Sorry to criticise people who are clearly on our side. The Wikileaks folk are great, and the job they were doing was great, and it will be great again when they start back up...

...but it was not a good idea for them to take all the leaked documents offline without notice in order to show their value so that people will donate. It was last year, probably December, and everything's still offline :-(

For one example, they published the only (at the time) big ACTA leak. (There's since been a bigger one, hosted elsewhere) Everyone was pointing to them, and they took their copy offline. To my amazement, no one had a back up, so us anti-ACTA campaigners simply lost the only leaked draft.

At the implementation level, it was a bad idea to simply cause all pages to give error 404. A page of "We need donations, we'll be back up when we get them" would have been better.

Lesson: take backups of important docs, even ones published by groups of good people.

> To say the ruling class owns the politicians is a circular statement.

You're assuming the politicians aren't puppets.

Look at ACTA. There's nothing in there for the citizenry.

And what do our representatives think is worth debatin? A: Whether instruments of infringement should be destroyed "promptly" (US/EU/Mex), or "without delay" (Canada), or whether a time shouldn't be specified (Aus). Wow, thanks guys.

This sort of thing will not be considered in Europe or North America, and us residents of those places will pat ourselves on the back for our love of liberty...

The difference between Venezuela and our countries is that in our countries, the ruling class own both the media and politicians. In Venezuela, they just own the media.

Chavez has some bad policies, and we're right to criticise those policies, but the context is important for forming an accurate opinion rather than a knee-jerk chauvinist one.

If they do that, then any student can disable it, and every student can then use that one student's non-spying version.

The perfect solution would be to have no spying in the first place, but since you haven't offered any way to do this, having software freedom is indeed the next best solution.

There's no proposal that can solve everything. Of the proposals that exist today, free software is just far and away the best situation life's offering.

It's not about *you* being free to read and change the source or distribute modified versions, it's about *all users* being able to do this. "freedom 3" makes this clear:

"The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this."

It's about allowing people to help each other, building an empowered community. If the situation is serious enough, anyone can take a look, or find/pay someone else to take a look. And even if the situation doesn't seem serious, there's still the possibility that someone will be taking a look at the code anyway. And once one person does this, then all users can benefit from that person's exercise of their freedoms.

The possibility of these things happening is usually enough to dissuade software publishers from putting nastyware into free software in the first place.

So, you're theory just predicts a problem that's possible but which is non-existant or practically non-existant in reality.

Hopefully this situation will be a stepping stone to help the public understand the role that computers play in our personal lives.

I switched to GNU/Linux in 1998 because lights on my external modem flickered each time I used RealPlayer to play files that were on my own computer.

> it's not a practical concern.

According to the references linked from that en.swpat.org page, it seems the developers of the free software Mesa project think it's indeed a practical concern.

Any chance the patent problems of OpenGL 3 have been fixed?

In the Bilski case, IEEE filed a brief pushing *for* software patents. Maybe specific groups in IEEE, like the 802 group, should push for a change in this position. Having the whole wifi industry paying a tax to CSIRO for a wifi patent must make this group a little more clued in about the harm caused.

Read draft leaked on March 1st to know why.

Glad to hear that he sees this as the major post-leaving issue to raise. I think that's pretty significant in itself.

Hopefully this brief blog entry is just a teaser. It really is hard to draw a clear line between trolls, inter-company attacks, tax seekers.

This is terrible news.

His swan song even talks about the "great satisfaction" of working with "Inventive people who write more software patents per capita than anywhere else".

HTML5 already has big problems with software patents forcing it to exclude all video format recommendations. What influence will this guy have in W3C?

> see if it's on download.com...this can only prove that it isn't malware

Proof? Dude, what do you think the download.com guys do?

They get given a binary, they run some black box testing on the output of it, then shrug their shoulders and say "looks okay".

The closest you can get to "proof" is if the source code is online as free software, there are developers that don't work for the same company, and there are plenty of users. In those situations, malware tends to be found and removed.

Failing that, the simplest criteria is just that it be free software. That doesn't guarantee anything, but there are almost no cases of free software containing malware. ...or maybe you meant that being on download.com is just a proof that the software isn't *too* bad.

Calling for publication of the text is good.

The other provisions of this demand are pretty weak. Some example points:

#2 - no basis? Here's the basis: 2008-04-14: EU: negotiating guidelines for ACTA formally adopted by the Council

#10 - "subsidiarity" etc. - no problem, that's why the EU keeps pushing the words "Those measures, procedures and remedies shall also be effective, proportionate and deterrent" into the ACTA text (see March 1st leaked draft)

And the criminal sanctions are EU okay because the treaty will be handed to the member states for implementation.

Still a great move. Just don't starting thinking we win with it.

In the two coutries that I've lived in in Europe, the minimum number of days leave of your choosing is 23. I've usually had more. I'm not sure if that minimum is in the law or in the workers collective contracts (things negociated by the unions and which apply to everyone even if no one in your company is part of the union - unless your company exlicitly opts-out).

In addition, there are usually 11 public holidays.