Triggered

Somebody pointed me to a research article about how many app developers fail to comply with the GDPR and data requests in general.

The sender suggested that I could use it in marketing for Nextcloud.

I appreciate such help, obviously, and often such articles are interesting. This one - I read it for a while but honestly, while I think it is good this is researched and attention is paid for it, I neither find the results very surprising NOR that horrible.

What, a privacy advocate NOT deeply upset at bad privacy practices?

Sir, yes, sir. You see, while the letter of the law is important, I think that intentions also are extremely important. Let me explain.

Not all GDPR violations are made equal

If you or your small business develops an app or runs a website to sell a product and you simply and honestly try to do a decent job while being a decent person, the GDPR is a big burden. Yes, the GDPR is good, giving people important rights. But if you run a mailing list on your local pottery sales website, with no intention other than to inform your prospective customers and followers of what you're up to, it can be a burden to have people send you GDPR takedown and 'delete me' requests instead of just having them, you know - unsubscribe via the link under your newsletter!

The goal of the GDPR, and of my personal privacy concerns, isn't at all related to such a business. If anything, their additional hardship (and we at Nextcloud have this issue too) is at best a by product of the goal. That byproduct isn't all bad - we all make mistakes, and being more aware of privacy is good, even for small businesses. The GDPR has forced many small businesses to re-think how they deal with private data, and that isn't a bad thing at all. But it isn't the main benefit or goal of the GDPR in my eyes. There are big businesses who totally COULD do better but never bothered, and now the GDPR forces them to get their act together. While that's a real good thing, even THAT is not, in my opinion, what the GDPR is about.

Privacy violation as a business

You see, there are businesses who don't violate privacy of people by accident. Or even because it is convenient. There are businesses who do it as their core business model. You know who I'm talking about - Facebook, Google. To a lesser but still serious degree - Microsoft and yes, even Apple, though you can argue they are perhaps in the "side hustle" rather than "it's their primary revenue stream" category.

For these organizations, gathering your private data is their life blood. They exploit it in many ways - some sell it, which is in my opinion definitely among the most egregious 'options'. Others, like Google and Facebook, hoard but also aggressively protect your data - they don't want to leak it too much, they want to monetize it themselves! Of course, in the process of that, they often leak it anyway - think Cambridge Analytica - that was in no way an incident, hundreds of apps get your private data via Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. But by and large, they want to keep that data to themselves so they can use it to offer services - targeted ads. Which in turn, of course, get abused sometimes too.

My issue with this business model, even without the outright sale of data, is two-fold.

Ads work better than you think

First, in principle - while people might feel ads don't effect them, there is a reason companies pay for them. They DO effect your behavior. Maybe not as much or in the way marketing departments think or hope, but the effect exists.

How bad is that? Depends, I guess. To some degree, it is of course entirely legitimate that companies have a way to present their product to people. But modern targeting does more, including allowing companies to charge specific people different prices, and of course a wide arrange of sometimes nasty psychological tricks is used. The example Facebook once gave to potential advertisers, of targeting an insecure youth "at their most vulnerable" with an ad is... rather disgusting.

This gets worse when we're not just talking about product ads but political ads, either from political countries or, of course, from foreign non-democratic adversaries trying to influence our freedoms in a rather direct and dangerous way. And again - this is more effective than most people realize or are willing to admit and has swayed elections already, making is all less free.

Centralization is bad

Second, there is simply a HUGE issue with all-our-eggs in one basket. Especial when that basket is in a foreign country and not protected by privacy and security laws compatible with those in your own country. Having a single point of failure, how well protected - is just not smart. Things WILL fail, always. Better have slightly more breaches that each are just a single provider, than one breach of all private data of everyone in a country...

And that's not even talking about the fact that this data helps these companies get incredibly huge and then allows them to suppress or kill competition (or just buy it) - think Amazon, Microsoft. These tech molochs are just plain bad because of many reasons. They are anti-competitive, which raises prices, decreases choice, and the much lower innovation-per-dollar they produce is of course a worse deal for society too. They are too easy to control by law enforcement and censorship, impacting our freedoms - even when they're not 'foreign' to you. Yes, it is harder to censor 50000 private servers than one Google server farm!

Triggered

 So, as you notice, this question triggered me. Not all privacy violations are equal. Intentions matter. As does market power. And the GDPR is not a golden bullet. It has downsides - compliance is often easier for big companies than small ones, a serious issue.

Luckily, our judicial system tends to look at the intentions behind law, and I would expect a judge to fine an organization heavier for truly bad business models than for honest mistakes. I hope I'm not too optimistic here.

From my side, I don't want to bang on people's head for mistakes. I want to attack and challenge bad business models and bad intentions. A local, small app maker who fails to respond quickly enough to GDPR requests - not my target. Facebook - yes.

And by the way. Maybe it doesn't need to be said to most of you, dear readers, but of course - our open source world is, I still believe, a huge part of solving this problem. KDE, openSUSE and other Linuxes and desktops - and of course Nextcloud, Mastodon, Matrix and other decentralized and distributed and self-hosted platforms. We have ways to go, but we're making progress!

As I concluded to the person who triggered me - I know, this is far too long a reply to what they said

But it triggered me ;-)

Best reply over twitter, (twitter.com/jospoortvliet) or so, this awful Google platform makes commenting nearly impossible. And I know, the irony, replying on twitter, and I still have not moved away from blogger.com... Some day, some day. When I find time.

3 alternative reasons why you should test Nextcloud 11 Beta

On the Nextcloud blog I just published about the beta for Nextcloud 11. The release will deliver many improvements and is worth checking out in itself, plus I put a nice clickbait-style title and gave three reasons to test it.

But I actually have some more reasons to test. You see, Nextcloud is one of the tools we need to keep our democracy working. As Frank notes on his home page:

"Privacy is the foundation of democracy"

And he is completely right. So, here are three different reasons why you should test (and help improve) Nextcloud:

1. The USA is making a massive swing towards even more spying

Obama has done nothing to curb the growth of the NSA and the scope of its operations. Secret laws spiked under his watch. Many of the folks about to be put in power by President-elect Trump favor more spying, including on US citizens, expansion of the NSA, a crackdown on whistleblowers and more. Trump's pick for CIA director calls for Snowden's execution. For what I can only guess must be giving proof of illegal government spying to dangerous terrorists like the Washington Post and the Guardian, who proceeded to win a Pulitzer prize by disclosing this information irresponsibly to the US public.

In general, as somebody who changes his stance on hugely important and complicated issues like torture in under an hour, it is impossible to predict what Trump will do with the most powerful spying agency in the world under his control, but his appreciation for dictatorial figures like Kim Jong Il and Putin gives plenty cause for concern.

2. Britain isn't doing much better

I wrote about the Snoopers' charter just some days ago - this piece of legislation goes further than any earlier piece of spying law. It allows not only passive spying but also actively hacking devices from citizens.

