Manifiesto: "In deffense of the fundamental rights in the internet"

A group of journalists, bloggers, professionals and creators want to express their firm opposition to the inclusion in a Draft Law of some changes to Spanish laws restricting the freedoms of expression, information and access to culture on the Internet. They also declare that:

1. Copyright should not be placed above citizens' fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.

2. Suspension of fundamental rights is and must remain an exclusive competence of judges. This blueprint, contrary to the provisions of Article 20.5 of the Spanish Constitution, places in the hands of the executive the power to keep Spanish citizens from accessing certain websites.

3. The proposed laws would create legal uncertainty across Spanish IT companies, damaging one of the few areas of development and future of our economy, hindering the creation of startups, introducing barriers to competition and slowing down its international projection.

4. The proposed laws threaten creativity and hinder cultural development. The Internet and new technologies have democratized the creation and publication of all types of content, which no longer depends on an old small industry but on multiple and different sources.

5. Authors, like all workers, are entitled to live out of their creative ideas, business models and activities linked to their creations. Trying to hold an obsolete industry with legislative changes is neither fair nor realistic. If their business model was based on controlling copies of any creation and this is not possible any more on the Internet, they should look for a new business model.

6. We believe that cultural industries need modern, effective, credible and affordable alternatives to survive. They also need to adapt to new social practices.

7. The Internet should be free and not have any interference from groups that seek to perpetuate obsolete business models and stop the free flow of human knowledge.

8. We ask the Government to guarantee net neutrality in Spain, as it will act as a framework in which a sustainable economy may develop.

9. We propose a real reform of intellectual property rights in order to ensure a society of knowledge, promote the public domain and limit abuses from copyright organizations.

10. In a democracy, laws and their amendments should only be adopted after a timely public debate and consultation with all involved parties. Legislative changes affecting fundamental rights can only be made in a Constitutional law.

Other languages and more info here.

...custodian of the
stolen plans that can save her
people and restore
freedom to the galaxy....

Opening Crawl: A New Hope

Check out this pic...

"Not again! Obi-Wan's going to kill me"
Anakin Skywalker

A very expensive javascript...

Hallvord R. M. Steen GeekDancer and Sith hacker at Opera Software explains in his blog how, by the time they were increasing the computing capacity of the company, they found some nice and smart javascript.

The thing is that, by the time, Opera Software was about to buy some servers to fulfill the growth of their services. The management department turned on the green light to spend a hefty quantity of money in the new purchase, so all the big hardware companies wanted a bite of the cake and servers samples were travelling from all over the world to Oslo trying to satisfy the sysadmins needs.

One of those major hardware vendors, name not revealed but apparently whose name you would be familiar with, didn't do it very well. When Opera's sysadmins booted up the server and tried to test the web-based administration interface, they founded some wonderful javascript able to piss off everyone there.

Apparently it had been written by some sub-contractor they had outsourced in order to come up with the programing of the administration interface. This cost them a lot of money in unsuccessful sales.

Here you have some of the code sent to Opera Software for testing:

if (is.opera)
{
window.location.href="config/error.htm";
}

"Watch what?"
Princess Leia Organa

Not everything is perfect...

"...they might find a weakness and exploit it."
General Tagge

Europe keeps Internet free...

The European Parliament has rejected to allow governments to disconnect Internet users. By 407 votes, they approved the amendment that will force the European governments to ask for a judge's warrant in order to be able to disconnect someone.

These are some new impediments for those countries, such as France, that want to obtain the power to disconnect P2P users without having to ask for any warrant. This is a new step in the fight to preserve the rights of the users as well as the freedom over the Net.

Yes, this is a new victory in our battle against the dark side of the source. We blew up the death star, but don't get too excited they might come with a new one soon...

Yahoo! [just after the Death Star is blown up]
Han Solo

Letter to the European Parlament

Next 5th of May the European Parliment will be voting to decide if they would give the Internet Providers the power to limit the number and type of pages you can see or the services you can use over the Internet. They call it "New options for the consumer matching his necessities", but it is just a new law in order to control the flow of music, films and other entretainment and cultural stuff. In summary: Just another try to privatize the Internet

Hacktivistas, Jedis knights fighting for the freedom of the universe have made this form in order to help us send the Eurpean Parliment our thoughts about the privatization of the Internet...

