Free world, free software

Anon Flags For Sale

2012-02-17T07:32:00.000-08:00

After the great reception the Anonymous flags that I imported from the states had at the recent Stop the War and Stop ACTA demonstrations I have decided to make it easier for other people in the UK and EU to get hold of these by setting up as a reseller.

I was very pleased to find that the anonflag.com and anonflag.co.uk domain names were available so they are now in service letting people buy the flags that will look so good at your protest.

Current flags are available in Hand waving size 15" by 12", Standard (5ft by 3ft) and Huge (8ft by 5ft). They come without poles (as these are easier to find locally then get through the post!).

My Love/Hate relationship with a Lenovo Ideapad S205

2012-02-17T07:23:00.000-08:00

This was a bit of an impulse buy. I was out shopping and noticed in
Dixons, beside the usual netbooks with their crippled Windows 7
'Starter' edition and deliberately crippling measly 1GB of memory was
this slightly larger machine physically but with a much better spec.
AMD Vision APU, 4GB memory instead of just 1 and a 320GB disk.
Promised battery life was over 5 hours. All this for only an extra £30
over the netbook price thanks to a 'Huge' sale discount.

I have been after another netbook for a while as I lent my trusty Dell
Inspiron 910 to my daughter. I wanted something with the processing
power and disk storage to let me do Livestreaming as has been
popularised by the Occupy movement. My big laptop with a barley 3
hours battery life at best would have been a bit bulky for this.

I got the Ideapad just a couple of days before the 11th Feb Stop ACTA
so there was no time to replace Windows with Linux for that. With the
help of the Occupy LSX tech team I managed to get livestreaming set up
under Windows. By the time it was working however I realised that
running an external USB camera and a 3G dongle also soaks up battery
life! I was down to 45mins of power before the march had even started!

I thought I had a solution to this in that I had noticed in the local
Maplins to St. Pauls that they have a rather natty 12v lead battery
and 200w mains inverter package for under £50. About the size and
shape as a yellow plastic lunch box but MUCH heavier!

The power pack seemed to have some charge in it so I loaded it into my backpack and started off the march from St. Pauls to Trafalgar Square with operational (and watched) livestream feed.

The problem was that the initial charge in the power pack was not that great so by the time I reached the square the power had drained. I then found from the instructions that a full initial charge is about 26 hours.

It will come in handy for next time. There are lighter and higher capacity solutions for just powering phones and netbooks for extended periods. The key Livestreamers in the states use them, but the disadvantage is that they are very expensive. The simple lead acid battery can power your laptop for another 3 hours or so which should be enough. If you are a glutton for weight carrying it is possible to attach a bigger external battery to the inverter too.

Although it was a novelty to use Windows (this is my first Win7 machine) I did not want it to be the ONLY OS on there.

320GB disk! I thought there would be plenty of space to put several choices of Linux distro on there. However when I booted Linux from a USB disk to do some initial compatibility testing I found that the partition table had been laid out with NO spare space!

sda1 is win boot partition 200M 29M used NTFS
sda2 is win main partition 22G used 233G free NTFS
sda3 is an extended partition containing sda5
sda5 is LENOVO 29G 1.3G used 28G free NTFS
sda4 is LENOVO_PART 15G 8.3G used 6.4G free NTFS - looks like recovery
copy of Windows OS, compressed.

85% wasted space on boot partition
95% wasted space on a whole partition just used for Lenovo specific
drivers and other gunk.

The sda4 partition is a special recovery one. If a special recessed button on the Ideapad keyboard is pressed this is the means by which a trashed copy of Windows can be rebuilt.

Looks like Windows was doing the equivalent of stretching out all over the couch to stop someone else sitting down.

As I was already running Linux from a nice big USB disk my first task was to save compressed images of these partitions so that I could reset things if things did not go to plan.

I used dd piped to gzip for each one with 4k block size onto usb external disk. This took quite a while but left me reasonably confident that I could get thing back again if my experiments with Linux caused data loss.

The next thing I tried was a Fedora Core 16 install. I attempted to shrink the main windows partition but doing this gave a runtime error, not good. What was worse was that booting Windows again pronounced the installation unfixable. If I had not taken those initial backups I would have been one unhappy bunny at this point!

As there was nothing left to loose I did a whole disk install if FC16. This worked well, much nicer than Windows but with a couple of issues. I could not get the WiFi working! This was a bit of a shock for a Lenovo product as I am used to the Thinkpad range generally being rock solid, no hassles, performers with Linux. The Ideapad Wifi is one of those 'it nearly works' issues for which there is more than one solution offered on the web. I tried them all but never actually got a
working connection. The other thing not working at all is the SD card slot. For this I could not even find any solutions! This is a great shame as on my previous two netbooks I have been used to the luxury of being able to install the OS to SD cards and thus return to the care-free time of the floppy disk by being able to swap between whole personalities just by swapping out a small piece of plastic!