3. Nor is Europe

The UK is not alone. Since Snowden, Europe has complained a bit about the NSA but seems to simply follow suit, rather than doing anything about it. Germany is even introducing a bill that will allow spying on foreign journalists.

Help out!

So, how can you help? Well, test Nextcloud 11 Beta, obviously. Help others to use it, get them involved. But it goes beyond Nextcloud - promote the use of and help improve tools like Tor, Signal and others, or democracy is screwed.

Edit: updated the blog 

Latest attacks on privacy...

With the EU (in this case France and Germany) gearing up for another attack on privacy I'm quite happy and proud to have been part of the release of Nextcloud 10!

Privacy

It is the usual story: we should disallow companies from using perfect end to end encryption and force them to insert backdoors against terrorists.

Not that it would help - that's been discussed extensively already but in short:

• If you have nothing to hide, you'll use a backdoored app and you're vulnerable to foreign (and your own) governments, terrorists (!), criminals and others who can abuse your data in more ways than you can imagine.
• If you have something to hide, you can use 1000 different tools to do so and there is nothing government can do about that so you won't use a backdoored app.
• And note that government has failed to even use fully unencrypted information to stop terrorist attacks so perhaps we should first see if they can actually get their act together there.

Now yes, backdooring all commonly used encryption apps will help a BIT, essentially only with the low level, common crime. So you might catch the dude who broke into your house and bragged about it to his friends over Whatsapp. You won't catch the terrorists plotting with Al Qaida (or whatever the terrorist organization du-jour) to blow up a train because they can simply get one of the many solutions out there to protect themselves.

Nor will you catch corrupt politicians or big companies doing nasty stuff, though I am quite certain the laws will be written in such a way that you can use them to go after people who actually try to expose such politicians or companies.

And I'm also quite certain companies will use this as an excuse to not implement proper protection in their products so you can continue to stop pacemakers remotely or disable the brakes in cars over the internet.

Generally, laws targeting encryption and terrorism do more to harm whistleblowing than terrorism and are thus promoting corruption and bad, unsecure products.

These laws will literally cost lives. Not save any.

And it is exactly why Frank started ownCloud and why we continue to develop that vision at Nextcloud. And keep developing new features, like the File Access Control app which can provide an extra protective layer around your data. I for one certainly can use that app and exactly in the way described in that blog! So much for 'enterprise only features'.


Get it and migrate today. You and your data deserve it!

On Open Source, forking and collaboration: Nextcloud 9 is here!

The nature of Open Source is, in a sense, dualistic. It encourages collaboration through the threat of not collaborating--a fork. When I was approached by Struktur AG to join them to work on ownCloud and Spreed, I loved the idea. I always wanted an ecosystem around ownCloud, which is why I pushed things forward like our collaboration with Western Digital Labs and Collabora, matters of no business interest to the company I worked for. I believe a stronger ecosystem benefits everybody.

Ecosystems and confidence

A major point which makes open source so beneficial for businesses is that it puts pressure on suppliers to offer great service and support. If they don't, another can enter the market and out-service them. Tight control over the community tough things like CLA and trademark makes it hard to grow such an ecosystem and negates some of the benefits of open source for customers.

Luckily, in the end, the AGPL license protects the future of a project, even if its steward clings to power. From conversations with Niels early on, it was clear to me that he has a very different and very confident view on his ability to run a real open source company. His history at Red Hat results in frequent comparisons. And indeed, Red Hat runs things the right way, even supporting a project like CentOS which many other companies would consider an existential threat to their business model. Just as their investment in opensource.com shows: they aim to grow the pie, not grab a bigger slice.

former 'enterprise feature' done right (and open)

I'm super proud and happy that we could announce today, with our first release, that Nextcloud will not be doing proprietary code. No closed apps means no inherent conflict between sales and community management/developers within the company, but a full alignment in one simple direction: servicing the customer.

And if you wonder about the collaboration with Collabora/LibreOffice Online and with Western Digital: yes, of course, we'll go full steam ahead and will facilitate where we can! No, we're not afraid that either would 'compete' with us: both will complement and strengthen the ecosystem. So we will work together.

Why? Because the core contributors and founder shared an ambitious goal for Nextcloud: be THE solution for privacy and security.

Home Automation, AI and the Crownstone

Waiting for that future where you're dressed automatically? I'd rather do that myself and don't have a Roomba yet but as tech marches on, we'll get more automation in our homes.

With more and more 1984, Brave New World and Farenheit 451 being brought to this century by our esteemed leadership and our corporate overlords, I'm hoping that this tech will be ours, rather than theirs.

Enter a nice player in the "automate stuff" arena: Dobots. In their own words:

Our goal: Really smart buildings. Really smart robots. We're a startup in AiTech with applications in CleanTech and GreenTech.

What makes them nice is that they are real Open Source folks, putting what they code on github under a free license and working with and building on open tech.

They previously did industrial cleaning robots and other stuff. Currently, they are running a kickstarter for a smart power outlet as a first foray into home automation. EDIT: they've instead decided to, for the first run, only create EU plugs as there was little interest in the US. You can order them on the crownstone.rocks website.

Enter the Crownstone

How is AI relevant for power outlets? More than you'd think. One example is SLAM. SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) tries to answer two key questions in Robotics:

• Robot Localization: “Where is the Robot?”
• Robot Mapping: “What does the world around the Robot look like?”

(read more about SLAM here)

Dobots has turned this around in the crownstone, using these algorithms to map your house and localize people in it. Yes, the Crownstones know where THEY are and where YOU are. While not exactly a localization tech, the Crownstone uses Bluetooth LE for this so it works with pretty much any device. And the best part: their localization code is, in Javascript, to be found on github!

This means you need no motion detectors or cameras to know where people are in the house, keeping things simpler and cheaper. But Bluetooth LE is used for managing the Crownstones, too. Rather than turning to WiFi or (expensive) central control hubs, Dobots lets the Crownstones automatically create a mesh network. Your smartphone acts as control hub (apps on github, of course) though you can also take a Raspberry Pi, plug in a bluetooth usb module and have it act as hub. That way, even when you're not at home, you can control devices or get notificationsthat, say, your television, computer or other devices are getting unplugged. It uses XMPP and WebRTC to get through your firewall and guess where you can find the Cordova based Raspberry Pi app...



But there's another innovation in there which helps avoid extra devices and complicated configuration: extremely fine grained power usage monitoring. Yeah, it can tell you how much power your fridge and TV use but more importantly: it can automatically detect which device you connect to it! So when you leave the house, it can kill power to your tv but not your fridge... I've been told they think they eventually will be able to figure out different makes and models of laptops based on their power signature. Now is that cool, or what?

The algorithms to do this are currently Matlab code but once finalized, they'll be on github, too.

