Thursday, December 15, 2011

The Internet Censorship debate


Freedom of expression takes a new dimension altogether when placed in the context of the digital channels like blogs, social networks or microblogs in the Internet. While there is no absolutism associated with any freedom, the applicability or the non applicability of restrictions and laws between the real world and the digital space needs clear understanding and a distinction based on this understanding.

The stand of Free Software Movement, has always been to sustain and perpetuate the freedom of computer users and information technology benefactors. When the Government of India today has proposed severe but unsubstantiated endorsement of censorship, leading to the curbing of fundamental rights of expression, we would want to reiterate our stand to Free Software supporters by presenting the the threat this move would pose to the essence of neutrality in the Internet and democracy in the country.

Expressing oneself in the conventional media like press, books, television and radio are entirely different, than when an individual is expressing via digital vents on the Internet. The accessibility to the media itself, and the broadcast range of the channels in both the realms are fundamentally different.

In conventional media, not everyone has a say, and the chances of rebutting to the opinions of the 'media privileged' people expressing them is seriously restricted; In the Internet it is quite the opposite. By design the Internet provides equal footing to everyone to express their own views. Anyone can express their views, or counter an expressed view without having to depend on 'media partners' to attach a voice to their opinions. Hence, it could be said that the Internet is self conditioned, and does not require external regulators.

Secondly, the views presented in newspapers, books and television, or any other form of conventional media are in a sense 'imposed', wherein except from unsubscribing to those services there is little of resentment one can demonstrate. Moreover the conventional media vents have percolated deep into the society in a country like India, where it is not the Internet but newspapers and television which build opinions of people. In contrast, the content put up on the Internet operates and caters to a relatively small portion of the population. The sensibilities of the information on the Internet makes sense to the communities of people on that particular service or platform alone, and does not spill over to the streets. It is the user who seeks content on the Interent and nothing is imposed, in comparison with the conventional media.

Further the current stand of the Government to curb and hone down the views expressed on the Internet comes as a shock. Authorities headed by Mr Kapil Sibal, whose lack of comprehension of the problem at hand is being debated heavily on all platforms, well beyond the online platforms. 

http://www.labnol.org/india/censorship-in-india/20527/

It seems he has suddenly gotten aware of the censorship trick. Mr. Sibal and the rest of the Government have been projecting that “religious blasphemy” is what they are trying to counter in the Internet – which is far from the whole truth.

There has been a lot of active propaganda on the net about the plethora of scams that the current UPA Government has been involved in. The facts being circulated might not be audited, and very just but the essence these streams online have been carrying have certainly put the Government at guard and now are using a masquerade of “religious blasphemy” to curb the freedom of expression in the Internet.

The extreme interest Mr. Sibal has been taking in this regard comes as a bigger surprise, for, the issues pertaining to the infrastructural problems of e-Governance in India, the security issues related to the Aadhaar Unique Identification project and the secretive NATGRID are not being given the same importance. These issues about Internet and technology which have been growing steadily for sometime now have to be addressed firstly, which neither Mr. Sibal nor his instigators have bothered about.

The enthusiastic involvement which Mr. Sibal, representing the Government of India has demonstrated, to curb the freedom of expression in the digital sphere manifests the unreasonable apprehensions of our current governors. If implemented, this censorship would beyond curbing the freedom of expression, cripple the democracy, or the little of it which remains.

Free Software Movement with this clear understanding, urges Internet users and activists to take up online campaigns, propagate the nuances of the issue at hand and stand up for the freedom in the Internet. 

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Running 32 bit compiled binaries on 64 bit machines

Although the officially supported packages for GNU/Linux platforms from major corporations like Texas instruments might not wholly adhere to the Free Software guidelines, when the user is in desparate need to run an application from such corporations, the most optimal solution would be to get the binaries running on GNU/Linux rather than out of compulsion to use Windoze.


Code Composer by Texas Instruments is one such handy environment for all Electronics engineers. Although the tool itself is a propreitary one, TI does give a GNU/Linux version of it. It comprises of the binaries and dependencies for easy porting onto different flavours.

And because this is a precompiled package, and mostly compiled for the scenario of 32 bit architecture running a 32 bit kernel, if the necessary dependencies are not installed the binaries wouldn't run on 64 bit machines running 64 bit kernel.

"ia32libs" is the package which contains runtime libraries for the ia32/i386 architecture, configured for use on an amd64 or ia64 Debian system running a 64-bit kernel.Without these libraries, the above mentioned binaries will not get installed on the system.

Default installation,
fossphosis@raghu # apt-get install ia32-libs

That's all!
Now, your machine will be able to run the binaries compiled for 32 bit scenarios as well!

Monday, November 7, 2011

Rendezvous with a Debian Developer

Just about an hour ago is when I dropped of Jonas Smedegaard on his way to the Bangalore International airport after his week's stay here.

courtesy vigneshwar shankar


Although I haven't been writing about any person in specific even in my personal blog, in this post I only intend to reflect upon the paradigms of Jonas in comparison to my own. I won't repeat all the technicalities discussed through the week, but will try to project my perception of this hacker, who is more than a mere geek.

Now, why Jonas, and not compare myself to someone I've already known?
I believe our perceptions, and hence our deep principles heavily depend on the circumstances we are faced with, and it cannot be universal - will be relative.
Me and Jonas, as I did very well realize are from different societies, and hence have different mental worlds.

