Everyone and his dog has their multihost ssh so why not me?

2009-08-28 by mjr

I call this sshtomany:

#!/bin/bash

cmd="$*"
cmd="${cmd/#* . /}"
[ "$cmd" = "$*" ] && echo "Usage: $0 [HOSTS] . [COMMAND]" && exit 127

while [ "$1" != . ] && ssh $1 -vt $cmd ; do
  echo Success at "$1"
  shift
done

clusterssh and its emacs equivalent are quite handy if you want to execute commands simultaneously and fairly graphically.

The various versions of dsh and dssh are flexible command-line tools.

But sshtomany will do 90% of simple jobs by running the same ssh command on a list of hosts, one after another.

Posted in GNU/Linux | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Avon and Somerset Police’s Worrying Approach to High-Tech Crime

2009-08-27 by mjr

Last week, I wondered about Green or Pirate Party Membership and got some good comments. Thanks to all for those. There seemed a slim leaning towards the Greens and a good point made that “Pirate Party” is a very bad name in a coastal area like mine. I’ve ranted before about the abuse of “piracy” to mean “unauthorised copying”.

This week, Lord Mandelson forced three-strikes up the priorities (something we avoided in parliament, except for the KangKaroo Court ISP). Please go answer the consultation if you haven’t already and make some comments against increasing the already-unfair and excessive influence of foreign media corporations on UK law enforcement.

On that theme, the BBC reported on Somerset’s own excessive filesharing arrest. Over seven hours detainment without a phone call for suspicion of breach of the Copyright and Patents Act – how is that reasonable?

One interesting phrase in the report:

“the downloading of any copyrighted item, without the owners consent, was a crimnal offence and not a civil one …first I knew of it!”

I’ve encountered everything from disbelief to outright abuse when I’ve told people about this. Did you know copyright and trademark infringements are criminal offences these days?

Finally, why is it that the Federation Against Copyright Theft (urgh, another abused word) can get Avon and Somerset Police to work for them, but when my co-op reports a high-tech crime to ASPolice, we don’t even get a reply? Wouldn’t the population prefer the police to raid spammers and attackers?

Posted in Cooperatives, SPI | Comments Off on Avon and Somerset Police’s Worrying Approach to High-Tech Crime

Youth Freedom and an IRC Q+A

2009-08-24 by mjr

Advertisers try to “get ’em young” to get them buying their wares from an early age. So why don’t we advertise freedom at young people more? The younger we make them aware of freedom, the more time they’ll spend defending that freedom from Big Media, the surveillance state and other threats, hopefully.

Of course, the threats I suggest above means that I don’t think we can rely on much help from most governments or media companies to promote it. Something more grassroots is required.

Students for Free Culture board will be holding an IRC question and answer session today, which I think is at 0100 UTC. It seems like a good idea to have a network for free culture societies at universities, colleges and schools.

I’ve also seen DFEY – Digital Freedom in Education and Youth and the GNU Generation projects recently, which were discussed elsewhere.

If you’re young (and I feel old, writing that), will you be getting involved with any of these three and if not, why not?

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Green or Pirate Party Membership?

2009-08-20 by mjr

Cooperators are spoiled for choice in the UK because all the major parties say nice things about cooperatives and there’s even the Cooperative Party, but a lot of us who take a sharing view to software (usually Free and Open Source Software) are concerned by the attitudes of the Top Three Parties towards copyright and related rights. Generally, these seem to have been hostile to sharing and the creative commonwealth, focusing on punishing people for unauthorised copying.

The Green Parties have been fantastic, as far as I’ve seen. When I spoke at the “Resisting corporate monopolies and new enclosures” workshop in the European Social Forum 2004 in London, their Laurence Vandewalle spoke in the same session, as shown in the mugshots.

One relatively new party is the Pirate Party UK, who are hoping for similar success to the similar party in Sweden that has two MEPs now.

Some have questioned their attitude to copyright and how it would affect FOSS. They’ve posted an article where rms talks to the Pirate Party UK to try to clarify it.

At the moment, I’m an independent councillor. I have no particular objection to joining a party – I just haven’t yet. I think the current protectionist pro-WIPO stance of the Big Three means I won’t join them yet. Do you think I should consider GPEW or PPUK?

Posted in Cooperatives, SPI | Comments Off on Green or Pirate Party Membership?

SPI August 2009

2009-08-19 by mjr

The monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 19 August) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted and the main business is selecting the officers after the SPI Voting (won by Michael Schultheiss and Jonathan McDowell), as well as a report about OSUNIX’s associate project status delay.