Dobots regularly works with students who get to play with their tech and come up with new, innovative use cases. And this works wonders. Just some results from a recent hackathon:

• Team 1 developed ChildLock. Devices are only turned on when adults are in proximity.
• Team 3 developed Start VR. Virtual reality that allows you to picture your own furniture in an Ikea store.
• Team 4 introduced Never Lose. Lights indicate for elderly people where they have lost items with iBeacons.
• Team 5 used Crownstones to indicate the way to store employees.
• Team 6 worked on Tommy. An AI that analyzes patterns of daily life to combat loneliness.
• Team 7 developed Any Morning. Your phone using the Crownstones guides you to your morning routines to make you leave your home on time.
• Team 10 implemented Tipspromenad. Kids have to find objects in a place combined with solving puzzles for fun!
• Team 11 developed SpotOn. In emergency situations lights indicate how to flee a building

All together

The Crownstone has some nice advantages over the competition:

• Functional. Dimmer, iBeacon, a current measuring device, a standby killer and more in one.
• Cheap: you get 2 ready-made or 3 do-it-yourself for Eur 75 but there's no need for a hub, motion sensors or other stuff.
• Open. Using open protocols and code on github and I expect interesting applications to come from the community.

I did an interview with their COO - for more background, read it on LinuxVeda.

So I say - if you are looking to start with some basic home automation, go and get some Crownstones and get started!

BREAKING: Netneutrality more complex than you thought!

It was simple: netneutrality is good. Companies shouldn't be able to buy their way on a fast lane! That stifles innovation and competition and risks ruining the internet. Just like John Oliver explained it! But now the Brazilians are making things complicated.

Brazil was one of the first countries to introduce strong Net Neutrality laws, points for them. But now, Brazilian banks and local government are paying for the data bundles of users! Heresy! Why?

Well, many Brazilians can't afford a data bundle. Yet they need to bank, or order new passports. And it turns out that handling people in person at the office is more expensive for the banks and local governments than have them use an app on their phone. So, they made a deal with some local providers: users, even without a data bundle, can do their banking online and order their passports without paying. That seems like a win-win.

Zero rating, as this practice is called, exempts some services from from the data bundle - exactly what Brasil is doing. It is used widely in India ("internet.org") and in Chile it offered many people access to a limited set of internet services - until it was outlawed. But in a country where only a quarter of the citizens has access to broadband internet, aren't we doing the population a disservice by taking away their internet access, however limited?

Zero rating is essentially the equivalent of a collect call - the receiver pays. What is wrong with that? Even wikimedia supports zero rating!

It isn't win-win but lose-it-all

The thing is - the provider will be the gate keeper of what services you can. You are allowed only on a piece of the internet, being blocked not by technical boundaries but by a business model. A model which allows providers to extract more money from their business than they otherwise would have - not by offering more services, but by offering less.

The result will inevitably be lower data caps because it forces more companies to pay for zero rating! This is exactly what happens in Canada, where $45 gets you 2GB of data - compare that to the price of 8 dollars for the same amount in Finland. Canada is now changing the rules. Cable providers have figured that out, too, and try imposing limits while excepting certain services. And indeed, when providers introduce zero rating, prices go up!


Interestingly, when zero-rating is squashed, the opposite happens. When the government forbade zero rating in the Netherlands, its largest provider KPN responded by doubling their users' data caps without a price hike.

Thus, my suggestion to the Brazil government would be: work with providers to get indiscriminate data bundles to more users, rather than empowering providers to control their users' Internet usage.


Zero rating exist by virtue of artificial Internet scarcity in the form of usage caps and it is not part of the solution to bringing Internet access to everybody. It is part of the problem.

Dealing with our flaws in thinking

This is a follow-up on a post about the limited human rationality. In that post I described some facts - just a few - that perhaps left you a little more in doubt about your cognitive abilities. Or at least more aware of the limitations our human condition comes with!

Consequences

Unfortunately, the mentioned and the many other flaws in our thinking have consequences for decision making in our society, especially when there's money to be made. The lobby of weapon manufacturing is rather stronger than that of companies creating anti-slip mats in showers and car manufacturers, well, security is merely a factor increasing the costs of cars so there's little incentive for them to hammer on that issue either. The combination of our innate inability to judge the likelihood of these and other things to harm us and the financial pressure on politicians results in massive over-spending on what is in essence irrelevant or even dangerous and harming our society. The NSA, for one, stupidity around net neutrality is another and the war on drugs is third rather prominent example. And now Ebola, of course - a disease so unlikely to kill you, you're probably more likely to be killed by a falling piano.

I think it is pretty clear, as I mentioned above, that politics and business happily abuse our lack of rationality. But probably more often, 'the system' causes issues by itself, as the insanely huge political divide in the US shows. It pays of for the media to put extreme people in front of their audience - and today, we have a country where you can't discuss politics at the office because people see the world so vastly different that only conflict can come out of a conversation. Think of the biases I discussed earlier: these world views aren't likely to get fixed easily, either.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I don't think anybody set out to create this divide - but it is with us now.

Now indeed, the media are part of a system working against us. They get rewarded for creating an impression of problems; and they are often uninformed and biased themselves. As John Oliver pointed out, we don't put a believer in regular human abductions by aliens in front of a camera to debate a scientist, attempting to give both sides of the debate an equal chance! We pity the few who still don't get that this, and many other issues, are settled.


Yet this is what often happens in areas where science has long come to a conclusion. Not just the moon landing but also vaccinations, global warming, evolution and a great many more things. Take the recent "Snowden wants to come home" media frenzy!

I don't think any of that is intentional. It's the system rewarding the wrong things. We are part of that 'system': we prefer news that supports our view point; and we prefer new and exciting things - a balanced point of view is boring.

Quality decision making gets harder and harder.

Dealing

One way of dealing with disagreement has been to essentially declare all facts 'up for discussion'. It all depends on your point of view, proponents of this idea say. But reality isn't as malleable as relativists make it out to be. You can choose to leave your house through the front window on the 3rd floor, but gravity's a bitch. It's nice that some want to value everybody's opinion, but the universe imposes limits to that.

We have to realize that the world is real. People can be right or wrong about it and the choices we make matter!

As a society, we need to find new ways to make decisions in a healthy way. We've done good things - we eliminated polio and smallpox, diseases that were around for many thousands of years and nobody has had them in a long, long time. River blindness is hopefully next, and others will follow. We also drove half the worlds' animals near extinction and are abusing this planet to the point where it just will become a much more hostile place in a century or two unless we change something. You can guess I'm not much into libertarianism - it is clear that we can and do impact the world and going it all alone does not solve the tragedy of the commons style issues we have. There's a problem - and the inherent complexity of the world is certainly part of it, as is our lack of rationality.

How do we deal? I used to be an optimist - when I discovered the Internet, I thought it would democratize knowledge (it has) and news (not so much). Social media, sites like Digg where people vote on what the 'best news' is, it seemed a new and improved reality. No more single points of failure. No journalists who can be bought or oppressed. And then there were open source communities, with their flat structure of decision making, ideals of equality and meritocracy. Democracy would thrive!

Reality was harsh. The Internet has allowed us to hide in our corners with like minded people. It has lots of good stuff (if you're not into economy or net neutrality, this is a good read on both) but the Internet didn't kill conspiracy theories, it fuelled them. And open source works for some, but has its own issues of inequality (and that is just one problem).

