The father of free software, mr. Richard Stallman is notorious for his critical mind and software freedom activism quite well.
While checking some of his speaches and interviews, I came across another interesting, one here RMS critices and exposes the bad and evilness of fb and Google+.
Interview with Richard Stallman – Stallman: Facebook and Google+ Mistreat Their Users
People unaware of computer networks, programming, Unix and the deep computing so to say definitely didn't understand the profoundness of upcoming problems of so called "social networks". The Facebook and Google+ Mistreat Their Users video is also to be found in youtube under name Richard Stallman: Facebook IS Mass Surveillance .
Its a pity Stallman is mostly popular only among specific users like me which are already 'dubbed' into free software and have a belief that computer software should be free. Hopefully as time passes more and more people will be awakened to listen to his speeches and realize the severeness of problems, we face nowdays by simply accepting almost anything new without much privacy concerns … If you're a free software enthusiast like me, please take the time to share the video and whistle-blow about the problem to as many non-tech pc users as possible 🙂
Richard Stallman the main person thanks to whom the GNU (GNU is not UNIX) organization, free software as we know it and GNU / Linux free operating system exists has been notable for being a pain in the ass for politicians. RMS has dedicated his life for the only goal to propagate his ideas that all computer software should be free as in freedom. He is known to have engaged in various petitions and peaceful protest events as well doing his best to raise awareness in people that our Freedoms as we know it are large endangered due to a daily introduced laws throughout the world aiming to limit us and take away our constitutional (democratic) freedoms.
In his lectures RMS at many times puts his thoughts on the lack of real democratic decision taking in the European Union.
A good example on how un-democratic the EU is a Software Patent session being held in Brussels just a a year ago. The Software patent session is officially said to be opened, (so anyone from the public) can participate. What is really weird about the whole thing is that an European institution is trying to campaign a software patents to be legislated in Australia. Hmm isn't that weird, wasn't the European Union to be mainly engaged in minding for the European member countries and european economy or software situation. Why on earth they try to in-force software patents in Australia if Australia has nothing to do with the EU. Didn't the EU has enough problems already caused by patenting … The patent session held was completely "bribed" as Stallman points out, the people attending was "computer specialists" and patent experts who were all only in favor of software patents and there was no practical representative of any tech-expert who was not in favour of software patents. Stallman tried to peacefully protest the unwalful meeting by just holding a big signature saying "NO TO SOFTWARE PATENTS". He entered the hall and tried to stay in the back of the room with the NO SOFTWARE PATENTS slogan without even saying a word. A short after a policeman come and took him away for no apparent reason, obviously showing that peaceful protesting to any of what the EU is lobbying about is no longer possible. Now how this is a democracy and how comes the European Union is proclaiming being democratic if even a peaceful protesting of someone or bunch of people opposing an idea, agenda or meeting can't take place?
GNU founder tries to peacefully protest in European Patent session, being pushed away by police
I've gathered a collection of 15 Audio and Video songs dedicated to the Free Software / Open Source movement . All of the songs are based on the The Free Software Song Anthem written by Richard Mathew Stallman in the year 1991. The motive of the song is a Traditional Bulgarian song called Sadi Moma Bqla Loza – translated to bulgarian to something like Maid is Planting white Vines The original Free Software Song symbolizes all free software and the Free Software Movement and GNU and is in the Bulgarian unique / specific folk rhythm of 7 / 8 beats .
Most of the songs which I post hereby could also be found and downloaded from GNU's official Free Software Song page However some of the songs were only available from Youtube in the non-free format Flash Video (flv) . Hence, since the songs were dedicated to Free Software and apparently were being spread in a non-free format they either was missing any licensing or licensed under GFDL – free music / art GNU like license. To fix up this irragularity and add some freedom in terms of audio format of spreading, I've downloaded them and used ffmpeg2theora to convert the songs to the Free / Open Standard format Ogg Vorbis I'm quite sure that many people, who use Ubuntu or Linux Mint are pretty much unfamiliar with the Free Software Songs existence, also many people most likely have never heard the Free Software Songs or even those who heard it have rarely heard more than 2 or 3 of the song variations. Hereby, I'm sure many people who are lovers of Free Software will highly benefit and get inspired to continue in the Free Software by listening to these post shared little Free Software Song Collection .
