How to make a million dollars in pay-what-you-want — thoughts on the Humble Indie Bundle

Some thoughts¹ on how the humble Indie Bundle managed to get more than 1.25 Million Dollars² in one and a half weeks — more than one quarter of that from GNU/Linux users.

Let me repeat that: One quarter of the money came from GNU/Linux users. And the average GNU/Linux user paid almost twice as much for the game as the average Windows user.

How they did it? If I could give you a simple recipe which is certain to work for everyone, I might just hire up at Blizzard.

But I think a big part is that (from my view — and obviously from the view of others, too) they did everything right. And I mean everything:

• The games are great.

• The message the name “humble indie bundle” conveys is great.

• You could pay whatever you want. From 1 cent to a million. The highest single contribution was 3,333.33$, with an average contribution of $9.17 over all platforms and $14.52 from the average GNU/Linux user³.

• You could directly see how much money they made on the front page, along with an info about the average contribution, split by platform.

• Normally each game would have cost 20$, so the average payment for all games also was a significant price drop.

• They donated about one third to charitable organizations. The buyers could decide how much should go to whom.

• Payment was easy via Paypal and others.

• All games work on GNU/Linux, MacOSX and Windows out of the box.

• Each game already had a community. The bundle bundled their impact so it went viral on Twitter, identi.ca, facebook, etc.

• They have clear and simple download links. Should I ever lose the games locally, I can just redownload them. If need be with wget.

• They use no DRM [3] or similar, so I can show the games to friends and won’t be troubled by use restrictions.

• And on the last day they announced that for 4 of the 6 games the code would become free software [4] if they would crack the 1 million dollar boundary. It took just over 16 more hours to raise additional 200,000$. And they followed up on their pledge with 2 games already freed and 2 more to follow as soon as the code is cleaned up.

To wrap it up: They did everything right, so almost everybody who saw it was delighted and there was nothing to break the viral network effects.

And I think that getting any one of these points wrong would have killed a major part of the network effect, because the naysayers are far stronger in the networking game than the fans.

Any foul trick would have cost them many fans, because someone would have been bound to find out and go viral with it.

Motivation and Reward

Debunking the myth that you can increase the performance of creative workers with carrot and stick.

Executive Summary

For creative tasks, the quality of performance strongly correllates with intrinsic motivation: Being interested in the task itself.

This article will only talk about that.

The main factors which are commonly associated with intrinsic motivation are:

• Positive verbal feedback which increases intrinsic motivation.
• Payment independent of performance which actually has no effect.
• Payment dependent on performance which reduces the motivation on the long term.
• Negative verbal feedback which directly reduces intrinsic motivation.
• Threatening someone with punishment which strongly reduces intrinsic motivation.

To make it short: Anything which diverts the focus from the task at hand towards some external matter (either positive or negative) reduces the intrinsic motivation and that in turn reduces work performance.

If you want to help people perform well, make sure that they don’t have to worry about other stuff besides their work and give them positive verbal feedback about the work they do.

Background

Since this claim goes pretty much against the standard ideology of market-trusting economists, I want to back it with solid scientific background.

The easiest way to do that is going to google scholar [7] and searching for research on motivation and rewards. It gives a meta-analysis of experiments on the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation:

A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation.
— E.L. Deci, R Koestner, R.M. Ryan - Psychological bulletin, 1999 - psycnet.apa.org [8]

This paper is cited by 2324 other papers Google knows about, which is an indicator of being accepted by the psychological community (except if it should have 2324 rebuttals) - an indicator which even those can understand who are not really versed in that community (for example me).

I dug into the paper to find solid scientific research on the effects of payment on motivation. And that led me to this older paper from Edward L. Deci:

The Effects of Contingent and Noncontingent Rewards and Controls on Intrinsic Motivation
— Edward L. Deci, University of Rochester, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1972 [9]

Their research question was trying to find out if money paid unconditionally weakens intrinsic motivation like money paid for good performance:

» Two recent papers (Deci, 1971, 1972) have presented evidence that when money was paid to subjects for performing intrinsically motivated activities, and when that money was made contingent on their performance, they were less intrinsically motivated after the experience with money than were subjects who performed the same activity for no pay.«

This is about intrinsic motivation: The kind of motivation which fuels artists and other creative people and allows them to do great deeds.

It’s the kind of motivation, a company should try to inspire in every employee who does anything remotely creative or complex.

What reduces intrinsic motivation

There was previous research which showed a reduction of intrinsic motivation due to payment. To make their research solid, the first thing E.L. Deci and his group did was a replication to ensure that the basic theory is correct.

In another experiment using the one-session paradigm, Deci and Cascio (1972) showed that negative feedback resulting from bad performance on an intrinsically motivated activity caused a decrease in intrinsic motivation.

In my words: Tell people that they do bad work and you reduce their motivation - not surprisingly.

“Your performance sucks” → intrinsic motivation decreases.

Further, Deci and Caseio (1972) reported that when subjects were threatened with punishment for poor performance, their intrinsic motivation also decreased.

Threaten people, and their motivation gets reduced, too.

“If you fail, you’re fired” → intrinsic motivation decreases.

[…]Deci (1972) replicated the finding that subjects who were paid one dollar per puzzle solved showed a decrease in intrinsic motivation.

Pay people for good performance and you reduce their motivation.

“For each housing loan you sell, you get 20€” → intrinsic motivation decreases.

This is the result which actually marks all the performance-based payment schemes which are so popular with the administration folks as utter nonsense - at least for creative and complex jobs.

For those jobs your employees enjoy doing, bonusses actually decrease performance on the long run. These are the kinds of jobs in which people can work overnight and concentrated for hours and lose track of time while they work on systems which are too complex for most people to even pretend to understand. The kind of jobs where some people get into the flow and do more work in an hour than other people do in a week. Jobs in science, in programming and actually in any other topic in which you do not just follow prescribed rules but actually solve problems.

The kind of jobs which is more and more common, because jobs with prescribed rules can just as well be done by machines.

And social jobs, the other kind of jobs for which you need people, because people doing social jobs work with people and anything involving people is a complex problem by definition. At least if you want really good results.

Or, seen from a different perspective: If two companies compete in a segment of the market and one has motivated people and the other doesn’t - and other factors are mostly equal - then the company with motivated people wins.

So you want motivated people. And in creative, complex or social jobs, you want them intrinsically motivated. You want them to do a good job for the sake of doing a good job.

Which means, you want to avoid

• giving them negative feedback,
• threatening them and
• paying them based on their performance.

With that in mind, let us go on: How can we actually motivate people?

What enhances motivation

To answer that, let’s listen to research again:

On the other hand, Deei (1971, 1972) has reported that verbal reinforcements do not decrease intrinsic motivation; in fact, they appear to enhance it.

So, to increase motivation, tell people that they do good work.

„I like that plan! Go for it!“ → intrinsic motivation increases.

That’s all you can do. Tell them that they do good work. Encourage them.

But isn’t there a paradox? How can we actually employ people, if paying them money for good work decreases their motivation?

How to pay motivated people?

That’s the real question, the paper from Edward L. Deci tackled:

While extrinsic rewards such as money can certainly motivate behavior, they appear to be doing so at the expense of intrinsic motivation. […but…] when payments were not contingent upon performance, intrinsic motivation did not decrease.

So the answer is pretty simple: Just pay them money independent of how well they do.

„You get 3000€ a month. Flat. That’s enough to lead a good life.“¹ → intrinsic motivation stays stable.

The real trick is to just give them money, independent of how well they do. If motivated people work for you, ensure that they do not have to worry about money. Do all you can to take money concerns off their mind.

And tell them what they do well.

At least that’s what you should do if you want to base your actions on research instead of on the broken intuition of people who get paid for their performance in convincing you of their ideology (and consequently often do so in blatant, uncreative ways).

If you do that already: That’s great! Likely it’s really cool to work with you.

Illustration

A very illustrative experiment on losing intrinsic interest due to external reward was done by Lepper, Mark R.; Greene, David; Nisbett, Richard E..²

They observed three groups of pre-school children. The first group was told that they would get a “certificate with a gold seal and ribbon” if they would draw something. The second group wasn’t told that they would get a reward, but got it after drawing, too. The third group did not get any reward and did not expect any.

Before the start of the experiment, their intrinsic interest in drawing was measured by observing how much time they spent drawing when they had the chance.

One to two weeks after the experiment, the intrinsic interest of the children was measured again by observing them through a one-way mirror.

In that subsequent measurement, the children who had been told that they would get the reward for drawing (and had gotten the reward) used half as much time for drawing as those who had not gotten any reward or those who had gotten an unexpected reward.

And even when the pictures which they had drawn during the initial test were compared, the pictures from the group who expected a reward were of significantly lower quality than the pictures from the two other groups. the difference between expected extrinsic reward and no reward was 2.18 vs. 2.69 on an independently judged quality scale between 1 (very poor) and 5 (very good).

So offering children a reward for drawing not only reduces their intrinsic interest in drawing, but also reduces the quality of the pictures they draw.

And this is perfectly in line with the results from the paper from Edward L. Deci on intrinsic motivation of adults.

Summary

To increase the motivation of people, DO

• Pay them a good monthly income, so they don’t have to worry about money, and
• Give them positive verbal feedback on the things they do well.

Update: Good fixed income and long term contracts are a tool to allow people to work full-time without reducing their motivation. They avoid the harmful effect performance-based payment can have on performance while enabling people to work full-time on a project. An empirical study found [10], that the source and intensity of motivation of free software developers does not differ significantly between people who work for hire and people who work without payment, so many companies employing free software developers seem to do it right (or only the companies who do it right can keep their free software programmers).³

And should you happen to be interested in helping a free software project with money, just employ some of the people hacking on the project - and give them a good, longterm contract with enough freedom of choice, so they don’t have to worry about money or what they are allowed to do, but can instead focus on working to make the project succeed - like they did before you employed them, but now with more time at their disposal. And, as with anything else, give them positive feedback on the things they do well.

In the paper »Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects [11]« from 2005, Karim R. Lakhani and Robert G Wolf showed empirically that the payment people get to work in free software projects has no detrimental effect on their intrinsic motivation. In their sample 40% of the developers were paid for their work on free software projects and their intrinsic motivation was as high as the motivation of unpaid developers.

Key Takeaway:

If you want to help people perform well, make sure that they don’t have to worry about other stuff besides their work and give them positive verbal feedback about the work they do.

3 steps to destroy Bitcoin for anonymous usage

Bitcoin is often treated as a haven for black market buyers and people who want to avoid illegitimate laws. However 3 simple steps would suffice to mostly obliterate Bitcoin for black market usage of ordinary users.

Breaking Bitcoin

Three steps to break Bitcoin for small scale anonymous usage:

1. infrastructure: Make it possible for users to register their Bitcoin wallets with their real identity.
2. law or terms of service: Make it illegal to accept money from unregistered users.
3. program: create a script to check transactions whether the transferred bitcoins were tainted by being in wallets of unregistered users. Tainted bitcoins lose value, because non-anonymous services won’t be able to accept tainted Bitcoins anymore, so anonymous services become more expensive. Allow people to avoid being tainted by anonymous transactions by sending back the same value minus mining fees within a week.

That’s it. It will not deanonymize all of Bitcoin, but it will deanonymize most users, and making any kind of sustainable profit from Bitcoin will require identity fraud - which carries so harsh penalties that most small scale black market sellers will not dare going that far.