Perhaps technology can help - Google has apparently found ways to find out what's true and what isn't. I'm not so sure. I wonder what it would do to sites like this proving that even with mere facts you can create conspiracy nonsense.

Methods to the rescue

I think the solution has to be found in a system or a process in the way the scientific method works. Wikipedia describes it as follows:

The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge.

I prefer to call it a process, rather than a 'body of techniques'. The key is that if left to common sense, humanity decides that life emerges from lifeless matter until more than 2000 years later Louis Pasteur shows it really, really doesn't (except for this). The scientific method thus aims to take human decision making out of the equation, or at least, rigorously deal with the biases that cloud our judgment. Lots of books have been written on the subject of philosophy of science - I got my portion by way of Chalmers, worth reading.

However it works, key is that while science relies on people and thus makes mistakes, it has a process for dealing with these mistakes, correcting them over time. Confidence is gained over long periods and the result is that we have been largely refining our knowledge gained since the scientific method became widely used, rather than rewriting the world as we know it over and over again. Yes, Newton's theories on physics still stand - quantum mechanics and Einsteinian physics merely refines it, providing better results in areas Newton can't reach. Uncertainty exists in science, but only at the 'edges', where new knowledge is created. While many facts of evolution are debated, since evolutionary synthesis, we've settled on a core which is as solid as Newton's ideas about gravity; climate models might be imperfect today but much of what we discovered does not have to be debated over again and again.

Method for decision making

We have methods, systems, processes for decision making, too. Democracy is one, the trias politica part of it. But it has flaws and needs some refinement, ideally in the opposite direction of Citizens United. I don't think we can make a Philosopher King system work, so whatever we come up with has to be a bureaucracy, evolved from today's system. I think decentralization is part of the solution (majors should rule the world?), but we live together on this planet so there have to be over-arching structures, too.

I know there is research being done on the topic. And we've already come up with some strategies like the advocate for the devil.

What exactly the solution should look like - don't ask me. I'm a psychologist, I can merely tell you not to trust people and their gut instincts. If this feels like an anti-climax, well, it should. We will have to come up with solutions together - not one blogger alone!

Soon?

But we should hurry.

I believe, with self-described plutocrat Nick Hanauer, that the pitchforks are coming. Perhaps the militarization of police and governments (the NSA in particular) disrupting online security are attempts of governments to prepare for social unrest.

Maybe.

What I'm certain about is that humanity can't continue the way it is functioning now. If social inequality doesn't put a stop it, the depletion of natural resources or religious fundamentalists will. The Dutch would say: the wall will turn the ship.

Let's see how hard we'll hit it.

Why can the NSA do what it does?

This is part one of two blogs about how we make decisions and how our lack of rationality results in much of the mess we have today. I'll start with addressing the title of the blog - spying.

Much has been said about NSA by very qualified people like Bruce Schneier, comparing the NSA to

the Maginot Line (..) in the years before World War II: ineffective and wasteful.

The costs in terms of civil liberties and money resulted in one confirmed case where somebody was caught thanks to NSA spying (probably unfairly, though).

Like most technical people, I'm not impressed but very worried about the erosion of our civil rights, through the NSA spying and in other ways. And I am sure I share with others the impression that if only politicians and the general public knew more about the problem, we wouldn't make such bad decisions.

At the same time, I know I'm probably wrong about that. Like most people, I also care about global warming; health care; poverty; war; and the countless other things arguably Wrong With The World. And collectively, we know all there is to know about them.

Somebody, or a small cabal, must be causing this, then - an argument you often hear about many things gone wrong.

Is there a cabal? Let me invoke Hanlon's razor:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Because I think it's the human condition that got us here, not malice of anybody in particular. We just, collectively AND individually, fail at making the right decisions.

So the question should be: what makes us so unreliable? So easy to lie to, especially in groups? Why do we believe conspiracy theories that often require us to believe far more fantastic things than the reality they try to disprove? How can fans kill people only in South Korea?

I'd like to dig into that a bit in this post, more of an essay than a blog, I suppose. The immediate reason is the mess surrounding the NSA (probably not news to most readers of my blog), where one-liners and the inherent complexity of the issue have ensured most people I talk to don't see the problem.

Reality is that the more you know, the harder it is to have a firm opinion. In reality, often conflicts are like Israel vs Palestine - if you pick a side, you're wrong. The complexity of real life issues makes it easy for governments and companies to play people - I feel an urge to point to Russia, but how do we know they are not right claiming Israel-backed Neo-Nazis used US supplied weapons to shoot down Flight 17? You can point out that historically, (neo)Nazis and Jews haven't gotten along very well. That's a fact. But so is the support of the EU for 'political reform' (overthrowing a legitimate, democratically elected government) in Ukraine. How valuable are facts and reason in a complicated situation?

I don't want to talk about the facts of any specific situation here. I'm not an expert in pretty much every relevant domain and neither are all of you! But we do have decision power - that is how democracy works. Luckily, with the Internet today, it is possible to have the most important facts around. And unfortunately, it does not lead to better decisions. So I want to look at it from my background in psychology and talk about how we deal with knowledge and how we make decisions.

Most of the time, we make decisions using 'common sense'. Our gut feeling, which was useful when we were still in Africa. But what works when you're hunting antelope might just not do the trick when you have to decide for an insurance company.

Why we don't get it

The problem lies in cognitive biases, described by Wikipedia as a "pattern of deviation in judgment". That's a nice understatement if you ask me.

A cognitive bias is a remainder of our Africa times, setting us up for certain errors. You'd be surprised how much of our thinking is in our genes. It is why most people are afraid of snakes and spiders: somehow, our genes have programmed our brain to quickly learn to fear snake and spider like objects, but be totally fine with bunnies and flowers.

To understand how limited our ability for logical thinking is, let's remind ourselves of Optical Illusions. I'm sure you've seen many by now and you should realize how flawed our vision is. Yet we have evolved to 'see stuff' for millions of years. We have a big part of our brain dedicated to it. And we use our eyes all day long, every day of our life. Yet, these images keep confounding us. To top it all off, there is change blindness, showing it isn't just bad - we are terrible.

Logic, on the other hand, is quite new. While some brilliant people were inventing math and logic thousands of years ago, most humans kept busy hunting, later growing food. And most of the time, in day to day life, we work on the automatic pilot. There's a reason we learn to recognize objects with little effort as babies already but have to be taught the mere basics of math during excruciatingly long sessions at school! Humans are naturally absolutely horrible at math and logic, to the point where somebody with some reasonable knowledge of probability could have won half the riches of the ancient world by gambling - probability theory was only developed in the 17th century.

And if you think you did well in those 16 years of school, answer this:

A bat and ball together cost $1.10. 
The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?

See the answer two chapters further, just before the end.