In Jonas' own terms, he comes from a different world and many a times we from this world (as many of us kept proving it through the week) here get duped into just looking at the surface, and not the details of them.
"Surface is narcotics", as he said, is so apt.

I have had a different perception of westernization. I would never be a hypocrite, or a dumb emulator of people from different societies. I must have exhibited some tendencies towards some "unreasonable" emulation, and this week long interaction with Jonas has help me sort out my prerogative in my realms.

Another important aspect which got me all inspired was, the way he correlates his work, its impact to the grand scenario. I think I fail to recognize (at least for now), the ramifications of my own small contributions to the big picture. Being inert about an issue is equivalent to encouraging it, is another point he reiterated many a times.

Leaders need to inspire, and make space for the team to grow and express themselves : A nice notion about leadership I heard Jonas say, and I, like him too have been trying to get closer to this ideal.


All said and done, respecting differences between people and each taking the better of the paths for oneself is what is the ultimate path to harmony and cooperation, both in dissimilar communities of similar individuals, and similar communities of dissimilar individuals.

PS: If you missed the technicalities, here are some reports of the events in Bangalore
http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/karnataka/article2601600.ece
http://fossphosis.blogspot.com/2011/11/jonas-smedegaard-in-bangalore.html
https://alieniscogitationibus.wordpress.com/2011/11/06/debian-pureblends-and-the-freedom-box/
http://sreejithsblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/freedom-debian-pure-blends-and-jonaas.html

Friday, November 4, 2011

Jonas Smedegaard in Bangalore

Jonas Smedegaard : Debian developer is in Bengaluru and FSMK has been actively trying to get Jonas meet, interact and discuss with Free Software enthusiasts from the whole spectrum. Debian Pure Blends and FreedomBox are primarily on the agenda of Jonas' visit to India. So, most of the sessions would revolve around these.


The schedule for Jonas' visit, which I had worked out in consultation with Jonas has kept him occupied for most of the days ( and many a times making it hectic for him!).
Now that we are losing track of all that's happening, I thought it to be good if I could jot it down here. Will keep updating it further

  • 1st Nov: Jonas arrives, and although I was to escort him when he arrived, the train reaches early and I reach late - we then stumble upon each other serendipitously! Nice start :) 

  • 2nd Nov: No concrete schedule for the day, but casual interactions with some of our FSMK activists and enthusiasts

  • 3rd Nov: First of the formal talks at PES School of Engineering. Will gather more info about the talk itself from some of the audience and update it later. 
The talk was followed by a hurried, adhoc meeting with Secretary, Education Department, Government of Karnataka which was one of those unfruitful meetings. Nonetheless, an insight into the problem at hand of implementing Free Software in education did make itself clearer

 Towards the evening a dinner with Prof.Chatterjee from Indian Institute of Astrophysics, which turned out to be a vibrant discussion ranging from nuclear power to wars, to free software and astrophysics! We ended it with a eulogistic reminiscence of Neils Bohr!

  • 4th Nov: Free Software talk at Bangalore University in the morning. The talk has created extra interest amongst the audience, and we will look forward to creating an active GLUG there. 
Afternoon, a talk on FreedomBox and Debian Pureblends was organized at the Indian Institute of Science. Session details will be updated. 
Post talk, Jonas gave an interview to The Hindu

The day being so demanding, and all the sessions being monotonous, just to digress from the flow, it was arranged for Jonas to watch a carnatic classical music concert live. Will collect his views and update here!

  • 5th Nov: Another talk on Freedombox/Pureblends in BMS Institute of Technology scheduled in the morning. It will be followed by a casual GLUG members discussion on Debian, contribution etc...
  • 6th Nov: Debian Pureblends Packaging session at FSMK office, and the first hands on workshop in this stint! Looking forward to it.
    We're also working out a quick visit to the Ambedkar Community Computing Center.

  • 7th Nov: Jonas is leaving to Vietnam
This is for now! Will see if anymore appendages occur for the remaining time!

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Adding custom menu entries in Debian/Ubuntu

Some of the applications which we install from third party sources are not indexed in the Applications tab in the GNOME shell.

The problem in such a case is the high chances of forgetting what the application name is! And this happens so often with me, that I am forced to create these entries in the Applications menu.

Here's a simple procedure to do this. Although there's System->Preferences->Main Menu to do this, this one is better for some obvious reasons (you can give your custom icons)

  • The Applications Menu entries reside in the directory /usr/share/applications , and to create a new entry create a .desktop file in this directory
cd /usr/share/applications
sudo nano myapp.desktop

  • The .desktop files have just the information needed to put up an entry in the Applications tab, and to run your app; Here is the sample content of the Qtoctave entry from the file qtoctave.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=QtOctave
Comment=Graphical Qt frontend for GNU Octave
TryExec=qtoctave
Exec=qtoctave
Icon=qtoctave
Type=Application
Categories=Development;Math;Science;Education;Electronics
  • Make these entries into the myapp.desktop file with relevant modifications like your executable file name in the exec field.
  • After modification of the .desktop file, save and close it. Now, the entry should appear in the categories which you mention.
  • To add your application an icon, crop a 32x32 png image and add it into the default icons directory /usr/share/app-install/icons/,
sudo cp myicon.png /usr/share/app-install/icons/ 

In the Icon field of the .desktop file, provide the file name if the icon resides in the aforementioned default directory, or give the full path of the icon

And there you go, your own custom application entry with a custom icon!

