handyfloss

Hoy me ha dado el punto y se me ha ocurrido mandar esta carta a la dirección de feedback de la página web de Bebe. No sé si esa dirección servirá para contactar con ella, o solo tiene como fin comentar aspectos de la página web. Igual Bebe acaba leyendo el mensaje en este blog antes que por aquel medio :^)

Vaya por delante mi respeto por la artista, y mi aprecio a su música. Sé que la situación que describo ocurre con muchos artistas y muchos CDs, pero… a mí me pasó con ella.

Este mensaje no es sobre la página web en sí, sino para Bebe, porque es la única manera que he encontrado de contactar con ella. Yo estaría muy agradecido de que llegara a ella, y estoy seguro de que ella también valorará la información que contiene.

Estimada Bebe,

No sé si estás al corriente de las protecciones anticopia con las que se comercializa tu CD, pero yo, lamentablemente, sí.

Te comento cómo consumo yo la música: me voy a la tienda, me compro el CD, lo meto en el ordenador de mi casa, lo paso a MP3, saco el CD, lo guardo en su caja, y ya NUNCA MÁS lo saco. Siempre escucho de la copia del disco duro, a través de los altavoces del ordenador (frente al que trabajo todo el día).

Por motivos obvios, esta estrategia es imposible con tu CD, el cual compré, y tengo muerto de risa en una balda. Como yo quiero escuchar tu música, recurrí a pedirle un CD pirata a un amigo, del cual pude sacar los MP3 sin problemas.

Ahora bien, ¿no es irónico que no pueda escuchar la música que compré, pero sí la que NO compré? En las circunstancias mencionadas, ¿crees que me siento incentivado para comprar tu siguiente CD, cuando me veré obligado a hacer la misma jugada? ¿Con qué cara puedo criticar la “piratería”, si gracias a ella puedo escuchar el CD que a través de su compra legal no pude disfrutar como yo quería? Mi “recta moral” me puede llevar a comprar tu segundo CD, aún sabiendo que me será inservible, simplemente para compensarte económicamente… pero estaremos de acuerdo en que eso requiere un huevo de “recta moral”.

Puede que pienses que un sistema anticopia impide, o dificulta, el tráfico ilegal de grabaciones de tu CD, pero esto no es así. En cuanto UNA sola persona rompa la protección (este proceso suele durar, como mucho, horas tras la salida al mercado del CD), esta la pondrá en internet y ya está, así de fácil. La persona que me pasó la copia pirata, ni sabía que tu disco tuviera protección anticopia. La protección solo molesta a las personas como yo, que nos hemos comprado el disco legalmente, y no recurrimos a métodos ilegales, a menos que se nos fuerce a ello.

Por eso, en bien tanto de tus seguidores, como tuyo propio, porque venderás más, te invito a elimiar cualquier sistema anticopia de tus subsiguientes discos, que espero con impaciencia, para comprarlos si no incluyen tecnologías lesivas para mis intereses como consumidor.

Hace tiempo que vengo diciendo esto a quien me quiera oir, y hoy me he dicho ¿pa qué está el blog?

Todos sabemos que las compañías aseguradoras son unas hijas de la grandísima… madre que las fundó, así que básicamente no voy a decir nada nuevo. Lo que sí puede ser esclarecedor es una reflexión sobre cómo nos timan.

Tomemos una de las cláusulas de las que más se vanaglorian las propias aseguradoras (hablo de seguros de coche), y que más valoran los propios asegurados: la bonificación por buen conductor. Señoras y señores, esto es un TIMO.

Todos tendemos a pensar que somos los mejores conductores del mundo, y que los demás son unos torpes. Así, nuestro egoísmo nos hace considerar que, dado que otros van a causar más gasto a la aseguradora (porque sus accidentes van a ser más frecuentes), y nosotros no vamos a accidentarnos nunca, pues deberían ser esos otros los que pagaran más. Las aseguradoras saben que somos unos cabronazos egoístas y, sobre todo, unos egocéntricos y unos chulos y que vamos a pensar aplicando el razonamiento anterior, así que nos ponen la trampa con el queso delante, y picamos como tontos.

¿Están deseando distribuir las cuotas más equitativamente entre sus asegurados? No, claro. Lo que desean es ganar más dinero, como es de esperar (y legítimo). ¿Qué es lo que realmente ocurre? La aseguradora tiene un seguro a todo riesgo con una cuota X, igual para todos. Ahora sube la cuota base a 2X, y dice que hace un descuento del 50% a los “buenos conductores”, que se definen como aquellos que no reportan un accidente en, digamos, 6 meses.