The issues were bugging me so much I decided to use my backups and return the machine to the servitude of running Windows. For some reason a direct byte for byte recopying of the boot and main partitions did not give me a bootable system. I can only imagine I had missed some small but vital bit of copy protection. Luckily the restored recovery partition worked as the handbook said it did.

Pressing the special button with a pen enabled me to get back to the state of the system as delivered.

Hardly ideal, because of being bogged down with Anti Virus vigilance needs, but I then tried the Windows version of the VirtualBox VM system that is standard on Ubuntu. It is an easy download for Windows and I soon had a virtual box version of FC16 running under Windows 7. There were a couple of problems though. Firstly I was stuck with a 1024x768 sized screen and secondly the video performance was dire. The FC16 virtual machine could not even play Youtube videos without staggering. I have the same VirtualBox software running on my Linux desktop and client systems there have no problem playing Youtube movies.

At the moment I am concluding that this is all due to the runtime weight of having to run Anti Virus.

I do need to keep some Windows capability for occasional use but I still need to find a way of shrinking the main partition reliably. The default scheme Lenovo has chosen for this machine is very wasteful.

I called this a love/hate relationship.

On the plus side I think the machine is good value for £280. It is light with a great keyboard and reasonable battery life.

On the minus side Lenovo REALLY SHOULD make sure that all their range work properly with Linux, otherwise they are throwing away all the years of good name of years of the IBM then Lenovo Thinkpad.

This was an impulse buy on the strength of the brand name. I have learned to always do research into a particular machine I am buying.

Every PC buyer should insist 100% on proper Linux compatibility. Otherwise you are just getting an appliance, not a true general purpose computer.

The usb external disk with PC LinuxOS on it that I used to do the backups seems to boot faster than Win7 too! So installing Linuxes to usb and running them there is always an option, just not as tidy. Just a shame about that SD card not being standard. A 32GB SD card for main OS work and the big disk spun up only for playing media etc would be ideal.

The bigger battle - the war on general computation.

2012-02-08T02:04:00.000-08:00

I think ACTA is just a small part of something bigger. The Internet was developed not as a money making exercise by a mega corporation, but by lots of academics and small companies who saw the value in easy instant communication and sharing of knowledge. The general purpose computer is at the heart of this and over the life of the Internet has gone from something that cost as much as a house, to being affordable by just about everyone.

The thing about a computer as opposed to a toaster or a games console is that you the owner can decide what it does. This power is under threat. Microsoft wants the next generation of computers and tablets to run Windows 8 to be designed to make it impossible to run anything else (all in the name of security of course)! This makes your computer just a different sort of 'XBox' and you are only allowed to run what the corporate masters approve on it, unless you commit a criminal act and crack it of course.

This is another thing that the public needs to rise up and say NO WAY to.

Keep your right to a general purpose computer where you can run the software, including the most fundamental level, the Operating System. There are many different variants of Linux that you can choose, all have been developed by people like you who care about freedom. Find one that suits you and move off Windows now. Find a local Linux User Group and join it. Join FLOSSUK - the organisation that promotes Free, Libre and Open Source Software at the national level. http://www.flossuk.org/

Here is a video by Cory Doctorow that explains the attack on general purpose computing in more detail.

The fight is not over even if we send ACTA packing.

Hate ACTA? Yo will LOVE TPP (NOT!)

2012-01-30T03:55:00.000-08:00

https://www.eff.org/pages/trans-pacific-partnership-agreement

If you are interested in what will rear its ugly head even if the gathering marches of millions of people manage to defeat ACTA. There is one such march in London on 11th Feb 2012 which I am helping to organise.

They just do not know when to quit do they!

How many more hated and useless laws are there sitting in the pipeline just to maximise some corporations profit margin? Earth is for us humans (and other creatures) corporations DO NOT COUNT. They should be allowed to exist for the benefit they bring to mankind (such as supplying fresh water to the home), not as an end in themselves.

Anonymous speak about the Illuminati and the New World Order. The truth may however be simpler than some grand conspiracy. Corporations act in ways that seem sensible to the people making the individual decisions but combine to form absolutely appalling and genuinely 'evil' looking behaviour patterns.

A good example of this is the appearance of a hate campaign against Android phone vendors by the big corporates. Apple, Oracle and Microsoft are all being vindictive at once about some really tenuous IP claims. As Android gives the public some real choice and by being open has spurred on some great innovation the fact it is being sued has more to say about the rubbish state of IP law nowadays, it has strayed a very long way from the original intentions of 'encouraging authors'.

Just look on the net for Conways 'Game of Life' for a simple example of how a large number of instances of something following very simple rules can lead to very 'life-ike' behaviour. The interaction of our corporations and their quest for profit is a bit like this I feel. The first step to controlling it is to recognise the mechanism.

We the humans need to set some much, much better rules to limit corporate power, and we need to do it NOW.

The sinister side of the right to be forgotten.

