Without a Traceroute

Don’t worry, you’re (probably) not a victim of DNS spoofing. As you may have noticed, the site looks a bit different. To celebrate my arrival on a brand-new continent, I’m relaunching this blog with a brand-new, custom, WordPress theme. All of the design work, and the lion’s share of the PHP/CSS work, are courtesy of Monica Joyce. As you might expect, given the nature of this blog, the theme is GPL-licensed and you can download it from her site if you’d like to use it on your own blog.

I’m pretty pleased with the new design, I think it’s very clean and modern-looking without being too gimmicky. It does have some fancyness like transparency, and rounded corners and so forth, so if anyone out there is running into weird glitches (things overlapping, sections disappearing, etc.) I’d appreciate hearing about them. You can leave a comment, or email me. Please include your operating system and browser, too.

On Saturday, I went to see the DDR Museum in Berlin (a terrible example of an historical abbreviation striking mental miscues). I had originally been planning on seeing the Deutsches Technikmuseum instead, but it occurred to me that I’ve seen a couple other technical museums on this trip (most notably in Zagreb). While the one in Berlin is reportedly very nice, it probably doesn’t offer anything unique. The DDR Museum, on the other hand, is the only one of its kind and explores a subject particular to East Germany.

The museum, for its part, turned out to be pretty interesting. So many museums are focused on “important” things: epoch-shaping wars, timeless art, science−it was cool to see one devoted simply to daily life in the DDR. The tone of the museum reminded me a little bit of the charming comedy Good Bye, Lenin, a sort of bemused appreciation for communist kitsch, but with recognition of the negative aspects as well. I learned a bunch of things I never knew about East Germany.

Living room in the DDR

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One cool thing about Sweden is that it has relatively strong legal protections for freedom of speech and online privacy, especially by European standards. As a result, it’s something of a hotspot for peer-to-peer file sharing and copyright infringement. The other day, I slept in the same basement as one of the Pirate Bay admins. I felt a little bit like I was in the presence of internet royalty.

The pirates in Sweden have even created an organized political party to lobby for changes to copyright law in Sweden. Recently, the youth wing of this party, Ung Pirat (Young Pirates) received around $159,000 from the government bureau tasked with giving money to youth organizations  to encourage young people’s participation in politics. Ung Pirat is apparently the third largest youth political organization in Sweden, and the money is distributed according to membership.

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So I’m alive. I felt a little bit better for a couple days, but now I’m back to feeling awful again. My throat hurts like crazy and it’s preventing me from sleeping and eating. Tomorrow I’m going to try to go see a doctor. All things considered, I guess I should be happy I got really sick in Sweden, and not like, Croatia.

There was a decent article in the New York Times a couple days ago about Ubuntu.

It’s always nice to see Linux getting attention in the mainstream press, although as usual, the author doesn’t really seem to grock free software. The article is in the business section, and the author seems to have a lot of trouble with the idea that software can be something other than a product, that software development can be something other than a business. So we get quotes like the following:
“CANONICAL’S model makes turning a profit difficult.”

“All told, Canonical’s annual revenue is creeping toward $30 million, Mr. Shuttleworth said.
That figure won’t worry Microsoft.”

“Canonical’s business model seems more like charity than the next great business story.”

Also, the NYT writer completely fails to draw attention to the distinction between “free as in beer” and “free as in freedom”. I realize that the average user probably only cares about the former, but it’s the latter that really makes free software a socially significant phenomenon. It’s the difference between software that obeys its user (you) and software that obeys some company that wrote it.

Day two of the HAIP festival was mostly lectures. Kiberpipa is putting together a video archive of all the lectures from the festival, so you can watch them for yourselves there, there’s also text explanations from the HAIP program here.

The first talk was by a woman named Eleonora Oreggia. She has an idea for something she calls “Virtual Entity” which would be a universal, shared, collaborative metadata system for files. She wanted the system to be decentralized, automatically updating to take into account new revisions of the file, and allowing for people to comment on it. She gave an example of the problems with current, static metadata systems: if she uploads an early version of an artwork, without filling in all the metadata, and somebody downloads that file, then later when she finished the file and fills out the rest of the metadata, then anyone who downloaded the file earlier would have bad, incomplete/out of date metadata.
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