El resultado es que, en el mejor de los casos, casi todo el mundo sigue pagando lo mismo que antes, pero creyéndose afortunados por beneficiarse de un megadescuento del 50%, mientras que algunos pagan el doble. Pero no solo eso. Es que, además, cuando los “buenos conductores” tienen un accidente leve, no dan parte por miedo a perder la jugosa “bonificación” del 50%.

En el fondo, la “bonificación” del 50% no es más que una coacción, en la que nos amenazan con cobrarnos un 100% más de lo que ya pagamos si nos atrevemos a exigir la contraprestación contractualmente estipulada para un hipotético accidente. ¡Es realmente vil y retorcido! Se comprometen a compensarnos económicamente en caso de accidente, a cambio de una cuota (ese es el fundamento de un seguro), pero luego echan mano de todos los mecanismos que puedan para coartar nuestro derecho a pedir esa compensación cuando la necesitamos, Y ENCIMA NOS HACEN CREER QUE NOS ESTÁN HACIENDO UN FAVOR, COBRANDO MÁS A LOS “MALOS” CONDUCTORES.

Many people wonder why, Linux and FLOSS being so good, is Windows the most used OS around. Generally, this leads them to argue that, since Windows is so popular, it must be because it’s better. After all, we the users are not stupid, are we?

No, we are not. Not even Windows users are :^)

The reasoning above rests on the premise of fair competition, which is not the case in the software market nowadays. No, it is not, and I mean it. Consider the following example:

There is a bicycle maker A, who makes A bicycles. She has no competition, no rivals in the market, hence A bicycles get very popular.

When the market is saturated, maker B comes into town, and starts producing B bicycles, which are much better.

No matter how monopolystic A was: in a short time, B will dominate the market, due to her better product.

This example is a good one of a fair market. But now consider another case:

We have maker A producing car A. Now, a car needs gasoline! As car maker A grows, gasoline A providers grow in parallel. Soon enough, all the cars in the town are A, and all the gas stations serve A gasoline.

Now, if an independent car maker B comes to town, and wants to produce B cars… she’s out of luck! B cars need B gasoline, but ALL THE GAS STATIONS ARE A!!

No matter how hard the newcomer tries, B cars will never be popular, because the potential buyers would have nowhere to get fuel. Conversely, someone could start providing B gasoline, and compete with A gas stations… but, how on earth!? B gas stations will always bankrupt, because ALL THE CARS ARE A!!

This is, ladies and gentlemen, the present situation in the software industry: a car/gasoline lock-in. We have to realize that Microsoft is trying hard to push this lock-in down our throats, because creating lock-ins is a most succesfull, albeit immoral and barely legal, marketing strategy. When forced lock-ins pervert the free market, legal actions have to be taken by governments… and that’s part of the reasons why we see Microsoft day after day in the courts.

Does Microsoft really force lock-ins unto us? Let’s consider some car/gas pairs these “gentlemen” try to enforce us:

• HTML only IE understands / IE
• DOC, XLS, PPS / MS Office
• WMV, WMA / Media Player
• Hardware with windows-only drivers / MS Windows OS
• Windows-only games and software / MS Windows OS

Remember: each time you create a web page (say, with Frontpage) that can be properly viewed only with IE, you are supporting the Microsoft monopolistic lock-in. Each time you surf the web with IE, and ask a web administrator to modify her page so that you can view it with your flawed broser, you are supporting the MS lock-in. Each time you send someone a DOC file, instead of a PDF or an ODF OpenOffice.org document, each time you share some video or audio in a Windows proprietary format, each time you buy a windows-only TV card or Wireless card… each time you are surrendering your liberty to the Microsoft lock-in.

And this is bad even if you are a die-hard Windows fanboy, because the sad fact is, this lock-ins only benefit the locking vendor, not the locked client. It is a way of gaining power upon us, to enable them to charge as much as they want for a product of as low a quality as their self-confidence allows (which is much).

Fight them back, and use the alternatives: Firefox and w3c-compliant HTML code, OpenOffice.org and ODF-compliant documents, MPEG and Theora for videos (WMV deprecated, closed and under patents), OGG Vorbis for music (MP3 deprecated, under patents), JPEG and PNG for images (GIF deprecated, under patents)

Todo lector español estará al tanto de las acusaciones a Afinsa y a Fórum Filatélico de estafa, por parte de la Fiscalía Anticorrupción (noticia en El País).