Friday, October 14, 2011

Over to Oneiric Ocelot

Ubuntu 11.10 aka Oneiric Ocelot made a silent appearance yesterday in the Operating system arena. Although it has come silently, it does make quite a bit of noise with whatever it has brought along.


After Natty Narhwal and the controversial Unity, Oneiric Ocelot comes somewhat as a pacifier, with improvements on Unity (yes, Unity is here to stay) and official support to Gnome3.


Here are some salient features of Oneiric.
  • Linux kernel 3.0! 
Of all the reviews I had read, no one seemed to have noticed that Ubuntu 11.10 ships with the Linux 3 series kernel. That is certainly worth a mention. Although the Linux3.0 by itself has had no major changes except for the notation and rumors about power regression. Will keep an eye on the battery on my machine.


  • Unity revamped
As all other reviews have been posting, Unity does get a revamp and seems more stable. It responds quickly, no lag whatsoever. And the aesthetics are more pleasing than in Natty. When I am going to get Oneiric as my production OS, I will certainly want to have picked up all the keyboard shortcuts for Unity.
super+s, super+a, super+f and super+m are for now really handy to view the workspaces, browse applications, files and music respectively.

Another important aspect about the feel of Unity is the dash itself. The new dash is gorgeous which acquires a tinge correlating the backdrop of the other windows/the desktop itself.


  • Login screen is sleeker
Another small but pleasing change is on the Login screen itself. It looks simple, yet futuristic. There is also something about the new asterisk while typing the password which grabs one's attention :-)


  • No Me menu
The elaborate Me menu has been removed and a less elaborate dock with access to most performance options like Power, hardware, etc.. has been added. Unclear of the intent of this change though.
  • Evolution gives way to Thunderbird
Evolution the  long associate as the default mail client has been replaced with Mozilla Thunderbird. Having used only Evolution and not Thunderbird I'm not in  a position to comment on it. From Mozilla must be good. 

  • Software Centre is bigger, better
I haven't been a big fan of Software Center. Nonetheless, it has a more professional look and will be of certain use to new users. First thing, I am getting Synaptic, just for sentimental reasons ;-) 

  • Missing applications
After removing GIMP from the default install in Maverick, there's no Synaptic Package Manager and Pitivi video editor. Nonetheless, still very much supported by Ubuntu.
  • Miscellaneous: Default font all across is the Ubuntu font. Looks a little weird on the terminal though. The default set of wallpapers are amazing, except for the Oneiric one.
  • Installation took about 7 minutes and that is still the best in Industry!
  • Multitouch support still there; One point touch is left click, Two point touch is right click and the accelerometer simulation kind of an effect with the track pad are still thriving.
  • Booting takes about 10-12 seconds on a fresh install; Will see if it slows down as Natty did when I had loaded with hundreds of startup applications. 

 Of all the current OS'es, Oneiric, if not for everything, just for its aesthetics takes a far leap ahead!


Sunday, October 9, 2011

Wavelab with GNU Octave

GNU Octave is the Free Software used for mathematical computation. With an extensive support for versatile library functions, and code compatibility with Matlab, GNU Octave is a sweet treat to every engineer and researcher.

Apart from the officially supported libraries and application toolboxes, GNU Octave also has abundant support and addons from extraneous efforts.

The Signal processing toolboxes, are exhaustive enough and consist of speech processing, image processing and video processing functionalities, which provide a common, stable and evolving platform for any of these domain specific applications.


Taking signal processing to the next level, when one is looking for some advanced signal processing functions, rendezvous with Wavelet Transforms is assured.


While GNU Octave does not officially, as yet , support a Wavelet Transform toolbox, the Wavelab toolbox from the Stanford University project works like a charm. With this extensive background to the toolbox itself, I present the procedure for incorporating this Wavelab toolbox with GNU Octave.
  • Unzip the archive; A folder Wavelab850 will be created with the contents of the toolbox
  • Create a directory /usr/toolbox to dump the Wavelab toolbox
sudo mkdir /usr/toolbox
  • Copy the unzipped contents to the location /usr/toolbox 
sudo cp -r Wavelab850 /usr/toolbox
  • To link the Wavelab library to GNU Octave, open the GNU Octave interpreter in the GNU/Linux terminal, and add the path of the previously added Wavelab850 directory, so that GNU Octave can fetch the Wavelab library files when the function call is made 
octave:2> addpath /usr/toolbox/Wavelab850
  • Now, invoke the functions from Wavelab by running the Wavelab file WavePath.m in the octave terminal, by just typing WavePath in the interpreter.
octave:2> WavePath
  • If the WaveLab has been invoked a welcome message as shown below would appear  

  • Now all the amazing Wavelab functions are available in GNU Octave! 
  • To take a stroll into WaveLab, type WTBrowser. "Chapter 2 Fourier Kingdom" is something every science enthusiast must look into and understand! 

  • Further one particluar example code I was deeply impressed with is the 2-D analysis of synthetic objects ( like images). Type in toon0231 in the interpreter to have some pleasing revelations of Wavelet Transforms
octave:2> toon0231
 Happy Hacking, Happy Learning !
PS: In subsequent posts I will try to regress and give some more fundamental features of GNU Octave. 

Saturday, October 8, 2011

i-freesoftware: My eulogy to Steve Jobs

Well, it might sound abusive to add the i-tag to Free Software, I suppose.

After the demise of Steve Jobs, and the initial outpour of adulation of Steve Jobs and few trickles of criticism, I am late in getting this post up.


