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.

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.

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, 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?

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.)

Firstly, i think I managed to cause my pc to power off by having a plasma ball too close. I also managed to get a bit of interference on my podcast from it (when I say a bit, I mean *very* loud, bit we didn’t have it switched on for long), on top of the fuzzy sound from my on board sound card.

Then, I decided to try using networking scripts intsead of network manager, so that it wouldn’t wouldn’t drop the wireless connection when I plugged an ethernet cable in, and then not being able to reconnect (I’m not sure why).

So, whilst I was messing around with the networking scripts, I plugged an old hard drive in to look at one I had on there. Unfortunately, this meant opening up the side of my pc, and whilst doing this, I knocked my brocken SATA cable connector out of the electrical tape that was holding it in place, and thus lost my primary hard drive.

The cable connector has to be in just the right place for the contacts to touch, so I could not get it to work again, no matter how much tape I used, without holding it in place myself. After much frustrastion, I realised that I could achieve a temporary soltion by plugging the cable in the other way around.

All this messing with with the hard drive caused a bit of corruption. Firstly, there a lot of fscking when I finally booted my system back up. Secondly, some of the files in /var/lib/dpkg/info/ are now corrupted, some containing weird SATA errors. This means that I couldn’t use the package manager. I managed to lessen this issue by removing corrupted files, and reinstalling some packages, however, I still get warnings all over the place.

Also, these are not the only files that are corrupted. I have got a few suspicous errors from other programs (mplayer and gconf). In fact, mplayer refused to play video due to one of them, so I might have quite a problem and end up having to abadon this install (of debian). I could just switch back to gnewsense partition, but jokosher did not seem to work very well with that…. don’t get me started on jokosher.

And the reason I started all this messing that got me into this trouble? To have a go with some more pxe booting on that brocken laptop.. I’ve actually ended up doing nothing with it.

Im typing this in dvorak, which is still slower than my qwerty was. I haven’t done much deliberate work on it since becoming able to touch type though. I also now fail at qwerty. I was hoping to be able to do both well, but it isn’t looking promosing at the moment.

So, yeah, I’m a bit fed up.

I am trying Dvorak just for the fun of it - its supposed to be better than qwerty, anh although I think that its probably true, I don’t see any benefits yet due to the steep learning curve… I guess thats how many people feel about Linux or free software in general. Fear of change is not completely irrational… effort is required to make that change. All we can try to do is reduce the work involved as much as possible; but more importantly, wemust make it evident to people that their effort will be worthwhile.

I would write a bit more, but it is painstakingly slow…..

In ether news, the third episode of Freedom Socks, my free software podcast, has been released. Have a listen and please tell me what you think.

Firstly, yesterday, we started off using the Jokosher from the repos. It sucked, it literally crashed every minute or so, which was very frustrating, as the software looks so nice. However, I finally got the svn version, which runs slightly better, and ended up recording, today, using that.

Then, once we had recorded everything, it froze up, and I tried re-opening it, but that failed. I then changed computers (I could not stay at my friends house forever xD) and tried opening it on my pc. This involved creating an extra directory in home, since Jokosher uses static links to files :(. And, of course, I had the same problem. I eventually solved that, by deleting the levels directory.

So, yeah, Jokosher has so much potential, but is currently so much annoyance… I guess trunk being more stable than an actual release kindof tells you something. However, for what I want (recording from multiple sound cards, and mixing), it seems the best free tool. I’ll probably end up persevering and using it again next time.

So, I’m on school holiday now, so I have the time to resurrect a couple of projects I started a while ago. The first is multistanza, my free version of ubuntu’s multiverse repo. Now that I run gnewsense, not having packages like vlc or mplayer in main or universe is becoming quite annoying. I rewrote a substantial part of my multistanza creation script, so that it doesn’t require root, and doesn’t accidently include the non-free povray. My rewrite should also make it easier to support multiple archectures, as I am now working out the package url and wgetting it, rather than relying on the system-specific apt-get cache. I am also using my new(ish) hosting to host a repository - multistanza.freedomdreams.co.uk - but I must be careful not to pull too much bandwidth. I wonder if the people at gnewsense would be willing to host it for me.

The other thing I’ve had another look at is my Freedometer. This is a program that will scan your system, tell you how free it is, and help you make it more free. I wrote some code for it a while ago, but never publicised it. What I’ve done recently is clean up the code a little, and build a proper website, so that I can publicise it to try to find other people to work on it with me. At the moment, its written in python and only works fully on debian based distrobutions.

However, the main topic of this blog post is about my frustration with my computer setup. Firstly, something that has been annoying me for a while know. Being quite a novice to the insides of computers, I managed to snap off part of my SATA hard drive data cable, so the connection is loose, and I have to constanly stick it down with tape (which only works so well). Soo, if anyone in the Manchester area has a spare sata cable…… otherwise, I may end up buying one from amazon.

