so difficult, especially considering all the political fighting within the free software movement. Being back at school today did alleviate my despair - we have debian, yay! (only on a few pcs, and it was a bit broke, but still, a step in the right direction).

However, a couple of comments I had today are now coming back to haunt me. First is the reminder that I’m going to have a lot of ignorant people jeering at me. This was in the form of a “Don’t install Lenox [sic] on it” comment as I helped a teacher with a smart board. I’ve always known I’d have this problem, and I’ll just have to deal with it. That kind of people make fun of me anyway, so I have nothing to refuse in that respect.

Secondly is a brief conversation with one of the more considerate people. As well as the “I love Microsoft” (presumeably just to wind me up), she raised a valid issue - she odes not care about digital freedom so long as she can use msn, the internet and get songs onto her mp3 player.

I need to find a way to make these things matter to people. I know I have said it before (and didn’t follow up, I don’t think) but I’ll write another blog post about that. These issues to affect normal people, its just finding a way to show that. (I guess the mp3 player one is easy - DRM is EVIL)

Finally, I ought to point out, I’ve not got round to doing any of the things in the last blog post, partly because I didn’t feel like it.

Well, its starting to look like the way that ADFA is officially launched and starts campaigning is going to be radically different to what I though. As I’ve talked about before, I’ve discovered that my school IT guy is a free software fan, and we will have debain gnu/linux dual booting on 5 of the computers in the  sixth form common room, before ADFA even starts up properly!

This is the good part of what I was not expecting, the not so good thing that I overheard is that the school seems to be considering Apple Macs. Now, I don’t know what it is, but I really do not like the thought of this. True, macs run propreitary software by default, but this is no worse than the Windows machines we’ve already got. I just really don’t like the prospect of this happening. On a logical, and less gut-feeling level, if the school is considering Macs, it can swing two ways:

1. They’re less likely to go for gnu because mac is the was they want to go instead.
   OR
2. They are more open to technologies other than Windows, so will be slightly more receptive to the idea of gnu/linux

The tricky thing is that the higher school managment does not yet know that dual booting of gnu is going to happen, as, for my IT guy it is only a small scale experiment. Hopefully having a handful of machines in place will help demonstate that greater gnu/linux use is a realistic choice for the school to make.

A final note on the interesting-things-to-do-with-free-software-groups-for-young-people front - I might be helping to set up a group for the North West for free software for teenagers. It was Tim Dobson’s idea, see his mailing list post (I’ve linked to pastebin, because the mailing list archive isn’t updating).

Anyway, like I say, things are interesting, and ADFAs not even properly begun.

Watch this space.

So, I had a very pleasant surpirse recently. I had to speak to my schools IT admin, about some unimportant (in the scope of this blog) issue. I found that he used ubuntu on one of the computers in his office, but more importantly, was on the local Linux and free software mailing lists and, as a result of this mailing list post, has actually read my blog (so hi if you’re reading :D) and has seen the stuff I’ve been putting together on adfa.co.nr

So, I have since e-mailed him, and it turns out some of the things I want to see happening at school (a few demonstartion gnu machines) are already being worked on. He seems quite pleased with what I am trying to do, and seems supportive, which is a great bonus for the group. If he manages to install the machines as planned, ADFA should be able to kick in right after the exams.

Yay!

I’ve not posted for a couple of weeks (the Easter break). I was away on holiday for one week, and the other week has been spend doing homework and decorating, but also working on my new pet project - ADFA.

ADFA, which stands for Audenshaw Digital Freedom Association, is my attempt to start raising awareness of Digital Freedom issues in my local community (mainly my school). These are going to be issues like the problems of DRM, the concept of sofwtare liberty and the idea that copying is not theft.

Over the break, I have built a website listing the different projects that the association would pursue and also, an explanation of our (read my) views on each of the issues. (Although there doesn’t seem as much stuff on their as I’d thought I’d written). Hopefully this will be a useful resource for anyone who I talk to who is interested and also a good way for us to work out what direction we are going in.

I have no idea whether this project is going to suceed or not. Even if it doesn’t I have a nice resource of all my thoughts on the issue. However, I know I already have some supporters, so hopefully well be able to achieve this.

Wish me luck, and tell me what you think of the site and its content.