2012-01-24T23:37:00.000-08:00

BBC News carries a story about the proposed overhaul of the Data Protection Directive. The way this is being sold as a 'good thing' to the public is with the example that a youngster has pictures of them doing stupid things while drunk:

"These rules are particularly aimed at young people as they are not always as aware as they could be about the consequence of putting photos and other information on social network websites, or about the various privacy settings available," said Matthew Newman.
He noted that this could cause problems later if the users had no way of deleting embarrassing material when applying for jobs. However, he stressed that it would not give them the right to ask for material such as their police or medical records to be deleted.
Although the existing directive already contains the principle of "data minimisation", Mr Newman said that the new law would reinforce the idea by declaring it "a right".

This shows a terrifying and very SOPA/PIPA like misunderstanding of the way that the Internet works. There is much information on the net, not all of it true or of a good quality, but it should be up to the individual to filter what they pay heed to. The example give is particularly flawed as any such photo may very well have 'gone viral' if it was particularly amusing and would exist in any number of places. This is a bad law because it gives the uninformed the right to expect the impossible!

The really dangerous thing however is it makes it look ok and normal to revise history for the most trivial of reasons. This will completley destroy peoples trust in the Internet as a store of knowlege and memories. Maybe this is what the people behind this legislation want? Here is the quote from George Orwells 1984. Luckily the Internet is still free enough that I could find an online copy of this work STILL copyrighted after more than sixty years to paste this from!

"Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each
contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon — not
actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words — which was used
in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:

times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify
times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite
fullwise upsub antefiling

With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside.
It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The
other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean
some tedious wading through lists of figures.
Winston dialled ’back numbers’ on the telescreen and called for the appro-
priate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a
few minutes’ delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news
items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as
the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from The Times
of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous
day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a
Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened,
the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and
left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of
Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had
actually happened. Or again, The Times of the nineteenth of December had
published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption
goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the
Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual out-
put, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly
wrong. Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree
with the later ones. As for the third message, it referred to a very simple er-
ror which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as
February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a ’categorical pledge’
were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration
during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be
reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that
was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would
probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his
speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed
them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as
possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that
he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured
by the flames.
What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led,
he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the
corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The
Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the
original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.
"

In the days of electronic storage of data no dictator would have to go to all this trouble of messing with re-printing physical newspapers. The fact that you can no longer rely on the Internet to be a back up of your own memory of what has happened is very disturbing. It looks like the EU is attempting to produce legislation that needs to be questioned and resisted alongside SOPA, PIPA and ACTA. Please spread the word. There is something fundamentally wrong about this. Establishing it is OK to revise the past just because someone did something they later regret is a very dangerous precedent. Just change that for you do something that your government regrets that you did!

Occupy LSX The end in sight - no just the beginning.

2012-01-23T10:44:00.000-08:00

Today (or is it yesterday) marks the 100th day of the occupation at St Pauls Cathedral. The LSX means London Stock Exchange in the neighbouring Paternoster Square. However like a disturbingly large amount of the City that space is private land so the owners managed to get an injunction and strong security presence to prevent the protest from locating in its planned spot. Paternoster square is at present a solid sea of metal railings, tons in fact, to discourage anyone from thinking of camping there.

The sight of all that metal and the patrolling security guards 24 hours a day hardly makes it a nice working environment for the people that work there over the past 3 months. With worries about a renewed occupation once the injunction runs out the metal and the security guards will probably have to stay for many months to come.

I was not there at the start on the 15th of October but have visited the camp several times since and I share with you here some of the pictures and films that I took on my various visits.

1st November 2011

Early days, CRAWLING with press still, really exciting buzz!

And some of the art on the walls that day:

Wow that's a lot of pics. I had better end this post now. More later.

I support Ron Paul for President (and I am not even American)

2012-01-20T08:54:00.000-08:00

Just wish I was in the US so I could vote for this guy. This is just common sense. If you meddle in other peoples countries they are just going to get really mad. We need to go forward in a spirit of co-operation, not meddling and mistrust or else we are ALL DOOMED.

UK leaders have started making noises like Occupy but it is clear that they are only saying what people expect them to say. This guy is genuine. What he is saying risks making too many enemies for it to just be BS.

Obama has shown himself to be totally ineffective. Not just the US but the whole worlds needs the US to take a new less meddlesome, less profit orientated, direction.

The above is a long video but please watch - even if you are not someone who has the Republican nomination in your gift, if you share it those who can still choose may get to see it and realise it is time to be radical.

I really fear for the world if any of the other bozos get in. We have enough serious problems to worry about in the coming few years.

All the easy to get oil/gas/coal is nearly gone. What will the economy be like if we have to rely on water table polluting 'fracking' and super risky deep water drilling?
'Rare Earth' minerals are getting very rare indeed. Some like Strontium, Silver, Antimony, Gold and Zinc are only a decade or less away from being completely mined out. The clue is in the term. They were already rare when the term was coined hundreds of years ago!
Much of the fresh water that the increasing population of the world depends on comes from ancient aquifers which only fill slowly over thousands of years. We are using fresh water much faster than the natural cycle of rain replenishes it! In that way it is running out just like oil.
Farm land is getting poorer as it is over used and lost to desert. Fertilisers depend on both oil energy to make them and the availability of minerals like Nitrates and Phosphorous. Clever science has done wonders in increasing crop yields but we cannot assume that can carry on indefinitely as the sunshine that grows the crops is pretty much constant. Uncontrolled population growth looks like finding its control in starvation - not good!
Oh! And Global Warming caused by burning all that fossil fuel that took millions of years to deposit. That climate change will cause issues such as more farm land becoming useless, more unpredictable weather etc. This just makes all of the above even worse.