It shouldn't be a surprise to learn that the list of cognitive biases is as long as it is. Most of the time, instead of 'proper' logic thinking, we use heuristics, shortcuts to 'good enough' solutions. They work great - if you're hunting antelopes.

To state the obvious: we're not. To go back to the NSA - we're letting them go wild. And: global warming, poverty, war... We're not doing that well, as Douglas Adams pointed out:

“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

Some biases explained

You might have clicked some of the links above and seen some examples already, but lets bring this to life with a familiar example: why are so many people afraid of flying?

Let's turn the question around. SHOULD you be afraid of flying? There's a risk, certainly. But it is a well known fact (I won't even link to anything) that the chances of an accident when traveling by plane are larger on the way to and from the airport than while in the air! So why do many people still feel flying is dangerous? It is due to the way our brain does statistics. It's nothing like a calculator...

Our brains have ways of estimating how likely something is. They do that by digging in our memory: the easier it is to recall multiple instances of something, the more likely it is to happen. That makes sense - if you found food three times when walking a certain path, there is a high likelyhood of you finding more there rather than on a path where you never found anything to eat. It's clear where you should go if you are real hungry.

But our memory isn't terribly precise. First of all, it stores information in relation to emotion. This means when you're sad you can remember sad things better and when you're happy, happy events come to mind easier. It also stores things better when they are associated with strong emotions. This makes sense: events which upset, anger or scare you are probably more important than those which don't elicit any particular emotional response. You'll remember less details from your home-work travel from Tuesday a week ago then that crazy ride in a roller coaster, even though the latter didn't even get you to anywhere special.

This effect causes us to make massive errors in estimating things like the likelihood of getting a car accident, slipping in the shower or getting killed by a terrorist. And flying, of course - plane accidents feature prominently in the press and cause a lot of anxiety. But let me remind you:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

These accidents are worth talking about - don't blame the media for reporting the news. It's just that we fail at judging how likely it is that it happens to us.

And this is just one flaw related to just one aspect of how we think - statistics. We're not too good when it comes to statistics and causality either, as XKCD points out below.



Our failure to handle statistics can be abused quite easily, and not just in gambling or other situations where statistics obviously play a role. In marriage counseling, a therapist might ask you to try and come up with five good things about your partner. This wouldn't be too hard and put you in a more positive mood. If the therapist was evil, however, he/she could ask for ten good things instead. While you might get to ten, a number that should give more confidence than a mere five, paradoxically the difficulty in coming up with such properties is not going to be good for the relationship.

And there's (again) no malice needed. Stereotypes, for example, are known to cause behavioral changes without awareness of the subject ("you do something but don't know why you are doing it"). In an interesting experiment, it was shown that if you let a group of white people and people of color complete a standardized test, they can either do equally well, or not. It depends on what you tell them it is a test of "diagnostic of intellectual ability" or not!


That's right: when they know it is an IQ test, African-Americans score significantly worse than white people, while they actually do a little better when the same test is done without any mention of its diagnostic abilities. They let the stereotype come true, unintentional and unconscious.

An awesome example of how prejudices influence us on a fundamental level can be found in this great video of a talk by Mahzarin Banaji, who shows to an audience of liberal, well educated scientists the gender bias in their brains. Watch the section with the test below and while she does the test, participate! Speak out the 'left' and 'right' so you can experience the effect for yourself.


If you participate, you will notice that you easily do the first three tasks - but the fourth is inexplicably harder. This shows the fundamental bias in your brain: you take twice as long to answer a question that isn't congruent with your unconscious gender prejudice! Professor Mahzarin notes that she, herself, exhibits this same bias - about 75% of men and women do. Racism exists even in people with the best of intentions.

Nobody can be blamed for this - it is how we, humans, function, just another one of our many flaws. Stereotypes are central to how we function, influencing our behavior at every corner in our lives. They ARE the biases, the short cuts of thought, themselves!

What does this all add up to? For one, you can't judge how dangerous something is. That is why we spend lots of time and money to reduce risks that are tiny, see also this and this.

Confirmation bias

Let's discuss one more bias, confirmation bias. This is one particularly nasty bugger:

Confirmation bias, also called myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, or recall information in a way that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning.

Remember, the inductive reasoning Wikipedia mentions here is the one based on probability: after you've seen over 50 expensive cars in a new place you're visiting, you might be inclined to think it is a rich city. Maybe. But remember what I said earlier: how does your brain assess probability? Memory recall.

Wikipedia mentions explicitly that your brain has a tendency to remember things that fit the theory you are trying to verify! That means that it will fail to bring to mind the slum around the airport you saw from the airplane. Yes, your brain will explicitly take away your ability to properly judge a situation.

It sure makes you feel more confident about your decision. But not any less wrong.

And that is just the memory side of this bias. Countless studies have shown we explicitly look for evidence that fits our expectation. A truly impressive example is in the video below:

A little background on this experiment is here and an opinion piece by the LA Times connects it to how white people demonize people of color in the aftermath of Fergusson. Of course, when it comes to minorities there are many biases in play, this is just one of them.

About the Bat and the Ball. The bat was a dollar more expensive than the ball, and no, the ball isn't 10 cents with the bat being 1 dollar. That would make the bat only 90 cent more expensive. 5 ct and 1 dollar and 5 cent. Of course, if you did the math, you wouldn't get it wrong. But if you think quickly - you are. Because you're then using a shortcut. Sadly, you do that most of the time, and not just when math is involved.

The human intellect is particularly good at over-estimating itself. We even consider unrealistic positivism about oneself a healthy attitude - people who are more realistic are clinically depressed. There's a sad list of self deceptions here. And if you think that high intelligence means less cognitive biases - think again. It might even be that the opposite is true!

In a way, this video gives a philosophical view on the subject, inspired by Plato's cave:


I hope that with some of the facts and thoughts above, I've made you a little bit more humble, dear reader. Because if we're to solve the problems we have, we need exactly that...

Read part two for some thoughts on the consequences and dealing with our limitations. Feel free to comment below!

What's Holding ownCloud Back?

In the recent article about the ownCloud event program, I pointed out that while ownCloud has 2.5 million users, it is a drop in the ocean looking at the number of Internet users (a little over 4 billion today). The announcement of the "Let's Encrypt" initiative from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla and others prompted me to write this: it is one step in the direction of removing the limitations holding back wider ownCloud adoption. What does the future hold?

Easy ownCloud

As Frank pointed out in his blog on the future of PHP, ownCloud has ease of use as an explicit and very important goal. And while the technological choices made aren't always so exciting and bleeding edge, they do result in ownCloud being very easy to deploy on a very wide range of devices. Plenty of tutorials exist showing it running on everything from Rasberry Pi devices to big iron at organizations like CERN, where physicists looking for the origins of the universe are routing hundreds of terrabytes of data through their CernBOX build on ownCloud, sharing and collaborating on the data analysis.

Limitations

Unfortunately, there are limitations outside of what ownCloud can directly control.