Por cierto, que, buscando en Internet noticias a las que enlazar, además de las direcciones de ambas empresas (la de FF tarda muchísimo en cargar… será congestión de visitas de clientes iracundos), he encontrado sendos artículos en el diario El Mundo, fechados el 9 del presente (mismo día de la actuación policial, cuando, por ejemplo el Diario Vasco ya se hacía eco de la misma), con flagrante apología tanto de Afinsa, como de Fórum Filatélico, aunque el jueves 11, tras levantarse el secreto de sumario por parte de la Fiscalía, ya cambiaron el discurso y hablaban de las acusaciones de corrupción. Tanto cariño no es de extrañar, si son veraces ciertas acusaciones de connivencia entre Afinsa y El Mundo.

Pero bueno, el objetivo de este post no es implicar a los simpáticos periodistas de El Mundo en algun complot (más).

Primero, quiero dejar claro que esto ya se sabía. Que desde diferentes medios (por ejemplo, el sentido común), ya se decía, desde hace tiempo, que dichas inversiones eran arriesgadas, y que no era juicioso invertir. Para muestra, un botón: un comentario en un blog de HACE UN AÑO donde un tal hapasil recomienda a otra persona no invertir en ello. También parece que el Financial Times ya avisaba del tema en septiembre del 2005.

Pero voy más allá. Yo lo siento por los miles (se estiman en 350.000) de personas afectadas… pero niego tajantemente ninguna responsabilidad subsidiaria del Gobierno. Me niego rotundamente a que paguemos usted y yo y el de enfrente los errores de esta gente. No señor. En primer lugar, el gobierno no es responsable de las “sociedades de bienes tangibles”, sólo de las entidades financieras (p.e. bancos que quiebran). Esto queda bien clarito en el comentario de hapasil en el blog que menciono arriba:

Si te fijas, no están controlados por la Comisión de Nacional del Mercado de Valores, y siempre evitan el termino “financiero” escudandose en los sellos.

En segundo lugar, y por mucha pena que me den… ¿si hubiesen ganado dinero gracias a la estructura ilegal del negocio, habrían compartido algo conmigo? ¿Entonces, por qué cuando por culpa de la estructura ilegal del negocio pierden, yo tengo que cubrirles? ¿Acaso no sabían que era una inversión de riesgo? ¿Acaso no les parecía raro recibir unas rentabilidades que duplicaban y triplicaban las percibidas por el resto de los mortales con inversiones financieras convencionales (plazo fijo, bonos del estado)? ¿Acaso no les parecía inmoral? Claro que… ¿qué tiene que ver la moral con todo esto?

Usted, cuando se lo ofrecieron, pensó que no estaba dispuesto a correr el riesgo, y lo rechazó. Si ellos estaban dispuestos… ¡que lo demuestren ahora apechugando con las consecuencias! Claro, se creían más listos que usted y que yo, que eramos unos pringao a los que no daban nada por su dinero en el banco… y ahora quieren que estos pringaos les cubran las pérdidas cuando su “chollazo” se pincha… ¡Eso sí que es ser más listo que nadie!

Al fin y al cabo, y para enlazar con el título del post, estas inversiones funcionan igual que la mayoría de los timos, como, por ejemplo el tocomocho. En este tipo de timos, el timador cuenta con la avaricia de la víctima, la cual corre riesgos irracionales, cegada por la posibilidad de obtener un gran beneficio. Los timos más exitosos son aquellos en los que la víctima se cree más lista que el timador, y cree ser ella la parte que tima al otro. Todos conocemos casos (al menos, en películas) de tipos que saben de métodos “infalibles” para ganar al blackjack o a la ruleta en un casino, y acaban perdiéndolo todo, porque el casino es el timador y nosostros los pringaos, NUNCA al revés.

Al igual que los que invirtieron en Afinsa y Fórum Filatélico, este jugador del casino se jacta de lo listo que es, y de lo tontos que son los pringaos que le desaconsejan aplicar su “método infalible” en el casino. Y al igual que este jugador, los inversores de Afinsa y Fórum Filatélico han acabado convirtiendo sus risas en llantos…

Lo siento, pero este servidor, tan tonto que no supo ver lo chachi-guay que era esto de los sellos, no tiene ganas ahora de cubrir sus deudas. Apostaron y perdieron. Que les sirva de lección: cuando algo parece demasiado bueno para ser verdad… es porque no es verdad.

Read in Kriptópolis: Microsoft patents an automatic censoring machine.

That machine would, allegedly, detect “phonemes and/or words derived from phonemes for comparison against corresponding phonemes or words included in undesired speech data”, and then “the input audio data stream is altered so that the undesired word or a phrase comprising a plurality of such words is unintelligible or inaudible”. This capability is available for recorded speeches (of course), and even in real-time.