Steve Jobs' demise, personally to me has been the loss of an individual who showed people how to fight the odds. Like the many of you, even I too was deeply moved and inspired by his Stanford Speech. There is no denying that he was a man to look up to, and learn from at various levels.

But, when it comes to the perception of the entreprenuer Steve Jobs, there lies a deep disdain for some really important reasons I shall try to putforth in this post.

Steve Jobs: The Entreprenuer is not someone I would really be missing (I wrote this before RMS could say something on these lines); Given the fact that I am at awe with the aesthetics embedded in sleek pieces of Apple hardware, the point of contention is Steve Jobs being the grandest mascot of "Closed, Proprietary Technology" and  in this process Jobs has driven his customers into the most dreadful of the proprietary shackles.

Before a couple of years, while I was in an offline discussion with Eben Moglen, he had expressed serious bitterness towards Steve Jobs and Apple. I later realized it was about the BSD code of the UNIX which all Apple products embed, and also of the initial free software projects which today reside behind Apple's closed doors. And today, carrying on with that legacy, there is virtually nothing that ain't super proprietary and really closed when it comes to Apple.

Further, Apple products apart from being the zenith of closed source software, they are also the certain baton holders of highly closed hardware, and now into the Digital Restricted Media realms, ultimately rendering the users with zero freedom.


And as the brain behind most of the Apple decisions, these are certain moves by Steve Jobs which have made the technological world a really bad place! It might be good for technology, it certainly is not for people!

Although a person who showed courage in battling his life through odds will be missed, a ruthless entrepreneuer and mascot of unfreedom will certainly become oblivous.

People, and their freedom first, is what we believe in the Free Software Movement. 

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Software Freedom Day-2011 @ BMSIT

Software Freedom Day 2008 is when I got introduced to the movement and the awesome community attached to the Free Software. Ever since then, Free Software has been a revelatory experience on a daily basis.


The philosophy of learning, sharing and growing together has been manifesting itself regularly with opportunities of interacting with numerous other like minded individuals.

Free Software Movement Karnataka has been involved in propagating Free Software in various educational institutions. With regular efforts BMSIT in Bangalore will become a prospective Free Software hub.

And SFD, every year is something we look forward to and this year's celebration in BMSIT would undoubtedly be one of the most memorable Free Software meet ups.

This celebration comprised of the ritual of cutting a yummy chocolate cake and sharing the 'joy of freedom'. With this setting the premise I tried to invoke some background to the necessity of freedom in software using Eben Moglen's ideas of "Mathematics as property", which I think conveyed to some extent the need of freedom in software.




It was followed by a basic introduction to Python: The programming language by a couple of students from the college. We were trying to project the scalability and usability of Python.

It was followed by a demonstration of a signal processor based wrist watch by Texas Instruments, interfaced with Ubuntu executing python scripts and some aspects of the features that could be extended by writing simple scripts.




I demonstrated the 3-D module in python mayavi and the tool's super capabilities of simulating 3-dimensional surfaces and volumes. There was also a demonstration of solving second order ordinary differential equations using python, which was hopefully of some use to the students gathered there.

In all, this SFD was eventful in Bangalore, while the celebration at BMSIT was only one of the numerous other sessions we had planned to conduct.


Free Software is the future,
The future is ours.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Migration to FOSS at BMSIT

As sprint events to Software Freedom Day, and celebrating Software Freedom the second of the sessions in BMS Institute of Technology was organized today.


After a session on FOSS approach towards Privacy and Security in the Internet for students, a full day workshop aimed at facilitating the faculty members of Electronics and Communication Department of BMS Institute of Technology to migrate onto GNU/Linux platform with equivalent tools to most of the ubiquitous tools used in the ECE academic scene were demonstrated.

The overall response was overwhelming, and very positive. Being the ECE Department the speaker for the session Mr.Prabodh and myself was preparing to brace for a colder audience with some natural hesitation. But, on the contrary we found everyone really interested in the gamut of tools with unadaunted enthusiasm till the end of the day. Numerous tools available for the various topics to be dealt in teaching the curriculum. Through the day, interaction was highly productive with proactive queries and discussions.


There is a pressing need for the academic institutions to migrate to Free and Open Source Software knowing the entire depth of positive ramifications of the tools and the philosophy behind the tools. I am glad that my alma matter has taken this step. We at FSMK are  certainly looking forward to sustained efforts to perpetuate the momentum instigated by today's sessions.


And talking specifically about Electronics related tools in the GNU/Linux domain, a special push is required to bundle these marvelous tools already available with comprehensive manuals. This way first smooth migration and prospective contributions can be hoped for.

A big shout out to all who were part of today's workshop. Cheers!

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Right Click, Refresh Desktop in Debian/Ubuntu

Windoze users when switching to Debian/Ubuntu or any other flavours of GNU/Linux seem to have a hangover of some futile actions, that one would get used to while being desperate on the Windoze environments :D

And if you seriously are missing the "refresh desktop" options on the GNU/Linux environments, just to demonstrate the power of Free and Open Source Software, and the freedom they provide the users with, here's a small tweak which gives the "Refresh Desktop" option.

By the way, F5 on Debian/Ubuntu still perform the Refresh blink. This tweak is to add the Right Click -> Refresh Desktop option.

