Being unpolitical
means being political
without realizing it.
— Arne Babenhauserheide

Here you’ll find texts about politics and free licensing. Some of my creative works on the topic can be found under Songs, though.

More technical articles on using free software is filed under Free Software.

I just had a database error in WoT (the Freenet generic Web of Trust plugin) and couldn’t access one of my identities anymore (plus I didn’t have a backup of its private keys though it told me to keep backups – talk about carelessness :) ).

I asked p0s on IRC and he helped me patch together a WoT which doesn’t access the context for editing the ID (and in turn misses some functionality). This allowed me to regain my IDs private key and with that redownload my ID from freenet.

I needed to convert a huge batch of mediawiki-files to html (had a 2010-03 copy of the now dead limewire wiki lying around). With a tip from RoanKattouw in #mediawiki@freenode.net I created a simple python script to convert arbitrary files from mediawiki syntax to html.

Usage:

• Download the script and install the dependencies (yaml and python 3).

If you want to publish your scientific scripts, as Nick Barnes advises in Nature, you can very easily do so with Mercurial.

All my stuff (not just code), excempting only huge datasets, is in a Mercurial source repository.¹

Whenever I change something and it does anything new, I commit the files with a simple commit (even if it’s only “it compiles!”).

→ Comment to France Starts Reporting ‘Millions’ of File-Sharers by Torrent Freak.

I hope they all turn to freenet. There’s scance chance of getting many user-addresses there, and it can provide a service similar to torrents and decentral tracker in one, but anonymously and safe from censorship.

→ http://freenetproject.org

I’ve been running it for years now, and it got better and more secure every year.

→ comment to The Four Freedoms of Free Culture on QuestionCopyright.org.

Thank you for spreading the thought of freedom in culture!

I currently don’t use creativecommons licenses on my site, because they have no source protection (you can’t exercise your right of modifying, if the work is hidden inside some non-source container, like autoscrolling flash).

Update: I changed this in 2015 when cc by-sa became one-way compatible with GPLv3. Now I also allow cc by-sa for text.

Instead I use the GPLv3, for my site (draketo.de — licensing) as well as for a free roleplaying book I write (1w6.org — german).

My reason for using free licenses in all my hobby work is simple: When a cultural work becomes part of my life, any restriction on using that work takes away a part of my personal freedom.

That’s why freedom is essential for all cultural works that matter.

I just discovered tabbing of everything in KDE:

(download)

Created with recordmydesktop, cut with kdenlive, encoded to ogg theora with ffmpeg2theora (encoding command).

Music: Beat into Submission on [Public Domain](

Stories of Weaklings, who win every fight
against bigger foes with their voices might,

Stories of Anarchists, who do nothing more,
than talk and talk, and still win the war.

Stories of Mages, who mumble and roar,
for a fizzling spell, which still makes them sore.

Stories of Dreamers, who sing in the night,
and weave our future, shining so bright.

All this you can find here, come out of the dark,
set Style over Substance, for that is our mark.

(I actually usually do the opposite, but there is
something to stories of those who live on style)

Update: I nowadays think that voting down is useful, but only for protection against spam and intentional disruption of communication. Essentially a distributed function to report spam.

I don’t see a reason for negative reputation schemes — voting down is in my view a flawed concept.

The rest of this article is written for freetalk inside freenet, and also posted there with my nonanonymous ID.

That just allows for community censorship, which I see as incompatible with the goals of freenet.

science in a dent:

(1) Form a theory. (2) design an experiment to test the theory. (3) do it. (4) Adjust the theory, if needed → (2)

→ written in GNU social.

Please feel free to use it!

If that’s to brief:

→ the scientific method, explained very basically and simply.

and

*That’s not faith. It’s theory.

After the last round of polishing, I decided to publish my theme under AGPLv3. Reason: If you use AGPL code and people access it over a network, you have to offer them the code. Which I hereby do ;)
That’s the only way to make sure that website code stays free.

It’s still for Drupal 5, because I didn’t get around to port it, and it has some ugly hacks, but it should be fully functional.

Just untar it in any Drupal 5 install.

A song about sharing and free software and changing the world. Originally written to recreate the vision of the Polar Skulk in art.

Criticism and praise would be a great gift to the pup writing this song.

A song from the icy lands

Freedom for Music, for Movies and for every word,
Fighting is not quite absurd,
and we are peaceful, good and kind,
and fight for freedom of the mind.

To Why I Steal Movies… Even Ones I'm In by Peter Serafinowicz.

I think there’s a very simple reason why EMI remotely encumbers a channel: It’s a battle about control.

The battle about who will control where, when and how people can enjoy works of art.

That battle goes against the fans (who want to enjoy stuff and pay for it on their own terms) and the artists (who want people to enjoy their stuff and pay for it).

→ A comment to The Effectiveness of Political Assassinations.

Another answer why this doesn’t work is really simple: Consider that you were in a terrorist organization. You work with people in secrecy, but the ones you know are close to you, because they know your most intimate secrets.

Short: You fight alongside friends (though probably assholes by most ethical standards).

Now someone kills one of your friends.

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.

-> a comment to
Wikipedia, Notability, and Open Source Software by ubunTARD.