The other annoyance is wireless. I did have both my computers networking working perfectly fine with ubuntu, but I hope to switch to gnewsense, and both computers have freedom hating network cards. One is plugged directly into the router downstairs, but the ethernet card requires non-free firmware; the other, a desktop upstairs, is connected via wireless (and is some distance from the router) - the wireless card, of coures, also required firmware.

So, I bought a Linksys WUSB54G, a usb card that seemed to be highly recommend by the FSF. And yes, it did work with gnewsense, didn’t require any firmware, but its wireless capabilities are quite frankly crap. It is not usable upstairs. With a lot of palaver I managed to get it working in one minute bursts, but only with WPA turned off. Now, AFAICT, neither of these problems are due to the drivers, since it works fine on my downstairs computer, when right next to the router. This is useful to an extent, since it allows me to use gnewsense, despite the non-free ethernet, but I had hoped to be able to use the linksys card on both computers.

So, I don’t know what to do, I hoped to try to use 100% free software for a certain length of time, but at the moment, I still need 24576 characters of non-free firmware for my freedom hating wireless card. Is there anything I can do to improve the reception of the linksys one? Solder a new antenna on? baked bean cans?… has anyone got any ideas?

*sigh*

Also, as an update to my last post. The new fan is also being silly. Its slighly larger size means it is catching on the motherboard, so I occasionally have to nudge it a bit, to stop it catching and overheating. *sigh* Why are things always so complicated.

So, my parents get a guy called Andrew to sort it out. He seems a nice guy - he reinstalled our pc back in the Windows ME days (yes, Windows ME :’( ), and apparently he know runs ubuntu on one of his machines. Anyway, he orders a new fan for us, and then fits it a few days later when it arrives. Now, when I say fit it, it wasn’t as simple as slipping it back where the old one went; the new fan was slightly larger than the old one, so making it fit correctly involved cutting and filing at bits of plastic.

Now, I would like to be able to fix my pc myself, and I would be relatively comfortable replacing a hard drive, RAM, graphics card, cd drives or even the main fan. But the power supply is one of those rally tricky things. It is very specific to the case - not standardised at all. I guess it would be within my range now (having seen the powe rsupply removed and refitted), to fit a whole new power supply, but I wouldn’t have a clue about how to do all the messing about to fit a whole fan.

Well, I’ve been saying I would like to be able to sort out my pcs myself. Partly, this is for the feeling of control over those pesky machines, but more importantly it would save us money. We paid Andrew £40 (which he probably deserved after all that filing) - but, it makes me wonder - should I try and get a job in computing? He did mention that he knows people in London who are getting paid £500 a day for php programming. £500 A DAY FOR PHP!! Surely that must the exception rather than the rule. If not, perhaps I should brush up on my php skills…

Its forth rembmering though, I’m going to be rather picky when its come to computing jobs. I would prefer to use exclusively free software, and most of the time, that is not an option. I certainy would not want to develop propreitary software! Which is why I was thinking Physics would be the best for me, but still, £500 a day!?

Most of the above isn’t really blog worthy (or at least no more than the stuff I keep on not getting round to blogging), but the thing I really wanted to mention is my cake. Yep, that’s right, my Mum made me a GNU/Cake for my birthday. It really looks like a GNU, (especially the baby gnu that it is modelled after) and is also twice as high as a normal cake (yum yum).

I think GNU/Cake is the natural porgression from the tux cake I had last year. Question is, what will I have next year, a bsd daemon to complete the collection?

Another big bombshell was to hear that lugradio is going to stop podcasting. omg omg, how can they? those guys are so great and the show isn’t getting old at all (imo). Well, on the upside, lugradio live should be great, and will hopefully kick of a couple of new podcasts, one teenlug are planning and one me and Joe are thinking of doing.

Sooo… watch this space.

So, I install it on both of these machines. Well, on one machine ethernet didn’t work, but I had tested it with the livecd and expected this.  The wireless card on my other machine also required firmware, but it worked out of the box with gnewsense. Before we all give gnewsense a pat on the back for having hardware support, let my explain what happened when I installed updates - both the wireless and the sound stopped working. A package had been removed, since it contained firmware - now this makes sense, and is the way gnewsense works in order to fuffill its goal, but it means two things:

1. The gnewsense deltah-h cd I was using contained the non-free software required by my graphics card. Yes, let me say that again the gnewsense cd contains propreitary software.
2. Regreesions are happening, quite major ones where sound or 3D stops working for many or all people, which is just not something most people will accept, without caring an awful lot about the ethical issues. Not only this, but if someone asks why some of these regreesions happened, you must tell them: sorry, we lied to you - gnewsense wasn’t actually all free software, so we had to remove the bits that weren’t.
   Now, I think most of the people who are ready to use gnewsense will understand the technical difficulty in separating out all propreitary software - but for new GNU/Linux users it will just sound highly hypocrytical, and make gnewsense seem even more pointless than they already though it was.