...More than 300.000 mails has been already sent! Don't be the last one!

Fill in the following form

Filling in the following form you can send a message to the 876 members for the Eruopean Parliment related to the Open Letter to the European Parliment. Write them what you think is right, but try to be respectufl, only this way our requests would be listened.

Name:
E-mail:
Subject:
Message:

Privacy Policy

xmailer copyleft Isaac Hacksimov 2009, license GPLv3, powered by Hacktivistas.net

"You can't win, Darth.
If you strike me down,
I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

Obi Wan Kenobi

The picture of the Dark Side of the Source

The main and more powerful OS until now from the Dark Side of the Source (Windows XP) comes with a picture that has become pretty famous for being its default wallpaper. It is a picture called "Bliss" taken by Charles O'Rear at the Napa Valley, east of Sonoma Valley, county of Napa (Californa, United States). Charles O'Rear is a photographer from USA, he has worked for the National Geographic for more than 25 years. In year 2000, Microsoft bought this picture, paying 200 million dollars for it.

But things are usually quite different in those Napa Valley Hills, actually that wavy green hill is covered with a bunch of vines. Between 1990 and 1995 the vines from Napa Valley got infected by a plague called Phylloxera, which forced people to remove a 30% of the vines growing instead the nice green grass showed in the famous picture.
O'Rear took that picture while he was driving down the 12/121 road just stopping by on one of the sides of it. So, let's see how it looks right now:

"Faith in your new apprentice, misplaced may be.
As is your faith in the dark side of the Force."
Master Yoda

Swedish are loosing thier privacy...

[Update: Apr, 08, 2009] "After this law was enforced, interent P2P traffic has dropped down to a 50% in Swedish networks following the information provided by netnod. This company manages the main P2P exchange web pages (Luleå, Sundsvall, Stockholm, Gothenburg y Malmö). But there's still hope since many of the main networks only comunicate between them and are not included in these statistics."

The Swedish government has twisted by the dark side. They have come up with a law that allow the courts to ask for a user's information who is behind an IP address that has shared copyrighted stuff.

Yesterday, April's 01st 2009, Sweden, in an effort to end with the files sharing that is taking place over the Internet, has enforced the new law against the "piracy". So, now the owner of the rights of a song would be able to make the Internet Server Provider facilitate the personal data of an IP, that have been sharing files.

But on our side, there is still hope, Jedis from the council are fighting against these unfairness. For instance, Jedi Hackers from The Pirate Bay, the famous sued P2P portal, have released IPREDator, an anonymous surfing tool that will help us against to protect our privacy. Also, Rick Falkvinge, leader of the pirate party has asked all citizens to open their WiFis in order to make this law useless, so Internet will remain anonymous and open forever...

"The fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side."
Master Yoda

Free Blogger!! Italian Bloggers claim for help...

Italian bloggers are asking for help to bloggers knights from all galaxies. It seems that the politicians from the dark side of the source in their country are trying to make all the free bloggers in that country to be licensed by the state.

Italian Parliament has been accelerating the legislation against the Internet. It is the last free media. The rest are perfectly controlled by the government: 7 national TV's are owned by the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, 3 are owned by the state so they are controlled by the Governament (Prime Minister, again), all major newspapers are financed by the State...

Now Carlucci, ex show girl now member of Parliament for the right wing, is proposing to a law to forbid to publish any content in any form on line anonymously.

So, if you still believe in freedom of speech and want to help Italian Bloggers, please, send in your photos with the words: "FREE BLOGGER"

Send an email to freeblogger@beppegrillo.it with:
- subject: your name
- text: the address of your blog
- attached: a photo of you with a sign saying "FREE BLOGGER"

"Red Group, Green Group, Gold Group, all fighters follow me..."
Lando Calrissian

IE8? Nice job Microsoft!

Here they come again, with their right new Internet Explorer 8. But just a few days after the great release Nils, a German Jedi hacker of the open source, has hacked the ultimate navigation tool wining the 5000$ and the laptop offered at the 10th annual CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, Canada.

He managed to break into Microsoft's safest browser yet using a yet-unknown vulnerability a few hours after IE8 was launched as the browser was running on a Windows 7 Beta platform.

By the the contest policies, details of the vulnerabilities are kept confidential until the vendor releases a patch. They say they will work closely with the vendors to solve the problems.