Come along and see how the updated board performs…

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Python 3 and Backwards Compatibility?

2009-08-18 by mjr

A while ago, we had a big discussion in the software.coop about what programming language we should prefer when we have a completely free choice. Ultimately, while all the workers have our own favourites (like my Lisp and Perl bias), we decided we all like Python, with quite an affection for django.

One of the reasons for this was the backwards compatibility: Python has generally not broken everything when a new version appeared, as far as we’ve noticed. Compare that to the version hell which is still going on with PHP 4 and 5 on many of the major web hosting services – with PHP 3 to 4 being little better and PHP 6 already on the horizon threatening more of the same, as far as I know.

Now, Python 3 is around and takes a leaf out of PHP’s upgrade HowNotTo, being “designed from the get-go to be incompatible with prior versions”. Should I expect Python to handle this upgrade better than PHP and, if so, why? I guess the mod_wsgi ability to run multiple Pythons is one help. What other helpful tricks are ready-to-run?

Posted in Web Development | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

#ukgovoss and Poor gov.uk Websites

2009-08-17 by mjr

Using gov.uk websites is an ordeal at the best of time. Even the most polished websites tend to reflect the structure of the government body, which I find counter-intuitive – and I’m a councillor who pays attention to these things.

Few websites are polished though. Most don’t even seem to reach “competent”. After reports of 60% of UK government websites containing HTML errors and local government sites containing porn-links, there’s recently been reports about Birmingham City Council’s website costing nearly £3m and still not capable of basic features like apostophes. Have you got a horror story to top that?

Why does this keep happening? Good cooperatively-developed web applications and tech worker co-ops are available. I’ll be musing on this and other council-related topics over at Parish Councillor for FOSS for the next little while if you’d like to join me.

Posted in Wordpress and Blogs | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Would you help to Connect SouthWest England?

2009-08-14 by mjr

Martha Lane Fox, the recently appointed Champion for Digital Inclusion visited Bristol recently and met Bristol Wireless Community Cooperative.

I follow Digital Inclusion topics, but I only heard about that after the event because of a technical fault on ConnectingBristol.org, but in the discussion, I was asked:

“As Co-ops, maybe you and Bristol Wireless (and others?) could host a regional event?”

Anyone interested? The Bristol Wireless discussion suggests some possible topics: social networking and outreach, skills training and peer-to-peer learning.

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Facebook Disrupts Activism

2009-08-11 by mjr

Last week, I caused a little bit of upset by using the wrong word when questioning why an online course was advertising Facebook in its title. (Another typical MJR tact failure… I’m sure many people can guess how it went wrong.)

I’ve written about the general problem before but Facebook in particular irks me because open social networking, based on tools like elgg (as seen at unltdworld.com) and BuddyPress (as seen at gaatalk.net) just isn’t getting a look-in among activists and non-profits. They don’t even seem as popular as the OpenMicroBlogging.org alternatives to the currently-DDoS’d twitter.com (BBC). Third sector Social Networking is almost completely beholden to the private sector, isn’t it?

This is a problem because it leaves campaigning groups vulnerable to the sort of yo-yoing visible/blocked attacks that the Big Green Gathering Facebook group has suffered in the last month.

In general, most activist, voluntary and social enterprise groups don’t seem to have any preference for working and trading with other third sector groups. I’ve been discussing this on some social networks, but the elephant we just can’t crack is: why not? Is it simply because getting a social network application to critical mass requires a longer loss-making start-up time than any voluntary group is willing to bear?

Posted in SPI | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Karoo Chooses to Start Three-Strikes

2009-08-08 by mjr

You may remember that I did some work last year campaigning against the “three strikes and you’re out” disconnect system, where suspected filesharers are disconnected from the internet after the third allegation is made. That’s allegation, not any sort of proof. Like Big Media wants, you’re guilty until proven innocent.

I wrote to representatives including Neil Parish MEP (who sent one incomprehensible answer) and didn’t seem to have much effect personally, but collectively, the campaign saw an Improved Telecom Package Passed by EuroParl.

Now it seems that one English service provider, Hull’s monopoly ISP Karoo, has decided to adopt the “three strikes” process by choice. Amazingly, “three strikes” is actually an improvement on the “one strike” policy previously used by Karoo and exposed by the BBC.

When will someone take these Kang-Karoo courts to a real court for breach of contract, or for abuse of their Hull monopoly?

I’m outside Hull and against three-strikes, so I joined the Phone Co-op, so I can vote against three-strikes when we’re offered it.

Posted in ThePhoneCoop | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments