Yearly Archives: 2005

China releases “Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004”

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USA is used to release a report on Human Rights for every country in the world. Every country but the USA. So China thought about filling the gap and presented The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004. (i read the comment in Italian by Repubblica). Interesting reading, full of data, numbers and stats. This is a link to Yahoo Cache version, just in case.
Of course nobody could argue that China is better than USA about Human Rights. But it is interesting that China is explicitly attacking USA on such a topic: can you imagine any other country releasing such a report? By the Information Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China. I can’t. With this report, China is saying “we are as powerful as you and we can judge you, as you judge all the world”. This is a scary situation for our future.
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GUESS the graph

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GUESS: The Graph Exploration System by IBM seems a very interesting tool if you have fun managing and playing with graphs but I didn’t have time to try it yet. They say Source code available soon, if you have some desperate need for it in the meantime just email me and GUESS uses some great open source software including Piccolo, JUNG, HSQLDB, Jython , and RServe. I use JUNG and it is a delicious piece of software. If GUESS is able to improuve it and to give something more, it is probably an astonishing piece of software (and it is open source)

The economist on Collaborative filtering

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Article over at The Economist United we find on Collaborative Filtering. It is interesting to note that it speculates also on attacks to Recommender Systems. An interesting (simple as it should be) idea is the following:
Nolan Miller, of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and his colleagues (…) probabilistic techniques to determine whether a score is likely to be “honest”, by spotting unusual-looking patterns in scoring. Dozens of accounts created on the same day, all of which give high scores both to a bestseller and a new book, for example, might be an orchestrated attempt by a publisher to get fans of the former to buy the latter.
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No limitations for Google OS

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I don’t agree with Lucas when he reasons about the Limitations of Google OS. He says In any computing application where there is a sense of responsibility, the computer must be owned by the person or organization who owns the responsibility. A desktop company like Microsoft can sell you software which you then take responsibility for. A web company like Google can’t.
But there is an error: Microsoft does not sell you the software, you buy a licence of use from Microsoft. This is completely different. In the same way, you can buy from Google the licence of use for GoogleOS. The fact that the bits that compose the software happen to stay on your computer (or not) is totally non-relevant. Actually, in the licence of use, Microsoft could even ask you to not reverse engineer it, to not study it; you could be in situation when you have no way to verify the code you think is there is actually there. Besides, if you have Microsoft Windows installed on your computer, you don’t know if it is relying for some services on some remote servers (of course disconnecting from the Internet will reveal it). You have no way to check what is on your harddisk (a complete operating system or some random bits?) since Windows is not Free Software (it does not give you freedoms).
But, hey, if you want a CD pressed by Google with a shiny GoogleOS logo on it, that simulates its installation on your hard disk, I think Google will be happy to provide it.

I watched “Hotel Rwanda” and we can Prevent “Hotel Darfur”

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Yesterday I watched Hotel Rwanda, the movie about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. I have no words to comment it but you must absolutely watch it. Absolutely. And then, since a genocide is NOW happening in Darfur, we must prevent Hotel Darfour. I don’t want to go to watch “Hotel Darfur” in 10 years time and feel again as I was feeling while watching “Hotel Rwanda”. Hotel Darfour is happening now and we must stop it.

If you know an Italian shop selling computers with Linux preinstalled, insert it on LinuxSi.com

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(It is an Italian initiative, so I’ll write it in Italian).
LinuxSi.com e’ un sito per raccogliere informazioni su quei negozi che vendono computer con Linux gia` installato, e che magari hanno anche delle persone “linux friendly” che possono dare una mano e fare suggerimenti sulla selezione di un sistema dove far girare Linux.
E` un modo per premiare e aiutare chi pensa a noi.
Essendo nuovo, finora ci sono pochi negozi nel database, ma ci si mette molto poco per aggiungerne uno.

Italian Government Commision on E-content wrote a report copying (without citation nor permission) a sentence about CopyLeft, thus violating Copyright.

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San Remo is the most known Italian Music Festival. Millions of people watching TV these days. So 3 Italian Ministers had the good idea to show off in TV signing an agreement against piracy and for protecting music authors; in reality it just defends big Music Labels and not citizens. Anyway this is normal: we have a media govern, they govern via television.
What is more interesting is that the Ministry for Innovation and Technologies released a report about Digital Rights Management (2.9 Mb Pdf file in Italian). I come to know via an article by Emanuele Somma (you can try the automatic translation in English if you don’t master Italian) that this report, besides being full of errors, also stole a sentence about Copyleft from the magazine “Il Mucchio Selvaggio”, n. 526, march 2003, precisely from an article titled “Il copyleft spiegato ai bambini” (copyleft explained to children) written by Wu Ming Foundation. Of course they didn’t cite the original article. So here we are at the incredible paradox: the government commision, that wants to regulate e-content, copies the copyright-protected e-content of someone else without even citying it!!!
Moreover the sentence contains a lot of errors and it is not at all precise. They copied and they copied from a wrong report! Geniuses! They also refused to hear the Free Software Foundation (there was no time!), while they were happy to listen all the Music Labels lobbyists.
The copied sencence is:
“Si è andata affermando negli ultimi anni la filosofia del Copyleft. Il termine (denso gioco di parole intraducibile in italiano) si traduce in diversi tipi di licenze commerciali, la prima delle quali è stata la GPL- GNU Public License ([in nota] La licenza GNU/GPL è stata realizzata dalla Free Software Foundation), nata per tutelare quest’ultimo e impedire che le grandi case di software si impadronissero, privatizzandoli, dei risultati del lavoro di libere comunità di utenti. Il software libero è a «codice-sorgente aperto», il che lo rende potenzialmente controllabile, modificabile e migliorabile dall’utente, da solo o in collaborazione con altri.”
You can find all the articles that use the copied sentence by searching in Google for “denso gioco di parole intraducibile in italiano” (that means “pun overloaded of meanings, untranslatable in Italian”). The first article is the original, the last one is the goverment’s one shamelessy stealing the sentence. The copied sentence is at page 81 of the Commission report.
Just to let you know: based on current law, in Italy, someone caught downloading copyright material off the Internet could go to jail.

BillGates was (what he defined) a communist.

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Richard Stallman on news.com:
Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism. (…)
Here’s what Bill Gates told Microsoft employees in 1991:
“If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today…A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose.”
Mr. Gates’ secret is out now–he too was a “communist;” he, too, recognized that software patents were harmful–until Microsoft became one of these giants. Now Microsoft aims to use software patents to impose whatever price it chooses on you and me. And if we object, Mr. Gates will call us “communists.”
Read the entire (not long) article and join the No Software Patents campaign (We just received 2 good news from old Europe).