And enacting this does not even need a state. It can be be pulled off by any large entity which accepts Bitcoin as payment, like Paypal [15] or Microsoft [16].

It gets worse

And it gets worse: large scale Bitcoin owners and black market sellers will have an incentive to pressure their buyers into registration after their sale, because that will increase the effective value of their Bitcoins. Implement the method I outlined, and greed will drive the users themselves to make Bitcoin a hostile place for anonymous users.

People might run shemes to sell at high price to anonymous users and then pressure them into registering, so the bitcoins will become more valuable. Or to sell them registration with false identities. Which they could even report later, after they transferred their bitcoins at high value to someone else to disrupt a competitors business.

Happy Ending

Voilà, for ordinary Bitcoin becomes a viable, happy do-good, decentralized currency with full public accountability which can reduce the trust requirement in the banking system and simplify tax enforcement, while people who can launder money today can still use that power in Bitcoin and even get a few new tools in their toolbox to increase their power relative to ordinary and/or law-abiding users.

The prince marries the princess, the king exercises his right of the first night and all live happily ever after.

Epilogue

I hope I could show that Bitcoin isn’t the haven for freedom and state-free happiness it is often touted to be. It can reduce the power of banks due to the required trust in their actions - and I think that it will be used by banks themselves as a very efficient backend for reliable transactions - but the total accountability inherent in Bitcoin is hostile to any kind of free expression and independent life, because it allows others to judge you by your actions years later and as such creates pressure to self-censor how you use Bitcoin. In this it is inferior to cash.

And as I showed here, on the longterm only large criminal organizations will be able to retain anonymous usage of Bitcoin, while all others will either be driven into buying the services of these organizations to stay anonymous (which makes them susceptible to blackmail: their Bitcoins could lose most of their value at any point) or into registering their Bitcoin identity and giving up on anonymous usage of Bitcoin.

7,26€ through Flattr last month

Last month I earned 7,26€ through my Flattr account [17] (Flattr is a voluntary payment service where people can make micropayments if they like something - after enjoying it). The flattrs came in through just 4 items:

• The incremental Mercurial [18] guide, “Learning Mercurial in Workflows” [19].
• The Freenet [20] promotion “I hope French Filesharers turn to Freenet” [21] (written in reply to news about millions of hadopi letters).
• The Esperanto [22] version of my free one page pen-and-paper roleplaying game: The “Slipoj-Rolludo” [23].
• And my free software song “Infinite Hands” [24].

Thank you very much for your flattrs, dear supporters¹! Thanks to you I could pay most of my server cost this month via the money from flattr - and that’s great!²

A simple solution to the dining philosophers problem

The problem

5 Philosophers do nothing but eat and think.

They have a table with 5 chairs, 5 plates and 5 forks.

Each of them eats with two forks.

Ensure that none of them starves.

The solution

First I teach them to always take the left fork first.

Then I smash one of their chairs.

Explanation

Since they can't repair the chair (they think, but they don't build), there are only 4 places left, and so they have one leftover fork which gets passed on, once one finished eating.

Inspired by Willim Stallings' Operating systems: "Use a servant who lets only 4 dine at the same time"

Naturally now they have to either change places or move chairs, so they might still need a servant :)

Bitte stimmen Sie für Anpassungen der EU-Urheberrechtsrichtlinie

Ein offener Brief an die EU-Abgeordneten zur Abstimmung über die EU-Urheberrechtsrichtlinie [27].

Sehr geehrte Abgeordnete des Europäischen Parlaments,

Am 12. September haben Sie die Möglichkeit, darüber abzustimmen, ob das Internet weiter kleinen Firmen und Kreativen offensteht, was die Urheberrechtsrichtlinie in der Fassung von 2016 bewirkt hätte, oder ob es zu einer monopolistischen Zensurmaschine wird, wie es die Fassung vom Mai 2018 bewirken würde.

Ich schreibe Ihnen als Programmierer, weil die Auswirkungen dieser Richtline rein rechtlich nicht zu überblicken sind; das gilt vor allem für Artikel 13. So wenig wie ein Gesetz die Flut stoppen kann, kann es einen Algorithmus schaffen, der alle Urheberrechtsverletzungen schon beim Upload stoppt, aber alle legalen Inhalte erlaubt. Wenn wirklich alle Urheberrechtsverletzungen gestoppt werden müssen, dann müssen gleichzeitig viele legale Äußerungen verhindert werden, und zwar laut der Richtlinie in jeglicher öffentlicher Kommunikation. Das ist allerdings, was die Richtlinie fordert, da sie die Beweislast umkehrt, indem sie von Anbieter von Kommunikationsplattformen verlangt, den Rechteinhabern nachzuweisen, dass sie genug tun (und damit grundlegende rechtsstaatliche Prinzipien verletzt, nach denen im Zweifel die Unschuldsvermutung gilt). Plattformen — große wie kleine — müssen daher erstmal alles stoppen. Da auch keine Strafen für fälschliche Block-Forderungen vorgesehen sind, wird es sehr einfach, unerwünschte Aussagen zu verhindern, und sei es nur zeitweise.

Ein Youtube-Nachrichten-Autor (LeFloid) hat dazu letztens in einem Interview mit dem NDR berichtet,[1] dass bereits die existierenden Filter in youtube immer wieder Videos von ihm für ein paar Tage blockieren, was bedeutet, dass das Video weniger als ein Zehntel der Zuschauer bekommt, die es sonst haben würde, weil das Thema schon vorbei ist. Er geht so damit um, dass er seine Videos auch auf anderen Plattformen anbietet. Doch mit der Formulierung von Artikel 13 in der Fassung von Mai 2018 müssten alle Plattformen Uploads filtern, und aus Haftbarkeitsgründen müssten sie die Filter großer Anbieter nutzen, die es sich leisten können, zig Millionen in die Entwicklung von Filtertechnik zu investieren (und wie die Erfahrung von LeFloid zeigt trotzdem in vielen Fällen erlaubte Inhalte blocken). Damit könnte er diese Videos nirgendwo mehr zeitnah anbieten.

Ähnlich problematisch sind Artikel 12, Artikel 11 und Artikel 3, doch ich kann Ihnen dazu keine Beispiele schreiben, weil ich morgen um 5:00 aufstehen und zur Arbeit muss.

Daher möchte ich Sie stattdessen bitten, sich die Vorschläge von Greens/EFA und EFDD unvoreingenommen durchzulesen und ihrem Gewissen zu folgen, mit dem Wissen, dass das die Vorschläge sind, die von Leuten mit Fachkenntnis in Programmierung unterstützt werden.

Mit freundliche Grüßen,

Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE5AZDBygNQ

Censorship in the Streets — it’s idiocy everywhere

A man in the streets faces a knife.
Two policemen are there it once. They raise a sign:

“Illegal Scene! Noone may watch this!”

The man gets robbed and stabbed and bleeds to death.
The police had to hold the sign.

…

Welcome to Europe, citizen. Censorship is beautiful.

→ Courtesy to Censilia [28], who wants censorship in the EU after it failed in Germany. You might also be interested in 11 more reasons [29] why censorship is useless and harmful.

PS: This poem is free and permissively licensed: Please feel free to use it anyway you like, as long as you provide a backlink [30].

Copyright directive modal window for your website

The European Copyright directive [31] threatens online communication in Europe. On September 12th the European parliament takes the crucial vote which can still fix it [27]. But the parliamentarians (MEPs) need to hear our voices.

If you care about the future of the Internet in the EU, please Call your MEPs [32]!

And if you have a website and want to inform your visitors about this vote, copy the following and add it to your site:

    <!-- begin fsf-dbd-elem campaign element -->
    <!-- this campaign element was repurposed for the fight to fix the European Copyright directive, using freedom 1 of the four freedoms granted by the GPLv3 -->
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                                <h2>Sep. 12th decides the fate of the internet in the EU!</h2>
                            </div>
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                                <div id="fsf-dbd-elem-text">

<p>The <a
href="https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/">European Copyright directive</a> threatens online communication in Europe.<ul><li>Article 13 would require every site where you can share to <a href="https://twitter.com/ArneBab/status/1034823956107325440">build or buy massive censorship infrastructure</a>.</li><li>Article 12 would <a href="https://juliareda.eu/2018/09/copyright-sports-fans/">make it illegal to share a photo from a football game</a>.</li><li>Article 11 would require <a href="https://juliareda.eu/2018/09/copyright-showdown/">license fees for links</a>.</li><li>Article 3 would forbid working with information you find online.</ul></p>

<p>But thanks to <a href="https://juliareda.eu/2018/08/saveyourinternet-action-day/">massive shared action earlier this year</a>, the European parliament <a href="https://juliareda.eu/2018/09/copyright-showdown/">can still prevent the problems</a>. For each of the articles there are proposals which fix them. The parliamentarians (MEPs) just have to vote for them. And since they are under massive pressure from large media companies, that went as far as defaming those who took action as <em>fake people</em>, the MEPs <strong>need to hear your voice</strong> to know that your are real.</p>

<p>If you care about the future of the Internet in the EU, please <a href="https://saveyourinternet.eu/">Call your MEPs</a>.</p>

                                </div>
                            </div>
                            <div id="fsf-dbd-elem-right-column">
                                <div id="fsf-dbd-elem-buttons" style="border-radius: 20px;">
                                    <div id="button_0" style="background-color: rgb(230, 76, 34); border-radius: 20px; a {color: rgb(188, 27, 27) !important}; box-shadow: 0px 0px 5px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5); margin-bottom: 26.667px;">
                                      <a href="https://saveyourinternet.eu/"><i class="fa fa-check-circle"> </i>Call MEPs</a>
                                    </div>

                                    <div id="button_1" style="background-color: rgb(254, 203, 0); border-radius: 20px; box-shadow: 0px 0px 5px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);">
                                      <a class="long-button-text" href="https://juliareda.eu/2018/09/copyright-showdown/"><i class="fa fa-globe"></i> Learn More</a>
                                    </div>
                                </div>
                            </div>
                        </div>
                    </div>
                </div>
                <script type="text/javascript">
// @license magnet:?xt=urn:btih:1f739d935676111cfff4b4693e3816e664797050&dn=gpl-3.0.txt GPL-v3-or-Later

var startTime, endTime, fsfDBDElemMaybeShow, daysInFuture, fsfDBDElemHide, fsfDBDElemDontShowForDays;

startTime = new Date('2018-08-28T00:00:00Z');
switchTextTime = new Date('2018-09-11T00:00:00Z');
endTime = new Date('2018-09-13T00:00:00Z');

// possibly switch the text that is displayed in the modal window, depending
// upon the current date.
function fsfDBDElemMaybeSwitchText () {

    var now;

    now = new Date();
    if (now.getTime() < switchTextTime.getTime()) {
        return; // don't switch the dbd text
    }

    // switch dbd text
    document.getElementById("fsf-dbd-elem-text").innerHTML =' \
                                    <p> \
\
Tomorrow the European parliament decides the fate of the Internet in the EU! \
\
                                    <\/p>\
                                    <p> \
\
<a href="https://saveyourinternet.eu/">Call your MEPs today</a>! \
\
                                    <\/p>';

    // remove button_0
    button_0 = document.getElementById("button_0");
    button_0.parentNode.removeChild(button_0);