Now, there was something that rms said in his talk at manchester about people being cowards if they don’t use 100% free software. These are words that I’ve thought about a few times - he is calling 99.99% of the population cowards. But, then again, it is in Stallman’s nature to say such things. His point is partially valid, IMHO, but it is more laziness than cowardice.

We should be trying to introduce people to free software by starting off with gnewsense, as someone on irc said - it is a journey. Think about it - fair trade and free range groups concentrate on getting people to buy increasing ammounts of ethical food, rather than saying that people should switch 100% straight away.  We need to first show people firefox, then openoffice, then ubuntu, then gnewsense.

So, yes, the message of this blog is that giving out gnewsense cds to windows users will just give them a perception of a technically inadequate and hypocritical system. Far better to give them ubutnu cds, explain its weaknesses to them, and let them realise the need for gnewsense themselves.

Now, one great thing about free software is that it will run on much slower machines than propreitary software will. I could actually run compiz on this machine, but it slows everything else up - to get windows aero in a similar state you would need a machine several times more powerful.

Frustratingly, the machine is not as fast as I thought it would be. Perhaps I don’t have enough swap, or perhaps its the many services that run with (x)ubuntu (i had debian with xfce on my even older machine).

However, the thing that really got me thinking was this - how does free software’s ability to run on older hardware relate to Moore’s Law? Gradually the free software most people use regularly is requiring more memory (look at how memory hungry firefox and openoffice are). The ubuntu live cd for example wants >384MB to run, and I think there was controversy a while ago about fredora upping their requirements.

So, we know that the mainstream free software distributions is gradually requiring more powerful hardware, which is not really such a bad thing, since more poweful hardware is becoming more and more affordable (Moore’s law), and free software distros don’t require the expensive specs that vista does to run decently.

This brings me to my question, is the rate at which free software “slows” (for want of a better word), the same as the rate at which propreitary software slows, and at which hardware speeds up (albeit with a certain offset)..
OR is free software slowing at at a lesser rate, which would mean that the gap between the “midrange pc” and what gnu/linux needs to run well growing. Surely the conclusion of this would be that those who run free software would only need a pc ten times less powerful than the affordable midrange pc.

Since this would be such a startling and dangerous (for the hardware industry) thing, I presume it would be the first - same rate but with an offset. After all, it turns out that our needs do grow - 640k wasn’t enough for anybody.

Does anyone have any ideas on this?

The first was with Alice (hopefully you’ll retaliate in the comments :D). I was discussing how opressive our government actually was. She replied by stating the fact taht we are much better off than other places, such as China and Zimbabwe, which are both poor and oppresive. However, I pointed out that these countries had got to this point due to the immoral actings of our government upon them. The reply? You should be grateful for all of the good things that have been gained for you by war and oppression - wealth, womens rights (brought about by WWII) etc.

The second time was discussing Bill Gates and charity with someone. Although they did not bring the “bad for good” point themselves, it occured to me. After all, Bill Gates has given a lot of money to charity, yet this money has been earned by subjugating users in developed countries, and increaingly, developing countries.
One of the thing I was wondering was has Bill Gates caused net good or net bad for society (in my opinion of course). I think his contribution to computing has been undoubtably negative, due to all the use restriction. However, he has given a lot of money to geniune charity (work for combatting AIDS etc.) - but, this money has more or less exclusively been owned through taking away the freedom of computing users. Since the money has been earned this way, how can he have possibly done net good when only a fraciton of this money has been spent on charity?

I don’t think I can ever tell for sure wether the forces in either case were for net good or net bad. However, the question remains, how do I reaact to the fact that theese things have happened. As Alice points out, many of my 1st world priveleges are due to this kind of thing. But what if I was given the choice now? - if Bill Gates offered money to a charity group I ran? If there wwere no strings attached I think I would accept it. Seeing as the bad money already exists we might as well use it for something good. However, we should not be proud of the way that this money was created (as Alice seemed to be saying we should, perhaps she might clarify in the comments).

So, in the case of the Uk’s richness from force against other countries, the only remaining question is - could we have got to the point we are at now, in this amount of time, without the “bad for good” happening? Well, one of ALice’s points was that the UK has a lot of power in the global scene - we only got this through force, the UK does not have enough lands to get that much power through exports. And, in this case, I agree, the UK would not have as much power, because it should not! The UK population only makes up 1% of the world, so it shouldn’t have 10% of the power.
Also, our quality of life would probably be just as good by this point, due to money being invested in sensible ways, rahter than being used to fund agression.
Then, the question remainds, what about socially? Would we have womens rights without the war etc. This is a question I ifnd I can not answer. After all, not having agreesion means not restricting women (or slaves from African countries), in the ways that we so celebrate getting out of. So, I don’t really know. I really don’t know.

I am confused - the whole “bad for good” paradox is part of a wider issue: do we need to restrict peoples freedoms (in the way governemnt was) to ensure the freedoms of others. I really don’t know. I used to like the idea of democratic government and the welfare starte - it gave the best for all people. But, the ideal of voluntaryism sounds even better, just a bit too good to be true. I really don’t know - I really want New Hampshire to sucessfully become anarchist, just so I can see how well it really works.

