Freedom Dreams

I’ve spent the last week taking part in Young Rewired State for the second time. This time the event was spread across several venues across the country – with me being part of the Manchester one – and lasted a whole week, culminating with presentations in London. To see all of the great stuff that was made, take a look at the YRS Manchester App List or the general Rewired State project page.

I was fortunate to have worked on two of the winning projects. One of these was a simple bustimes app aimed at mobile devices. This, along with a live bus map for Manchester were created using the new raw GMPTE timetable data – released the week before YRS by Open Data Manchester.  I am releasing the source code for transforming the rather ugly CIF data format into these useful purposes – but please contact me if you are interested, because due to the hurried nature of the week, I have many scraps of relevant code spread across multiple locations.

Anyway, there was I thinking that this bus data was an amazingly fresh new resource, when half way through the week Trafford council started to release opendata – not only that but we met the person responsible ourselves at Social Media Café Manchester, and suggested another good dataset would be data on recycling centres. The very next day, that data was there ready for us to use – so Josh created recycle.me – a simple easy interface to the data. But it seems Trafford haven’t stopped there, and even more data sources have appeared on their opendata page. Good stuff!

The other project that won a prize was WhatBlock, which shared the title of the application most likely to antagonise a CIO. I didn’t do a lot of work on this project, but its a really interesting idea. Basically its just an iframe displaying a random website from a list, a text box for the school name, and a Yes and No button. However, its the potential use for this that is most interesting – we know that schools heavily filter, and in many cases this can be an impediment to genuine learning (blanket blocking of all blogs for example), but we have very little data on what is actually blocked where. This project aims to collect that data by seeking student participation, and it will be a very interesting thing to try in September.

Now could be the perfect time for trying to change IT policies in schools, with reports shedding light on the dire state of IT teaching in schools. Of course, that’s not to say convincing schools schools to use more sensible filtering schemes will ever be easy, but it’s one of the things we need to do if we are to make school’s into places that teach useful skills for using computers properly, rather than just boring pupils.

Another thing I helped make for YRS2010, which disapointingly (although not too surprisingly) didn’t win any prizes was some HTML5 wheels, for various purposes – choosing food, reading tweets and eliminating government spending. These were mostly for comic effect, to scatter between Manchester’s more serious presentations – but the fact they were written in HTML5 did mean it was a useful opportunity for me to learn new stuff like the canvas tag, and hopefully also helped raise awareness of these new standards (along with David Kendal’s Microdata Extractor). I’m looking forward to playing with HTML5 a little bit more.

As you may have noticed, I’m mainly talking about my projects in this blog post (more thorough coverage is available elsewhere), but one of the other projects I thought was interesting, was actually the winning project – Social Library – kind of like lastfm for books. This was just a mockup of the ideal interface, but was similar to a simple library interface (using actual data, and done in a day, so less nice looking) something I did at the Liverpool Hacks meet Hackers. However, both these projects are very far from any sort of completion or usefulness, for one big reason – the lack of library data.

If libraries want to stay relevant, they need to open up their catalogue data, in order for people to create these more usable and social interfaces. And I really hope projects like this being well received by judges at these events is a good sign that the ball might start moving, and that libraries might starting releasing this data. One of the most interesting things about the situation, is that one of the big library catalogue system providers in this country is Talis, who are also now a major player in open linked data (RDF), and are behind much of the data.gov.uk website, so hopefully could be in the ideal position to help open up library catalogues. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

So, to sum up, Young Rewired State 2010 was a really great week, I would throw in all the obligatory thankyous, but I’ll leave that to Tim’s Rap Video instead. There is lots of exciting stuff happening with open data sets, and the remixing of them, but as far as government’s openness data, we still have a long way to go.

Today I found out (although not very reliably), that someone I had known last year at school had been arrested, possibly on terrorism charges. This person had been producing homemade bombs, and was apparently planning on trying to blow up the school. This person was an anarchist.

When the media, or the majority of people refer to anarchists, this is the type of person they are thinking of. Someone who is violent, is a threat to people’s life and property. And can you blame them? This person called themself an anarchist, and, in point of fact, was one. They believed in a society without government.

However, the propblem with the idea of anarchy, is that it is a negation – without government. I oppose a government, and therefore am technically an anarchist. Do I agree with this person’s actions? Not in the slightest.