    // change href in button_1
    document.getElementById("button_1").children[0].href = "https://juliareda.eu/2018/09/copyright-showdown/"
}

// show fsf-dbd-elem if it hasn't been previously closed by
// the user, nor recently hit "maybe later",
// and the campaign is still happening
function fsfDBDElemMaybeShow () {

    var pattern, noShowDBD2018IDADElementP, now;

    now = new Date();
    if (now.getTime() < startTime.getTime() || now.getTime() > endTime.getTime()) {
        return; // don't show the fsf-dbd-elem
    }

    // see if cookie says not to show element
    pattern = /showDBD2018IDADElementP\s*=\s*false/;
    noShowDBD2018IDADElementP = pattern.test(document.cookie);

    if (!noShowDBD2018IDADElementP) {
        setTimeout(function () {
            // display the element
            document.getElementById("fsf-dbd-elem-container").style.display="block";
        }, 0);
    }
}

// call this first to set the proper text
fsfDBDElemMaybeSwitchText();
// call this right away to avoid flicker
fsfDBDElemMaybeShow();


// get the time `plusDays` in the future.
// can be a fraction.
function daysInFuture (plusDays) {
    var now, future;

    now = new Date();
    future = new Date(now.getTime() + Math.floor(1000 * 60 * 60 * 24 * plusDays));
    return future.toGMTString();
}

// hide the fsf-dbd-elem
function fsfDBDElemHide () {
    document.getElementById("fsf-dbd-elem-container").style.display="none";
}
// optionally hide elem and set a cookie to keep the fsf-dbd-elem hidden for the next `forDays`.
function fsfDBDElemDontShowForDays (forDays, hideNow) {
    if (hideNow === true) {
        fsfDBDElemHide();
    }
    //document.cookie = "showDBD2018IDADElementP=false; path=/; domain=.fsf.org; expires=" + daysInFuture(forDays);
    document.cookie = "showDBD2018IDADElementP=false; path=/; expires=" + daysInFuture(forDays);
}

// hide the element from now to past the date of the campaign
function fsfDBDElemDontShowAgain () {
    fsfDBDElemDontShowForDays(120, true);
}
// don't show the element for a while
function fsfDBDElemMaybeLater () {
    fsfDBDElemDontShowForDays(1, true);
}
// keep the element visible for now, but don't show it on future page loads
function fsfDBDElemFollowedLink () {
    fsfDBDElemDontShowForDays(120, false);
}

// close popup if user clicks trasparent part
document.getElementById("fsf-dbd-elem-container").addEventListener("click", function(event){
    fsfDBDElemDontShowAgain();
});
// don't close popup if clicking non-trasparent part (with the text and buttons)
document.getElementById("fsf-dbd-elem").addEventListener("click", function(event){
    event.stopPropagation();
});

// @license-end
                </script>
            </div>
            <!-- end fsf-dbd-elem campaign element -->

[33]

(this code is based on the day against DRM modal window [34] by the FSF, licensed under GPLv3+)

Equality and Prosperity go hand in hand

A reply to the common argument for inequality:

Much better to focus on growing the economy than on increasing equality.

This is the old trickle down theory. Homeless people in the US could tell you that growing the economy without increasing equality does not help the poor. The reality is:

Increasing equality increases longterm growth of the economy.

The trickle-down theory goes against research results. Even the IMF has accepted that equality and prosperity aren’t opposites but rather go hand in hand: The higher the equality, the more sustained growth a country experiences [35] (PDF [36]).

"Against this background, the question is whether a systematic look at the data supports the notion that societies with more equal income distributions have more durable growth."

"a 10 percentile decrease in inequality (represented by a change in the Gini coefficient from 40 to 37) increases the expected length of a growth spell by 50 percent."

They show that the income distribution is the largest single governing factor for the length of a growth period.

Also the Soviet Union had a higher Gini coefficient than the US.

The Gini coefficient measures inequality: The higher it is, the higher the inequality. So the Soviet Union had higher inequality than the US at the time.

That’s a nice way to counter the cry of the ghost of evil communists which is brought up most times someone talks about increasing equality. The Soviet Union had less equality than the US at that time; consequently its growth was weaker.

We do not threaten our prosperity with higher equality. The opposite is true. And we also don’t follow the path of the Soviet Union. The opposite is true.

If all else is equal, higher equality and higher prosperity go hand in hand. Higher equality helped the west to win the economic competition against the Soviet Union.

Therefore the reality is:

To focus on growing the economy we must increase equality.

How to make companies act ethically

→ comment on Slashdot concerning Unexpected methods to promote freedom? [37]

Was it really Apple who ended DRM? Would they have done so without the protests and evangelizing against DRM? Without protesters in front of Apple Stores? And without the many people telling their friends to just not accept DRM?

That “preaching” created a situation where Apple could reap monetary gain from doing the right thing. You see how they act when the stakes are different.

What you can do to make companies act ethically is to create a situation where they can make more money by working ethically than by ripping you off. The ways to do that are

1. (1) Laws (breaking them costs money when you get caught),
2. (2) Taxes on doing the wrong thing (i.e. pollution),
3. (3) Offering your work in ways, which make it easier for people to make money ethically than unethically (that’s what copyleft licensing does),
4. (4) Trying to convince people to do 3,
5. (5) Trying to convince people to shun products which are created unethically (that’s what you call preaching),
6. (6) Only paying for products which were produced ethically.

RMS does 3,4, 5 and 6, so he’s pretty much into gaming the market - and “preaching” is only one of the tools in his box. Though what he does is more convincing than preaching: He gives us reasons why unfree software is bad - and the mental tools to resist the preaching from the other side (for example via analyses of speech-tricks, like calling state-granted monopolies “property”).

I agree with just one of the 10 commandments of judaism and christianity

Many christians and many people who talk about “western christian values” like to say that the 10 commandments are universal: everyone can agree with them. So I checked that. I take them by their name: are they suitable as commandments? Not as a fuzzy general guideline, but as binding rules and a foundation for a shared culture?

(1.0) I am god who lead you from slavery in egypt → uhm, no?

(1.1) You shall not have other gods → uhm, why? I have pagan friends, so: no.

(1.2) You shall not represent me as anything which exists → that might make sense: don’t divide by different representations. But it did not work out, as now people picture angels, saints, and so on (and god, too). Also it’s part of commandment 1, so overally no to commandment 1.

(2) You shall not misuse my name → oh god, that really worked, right? no.

(3) No one close to you may work on sunday → and he went to the hospital and… no.

(4) Honor your parents → who might have abused you. No.

(5) Don’t murder → murder is defined nowadays as killing for low motives. So yes (with the right definition of low motives).

(6) Don’t break your marriage → if your wife/husband agrees, why not? So no.

(7) Don’t steal → if you would starve otherwise or the other one created monopolies for himself to oppress you: why not? So no.

(8) Don’t bear false witness → sounds mostly ok. Except if you want to save someone from a mob. So even this is not fit for a general rule. We even have laws which allow bearing false witness when asked illegal questions in a job interview. So no.

(9) Don’t desire the wife of another → why not? What if she desires you, too, and he does not mind? So no.

(10) Don’t desire property of others → be a nice little slave. Desire does not hurt anyone, and it can be a big motivation. So no.

Of the 10 commandments there is only one I agree with: Don’t murder (do not kill out of low motives). All the rest are either petty restrictions which aren’t needed in a free society or would be harmful if people actually always followed them closely.

Note that even for the one commandment I agree with, I only agree with the original version, not with what is currently taught (do not kill).

So the ten commandments are ill suited as a “foundation of western values”. The actual foundation of western values seems to take inspiration from them, but follows from much deeper values like preserving human dignity, valuing every human¹, being reliable, and only limiting individual freedom where the freedom of others begins.

I w̶a̶s̶ t̶a̶r̶g̶e̶t̶e̶d̶ got hit by an attack on GnuPG/PGP

Update: Might not actually be targeted. See Evil 32 [40]. Thanks to Ximin Luo for giving me more peace of mind!

Update: I’m not the only one hit by this. Here’s a conversation on GNU social with more people hit [41] - though no one else reported yet having two keys faked and cross-signed.

Update: At the very least you should do this: echo keyid-format long >> ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf

$ gpg2 --list-keys --fingerprint arne.babenhauserheide
-------------------------------
pub   2048R/A70DA09E 2011-10-07 [expires: 2016-10-05]
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide <arne.babenhauserheide@kit.edu>
sub   2048R/39829E5F 2011-10-07 [expires: 2016-10-05]

pub   2048R/A70DA09E 2014-06-16 [revoked: 2016-08-16]
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide <arne.babenhauserheide@kit.edu>

pub   2048R/A70DA09E 2011-10-07 [expires: 2016-10-05]\\
      Key fingerprint = DC44 49A9 A0C9 9632 9897  1842 5C83 F364 A70D A09E
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide <arne.babenhauserheide@kit.edu>\\
sub   2048R/39829E5F 2011-10-07 [expires: 2021-08-28]

pub   2048R/A70DA09E 2014-06-16 [revoked: 2016-08-16 ]\\
      Key fingerprint = FA7F DA53 89DC 30F0 385B  FC4A EA32 F8E6 A70D A09E
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide <arne.babenhauserheide@kit.edu>\\
     (also: expires: 2016-10-05)

pub   1024R/FE96C404 2014-06-16 [revoked: 2016-08-16]
      Key fingerprint = A000 B099 C138 B7EE 4C19  1D8F 895D BE4E FE96 C404
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide (Physikliebhaber, Hobbysänger und Ideenspringquell) <arne_bab@web.de>

pub   1024D/FE96C404 2002-02-04
      Key fingerprint = 6B05 41F0 94FF 2163 6FBA  2433 3307 469B FE96 C404
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide (Physikliebhaber, Hobbysänger und Ideenspringquell) <arne_bab@web.de>
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide (Rollenspieler, Spinner und freiberuflicher Weltenbastler) <arne_bab@yahoo.de>
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide (Eine selbstbewusste Gesellschaft kann viele Narren ertragen) <arne_bab@web.de>
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide (Rollenspieler, Spinner, Physikliebhaber, Gurpser und freiberuflicher Weltenbastler) <arne_bab@web.de>
sub   1024R/0BC10548 2010-07-29
sub   1024R/95806B33 2010-07-29
sub   1024g/0136732E 2002-02-04

gpg --check-sigs "<fingerprint or email>"

gpg --check-sigs "arne.babenhauserheide@kit.edu"

pub   2048R/A70DA09E 2011-10-07 [expires: 2021-08-28]
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide <arne.babenhauserheide@kit.edu>
sig!         FE96C404 2011-11-07  Arne Babenhauserheide (Physikliebhaber, Hobbysänger und Ideenspringquell) <arne_bab@web.de>
sig!3        A70DA09E 2016-08-29  Arne Babenhauserheide <arne.babenhauserheide@kit.edu>
sig!3        A70DA09E 2011-10-07  Arne Babenhauserheide <arne.babenhauserheide@kit.edu>
sub   2048R/39829E5F 2011-10-07 [expires: 2021-08-28]
sig!         A70DA09E 2016-08-29  Arne Babenhauserheide <arne.babenhauserheide@kit.edu>

pub   1024R/FE96C404 2014-06-16 [revoked: 2016-08-16]
rev!         FE96C404 2016-08-16  Arne Babenhauserheide (Physikliebhaber, Hobbysänger und Ideenspringquell) <arne_bab@web.de>
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide (Physikliebhaber, Hobbysänger und Ideenspringquell) <arne_bab@web.de>
sig!3        FE96C404 2014-08-04  Arne Babenhauserheide (Physikliebhaber, Hobbysänger und Ideenspringquell) <arne_bab@web.de>
sig!         A70DA09E 2014-08-05  Arne Babenhauserheide <arne.babenhauserheide@kit.edu>