Which just brings me to a little side note - am I close minded? A lot of what I say is manipulated (not malicously of course), by a particular group of people - free software advocates, especially those in #libervis on freenode, who have also made me rethink governemnt. Am I brainwashing myself, or just unbrainwashing myself? As I said above, I really do not know.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I guess I could write some of the stuff down, but its about anarchy, and I want to read through all my older posts. (Which I cba doing now).

This whole things also make me wonder about my blog style, about whether anyone regularly reads my blog. About whether I should blog more - about how I should write down those things I want for my self. Wordpress has a private post button but I don’t really like it. I have a private wiki I’ve used for a bit, but now its just notes and toedeo lists. Maybe I could do with a twitter, or a private copy of wordpress. Or maybe I should be more open - privacy is a funny thing on the interent. Anyone can read this. And, its going to hang around, already I know theres some stuff on my blog that I might mind people in the future seeing. Nothing too serious though, you just wonder.

Talking about privacy, (hmm im actually starting on the topic I had on my head), I’ve been listening to little brother. Its scary. On one level because of the terrible interogation procedures used on a kid my age. The most chilling thing though is the realness of it - I can quite imagine similar events happening - if they have not already!… most kids would be too scared to speak of it.

And, of course, it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone. I’m a criminal with dangerous views on anarchy. I know its not likely - I’m not that paranoid - but something needs to be done to stop the ever marching trampling of our rights. Whether the right way to do that is anarcy, I’m not sure, and will explore in a later post. But, one thing I know for sure - something must be done.

I’m helping push forward one fight for freedom, that on the digital frontier. But, I feel like doing that is not enough. I need to get involved in the amnesty group when it starts again after exams. Mind you, saying that, our amnesty group seems to be centered around stopping abuses by non-trusted groups - e.g. trafficing. Whilst such work is of course important, it doesn’t mean as much to me personally as work to stop the governments marching in directions that are harmful to us all.

I’m really beginning to dislike forced authority. Although, I’ve always really disliked it. I’ve never like being told what to do. I’m happy to co-operate with someone if they suggest something and it makes sense to me to do it, but something about straightforward order following really pisses me off. This is why I tried the CCF (combined cadet force at my school and hating it). I don’t like to be told what to do in that way. This isn’t to say I’m against people joining such organisations - that’s fine if they want to - just as long as I can stay away.

So, where was I? Oh, I hate authority, I really do. Not structered rules in themselves, but being forced to do them. For example, I am fine with rules at sixth form, because I have an option not to obey them, that is by quitting the xisth form. Consequently I am happy to obey rules because I know I am doing it out of my choice in return for betterment to me. I guess this is what kevin on #libervis was on about when he was talking about being personally free and yet paying taxes. I hadn’t realised that I’d felt it myself.

Oh, lost my place again. I was supposed to mention the culture of ownership blog - another example of how governments are conspiring against the “citizens” that they are supposed to protect. I had a breif glance at UK copright law. Goodness, law is confusing - but I’d really like to know what rights I actually have.

There’s a point. Surely a government is supposed to serve the people of that country. Pay taxes in return for services and a say in how stuff work. Not that I have much trust in modern democracies. All the main parties always seem to be heading the same way. Also, if this is some sort of mutual agreement, how do you get out of it!?! I’m still not convinced that an-cap can work, but I really wish there was somewhere without a government that all the people who wanted freedom could go, and the rest of the world could watch and see what happens. (Yes, I am partially stealing this idea from someone in #teenlug)

So basically, I want freedom. I want privacy. And I want to stop people trying to take that away. I really ought to do more about it, think more, act more, be more.

So, I have myself a little list of things I want to do:

• Get a notebook
• Read back through old blog posts (and wiki) for ideas and things I have not done yet
• Learn what my “rights” under UK law are with regard to copyright, and also in other areas. Maybe also look at human rights

Whoah, now that was one spontaneous blog post. I feel like I lost my thread completely at the end. Nevermind. Hopefully I’ll be able to read through all my stuff, pull my thoughts together, and decide what I really think of stuff - and what I should do about it. I like that little phrase I coined (its probably based subconciously on something else):

Think more. Act more. Be more.

Sounds like doubleplushuman, I wonder how that is progreesing. (Omg, I got so lazy I’m asking people questions throught my blog).

I end, 1000 words. (Edit: fail at that, gedit disagrees and I aciddently deleted the leading I; so much for trying to be poetic, I think that I wil leave that to Joe. Speaking of poetry…., no I must save that for later.)

I gave up with it in the end, it was too much hassle. However, I did find that my dream recal increased dramatically. I now remember a dream most nights, wheras before I could go for over a week without remembering any. This, and this alone makes me think that lucid dreaming may be attainable for me.