In the database area, SQLite is default because it requires no manual setup whatsoever. But performance suffers when an installation has more than a trivial amount of data. When sharing with more than 15 users or indexing your mp3 connection, SQLite usage leads to frequent time-outs and other issues!

Another, more serious issue, is the architecture of the current internet. Most users are set up at home behind a firewall provided by their internet router. While this provides some additional security, it is mainly because the limited number of unique addresses available in the still widely-used 'IPv4' protocol. It simply is impossible to assign a unique address to each device connected to your internet at home. But this means your server will not be reachable when you're not home, unless you adjust some settings on your router. While we can configure some routers automatically, most we can't and as every router is different, an easy 'generic' how-to can't be provided either.

A third issue is that an ideal ownCloud platform would be small and cheap devices like the Raspberry Pi, but these are almost all based on 32bit CPU's. Due to technical limitations in the platform ownCloud builds on, this means you won't be able to have it handle files bigger than about 4 gigabyte! That is a big limitation if you'd like to store your virtual machine or Blue Ray collection on your ownCloud.

The fourth issue I see is security. While not the biggest problem of the three, setting up a server to be secure, including a decent SSL certificate, is not easy. I personally couldn't figure it out and while I'm new to server things, I am not a technology hater by any means. My parents wouldn't ever be able to figure it out and more importantly, they wouldn't want to!

Solutions

These four issues to wider ownCloud adoption aren't the only ones, but as far as I can tell, the biggest. So how do we deal with it?

There are several routes to an even easier ownCloud installation. Having a pre-setup operating system in the form of a container (Docker?) or a virtual machine can take care of much of the trouble around database setup and help a lot with the security issue. However, it can't run on light hardware like a Raspberry Pi and doesn't deal with the file size problem.

When it comes to the address limitations, the internet is slowly transitioning to IPv6 which will provide more unique addresses for each person than IPv4 offered in total (see here how Google explains IPv6). So, essentially, we just have to wait for this problem to be solved.

The hardware problem is also working on solving itself: the upcoming new swath of ARM CPU's (and Intel CPU's targeting the embedded market) are fully 64 capable so while current-gen Raspberry Pi devices (and other embedded devices like routers!) aren't perfect for ownCloud, a year from now many new devices will be perfectly capable of providing a great ownCloud experience.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Let's Encrypt" initiative offers a (partial) solution for the security issue. Without it, a pre-configured ownCloud system will most likely be set up to use a self-signed certificate. While secure in principle, it always warns visitors of the self-signed state and thus isn't ideal. Let's Encrypt provides an automated and more importantly free (in terms of cost) solution for this.

And now

While I'd love for all these changes to be implemented yesterday, in reality we simply have to wait for the transitioning to IPv6 and 64bit CPU's. In the mean time, we can already start working on integrating Let's Encrypt into virtual machine and Docker images with a pre-configured MySQL (or MariaDB) and perhaps recommend people to run them on a 64bit capable system like a modern NAS or a NUC. The ownCloud-in-a-Box image on SUSE Studio is a great start!

Meanwhile, getting ownCloud ready to run on a wider range of devices and perform a wider range of 'cloudy' functions like running as backend of the Chromebook devices (see this page and ping me if you want to get involved) should be on the agenda as well. I personally look forward to more 'social' integration in ownCloud, like the ability to comment on images or other data and share these with the people you share files with. We're on it, tags sharing is integrated for ownCloud 8 and a generic metadata repo was created (empty still). Get involved if you can!

Obviously, telling people about ownCloud is still important - which is what the ownCloud event program is all about - and help is welcome. Go to owncloud.org/promote and share the love!

Security doesn't discriminate

Yesterday I published a long blog about privacy and why it matters. Unfortunately, as Commit Strip eloquently paints below, privacy almost always gives away to the same old arguments...

That was all too typical in Holder's call to tech companies to leave device back doors open to police. What Holder doesn't seem to get (or care about!) is that a back door doesn't discriminate who gets through. If you leave your door unlocked so the police can get in, do I really have to tell you it also means thieves can come in?

It is no different in 'cyberspace'. There ARE differences between real life and online life - but in this is not one of them. Security Ninja Bruce Schneier pointed out the effect of this reality:

"We are all vulnerable to everyone because the NSA wanted us to be vulnerable to them."

In his blog from 2 weeks ago, he continued:

"We have one infrastructure. We can't choose a world where the US gets to spy and the Chinese don't. We get to choose a world where everyone can spy, or a world where no one can spy. We can be secure from everyone, or vulnerable to anyone. And I'm tired of us choosing surveillance over security."

Me too, Bruce. Me too. And it's even more irritating that the people who are supposed to protect us keep lying about it all.

Later addition

October 3 Vox put the issue in a historical perspective. More details are in this New York Times article from 1994.

I spend some time collecting and commenting on the most interesting quotes:

"Wiretapping is among law enforcement's most cherished weapons. Only 919 Federal, state and local taps were authorized last year, but police agencies consider them essential to fighting crime."

We know things have changed, and not just in the US. In 2011, the Berliner police collected data from 4.2 MILLION mobile phones just to catch ONE group of car thieves... Shows how government surveillance has begun to spin out of control, if you ask me.

"Still, the effect of strong crypto on N.S.A. operations is not difficult to imagine. The agency is charged with signals intelligence, and it is widely assumed that it monitors all the communications between borders and probably much of the traffic within foreign countries. (It is barred from intercepting domestic communications.)"

Thanks to Snowden, we know that they're now heavily intercepting domestic communications. Some things have changed (guardian article on effects of the Snowden leaks) but we have a long way to go. If you want to know more about Snowden - this article on Wired is among the very best.

The article talks about introducing a security chip (Clipper) with a back door for Law enforcement, but correctly asks:

"What sort of nuclear terrorist would choose Clipper?"

Indeed:

"Some people criticize Clipper on the basis that truly sophisticated criminals would never use it, preferring other easily obtained systems that use high-grade cryptography."

"The Government understands the impossibility of eradicating strong crypto. Its objective is instead to prevent unbreakable encryption from becoming rountine. If that happens, even the stupidest criminal would be liberated from the threat of surveillance. But by making Clipper the standard, the Government is betting that only a tiny percentage of users would use other encryption or try to defeat the Clipper."

In other words, this would do the same thing as famously copyright protection on music CD's did: legitmate use (like copying the songs from the album you own to your iPod) was made impossible, but slightly more sophisticated, often professional music sharers had no issues with the 'protection'.

"This seems to be the Government's intent -- to encourage "crypto lite," strong enough to protect communications from casual intruders but not from Government itself."

Making us thus all vulnerable to hackers, foreign governments etc etc. Nothing new under the sun!

A quote from the documentation of PGP gives this same response:

"If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy. Intelligence agencies have access to good cryptographic technology. So do the big arms and drug traffickers. So do defense contractors, oil companies, and other corporate giants. But ordinary people and grassroots political organizations mostly have not had access to affordable 'military grade' public-key cryptographic technology."

Amen.

