Freedom Dreams

Heres an interesting thing that has croppped up a couple of times recently. Are there times when it is necessary for bad things to happen to have good in the long run. And if good is achieved through bad, how should we react to that? I guess it is kind of like the “room has to get messier to get fully tidy” paradox.

The first was with Alice (hopefully you’ll retaliate in the comments ). 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I really need to get a good notepad. I mean a real notepad – small pad of paper that will fit im my pocket. I had a few things that I was thinking about blogging – I thought of them this morning, but I’ve been out all day, and now they aren’t really coming to me.

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.)

Me and my friend Joe have been wondering about lucid dreaming recently. He recently livejournaled one of his dreams. Now, I don’t really want to share my dreams, they are either too private or too weird, and I should imagine too uninteresting to post here. Also, some of them are written on a real notepad, and I cba typing them up. However, for about a week, I did make an effort to write my dreams down.

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.

Whilst my friend Joe has been having fun taking apart his TV, I’ve been trying to make a rather brocken laptop useful in some way. I took it off someone thinking that just the screen was broke and I could use my monitor to make it quite a useful stationary machine. No such luck! The hard drive was also brocken.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch this space.

Well, OCR (uk exam board) has just gone and shown how useful copyright acknowledgment can be In a GCSE music exam they contained the answers to the questions!

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>