2010-03-23
Update: I just got unblocked by henrik who also sent me an excuse for the way the whole process was handled: “…The block was partly an individual misjudgment, but also a result of the systemic culture and some poorly thought out policies. If you're interested, I'd be happy to discuss it in more detail…”. And that restores a lot of my faith in the wikipedia community — thank you very much for your excuse, henrik!
Also they are currently discussing on the incidents board how to avoid similarly overboarding blocking like that in the future.

Just as an inside notice from the discussion: I joined the first deletion discussion when I got note of it (I don't know anymore through which channel) and when it got closed, I joined the second one and got heavily frustrated when people tried to turn “he sent the developers a berliner bratwurst” into “the magazine which published his article is a first source” (which would mean it wouldn't count as source for “notability”).

-> written in reply to Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation on techdirt.

This shows painfully how power is shifting currently:

• <5% of the people have >90% of the resources.
• So the <5% have more influence on the media.
• The media influences which people are elected into positions of power.
• Then these elected pass laws which shift more resources and power towards the <5%.

-> A comment on The Importance of Managing Your Online Reputation.

I read your article, and I found the points you make very interesting, though not only in a positive way.

You tackle the “we have a network others can see” from the active side: “How can I make sure my employer likes what he sees?”.

-> A reply to bashing against Defective By Design.

I was a rabid MacUser 5 years ago.

Then I learned about DRM, TPM and privacy. And I left Apple because they put in TPM chips into developer machines.

Today I'm a happy GNU/Linux user and I contribute from time to time to Gentoo, KDE and Mercurial.

(my way from Apple to GNU/Linux:
- http://bah.draketo.de/ (Broken Apple Heart in German)
- http://draketo.de/english/songs/light/broken-apple-heart (in english) )

What !oog is

The Out of Group 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) and add a group tag then.

How To

Some of my answers to basic questions

Written in a survey about attitudes towards free software.

Is proprietary (=unfree) software immoral or unethical?

it isn't immoral (moral = what's the current stance of mainstream society), but it is unethical when solidarity and self-determination are part of your ethical axioms.

Update 2016: I nowadays just use emerge --sync; emerge @security

To keep my Gentoo up to date, I use daily and weekly update scripts which also always run revdep-rebuild after the saturday night update :)

My daily update is via pkgcore to pull in all important security updates:

pmerge @glsa

That pulls in the Gentoo Linux Security Advisories - important updates with mostly short compile time. (You need pkgcore for that: "emerge pkgcore")

Also I use two cron scripts.

- a Filk on "X as in Fox" by Cecilia Eng -

Once we believed in the speed of the light,
and experiments show that what we thought is right,
But we search our math for another sight,

'Cause we hope that the truth is in there.

When we measure the speed of something somehow,
we can only check against the distance, but now
we'll show that we get it from Maxwell', and wow!

We will know that the truth is in there!

First we take a sheet of charge at hand,

-> an answer to Blog posts are no replacement for documentation by flameeyes.

Hi flameeyes,

I kinda know your problem: It's far easier to write a number of Blog posts than to write a structured book up front - and I think two major parts of that are, that a weblog provides many more "Yes, I've done it!" moments than a book and that a blog has a much lower barrier to entry.

To the melody of Dawson's Christian from Duane Elms.

<

div style="float: right; text-align: center; border: solid thin gray; padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em; padding-top: 1em; margin-left: 1em">

- PDF -
FilkTeX

Update: The basic bug shown here is now fixed in Firefox. Read on to see whether the fix works for you. Keep in mind that there are much stronger attacks than the one shown here. Use private mode to reduce the amount of data your Browser keeps. What’s not there cannot be claimed.

After the example of making-the-web, I was quite intrigued by the ease of sniffing the history via simple CSS tricks.

So I decided to test, how small I get a Python program which can sniff the history via CSS - without requiring any scripting ability on the browser-side.

I first produced fully commented code (see server.py) and then stripped it down to just 64 lines (server-stripped.py), to make it really crystal clear, that making your browser vulnerable to this exploit is a damn bad idea. I hope this will help get Firefox fixed quickly.

It's often said, that Gentoo is all about choice, but that doesn't quite fit what it is for me.

After all, the highest ability to choose is Linux from scratch and I can have any amount of choice in every distribution by just going deep enough (and investing enough time).

What really distinguishes Gentoo for me is that it makes it convenient to choose.

Since we all have a limited time budget, many of us only have real freedom to choose, because we use Gentoo which makes it possible to choose with the distribution-tools.

-> the_gdf just got spam from a raving christian. Since I am a moderator there, I got that spam and rejected it. But because I was in a good mood, I felt compelled to answer :)

- insert random ravin' lunatic the-world-is-going-to-end talk -

*gg*

Have fun!

Me, instead, I'll rather go with the 6th world of the inkas - they were there earlier than your book.

The alternative is to just believe in science:

Comment to is the web too good for us 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.

From the Gentoo Forums:

I agree that spreading a positive 
message is good, but I've always 
been nervous to send thank you 
notes out to people I've never 
met.  
Worse, I don't want to potentially 
overload an inbox with a mes-
sage that isn't going to help all 
that much. Hopefully it would be 
received in a positve way. 

I try to remember to send "thank you"s from time to time.