The Vox article also points out the Washington Post had to correct a op-ed by former FBI official Ronald Hosko who gave a specific example where encryption would have thwarted a law enforcement investigation and cost lives - but turned out to be wrong. Honestly, if the one example the FBI has turns out to be wrong, how much is there to say for their argument? I don't think encryption will do as much harm as they like to claim.

XKCD already comically explained this: the government has many means of getting information from its citizens, and encryption doesn't change that much.



EDIT october 6: I can keep updating this post forever, but I won't - only one more link: Bruce Schneier weighted in, calling it Return of the Crypto Wars - referring to the fight around the Clipper chip I described above.

EDIT 2: Rather than writing a new blog, I thought I'd add another piece here. I've made the point that the pervasive spying doesn't help. Just, for reference, some evidence in the form of a series of attacks where the perpetrators were known but the secret service simply lacked the resources or insight to follow and catch them:

• September 11 2001 attacks
• Murder of two people at anti-Muslim exhibition in Texas
• Murder of Theo van Gogh,
• Charlie Hebdo attacker
• Attack on the Thalys
• Failed attack at a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit
• Attack in Tunis
• The attack in Kopenhagen

Via a blog from Dutch journalist De Winter

Of course this is still all complaining in the margins, no matter how horrible 'terrorism' is, it isn't a cause for death which is even remotely relevant in comparison to serious threats to people's lives like smoking or car accidents... And indeed, as the word points out: it is about 'terror'. Making people afraid. Not actually killing or harming them - ISIS and friends don't have the resources to do any real harm. They can just scare us into changing our society. Which our politicians are all to happy to do, well supported by the media (see this video).

Frameworks 5.0 is out!

It took us a while but here it is. And I think we did quite a decent job communicating this to the outside world with articles like

• An extensive overview of and background on Frameworks 5
• Tech Preview release article with lots of info
• How KDE contributed to Qt 5.2 to ready it as base for Frameworks 5
• The mini series of 'where KDE is going' discussed Frameworks and its importance pt 1, pt 2
• Article for Linux.com about why Frameworks is a big deal for Free Software

For the final release (this one, I mean) we had far less time than I had hoped - I wrote most of the announcement last Saturday (though we started a few days earlier and had our already-prepared communication plan) and we didn't really rally as much of our 'friends' to help promote the release as I had planned initially. And yesterday my internet broke down so in the end, Mario and Jonathan R had to put most of it live, half a day behind plan. But despite these issues, it did turn out quite well I think.

Now the communication is done and it is up to the code to prove itself in real life!

As I blogged before, I think this is a huge deal for Free Software on desktops AND mobile devices - it goes far beyond the KDE community. Qt is by far the largest Free Software ecosystem doing native (non-web, I mean) end-user software, but much of that is proprietary. Which makes sense - Digia and the other companies in and around Qt have to make money and don't have 'spreading Free Software' as their prime goal. Frameworks introduces a genuine FOSS touch to that, hopefully bringing many of these developers in touch with the KDE community and the Open Source development processes.

Oh, and just a few more days to go to support Randa 2014, and support it really needs. Remember, this is where Frameworks started! Let's see what KDE comes up with this year at Randa ;-)

On Innovation, Free Software, NIH, Geary, Trojita and KDE PIM

I argue that if Free Software wants to get anywhere, it needs a culture of 'collaboration first'. In most areas, we have that. In some, we don't - and that is hurting. The desktop is probably a prime example of that.

Rob Boudreau wrote an opinion piece about Personal Information Management (PIM) and the future. He concludes that 2013 has different requirements from PIM than 1995, and:

"KDE PIM seems to be the only FOSS project working on technology that will eventually go beyond just the PIM itself"

I think reality agrees with him. Mobile devices are cleverly integrating chat, email, social media and phone in one. Contacts have details on all of these and show the latest tweet or Facebook message of that person as status. Why doesn't the desktop do this? Well, it does, but only by putting your data on corporate servers, accessible though web browsers: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, ...

The Linux Desktop has a mission here: help keep user data out of the greedy hands of Google, Facebook and Microsofts! That can only be done by building on the shoulders of giants, not by re-inventing the wheel out of sheer arrogance. Let me explain what I mean.

Collaboration

10 years ago I often presented to people new to Free Software and how we work. I would explain the benefits of Open Source so:

"Imagine you thought of the best New Idea for word processing. From now on, documents will almost write themselves. But you first have to embark on the huge journey to write a full word processor. Three years later, your amazing application does not get anywhere as it can't open MS Word files."

"Imagine instead you added your amazing feature to an existing word processor. The discussion with the experienced word processor developers even resulted in a better result!"

Being able to stand on the shoulders of giants is an important benefit from collaboration in Free Software. We do have competing projects but note that most successful forks and rewrites were started due to a lack of collaboration! A recent example is LibreOffice. Often people from the 'original' project join or even start the fork or rewrite. Wayland is build by the Xorg team and the MySQL fork MariaDB is led by the founder of MySQL!

The Linux kernel is another great example. Google, for example, is putting in enormous resources in getting their technologies back into the kernel. After a period of forking for the benefit of speed and efficiency, they figured out that in the long run, it actually is more efficient to not fork and put in the extra effort in collaboration.

Collaboration-by-default is not a given. Aaron Seigo said about KDE:

"The open nature of the community has purged the “not invented here” syndrome from our ranks"

Yes, the KDE community has a strong tradition of re-using efforts and building on the shoulders of giants. And questioning those who don't! But such a culture took years to build as there is plenty reason to NOT collaborate.

Reasons for not collaborating

Failing forks or duplicating projects are often based on personal conflicts or a dislike for certain toolkits, languages or technical choices. And there is much starting from scratch because developers just focus on their own problem or want to learn something new.. While I would argue that you probably learn more working with experienced, competent people, and you might get more done, too, it is not hard to understand these reasons.

Then, there is psychology. Most people think they are smarter than average and programmers are no different (sometimes expressed as "what others do is easy")... Given the bell-curve followed by the distribution of intelligence, this clearly is one of the many fallacies our brain saddles us with. Even companies are affected. Google, working to get their features into the upstream kernel, discovered that not all the intelligent people in the world work for them and there is lots of room for improvements in what their team came up with.

More than one mail client

I argue that this last reason leads to more duplication of effort than healthy in the area of mail clients. Recently, Yorba pushed to get funding for Geary, another 'new approach to mail'. And there is Trojita, also providing a great IMAP client. Both projects were started in the last couple of years and seem to be re-inventing the wheel -- twice. As you probably saw many prominent developers giving a hard time to a company insisting upon writing another display server, I hope you understand how misguided I think this is. Yorba said they decided to write a new email client to keep things simple and fast and due to the complexity of other mail clients... I described the rationale and wrongness of this "let's write a new mail client" approach in a comment on LWN a while ago. In short, I'm betting that the reasons behind it boil down to the previously mentioned combination of over-estimating oneself and underestimating the problem. In the case of email probably a lack of ambition and forward-thinking as well. Just email doesn't cut it in 2013, certainly not 5 years from now.