100 signatures not checked due to missing keys

$ gpg2 --list-keys --fingerprint arne
pub   2048R/A70DA09E 2011-10-07 [verfällt: 2021-08-28]
  Schl.-Fingerabdruck = DC44 49A9 A0C9 9632 9897  1842 5C83 F364 A70D A09E
uid       [ uneing.] Arne Babenhauserheide <arne.babenhauserheide@kit.edu>
sub   2048R/39829E5F 2011-10-07 [verfällt: 2021-08-28]

pub   1024D/FE96C404 2002-02-04
  Schl.-Fingerabdruck = 6B05 41F0 94FF 2163 6FBA  2433 3307 469B FE96 C404
uid       [ uneing.] Arne Babenhauserheide (Physikliebhaber, Hobbysänger und Ideenspringquell) <arne_bab@web.de>
uid       [ uneing.] Arne Babenhauserheide (Rollenspieler, Spinner und freiberuflicher Weltenbastler) <arne_bab@yahoo.de>
uid       [ uneing.] Arne Babenhauserheide (Eine selbstbewusste Gesellschaft kann viele Narren ertragen) <arne_bab@web.de>
uid       [ uneing.] Arne Babenhauserheide (Rollenspieler, Spinner, Physikliebhaber, Gurpser und freiberuflicher Weltenbastler) <arne_bab@web.de>
sub   1024R/0BC10548 2010-07-29
sub   1024R/95806B33 2010-07-29
sub   1024g/0136732E 2002-02-04

pub   1024D/2F6F2642 2004-10-28
  Schl.-Fingerabdruck = 7172 BE09 9661 8A67 0D70  E801 E8B2 C3EB 2F6F 2642
uid       [ vollst.] Arne Babenhauserheide (Dust: Dumb Unsuspecting STudent) <arne_bab@web.de>
sub   1024g/14FAA61F 2004-10-28

pub   4096R/FF8DA6F0 2016-03-16
  Schl.-Fingerabdruck = AFCE FDAA A09E 3014 367C  7384 7D0A B287 FF8D A6F0
uid       [ vollst.] "Arne Bab." <Arne_Bab@web.de>
sub   4096R/CE39F489 2016-03-16

pub   4096R/2403C3EB 2016-01-04
  Schl.-Fingerabdruck = F34D 6A12 35D0 4903 CD22  D5C0 13EF 8D45 2403 C3EB
uid       [ vollst.] Arne Babenhauserheide (Drak) <arne_bab@web.de>
sub   4096R/D0E0B44C 2016-01-04

pub   4096R/8A8AAA50 2016-08-29 [verfällt: 2021-08-28]
  Schl.-Fingerabdruck = B5B3 AC76 6695 D1E3 4E0B  9075 B598 1EEC 8A8A AA50
uid       [ uneing.] Arne Babenhauserheide (-) <arne.babenhauserheide@kit.edu>
sub   4096R/A017ECEC 2016-08-29 [verfällt: 2021-08-28]

pub   2048R/A70DA09E 2011-10-07 [expires: 2021-08-28]
      Key fingerprint = DC44 49A9 A0C9 9632 9897  1842 5C83 F364 A70D A09E
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide <arne.babenhauserheide@kit.edu>
sub   2048R/39829E5F 2011-10-07 [expires: 2021-08-28]

pub   2048R/A70DA09E 2014-06-16 [revoked: 2016-08-16]
      Key fingerprint = FA7F DA53 89DC 30F0 385B  FC4A EA32 F8E6 A70D A09E
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide <arne.babenhauserheide@kit.edu>

pub   1024D/FE96C404 2002-02-04
      Key fingerprint = 6B05 41F0 94FF 2163 6FBA  2433 3307 469B FE96 C404
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide (Physikliebhaber, Hobbysänger und Ideenspringquell) <arne_bab@web.de>
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide (Rollenspieler, Spinner und freiberuflicher Weltenbastler) <arne_bab@yahoo.de>
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide (Eine selbstbewusste Gesellschaft kann viele Narren ertragen) <arne_bab@web.de>
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide (Rollenspieler, Spinner, Physikliebhaber, Gurpser und freiberuflicher Weltenbastler) <arne_bab@web.de>
sub   1024R/0BC10548 2010-07-29
sub   1024R/95806B33 2010-07-29
sub   1024g/0136732E 2002-02-04

pub   1024R/FE96C404 2014-06-16 [revoked: 2016-08-16]
      Key fingerprint = A000 B099 C138 B7EE 4C19  1D8F 895D BE4E FE96 C404
uid                  Arne Babenhauserheide (Physikliebhaber, Hobbysänger und Ideenspringquell) <arne_bab@web.de>

If one dozen people will stop eating beef, how much will this help to slow down global warming?

If one dozen people will stop eating beef, this will reduce the yearly global CO₂ emissions by around 48 tons CO₂-equivalent¹ (about one quarter of their total emissions, and half their emissions from food [44]).

That’s the equivalent of planting about 48 trees per year, with the assumption of an old tree weighting 1 tonne, half of which is carbon. CO₂ mass is carbon mass times (44 / 12), but an average tree in a forest has less than that, because they don’t start as old trees, so you get roughly 1 ton of net CO₂ absorption from one newly planted tree.

So if you assume that the one dozen people will still live for 50 years without eating beef, they will have done as much good for the climate as if they had planted 2,400 trees. That’s roughly a forest with a size of 5 hectar (assuming 50,000 trees per km² [45]).

Internet, community cloud foo and control of my own data

Why?

What I miss in the internet is the notion of being able to control what my apps access for data.

Why can’t a chat application just connect to a neighborhood- or community-server, and why can’t the activity-stream come from the people I know — and query only their systems, like jabber does?

Almost all geolocation services should be implementable over direct friend-to-friend connections like jabber, and I don’t really see why my local identi.ca program can’t also get the news from my local jabber contacts.

Or why I can’t set a local info-provider as geolocation source and have a “phone-book” of info-providers in each town.

And when it can do that, why can’t I have a general info-server which serves as synchronization and aggregation service for any of my devices, so all my programs on any device know which sources to use?

And why can’t I tell that server to allow my friends to access a subset of my data — selected by me?

Sadly I assume that the answer is “power”. Google and Apple don’t want to lose their control on synchronization and sharing. Otherwise most of the control and centralization (=moneymaking monopoly) of the internet would fade away.

What?

For example I’d like to be able to select whose information I get, and I’d like to be able to also get the information my friends and their get. Without anyone outside knowing that I access that data (because I ask them directly). And ideally also without me knowing from which of their friends the data originates, but still being able to block those individually.

Then I could allow certain product information providers (=good advertisers) inside my network, so I get news about stuff I might like to spend money on. And automatically get information about the info-providers from my friends — or my community.

And all that without direct dependency on a single company or system.

It would make it infeasible to monopolize the services without making everyone trust you — and having to make sure most people trust you creates a reverse-dependency which could help to keep the information-providers honest.

How?

And I think one key to that is to make that service less like a full-storage and more like update-collecting and synchronization services.

There’s no reason why a synchro-server should keep any data I already pulled to all my devices.

This would be similar to using a Mercurial push-cache of kinds: When I push data to a service, it just stores a bundle against the revision of the data on my least up-to-date device. All my devices can access that bundle, and when all are up to at least a certain state, the now useless data gets stripped out and only the new data remains.

Not yet pulled information could be stored as snapshots, until the first of my devices pulls it. Then it could get replaced by synchronization data — a compressed update-bundle. That would also make sure that incoming data has to be integrated and parsed only once.

→ http://mercurial-scm.org/ [48]

…

Maybe Akonadi (from KDE) can someday accomplish something like that.

→ http://userbase.kde.org/Glossary#Akonadi [49]
→ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akonadi [50]

PS: Originally this started as a comment to The state of the internet operating system [51] by O’Reilly.

My answers to the Public Consultation on the review of the EU copyright rules.

The following PDF and ODF contains my answers to the Public Consultation on the review of the EU copyright rules [52].

• 2014-03-04-eu-copyright-consultation-document_en-arne_babenhauserheide.odt [53]
• 2014-03-04-eu-copyright-consultation-document_en-arne_babenhauserheide.pdf [54]

If you want to comment, please use the contact form [55].

PS: And now I hear that the commission is trying to get into treaties with Canada (CETA) which make any positive changes to copyright impossible: CETA: Mehr Rechte für Musikkonzerne [56] (german). I signed a petition against CETA [57] (german) - maybe it’s time to march the streets again. But what do we actually need to change to stop these ever repeating [58] attacks on our digital life [59]?

Neither Humble nor Indie Bundle

Update 2016: Later Bundles seem to have gotten better again.

Comment [60] to New Humble Bundle Is Windows Only, DRM Games [61].

The new Humble Indie Bundle is no longer free, indie, cross-plattform or user-respecting.

When the first bundle had a huge boost in last-minute sales [62] after the devs offered to free the source of 4 of the 5 games, I had hoped, they would keep that. I was one of those who paid when they offered to free the games, and I’m pretty sure that they got a huge boost in people who knew the Humble Indie Bundle due to that.

But when the second bundle did not offer freeing the source, I did not pay. Unfree games aren’t worth much to me and I feared they would go further down that track.

Now Steam comes to GNU/Linux, so being cross-plasform isn’t unique for the Humble Indie Bundle anymore. And they dropped cross-platform support and added DRM. They replaced fans with short-term cash-cows who will happily switch to another project without second thoughts. Somehow I saw that coming…

Well, they sell their brand while it still holds, but by doing that they burn the ones who brought them where they are today.

Never put effort in a project where you have to trust the creator to not misuse it. Free copyleft licenses are a safeguard for contributors - not only the coders, but also for those who promote the project.¹

Patent law overrides copyright breaks ownership

Concise and clear.

In patent law, copyright and property there are two pillars: protection and control.

Protection

• Property: No person shall take that from me.
• Copyright: No person shall have the same without my permission. A monopoly.
• Patent Law: No person shall create something similar without my permission. An even stronger monopoly.

Control

• Property: I decide what happens with this.
• Copyright: I decide what happens to everything which is the same. Takes another ones property. → a monopoly¹.
• Patent Law: I decide what happens to every similar thing. Takes the copyright and property of others. → An even stronger monopoly¹.

In short: Patent law overrides copyright breaks ownership.

¹: Others may have copyrights and property rights which they can only exercise with my permission. So effectively all their rights belong to me. If you want a longer argument on this, please read Intellectual Property Is Theft [67].

(translation of Patentrecht bricht Urheberrecht bricht Eigentum [68])

Please accept the signatures from the petition against Article 13

Dear Antonio Tajani,

Please accept the signatures from the petition against article 13 [69].¹

In 2014 I contributed to the Public Consultation on the review of the EU copyright rules [70].²

I publish music online, I write online, I publish Free Software, and I share links to news.

