My Geekdom

Earlier this week, the Florida appeals court made a ruling that even the poster of a defamatory posting on a public website could not force a website to remove the posting. While most sites allow you to remove your own postings, RipoffReport.com, the site involved in this ruling, states that as an advocate of free speech, it never removes reports. This is clearly stated at the top of their home page and documented extensively on their Wikipedia page.

While not allowing the poster to remove or have removed a posting seems extreme, the site claims that it wishes to remain unbiased. As such, it makes no judgment calls about its content. Everything that is appropriate for the site will stay on the site, forever. RipoffReport.com is afraid that posters may be pressured by 3^rd-parties to remove articles. As such, They are simply not allowed to.

While postings are never removed, the site allows anyone to post a rebuttal to any posting. A poster can use this mechanism to retract their initial statement.

The court ruled that RipoffReport.com could neither be held liable for the defamatory posting nor be forced to remove it. The bottom line of all of this is that

While Congress has delayed voting on SOPA for another month, it is still on the docket. It is unclear what the fate of SOPA will be.

One can hope that Congress pays attention to protests such as the statement]] consumers sent to GoDaddy after it announced its support of SOPA. GoDaddy announced that on a Saturday (see more complete chronology) and then lost 21K domains on the next day. More recently, the Wikipedia announced it would discontinue all use of GoDaddy.

Let's continue to hope that advocates of free speech, including you (see SOPA: The End Of Free Speech for instructions as to how to help), continue to pressure our government into sane activit

Copied directly from the Slashdot article:

RipoffReport.com contained an admittedly defamatory posting, by one of its users, about a person who operated a Florida corporation providing addiction treatment services. Although the site was asked by the poster herself to remove the post, it refused. A Florida appeals court has ruled that the site is absolutely immune from suit (pdf), and cannot even be directed to remove the offending post, since under the [[http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode47/usc_{sec4700000230}-—000-.html][Communications Decency Act (47 USC 230)] 'no cause of action may be brought' against a provider of an "interactive computer service" based upon information provided by a 3rd party.

This posting is best viewed as part of the series of postings about The Litigious Trio and, in a larger context, Online Freedom.

To be clear, The Litigious Trio are, in alphabetical order, Apple, Google and Microsoft. While they are three wonderful technology companies, over time, each has turned to an increasingly large amount of litigation to enforce their current market status.

While I do not believe that the three companies actively collaborate with each other to hinder the success of smaller companies, I believe that selfish¹ business practices by the trio have had the affect of having created a three company monopoly². While the three companies are locked in a near-endless stream of litigation against each other, this is rather typical amongst large corporate competitors. I can't say that I'm in favor of such litigation but I the three companies can spend their money that way if they want to. They have more than enough of it.

But when The Litigious Trio, behaving in a pseudo-monopolistic manner, use litigation to block competition from smaller companies, they end up stifling innovation.

Furthermore, The Litigious Trio are not necessarily the most user-friendly companies. They, along with Facebook, are some of the leaders in gathering information about its users. Consider the following:

• Nearly all of Google's revenue comes from advertising. Their advertising is so valuable, and profitable, because they are able to sell well targeted ads. That is, they know so much about each user that they can sell ad space for that specific user for more than other advertising vendors. The article, We Are Google's Products, provides a good summary of this concept.
• Google has a near-monopoly on internet advertising. The US Senate has recently requested the FTC to investigate this.
• Microsoft's monopolistic practices have been discussed and challenged by courts around the world for years.
• Apple is currently under investigation for price fixing on its eBooks, has just been fined for charging customers in Italy for providing federally mandated, free support, and has tried to destroy Samsung's mobile market by presenting falsified evidence to courts around the world. While this last claim seems hard to believe, an easily accessible description and images demonstrate that Apple is either incompetent or dishonest.

The only question seems to be whether the public is motivated to address this problem and what the public can do to address it. The reason monopolies are illegal is because fighting them is difficult.

usermod -a -G GID1,GID2,…GIDn USERNAME

• USERNAME must already exist
• The one or more GIDs must already exist
• Omitting the -a will first remove the user from all groups except their login group and then add them to groups GIDs.

Dropbox took the internet by storm with its free storage and ease of access. But Dropbox comes with a limited amount of data, a level of secureness that is hard-to-understand, and rather proprietary.

Sparkleshare is an open source alternative to Dropbox that hit my radar screen about 6 months ago. I played with it a bit back then but it didn't seem to be quite there. I think I was using an early-alpha, pre-release version so I this was to be expected.

