ACTA, if you are even slightly interested in your rights on-line you will have heard about it. The document, although it encompasses more than just your on-line life, is meant to combat piracy: the free flow of copyrighted material made possible by the internet. Recently, the proposed text has been released. There are severe implications for your life on-line, if this agreement is accepted by the negotiation partners (the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia and a couple of other countries), things like filtering of internet traffic and even permanent disconnection from the internet are possible facts of reality that you will have to contend with. It is therefore time to act, and write to the members of the European parliament to convince them to vote against the dangerous parts of this proposed agreement.

Now I admit, reading through the almost 40 pages of legalese is not for everyone. Luckily, the EFF (the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a long-standing fighter for your rights online) has written an excellent summary on the document. I recommend reading that if you don’t want to read the actual document itself. There is also a nice Dutch summary written by BOF (Bits of Freedom, sort of the national counterpart of the EFF). Both list four reasons why ACTA is dangerous:

• Intermediate parties, the internet providers, will be made to enforce the agreement by filtering internet traffic relating to file-sharing;
• Disconnection from the internet in case of alleged infringement of copyright, you as an internet user can be disconnected by your ISP if there is an accusation of infringement, no trial, no judge, just gone from the net;
• Criminalization of non-commercial use, severe penalties for mere citizens such as you and I that up until now were reserved for criminals who are willfully and for profit mass-producing illegal copies of, for example, movie DVD’s;
• Seizing of computers and other equipment in the case of alleged copyright infringement, in other words: the police can come and take your computer (and destroy it) if you use file-sharing technology, irrespective of whether you are sharing copyrighted material or not.

Several organisations so far have jumped on the ‘Stop ACTA’ bandwagon, and a simple search on ’stop ACTA’ on a search engine of your choice will get you a whole lot of sites that are somehow trying to counter this agreement. You can sign several petitions, and you should. But in the end, a petition is just a single number, and does not impress the average member of the European parliament that much. What impresses them most: personal letters, emails or even phone calls, where citizens of their constitucy explain why they believe ACTA is not a Good Thing.

So I hereby call everyone to arms: write your members of parliament! Tell them, in your own words, why you think ACTA should not become law in Europe. The site of the European parliament can give you a list of the members that represent your country, and their contact details. Of course, you can write to all members of the EP. But, in general, members of the parliament represent the people from their own country and are therefore more likely to listen to input from their country. On the other hand, you do not have to restrict yourself to those members of parliament that are aligned with your own political preferences.

Try to make your letter personal! Don’t just copy and paste one of the many example texts that are all over the web. Rather, use them as inspiration. A thousand different emails make a bigger impression than ten-thousand copies of the same letter. You do not have to write high-quality prose ready for publiction in the papers, so even if you think yourself a bad writer I am sure you can come up with a sentence or two saying you do not want ACTA in your life.

Some members of parliament will respond to your letter, perhaps explaining why they think ACTA is a good thing, or why they agree with you that it is not. Some might not even reply, and yet in other cases you will hear from an assistant to the member of parliament. Don’t be discouraged by that. Voicing your opinion is important, and even if you do not get to speak to the member of parliament in person, your input will be passed on and considered when time comes to vote.

Act now! Stop ACTA! Write to your members of parliament!

Staring at the output of select histogram_bounds from pg_stats where tablename='im_page' and attname='network_id'; for a while made me wonder if this information could not be shown in a form more intuitively interpretable. So I came up with the very quick, dirty but useful php blurp below that visualises the information in the histogram bounds field. Wipe your ass with it, use it, snort about it, but don’t blame me if it explodes in your face!

Of course, you will need DejaVuSans.ttf somewhere php can find it. It only works for numeric attributes, and shows the distribution of values across the entire range in a pic like this:

<?php

$histo = array(3,1093532,2500008,3347370,3773220,4329046,4892919,5390692,5395070,5399958,5410010,6070732,6083634,6099913,6130248,6178513,6247523,6343449,6453638,6623753,6768751,7397769,8399216,9846065,10544718,11031060,11860674,12419158,13316261,13381469,13542198,13612939,13691688,14129002,14521475,15031702,15757599,16379081,16911263,17373535,17867201,18334590,19029738,19540986,20134883,20960943,21533740,22135095,22891305,23693757,24404628,24998347,25322610,25876449,26639871,27120442,27879107,28377881,28902544,29184971,29500076,29905742,30211641,30862716,31463170,32303386,32700442,33280207,34106019,34652112,35375896,36329008,36898304,37775921,38786805,39217310,39422963,39595039,39820321,39985192,40201842,40307867,40386696,40473160,40549746,40630896,40707828,40782292,41002531,41239758,41536689,41770244,41939655,42117194,42315945,42507594,42678925,42870015,43041425,43244698,43415095);

$min=$histo[0];
$max=$histo[count($histo)-1];

print "min $min, max $max\n";
print "number ".count($histo)."\n";

$im     = imagecreate(1044,200);

$black  = imagecolorallocate($im,0,0,0);
$white  = imagecolorallocate($im,255,255,255);

imagefill($im,0,0,$white);

imageline($im,10,49,1033,49,$black);