Up to now, Microsoft has released a statement saying that they are investigating reports of possible vulnerabilities and actions will be taken if confirmed.

"Oh, great warrior, hmm? Wars not make one great."
Master Yoda

The Apple

Today I am going to talk about how the dark side of the source decided one of the most famous and most appreciated symbols, THE apple.

Apple's first logo lasted from 1971 to 1976. It was designed by Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne, and it shows Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree:
It didn't last much time, mainly because it was replaced the colored Apple designed by Rob Janoff in 1976. It's believed that this apple is a tribute mixing Isaac Newton's discoveries of gravity and the separation of light by prisms:
Another known explanation for the bitten apple exits, and it refers to the mathematician Alan Turing, who was founded dead apparently because of eating a cyanide-laced apple he left half-eaten beside his bed. Most believe this was a suicide. His mother, however, strenuously argued that the ingestion was accidental due to his careless storage of laboratory chemicals. The rainbow colors are attributed to Turing's homosexuality.

In 1998, with the iMac the monochromatic logo was released, conferred to the insistence of recently returned Steve Jobs. Right now no color is prescribed throughout Apple's software and hardware line.

"Already know you that which you need."
Master Yoda

Windows vSHITa

I was using this shity O.S from the dark side of the source, in a friend´s computer and suddenly Internet stopped working, and when I looked at the task bar... waaaaaaah!, there was the old windows bar!! It´s hidden right under the new one!! What a piece of crap!!

"That's no moon... it's a space station."
Obi-Wan kenobi

Transformers!

They are coming...

What an incredible smell you've discovered!
Han Solo

Spanish Consulting Company uses Debian's logo in green

[Update: Feb, 03, 2009] "As I promised here is the results of my research: So, I decided to ask in Barrapunto (the Spanish Slashdot) about the issue, and following the comments and re-reading the Debian Logo's license it seems that it could not be a "huge" violation of the Copyright law. They should just add a comment saying where the logo comes from and/or a link to the Debian project's web page. And the final obtained conclusion is that since I am not directly affected, I cannot "do more" than inform the parts involved in the case."

Surfing the Internet I founded a Spanish consulting company from the dark side of the source using a nice green logo lightly similar to the logo of the rebel group called Debian. I am not very strong in laws, and after reading the Debian Open Use Logo License, I don't really know if this becomes a violation of the it. I know that in the software galaxy the fsf take charage of violation reports of their licenses GNU GPL, LGPL, AGPL, o FDL, but I don't really know what should be the correct acting protocol in this case. Right now I am researching about it, I will post my progress...

Here you have the logos so you can check the mentioned similarities:

Debian's Logo:

Consulting Company's Logo:

"I have a very bad feeling about this."
Luke Skywalker

Some history of Weapons from the Dark Side (Mac)

Apple's Macintosh commercial, directed by Ridley Scott

Steve Jobs Introducing Mac to the Galaxy

And now some pics...

1984 - Macintosh 128Kb

1987 - Macintosh II

1989 - Macintosh Portable

1991 - Quadra 700

1991 - PowerBook 100

1993 - Macintosh Color Classic

1998 - iMac

1999 - Power Macintosh G3

1999- iBook

2001 - PowerBook G4


2002 - iMac G4

2003 - Power Mac G5

2008: MacBook Air

The Future?: MacBook Wheel (no keyboard!, WTF?!)

"I have you now."

Darth Vader

OpenBSD's song 4.4: "Trial of the BSD Knights"

Source Wars
Episode IV
Trial of the BSD Knights




"Not so very long ago
and not so far away
AT&T made system code
and gave some bits away

Some Berkeley geeks rebuilt it
better, faster, more diverse
This open thing was wonderful
for everyone on Earth

And then the roaring 90's came
The Empire changed its mind
And good old greed was back again
The geeks were in a legal bind

The Empire's Unix Lab
sued BSDi from above
The code is free but
only we can sell it bub!