1.Open terminal (ctrl+alt+t)
2. Install the the nautilus (default file browser) menu configuration tool and the lineakd is the daemon that runs in the background of an X session and listens to incoming events from multimedia buttons

sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions lineakd

3. Create a directory to dump this and anymore future tweaks you might be performing to nautilus

mkdir nautilus-scripts

4. Enter the new directory,

cd nautilus-scripts

5. Create the script file,

gedit refresh-desktop

6. Copy these contents in the file (this will perform toggling of F5, and hence the refresh !)

#!/bin/bash
xsendkeycode 71 1
xsendkeycode 71 0

Save and close.

7. Make the script executable using chmod.

sudo chmod u+x refresh-desktop

8. Now, the script is ready, we need to link it to the action. And to add the right-click -> Refresh Desktop short cut, go to System -> Preferences -> Nautilus Actions configuration,

9. Create a new action


10. Change the context label to "Refresh Desktop", or "Mimic Windoze", or anything that pleases you :P

11. Check all the "Display Item options"

12. In the command tab, click on the browse option of Path, and link the refresh-desktop file in the directory "nautilus-scripts" created in step 5
13. In the conditions tab, select "Both"
14. Record all changes, or Save
15. Logout and login
16. And there you go! No more missing a futile action :P

Friday, August 12, 2011

GRUB and Reinstalling GRUB : Debian/Ubuntu

GNU GRUB is a Multiboot boot loader. It was derived from GRUB, the GRand Unified Bootloader, which was originally designed and implemented by Erich Stefan Boleyn. 

And playing around with GRUB to get multiple Operating Systems indexed and to make them available for booting is as awesome as it could get. 
The sheer scalability GRUB has to offer in terms of the number of OS'es it can index is superb. I have gone up to six different operating systems at one point of time, and currently am running five. And that doesn't still represent the number of OS'es that can be multi-booted via GRUB. It is only constrained by the space on your hard drive!

My current Grub entry
While trying the tricks of installing multiple operating systems, if care is not taken the latest OS will overwrite the GRUB and if it ain't a GRUB based bootloader (as would be the case when the last OS is M$ Windoze, or sometimes even Redhat!) the entries of other OS will be lost. 

GRUB on the top of Ubuntu/Debian are the best to retrieve and index all the installed OS. 

Here are the steps for reinstalling GRUB at the MBR for an Ubuntu/Debian distro. 

  • Get hold of a Live CD/Live USB stick with either Debian or Ubuntu
  • After entering the Live user environment, spot the ext4 partition of the Ubuntu/Debian
  • To get to know the partition where the hidden Ubuntu/Debian is installed, usually   
sudo fdisk -l
would suffice. Or gparted is another tool which could be of help
  •  Once you've got to know the ext4 partition, then mount it in the Live environment 
sudo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt (assuming that the ext4 partition of the hidden Ubuntu/Debian install is on sda5)

  • Now, reinstall GRUB :)
sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda
(GRUB will be installed on the MBR of sda)

And you're done!

  • Now, boot into your Ubuntu/Debian distro which was running on sda5 (in the example) and run  
sudo update-grub

This will generate a new grub.cfg file as shown in the image above.

Monday, August 8, 2011

War of the social networks



After the long standing browser wars and the still continuing Operating Systems war , we are now at an epochal internet phase where the Social Networks are competing vigorously with each other.

From the Myspace days of celebrity social networks, to the now almost oblivious Orkut, social networking has had its course of metamorphosis. But, the credit of making Social networking a global phenomenon undoubtedly rests with The Social Network- Facebook. With all its flaws and contentions, Facebook boasts of a humungous user base, and stands third in the global population index, only after China and India!

When such is the reach of social networks, the crucial nuances pertaining to the fangs of the Internet like privacy, security and freedom for the users are little spoken about by the mass of the users, or are at least kept obscure to the users by the major players.

Privacy and Centralised Social Networks:

Prof.Eben Moglen calls monopoly networks, or the centralised social networks like Facebook, and the recent Google Plus, as large spying machines, and so, for valid reasons. Users have voluntarily surrendered intimate and delicate data to corporations like Facebook and Google, respectively. With the increase of the un-freedom in the internet, there are high chances of misuse of this data by the corporations either for profit or for information gathering, without the full consent or understanding of the users using their services.

Looking back at the initial days of the Internet, when conceived it was an autonomous conglomeration of end user machines present at the edge of the network. It was decentralized, free (as in freedom) and neutral (as in unbiased). But this fundamental trait of the Internet has eroded substantially, rendering the Internet vulnerable to severe censorship and manipulation by the big players of the Web.

Social Networks, give a comprehensive case study of all that the Internet was supposed to do, and is somewhere failing to do.
Diaspora : The Distributed and contextual social networking, mode of online socializing has been unleashed by the Free Software community. This will hopefully try to emancipate the Social Networking aspect of the Internet.

Knowing the perils of the devils:

  1. Privacy: The privacy terms of be it Facebook or Google Plus are apart from being obscure, ultimately end up conveying the fact that the users' data will be not be given the discretion it deserves, on the contrary will be traded with third parties.
  2. Security: The fiascoes of account crackings, floods of spams and unsafe content on these networks is certainly worth severe scrutiny.
  3. Data ownership: Even when the users have deleted their account, there is no guarantee that the users' data is off the servers, and in many cases it still resides there.
  4. Mandates: Users are at the mercy of the corporations for the features and applications which flock the users' profiles, with little or no role to the users in setting up the framework of their social network. Ex: The recent chat application updation in Facebook has created a lot of disgruntle amongst the users, but there is little that the users can do about it. 
     Google Plus and its privacy policy

  1. Mad Ads: Personalized marketing of products and services using the personal data handed over by the users is a nuisance which has certainly annoyed lots of users.
An instance of a friend's personalized ad on FB!