The covers of the Original version publicly sang by Richard Stallman are in different musical genres, some of the song performances are in Folklore, played on Piano other covers are performed by musical bands in pop / punk en popular music styles, there are one person performances, cheerful christmas like soundings, 8 bit free software song, Metal free software variations etc. In the collection I've included also few other nice songs which are propaganda on free software, even though not a cover of the Free Software Song , I found them myself worthy to be included in the collection..:
Herein you can download or listen all the Free Software Songs version (Enjoyment is guaranteed! 😉 ):
On 27 of September this year (2013) Richard Stallman's GNU Project celebrates its 30 years Anniversary! Richard started the GNU Project and devoted his last 30 years of his life and thanks to him now we have free software. His work is remarkable. Million of GNU / Linux System Administrators and Programmers (including me in this number) round the world today has a daily income thanks to RMS. Interestingly the GNU Project was started in year I was born in the distant 1983. In fact the GNU Project is older than me with a couple of days (I'm born on 8-th of October 1983! :). Probably it is not a coincidence that I got so interested in Free Software GNU and Software freedom as the project was started so near my birthdate 🙂
Here is how RMS Announced the existence of GNU project and the general philosophy behind it:
I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.
So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.
You can read whole original Stallman announcement here
Stallman's GNU Project is a good example how a single man who believes in something can change the world, by sticking to his believes. We all know Stallman is a true hacker legend, besides that as a friend used to say RMS is one of the greatest philosophers of our times. Stallman doesn't have kids but according to his words for him the GNU Project is like his Child. His Virtual Child gave chance to millions of people around the world to study source codes and develop in their career. Even his child gave birth to thousands of hundred other "hacker" childs 🙂
Again, Happy Birthday GNU!!! I wish Stallman another 30 years of work in field of protection of Human Liberty and Software Rights!
If you want to be strict on using only Free Software (in a as in freedom sense), just like Richard Stallman. You will be happy to know there is a tool in Linux called Virtual Richard Stallman ( vrms – report of installed non-free software ) 🙂
On launch vrms simply lists, all software and software documentation installed on Debian GNU / Linux that is not 100% free software licenses / GPL compatbile. This is software installed via non-free package Debian repositories or somehow not sticking to the standards of Debian Free Software Guidelines. Of course living with 100% free software is only for the hard core free software evangelists and rarely there is someone who can use computer on daily basis without some bits of proprietary software like flashplugin-nonfree, Skype rar, unrar. I tried for a while living on only 100% free software but didn't succeeded cause some non-free software is still a must to be able to not detach from "Digital Society". Living on only free software is not easy especially if you want to have normal multimedia stuff on Desktop. Anyways even if you don't plan to purge your non-free software vrms is useful to list what free-software is installed on PC.
noah:~# apt-cache show vrms|grep -i description
Description-en: virtual Richard M. Stallman The vrms program will analyze the set of currently-installed packages on a Debian-based system, and report all of the packages from the non-free and contrib trees which are currently installed. . —
Install vmrs with:
noah:~# apt-get install --yes vrms
Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree Reading state information… Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: liboggkate1 xulrunner-10.0 Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following NEW packages will be installed: vrms 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 101 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/13.0 kB of archives. After this operation, 102 kB of additional disk space will be used. Retrieving bug reports… Done Parsing Found/Fixed information… Done Selecting previously unselected package vrms. (Reading database … 226672 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking vrms (from …/apt/archives/vrms_1.16_all.deb) … Processing triggers for man-db … Setting up vrms (1.16) …
Below is a list of all non-free software installed on my Debian 7 Thinkpad:
noah:~# vrms
Non-free packages installed on noah
acroread Adobe Acrobat Reader: Portable Document Format file vi acroread-data data files for acroread acroread-dictionary-en English dictionary for for acroread acroread-escript Adobe EScript Plug-In acroread-l10n-en English language package for acroread firmware-iwlwifi Binary firmware for Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 and 802.11 frogatto-data 2D platformer game starring a quixotic frog mame Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) mame-tools Tools for MAME and MESS mess Multi Emulator Super System (MESS) mess-data Data files for the Multi Emulator Super System (MESS) mozilla-acroread Adobe Acrobat(R) Reader plugin for mozilla / konqueror nikto web server security scanner opera Fast and secure web browser and Internet suite rar Archiver for .rar files skype Skype teamviewer TeamViewer (Remote Control Application) unrar Unarchiver for .rar files (non-free version) xmame-tools Transitional package for mame-tools
Contrib packages installed on noah
cbedic Text-mode Bulgarian/English Dictionary dosemu DOS Emulator for Linux flashplugin-nonfree Adobe Flash Player – browser plugin frogatto 2D platformer game starring a quixotic frog gnome-video-arcade Simple MAME frontend mess-desktop-entries Desktop entries for MESS ROMs ttf-mscorefonts-installer Installer for Microsoft TrueType core fonts winetricks package manager for WINE to install software easily
Contrib packages with status other than installed on noah
gxmame ( dei) GTK XMame frontend
19 non-free packages, 0.8% of 2531 installed packages. 9 contrib packages, 0.4% of 2531 installed packages.