Last month I wrote to my representatives in JURI and asked them to preserve internet freedom. 15 of them nontheless voted to destroy online freedom. I cannot understand how they could vote for a system which will enforce the widespread establishment of technologies which can form the foundation for censorship which lets chinese censorship appear like a paradise of free speech.

Therefore I now beg you to accept the signatures from the petition against article 13.

Please let the voices of the European citizens be heard. Please help us preserve the Europe we love.

The best of wishes,

Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide

Shackle-Feats: The poisoned Apple

Steve Jobs managed to make a user interface which feels very natural. And that is no problem in itself. Apple solved a problem: User interfaces are hard to use for people who don’t have computer experience and who don’t have time to learn using computers right.

But they then used that solution to lure people into traps they set up to get our money and our freedom.

As analogy: A friend of mine told me, that Photoshop gives her Freedom, because she can do things with it, which she can’t do with anything else. And she’s right on that: She gets a kind of freedom. But she has to give up other freedoms for that, for example the freedom to do freelancing work without paying 3000€ up front.

To make the problem with that kind of freedom visible, let’s use one more analogy: When I get a flying car with which I can visit the Himalaya without having to get a drivers license, then I just got the Freedom to actually visit Himalaya. But sadly that car comes with a rule, that I am not allowed to take friends with me, and it does not allow me to drive into cities ruled by left-wing politicians. It costs so much, that I can’t afford another car¹, so now if I want to be able to visit Himalaya, I can never take friends with me even when I don’t want to go to Himalaya right now, just to the next shop, and I can’t visit left-wing friends.

That car would give me a kind of Freedom, but it would take away other freedoms I had before I used it. If all people used it, the effects would be horrible, and not just for left-wings and car owners: You would not be able to get a ride from a neighbor when you needed to get to the doctor fast.

Now imagine what would happen, if people would find ways to make money with that flying car. They would create a society, where you have to give up Freedom if you want to get one of the good jobs.

So creating a new kind of Freedom and coupling it with heavy shackles does not give you more Freedom. It creates a situation where people have a harder time living their life when they want to keep their basic freedom, because those shackle-feats become mandatory.

Apple kinda invented the shackle-feat “use shiny computers without understanding them”.
They managed to make shackles almost mandatory for parts of society by creating a pressure on people that they have to be able to do the feat, so they have to accept the shackles.

Now we have to recreate that feat without the shackles so people are able to keep up without losing their freedom. We have to do additional work, because society is being shaped by those who made the shackles.

Best wishes,
Arne Babenhauserheide

PS: Steve Jobs managed to create really nice interfaces. Sadly he used his abilities to shackle people. He once was a hero to me. Even today there is stuff he did that I admire. But he decided to use his abilities for shackling people.

Steve Jobs, Get Your Head out Of the Sand! - Broken Apple Heart

Dear Steve,

Do you understand that imposing Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is unethical? That attempting to control our computers and electronic devices to monitor what we do with digital files is wrong and a danger to society?

The problem for DRM proponents is that DRM doesn't work as advertised - and you are helping perpetuate a lie. We know you know this, you've said as much about music and DRM yourself. So why do you persist in touting DRM for video?

What DRM does do is trample my rights and create a situation where, if I were to circumvent a DRM scheme to be in control of my computer, it would be a criminal act - thanks to legislation like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

So what does DRM do? It monitors what I do, Often, it reports on my activities to a central authority. It locks me to one vendor of software. It limits what I do with the stuff i own. Yet Apple takes advantage of DRM to gain exactly this kind of control over its customers doesn't it?

We don't want DRM! We do want our music and video in formats free from proprietary restrictions. And we want the devices we buy to be under our control.

Do you still have Apple's head stuck in the sand?
I'm writing to suggest you take it out.
- http://defectivebydesign.com [76]

Personal Comment:
I've been a Mac User my whole life. I left you with a broken heart, when you used the TPM chip to lock down _developer_ Macs.

Now I'm a GNU/Linux user (KDE), and even though I sometimes think back to Macs, to Shufflepuck (my first addiction), to professional video editing (With my old 66Mhz Mac), to the 6 months when I tried every beta of MacOSX even though my 266Mhz G3 was far too slow to render it in speed, and to the ease of music production on my Flat-Panel iMac, I won't come back to have my freedom taken.

You're creating great computers. Why do you still have to make them a tool for digital slavery, even though you now aknowledged yourself, that this slavery is bad?

The one who acts bad but doesn't know it, is a fool.
The one who acts bad and knows it, is a criminal, regardless of the laws.

Disappointed wishes with but a glimpse of hope,
Arne Babenhauserheide - Broken Apple Heart (german) [77]

Thank you for your Flattr’s! | Danke für eure Flattr! | Dankon por vian Flattrn!

It’s always a great feeling to see a flattr - Thank you for your support!
You can find new free works for you enjoyment on draketo.de [78] (infrequent and bursty) and 1w6.org [63] (currently weekly but mostly in German).

→ ArneBab on Flattr [17]

Es ist ein tolles Gefühl, geflattrd zu werden - Danke für eure Unterstützung!
Neue freie Werke von mir findet ihr auf draketo.de [78] (unregelmäßig) und 1w6.org [63] (zur Zeit wöchentlich).

→ ArneBab auf Flattr [17]

Mi ĝojegas ricevi novan flattrn - Dankon por subteni min!
Nova verkoj estas en draketo.de [78] (ne-regula) kaj 1w6.org [63] (nuntempe ĉiusemajna, sed en la germana).

→ ArneBab en Flattr [17]

Best wishes,
Liebe Grüße,
Kore,
- Arne alias Drak

PS: This month I got >6€ via Flattr - 80% of my server costs.
_   Diesen Monat habe ich >6€ über Flattr bekommen - 80% der Serverkosten.
_   Tiu monato mi ricevis >6€ de Flattr - 80% de la kostoj por la servilo.

The assisted brain and the chained brain

Who serves whom? Our tools can be our allies or our masters. Do your tools assist or chain?

Lisa

Good morning, Lisa. Your group rescheduled the meeting, so you should get up early today. Do you want a suggestion for rescheduling your workplan to optimize for your biorhythm?

Yes, please. Use the “we had great sex” mode. I’d like fried eggs today, please search for a recipe.

What about “flaming chicken fun”? It’s a favorite of Marta and Dave.

Sounds good. is there anything urgent today?

Dave asked to upload your plan to moogle sheat again. Shall I send him the public data?

No. Just send him a message “you can have all my data, but I don’t give it to moogle. Just come over at six”

This sounds like an appointment at six. But your schedule today ends at 7. Shall I adapt the schedule?

Yes, adjust it.

“You can have all my data, but I don’t give it to moogle. Just come over at six”, is that correct?

Yes. Send it, please.

Dave

Good morning, Dave. Your group-leader rescheduled the meeting, so you have to get up early today. Shall I reschedule your workplan to maximize your healthcare bonus?

Yes, please. Use the “latenight workout” profile.

I can’t do that, Dave. The “latenight workout” profile requires a workout token, but you met with Lisa who does not have a latenight-account. Your biosignals meet the criteria for “latenight workout”, though. Shall I request individual validation?

No! Just use the usual profile. And search for a recipe with fried eggs.

I can’t do that, Dave. You already bought ice cream yesterday. Ice cream and fried eggs without workout would violate your employee contract. May I suggest orange juice and a salad?

So be it. Is there anything urgent today?

Lisa replied to your request for her plan.

What request?

You asked for her plans, so I sent a request for uploading them. Fapple flagged her answer as aggressive and sleazy. Do you still want to read it?

Not yet. Notify me again after breakfast.

I can’t do that, Dave. Re-notification for aggressive messages makes users unhappy. If you do not read it, it will be deleted in 7 days.

Then say it.

Lisa says “you can have all my data, but I don’t want to give it to moogle. Just come over at six.” I filed a potential appointment at six in your moogle sheat. Do you want to acknowledge it?

Yes, please.

The danger of promoting dead closed clients

I had a strange feeling about people advertising the dead and closed source Gnutella client BearShare, but I only found one of the reasons for that gut feeling today.

Assumptions I use: We want Gnutella to continue to evolve and grow better.

To have Gnutella evolve, the developers of actively developed clients need feedback (and be it only encouragement).

If people now use a dead client, which won't evolve anymore, they don't provide essential feedback to actively developed clients, and it might even happen, that some developers waste time on trying to hack the dead client to make something work (again), instead of contributing to an active open client.

So every user who uses a dead closed client instead of an active open (and free licensed) client hinders the evolution of Gnutella.

That's not the fault of the user, and it's not per se damaging to the current state of the network (as long as the user shares, he contributes to the availaable files), but on the long term it hinders Gnutella from becoming better.

And that in mind, promoting a closed dead client directly damages Gnutella.

I know I'm human and as such prone to errors, so if you see anything I overlooked, please tell me about it.

The dynamics of free culture and the danger of noncommercial clauses

NC covered works trick people into investing in a dead end

Free licensing lowers the barrier of entry to creating cultural works, which unlocks a dynamic where people can realize their ideas much easier - and where culture can actually live, creating memes, adjusting them to new situations and using new approaches with old topics.

But for that to really take off, people have to be able to make a living from their creations - which build on other works. Then we have people who make a living by reshaping culture again and again - instead of the current culture where only a few (rich or funded by rich ones) can afford to reuse old works and all others have to start from scratch again and again.

Sharealike licensing gives those who allow others to reuse their works an edge over those who do not do that: They can access many resources early in their career which allow them to produce high-quality stuff without needing to pay huge amounts up front. And they hone their skills in working with free stuff. So when they become good enough that they can work in art for a living, they are deeply invested in free culture, so they have very good reasons for also licensing their new works under free licenses.

As a real-life example for the dynamic of free licensing, I’ve been working on a free tabletop roleplaying system [63] in my free time for the last 10 years. For 3 or 4 years now it has been licensed under the GPL [65], so we could use images from Battle for Wesnoth [81] in our books. And 2 years ago, I worked together with another roleplayer to create minimal roleplaying supplements on just one Flyer [82] - where only half the images were from Battle for Wesnoth, because a great artist decided to contribute (All hail Trudy [83]!).

All this would have been possible with NC licensing.

But about 2 months ago a roleplayer from a forum I discuss at unveiled his plans to create a german free rpg day [84] and I realized that our minimal RPG would be a great fit for that - but that I could not afford myself to print it in high enough numbers and good enough quality to reach many people.

So I worked on the design and text to polish them, and when I was happy I started a 4-day fundraiser to finance printing the RPGs. Within just those 4 days I got over 200€ in donations which allowed me to print 2000 RPGs in great quality along with supplements and additional character cards which made every single RPG instantly playable - instead of 1500 RPGs with only one card so people would need 3 RPGs to actually play.

And this would have been plain illegal with NC material.

It is not yet “making a living with free art”, but it is a first step out of the purely hobby creation into a stronger dynamic. One which allows us to bring 2000 physical RPGs to people without going broke - and more importantly: One which started small and can grow organically.

An RPG might not be the best example here, because tabletop RPGs are notoriously bad for generating money. But it is the example I experienced myself.

As an example which might be closer to you: Imagine that you created a movie with free music and other material from free licensed works. Imagine that half of the visuals you use could have already been created - maybe for some other movie. By using free stuff, you could save half the effort for creating the movie.

