(By the way: Linode, my VPS host, seems to be awesome.)

My chat client Irssi combined with OpenSSH, GNU Screen and Bitlbee provides me with hugely powerful social infrastructure in the form of continuous conversations that can be reached with any SSH client. Add logging and basic Unix tools to the mix and you have a silly fast and simple way of finding stuff you’ve discussed. In other words: my IRC/Live/Jabber logs are important works of reference and must be kept up to date with the system locale.

I failed to find any directly suitable or functional shell one-liners for this operation, until Thomas handed me something that worked for me.

The conversion command later on this page converts all files in Irssi’s default log location, ~/irclogs, and its subdirectories from ISO-8859-15 to UTF-8.  The conversion is performed on the files themselves using recode in their current location. Don’t run with scissors, please do yourself a favor by making a backup copy of your precious logs. The most obvious tool for that is perhaps:

"cp -r ~/irclogs ~/backup_irclogs"

This is Thomas‘ conversion command:

"find ~/irclogs/* | while read i; do echo "Converting $i"; recode ISO-8859-15..UTF-8 "$i"; done"

Stig later informed me about find having exec capablities, but since I’m lazy and all that, you’ll have to optimze the above version yourself.

I’m against ownership concentration as much as the next guy, but I wonder what pluralism in media policy has to do with blogs putting “journalists and other media professionals under pressure”. I don’t see how regulation of before unseen ways in which potentially independent, anonymous citizens can express themselves could have any effect on privately owned media’s current ability or inability to act as a “watchdog for democracy”.

Do these clowns really believe that biased blogs are anywhere near of becoming as big of a threat to democracy as mainstream media already is in some countries? These MEPs were probably just participating in rituals of verbal incontinence at a press event to celebrate some report they’ve written, but it’s always breathtaking to see how any topic related to the Internet is a good platform for letting clueless people sound like insane authoritarians.

Below are the most dubious parts of the article:

“Weblogs and other new on-line media pose new challenges, say MEPs. The growth of commercial media outlets for user-generated content, such as photos and videos, used without paying a fee, raises problems of ethics and privacy, and puts journalists and other media professionals under pressure, they say.

The report “on concentration and pluralism in the media in the European Union” – drafted by Estonian Socialist Marianne Mikko – also warns against the concentration of the media in the hands of a few companies because the media is vital to safeguarding democracy. “The media remains a powerful tool, which should not be treated solely in economic terms,” she said. The report calls for social and legal guarantees to journalists and editors. It will be put to the vote in the full plenary in the future.
…
Asked if she considered bloggers to be “a threat”, she said “we do not see bloggers as a threat. They are in position, however, to considerably pollute cyberspace. We already have too much spam, misinformation and malicious intent in cyberspace”. She added, “I think the public is still very trusting towards blogs, it is still seen as sincere. And it should remain sincere. For that we need a quality mark, a disclosure of who is really writing and why.”"

[via:Piraattiliitto (in Finnish)]

This probably means that HP does a lot of business with Linux, and that there really is a real demand for a GPL’d modern file system with features comparable to those of ZFS.

Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party discusses a wiretapping bill called “better adapted military intelligence gathering” that soon may hit hard on the privacy of anyone relying on any electronic communication routed through Sweden. A few quotes from the post:

“At about 20 points in the national information infrastructure network, all traffic is spliced off and fed into the Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA) agency. These points are placed as to catch all traffic entering and leaving the Swedish borders, but will catch much – if not most – domestic traffic too, for technical routing reasons. Electronic traffic, in particular, always takes the scenic route.”

The insanity of the bill has been widely commented on by authorities:

“How did the bureaucrats respond [to the bill]? In unusually plain language, actually.”

“The Police Board said that the bill “indicates a frightening lack of understanding for the requirements regarding the protection of citizens’ privacy that follow from our Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights”.”

“The National Registry Authority replied that this bill “is compatible with neither the Swedish Constitution nor the European Convention on Human Rights. Such an immense expansion of wiretapping of telephony and other forms of communication cannot be legislated under any circumstance.””

Congratulations, Sweden, you’ve got The AIDS of Right-Wing Government.

[via:Piraattiliitto (In Finnish)]

(Image borrowed from Google Blogoscoped)

For now, there aren’t really any proper sources in English, but for those willing to do some guesswork, Google’s translation tool can help, see Tietokone (translation), Digitoday (translation), Turre Legal’s blog with the court decision as an enclosed PDF (translation).

EDIT: There’s now a human made translation of Turre Legal’s blog entry and I’m trying to get the story published on Slashdot.

EDIT3: there’s now a proper post in English on Turre Legal’s own blog.

My attempt to sum this up is as follows: the verdict is contrary to what a district court thought of the same case last year when two local electronic rights activists were declared not guilty after having framed themselves by spreading information on how to break CSS. Back then it was to the activists’ benefit has CSS been badly broken and inneffective ever since DeCSS came out.

Lawyer Mikko Välimäki of the law firm Turre legal, which represents the activists, expresses surprise over the appeal court’s explanation which includes implications along the lines of Linux users not being able to watch dvds without knowingly downloading cracking software.

(image from Wikimedia commons)

Does this imply that the Jesus of file systems for serious storage needs may be ported to a near future version of the Linux kernel, despite the current licensing issues?

(image borrowed from some Apple dude)

After installing Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (Hardy Heron), I didn’t get any sound when I tried to play sound files in Amarok (the distribution’s own package of version 1.4.9.1), a music oriented audio player/music library for *nix.

I fixed this by changing opening Settings - Configure Amarok - Engine and changing the Xine engine’s (no other engine is installed by default these days) output plugin from “default” to “alsa“. The problem is probably related to PulseAudio, a new sound server used by default in many recent GNU/Linux distributions.

By cleverly taking advantage of The United Kingdom’s groundbreaking pioneer work in making a real life version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, they extremely cheaply recorded themselves using surveillance cameras in public places. The band managed to obtain some of the recordings by leaning on UK’s Data Protection Act and to cut a well working (to the extent that a video of someone miming can “work”) music video out of it. (Embedded flash video below).

If nothing else, their charts on Last.fm may look different a week from now, as of 2008-05-12 23:07 UTC the total play count of The Get Out Clause is 414.

[via:BoingBoing]

(Multi-purpose surveillance image borrowed from Wikipedia.)

WTF, how did the people running Windows Live even come up with such a lousy idea? I’m guessing the explanation, if one ever will be given, will be related to spam/trojans/phising or whatever the latest security scarecrow is. I’m not willing to speculate whether this is some conspiracy to undermine Google owned services, and this would certainly not be the best way to perform such an operation.

Luckily I don’t rely on Windows Live Mess-enger, I merely run BitlBee, a third party IM client in the form of an IRC proxy together with Irssi to be able to talk with a few non-IRC persons.

I also verified that this is true with BitlBee. The filtering appears to occur on the server side, not in the client.

[via: istartedsomething, Tietokone (in Finnish). Image borrowed from Wikipedia]