The only other thing I’ve been doing, so far, to work toward lucidity is looking at my watch twice. Now, I hadn’t been doing this very seriously, and didn’t expect much of it, but a couple of nights ago, I did it in a dream. In the dream the time went funny the second time, and in the dream I eralised I was lucid. I promptly ran backwards and forwards very quickly, flew up into the air, before trying to edit a door with blender. However, frustratingly, I am not sure that this was really lucid, or if it was just a non-lucid dream about being lucid. *sigh*

Either way, its interesting. Even if I don’t get any further, at least I now remember my dreams.

Now, here’s the interesting bit, you would expect my live cds to work fine, even though the hard drive is broke. No, my ubuntu cd fails, so does DSL, but a gparted disk and a puppy disk boot into X fine. It would seem that the live cds panic if they see a disk, but it doesn’t work properly. Actually removing the hard disk seems to have solved that problem, l and Ubuntu boots.

But, we’re not sorted yet. My main use for any machine is the internet. Ubuntu live CD gets the internet fine over ethernet, but i have no wired access upstairs (where I want to use the machine) and the wireless is being a pain. I guess I could mess with the wireles a bit, but it needs yucky proprietary drivers and any changes I make won’t we saved.

So, I want some way to have a persistent system. I’ve tried using a usb stick, but to no avail. It doesn’t help that parted freaks out when it sees my disks and refusing to deal with it properly. (It sees no filesystem, even when there is one, and says my disk is a quarter of its actual size).

Lastly, I attempted using pxe - I was quite surprised to find that the laptop supports this out of the box. After finally getting to grips with how pxe linux works, I managed to get a kernel booted. However, the filesystem is supposed to be carried over nfs, but it just would not happen. It might help if I had a direct ethernet connection between the two machines, but I need a new ethernet card for that.

So, I’ve put the project to one side for now. Hopefully, sometime this week I’ll be able to get hold of Joes old pc (before he obliterates it like his TV) and then I’ll have more hardware to work with.

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.

Now, I can just about understand how that error went unnoticed - it just proves that everyone ignores copyright ;). But, what about obvious errors in the wording of the question? Simplified a bit, we had something like this in our physics exam.

Write down the wavelength and speed:

Wavelength ………………..
Wavelength ………………..

I mean surely anyone with half a brain cell could spot that. Okay, one person might make a mistake, but how could it pass through the chain of people involved in this and still come out wrong? Unless this error came near the end of the process (like I imagine the copyright printing would have), then there must be something going wrong with the chain! Either that or everyone at OCR is retarded! Yeah, I know calling an exam board isn’t nice, but at least I don’t do it in an exam!

Seriously though, exams do seem a bit broken. We go to school to pass exams, instead of to learn. Its difficult to learn stuff outside of exams and outside of the normal school system. More and more people are getting As, so universities have to discriminate much harder on other things.

</rant>

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!

So, firstly theres the annoying issue with wordpress. Yes, thats you you annoying blog site. Eating up my cojmments and putting them in the wrong places. It only seems to do it occasionally, so its hard to diagnose, and I cba doing anything about it - but an irritance none the less.

Then, theres firefox, good old Mozilla Firefox 3 beta 5. No-one quite knows why its the default in hardy, considering it is supposed to be an LTS. Maybe it makes sense to work towards having firefox 3, but the thing its ITS SO DARN CRASHY. Yes, and (afaict) this is not Ubuntus fault. Its you firefox!
CRASH. Reload. Do something. CRASH. Reload. Try something else. CRASH.
And you may think I’m exagguariting when I describe it like that, but I’m not! It seems to have got worse, to the point where I can have 4 crashes in under one minute - I’m serious! I mean what on earth is going on? I guess it must be something to do with my particular setup. However, I’ve tried running in safemode and removing all plugins, but just the same: CRASH CRASH CRASH.

Well, at least I have a clue whats causing it. Its when I close a tab of a complicated page (thing Google Reader or Google Mail) in a particular way, either whilst a different tab is active (middle click) or when there are only two tabs open. So I know what to avoid, its less annoying. But all the same, a crash every 10 minutes, it takes the p*ss.

I tried talking to a #firefox guy about it, but it seems difficult to get debug information from my version of firefox. He said to try the official builds, so maybe I will when I get the chance. Maybe see if has been fixed in the nightlies. Weirdest thing is, I had no trouble before beta 5 (other people have been noticing this too). But, the annoying thing is, Mr Crash Crash Crash is in a long term support release!!!?!?!?!??!?!?!

Okay, enough of that rant, and onto another Docuemnt Formats, an absolute pita. My brother did a document at home, using OpenOffice on Windows (we’ve never bothered buying Word, and OpenOffice is so much better than Works; also, fwiw, its my printer and not my brother that is the freedom hater). Anyway, he takes it to school, and happily it opens. A vast improvement over a few months ago. However, here’s the wonderful thing - the reason it works is because of a filter designed to add .docx support - yes! that wonderful lie of an open standard and pile of mess OOOXML makes an appearance. However, as if the irony was painful enough, Word and its plugin, in their infinite wisodm decide to save the document, after my brother has made some changes, in .docx. Yes, thats write! It steals a .odf, rapes it and leaves it as a .docx!!!!!!!!