But if that other stuff had been NC, you would not be allowed to start a fundraiser for getting it to blu-ray quality - at least not without replacing all NC parts, which would have added a high cost to be able to increase your outreach. Likely it would have been a blocking cost. It would have been easier to just create a new project than to polish the one you have to reach more people.

And polish is what allowed me to move the RPG from just being a hardly readable PDF to a work I can look at with pride [63].

To wrap it up: Free culture - just like free software - allows people to take little steps into creating culture and to move organically from just being a hobby artist towards making a living from their work - and spreading their work to many more people.

NC covered works on the other hand trick people into investing in a dead end, because they can never move beyond being a hobbyist without huge investments which bring no other benefit than recreating what they could directly use when they did not try to make a living. It’s like learning to use Photoshop and then realizing that you aren’t allowed to earn a little extra by improving wedding-images without shelling out 3000€ for a creative suite license. And that means, that you can’t move in small steps from a boring day job to a professional creative life.

(written in reply to a question from Keith, one of the makers of Software Wars [85], a movie about free software which is trying to fund going to a high-quality blu-ray release at the moment)

(also see Noncommercial doesn’t compose [86])

The effect of the optional restrictions of the GPLv3

I just thought a bit about the restrictions the GPLv3 allows, and I think I just understood their purpose and effect for the first time (correct me, if I'm wrong :) ).

What are the restrictions?

The GPLv3 allows developers (=copyright holders) to add selected restrictions, like forbidding the use of a certain brand name or similar.

The catch with them is, that any subsequent developer who adds anything is free to simply strip off the restrictions.

What is their effect?

Now I wondered for a long time, what that really gains us. today I then realized that subsequent develoeprs are only free to strip off the restrictions, as long as that doesn't violate any license of some part of the program.

That means, the GPLv3 restrictions simply have the effect of adding compatibility to other licenses, while keeping the option to strip off any restriction, when you replace the part under the other license with a more liberal licensed part.

So this doesn't place any additional burden on packagers, because they already have to check those other licenses for their restrictions. Now the GPLv3 description of the whole package clearly states what additional restrictions are inferred by the parts which are under different but compatible licenses.

While those parts where under seperate licenses before (and had to be checked), they can now be impcoved with GPLv3 code with additional restrictions.

And as soon as the GPLv3 code can stand on its own feet, the more restrictive licensed part can be replaces with GPLv3 code, and the restrictions can be removed again, making the work of the packagers easier.

Better still, the GPLv3 shows clearly the sum of all restrictions of the individual (differently but compatible licensed) parts, so packagers only need to check the GPLv3 license information to see all restrictions in a standardized format (GPLv3 additional restrictions).

Example

Let's assume I find this great piece of software which says "do what you want but don't touch my brand", and I want to build my GPLv3 program on it. Let's call the piece of software "foo". So I just begin coding and use the GPLv3 for my parts (simply copyright message in my code files). For the whole package I add a license information ("license.txt" or "COPYING" or similar) which give the information

  "This program is licensed under the GPLv3 
  with the additional restriction that the brand 
  'foo' may not be used for derived products. 
  The additional restriction is inferred by the package foo.

  (plus license mumbo jumbo you can find at and copy 
  from http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html [87])"

Now someone else takes my program and improves it. But he also uses the package "blah" which also says that it's brand must not be violated. Now the combined license would be:

  "This program is licensed under the GPLv3 
  with the additional restriction that the brand 
  'foo' and the brand 'blah' may not be used for 
  derived products. 
  The additional restriction for brand 'foo' is inferred by the package foo.
  The additional restriction for brand 'blah' is inferred by the package blah. 

  (plus license mumbo jumbo you can find at and copy 
  from http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html [87])"

So now a group of free software activists takes offense at the restrictions. They don't want anyone to be restricted by copyright from using a brand. One reason could be that the brand protection was voided by some trademark action.

Now they can't just say "that brand isn't protected anymore", since the protection was reinforced by copyright law.

But they can just replace the parts under the more restrictive licenses with honest GPLv3 licensed parts - either by writing them or by finding a drop-in replacement. Now let's suppose they write the packages "bar" and "baz" which implement the functionality of "foo" and "blah". They now no longer use any parts under licenses which require additional restrictions, so they are free to remove them. As they release their package, the license information might read as follows:

  "This program is licensed under the GPLv3.  

  (plus license mumbo jumbo you can find at and copy 
  from http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html [87])"

If they are nice (and we assume they are) their changelog will also contain a line saying something like "replaced 'foo' and 'blah' which allowed us to remove the additional license restrictions to avoid using the brands 'foo' or 'blah'."

Final remark

As you see (and if I understand it correctly), the additional restrictions can be a great tool for freeing software from restrictions, because they allow you to combine GPlv3 code with somewhat restrictive licensed code and get rid off the restrictions later by replacing the more restrictive licensed parts.

And since the only allowed additional restrictions are those which don't harm the four freedoms of free software, you can still make sure that you use ethically sound software by simply checking whether it is GPL licensed.

So kudos to the designers of the GPLv3. They did such a great job that it took me two years to realize one of the many powerful tools they gave us with the GPLv3 - and I did take part in the public discussion of the GPLv3 since draft 1 (but I never watched a GPLv3 speech...).

Also, since the GPLv3 allows combination with the AGPLv3 software (which adds the restriction, that the source code must also be supplied when the software is used over a network), it gives us a clear path into the future where people might use more and more software "as a service", so it doesn't get executed on their local machine and the normal GPL alone isn't enough to protect our freedom.

The generation of cultural freedom

New version of this article: draketo.de/politik/generation-of-cultural-freedom.html [88]

I am part of a generation that experienced true cultural freedom—and experienced this freedom being destroyed.

We had access to the largest public library which ever existed and saw it burned down for lust for control.

I saw the Napster burn, I saw Gnutella burn, I saw edonkey burn, I saw Torrentsites burn, I saw one-click-hosters burn and now I see Youtube burn with blocked and deleted videos - even those from the artists themselves.

Not even for greed or gain, because enough studies showed that we did no damage and that we actually paid more for cultural goods than those who did not enjoy that freedom.¹ They fought for control over us.

And the loss of cultural freedom is only the precursor for the loss of personal freedom, as many new censorship laws show.

Feel free to share this text under cc by [89]: [90]

The internet means unlimited copying. What we make of it depends on us

Comment to is the web too good for us [97] on a BBC blog:

But the web was not really free in the beginning. While its structure was open for everyone and websites bloomed and blossomed by copying code and design from others, the content of sites stayed closed by copyright.

There were many thoughts of freedom in the original web, but the structure gave more freedom than the law, and the easy copying inside the new medium still didn't reach the slow legal body of our offline communities.

Online, though, laws were first ignored, then bent and finally used to create new rules within the laws themselves.

Thus came free software a quarter of a century ago, even before the web spread its basic property of cheap infinite copying into the mainstream society, when coders realized that the traditional copyright didn't fit their way of cooperating and curtailed their creative work. Free Software spread and became the base and foundation of todays internet infrastructure, with Apache webservers on GNU/Linux computers serving its content - unbeknown to most of its users.

And from the same spring came creative commons, about 20 years later, used by artists who realize that the traditional rules do more harm than good to them.

The new digital world began before the internet was started by making the copy an integral part of even looking at data, but it grew with the internet which pushed the effects of this new technology right into the face of our societies. And so the digital world which currently finds its most well known expression in the internet is an ownership breaker by design, and many battles were fought over this most beloved and most hated feature.

You can no longer control what people do with things you put into the internet, as long as you allow them to see them. Once they saw them, if even for a moment, they could have a copy. You can only use social rules to keep them from passing on their copies, or take over their computers.

Even while I write this comment, I don't do it on your website. I write it in a local copy of your website which is stored by my browser, and I could go on writing it long after your website disappeared, as long as my computer kept the copy.

The only way around this is to go back to the analog age, where showing doesn't equal handing out a copy, or to allow some entity complete control over our computers to enforce certain rules - and over our lives which more and more move towards the digital space.

To come back to the question: The web is not too good for us. It provides more openness than many people want to provide, and far more than the law offers, but this openness gave rise to movements which shaped the openness into freedom by establishing the rule that whatever is freed must never be shackled again. They took the single inherent freedom of copying and added the freedoms of changing and using. From that source came free software which drives the internet and the Wikipedia which provides the worlds largest publicly accessible knowledge base. Creative Commons walks a similar path by always allowing the copying of the creative works, but it allows for much more control by the creator.

The internet removes the restriction on copying which is inherent in our analog world. Our societies and legal systems, though, will take time to adapt. If we're lucky they'll accept the internet as freedom and adapt as free software and the wikipedia did. If we're unlucky they'll try to limit the openness, either through technology or through laws. They could turn that openness from an openness for people into an openness of people, because copying doesn't only go one direction. They can just as well copy a record of every move me make and use this to create an almost perfect surveillance system with all its implications on freedom.

And they wouldn't necessarily need to establish rules based on punishment which we currently have as laws. They could just as well use digital shackles, which not just disallow some action, but make it impossible. The rules could be like a car which makes it impossible for me to drive faster than the law allows while my child bleeds to dead on the backseat.

So the web is neither good or bad. It's simply a world which operates on slighly different rules than the physical world, and we're still in the process of learning the implications, promises and dangers of that tiny change of rules.

The princess is the ultimate representation of social and hierarchical power

Knight, do my bidding.

A girl told my son “I’m a princess, you’re a knight, fetch me a glass of water!”. It was then that I realized that a princess typically isn’t someone to save. I was so proud of my son when he said “no”, because I suddenly realized how hard it is to escape the shackles of that special story.

A princess is the one person in the country, who reigns surpreme in both hierarchy and social standing. People in stories might hate the king, but the princess is beloved by most. Remember princess Diana. In life she was a role model, and her death moved most people in Europe. No one in his or her right mind would admit killing her, not even among close friends. This is different with a king: You can kill a king and still keep your friends. But a princess is out of reach.

The princess might be seen as tragic -- having to sacrifice love for the good of the kingdom -- but she is still out of reach to any man. And she can destroy any person with a mere accusation. The one who insults a princess is condemned both by the power of the state and by society.

The only capability a princess in stories lacks is physical force, and the only way a man outside royalty can be more to the princess than a servant, is saving her from some horrible fate. Since she reigns surpreme in everything but physical force, this fate will have to be fought by physical strength.

The power she uses is indirect: The princess in stories did not create her power, she inherited it. But this does not mean that it is not real: If the king is not depicted as evil, then the guards are loyal to the princess, and this loyalty is real power.

This is why it felt strange to me when people celebrated stories in which the princess also wielded physical power as an inversion of the archetype of a princess needing to be saved. Making her also physically strong made her the most powerful person on every level. But it did not invert power. Instead it just increased the concentration of power.

An inversion of power would have been to tell a story of the cleaning maid who trained in secret to become a guard and who finally saved and married the fair and friendly and handsome and harmless prince. The end result would have been the same: A queen who wields both physical, social and hierarchical force. But the path would have been one of a strong woman who makes her own path.

Please sit back for a moment and imagine that story. Then come back in 5 minutes. If you have a clock at hand, please check the time, then take 5 minutes to let your imagination flow.

… 5 minutes later …

How does it feel to see the woman at the bottom train to fight her way up? How does it differ from the princess who gets trained by her personal guard?