The thing with anarchy is that it is a negation, of a broad, complex, and arguably misunderstood thing. By most people, the government is seen as an agent of order – thus anarchy is seen to be a society without order. In fact, from talking briefly with this particular anarchist, a society without order is exactly what he wants – and violence is a means which he will use to achieve it.

Why I so strongly disagree with his actions can be seen when you consider my view of government. Government is an agent of violence, of coercion. It is this violence I wish to be rid of – my anarchy is a society without instituionalised force, a voluntaryist society where people interact with each other peacefully and civilly. This is almost the opposite of what is wanted by this other person.

We need to focus on the positive. What we want not what we don’t. People might also presume that since we are against the state, we are against the “enslavement” of property; that we are anarcho-syndacists. We need to stop presenting ourseves as anti-state, although we are. We need to change ourselves from being anti-state to pro-freedom, pro-voluntary interaction and pro-individuality. And I know all this has been said by others before. But it is now that I realise the importance of it. I plan to stop using the word “anarchy” – I will say what I am, what I am not.

However, back to this person – I do sympathise to a degree. I think he may genuinely have caught a glimpse of what is wrong with modern society. But they have misidentified it, and are trying to correct it in a way that, will in fact make things worse. Violence is not the solution, it is the root cause of our problems. Attacks such as his just give the government a reason to be more oppresive.

So, although we should always be clear to distance ourselves from people such as this. But they’re part way to where we are. They know the state is bad, but don’t know way, don’t realise that violence is the problem. So, what I wonder now, is can we help them progress further. I knew this person, and knew of his beliefs. If I had managed to help him understand voluntaryism, might he never be where he is today. Could I have saved him risking time in jail, and converted him to a pro-freedom but anti-violence activist?

I don’t know. I think he may have been to far gone. But the point is, some people are straying towards traditional violent anarchism, and we need to stop them, show them the real problem, and the real alternative. Voluntary action, not chaos, is the real remedy to the state.

This blog his a whole year old today. Happy birthday freedomdreams! Its funny really, in many ways, it seems like much longer than a year has passed, and so many things have changed. My belief in freedom has shifted from software to a far wider scale; I have met a person who means more to me than any other; my future has become, in some ways clearer, and in other ways I have hazy and (arguably) wacky ideas for it.

And as for this blog itself? Well, I’m changing, and so will this blog, which is a good thing. But this state of neglect it is in at the moment is not good. I plan to start blogging more often again, probably a lot more about voluntaryism. It helps me clarify and work over my own thoughts, and hopefully I’ll be able to offer an insight of my new thoughts to others. So, watch this space, another blogpost will be coming soon (I promise). Maybe a site redisign is in order, or maybe just a few tweaks. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen… but I plan on being here for a few years to come. I’m still still Dreaming of Freedom! And I always will be, until the day when that fabled freedom really becomes a reality.

P.S. I really do ramble don’t I. Two paragraphs to say “A year since I started blogging. Not blogged so much recently, more soon.”
P.P.S. Woo, for self referencialism.
P.P.P.S. Yay, for nostalgic self-self-referencialism
P.P.P.P.S…. nah, only kidding

This is my forty third blog post. 43 is an important number for me, I am number 43 of 43 others. Part of the spiritual force that is the 43.

The 43 have existed many times throughout history. It is hard to tell quite how many times, because names change, and stories are told from different perspectives. Throughout every major event in the world’s history, the 43 have been part of it. Not just observers, but actual pieces in the tapestry of history. These 43 threads are being brought together oncee again. Destiny is collocting the members of the 43, ready for the next great change in the world.

The 43 are a force for what is right and just. The philosophy of the 43, or 43ism as it may be known, is based on three basic principles:

Love, Life and Liberty
These are the three pillars of 43ism.

Without life, there can be neither love nor liberty.
Without liberty, one can not reach that which one loves, or truly live
Without love, there can be no meaning of life, no point to liberty

The 43 follow this philosophy, and together, will bring help return its essense to the world – help the world regain its lost 43dom. A state of full 43dom is the ultimate goal of the 43. Where true love and compassion is shown by each to every other; where people are free to act in true accordance with the nature of themselves; where people no longer have to survive, as so often in the world today, but can truly live.

Watch this space, It’s a conspiracy!