You can find much more like this in Chris Martensons Crash Course book and set of Youtube hosted lectures.

War and preparing for war is SO expensive as a planet we just cannot afford it any more. The major military spending like $30 billion by Saudi Arabia just has to stop, right now.

The situation facing the whole planet is really really grave. All those bright minds and industrial capacity that is at present devoted to outrageously expensive ways to kill people (such as single fighter aircraft that cost over a billion dollars each) needs to be turned to finding real and lasting solutions to the very grave and urgent problems that we face.

I turn 50 this year. Retirement is still a decade or two away so I would like to have some sort of viable world to live in.

I think this trouble is coming so soon that it will affect the lives of anyone under the age of 80 - so that is most of us that need to be really really concerned.

What would instil the right sense of urgency? How about if we acted like a massive asteroid was going to hit us in 15 years and we have to work out either how to deflect it or develop large scale space flight to get off the planet? That is the sort of level of commitment I am talking about. Think of Apollo moonshot times 1000.

The world is gathering for the Olympics in London this summer. We have huge stadia ready and waiting. What needs to happen is for world leaders to fess up to their populations just how serious things are and that we use the time between sporting events there to have meetings with as many people involved as possible to sort out just how we are going to cope with the coming changes.

We need to plan for a soft landing. As I have already said war and preparing for war is the fastest way to destroy and use up what resources we have left. Just doing nothing at this stage will guarantee that a fight to the death for what remains is the only option humanity has left.

There is a chance for a much better outcome but we must act now. Governments the world over seem to be choked off from doing the right thing for the survival of their people by the vested interests of profit orientated corporations. This is what the Occupy movement means by the 1% controlling what the 99% needs to.

The choice is stark, we fight for life now, by not allowing people just to carry on in their complacent daydream, or fight to the death a decade or so down the line. Which would you rather do?

If you were the passenger in a car and you noticed the driver was nodding off would you try to wake him or just sit tight and shut your eyes, hoping not to hit anything! We need to wake the general population not through ideological reasons but self preservation. We need the majority to realise just how serious things are as their co-operation will be needed if we are to get through this.

The fossil energy fuelled Industrial Age is over. We have enough resources left (maybe) for a smooth transition to a more sustainable way of life, but not if we get dragged into more pointless wars like Afghanistan, Iraq and the now looming Iran.

My trip to OccupyLSX 10th Jan

2012-01-11T11:47:00.000-08:00

Took the Jubilee line down to Canary Wharf for Occupy London to welcome back Parliament with ‘executive pay’ teach out at FSA in Canary Wharf a lively and interesting debate held on the pavement outside the FSA building.

Nice to see that Occupy is starting to have an effect in that MPs and Peers want to side with us against the obscene amounts that company bosses are awarding themselves in pay rises. It is clear that we have a system out of control here.

David Cameron's suggestion that company shareholders have more say over executive remuneration is no good because, as Robert Preston pointed out many shares in large companies are owned by other large companies. The people that make the decisions about which shares to hold and what to do at shareholders meetings are the very sort of senior employees whose compensation packages they are supposed to be monitoring!

Maybe it will take drastic action to fix this. Here's one suggestion, how about banning the practice of allowing one company to own the shares of another. This means all share holders have to be real living people, who hopefully will be more likely to act in the interests of the human race as a whole? If this does not work for the really big multinational corporations, then maybe it is because they are too big?

Later that afternoon I have a nice cup of tea in the Paternoster Square Starbucks. I got a chance to charge my laptop and while I was doing it found a very interesting film that may explain why a small number of 'powerful' people could have caused such a big mess. They are probably psychopaths!

What also was surreal was seeing the hundreds of metal barriers that had been crammed into the square in an attempt to discourage any though of the Occupy LSX camp expanding there. At least it is a nice steady source of employment for a small army of security staff now!

OpenSuSE 12.1 on an EeePC

2012-01-09T02:51:00.000-08:00

The January 2012 Linux Format magazine comes with two distros to try, Fedora 16 and OpenSuse 12.1.

I had one of the original Asus Eeepc 701 machines, upgraded to 1G of memory, lying about so I thought I would try it out with both the disks.

First I tried Fedora 16, a distro I have already installed on other machines. It booted from an external DVD drive ok but then I soon ran into a problem as the 800x480 pixel screen on the Eeepc 701 was just not big enough to handle the installation GUI - I just could not see the buttons I was supposed to be pressing.

Moving on...