I bet Franco, for one, would have loved this precious thingie, back then. And I bet that some governments today will put it to *cough* good *cough* use.

It seems that this year the prestigious prize Prí­ncipe de Asturias (precisely the International Cooperation Prize 2006), given by a Foundation lead by Prince Felipe (the son of the current king of Spain. Yes, we have a king… no comment) has been given to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

You can read about it in many places, e.g. the Fundación Prí­ncipe de Asturias site, a newspaper like El Mundo, or a news blog like menéame (all the links in Spanish).

Now, I am sick and tired of hearing this bullshit about “Maybe Microsoft is a bit on the dark side of the Force, but this Bill Gates fellow is not a bad guy after all. Hell, he gives away for charity a whole lot of money!”

This is false, for two reasons:

1) Giving away that much doesn’t have so much merit.

Bill Gates’ Supporter: He gives away so much money, he is Good.

Voice of Facts: False. He has so much money, that what he gives is not much.

BGS: Yes, but even as a percentage it is a lot. He gives away a x% of his income, and neither you nor me do it!

VoF: False. You and me spend 105% of our income paying our flat, our car, the gasoline, the food, the clothes… He is so rich that he could easily donate 75% of his possessions and still be so rich that he wouldn’t notice the difference.

Hence, comparing percentages of income is not fair, either. For most people, donating a 10% of their income amounts to the difference between having where to sleep tonight or not. That’s not exaggeration. That’s a fact.

BGS: OK then, but meritorious or not, he does give away an awful lot of money!

VoF: We get back to the first point. Maybe that money is peanuts for him, but that’s a lot in absolute terms. OK, true. But the whole point was to demonstrate how philanthropic Gates was!

2) For him that money is an inversion. It is well worth it in tax refunds and market revenues.

VoF: Did you know that Bill Gates saves a lot of money on taxes because of what he donates to his own “charitable” Foundation?.

BGS: That’s silly! If he gives away one billion, and saves x% in taxes, he would have been better of not giving away anything at all! How can donating be economically advantageous?

VoF: My friend, this is in our poor fellows’ world, not in the world of the super-rich. According to the merits the newspapers (see above) atribute to the Foundation, they have spent USD 10 billion since 2000. Now, according to the Wikipedia, as of 2005, they had USD 28 billion as endowment (that is, “money to spend”). According to US law, a foundation has to give away at least 5% of his assets, yearly, to be considered “charitable”.

If my math is not wrong, USD 10 billion since 2000 amounts to USD 2 billion/year, which is not much above the USD 1.4 billion/year that an endowment of USD 28 billion requires. If the Foundation had given away less than what they did, they would not even be considered charitable by the US government, so putting money into it would not ensure good ol’ Bill a tasty tax deduction.

Even if I try to put my best to it, I can not see why they don’t give away for charity all the money they “donate” to the Foundation. Either they give away the whole USD 28 billion, or they only put into the Foundation the USD 2 billion that they expect to give away! Oh, wait, maybe they get tax reductions for the USD 28 billion, but end up “losing to the poor” only USD 2 billion. How philanthropic!

Now, some people might say that the other USD 26 billion have indeed been “spent” by Gates… he also “lost” them. Not at all. The Foundation uses this money for many different things, most of which are beneficial for Mr. Gates. Look at that new at ZDNet Australia. In 2004, Gates offered the Australian government to spend:

“AU$40 million over the next five years to help improve technology literacy in under-privileged communities.”

However, Australian Democrats’ IT spokesperson Brian Greig calls this “tainted charity”, because:

“the software tycoon’s global philanthropy exercises carry a hidden agenda to persuade beneficiary governments to reverse policies promoting the use of open source software.

Greig claims Gates’ whistle-stop visit to the country was more likely to have been motivated by NSW Commerce Minister John Della Bosca’s intention to end the state government’s reliance on proprietary software.”

Graig recalls the case of India, where Gates spent USD 500 million in “charity” in 2002, after the government disclosed its intention of getting rid of proprietary software (that is, Windows). Of those USD 500 million, 100 where aimed at helping fight AIDS (highly commendable), and 400 to “improving computer literacy in the country.” (???). Craig’s words remind those of Sergio Amadeu, president of the Brazilian National Institute for Information Technology, who compared Gates’ strategy with that of drug dealers who give first doses for free, to get people “hooked”.

No wonder Microsoft’s lawyers sued Amadeu “for difamation”. However, the accusation hardly held any water, after Gates’ words regarding software piracy in China, in which he “difamated” himself:

“As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade”.