The archetype of the royal prince in shining armor, fair and strong and beloved by everyone, has mostly disappeared. We rarely have these stories nowadays, because they are much less interesting than stories about people who have weaknesses, and because so many real royal princes hugely underperformed compared to the archetype. And writers in the past century worked a lot to dispell hierarchy and the story of the good and noble king with the inherited right to rule. Nowadays we ask why someone should have the right to rule others.

If these stories which glorify hierarchy come back with the martial arts princess, that does create a female version of the archetype of the royal prince saving the world, but it does not reverse the archetype of the knight saving the princess. Instead it uses a weakened version of equality as excuse to bring back justifications for hierarchy.

However this does not mean you should not tell stories of martial arts princesses, if you like them.

Those stories might actually be pretty cool, and might capture the imagination of a whole generation, as Street Fighter did with Chun Li (though she wasn’t a princess), or Starcraft did with Kerrigan¹, or Alien did with Ripley. If you have a millionaire with super-human strength and extreme intellect saving people from the shadows (yepp, Batman), there’s no reason not to have a princess who takes up the good fight.

Also what I call the martial arts princess here is not the princess who rebels against her upbringing and is ready to give up her power for freedom. That is a genuine story of liberation. The martial arts princess is about just adding physical power to social and hierarchical power (as most magical girl princess anime stories do²).

But stories of martial arts princesses won’t get my cheers for being on the forefront of equality. They might get my cheers for being great stories, but my cheers for equality are reserved for stories of women who make their own paths without strengthening the chains of existing hierarchy.

The translation of NSA is Stasi

Just to give you a short note, if you have been surprised by the NSA acting like the Stasi in former DDR (German Democratic Republic).

Here’s the translation of NSA:

• N: National = Staatlich
• S: Security = Sicherheit
• A: Agency = Ministerium

Let’s put that together:

NSA = Staatliches Sicherheitsministerium
(in more regular German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit)

Well, that’s long. Shorten it to Staatssicherheit. Still to long for casual discussions. So shorten it once more: Stasi.

NSA = Stasi

Do you still wonder why the NSA acts like the Stasi?

The “Apple helps free software” myth

→ Comment to “apple supports a number of opensource projects. Webkit and CUPS come to mind [98]”.

Apple supports a number of copyleft projects, because they have to. They chose to profit from the work other people released as copyleft, and so they are obliged to release their improvements.

Webkit

Webkit is an especially good example of this: Apple took the khtml code from KDE [99], worked with it for half a year and only released binaries (which is a breach of the license of khtml) until they finally released their code in one big code-drop which the khtml folks had no chance of integrating cleanly.

That way Apple broke away from the community and created their own fork in a way which made sure that the KDE folks could not profit from Apples work without throwing out their own structure.

They still had to adhere the license, though, which enabled others to use Webkit - and essentially created a revolution in Webbrowser-development, because Apple added all the polish needed for a modern browser. If you look at the way they treated the khtml developers, though, do you really think they would have released any code on that critical part of their OS, if they had not been forced to do so by the strong copyleft used by KDE?

Cups

CUPS, the other example of Apple-maintained free software, … is GPL licensed, too. No surprise there: Why else should Apple give their work to others, if not because the license forces them to?

And even there they try to get out [100] by adding a GPL-exception to the parts they write, which allows using those parts without giving out source code. But “This exception is only available for Apple OS-Developed Software and does not apply to software that is distributed for use on other operating systems”.

What do you think how much they will still maintain, as soon as they managed to get that header into all files - and don’t fear a free fork anymore? (also note, that shortly after Apple started maintaining cups, it broke on my GNU/Linux system - „Ein Schelm, wer böses dabei denkt“, as we say in Germany)

Darwin

Just look at what they did with Darwin. They took all the code from FreeBSD. Then they kept the uninteresting part free as long as needed to have a good name and get people work in their spare time on porting it to intel architectures, a work which greatly benefitted Apple, because they could then get away from PPC to no longer depend on IBM. The interesting part however, the graphical interface, was completely locked up from the beginning.

See why OpenDarwin stopped: “Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community“ — OpenDarwin Shutting Down [101]

4 of 5 reasons for stopping the free alternative directly come from Apple…

LLVM

Since LLVM was brought up in a comment, here’s the relevant part of my answer: For LLVM they have a clear goal to reach: Getting rid of a dependency on GCC for which they will have to release their adaptions indefinitely, while they can close down their new code for LLVM at any point.

I as potential user of their code cannot be sure that their future work on it will stay free (which is why I do not use their code - and different from Xorg, Apple has a track record of closing down their devices).

Epilogue

Should I complain about that? Actually no. After all, they are allowed to do it by the license. They just do what they can to maximize their monetary gain.

And actually I prefer seeing a big company use copyleft programs to improve its products, because that means that others will be able to achieve at least that part with free software.

If I should complain about anybody, then about all the people who praise Apple for doing what they are forced to do to get the work of others for free - and about shortsighted developers, who use non-copyleft licenses, which allow folks like Apple to save lots of money while locking out others and creating “the computer as a jail made cool”, as Richard M. Stallman put it [102] quite nicely [103] — I call that shackle-feats [104].

Since my interpretation was called worst-case in a comment, here’s the relevant part of my answer: I don’t really see anything, where Apple contributed something to be good. They did what they needed to avoid being sued, to avoid getting a GPLv3 fork which they would not be able to lock down, to get work for free without having to commit to anything and to get rid of GCC which they cannot lock down.

What irks me, though, is that there are quite a few people who call Apple good because of that. No, Apple is not good. Apple is a company and you should never trust a company [105]. The only way to make Apple act ethically (“good”) [106] would be to get their customers to base their buying decision on ethics. You can see this article as part of that effort: Dismantling illusionary ethics to make it easier for people to spot real ethical behavior.

Two visions of our future

[107]
    by Mike Perry (http://nodicemike.com [108])

We still have to stop CO₂ emissions and plant trees to prevent even worse catastrophes, but since 2022 the most likely future is that there will be catastrophes even if we stop CO₂ emissions right now. This is what climate scientists in the past 30 years hoped to prevent. We failed. Now we must fight to avoid even worse outcomes. We are making progress at that [109], but we must speed up.

Update 2022: As by the WMO [110], we’re now at 50% within the next 5 years: “⚀ or ⚁ or ⚂” (1 or 2 or 3). “The odds of at least one of the next 5 years temporarily reaching the Paris Agreement threshold of 1.5°C have increased to 50:50. In 2015 the chance was zero.”

Update (2021-09): According to IPCC AR6 [111], we’re now at 50%.

Update 2018-09-03: As by Aengenheyster et al. 2018 [112], we’re now at “⚀ or ⚁” (1 or 2): »However, reaching the 1.5 K target appears unlikely as MM would be required to start in 2018 for a probability of 67%.« MM means getting a 2% increase of the share of renewables every year.

I don’t know what we rolled, but I sure hope it’s not a 1.¹

For the robust science behind the green future, see Hansen et al. 2017 [113]:

Young people's burden: requirement of negative CO₂ emissions. [113]

If we stop emissions almost completely until 2025² and get lucky (so we only get the moderate part of the likely global warming due to the greenhouse effect), then we can prevent most longterm problems by innovative agriculture and forestry [113].

This is a time for all of humanity to band together and protect our home world. Even if you would not be willing to bet on not having rolled a 1, please help to cut emissions now. Use a bicycle if you can. Use public transport. If you need a car, buy by CO₂ emissions. Buy power generated from renewable sources. Eat less meat (at most 300g per week). Vote for those who fight to mitigate global warming and keep climate change manageable.

For the robust science behind the bleak future, see Hansen et al. 2016 [114]:¹

Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms. [114]

If we don’t get much more active, I’ll soon have to update the bleak future to “⚀ or ⚁” (1 or 2).³⁴

It’s crazy to just imagine the risk taken in the Paris agreement 2015 by targeting up to 1.5°C warming, and that was already the best plausible outcome.

Strip drawn on commission by the awesome Mike Perry (http://nodicemike.com/ [108]). Licensed cc by [89]. The full source is attached.

There is a german version: Zusammen für Zivilisation [115].

Why free speech does not equal to the right of being heard

→ written in a discussion with Sascha [123]¹ in Freenet [20] using Sone.

If free speech included being allowed to force all people to listen, then it would also include my right to force you to listen to everything I say.

Think this on the scale of 6 billion people all using freenet. Every one of them could force you to listen to him/her/it. Whom would you ignore?

In WoT getting some people² to see your message is possible, but it has a price: solving captchas.

The same is true for real life demonstrations: If you want to be seen, you have to get up and actually invest something - be it time, effort or risk to your reputation.

In real life we have channels through which we sell our attention. They are called advertisements and advertisement financed services, and access to our attention is tightly controlled by some few gatekeepers who make lots of money by keeping a hold on our attention.

In freenet all you have to do for being seen is solve some captchas, a rule which is the same for everyone.

You cannot afford 1% predators

The discussion about sexual assault at conferences has been going on for a few years now. Moral reasoning has been discussed a lot, and I will not repeat that.¹

Here I will give a dispassionate, cold and calculating reason why your community cannot afford to tolerate 1% predators:

If in a community of 50 men and 50 women, one person is a predator who attacks one woman every year and causes her to leave, and every year either a man or a woman joins, the community will be male-only after 100 years.

Even 1% predators is far too much.

To take this apart:

• I assume that interest in the topic is equal between men and women.
• I assume that the community starts out with 50 men and 50 women.
• Now I add a single predator who attacks one woman every year.
• The woman subsequently leaves.
• One new person joins to take her place. Since interest is assumed equal, there’s a 50% chance that it’s a woman and a 50% chance that it’s a man.
• Overall the community therefore loses one woman every second year.
• Within 100 years there will be no single woman left in the community.

Therefore no community can afford to tolerate even one predator per 100 people — regardless of how the predator causes women to leave.

Even 1% predators cause massive structural discrimination. If you tolerate those 1% of people, you lose 50% of your community — and, all moral issues aside, no community should burn half their members for the sake of the 1% who might be predators.

Note that most people in such a community won’t notice the predatory behavior, simply because most of the time they will only interact in smaller subgroups of 5 to 10 people. If in a community of 100 people more than 10 people noticed something odd, that’s a big red flag that there might be a predator in the group who could hurt and drive away half the community if not stopped.

