Technophile Monkey

This has nothing to do with Linux, but since this is my University of Liverpool category, I’m posting it here.

One of the lectures includes the sentence:

P2P (peer to peer) systems that enable web surfers to “pirate” music have been deemed illegal.

This sentence is wrong on three levels: First, “web surfers” aren’t doing P2P. P2P is done in a P2P client and has little to do with the web, the web isn’t necessary for P2P nets to work. Torrent tracker frontends etc. are just conveniences.

Secondly, and this is more important, the sentence is factually wrong. The Dutch Supreme Court, which is the jurisdiction of Laureate, the publisher of the lecture, has established that peer to peer networks and their operators are not liable for what they transmit. That decision was reached in 2003. The lecture is from 2007.

Thirdly, it’s not possible to prevent the abuse of a communications medium without also removing basic human rights of privacy. So the notion that there are P2P networks that do allow piracy and such that do not is not true.

So I’ve asked my instructor what jurisdiction that would be that “deems P2P networks illegal”. I have received no answer to that, the question was dodged twice. So I presented proof that the statement is false in both jurisdictions that concern UoL and Laureate, as well as in my own (Switzerland). When I mentioned that the university might be spreading non-factual information here, I was told that the statement does represent a fact. Then I was told to stop discussing the issue.

I think this is a very bad way to treat things. If students spot mistakes in lecture material, they should be heard and corrections should be made. Sticking your head in the sand and not even discussing the issue is very disrespectful and I think it’s totally against the spirit of science. We should be responsible and try to keep things factual, to make absolutely sure they are factual!

Who other than educational institutions can set things right in the minds of people? The way the lecture is written, it looks like UoL is part of a mad witch hunt against P2P technology. Just because something is abused doesn’t make it illegal, otherwise hammers, cars and water would all be illegal, each of them can kill people. I am severely disappointed with how UoL is treating this and will see if there are any legal means to correct the lecture. I’m quite sure a university should double-check its facts in their lectures or offer a way to correct them, I just wonder if they are legally bound to do so.

If you look on the right, you see how the titles of blog postings here are supposed to look. If you are using a braindead browser such as MSIE 6.0, 5.5 or earlier, you won’t see that yellow bar and the post metadata.

This is due to a bug in IE 6’s rendering of elements with negative margins. I’ve found a few workarounds for this, but I’m very reluctant to use them. I can finally empathize with all those web designers who have been complaining about IE for years. Trying to get something to look correct on a browser as broken as that must be a non-stop nightmare.

More standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Konqueror, Opera and IE 7 seem to display things correctly. It should look roughly like in the screenshot here.

Should we really still support a very old and broken piece of software? I think it’s time to stop. It still has a market share of over 20%. Let’s pray for MS to force an upgrade to 7.0 on each and every one of the machines still running it.

The chairman of the Norwegian standard body’s SC34 (K185) group has resigned after 13 years, in protest of the recent acceptance of MS-OOXML by Standard Norway. He now reveals details on the entire (farcical) voting process:

http://topicmaps.wordpress.com/2008/04/18/the-norway-vote-what-really-happened/

I have to go through the details of the BRM and the aftermath to see what parallels there are to the Swiss working group.

I was getting tired of my post text being so wide, so I tried to give the theme a look that’s a bit more sporty. I don’t want to limit the width of the post boxes themselves to a pixel size. That would be easy on the eyes for general reading, but I think it royally messes things up for people that have to use enlarged fonts. The way I’ve set it up now, things are still liquid enough so that you can view the site on anything from 640×480 to 1920×1080 and with any font size between 8pt and 72pt. I use em measures whenever it seems important, so your own browser settings can easily override my font sizes without various bits of text destroying each other.

Oh, and I’ve added widget support for the sidebar (finally). That’s why I’m calling this 2.0 and forking from the first version.

If you have the same broken taste as I or suffer from some sort of mental illness, you can grab the theme via Subversion from http://code.zhdk.ch/svn/schnipsel/themes/wordpress/techmonkey2

Back in March, I went to Megadeth’s concert in Zürich. Megadeth were my childhood heroes during their Rust in Peace era, and I still consider RIP one of thrash metal’s best albums.

It was a surprising gig for me. I’d never seen Megadeth live before, and the Megadeth at the (hopelessly overcrowded) Rohstofflager wasn’t the same as the band I used to know. None of the RIP-era members except Dave are still in the band, and Dave Mustaine is what keeps it all together. No offense neant, but the others just seem like remote-controlled robots.

They did play some of my favorites, like Tornado of Souls and Hangar 18, but the show was really hampered by the awful sound. I’ve heard people complain about the Rohstofflager’s horrible equipment before, but I hadn’t expected this. The guitars were muffled, the room was way too small for the drums and Dave’s vocals disappeared completely every few seconds. Not such a happy event.