In summary, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is just a corporative arm of Microsoft, aimed at cleaning Gates’ bad reputation, spreading pro-MS propaganda, financing bribes to governments to perpetuate Windows use, and give free samples of their product to keep markets hooked, all of it under a charity mask.

Many newcomers to Linux are appalled by the apparent need of using the feared CLI (Command Line Interface) in this OS.

This is partly FUD, because most everything can be done in modern Linux desktops that come with major distros (e.g. Xfce under Debian), through a GUI (Graphical User Interface).

However, this post does not try to deny the need of the CLI, but rather stress that an experienced user (if I may call myself so) finds himself doing 99% of his tasks from the command line, just because it is more comfortable and efficient in the long run.

As an example, the data that prompted me to write this: my computer (called Bart) has been up for 63 days so far. I also work on four other computers, called Casandra, Amphiaraus, Orpheus and Arina (through OpenSSH, of course). Part of these 63 days, I have had terminals open in all of the other machines (except Arina, the connection to which is automatically closed after 48h of inactivity, a.k.a. weekends).

All right, so the number of command lines typed in by me during the “lifetime” of these terminals (less than 63 days) are as follows:

Bart: 5047+934+782 (3 simultaneous terminals)
Casandra: 159
Amphiaraus: 114
Orpheus: 6289+4067
Arina: 313+242 (last 3 days only).

This data is not taking into account other terminal windows I have opened and closed in the meantime, and the fact that Amphiaraus has been up only 3 days, and Casandra just 18 (Orpheus 136 days, Arina 194).

Counting only 45 of the 63 days as laborable (5/7), it means I type 400 lines of commands per day, on average! It also means that my computer is keeping track of the last 18000 commands I introduced (not really, because I have set each window to “remember” just the last 1000 commands entered).

A screenshot of an Orpheus terminal below.

Suposedly it is an old story, but I found out about it today (pages one visits when staying too late at work).

The “content makers”, like film studios, singers, writers and so on, are day and night stressing how important it is to respect the copyright holders and not to pirate, in order to have the authors get their fair pay for their hard work…

Now, how freaking hypocritical is this, coming from a company who made this! What the link shows is that the Disney company blatantly copied the story, characters and scenario of a previous (old) Japanese movie called Kimba The White Lion.

The story goes like this: Disney “thinks” they own the rights, and start saying they are going to make a remake. Later on, they find out they don’t own such rights, so they start saying their movie is completely original, and denying that any of them knew anything about that Japanese Kimba thing. Truly outrageous.

According to ITWire, (I read it in Linux Weekly News), the use of Linux in China is relentlessly growing. I can not interpret the data, and don’t know how “promising” or “good” this is, but it certainly is significant, because pirated copies of Windows are even more commonplace than in Europe, so the low cost of Linux is not such a big incentive. However, Linux is still gaining market share.

Writing the previous post lead me to read this Wikipedia article about the Sony DRM rootkit fiasco last year. Read it, because it is very interesting.

Among other things, I’ll quote the following (boldface emphasis mine):

Sony BMG released a software utility to remove the rootkit component of Extended Copy Protection from affected Microsoft Windows computers, but this removal utility was soon analyzed by Russinovich again in his blog article “More on Sony: Dangerous Decloaking Patch, EULAs and Phoning Home”, and revealed as only exacerbating the privacy and security concerns. In fact, the Sony BMG program merely unmasked the hidden files installed by the rootkit, but did not actually remove the rootkit. In addition, this program was reported to install additional software that cannot be uninstalled.

So, the “solution” Sony gave to its screaming customers was worse than the problem they had previously caused!

Now, read what the Wikipedia article recomends to eliminate the risk of abuse from Sony (and others):

The XCP software can be prevented from installing in several ways. First of all, a user can refuse to purchase such copy-protected CDs, perhaps downloading the music from a digital music distributor. Second, it is possible to disable autorun so that the software will not run automatically (this can be done, temporarily, by holding the SHIFT key while inserting the CD). Putting a piece of tape on the outside of the CD will also prevent the DRM from running. An alternative is to use an operating system which the software does not automatically install itself on, such as Linux or Mac OS X, or running Windows under a restricted account instead of an administrator account, in which case the installation program will not have the sufficient rights to install the rootkit.

Quite remarkable is, also, the fact that the DRM scheme Sony wanted to force-feed into its customers, with the alleged objective of preventing copyright infringements, did actually breach a previous copyright, more precisely, a LGPL license (that of LAME MP3 encoding library). That is, they were stepping on the toes of some Open Source material: THEY, the defenders of artist and creator rights, were attacking US, the thugs that want a free-for-all right-smashing steal-fest of all kinds of materials!