The University came calling
in full protective mode
and proved the source in Net/2
didn't use the Empire's code

Then Bostic brought the Empire's books
n' slammed them dandys down
And showed the giant chunks
of BSD code all around

They didn't even give an ounce
of credit front to back
This broke the license USL
was using to attack

The case was thrown out by the judge
and "settled" out of court
And UCB was big enough
to take it like a sport

And to this day the geekfolk say
Now did we win or lose?
They shoulda made 'em reprint
every book with proper dues

And take out ads in major rags
apologetically
And maybe now it wouldn't be
the same monopoly

The Empire might have tumbled
down if everybody saw
How greed became so big
they couldn't see that glaring flaw

But only one community
the one that makes it tick
Is there to fight for everyone
exposing hypocrites

And OpenBSD is here
to tell the story right
Once again the fight is fought
and kept in shining light

And may the source be with you
May the Empire fall apart
Ya like that's gonna happen!
But we gotta keep heart!"

Download song, more here.

Que?!
Darth Vader.

YouTube's Internal Server Error

It seems that Google's stuff can also fail. It's undeniable truth that it doesn't happen so frequently as in other apps... but here you have an Internal Server Error I got today trying to find a Halo video on YouTube. Pretty cool the second line of the error's explanation, Huh? What a freaks!
Now a philosophical question comes to my mind: Do they have monkeys working at Google or are they calling they own workers, trained monkeys?

"I'm afraid my mission to bring you to Alderaan has failed."
Princess Leia Organa

The Environmental Impact of Google searches

A typical Google search generates about 7g of CO2, Boiling a kettle generates about 15g, pointed out Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, Physicist at Harvard University. So according to Dr. Alexander performing two Google searches will generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.

According to Times online's article: "More than 200m internet searches are estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions."

Up to now, Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. Data centers are one of the most energy-intensive facilities that exists and Google operates huge data centers all over the world consuming a big amount of power. On the other hand, google's explaination says that obviously in the quantified amount of energy is also included the one used by your personal computer which is higher than the one used by the search engine to answer your query. The company said that one Google search is about 0.2 grams of CO2.

For further information here is Dr. Alexander's website called co2stats, and here a more deep description of the research.

"Do you think they'll melt us down?"
C-3PO

Cut-backs at the Evil Empire force of MS

There are rumors going on about layoffs at the "Evil Empire force of Microsoft", as much as 17% of its workforce (which is a lot). It seems that they are not immune to recession and things are not going good for the strongest privative force of the Software Galaxy. The truth is that some sources from the inside pointed out that there might be a hit for a few quarters next year. They assure nothing is gonna happen in January but they also say that "anything" could be possible over the following months... certainly it seems that is not gonna be before the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held in Vegas (Nevada), on the 15th of January, because it won't be good for them to have any bad news before it.

However these are some undeniable facts showing that things are not going really well for the Redmond giant:

• Several big customers have not renewed MS Software Assurance (SA)
  
• The whole worldwide economy is in a major slump.
• Hiring is way, way down. Except for a scattered few positions, Microsoft has almost no openings for external hires.
• One of the more likely solutions to be employed is no bonuses in 2009 reviews.
  

You can reed more about this here, written by an anonymous blogger from MS.

Only a master of evil, Darth.
Obi-Wan Kenobi

200 PS3 break SSL!

A team of Rebel Security Hackers (researches and academics) with the help of 200 PS3 weapons, the equivalent to 8000 standard cores or $20K of Amazon EC2 time, have broken SSL (Secure Socket Layer), one of the core protocols of the Internet. This attack is possible because of a flaw in MD5. This might convert the entire software galaxy in an unsafe place.

They collected around 30000 trusted certificates from Firefox, 9000 MD5 signed. 97% of them from rapidssl. They builded a fake certificate and transfered the signature to it. The task took around 2 days to complete making use of the 200 PS3. Taking advantage of the known content of the certificate that would be issued by RapidSSL, they predicted two variables: the serial number and the timestamp.

Now, since they control the content of the certificates, they changed the flags to make themselves an intermediate certificate authority. That gave them authority to issue any certificate they wanted. All of these ‘valid’ certs were signed using SHA-1.

You can try their live demo site, you just need to set your clock back to some date before August 2004. This is just a secuirty measure for the example, but it would work identically with any certificate that hasn't expired.

In order to fix this, Certificate Authorities are now using SHA-1 for signing and Microsoft and Mozilla will blacklist the team’s rogue Certificates in their browser but... enough? :s

Here is the project site and for more information here is a more detailed article.

"We're doomed."
C-3PO