So, now my brother comes home and complains to me about the fact he can’t open his work! So, I endure the 20 minute wait to get OOo beta 3 running, only to find, the document is NOT OPENED PROPERLY!!!!! And, of course, I know this is not Open Offices fault, its god damn OOXML. Open standard with multiple implementations my foot:

1. Its not open, because no-one can understand the mess of a “specification” that they have put out (oh, im sorry, theres a newer one, but that ones just imaginary isn’t it). Which is why Open Office have a hard time writing import filters.
2. Microsoft Word does not implement it! The files it produces differ from the spec!!!!!!!! No wonder its not compatible!

Btw, the point about multiple implementations is that OpenOffice is not an implementation of the Open Shamdard! No, its just for compatiblity with the non-OOXML files that Word produces. And as you can see, that format is lovely and clear, and OpenOffice are finding it easy to implement….. NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And, that brings me onto one last annoyance, lack of ext2/3 support in Windows. (My brother wanted a look at one of my old documents). I have to install this rubishy freeware. Actually, the freeware itself is okay (its not freedomware, but seeing as you’re running windows anyway, who really cares), but if Windows crashes, as is its favorite pastime, every mounted ext3 must be checked at next Linux boot. Maybe I need to find something that can easily be turned off when not in use.

</rant>

In other news, I tried to slim down my mediawiki installation (used mainly for ADFA wiki) by removing language files, but seemed to get an error:

Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Empty regular expression in /path/to/wiki/includes/Linker.php on line 1259

Turns out the error was unrealted, and I got rid of it simply by clearing the cache DOH (add &cached=no to the end of the url). I’m not sure what was causing that though. Its supprising though, after actually deleting the unwanted language files, I managed to free up 19M of disk space. Quite a bonus when my account only has 50M of space! The moral of the story is, check something is working before trying to improve it.

Following from my last post, I decided that the best way to try and solve this issue would be to create a free-multiverse repositroy. To do this, I hacked together a bash script that would compare sid-main with ubuntu-multiverse (using packages lists I downloaded manually and removed the headers from) and pull any of the packages that overlapped between the two. I also got it to read an extras file, for packages that are in multiverse but not sid main, but yet are still free.

So, I now have a demonstration free-multiverse (which I call multistanza). This is currently hosted on my own pc, so will dissapear at night. If you are interested, try this link. compare.sh is the main script and the repo an be added as “deb http://bjwebb.homelinux.com:81/multistanza/ binary-i386/”. I will look for some off site hosting if I decide to pursue this further. If anyone does use my repo, I suggest using it in conjunction with medibuntu (see below).

But, the question is. Is this the best way to pursue this? What I’ve done so far has been no loss to me, because I’ve learnt some more bash scripting; but it is only worth continuing if my new repositry will be of use to other people. Thus, it would be a good idea to know if this has been done already. As far as I know, it hasn’t quite been done the way I want it. However, there is medibuntu, which contains packages not allowed in ubuntu, and is separated nicely into free and non-free. In fact, since I have the repo added, some of the apps get pulled from medibuntu instead of my repo. Unfortunately, not all the packages in medibuntu are as new as the ubuntu ones (hence why my repo and medibuntu could be complimentary) and some are not there at all (vlc for example).

So, I think that the best and most consitent way of having a free “extras” repo, and to avoid duplication of effort, would be for medibuntu to offer all of the free packages in multiverse in their free repository. I think this would fit in with their goal, but I’m not sure if they’d agree. I will contact them about this issue, and see where to go from there.

Nonetheless, I wish to strive to become better in this respect. Recently, I took a look at the 100% free software distribution gnewsense. Thing is, I’m still rather undecided about whether non-free firmware is a problem (topic for a future blogpost maybe) and gnewsense breaks the network cards on both my pcs, rendering it useless for me, until I buy new network cards of course (It also means that I have no compiz, due to graphics card firmware, and the fact that glx has been stripped out (this annoys me, no truly free 3D acceleration yet :S), but I can live without this. The internet, I basically can not).

And, there is also the fact that my belief in the importance of free software has been wavering a bit (I know it is important, I’ve just been wondering how important - I’ll elaborate more in athoer blog post). But, I decided I was at a point where I wanted to try to remove all the tradiotional non-free software. By this I mean software that is regared by everyone by non-free, is not GPL’d etc. In fact most distributions have this content in a separate repository.

On Ubuntu (which I use on my main PC), this software is put into the multiverse. I decided today that I would cut myself off from this repository completely. It should be no harm for me, as I do not use any of these apps, flash and java were installed, but only for other people (gnash and icedtea ftw). However, the thing that is really annoying me is that by disabling multiverse, it is not only non-free software that I can not download, it is also perfectly free software with some sort of legal problem (patents, DMCA). The two groups of software are not the same thing for me (being a freedom lover and patent and DMCA hater), so it is a great inconvenience if the two are just lumped together!!!!!!