I am a long time user of SuSE and was in fact one of their first UK resellers back in the mid 1990s. I have more used RedHat (because of the commercial predominance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Ubuntu. I was interested to see how well OpenSUSE was now doing, given that SuSE is no longer part of Novell with the too cosy relationship with Microsoft.

The OpenSUSE install process coped just fine with the 800x480 screen on the ageing Eeepc. The original 4GB SSD which may have seemed generous back in 2007 is now too small to do anything sensible with. Luckily decent sized SD cards are now 'cheap as chips' so I did my install with the root and swap partitions on the original SSD and /usr and /home on a 16GB SD card.

The internal disk is about twice as fast as the SD card slot which is in turn about twice as fast as USB2.0 memory sticks which is the option for even more storage.

The original Eeepc came out before the Intel Atom chip. It is only a 600 MHz Celeron at its heart so is a bit too weedy for playing Youtube videos. However as a general purpose computer it is fine. This was the original netbook remember, it broke the rule that small notebooks had to be really, really expensive (or had to come loaded up with Windows you did not want). There have been better netbooks over the years but you should be able to pick up one of the original EeePCs for next to nothing.

I just thought that people would like to know that a bang up to date 2012 Linux distro works just fine on one of them.

I have also been making some use over the past few days of an even older computer. An IBM Thinkpad T23 running Linux Mint. Although it is only a 1GHz PIII chip it is a nice size for just doing a bit of net browsing in the living room.

The biggest drawback with that machine is that it only has 512MB of memory. For most things this
is no problem but I have found that after a while web browsers can get very large and make the poor thing start to swap.

Guess I will have to do some experimenting on being very frugal with how much information the browser is permitted to cache. On a machine with limited resources too much caching can be a disadvantage, especially if the Internet is so much faster than it would have been when that generation of computer was developed. We have to adapt to changing environments.

The point of this piece?

By choosing your software carefully and having some sympathy for the age of the technology it is still possible to make good use of computer gear that other people stuck in the Windows mindset would just consider 'junk'. This gives you a big advantage. Even a slow computer can be an active part of the Internet and draw from the huge shared store of knowledge there.

Taking the legal battle to the City of London

2012-01-07T02:56:00.000-08:00

You will first need to read Scrapper Duncan's blog entry before anything I say here will make any sense. There is no point in me re-hashing all the core information about this.

OK then, for those who did not bother here is a very short precis:
* The City of London is undemocratic in that it's ruling council is elected mostly by corporations, not real people.
* This is in DIRECT CONTRAVENTION of the 1998 European Convention on Human Rights
* We counter this by getting enough actual people to establish that they live in the various electoral wards of the city (you do not have to be a homeowner to vote) so that they can outvote the corporations and force transparency on the City.
* If their registration of voters is opposed there is a full scale class action suit brought against the City of London for denying people their legal democratic rights.

London has many homeless, some of them may not be interested in helping with change, but the Occupy movement already has much to thank the homeless for. Many Occupy groups not only 'look after' the local homeless but in return get to learn valuable skills about rough sleeping and surviving outdoors.

If we could organize enough of London's homeless to choose to make their homes in the wards of the City itself, and officially state that they are living there then we can make phase 1 of this plan a reality.

The Occupy movement would have to provide support, for many months if need be. We need to go mobile. Both in the form of traveling soup kitchens so that the street sleepers can at least have a warm meal inside them, and coping for the other end of things, camper vans with toilet and washing facilities. Alongside the bodily needs would be the security that the World is Watching. The UK will be asleep but our American friends will be awake so there would be plenty of witnesses to victimization and assault against the people taking part in this historic action.

It is convenient that the Congestion Charge does not operate at night. What can they do to stop Occupy support vehicles from traveling the streets of the city at night? Declare a curfew?

These are just some ideas, as Scrapper says it is going to take a lot of organizing, and funding. The prize however is that the City is stripped of all its special status and becomes just another London borough. The current system is an anachronism so needs to end.

We really have no more time to humor these corporations any more. With their profit above all motivations they cannot be expected to act towards the goal of the continued survival of the human race. People need to be the ones making all the big decisions.

SOPA - BAD!

2012-01-05T15:04:00.000-08:00

As I write this it is the middle of a global Internet campaign to protest about and educate the public about the dangers of the Stop Internet Piracy Law that the US wants to inflict on the Internet.

I am including here a couple of videos that explain the issues.

First with a creative use of sub-titles:

And also one of the many Anonymous information vids:

Richard Stallman was right all along!

2012-01-04T10:07:00.000-08:00

An article from OS News states that for years RMS was viewed as a bit extreme by the millions happy to just reap the benefits of the Free Software culture that he started.

Oh how things have changed!

I would URGE everyone who sees the values of freedom and openness that have proved themselves in the world of Software over the past decades to consider joining, and offering any assistance that you can to your local Occupy movement. We need to stop SOPA and PIPA, the chilling effect on the Internet we know today will be global.

There is a new Occupy specific social network called Occupii. Join that or just find one of the many thousand of Occupy groups on facebook or follow one of the many thousands of twitter hashtags depending on your areas of locality,interest and expertise.

