Without a Traceroute

I really really need to get caught up to the point where I’m finally writing about the city/country that I’m actually in again. I swear I’m going to get caught up in the next day or so and get back on a frequent posting schedule. So I may give my week in Berlin shorter shrift than it really deserves.

The big thing that I came to Berlin for is C-base. C-base is amazing. It’s basically the hacker mecca. It’s been in its current location since the late 1980s, which in the computer world is practically an eternity. Unlike many of the other hacklabs I’ve visited which are precariously located in squats, or part of some larger social center, C-base is its own entity. Registered as a non-profit corporation, it collects money monthly from some 400-500 dues-paying members.

C-base is tricky to photograph. If I use a flash, it washes out and does a very poor job of conveying the dark, cyberpunk aesthetic of the place, and it’s too dark to really photograph properly without the flash. At least, for my crappy camera. It looks kind of like the inside of a laser-tag arena, only without the smoke machine; and most of the neon blinking things actually do something. There’s strange aliens, and circuit boards all over the walls. Apparently some of the original founders’ mother/mainboards now adorn the “nerd room” in the basement. This room is off-limits to non-members unless escorted by a member. When I emailed, the C-base guys generously found an American ex-pat member to show me around. (more…)

Tech sites on the internet are buzzing about Google’s new browser, Chrome, which just launched. Chrome is a big deal for multiple reasons. Partly it’s just the fact that any time Google does anything, techies on the internet flip out about it. It’s also a because Chrome was developed in secret and comes as a big surprise to everyone.

I downloaded it, I tried it, and I’ll say it right now: it’s good. Very good. The interface is clean and intuitive, it uses the WebKit engine also found in Apple’s Safari, which results in fast, accurate page renders. I didn’t run any memory comparisons (I’m sure hundreds of people are doing that already), but it feels much snappier and more responsive than Firefox 3, especially on Vista (I tested on XP and Vista; Google claims Linux and Mac versions are on the way). In many ways, Chrome combines the speed and responsiveness of Opera with an interface I much prefer. The startup page displays your 9 most frequently visited sites, a nice feature ripped off from Opera.

In short, it’s clear that Google put a lot of time and effort into this, which actually makes me very suspicious. Why go to all this trouble? What do they have to gain? It’s not like the world needs another web browser (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany and K-meleon have that covered, thanks). Google’s released it under a free software license, so they aren’t trying to sell it. They already own the search market, and they pay a lot of money to Mozilla in order to be the default search engine for Firefox, so it’s not like they need Chrome to be a trojan horse for their search engine.

The only thing that makes any sense to me (and the part that makes me really suspicious), is the inclusion of Google Gears support in the browser. Gears is a Google-developed framework for web applications, and it looks to me like their goal with Chrome is to make Gears a must-have application platform. This is a really, really bad idea. It will complicate the lives of web developers endlessly, and you’ll start to see sites that are designed for Gears, not according to common web standards.

The entire thing smacks of Microsoft’s “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy, where they would move into an area where open-standards prevailed, embrace and support the standards, but then add their own non-standard extensions until those extensions became widely adopted. Then, change their extensions in such a way as to break compatibility with competitor’s products. This looks eerily like what Google’s going for with Gears. Now, Gears is BSD licensed, so it would be very hard for Google to deliberately inhibit compatibility with competing products without changing the license. But even if they don’t break competing products, they will still be in a position of power controlling a “standard” developed internally, by one company, that already has a great deal of power in several key internet sectors (search, context-ads). You’ll likely never be “forced” to use Chrome, but if Google is successful it’s entirely possible you’ll start to see websites that just don’t quite look or work right in other browsers. It will mark a regression, not a progression in the browser market (which has in recent years trended toward ever-greater standards-reliance). It will be like the bad old days when sites were “Designed for Internet Explorer” or “Designed for Netscape Navigator”.

When I tell people I’m traveling around the world studying hackers and free software activism, some of the most common reactions I get are along the lines of, “Isn’t that illegal?”, “Make sure they don’t steal your credit card number,” or “I can’t believe they’d let you meet with them.”