I want to be able to have all free software enabled (including that with patent issues etc.) but no non-free software. With ubuntu, I can’t do this - all I can do is pick debs out of multiverse by hand! For this reason, I’m thinking of switching to a distro that does not lump non-free and possibly troublesome together, the obvious choice, I think would be Debian (Sid, I think). Already, I had realised I would be comfortable with debian (I use it on another machine), but given that ubuntu is considered more user friendly and will do anything Debian will do, I had no incentive to switch. Now I do!

I wonder if I can update my current hardy installation to Sid. Its probably not advisable, but given that I have a fallback Kubuntu partion, I might just give it a go, for the hell of it.

Another thing I was wondering, is that I do decide to go freedom crazy (and hate non-free firmware). Then what distro would I choose? Not gnewsense I don’t think, because that doesn’t ship the free software that ubuntu lumps in multiverse. Annoyingly, there doesn’t seem to be a freefree distro based on pure debian. Maybe gnewsense could be tweaked to be based on debian (project for the summer holdiays maybe).

Okay, I just spoke to the gnewsense guys, and it would probably be easier to create a “free multiverse repo”. So, I might not switch to Debian afterall. Then again I might. And everything could change if I manage to buy a new ethernet card. Watch this space
Self referencial note: This blog is almost like a conversation with myself. I either leave too long before writing or am still making up my mind whilst I’m writing. The latter is definitely better though.

One of the biggest things was Richards unfaltering commitment to the four freedoms as moral imperatives. One thing he explained particularly well, that I’d known for a while, but found difficult to explain was the problem with free software not allowing people to do certain tasks (e.g. use a printer, due to the technical incompleteness) and yet still claim to be liberating them. His explanation, which I will use from now on, is that something like this is not about freedom, it is about convenience. The two are completely separate, even though people are sometimes try to lump them together.

Of course, that then raises the question for me personally: How committed am I? What inconveniences am I prepared to face? This was really brought home to me by part of his talk specifically about schooling. Not only did one of his apologies compare roughly to my own experience (free software is great for learning for children who want to know how stuff works, unfortunately, I was still part of the proprietary software world during most of my childhood, so I missed out). But, also he was talking about how exclusively Free Software is an absolute must in schools, for four reasons:

• Its much cheaper, and schools have tight budgets as it is
• To prevent proprietary software companies from locking in, or “addicting” children
• Given that the four freedoms are important, the most important people to teach these ethics to are our children. Rms gave his example that children should be willing to and able to share anything they bring to class, whether that be sweets or software
• Free software provides a much better way for eager students to learn how software works (as explained above)

However, what struck me most, was again, how he talked about achieving it. That those who care about Free Software, such as myself, should refuse to use the proprietary software in schools. I’m currently wary of doing this, especially for diplomacy, but it is certainly something I should consider doing. Then, there’s the point of whether I can avoid proprietary software entirely - really, it is something I should aim for, and am working towards, but when am I going to take the plunge entirely.

Something I found interesting, especially as it will be one of ADFA’s campaigns, is his stance on webapps. Using computers in the way he does, he sees no need for them, and points out that you are giving up a certain amount of control to your data (whether the server runs free software or not), something that I had pointed out on the ADFA project. However, the thing that I had not thought about, was the fact that these apps run software on the users machine, in the form of languages such as javascript. It is these scripts that must be under a free software license for webapps to be 4-freedoms-compatible. I’m still not sure whether this is a terribly big issue, but it is definitely something to campaign for - particularly since freeing these scripts would not cause much loss to the companies, escpecially as the source code is already availible anyway.

One less important, but interesting thing I took away from the talk was a fresh look on the whole Linux naming controversy. What I am trying to campaign for is free software as a right, not just Linux as a system or open source being good technically. Since what I am striving for is most similar to GNU/FSF than any other project, using the name GNU should really be a good thing. My main issue with GNU/Linux was that it sounded technical and off-putting. However, I hope to use the term “GNULinux” from now on (to avoid the “slash”). Really this is not so off-putting, especially since a gnu is also an animal, so those who won’t appreciate “funny” acronyms don’t need to know about them. And, if you are trying to market simply as a software product, then just use the distro name like Ubuntu - however, I don’t just want to market a product, so from now on, I hope to make an effort to mention GNU. Linux might be shorter to say, but surely we can at least use GNULinux as the “full name” for the system.

Another minor, but useful thing was how he answered the question about the loss of jobs if the whole world moved towards free software (aka. free software is communist, developers can’t make money etc.). He pointed out something I’d not quite grasped. Within the computing market, jobs actually developing software are only a small section, and only a small section in that is creating proprietary software (the rest is building custom software, which as long as the one user of the software has the four freedoms is completely ethical - giving people software and restricting there use of it is immoral, but not sharing at all is just a bit mean). The worse that could possibly happen is that this small section within a section would disappear. Not a problem at all, considering that it is entirely possible to get jobs developing free software! Someone raised the issue of one person propreitary software developers no longer being able to make money, and rms pointed out the argument we too often overlook - that nobody has a right to make money if they are exploiting people (in fact, he told the person that he hoped their business failed!). Free software is about encouraging a completely different mindset and ethos.