Just googling for occupy is a damm good start, come on thats just six keypresses and return.

Why the world needs the Occupy Movement

2012-01-04T04:22:00.000-08:00

The public needs the sort of education that the state seems unwilling to give.

Too many people are just sleepwalking between the next football match or episode of Eastenders. The system we have all grown up with is unsustainable.

This is not just some crackpot theory, the cracks are not just showing, they are gaping!

If we change now the earth has enough resources left for a reasonably 'soft' landing into a new sustainable way of life - but it will be quite different from the current one. We have absolutely run out of time to let the vested interests just carry on caring only about their own profits. The end of the road is here,now, this year. People all over the world are waking up to this reality.

A key component to this is the end of ever more outrageous military spending. We are getting critical sort not just of Oil but of other raw materials including 'rare earth' minerals. To spend millions, and sometimes billions and the efforts of thousands of skilled people to make things that in the end just get blown up is just plain nuts on a finite world.

We don't need the threat of nuclear weapons for mutually assured destruction, any conflict over finite resources that risks loss of those resources is a conflict neither side can win.

We will always need armies to protect against groups of people that are evil or just plain greedy. However the AK47 has proven over many years to be a very effective killing machine. Do we really need ways of killing men that are millions of times more costly so that military men have to think twice about deploying them? Eurofighter jets are over a BILLION dollars each! Bigger pieces of military might like warships cost multiple billions. The brains and production facilities used for such folly would be much better engaged in finding alternatives to the fossil fuels that are running out.

If we have more democracy and more emphasis on fairness and conflict resolution the need to fight should decrease.

We HAVE to at least give this new way our best shot. We cannot just carry on the way we are and the alternative is a very destructive global war fighting over dwindling resources, destroying many of them in the process.

Those in power hopefully have the sense,when they see just how many people already know the truth, to see that treating their populations as adults for a change and letting them take responsibility for what happens to the human race next is the least worst outcome.

It is not going to be easy though, some people when woken from a pleasant dream can be very grumpy indeed. We have no choice but to work for a fairer world, we cannot afford to let it get to a fight as NOBODY will win.

That is the stark truth as I see it.

On the plus side it is more freedom for humanity but with freedom comes responsibility that cannot be shirked. Even if they really, really don't want to we must make everyone face up to their responsibilities as citizens. Everyone must pull their weight from the richest plutocrat to the poorest benefits culture 'reject'.

New Facebook Group - Occupy Leaflets

2012-01-03T09:07:00.000-08:00

I have started a new Facebook group called Occupy Leaflets.

It may seem a little old fashioned to some in this Internet age but a great way to reach people and make them think is still the printed word.

I am proud to say that I went on the Occupy LSX March on Parliament on November 5th. I treasure the flyer I was given. Information about the march on one side and the Occupy LSX initial statement on the other. It was a bit crumpled from being in my pocket but I laminated it to save it for posterity.

What we need is leaflets like this that accomplish on a single sheet of paper, explaining something about the Occupy movement and how the rest of the 99% need to wake up and join us before it is too late.

My idea is to have a wiki to contain down-loadable leaflet designs in open source file formats with Creative Commons licensing. These can then be taken by anyone with a printer and a desire to 'do their bit' in the form of running off a few hundred copies of a statement they can themselves believe in.

The Occupy movement needs to grow. There will always be the 'head in the sand' types who do not want to be disturbed from their football or shopping but we need to gain the majority of the people who do care about what is going to happen to them in the very near future.

I think leafleting if done well could have a great impact in reaching that goal - a democracy with so many voices that are part of it that the leaders and vested interests have no choice but to listen. "There are more of us than there are of you".

If you share this view and want to get involved in creating these leaflets or using them once created then join the group!

Old Speech, powerful current message!

2012-01-02T16:33:00.000-08:00

The Charlie Chaplin speech has of course been around a long time, but it is a powerful truth for our time. The adding of images to it brings it right up to date. Very powerful!

I am now an Occupier! (Well for 1 night only)

2012-01-02T08:28:00.000-08:00

I joined the Occupy LSX New Years celebrations. The Demotix site has some great pictures of the DJ set outside St Pauls. This lasted until about 11:15 pm with only occasional bouts of drizzle to dampen spirits. A large contingent of the camp then walked 'en masse' down to the river to see the fireworks. As we went I played a few 'Occupy' songs on my megaphone and there was much singing and 'Mic checks' for the rest of London that seemed to be heading for the river with us.

The songs played were:

This one predates the Occupy movement but it is so appropriate still!

And lastly

2012 seen in with the crowds we then made our way back to St Pauls where there was still a large crowd and then onto Occupy Finsbury Square where I had pitched my tent. The music and high spirits carried on to about 4am.

Its the first time I have camped out in a big city. The traffic along the main road never stopped. What was more surprising was the snatches of birdsong throughout the night too. I did not get much sleep but the warm welcome from complete strangers was unforgettable. The all night party even brought people in off the street interested to find out what Occupy is about. I still had battery power in my laptop enough to watch the starting of events unfolding over in New York. How can security people be so stupid as to stop American citizens from carrying the American flag? In the morning I awoke, got myself to the Liverpool Street Starbucks for breakfast and even more important, a Laptop charge and found out the true extent of the overnight struggles in New York. Many arrests - the timeline captured for posterity.

