Paolo blog: Ramblings on Web2.0, Trust, Reputation, Recommender Systems, Social Software, Free Software, ICT4D and much more

Mozilla Firefox 1.x with all vendor patches installed and all vendor workarounds applied, is currently affected by 3 Secunia advisories rated Less critical.
Microsoft IE 6 with all vendor patches installed and all vendor workarounds applied, is currently affected by 20 Secunia advisories rated Highly critical.
via BlogForFirefox

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

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

This is just insane! Links are “campaign contributions!” (via BoingBoing)
Seems that a US judge has ruled out that a link to the site of a political candidate is a contribution to her campaing and, since this is regulated in many ways, it may be the case that you cannot link to it! That’s weird. This is just free speech. Just as I’m free to tell my friend that I appreaciate Kucinich as US president, I must be free to express the same opinion on my blog. Otherwise, is the federal commision going to record every single conversations we do, monitor when we speak about candidates and count (monetarizing it) how much we “contributed” to a candidate campaign? … Beware, the enemy is listening. Don’t express political opinions! Even better, don’t think. Just swallow whatever bullshit they are throwing in your direction. I’m more and more scared thinking about who had the power to legislated about Internet.

Some days ago Richard Stallman was speaking at the University of Trento, Faculty of Sociology. It was a great day. Stallman spoke most of the time of freedom, of sharing, of helping your friends and neighbours. These are the reasons behind GNU. Check his biography if you don’t know who he is.
I took some photos of that day: in the photo on the left, I’m with Stallman, Napo and Arianna.
Emanuele recorded a complete video (courtesely hosted by archive.org, if you need to host videos, audios, do it on archive.org and make them available to everyone! you can also just watch the thumbnails) and there is also the audio. And if you like sounds, you might enjoy a compilation of free software songs (collected on the wonderful Webjay).
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While M1cr0$oft 5uX, Google H4×0r.

Yesterday I watched the movie The Corporation. Highly recommended! The first part is incredibly cleverly designed. First there is an historic study of the born and evolution of corporations (the breaking point was when lawyers where successful in making them accepted as persons, giuridic persons but still persons with all the rights of a person, property included). Then the usual behaviours of a megacorporation are shown with paradigmatic examples and they are posed in parallel with the characteristics of the medical profile of a psycopath. Clever! The second part is more conventional and keeps presenting examples of what megacorporations have done in our world. The movie is in reality a documentary, a very well designed documentary. It is a little bit long, though, more than 2 hours I think. My suggestion is to watch it in 2 tranches. But to watch it.