It’s three months since my last blog post, and quite a few things have happened since then. There’s been Christmas, New Year, my January exams; I’ve learnt to solve a Rubick’s cube, started playing the piano a bit more often, had a conditional offer from Cambridge University. I’ve also updated this blog to WordPress 2.7, so sorry for any breakages. Unfortunately, something that hasn’t happened is further progress on AGPLMail and Libreapps. I’m sorry, both those projects have died a slow death – I hope to resurrect them both in the future, but I make no guarantees.

However, for me personally, the biggest thing that happened is none of the above. It’s something I first started thinking about nearly a year ago, asking myself what freedom really was. Interestingly, looking back, I have blogged much about the transition to where I am now. And where is that?, I hear you ask. I am now a voluntaryist.

As a voluntaryist, I believe that every human being owns their own life, and thus their liberty and property. This is the idea of self ownership. All interactions should be voluntary, so initiating force against someone is morally wrong – the non-aggression principle. (Defensive force is a completely acceptable and unfortunately necessary way to deal with those who decide to initiate force against you). And, I believe that this principle of non-aggression applies not just to individuals but also to the government – because, all I see government now is just a bunch of individuals claiming the authority and knowledge to tell other people what to do, and I believe that their claims are false.

I used to accept government as a necessary evil, but now I realise that it is an unnecessary one. People are perfectly capable of organising and defending themselves without the force of government there. The system by which this would happen is one of anarcho-capitalism or market anarchy – The Market for Liberty did a great job of helping me understand how this would work. Not only would such a sytem be as good as a governmental one, in most places it would be far superior, because people are generally better at making decisions about there own lives than the countless bureaucrats in Washington or Whitehall, who have no idea about the individual complexities of every individual’s situation.

So, even once I had come to the conclusion that society could function perfectly well without government, there was still something bothering me. You see, for small government conservatives, proof that government is unnecessary for an orderly society is enough to make them voluntaryists. But, I wasn’t conservative, I’ve always to dislike political classifications (although not as much as I do now), but, on the left to right scale, I knew I was certainly somewhere on the left. I care about people and nature, I don’t want the poor exploited or abandoned, and the same applies to a lesser extent to the environment. I’ve never been a communist, but surely slightly socialist governments that make sure the poor are treated acceptably and are given a chance are a good thing, right?

Wrong. Firstly, although some people in government are genuinely trying to help the poor, there are also many people in government who do not care, and the many rules and regulations that the government create often end up stifling the opportunities for the poor. One example of this would be the fact that Churches in some places have been told they can not allow poor people to sleep in their buildings because this contravenes zoning regulations. Doesn’t sound helpful to me.

Nonetheless, I still believe that people should be compassionate and help those in need. Not only does government squash others attempts at this, when it does it itself it does it in the most inefficient and uncompassionate way possible. Money is taken from people by force (taxes) and then goes through government programs, who have to employ bureaucrats, leading to only a percentage going to those actually in need. In a voluntary society, people would give money to organisations that they support, so this kind of wastefulness with funds would not be accepted.

The idea that you don’t need government for kindness and generosity to flourish, and in fact quite the opposite, was brought to me best by The Law, an old french book by Frédéric Bastiat – “Every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.” Another point of this book is that government can not possible act for the good of everyone, it will be biased by those with friends of political power, by the most vocal pressure groups. This kind of twisting of where government force aimed is a great waste of people’s time and money, and ultimately does not favour the poor, since they don’t have time or money to spare. In the words of Bastiat – “legislation will then be — in fact, it already is — the battlefield for the fantasies and greed of everyone.” We all try and get government to help ourselves, and in the end life is made worse for everyone.

So, to sum up, I new thoroughly believe that coercion (initiated force), and is no more justifiable when it is done by “the government” than ordinary people. I value compassion – helping the poor and looking after the environment. The best and most effective way to do these things is in a world without the artificial interference of those who call themselves the government.

Free software is a good thing, its empowering, I might even go as far as to say its the way things should be done. One of the biggest threats to free software at the moment is “web services”, or if you’re an airy fairy Web 2.0 person “The Cloud” (airy could, geddit?). The reason its such of a threat is because not only most open source advocates, but also a lot of free software fans are using these propretiary, remotely hosted applications. Including me.

