It happened unconsciously somewhere in the recent past, but for a while now I have been ignoring traditional media. Ignoring is not the right word: it implies an active deed on my part, but it is nothing like that. Somehow, traditional media just lost me, or I lost traditional media. Newspapers, television broadcasts, they are just no part of my life anymore. Somehow, they have vanished. Gone over the horizon. And it has been an improvement, to say the least.

Sometimes, I hear people talking about ‘the news’. Stuff that happens miles and miles away. I remember the days I used to care about all the injustice in the world. The troubled days, I must add. It was such a burden. Today, I hear something about a revolution here, an oil-spill there, but it has no meaning anymore. I can let it pass without getting worked up over it. As long as there is no oil on my doorstep, how does it influence me?

Even though I live next door to the Dutch parliament, the political arena is reduced to a virtual reality. An amusement show that has no bearing on my self. No matter what they do, what they decide, I will always be me. Wilders, a demon to some, a saviour to others, is merely a clown on the stage of this comedy. He does not bother me. Is not real.

It may come across as a little ego-centric, to say the least. But stop and think, the reverse is actually true! Who am I to think that all those far-away injustices concern me. Who am I to think I have anything to do with it, that I somehow have a role in bringing about, changing or correcting those circumstances. How ego-centric is that??

The important news will come to me anyway, through the people I know. The real world that surrounds me. And then I will be able to act, to change reality. That which I cannot change is not a part of my reality. And that which I change, is my reality. Always and constantly.

I perceive, I act, I change.

I have no past, no future, just the here and now.

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');

?>

Ik kan slecht tegen homo-onvriendelijk gedrag, degenen die mij een beetje kennen zullen dat inmiddels wel weten. Helaas is het binnen een heleboel subculturen volledig normaal om woorden als ‘homo’ als scheldwoord te gebruiken. De piratenpartij, zo blijkt, heeft daar ook last van. En dat is jammer, want de idealen waar deze partij voor staan bevallen me wel. Zoveel, dat ik onlangs op het stadhuis van Den Haag een steunverklaring ondertekende en daarmee mede mogelijk maakte dat de piratenpartij in Nederland meedoet met de parlementaire verkiezingen. Ondanks waarschuwingen van mensen die ik vrij hoog acht, dat ze niet veel vertrouwen in de partij-organisatie hebben. Ik besef echter dat alle begin moeilijk is, en gaf ze het voordeel van de twijfel.

Maar helaas werd ik onaangenaam verrast: de lijsttrekker, Samir Allioui, bezigt vrolijk woorden als ‘Gore morralfaggots’ (1), en vindt dat nog eens de normaalste zaak van de wereld. Dat heeft niets met homo-onvriendelijkheid te maken, aldus de lijsttrekker van de partij. Om zijn uitspraak te duiden verwijst hij naar een obscure site, vooral in trek bij een kleine sub-cultuur van internet-geeks en nerds. De pagina die volgens hem uitlegt dat het niets met homofobisch gedrag te maken heeft staat echter bomvol homofoob materiaal. Van het niveau van pubers, die elkaar voor ‘homo’ uitschelden als ze iemand willen beledigen.

Waarom heb ik er eigenlijk zo’n probleem mee?? Schelden doet toch geen pijn?? Wie daar zo over denkt, beseft niet wat het is om erachter te komen dat je homo bent in een homo-intolerante maatschappij. Veel jongeren die homo zijn, durven er niet voor uit te komen. Want homo is toch een scheldwoord? Dit hakt er bij sommigen zo hard in, dat ze uiteindelijk maar zelfmoord plegen. Want ze deugen immers niet. Zijn ‘verkeerd’.

Roepen dat de opmerking uit context is gehaald, en verwijzen naar een obscure pagina, dat is volgens mij niet het juiste antwoord op de kritiek. Die site doet het misschien goed bij nerds (overigens ben ik zelf ook een behoorlijke nerd), maar voor ‘de buitenwacht’ versterkt deze uitleg alleen maar het beeld dat de lijsttrekker een homofoob is. Los van het feit of dat beeld nu klopt of niet. Dat Allioui dat niet in ziet is een veeg teken; is dit wel de juiste man om de piratenpartij naar een overwinning te leiden?

Ik vind de woorden van Allioui zeer kwalijk, en dat de lijsttrekker van de piratenpartij niet beseft dat zijn uitspraak simpelweg beledigend is en een homo-intolerant spraakgebruik in stand houdt, baart me zorgen. Ik moet er niet aan denken dat deze figuur daadwerkelijk in de tweede kamer komt om de idealen waar ik ook achter sta te op deze incompetente wijze te verdedigen! Mochten ze een zetel halen, dan komt hij er zeker niet meer mee weg om te jammeren ‘maar mijn uitspraak is uit de context gequote‘.

Ik hoop echt dat deze partij zijn zaakjes op orde krijgt, maar ik heb er een hard hoofd in. Ik zal hier niet ingaan op andere recente incidenten, laat ik volstaan met de constatering dat ik het vertrouwen in de Nederlandse afdeling van de piratenpartij kwijt ben. Mijn steunverklaring kan ik niet meer intrekken, maar verder zullen ze het zonder mij moeten doen. Maar ach, ik zal na bovenstaande tekst ook wel bestempeld worden als ‘morralfaggot’, dus echt wakker zullen ze er niet van liggen.

1) De link naar pastebin is slechts een maand geldig, voor het nageslacht hier een screenshot van de betreffende pagina. De ‘nickname’ coretx is een alias voor lijsttrekker Samir Allioui, een soort van psuedoniem waaronder hij op het internet bekend staat.

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