Then there’s the fact of Megadave. His crazy red hair makes him look younger, but there’s still something eerie about seeing how old the people seem that in your mind are never older than 22. It’s not that he has no energy, but he’s just not the Dave that fits in a thrash metal band anymore, at least to me.

What a weird evening. I’d been offered 200 Francs for my ticket, twice, before even getting to the venue. I think I should’ve sold it.

There are some people that claim that goat’s milk is digested more easily than cow’s milk, and that it’s even digestable for people with lactose intolerance. Since I spotted goat’s milk at the store today, I thought to give this a try. I just had a chocolate milk that tasted like a bit like a farm smells, only with a hint of cocoa. I’ll update this posting with my results. I’m very, very, very lactose intolerant, 0.2g are easily enough to trigger several days of diarrhea, so we’ll see if the myth is true. I couldn’t find any scientific evidence for it so far, but I don’t have access to many medical journals, so I might have missed something.

Update 1: I just found this in a journal: “Despite anecdotal evidence and a small number of clinical cases showing that goats milk is a hypo-allergenic substitute for those allergic to cows milk, and tolerated by those with lactose intolerance, there are few data to support this. Indeed, there appears to be more evidence to refute the claim.” (Frances Robinson, ‘Goats milk – a suitable hypoallergenic alternative?’, British Food Journal, Vol. 103, Iss. 3, 2001)

So I might be in for a very fun Sunday on the toilet. Should’ve checked the journal before

Update 2: To finish this: The goat milk turned out to be surprisingly digestable. I did get feel very bloated for a few hours, but there were no other consequences. I think with the same amount of milk, I wouldn’t have left the bathroom for a bunch of days. So count me as another piece of anecdotal evidence, please.

While Switzerland’s people can see nothing wrong with the scandalous acceptance of MSOOXML as an ISO standard, Norway sees it differently. Perhaps that’s because Norway is more successful in the international software business (Opera, Funcom, Trolltech etc.) and therefore has something to lose, while Switzerland has a very passive and consumerist attitude.

But never mind the reasons, Norwegian people were smart enough to gather in front of the ISO SC34 meeting for a demonstration to kick OOXML out of ISO. One sign even asks Neelie Kroes to intervene. Seeing that the EC has started an investigation into the irregularities encountered during the OOXML voting process, it looks like she read the sign.

Yes, throw IS 29500 out. It’s a broken specification, and there is proof. If any other company had submitted this spec, they would have been sent back to the drawing board to fix all the defects. But Microsoft has the power and the money to manipulate and to bribe, so they can undermine ISO’s integrity and force steaming piles like this through an erstwhile respectable standardization process.

The general idea being tossed around by leaders of the Swiss standardization body is now “let’s all be happy and hug each other, and start to fix IS 29500 together”. Come again? Why should we waste our time and money to fix a broken product that we do not even control, because of the patents on it and because of the proprietary extensions that are at any point possible? Why shouldn’t we instead invest this time into making the existing ODF standard even more interoperable and accessible? It’s not impossible that IS 29500 at some point is mature enough, but the problem is that it should have been mature enough to begin with. Microsoft should not have submitted such a broken spec and come through with it. That they have shows that the standardization process has failed.

Link via noooxml.org.

The whole voting process for fast tracking DIS 29500 (i.e. MS-OOXML, Microsoft Corp’s broken new format for office documents) was full of irregularities. Votes that were not counted or counted wrongly, Microsoft Gold partners that were bribed into joining national standards bodies to swing their opinion around in the last minute, meeting rooms for discussing these issues that were deliberately too small for people who could point out the flaws in the formats, but not too small for its supporters.

I read the news reports as all of this was happening and couldn’t help but be reminded of fake elections in a corrupt country. I also had to laugh. I believed that ISO was on top of all this, would not stand for such corruption and would use their own processes to find the people responsible, punish them appropriately and bring the voting process back to a reasonably democratic shape. I was so naive. ISO has failed. Failed in their mission to jointly introduce new standards for and with its members, failed at assessing a technical standard objectively, failed at taking the voices and concerns of their members seriously, failed at being a neutral body without bias.

There are ways within ISO to disapprove a standard, but if they are governed by the same people, I see no hope of getting this severely broken standard to a place where it belongs.

Today is a black day for freedom. And if you like democratic process, it’s a black day for that too.

Update: Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Canonical, maker of Ubuntu) is sad too: “It’s sad that the ISO was not willing to admit that its process was failing horribly.” He offers a few more details. I’m not willing to risk talking about things I am not allowed to talk about, so I’ll leave uncovering the internal failings to the real news sources for now. Shuttleworth provides a good summary.

Update 2: The European Commission is investigating the irregularities encountered during the standards approval process. Maybe there is still hope to get rid of some of the corruption and hopefully get the standard revoked, so that its vendor can apply for standardization again and do it properly this time.