Getting to know Diaspora:

Diaspora is the social network that puts you in control of your information. You decide what you’d like to share, and with whom. You retain full ownership of all your information, including friend lists, messages, photos, and profile details. Diaspora was kick started by four talented programmers from NYU Courant Institute, after having heard Professor Eben Moglen talk about “lack of privacy and free spying in the cloud”.

Diaspora doesn’t expose your information to advertisers, or to the games you play, or to other websites you visit. It’s inherently private.

Diaspora is not a single site — it’s a collection of different sites, with different URLs, run by different people. But they all run the same software, and they all talk to each other. Each server is called a “pod.” As the service grows, lots of these pods will join the Diaspora network.
The official pod, run by the project’s founders, is http://joindiaspora.com. Because Diaspora is a Free (as in freedom) Software, these 'Pods' can be installed and run even on a personal computer, and be made available to users on a small network for online socializing, like they would on any other centralized social networks. Also, as the source is available the users are free to tinker aroud with the features and share the modified updates!
Diaspora, by the virtue of being a Distributed Social Network, ensures privacy while still keeping the users connected and, not connectedness at the cost of privacy like in the major centralized social networks. With Diaspora, users will be reclaiming all their data, get connected on secure social connections, while sharing the data at their own terms.
Future of the Social Network Wars:

With the arrival of Google Plus, and the previous experience of failures with Google Buzz and Google Wave, Google seems to have hit the right chord this time around. Facebook-ers have been looking for an alternative and Google Plus might offer that respite.

Diaspora, although is the right antidote to the centralization of social networks, it might not well the replacement to the centralized mammoths like Facebook and the growing Google Plus. To envisage the future of Diaspora, I might concur with a Diaspora friend-Peter Rock-Lacroix, who on his blog writes the following:

Putting aside social pull and the goal of market power, I think the success of Diaspora should be measured similarly to the goals of the GNU Project. While advocates of software like the GNU/Linux operating system enjoy hearing news of market success, they see the existence of free software itself as the most important success, rather than growing popularity. Maybe there will only ever be enough capital behind Diaspora to sustain a niche market or perhaps, it will come to the mass market. Regardless of that, even if a small network of users exist who can run their own privacy-aware, free personal web server, that’s a success too.”

In the next article, a feature wise comparison between these social networks, along with the steps to install a Diaspora Pod will be presented.

Raghavendra S
(raghuarr@joindiaspora.com)

References:
http://gnuosphere.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/will-diaspora-succeed/

(My article published in the August 2011 edition of the FSMK newsletter
http://www.fsmk.org/newsletter9 )

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

DNS and DNS flushing in Ubuntu

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical naming system built on a distributed database for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. Most importantly, it translates domain names meaningful to humans into the numerical identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these devices worldwide. (Wikipedia)

Translating URL's to point at the IP addresses of servers is an important portion of the Internet browsing. There could be multiple levels of DNS resolutions happening to expedite the browsing experience of users.

On a GNU/Linux machine, if the user is aware of the URL and IP address of a host, he/she can make a manual DNS entry on the /etc/hosts file.


To view and add the DNS servers the host machine is using, the file to look at is
/etc/resolv.conf

Further, caching the DNS entries ( mapping of URL's to IP addresses) is a feature used to avoid the repeated Domain Name resolution iterations. But sometimes, when a single URL points to multiple servers ( like google mail etc..), and when secure sessions on different servers are established the chances that one of the servers would not resolve might occur.


During such instances, the DNS cache has to be flushed. The first and simple command which has to be manually run to flush the DNS cache is dns-clean.
It can be invoked by the following command:

raghu@fossphosis:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/dns-clean


But, repetitive invoking of this command might get on to the nerves of the users, and a daemon to automate this task is NSCD (Name Server Cache Daemon).
NSCD automates the DNS table flushing and refreshing process at the back end.
NSCD on Ubuntu can be installed by the following apt-get command.

raghu@fossphosis:~$ sudo apt-get install nscd

Fine tuning of the refresh rate and time-to-live of the DNS entries can be altered by changing the values in the configuration file /etc/nscd.conf

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

FSMK Newsletter Revamped and back!

FSMK Newsletter is back, and will get better.


Please share and spread this Newsletter to as many people as possible.
For, Sharing is Growing :)

Do send in your articles for the coming editions...

http://www.fsmk.org/node/79

http://fsmk.org/sites/default/files/FSMK_Issue8_July_2011.pdf

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Reinstating freedom in the Internet

The Internet when conceived was an autonomous conglomeration of end user machines present at the edge of the network. These terminal machines were talking to each other using the infrastructure provided by the Internet Service Providers (ISP's). The only arbitrators in the Internet were the standards organization (like ISO, IEEE), which made the nodes on the Internet to follow universal protocols for intercommunication.
The Internet was simply 'decentralized'.
P2P networks

The Internet has been the grandest manifestation of democracy of the users. It has been free (free as in freedom ) and neutral (as in unbiased) until the late 1990's. Starting  then, the Governments, primarily of the developed countries, in the name of making the Internet safer and secure have tagged with some of the big profit seeking corporations in the world wide web to monitor and influence the way the Internet works. The Internet today is no longer neutral and/or free; From being decentralized it is steadily converging to become a Centralized infrastructure with little or no freedom to the end users.