$step = ($max-$min)/1023;

$counter=0;

$lastx=-10000;

foreach($histo as $val) {
  $x=($val-$min)/$step;

 print "$x\n";
  imageline($im,$x+10,40,$x+10,58,$black);

  if($x+5>$lastx+10) {
    imagettftext($im,10,-90,$x+5,60,$black,"./DejaVuSans.ttf","$val");
    $lastx=$x+5;
  }
  $counter++;
}

imagepng($im,'line.png');

?>

On May 29th, 2010 the terabyte dinner device project invites interested parties to Revelation Space in The Hague, NL for a brainstorming and kick-off workshop to design the citizens answer to ACTA, internet monitoring, content filtering, net neutrality sabotage, criminalization of various behaviour and technology related to downloading and other dangers to the free exchange of content. We are taking the flow of information off-line again, out of reach of the content conglomerates. The return of the sneakernet, 2.0 stylee!

Invite some friends over for a nice meal, have them bring an external 1TB hard-drive each and hook them up to your Terabyte Dinner Device. Enjoy the food and the company, and when the evening ends each of you will have at least 750GB of new content, software or literature. All in crisp digital quality. And without leaving a trace that might implicate you for committing the horrendous crime of exchanging information.

At the eth0 summer event in August 2010 participants are invited to built their own TBDD, after which the first terabyte dinners may take place right there and then! Some of the more important design goals: easy to use (even your grandmother should be able to organise a terabyte dinner), using off-the-shelf components, easy to assemble, low energy consumption for terabyte picknicks in the park and a small form factor for maximum portability.

More information about the project, initiated by Revelation Space, the Hxx foundation and eth0, can be found on the revspace wiki.

If you are into embedded systems, electronics, product design, user interaction or just have a creative mind in general, please come over and join the revolution in content sharing!

When: May 29th, 2010, 14:00 hours.

Where: Revelation Space, The Hague, NL

Workshop page: TBDDWorkshop

With GUADEC 2010 getting on its way, it is about time for an update. The website is getting a new skin every day now, and the call for papers deadline is nearing. More on that below. We also expect to have registration open any day now. Visitors can choose between three levels of registration (EUR 0, EUR 100 or EUR 250), depending on their budget or expense accounts.

Schedule

The schedule outline for the conference has been drafted, and features a warm-up weekend and a number of parallel events that might interest the Gnome lover. Here it is:

sa 24 - training sessions
        GNU hackers meeting
        room for auxiliary meetings
su 25 - GNU hackers meeting
        room for auxiliary meetings
mo 26 - training sessions
        government sessions
        room for auxiliary meetings
tu 27 - GUADEC main conference program
we 28 - GUADEC main conference program
th 29 - GUADEC main conference program

More information about the GNU hackers meeting, training sessions and government sessions will be released soon.

If you are planning to get together with your team during or before GUADEC, please drop us a line (on the GUADEC mailing list) so we can accommodate your event in the room scheduling.

Call for papers deadline nearing

The deadline for the call for papers is nearing. You have until march 20th to submit a proposal for your presentation on the guadec website.

For a while i’ve been playing with microchip PIC chips. I have an olimex PIC-MCP-USB programmer which I use with picp under linux, and recently ran into some problems with 18F4550 chips. It would program just fine, but not erase the memory properly (took me a while to figure that out!). So I installed mplab on a windows machine, and sniffed the sequence of bytes going over the wire. Just for anyone who is fooling around with this as well, here is the proper picdevrc entry for the 18F4550:

[18F4550]       ; pic definition
        0       ; config word: code protect bit mask
        0       ; config word: watchdog bit mask
        4       ; Word alignment for writing to this device
        300000  ; Configuration memory start address
        200000 0        ; ID Locations addr and size
        f00000  ; Data eeprom address
        0       ; number of words in cfg bits with factory set bits
        0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ; fixed bits mask
        WARP OLIMEX     ; bit map of supporting programmers

[18F4550:def]
        40 00   ; size of program space
        ff ff   ; width of address word
        ff ff   ; width of data word
        0f 0f   ; width of ID
        0f 0f   ; ID mask
        cf 3f   ; width of configuration word
        cf 3f   ; configuration word mask
        00 ff   ; EEPROM data width
        00 ff   ; EEPROM data mask
        00 00   ; Calibration width
        00 00   ; Calibration mask
        00 00   ; ??
        40 00   ; ??
        00 00   ; address of ID locations
        04      ; size of ID locations
        00 00   ; address of configuration bits
        07      ; size of configuration register
        00 00   ; address of data space
        01 00   ; size of data space
        00 00   ; address of internal clock calibration value
        00 00   ; size of clock calibration space
        03      ; additional programming pulses for C devices
        13      ; main programming pulses for C devices
        1e 0f   ; ?? ZIF configuration ??

[18F4550:defx]
        05 00 1f 1f
        83 00 00 85
        c0 0f e0 0f
        40 0f 00 00
        cf 3f 1f 3f
        87 00 00 e5
        c0 0f e0 0f
        40 0f 00 00