It was nice to be back at home, to have a hot shower and 10 hours solid sleep. You may say I am a wimp for only occupying for a single night, but it has increased my admiration for the people willing to give up basic comforts week after week to bring the point home that there is something very, very wrong with the way the world is and it needs urgent change. Things are in such a mess we no longer have the luxury of the slow path to change.

Magic night last night! - attended Occupy LSX reading of Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol"

2011-12-31T00:54:00.000-08:00

And you too are in for a treat because it was recorded for posterity as part of the Occupy LSX Livestream.

occupylsx on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Wishing everyone a happy new year.

Found a great vid to look forward to 2012 with :)

2011-12-27T15:27:00.000-08:00

Occupy seems to be in Russia (even if they do not choose to call it that).

2011-12-27T13:34:00.000-08:00

In Russia, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has rejected calls for a review of disputed parliamentary election results. The contested elections have led to the largest protests Russia has seen in decades, with tens of thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets in Moscow and St. Petersburg. On Saturday, more than 100,000 protesters gathered in the capital. Opposition leader Garry Kasparov claims the controversial elections have galvanized opposition to the Russian political establishment.

Garry Kasparov, Russian opposition leader: "This is the first time that people have felt that they are the strong. It seems to me that this is a psychological change. There’s not the feeling anymore that there are a few of us and many of them. Now we have many. I believe that these people who come out, they are active, successful people. They need to use the internet not only for preparing these types of events and to organize themselves, but also to propose an alternative to the people in power, that power which is corrupt and incapable of solving the country’s problems."

Putin, meanwhile, has said there can be no talk of review and criticized the massive protest movement for lacking a unified goal.

From Democracy Now!

Well - maybe someone needs to send Putin this:

Nobody should be forgetting the role that global warming is playing in this.

2011-12-27T12:46:00.000-08:00

The International Energy Agency tells us we have five years until the window to avoid irreversible climate change closes. The science tells us that we have five years maximum. You’re saying, "Give us 10."

So what part of "five years maximum" is it hard for our ''leaders'' to understand?

Why all this is important, perhaps the most important thing you will have seen...

2011-12-27T11:08:00.000-08:00

There was a news story on Slashdot just before Christmas that the Occupy movement that has managed to mobilise tens of thousands of people across the USA seems to have had little impact in Silicon Valley and the other 'High Tech' enclaves. I can sympathise to some extent with this attitude, if you have skills (as I do) that are at the moment in high demand then you have at the back of your mind 'I will always find something else' even if your current employer runs into financial trouble.

There is something deeper going on here than the grumblings of an increasing number of 'have nots'. What has grown up over the past hundred years or so is an economy based on bigger and bigger corporations with bigger and bigger investment needs which in turn has lead to more powerful banks and financial institutions to supply those needs. The upsides of all this investment is the modern world we now take for granted. Cheap manufactured goods to make our lives much easier than those of our great grandparents were.

There is however a big downside to this abundance. Corporations and Banks have no 'conscience' they are in fact legally obliged to take a course of action that maximises the profit for their owners. The only way for this 'greed' to be restrained is either by legislation (with the corporation equally obliged to try to find loopholes because of its duty to the shareholders) or by the greed of different corporations pulling in different directions. The positive side of the latter is competition that keeps prices down, but only to those consumers who have the power of choice. The darker side of this is a form of open warfare. We see this as all the stupid squabbles over Intellectual Property that corporations waste court time with.

What is more serious is that the self interest in the corporations of keeping things 'the way they are' means that humanity is not getting told the truth that it urgently needs to hear.

The truth is we are running out of time really fast. What I am just skirting over here you can found in detail by Googling for "The crash course".

This video is a very condensed form of the course that Chris gave to the Gold Money Foundation conference:

The simple truth is that we are a world of exponential growth, as our beloved leaders keep saying that growth is what we need to get us out of the current ''temporary difficulties'' with the economy, so that does not sound too bad, does it?

The problem with exponential growth is that even if the rate of growth stays the same the amount of growth is always accelerating. If you are in a speeding car and the brick wall you are heading for is a mile or so away the fact that the driver has his foot hard down on the gas is not that concerning. But how about if that brick wall is just 50 ft away? We are living on a world of finite capacity. Our now 7 billion population is way above what the carrying capacity of the earth would be without our wide scale use of fossil fuel energy.

The bad news is that there is not an infinite amount of this fossil fuel. In a way that is a good thing because we would inevitably make our atmosphere unbreathable if we did just carry on turning it into CO2!

The other bit of bad news is that with a growing population and growing demands for 'the better life' (who can blame us?) our need for energy is growing exponentially too. However as the amount of fossil fuels on the earth is finite the rate of discovery of new reserves has been slowing down for decades now! The ones that are found and go forward to production are progressively more expensive to exploit. The cost of the energy that is needed for the modern world is always rising.