Now, I personally think web services are a useful thing, especially since most people end up using multiple computers. But, the critical requirement for web services that respect the users freedom is that the user can take their data and run the software, in freedom, on their own server. If they can’t do this, they are locked into one vendor who may go bust at any time, this isn’t right. (A great example of doing-it-right™ is wordpress, I was able to migrate this blog, onto my own server, using free software, with great ease.)

So, a couple of weeks ago, I had one of my amazing code genius moments, and I decided to write a free software replacement for GMail. I did this because no-one else seems to be addressing this issue (except maybe the Bongo Project, but they’ve decided to rewrite the entire web front-end, so it doesn’t seem very ready at the moment).

Anyway, I know have a working (but rather hackish) email client written in php that supports conversations and archiving, which I have called AGPLMail. The name is due to the the fact its released under the AGPL (bet you’d never have guessed). For those not in the know, this is an FSF license, like GPL, but which extends the provision about users right to source code to include programs accessed over the network. This means someone can’t take my code, change it, offer it as a service, and then not contribute this. My application actually prints its own source code.

Now, the problem with my “code genius” moments, is that over about a week I write several hundred lines of codes, and then get distracted by something else, and leave it half finished. This is the fate that greeted Freedometer, something I don’t think I’ve even blogged about.

And that, is I guess the point of me writing this, I have written this code, which works and is useful, but I don’t want to be the only person involved. So, please tell me, am I doing something valuable? Is my code/overall design good or completely crap? Does anyone else want to use it (this we be a cool honour for me). Most importantly, would anyone be willing to help me develop it.

If anyone is interested, I have created the project a git repo [1], and my own copy can be found here. There is a demo account (username: demo; password: password), if anyone is interested in having a play. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Whether anyone else jumps onboard will make a big difference to wether AGPLMail becomes a succesful project, or just another of my abondoned projects.

[1] Noww, time to open a real can of worms. I’m hosting this project on github, which does not provide the source to there interface. However, as a git host, the data is inherentley get-at-able, and more importantly decentralised. The important thing and the reason that I don’t see github as a problem is the escapist principle. I don’t need github, if it were to go down suddenly, I’d still have my own personal repositories (which have exactly cthe same info as the github one) and could point people to them instead.

In my ongoing fight against spam I have resorted to using captchas. Now, in one way, captchas generally do there job quite well, they are a big barrier to automated spam systems. However, they also act as a barrier to legitimate users, or just end up being fucking annoying.

The best solution in my opinion (since its the one I’m using xD), is reCaptcha. It uses words from books that failed OCR, so is unreadable by even the most sophisticated OCR tochnology (in theory). But, because it is words, it is inherently very readable by humans. Not only is it accurate and bearable, it is also helping to digitize the books the words are from (presumeably it must decide what the right answer is by taking a consensus).

Sooo, generally nice nice nice. I’m not sure why I haven’t tried it before now. Fingers crossed, and be sure to let me know if it breaks.

So, yeah, a little update from the Freedom Dreamer. There might be more posts coming soon, there might not.

So, I’ve never blogged about the results of the TeensOnLinux merger (with TeenLinux) vote. This is because, I was wrong in my assumption that most people in ToL wanted a merge, and I had nothing more to say about it. However, my former enemy cactaur (aka he was very vocally opposed to a merge) has written a very observant blog post about the situation we are currently in. (Apologies for taking all this time to reply to it.)

To be honest, I’m not even convinced that a merge would be as beneficial as I once thought. However, as cactaur rightly notes, the way we are currently so divided is certainly not good. He manages to some up very nicely what makes the two groups different – ToL doesn’t speak much about GNU/Linux, wheras TL does. This, he suggests, means tthat ToL and TL can work together with TL being an on-topic group and ToL being an off-topic group.

I would suggest going one step further, the two groups can be kept distinct, but should both gather as one community under one banner (ie. name). Cactaur’s argument for keeping the names distinct is that ToL has invested a lot of resources into the branding. Whilst this is the case, he misses the fact that TeenLinux, meanwhile has not got any realy investment in the name (apart from domain names of course), and, as far as I can tell, most people in TL aren’t that attatched to the name, it was simply chosen to be dilomatic during the merge between TeenLUG and TeenLinuxLounge.

