Author Archives: sirmacik

About sirmacik

Co-Founder at Gezly.net, editor in chief at OSmedia group and Diaspora.pl. Fan and promoter of free and open IT solutions addicted to movies and good music.

Kopimism is not piracy

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While reading the news about Kopimism recognized as a religion in Sweden one thing that got my attention and made me angry was defining it as a piracy in all Polish media. To get this straight I wrote few words about it in news posted on OSnews.pl:

Kopimism is not piracy. It’s data sharing, philosophy, movement and now religion. It asks you to share, copy and spread the content you’ve created or you’re allowed to spread. It’s strongly connected with DataLove which says that data is free, neutral (it isn’t good or bad) and it must flow.

It’s good to let others know that you want your content to be copied and spread by including KOPIMI logo next to it Continue reading →

Help Telecomix with action for Belarus

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So at first few words on what’s going on… Since 6th of January all businesses are required to have their services for Belarus citizens hosted on Belorussian servers. All ISP’s and internet-cafes are ordered to gather all data about their customers and logs from their usage of internet.

It’s quite obvious that the biggest businesses will do it. But we cannot say that for smaller ones having casual customers from Belarus (shops and other services). So they’ll basically have to shut down the access for Belarus citizens which gives us the same result as site blocking, but (I really hate to say this) done right (meaning not via DNS blocking which is still bad). For now we cannot say for sure how hard this law is going to be used, and if and which businesses are going to respect it. As we’re said punishment for breakin’ it won’t be so big for them (as in scale). One thing is sure, that bringing those services to Belorussian servers will make them really easy to shut down if it’s necessary. Continue reading →

Pidgin as default IM client in GNOME 3

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Empathy is a good IM client. It’s pushed as a default one in Ubuntu, its remixes and all other distros using GNOME environment. It has one big lack, witch makes it really bad choice for your default one. Off-the-Record messaging (OTR) is somethin’ that any modern IM client should support. You can find it in Kopete from KDE, even Adium on Mac OS X has it… Where is this support in GNOME? Nowhere… There is a bug reported in 2008 and yet it’s still not implemented.

So how can we change the default IM client in GNOME 3 and still get this eye candy and handy support? There are two choices (but of course you can use also QT based clients like Kopete or PSI if you want): Gajim (supporting OTR since 0.15) and Pidgin. I’ve chosen second one (you should too if you want to connect with users of other networks than xmpp). Continue reading →

We can provide help for people hit by Anonymous actions

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After spending few hours on looking through data obtained by Anonymous and published on pastebin (you can find them while reviewing @YourAnonNews account on Twitter) during #LulzXmas action I felt concerned about the privacy of all those ppl which data are flying now all around the internet.

It’s obvious for me that if someone had to put his hands such data like this held by Stratfor (I really can’t find a better words than complete idiots to call them) Anonymous group is the best option (it doesn’t really matter if those were Anonymous or Lulzsec or Antisec, their ways are really close). They at least are talking and spreading the news all around instead of using the data. If it was someone else I bet it’d take a really long time for Stratfor “specialists” (have their ever heard of the thing called data encryption?) to find out what has happened and by then really big amount of money’d be gone from their client accounts.

By looking at their facebook fan page (yea, the best, safest and privacy friendly service to spread this kind of news) I lost all my hope about them telling their clients what really happened and what they should do in this case to save their privacy and money (just look at this). After looking at two more archives published by Anonymous from next companies I thought about an open source software/script/service which’d allow to send anonymously an email informing about a leak, current situation and steps which should be taken to increase clients/users (which were hit by the leak) privacy, safety and get their current and future situation straight. Continue reading →

Transferring account between pods, will it make Diaspora better?

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Since Ilya died it’s really hard not to notice how joindiaspora.com pod slowed down and it’s kind of annoying and frustrating. From obvious reasons after information about Ilya and his work on Diaspora hit the mainstream media, its first and official pod started to be overloaded with new users.

As I written on my D* account:

Ability to move account from #Diaspora one pod to another would be awesome. Most new users while trying out D* uses joindiaspora.com, they make friends and post stuff. Once they discover how D* really works it’s kind of too late to delete one and create new account on a pod that suits you.

Recently joindisdpora got much slower and it’d be great to move my whole account to another, faster and less loaded pod without creating completely new account. Just transfer all my posts, aspects and still be in aspects of those who are following me already and sharing with me.

It’s sth between #feature request and #bug report.

I’m in that state, building new account as useful as current one will take definitely too much time and I’m sure that it’s not only my problem.

After making this kind of decision to implement account transferring there are many more problems to be solved in order to achieve this. What to do with the data on the old pod? Should we keep it? How long?

But I really feel that we need to start to discuss about it and find a solution for this problem.