Reactions like these betray a fundamental and all-too-common misunderstanding of who hackers are and what they do. At its most basic, a “hacker” is one who hacks. The word ‘hack’ originated at MIT in the 1960s and 70s, where it meant something like “messing around”. One of the earliest applications of the term was for students who explored locked parts of buildings or steam tunnels under the campus. This was known as “tunnel hacking”.  Later, the word came to refer to elaborate and intricately planned pranks orchestrated by MIT students. The Jargon File (an invaluable repository of hacker culture) lists examples such as putting a police cruiser on the roof of a building, or inflating a huge ‘MIT’ balloon at the 50 yard line during the Harvard-Yale football game.

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Yesterday, August 16th, was the 15-year anniversary of the first release of the Debian Linux distribution. This makes Debian, along with Slackware, one of the oldest Linux distros still being actively developed.

The name Debian is a portmanteau of project-founder Ian Murdock’s name with his then-girlfriend’s (now ex-wife’s) name, Debra. The lesson: don’t use girlfriends’ names for tattoos or software projects. Debian is famous for taking the concept of free software incredibly seriously. They even re-branded the Firefox browser as “Iceweasel”, because the name “Firefox” and attendant logos are trademarked by the Mozilla Corporation and the Debian project felt the terms of their use were incompatible with their policies on free software.

Debian is important for historical reasons, but also because it serves a base for numerous other popular distributions such as Ubuntu, Xandros (which is the default OS on the popular eee PC) and KNOPPIX.

While there are many people who do run Debian as their primary OS, I’ve always thought that it was in this aspect that Debian truly excelled–as a large pool of stable software for other distro developers to draw upon. The Debian project is nothing if not ambitious: it includes over 18,000 software packages and supports eleven different hardware architectures, most of which you’ve probably never heard of. You can run Debian on everything from the ARM chip which likely powers your cell phone, to giant IBM mainframes (your desktop computer is most likely an x86 architecture).

But trying to do so much inevitably leads to shortcomings. Debian has been famously plagued by slow release cycles, almost 3 years passed between woody and sarge (all Debian releases are named for Toy Story characters). As a desktop OS, Debian lacks the polish of desktop-focused distros like Ubuntu or SuSE. Debian has been accused of lacking focus, with resulting conflict and controversy between different developer communities.

But for the most part, Debian does a fantastic job of providing quality code, and it’s even more to the developers’ credit since they labor in relative obscurity on a massive workhorse project, not on the latest flashy project at the top of the DistroWatch list. And hey, any distribution that comes with its own manifesto is alright by me (I’ve always wanted to write a manifesto!).

I bought another bike yesterday. This one cost me €50, plus €10 for a clamp-style lock for the rear wheel (I’m going to get a second, even heftier lock soon). It’s somewhat worse than the bike that was stolen, and it rattles a lot. My hope is that I will be able to sell it at the end of my time in the Netherlands for most of the purchase price.

You can see the lock on the wheel

I also met with one of the guys from PUSCII. He seemed like a very interesting, intelligent guy, but also very intense. He apparently spent 10 days in jail for chaining himself to railroad tracks along with other protestors to block the movement of trains carrying equipment for the war in Iraq. The charges were eventually dropped in response to bad press. He’s a true old-school computer guy, he even has a Commodore 64. He seemed to feel like the hacktivism scene in Europe was getting stale from a peak in the late 90s with the tech bubble. PUSCII at this point doesn’t have much of a physical presence, and he said it’s been hard attracting volunteers. He did give me some tips on other groups that might be more active (including a couple in nearby Amsterdam). So I’ll probably try to check that out.

The PUSCII sign

For dinner I cooked up this thing that’s sort of a Turkish equivalent of the frozen burrito. It was actually fairly tasty with vegetables and spices and stuff (I cooked it in the oven instead of the microwave, which usually helps). But what was really bizarre is that actually printed(?) onto the wrapper/tortilla part of it is the word “Mmm”. You can see it in the photo below. When I first saw it, I thought I was imagining it, or that I’d somehow failed to remove all the plastic covering. But no, it’s actually printed on there with food coloring or something. As a general rule, I try to avoid readable food, with special exemptions for alphabet soup/cereal.

"Mmm"