If you want to go the Stallman way and be a 100% Free Software user, Go free and purge all "evil" non-free software 🙂 issue:
# for i in $(vrms -q|grep -v 'Contrib packages'|grep -v 'Non-free'|awk '{ print $1 }' | awk 'NF'); \
do \
apt-get remove --yes $i; dpkg --purge $i; done
It is a public secret that Mobile Phones which does us very good and generally makes our daily lifes way easier are also a big enemy to our natural ihnibited freedom. Life has become such that it is almost inevitable to do any business or do a daily simple jobs without using Mobile Phone. There is almost none practically today that has wilfully rejected to use the mobile phone on any basis, almost anyone except some strangers like Richard Stallman and probably few others security freaks.
I've been shocked to find out the Father of Free Software (Richard Mathew Stallman), well known in the hacker dome as RMS does not own and didn't use any mobiles. The concerns he pointed are very much logical and rightful. Owning a mobile is a great security hole in personal privacy (mobile phones can be easily sniffed by Mobile Operators) as well as anyone wearing a mobile can be tracked up to 5 to 2 meters to the exact location where he is based on the mobile phone cells to which the mobile is connected.
Many people are not aware actually of the severeness of the issue of constant tracking of people everywhere through this call "goodies". Many mobile operators are already running a software which is building place behaviour patterns of every user of their mobile network. In other words, as we're used to bring and use the mobile everywhere in automated program is creating a map for each number assigned in some of the mobile operators. The gathered data about our location going habits can then be easily used as a indicator for predicting our future behaviour, bying habits (how many times we go to super-market), how many times we go to cinema, what kind of interests we hold etc. etc. This combined with Google, account monitoring could possibly create a system similar to the old movies Big Brother, where all people goods and even attitudes or desires is monitored, influenced and controlled ….
The severeness of the future implications of this constant "personal surveillance and tracking device" as Stallman use to call it is very dangerous for our freedoms.
I tried to live without a mobile phone, just like Stallman for about months, and to tell you the truth the world around seems completely different when you decide not to use 'em. The time I lived wihtout a mobile, clearly show me we have come to the point we cannot any more live without GSM. We fall the trap of dependanding the little "talk box" communication for absolutely everything, obviously sacrificing privacy and freedom for convenience. Mobiles are just one side of the coin, as the non-free software which is ruling the software market and the use of computers puts another treat and takes away many foundamential freedoms we used to have in the less technological world.
Apple as a vendor of software and hardware also denies and breaks our freedom very badly, as the company tracks everyone who owns anything created by apple connected to the internet. Besides that non-free software producers, could change the user software with a press of a button giving them the opportunity to decide what is good and bad for us, leaving us at a state of a helpless dependable users.
The topic of technological little-by-little enslavement, we're going through nowdays and the denying freedoms, we experience while being convinced by companies that we became more free by each next mambo-jambo gadget or by owning the latest smart-phone is very huge and complex but unfortunately underseen in society. I don't understand why, is it due to the low technical skills of mass users is it due to a "not-care what will happen in future" attitude, but obviously people openly discussing or protesting the technologization taking away our freedom is almost zero ….
Here is the video I found in youtube in which Stallman is asked few, questions on Ipads (IBADS) and Mobile Phone use. I believe his short explanation synthesizes the problem quite well ;;;;
I just wonder after you check the video, Would you still accept an Ipad as a birthday gift ? 🙂 Do you still think cell-phones are "good" freedom safe and reliable ?
I've installed Jabber as a platform for internal company communication for a company. It was a requirement for this jabber server to be accessed from a different type of computers / devices different in size, hardware and OS e.g. (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Ipad, mobile phones etc.)
Happily there is plenty of free software programs which allows access to jabber for free. On the major operating systems GNU / Linux, Mac OS X and Windows the client jabber accounts are working fine with the wonderful free software Pidgin – The Universal Chat Client
One of the jabber clients, however was primary had to be used on Apple's proprietary IPad / IBad as Richard Stallman likes to call it 😉
The person who had to have the Jabber protocol working on IPad program was not a proficient user and therefore I had the task to find a program to be able to talk to the Jabber protocol for him. A quick search in Google for jabber ipad client led me to few programs said to support Jabber on Ipad :
BeejiveIM for IPad
Jabba
Jabba was looking quite, nice but unfortunately costs $1.99 and should be purchased in Apple's App Store and it was preferrable not to spend money on a trivial thing as a Jabber client. I gave BeejiveIM a try but it required some very complex registration, as well as again required to be purchased (if I remember correctly), so it wasn't an option either.