Centralised Server based networks
The closest to what the Internet should be resembling in the current scenarios is the Peer-to-Peer mode of networking. In this architecture, every end user apart from being a client, is also a server.  This is in contrast with the rest of the services in the Internet where we have the Single Server- Multiple Client model. This model is called the Centralized model, where the online transactions occur between the mandating, giant servers and the helpless end users. This deterioration of the democracy in the Internet reflects a major invasion into the privacy of the users and more importantly infringement of the political freedom of the users as well. The case when the Internet services for Wikileaks was withdrawn by the corporations succumbing to the pressure of their Government is a direct manifestation of the impact that Centralization of the Internet can have.

As users, the point we need to be concerned about is the safety of the data we entrust to the biggies in the Internet. Every time we are online, there is almost a certain chance that either we are being spied, or our data is being used for increasing the business on the Internet.

One prospective solution to reinstate freedom in the Internet is, by the decentralization of servers, and giving the full control back to users. Decentralized Internet will comprise of not few servers where all the users will have to mortgage their data, but when fully decentralized, every user will end up having a small, cell phone charger sized Open Plug servers like the FreedomBox.
The FreedomBox again has been an initiative instigated by Prof.Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Centre and now the Debian Community of Free Software developers have kick started the project to set the Internet free.

To visualize it better, consider the current model of online Social Networking: About 500 million users on one famous Centralized Social Networking site have handed over all of their data to a single bunch of servers, after endorsing heavily privacy invading terms and conditions. Statuses, chats, pictures and the private interaction between users on the network is all under the scanner of on single Corporation.

To tackle such hegemony in the Internet, a new model of social networking is being tested. Distributed or Federated Social Networks, like Diaspora will decentralize the way online social networking will happen. Instead of all the users handing over their data to a server farm belonging to a single corporation, users can now put their data on smaller, independent servers like campus servers (called Pods) and get networked with other pods. In this way, the centralization can be reduced from a single hegemonic server cluster to decentralized, independent servers. The best part of this decentralization is that this decentralization can trickle down to the last of the users.



Using the Plug servers such as FreedomBox, individual users can run their own Diaspora Pods, with all the data residing in their personal mobile servers, which will communicate with other pods. Users will have total control over the data, and the extent of its availability to other users and even to the Internet.

This model of decentralization using FreedomBox like open plug servers will not only increase the privacy and security in social networking, but in near future will be applicable to mails, voice-over-internet phone calls, making the Internet neutral and democratic, reinstating freedom back to the users.

PS: The initial writeup for the recently published article in The Hindu , which was later optimized to concentrate mainly on Diaspora*.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Bangalore/article2132236.ece



Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Swecha Free Software Workshop

Swecha does it all in the big way.

 The ongoing 15 days Free Software Summer Camp in Hyderabad is by itself the first of its kind in India. The workshop is targeting students pursuing technical education and to enable them with the gamut of Free Software technologies which are in use in Industry.  Swecha team claims to have a modest number of about 600  students gathered for the 15 days Free Software Workshop happening in CBIT-MGIT, Hyderabad.

Swecha is the senior counterpart of the Free Software Movement - Karnataka (FSMK); both being part of the Free Software Movement India(FSMI), have everything but the regional geography in common.

Free Software in the air by alone was sufficient to draw someone like me into the ambiance of the workshop, but adding to it was Swecha as the host. I did pull one of our budding activists along this time, and I'm hoping he did get motivated further to carry on his work. The warm and amicable team with my fellow activists there is always an occasion not to be missed. And it proved right yet again. By the way, the experience of organizing an event of this scale is by itself a huge learning experience.












 Comprehensive theory sessions to start the day, followed by marathon lab sessions in about 20 labs all running Debian has been the routine everyday. Although the network has been something less than an adequate one, machines have been arranged for evey participant to work on.

The fifteen days are divided into five three-day modules to enhance the focussed exposure students would be getting on the technologies.
  • Making of a Computer Suite  
  • Programming using Software Carpentry aspects 
  • Mobile Computing 
  • Multimedia 
  • Content Management Systems      
Each of the days, after the regular sessions and labs,some important complimentary sessions have been organised to enable students on the non-technical aspects of the gamut of technologies they were handling in the evening. Sessions on the philosophy, policies, licensing and social ramifications of the technology are being held on a daily basis, which are equally important when compared to the technologies.

 









On these lines, I handled a session on Distributed Social Networking, taking Diaspora as an example. The importance of Internet to become decentralised and for the users to have control over their data in the current context of Internet technologies were touched upon in my talk. The overall reception of the talk was good, and there was some good interaction about the same all through the day.
 

Apart from serious tech sessions, labs and talks, a bunch of team-events and culturals are also in the line up for the days to come. There have already been a couple of team events which got all the participants enthusiastically engaged.

My stay at the camp was for less than 48 hours, nonetheless was a very good experience. There are better and more exciting sessions,talks and interactions in the days to come. Speakers of the likes of Prabhir Purkayastha, P Sainath will be participating in the camp, and I so did not want to miss them.

Now that I'm back in Bangalore, FSMK is working on a scaled down version of a workshop of this kind. Will keep you all posted about the updates from FSMK.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Running SMTP server on two ports concurrently in Ubuntu

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol(SMTP) server in Ubuntu is available via the package "Postfix", which is the most widely used SMTP server in UNIX-like systems including AIX, BSD, HP-UX, Linux, MacOS X, Solaris, and more environments.