So, my suggestion is this, we should both use the Teens on Linux name. How do we keep the two groups distinct? TL can become TeensOnLinux.Com and the current ToL can become TeensOnLinux.net (since it is more of an off-topic network). The current .org domain name can be a splash page, explaining the existence of the two groups. The IRC channels would similarily be renamed to the .com and .net names, with pointers in the topic to the other one (e.g. If you would prefer more on/off-topic chat, please see #teensonlinux.com/.net).

I would be interested in what others think of this idea. In my opinion, its a both nice and plausible compromise, and if we can go ahead with it, I feel it would help put an end to all the tension between groups.

So, unintended consequences. This is always an annoying thing, something you do or say just is misterpreted and causes something you don’t want. As a random example, two friends of mine were discussing, on Monday, when to have a meeting (of a Fairtrade group as it happens). A says “on Tuesday?”, B says “tommorow?” and A responds, “nah maybe on Wednesday instead”. Person B was simply trying to clarify, and proceeded to state as much, but person A went and choose Wednesday, consequntly clashing with another group!!! WTF!?!

So, another recent example of this would be Spore. I’m not going to debate the ethics of Spore in respect to software freedom, because that would take for ever. Instead, I’m thinking about people’s perception that spore is hinting at Intelligent design. Tihs is a tricky one, because I’m sure this wasn’t intended (but, you never know), but is rather hard to avoid – you have to have a designer in a simulation based game, because otherwise its not a game, just a simulation!

So, a final tangental topic. It would be the ultimate unintended consequence if a Physics[1] experiment destroyed the world, I am of course thinking of the LHC. Now the big thing here is that the chances of this actually happening are similar to an evil wizard killing us all (since both require large parts of our recent scientific understanding to be wrong). However, surely the LHC could have managed the story a bit better… or maybe they couldn’t – people do love a, sensationalist story, and people can understand End of the World much easier than actual science. The biggest irony about this whole thing is that if the LHC were to create a large black hole, it wouldn’t happen today “Switch on Day”, but in a month’s time when the first collisions happen, or maybe even later when the energy is increased.

So, to sum up, I hate conclusions.

[1] I always seem to do Physics with a capital P – should I? Am I just a Physics fanboy?

So yeah, I’m writing another blog post. Theres been a longer delay than normally between posts. Even once I decided to write this post there was a longer than normal delay to me actually getting it written (who knows how long before its actually published and you read this). If you haven’t guessed already, this is going to be another post of a collection of random things going through my mind, squashed to fit in under one title. Perhaps not the most elegant way of writing a blog post, but it works for me. And I don’t know if anyone will find it interesting, but at least I get to write some of my thoughts down (which I still haven’t got into the routine of doing properly).

My blog is now popular, but not in a good way. I have 2976 spam comments waiting for moderation, thats not good (…bloggers thats not good). And, I’ve not got round to installing a proper spam control mechanism yet, so I guess they will have to stay there. I could use akismet, but I don’t like it, because it is a third party service.

Then there’s my podcast. The last episode was later than usual, especially since neither of us are on holiday. We had to record over two seperate nights, which we have only done once before, but, we did do an interview. Also, its taken much longer than expected to sort out the sound issues(noise and echo). It looks now like we need to get a proper sound card, but they are sooooo expensive. £100 for a four input one, yeah, I can probably sort out the money, but it seems a lot to pay, before I even start thinking about microphones!! Anyone have any ideas?

Something I finally got round to doing recently is updating my facebook pic (I know, I know, it hates freedom…. or does it), from a not so flattering one, to a rather nice one. Perhaps I should finally get round to creating a hackergochi for myself; maybe with my head in a sock? (freedom socks related) – or would that look too silly?

The final thing thats been taking me a long time to achive is my goal of having my primary system fully free. At the momnt, the only thing that is stopping me is wireless card firmware,so hopefully in the next few days I will get round to ordering a nice atheros based card. The one I’m thinking of getting is supposed to have good range (and with three aerials on the back! I’m tempted to believe it), so hopefully this will sort out the annoying connection problem I have so often (apparently I’m the person that joins/leaves most in ##teenlinux). Ironically, I have just and only just worked out a way to get my internet to reconnect without a reboot (modprobe all three relevant modules and restart network manager, although I’m not sure if it’s just a fluke.

Actually, I lie when I say its the final thing, there is something else, but it deserves its own blog posts. (Although, this may be one of the times I say that and it never happens.)