A few years ago you could dismiss this if you wanted a closed mind as all just theory, but signs of the change that is upon us are now so obvious in our economy that only the truly foolish will continue to ignore them.

What of corporations? As they are obliged to run themselves for the profit motive it is hard to see how they can be expected to start taking that foot gently off the gas and help steer the human race if not away from the danger, at least on the optimal course through it.

What is needed is some other way to organise the human race other than the capitalist oligarchy we seem to have at present.

The Internet gives us the chance to get enough people educated to make 'for the good of all' decision making possible. The danger we are facing is just as real as if there was a comet heading on a crash course for Earth, and the urgency is just as great.

The Occupy movement is proposing we try for a fully inclusive global democracy.

The first stage of this is to make sure that the whole world is made to pay attention long enough from the distractions of football & fashon to realise we have a real and urgent problem here. One grave enough that all the long established vested interests that have kept things the way they are need to be questioned and have the light of truth shone on them.

I think you are probably fed up with hearing politicians say this because their sincerity is dubious but "we are all in this together" - unless you know of any Oligarchs that have built themselves a fleet of space ships! The earth has finite resources, that is a fact, not an opinion.

The idea that we all have to come to the hard choices together and take collective responsibility for those choices is not an ideal - but what are the alternatives?
Have some despotic oligarch make the decisions for you (in their, not your, best interests)?

Just share out the world's resources equally? A socialist utopia but doing it literally would never work (if you disagree with me I would be glad to expand my reasons as another post). We need a system that still motivates people to work but does not create 'non human' entities that do not have the well-being or even survival of the human race as part of their aims!

I do not pretend to have the solution to this, as many as possible of the 7 billion of us should talk about it though, you never know what new, better way, someone is going to come up with!

Ok here is my idea for some nice green fuel.

2011-12-26T10:52:00.000-08:00

The worlds Oceans have quite a problem with Algal blooms, great choking masses algae that grow for many miles in places and cut out the light to the Ocean below. Scientists think that these are caused by excessive nitrates and phosphates in the water because of all the artificial fertilizer man puts on the earth. It is a problem that is getting worse. Doing something to help would be worth-while on its own. Doing something that also gets us a large amount of 'green' energy is well worth some thought.

What I am wondering is if it would be viable to lift this nasty stuff from the sea, in much the same way as Oil slicks are dealt with. It could be compressed and dried into fuel pellets that would be the ultimate green fuel. If we make a return to steam powered ships the whole operation could be self sustaining. Ships could burn the very fuel pellets they make allowing them to reach the harvesting grounds and bring back holds full of pellets back with them to burn in power stations on land. This is green energy because the CO2 released is not extra carbon from the ancient times, it is what the algae has taken from the atmosphere just weeks before. If the ash from burning the fuel was not dumped at sea there is the extra advantage that at least some of the unwelcome nutrients are being removed from the marine system too.

Algae grows quickly so I would guess that even a large fleet of harvesting ships would not be able to deplete the resource.

I would be pleased to here from anyone in a position to do feasibility studies of this idea.

A lot of the research on using Algae has been on the holy grail of getting special strains to produce 'green petrol'. My idea is distinctly 'low-tech' compared to this. It would be a great shame if the solution to our impending dire energy shortage is overlooked just because someone cannot see how to extort money from the rest of the world with an Intellectual Property argument.

Sometimes you don't need high tech, just a common sense solution that is technologically within the grasp of any nation.

Welcome to the Revolution!

2011-12-23T16:25:00.000-08:00

2011 was the year everything changed.

'Free software has been around for nearly thirty years now and the Linux OS that powers so much of the Internet has just celebrated its 20th birthday. With the exception of a few small protests made by the Free Software Foundation against that pernicious evil of 'Digital Restrictions Management' the success of free software has been by the power of persuasion. One by one 'the geeks' have shown each other that there are better alternatives to paying a fortune for crappy commercial software. I remember when Linux first came really usable, Windows95 had not even been released. If you had a PC the only choices was buggy Windows 3.1 with 8+3 character file names or Linux with X11 that worked just like $20,000 workstations!

Although great strides have been made in Linux uptake (it runs at the heart of Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and myriad other Internet age companies) there have also been numerous cases where Windows has survived and had large amounts of somtimes public, taxpayers, money spent on this.

Is there any connection I wonder between the status of Microsoft as a particularly powerful corporation and the dogged insistence that its products still get bought and used? Even when the logical solution would be for the users to choose the best in free software to deploy, and spend the money they would have paid year after year towards further development and refinement.

What I hope to do with this blog over the coming months is to explore how the new free and democratic society that the likes of Anonymous and the Occupy movement are in the process of forming with the Free and Open Source software community.

There is much to share in both directions. Tonight I would just like to leave you with some words from an ex CIA agent Robert David Steele who mentions that the Linux community is an example that the new movements can emulate.

It is a really exciting time with great changes about to happen. Will write again as soon as I can.