SMTP as a service runs on Port 25.


fossphosis@fossphosis:~$ cat /etc/services | grep smtp
smtp         25/tcp          mail
ssmtp        465/tcp        smtps        # SMTP over SSL

To get Postfix running on Ubuntu, all one needs to do is apt-get the package.

fossphosis@fossphosis:~$ sudo apt-get install postfix

Once, Postfix is installed, in case of configurations apart from the default ones, reconfigure the settings by running the dpkg-reconfigure, to set the parameters matching the network requirements.

fossphosis@fossphosis:~$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure postfix

I wanted my SMTP instance available on the local network for all the machines on the 192.168.1.X subnet. To accomplish this the only change, or the appendage to the existing default configuration is to add the subnet in the entry, as shown below:
Adding 192.168.1.0/24 subnet for reachability of the SMTP server on my network
In case of applications, like the one I was faced with, where i wanted the SMTP to run on an alternate port other than Port 25  parallely, all you need to do is add the port entry in the following postfix configuration file.

Edit /etc/postfix/master.cf,

I wanted SMTP to run on port 2525, so added the following entry just, as shown below:

# ==========================================================================
# service type  private unpriv  chroot  wakeup  maxproc command + args
#               (yes)   (yes)   (yes)   (never) (100)
# ==========================================================================
smtp      inet  n       -       -       -       -       smtpd
2525      inet  n       -       -       -       -       smtpd

Once editing is done, restart the Postfix server

fossphosis@fossphosis:~$ sudo service postfix restart
[sudo] password for fossphosis:
 * Stopping Postfix Mail Transport Agent postfix           [ OK ]
 * Starting Postfix Mail Transport Agent postfix           [ OK ]

To verify if SMTP is running on both the ports,perform a basic telnet to the ports.
Testing on port 25
fossphosis@fossphosis:~$ telnet localhost 25
Trying ::1...
Connected to localhost.localdomain.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 Comp ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)


Testing on port 2525

fossphosis@fossphosis:~$ telnet localhost 2525
Trying ::1...
Connected to localhost.localdomain.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 Comp ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)

And, that's it!


Monday, May 9, 2011

FSMK General Body Meeting

The first annual General Body meeting of Free Software Movement-Karnataka was convened at the FSMK office on the 7th of May,2011.
It was presided over by Dr.Chidananda Gowda, eminent Kannada literary figure, former Vice Chancellor of Mysore University who also formally inaugurated the new FSMK Office in Wilson Garden, Bangalore.


As the host for the event Senthil mentioned, of all the guests we've had for our FSMK events, Dr.Chidananda Gowda spoke the most fitting to the context of Free Software, with his experiences in the domain of Free Software and Governance.


With the formal inauguration done, followed by the
culture of lighting of the lamp, indicating the conquest of photons (knowledge) over darkenss (ignorance), the General Body Meeting had begun on the 7th of May,2011.



The FSMK General Body comprises of 50 members, and has Free Software activists from varied backgrounds:Students, teachers, scientists, researchers, IT professionals, slum computing centre kids and writers. This mixed diaspora of Free Software enthusiasts gives the much needed multi-facetedness to take Free Software into the different realms of lives.




During the course of the three hour meeting, Prof.Chidananda Gowda's address comprised of him sharing with us the Proposal he had presented to the Government of Karnataka, to include and implement Free Software in the functioning of the State Government, as implemented by the Kerala Government. He very well understands the dynamics and importance of Free Software, upto the level that he had proposed individual Free Software alternatives to the most widely used proprietary utilities.
Senthil presented the activities conducted by FSMK post the National Conference in 2010, until the latest State Level Convention for Academicians by asking the respective coordinators from the GB to talk about the events for a couple of minutes. St.Jospeh's college Free Software course, IISc Open Day, NCAR in Hyderabad, numerous other talks and technical sessions through the year were briefly chronicled.

This was followed by the presenting of the accouts of FSMK to the General Body by Jayakumar.

The most important aspect of the GB was to give a structure to the adhocism to the functioning of FSMK without mellowing down the spirit of the team.
In this regard, an advisory panel for FSMK comprising of Prof.Chidananda Gowda, Baraguru Ramachandrappa and Chandrashekhara Kambara was proposed and was welcomed by the General Body.  A fourteen member Executive from the General Body was proposed and was wholeheartedly endorsed  by the GB.
Prof.Gopinath from IISc has been elected the President,FSMK activists Rameez and Surendra as the Vice-President, Jayakumar as the General Secretary, Naveen and Karthik as Joint Secretaries and Senthil as Treasurer were the chosen Office Bearers.

Seven committees directed at specific Free Software activities have been proposed for the systematic functioning of FSMK as an organization to build the Free Software Movement in Karnataka.

Students committee, Academicians committe, Localisation committee, Journal and Website committee, Slum Computing Centre committee, Schools committee and the Office Maintainance Committee are being formed to channelize efforts and coordinate the resources for better efficacy in the functioning of FSMK. Each of these committees will have a member from the Executive to keep the action going.

Finally, the GB meeting was concluded with a talk from Dr.Chatterjee which was an aspirational one for FSMK,talking about certain implementations we might want to take up in future, and then a talk by me on an upcoming campaign by FSMK on Web Democracy and Wikileaks.




Free Software is more than just community produced software; It is the arsenal of digital implements, using which freedom in the Internet and digital world will have to be sustained and perpetuated.