PS: The same goes with the genders reversed: Anyone who makes one person of one specific gender leave every year can effectively render a community single-gender.

def censor_the_net()

def censor_the_net():
  "wealth vs. democracy via media-control [125]"
  try: SOPA() # see Stop Online Piracy Act [126] 
  except Protest: # see sopastrike.com [127] 
    try: PIPA() # see PROTECT IP Act [128] 
    except Protest: # see weak links [129] 
      try: OPEN() # see red herring [130] 
      except Protest: 
        try: ACTA() # see Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement [131] 
        except Protest: # see resignation [132]⁽¹⁾ [133], court [134], vote anyway [135] and advise against [136]
          try: CISPA() # see Stop the Online Spying Bill [137] 
          except Protest: # see Dangers [138]
            try: CETA() # See Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement [139]
            except Protest:  # see ePetition 50705 [140]
              try: TTIP() # See Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership [141]
              except Protest: # see TTIP-Protest erreicht Brüssel [142] and Wie wir TTIP gestoppt haben [143]
                try: TISA() # See Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) [144]
                except Protest: # see Unter Ausschluss der Öffentlichkeit [145]
                  try: JEFTA() # See Wie TTIP [146] und wieder hinter verschlossenen Türen [147]
                  except Protest: # see deep concern [148] und TTIP auf Japanisch verhindern [149] und Ein Kniefall vor Japan? [150] und JEFTA Leaks [151]
                    try: Article11And13() # See Die Zensurmaschinen und das Leistungsschutzrecht kommen in die Zielgerade der EU-Gesetzgebung  [152]
                    except Protest: # see Stop the censorship-machinery! Save the Internet! [69]
                      try: FreiwilligeRasterung() # See Mit Hashabgleich und TPM  [153]
                      except Protest: # see nur für gute Menschen [153] and „eine neue Zensursula-Kampagne“ [154] and „Wenn Privatsphäre kriminalisiert wird, werden nur Kriminelle noch Privatsphäre haben.“ [155]
                        try: TERREG() # See TERREG-Verordnung [156]
                        except Protest: # see discord.savetheinternet [157] and TERREG-Sharepics [158] and Uploadfilter auf Steroiden [159] and new online censorship powers [160]
                          try: Chatkontrolle() # See Nachrichtendurchleuchtung [161]
                          except Protest: # see KI Anzeige wegen Sexting [162] and Wiretapping Children [163] and Deutscher Anwaltsverein [164] and Strategic autonomy in danger [165] and Kinderschutzbund gegen anlasslose Scans verschlüsselter Nachrichten [166] and droht unsere Strafverfolgung…lahmzulegen [167] and das verdächtige Bild [168]
                            try: CETA_in_Gruen() # See Ratifizierung im Galopp [169]
                            except Protest: # see Ceta bleibt falsch [170] and Zu wenig staatliche Kontrolle [171]
                              if destroy_free_speech_and_computers() [172]: # (english video)
                                from __future__ import plutocracy 

while wealth_breeds_wealth [173] and wealth_gives_power [174]: # (german text and english video)
  # see wealth vs. democracy via media-control [125] (german)
  censor_the_net() 

This code is valid Python [175].

Feel free to use and change this snippet, as long as you include a reference to this page (http://draketo.de/node/475 or http://draketo.de/light/english/politics/def-censor-the-net-2012) or my name (Arne Babenhauserheide).

Here’s the linked english video, embedded (external, not GPL!):

default answer to “I want to connect with you on [hip unfree service]”

I just decided to give a default answer when I get some email from people asking me to connect to them on some new unfree service:

Hello [Person],

You asked me to connect with you on some unfree service. If you still want that, just use a status.net [176]-server. Those are federated, so you can use a number of different providers and still be connected to everyone on any other server. As an example, see quitter.se [177] — or check the server-feature list [178]¹.

You can then subscribe to me on sn.1w6.org/drak [179].

It’s bad enough that I have Twitter and G+. I don’t see value in another non-federated service.

Best wishes,
Arne

PS: Join the Federation!

don’t change your habits - fix your tools!

→ In don't run 'strings' on untrusted files [180] Michal Zalewski complained that running the strings-utility for computer forensics or other fields of information security could make you vulnerable yourself, so you should not use that. Given that strings is Free Software, I find a different conclusion from the vulnerability of tools used by professional forensics people.

I’d say if you’re actually using these tools to earn money, it is high time to go in and fix them. Also the linked bug (nine years ago) is marked as fixed. So there are people doing that.

Software has bugs. Free Software [181] makes it possible for people who rely on it to fix problems they encounter - especially when they rely on it for their profession.

That’s part of the point of allowing commercial use of Free Software: To allow expert craftspeople to collaborate on improving their tools.

PS: Naturally there’s a limit to fixing the tools. There are habits which should be changed, but if the tools don’t get worse for other things by fixing them, those changed habits are workarounds which should be replaced with clean fixes.

identi.ca Group: Out of Group (!oog)

What !oog is

The Out of Group [182] group is a way to request leading an overboarding discussion out of group (so you don't spam all the people who are in the group where the discussion started, but who simply want news).

Motto

Please discuss out of group. You can wrap up the discussion afterwards (link to the context [183]) and add a group tag then.

How To

To request taking a discussion out of group, simply join !oog [182], add !oog to your message and then leave the group again (except if you want to see other !oog requests).

For example you can use the following to request moving !oog:

Please let us continue the discussion !oog and wrap it up afterwards. It disturbs others in here. !group1 !group2

Background

This is a reaction to a discussion about the use of group-tags in discussions [183].

Archived discussion

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license [184].

• rysiek
  @teddks: stop using group tags, please. everybody on !ubuntu and !linux have heard enough, really.

• teddks
  @rysiek I respond to in-group messages in-group. If you don't want me to use them, don't use them to me. !ubuntu !linux

• arnebab
  @rysiek @teddks please leave the group tags out, both of you.

• teddks
  @arnebab My policy for group-posting rebuttals was posted a bit ago.

• arnebab
  @teddks please discuss out of the group. You can wrap up the discussion afterwards and add a group tag then. You're one post from a block.

• arnebab
  @teddks By not discussing in the group you make the others' in-group posts look silly. Otherwise you just look silly yourself.

• teddks
  @arnebab Wait, what? I only discuss in-group if the previous post was in-group.

• arnebab
  @teddks That principle doesn't scale. If we all used it groups would be useless. A wrapup post can get people to read all http://is.gd/6CoYI [185]

• teddks
  @arnebab I might start doing that for oog discussions, but I'm not going to deny myself the same forum my opponents have.

• arnebab
  @teddks they are not opponents but discussion partners. And they look silly if they stay ingroup while you post oog. Just ask them to go oog

• arnebab
  @teddks and wrap it up later. If they insist on staying ingroup, just post one ingroup request to come oog and let peer pressure do the rest

• arnebab
  @teddks they broadcast to people who aren't interested and will block them.

• arnebab
  @teddks sorry for the phraselike answer. 140 chars aren't ideal for discussing more complex topics...

• teddks
  @arnebab I understand. I kind of regret how identi.ca has taken the place of IRC for a lot of things.

• teddks
  @arnebab That's irrelevant; in-group they get to broadcast their arguments and their views. I'm not going to deny myself that.

• arnebab
  @teddks That means I have to block you when you post your next ingroup broadcast. You lose all readers that way.

• teddks
  @arnebab Now you are inviting spam and personal attacks against me in !ubuntu. Is that pursuant to the Code of Conduct?

• arnebab
  @teddks You do know that people can see the context with one click, do you?

• teddks
  @arnebab I don't see what you're implying - that I should depend on clickthroughs to have my arguments be heard?

• arnebab
  @teddks Since you kept spamming the !ubuntu and !linux group and explicitely said you won't stop ( http://is.gd/6Cucx [186] ) I blocked you.

• teddks
  @arnebab I can't respond fully now, but I will later. I'm sorry that the #Ubuntu group's de facto policy is now one of censorship.

Note: arnebab was no member of the ubuntu group at that time. The block was/is a purely personal one: Nothing teddks writes will appear on arnebabs timeline, till he unblocks teddks.

p2p-networks help law enforcement catch hard criminals

Comment to: Local man faces court on child pornography charges [187] by heraldstandard.com

As I see it, the only way the authorities did track him was due to his use of p2p-networks.

At the moment, technology makes it relatively easy for the police to track hard criminals in p2p-networks, but it also allows people to do small infringements rather safely (just like people don't stop at red traffic lights when there is no car in sight),

So I'd think the current state quite ideal.

Sadly there's an organisation called RIAA¹ which drives p2p-networks underground and which will eventually cease that action or achieve the "fame" to have been the one organisation which was responsible in the end for forcing p2p-networks to evolve into completely anonymous and untrackable networks, where hard crimes aren't trackable anymore.

So, this case shows once again, that noncommercial "piracy" shouldn't be attacked but should instead be allowed and even fostered, because it increases social welfare (the access to media is improved, while there is no significant damage to sales) and in many cases even helped law enforcement catch criminals who really do damage (and in this case: did very much damage).

Information about the impact of p2p-networks based on a study from the university of chicago: - http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JPE/journal/issues/v115n1/31618/31618.html [188] - http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?JPE31618PDF [189] (open twice to read)

power and blindness: the tragedy behind systemd

→ comment to The Tragedy of systemd [190] where Benno Rice said that he’s impressed by the way how systemd was spread into most GNU/Linux distributions and that systemd was a source of ideas for BSD.

Looking at the methods used to force distributions to adopt systemd, i.e. by adding hard dependencies in the biggest desktop environment or by bundling udev and continuously tightening the dependency from udev on systemd, that’s a form of power-play against the distributions. A dependency I really don’t want [191]. One group decided that they wanted to force everyone else to buy into their new system. And then they used every leverage they could get to do that.

SystemD developers decided to become the one group that can dictate conditions on everyone else.

I can see the skill in that power-play, and be impressed by the skill, but seeing how that power is used and what methods are used, I am also horrified by what they did and how they will continue to abuse that power they now grabbed.

About systemd being a source of ideas: systemd contains quite a few ideas that come straight from the Hurd, but have worse implementations in systemd. Systemd solves problems by tacking things onto Linux — problems that have been solved in the Hurd in a clean way 15 years ago. For good ideas, don’t repeat the mistake of ignoring the Hurd. Instead first look at the clean implementation and take care to put functionality at the right level.

In hindsight, SystemD is the consequence of ignoring that the Hurd solves real problems. Of ignoring the technical advantages of the Hurd [192].

power and deception

A religious leader is nothing more than a media-star who managed to convince people that the tale, in which he or she is special, is actually true.

Just like aristocrats managed to convince people that what their ancestors did gives them the right to control the lives of other people.

And like the rich convince people that money gives them the right to control a larger part of the world than others.

“If you like what I do, why don’t you help me?”

Almost every free software developer made the experience that many people like his or her work, but very few actually provide help. If you experience this, don’t let it disheart you. Verbal support without practical help sounds inconsistent at first, but it actually is the result of limited time.

Most people who have the skills to help are already committed to other projects, so they cannot help you on yours. They can encourage you from the sidelines (“This is cool! If I had time, I’d gladly help!”), but they cannot dive into the code, understand it and help improving it.

If you have 100 fans, one might actually have the resources to provide help. And this is not limited to software.

See for example how this works in media: A video from acapella artist Smooth McGroove [193] gets 250.000 views on Youtube and 15.000 Likes. It is funded by 750 people (with at least 1$ per video - about 200 give at least 5$). These are the numbers for someone who has 45.000 followers in twitter and 160.000 Likes in F***b***. And who’s a legend in the gaming community - while being funded by only 750 people (including me).

250k viewers, 750 supporters. 3 in 1000 people support him (it’s enough for him to work full-time on his art). That’s the scale I want to show here. And this scale is visible when it’s just about giving One Dollar - the equivalent of 5 minutes of work. Much less than the time it took me to compose this text.

So whatever project you do: If few people help you, keep up your spirits: You are competing against every other project out there for their time and money - and some of these projects might be their own creations.

And when even a single person supports you, remember that this is a huge statement of support - much bigger than it seems when you are focussed on the work you do.

(This is the best time to again thank everyone who ever supported me: Thank you for your help! I don’t earn enough to fund the cost of my server, but everything I get is like a little star which lights up in my heart and shows me that there are people who care enough to give me something for the stuff I do.)

(Written in a bug-report for el marmalade [194])