Then thanksfully, I found TalknOut which is free and it is a perfect jabber client for Apple Ipad Talkonaut is a program also supporting both Jabber (XMPP) and GTalk2VoIP, hence supporting Google Talk and MSN/Live Messanger. It is written Java and therefore works on any device that has Java installed. Talkonaut supports the following mobile architectures:
Apple's IPhone and Ipad
Google Android Phones
Many of the Nokia Symbian's S60 3rd and 5th edition "smart" phones
Windows Mobile 5.x and 6.x
Java J2ME based phones
Installing TalkonAut is a piece of cake from Ipod's Safari you click on the Install link and it gets installed. I will not get into details on how it is configured as this also is pretty easy. Here is how it looks like on Ipad after configured and the user is logged in Jabber:
Something really unique and nice for the program is the way the chat dialogs gets ordered, the idea to place one person's sending on the left side and the replying one on right is innovative and something I've not seen in another chat client 😉
Talkonaut should also support VoIP (voice conversations), between mobile users, I'm curious if somebody used the program for VoIP and can share feedback?
Yesterday night, one more Computer Genius – John McCarthy has passed away at the age of 84. John McCarthy is mostly famous for the creation of Lisp Programming language, which was probably the most used programming language in the short past. There are plenty of corporate old iron hardwares which still run programs written in Lisp. Lisp is the language in which Richard Stallman has created his so famous EMACS text editor for GNU.
Computer Technology students, should have studied certainly Lisp in the form of Lisp Scheme. Lisp is the the second oldest high level programming language only to be predeceded by Fortran . Lisp gave birth to the so called Macro programming languages and was invented by McCarthy in 1958, while he was in Massachusetts MIT university. What is so important about Lisp is that it is de-facto the first language in the world which was written to be suitable for AI (Artificial Intelligence) researches. There is plenty of interesting information about Lisp as well as a number of forks and variations circulating for almost all the existing major operating systems nowdays.
Besides LISP creation McCarthy was in the first team who did a the first Remote Computer Chess game. The game played was among USSR and US scientists, where the moves were transferred by telegraph. In 1972 MCCarthy was awarded with the Turing Award – (Today probably the most prestigious award for incredible technology achievements in the world). McCarth’s home website had a lot of great papers on programming languages, mathematical theory of computation and most importantly philosophical words and notes on Artificial Intelligence His site has a lot of his essays as well as his personal views on the world and predictions (foreseen probabilities by him) on the world future. McCarthy had even written a short Sci-Fi story (The Robot and The Baby), the story aim was to explore the question, whether robots should have simulated emotions.
John McCarthy is among the brightest computer genius who ever live on this planet as well as a true “icon” for a computer hacker. The news for his death is quite shocking especially after the sudden death of the creator of C programming Language and UNIX Denis Ritchie , and a week earlier the pass of Steve Jobs It seems like no coincidence, that the brightest computer minds are departuring this life, probably God is taking them one by one just like he gave them the gifts to invent and revolutionize the technology we use today. Surely McCarthy has left a huge landmark on technology and his name will be in the books for the generations to come.
Triumph of the Nerds is 3 parts documentary movie on how the Personal Computer was developed. The movie features interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Allan Paul and many other IT veterans who played key roles for the development of the Personal Computer ,
The movie is an interesting watching for people interested into Information Technology and gives some minor insights on the starred interviewed people and their life philosophy. It was interesting times back then and it seems many of the guys who could participate in the PCs were very lucky, where others who made key developments which are de-facto standards today went into history without much being remembered.
Now the trends which these man set in world’s development is not nice. Even though PC brough a lot of fun in our every lives it suddenly started taking over our privacy and made the humanity divided. The movie is a story of a man motivated by greed arrogancy and exploitation. Even though the movie has historical value it doesn’t even mention about Free Software Richard Stallman and the free software movement.
The movie talks about the development of CP/M the predecessor of Quick and Dirty DOS (QDOS), MS-DOS Windows 1,2,3, Windows 95 etc.
It also tries to picture the events around the raise and fall of IBM and OS/2.
The most notable parts for me in the movie are the showing off of some old computer hardware and Mainframe servers as well as the quick explanation on how Mainframes irons predecessed the PC. Another interesting moment in the movie is displaying Steve Jobs demonstrating the Xerox’s Alto graphical interface. Talking about Jobs it was quite shocking for the world his sudden death just 3 days ago so (R.I.P).