Finally, after watching Richard auction  I’ve re-realised it would be good to read some of the free software movements literature. So now, I want to get my hand on Free as in Freedom and Free Software Free Society, as well as the ancap books Wikiacc mentioned in response to my previous posts.

PS: I left this a day before writing this. I reawlly ought to improve my blogging style and use a notebook or something.

PSS: Point in case, I’ve already found myself adding a major paragraph to this, I’ll probably find myself adding more to this as it comes to my head. I need a small pocket sized notebook!

However, one thing I have been thinking about, is freedom in the wider world (ie. not just software freedom). I have always been a great supporter of peoples freedoms. Every human being has rights, yay for the the Geneva convention etc. Of course, I thought, some rights are more important than others. And we need a government to intervene when different people’s freedoms/rights collide. As far as I understood politics, I considered myself a liberalist - individual freedom is very important, which, in my opinion, includes the rights to be happy, well educated etc.

The government, of course, restricts our freedoms: takes our money and stops us doing things, even when those aren’t harmful to other people. Of course, I have always accepted, and been taught to accept this as necessary to safeguard, other more important rights. However, I’ve recently been made aware by Daniel and Kevin on the libervis IRC channel to the possibility of a stable society without government. The idea being that although every person has fundamental rights (to life, liberty and property), those rights are enforced not by one single monopolistic* organisation, but by the free market. That is, if someone violates your rights you can hire a company to recoup damages off him. Also, people who do immoral things will become known for doing so (increasingly easy in the age of the internet) so people will not “do business with them”**. This concept is called anarcho-captitalism (an-cap for short) or the laissez-faire market.

Anarcho-capitalism, as long as it remained stable, would protect most of peoples rights, in fact most even more so than our current system. However, even if it were to be stable, my main doubt is whether it would discriminate against poor people. I’ve always been a great fan of the public health and education service we have in the UK - the same services for all; but of course, you would not have these without a government and taxation.

The answer to this, I guess, is that all people would be able to afford these services through a combination of charity, sponsorship and providing some kind of service. The last is the kind of idea that poorer people would get affordable healthcare and schooling by agreeing to take part in scientific studies etc, to be monitored. Whilst this idea my actually work, in my mind, the concept conjures up images of poorer people having to earn the medicine they need to stay alive by being human guinea pigs and being subjected to all sort of chemicals. I guess, once again, it falls down to the fact that there would be a free market. People would be able to vote with their feet against the things that they do not like and would be able to support things they do think are right through charity. In fact, I think that if people weren’t taxed, people would naturally be more generous, and unlike the way that taxation works, would donate to the causes that really matter to them.
Of course, one of the other arguments is that in an an-cap society there would be less poverty, so there would not be so much of an issue. However, I am not yet so convinced about this; although lack of government restrictions in this area would be good in many ways.

One of my biggest issues with the practicality of anarcho-capitalism, although a really great ideal, is the fact that it depends on people making thought through choices, preventing any bad things by making the right decisions about who to do business with. I’m not sure if a lot of people are capable of making that decision for themselves, at least not as they are. For it to work smoothly, an an-cap society seems to require better more conscientious people - doubleplushuman.

Perhaps a lot of people would be willing to become more active. In fact a lot of the reason people don’t care now, is because they have the government to look after them, but, as they often point out, the government doesn’t really listen to them. And, one of the greatest things about anarcho-capitalism, is the free choice. If you want to, you can choose your own government (a corporation who will look after you, in return for a tax-like fee), or even establish small idealistic groups. (If you and friends bought a plot of land, no-one would stop you setting up a commune there!) The whole point is, people would have the choice as to how they want to live. A great dream, but one that will take quite a while to achieve (its about evolution not revolution) and one that I’m not even sure is practical yet.

* That’s something that I find really ironic. The fact that I naturally dislike and disapprove of massive corporations which have way too much power and control, and yet, have accepted the government, which is by its very definition a monopoly, without a moments thought.
However, one of the problems you could suggest with a free market, is the tendency for monopolistic businesses to grow. But, monopolies tend to use government contracts and legislation to their advantage. In anarcho-capitalism, it would be much easier for new, smaller businesses to compete.

** When there is no government, “do business” can mean a lot more than trade. If someone initiates force against somewhere else, the majority of a town might forbid him to use there land as a path and he would become an outcast.

So there you have it, another quasi-essay, another splurge of my thoughts on the web. But, for once, I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, I’m still trying to work out where I really stand in the messy landscape of real world politics.

However, if you are interested, take a look at the philosiphy of liberty flash animation and there is also the Wikipedia article, and further information can be found here, here, here and here. My thoughts on the issue have been heavily influenced by Daniel’s and Kevin’s blogs.