Bringing conversation-view to email is an awesome idea - and can probably be done through a Google Summer of Code project within an existing client. Writing an entirely new email experience needs a bit more effort of course, but writing the entire underlying infrastructure too - that is just a sodding waste of time, pardon my French. Good to see Trojita at least has joined the KDE community and is working with KDE PIM! How about you, Geary?

More than one conference

I've always been a big proponent of the Desktop Summits and I do indeed think that it shows both arrogance and a lack of big-picture thinking that these don't happen anymore. I'm glad that the KDE board, including Agustin (who organized the first Desktop Summit) managed to kick off a "freedesktop summit" at the SUSE offices. I'm also glad that some people who DO see the benefit of collaboration participated there - even if their communities don't (yet) understand that it is worth the investment.

What we need

We need a culture where we are critical of people who don't try to work together or are unwilling to put in effort to collaborate. Free Software depends on collaboration and not working together is just counterproductive. So I'd like to ask all readers to support collaboration: talk about collaboration, share the tales of success. And if somebody decides to write an app from scratch, or is writing an application doing the same thing another does - question them, ask why they go it alone, why not collaborate. It is totally OK to be critical of forks and anti-collaborative behavior. You don't have to beat anyone up, but at least making them think about it is a good thing. And if you're a developer: integrate technologies, build re-usable libraries. And remember that the shoulders YOU are standing on can be made stronger for future generations of Libre developers! Just dumping disconnected code is NOT a contribution to Free Software, contrary to what some folks seem to think.

I'd also like to ask people to support KDE PIM: if we want to have a shot at keeping our data out of greedy corporate hands and if we want to ever get onto the corporate desktop, Akonadi is the only architecture that really has a shot. Instead of writing new wheels, let's improve this one together! Yes, KDE PIM needs UI work. Then why not do that? Writing a new mail client makes total sense - if you build it on a proper infrastructure. The KDE PIM team is greatly looking forward to help people who want to write new mail, RSS, Facebook or contact management applications. Skills required are mostly related to motivation and the willingness to ask questions and get help - otherwise, javascript coding skills will probably get you pretty far as it makes all the sense in the world to write these new UI's in QML.

Concluding

I'm happy to concede that things are not black and white. I'm sure nobody can fully judge neither Geary nor Trojita or all aspects of the Desktop Summit. Mea culpa for any wrongness. But please take the lesson to heart: there is great value in collaboration. And getting these benefits means putting in 'extra' efforts, yes, it can cost you something in the short run - that is the whole point of long-term vs short-term thinking. So, next time somebody argues that 'we can go faster if we do it alone', tell them that most smart people do NOT work for you and problems are always simple when they're not (yet) yours. Or just remind them that once upon a time, people thought volunteers could never write a encyclopedia. It is the 21st century and collaboration is what sets apart winners from losers.

Take care!

Video interviews with some very interesting folk

Heya,

In the last week I've been doing some video interviews with a bunch of interesting people who will speak at the upcoming LinuxDays/oSC/Gentoo/SUSE conf in Prague. Except for Agustin they all speak at the special 'Future Media' track which I proposed after having visited Re:Publica in Berlin. At Republica I saw a challenge for Free Software: connect better to people outside of our 'usual' crowd. This track was initially more ambitious but due to my recent health issues it hasn't turned out all that I wanted - still, it features a number of really interesting speakers and subjects.

In the following video's you can hear these speakers explain what they will talk about. Note that there are a few more speakers, most notably Shane Coughlan who will talk about open source flying Drones to help people in disaster area's and Ramon Roca who build up a 'free and open' broadband network in Spain!!!

Bas van Abel: If you can't open it, you don't own it!

Bas van Abel told me to start demanding open products. I found this interview really, REALLY interesting. I knew Open Source and Software Freedom have spawned movements well outside of the realm of software (Creative Commons anyone?) but this idea of decentralized production, getting closer to the products we use daily - really cool.

Bas explains fablabs and his vision in the interview below. Click here for blip.

Armijn Hemel

Many of you probably know 'Linux Defender' Armijn "I've been suing big companies since 2005" Hemel. He's been active at GPL-violations.org (hence the lawsuits) and is now official "European coordinator of the Linux Defenders" at OIN. I published this I believe last week already, watch it:

Click here for a blip.tv link.

Agustin Benito

Agustin Benito, our keynote speaker, who will talk about the importance of Small and Medium businesses for Linux World Dominance. See here for Agustin on youtube or click here for a link to blip.tv

Thijs de Vries: Gamification and Engaging Design

Thijs de Vries' presents session on Gamification, using concepts from gaming in software design.

Thijs de Vries' talk on Gamification provides inspiration for software developers who want to explore design concepts and create a richer user experience. Discover how software developers are using ideas from the world of gaming to create more intuitive user inferfaces, engaging websites and fun. As Free Software developer, getting your users engaged in your application is a good thing - the more people care, the more likely they are to be willing to contribute.

Watch Thijs de Vries below or click here for blip.tv if you prefer that.

Why Groupware matters

Georg Greve's 'What you don't understand will still control you' takes a look at the importance of Free Software. This interview was also enlightening despite me having known Georg quite well since a few years. His explicit goal after leaving the FSFE he founded was to 'solve' the problem of moving businesses to Free Software. According to him, the 'office challenge' consists of three pillars: the browser; the office suite; and groupware. While the browser and the office suite are well taken care off, free software groupware solutions are still very limited. And that blocks the other pillars. If you get a free office license with your groupware solution, why use LibreOffice? And if the collaboration tools integrated with our office and groupware require you to use a Microsoft browser, why also install Firefox?

The current Groupware solutions have issues, be it technical, governance-wise or in terms of licensing. Kolab seemed the best solution, but it needed commercial backing for stuff like enterprise level support, marketing and assisting in deployments. So he started KolabSys! It's a tad longer, this interview, and the video quality might not be perfect, but just listen. Georg really has something to say!


Click here for blip.

More

There's a more extensive article at news.opensuse.org with a quick Q&A with Ramon Roca (thanks zoumpis!) about the Broadband he set up and later this week (that'll be weekend, I think) we'll publish a Q&A with Shane about his flying drones!

And even more!

Of course these are just a few speakers from one track, there's really a lot of interesting stuff at the conference in Prague and it starts next week Saturday! So, go, book, register (really, don't forget to register: your stomach will thank you for the food and beer!) and come join us.

As usual, this isn't a only-openSUSE-thing, we've got people from Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo (heck, we co-locate with Gentoo) and many other distro's there. It is Linux for Everyone and it's shaping up to be a great event! We have well over 500 registrations already and I'm betting lots of folks haven't registered yet.

As the interviews show, we have an incredible schedule lined up with speakers about a wide variety of topics, both going in-depth into core Linux technologies as well as folks talking about the why and how of Software (and hardware!) Freedom.

And of course, entrance is free. What else?

The conference will start at October 20 and end on the 23th. Be there!