The movie author Robert X. Cringery stress out in the movie the great struggle between the so called “the blue Elephant” IBM and the just emerging early Microsoft Corporation
Triumph of the Nerds slightly mentions Digital Equipment Corporation / DEC or COMPAQ as later known. DEC is company less known in todays world which had historically great impact on computer market, so its a pity the movie part mentioning DEC is so short.
What the movie misses is to aforemention About’s Digital Equipment VMS operating system known under the code name OpenVMS. OpenVMS even of today is believed by many to be the most secure Operating System ever developed. The movie part that talks about DEC is the second part of movie it shows a nice COMPAQ portable computer.
One should admit COMPAQ portable Computer is a really trendy for its time, Also the way it sticks the keyboard to the screen does remind seriously the opening and closing of a modern laptop 😉
The movie includes some interesting, so called crash courses where the movie author gives some insight on elementary computing, so for those new to informatix the movie will surely be educative as well, though for a UNIX gurus this elementary computing scenes will look kinda ridiculous 😉
One serious flaw with this movie is the complete lack of interviews with Richard Stallman and the importance of Free Software for the development of modern PC and the influence of the free software culture on todays latest Macintosh and PC developments.
A related movie which probably most IT geeks already know / seen is Pirates of the Sillicon Valley , hence large chunk of Triumph of the Nerds gives another point of view on the ideas and stories presented in Triumph of the Nerds
Triumph of the Nerds brings back some good memories of the glorious PC computer past for all of us who had been a DR-DOS/MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 / 95 users.
Did you have the need to sometimes split an SQL extra large files to few pieces in order to be able to later upload it via phpmyadmin? Did you needed an extra large video or data file to be cut in few pieces in order to transfer it in few pieces over an USB stick? Or just to give you an another scenario where I sometimes need to have an enormous file let’s say 3G split in few pieces, in order to later read it in vim or mcedit . I sometimes need to achieve this on FreeBSD and Linux hosts thus I thought it will be helpful to somebody to give a very quick tutorial on the way large files can be cut in pieces on Linux and BSD hosts.
GNU/Linux and FreeBSD are equipped with the split command. The purpose of this command is exactly the cutting of a file to a number of pieces.
On Linux the split command comes by default install to the system with the coreutils package on most Debian (deb) based and Redhat based (rpm) distributions, theerefore Linux’s version of split is GNU/split since it’s part of the GNU Coreutils package. An interesting fact about Linux split is that one of the two programmers who has coded it is Richard Stallman 😉
On BSD Unix split is the AT&T UNIX (BSD) split
In the past splitting files in pieces was much more needed than today, as people used floppy drives to transfer data, though today with the bloom of Internet and the improve of the data carriers transferring even an extra large files from one place to another is a way more trivial task still at many occasions splitting it in pieces is needed.
Even though today splitting file is very rarely required, still there are times when being able to split a file in X number of parts is very much needed. Maybe the most common use of splitting a file today is necessery when a large SQL file dumps, like let’s say 200 MBytes of info database needs to be moved from ane hosting provider to another one. Many hosting providers does disallow direct access with standard mySQL client programs to the database directly and only allow a user to connect only via phpMyAdmin or some other web interface like Cpanel to improve data into the SQL or PostgreSQL server.
In such times, having knowledge on the Unix split command is a priceless asset.
Even though on Linux and BSD the code for the split command is not identical and GNU/split and BSD/split has some basic differences, the use of split on both of these Unices is identical. The way to split a file in few pieces using on both Linux and BSD OSes is being done with one and the same command, here is how:
The Second argument the split command takes is actually called a prefix, the prefix is used as a basis name for the creation of the newly generated files cut in pieces file based on SQL-Backup-Data.sql.
As I said identical command will split the SQL-Backup-Data.sql files in a couple of parts which of it will be sized 40 megas.
These command will generate few files output like:
freebsd# ls -1 SQL-Backup-Dat*SQL-Backup-Data.sql
SQL-Backup-Dataa
SQL-Backup-Dataab
SQL-Backup-Dataac
SQL-Backup-Dataad
SQL-Backup-Dataae
As you see the SQL-Backup-Data.sql with size 200MB is being split in four files each of which is sized 40mbytes.
After the files are transfered to another Linux or BSD host, they can easily be again united in the original file with the command:
linux:~# for i in $(ls -1 SQL-Backup-Data_split*); echo $i >> SQL-Backup-Data.sql
Alternatively in most Unices also using cat should be enough to collect back the pieces into the original file, like so:
Talkonaut should also support VoIP (voice conversations), between mobile users, I'm curious if somebody used the program for VoIP and can share feedback?
