handyfloss

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.

I have read in menéame and Barrapunto (both in Spanish) that some folks have developed some tricks to solve Sudokus. Feel free to find more about it here.

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.

Yesterday I went to the cinema and watched Spike Lee’s Inside man (Plan oculto is the Spanish title). I have to say that I wholeheartedly recommend this movie. It’s very well directed (although I don’t like Lee’s other movies all that much), and the photography is superb.

The plot is very nicely written and tied up together. There are, as always are, some weak points and things more or less difficult to believe. However, many real situations that actually happen every day are more difficult to believe, so…

For me that movie is what a movie should be. It tells a story the way the cinema should tell it. A book is a book. A song is a song. A picture is a picture. And a movie should be a movie. Each one has its tools and procedures, and this movie puts the ones of the cinema to good use, IMHO.

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!

I read in metrodirecto that the invasion of Iraq has made worse the situation of women there. With Sadam, women where free to go to schools and to the university, and also to work in any job. Now they are apparently being forced to “stay home”, partly because of safety reasons, and partly because of the repression of the new government.

Now, if we all know that the weapons of mass destruction stuff was bullshit, and both public safety (suicide bombers dozens a penny) and civil liberties (women’s rights stamped out, restrictive constitution) have not been enforced, but rather weakened, by the US invasion forces… what the heck was the reason to invade Iraq?

Today I changed the name of this blog from an unappealing Iñaki Silanes’ Blog to an intendedly witty handyfloss. I was going to name it Mental floss, but the name is taken :^(

The new name fuses the british expression candyfloss (meaning “something attractive but insubstantial”, according to the Merrian-Webster OnLine dictionary) and the acronym FLOSS (which stands for “Free (Libre) Open-Source Software”).

*some minutes patting myself on the back, for being so witty and humorous*

I *ehem* humbly *ehem* think that the word neatly sums up the message I want to transmit with the blog: that the free software is useful!

I am quite fond of an interesting GNU tool called rsync. This tool, originally written by Andrew Tridgell and Paul Mackerras, is superb for duplicating, backing up and updating file trees. For example, I use it to keep a portable hard disk up to date with all the music I have in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.

As a tool for making backups, I recommend reading this article about incremental backups with rsync. Trully useful.

The APT package management tool has a GPG signature checking system I keep forgeting how to configure in new Debian installs. This post is simply a reminder.

First step, get signature of official Debian repositories:

# wget -http://ftp-master.debian.org/ziyi_key_2006.asc -O - | apt-key add -
# aptitude update

Then, if we have other (non-official) repositories, the “aptitude update” above will give us errors like:

W: GPG error: http:whatever Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY XXXXXXXXYYYYYYYY W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

It means that repository “http://whatever” has a signature that is not in the list of your trusted signatures. From the “XXXXXXXXYYYYYYYY” number, take the last 8 digits (the Ys), and do the following:

gpg --keyserver pgpkeys.mit.edu --recv-key YYYYYYYY

This downloads the PGP key of that repository (from a trusted site, like mit.edu). Then you have to add it to your list of trusted keys:

gpg -a --export YYYYYYYY | apt-key add -

This last bit will output “gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found”, followed by an “OK”. You can safely ignore the warning. The procedure worked.

The info has been taken from the Debian Wiki.

I am currently reading Terry Pratchett‘s Equal Rites, and enjoying it quite a lot, at that. It’s not his best book, which is to say it’s only ten times funnier than your average comedian.

What drives me to write this post is a comment Mr. Pratchett makes in page 97 of this book. May the potential propaganda it brings him compensate for the copyright infringement it might ensue quoting it here:

One reason for the bustle was that over large part of the continent other people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disk had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry.

Self-explanatory, ain’t it? :^)