I gave it another try earlier this week and seem to be pretty happy with it. Some of the things I like about it include:

1. I get to host it on my own server. This means the data is private. I own it. Nobody else has a copy of it. Etc…
2. I have been renting a Linux VPS from RoseHosting.com ($20/month) for many years so they provide me with a convenient, managed, and relatively secure place to host Sparkleshare.
3. It only took me about 5 minutes to install and configure sparkleshare on my Linux VPS. Not because I'm brilliant but because Linux doesn't suck and Sparkleshare requires no special server software. Just a few standard packages such as Git and a copy-and-paste of one command line. The client install (Mac OS X) was equally simple.
4. Being that it is FOSS, there is continual scrutiny of the source code to maintain quality and security.

The only real objection I have with it is that Dropbox allows symbolic links in the Dropbox folder so I don't need to have all of my files in one directory. I haven't yet gotten this to work on Sparkleshare. Either I just haven't figured it out, someone else will add it shortly, or, being it is FOSS, I'll add it if I get motivated enough (BTW: I'm voting for someone else implementing it).

SOPA, and its sister bill PROTECT-IP, are currently making their way through congress. I have pointers to some of the excellent sources of information on the bills at the end of this article.

While the magnitude of these bills is staggering, this posting focuses on how the passage of these bills will dramatically remove the ability of individuals to produce and share content on the internet.

While I favor reasonable enforcement and punishment of internet-based crimes, these bills introduce the concepts of:

• Guilty until proven innocent
• Guilty by association
• Whoopsy daisy legal recourse that restricts damages (eg: going bankrupt) due to abuse of SOPA to "s— happens" response.

into American law. At least to me, those concepts don't seem very "American".

The problems with this bill can best be demonstrated by a simple example. Let us use the consider a fictitious, non-profit website run by a couple of friends that is focused on internet freedom. The website is called Big Brother, Back-off and Stop-It! with the URL BBBandS.org.

If this bill is passed, Big Brothers Big Sisters (http://bbbs.org) could simply write a letter to search engines such as Google, content distributors such as Facebook, and payment companies such as Paypal, claiming that they feel BBBandS.org is infringing on their domain name. Once this is done, each search, content, and payment provider must contact BBBandS.org (remember that BBBandS.org is a couple of friends working out of their garage).

BBBandS.org must reply to each and every provider explaining why they do not feel that BBBandS.org is infringing on BBBS.org's domain name. It seems clear that BBBandS.org could not accomplish this task in a timely fashion.

For each company that BBBandS.org does not manage to provide a credible counterclaim to (where credible is determined by the search, content, and payment provider companies), a fairly mechanical process will begin where federal courts will execute a cease and desist to each search, content, or payment service provider informing them that they must stop servicing BBBandS.org.

Guilty until proven innocent: Note that the simple lack of a timely response to sufficient to, by means of a judicial cease and desist order, force search, and payment providers to become legally and financially liable if they continue to do business with BBBandS.org.

Guilty by association: Whether a service provider agrees or disagrees with the order, they can be held accountable if they do not "block access to or end financial affiliation" with BBBandS.org.

To add insult to injury, the bill goes on to provide "immunity from liability for service providers" that follow a cease and desist order, causing clear economic harm to BBBandS.org, even if it is eventually determined that there was no infringement.

Whoopsy daisy legal recourse: Should the cease and desist order be determined to be incorrect via a legal process that may take years and cost more money than most people will ever have, this bill restricts BBBandS.org's legal recourse to accepting the apologies of the US judicial system.

While I am in favor of what the bill claims to be protecting, this bill proposes far too high a price to pay for that protection.

If you care about the rights of small organizations (eg: people like you), please:

• Read an excellent summary of SOPA in this article. Keep in mind that the reason that the article seems ludicrous, insane, and unbelievable is because it is accurately reflecting the proposed legislation.
• Google SOPA or PROTECT-IP.
• Take action via Mozilla's page focused on this issue.
• Take action via the EFF.
• Contact your legislator using this OpenCongress.org page (takes only a minute or so).
• Discuss this issue with everyone you know.
• Discuss this issue with people you don't know. I recommend "So what do you think about SOPA?" as a pick-up line though I encourage creativity and individualism as to the exact wording.
• Post a copy or a link to one or more articles on SOPA everywhere you can.

NanoBlogger supports tags. While they came working out of the box, their UI is a bit awkward. I now have it so that I can easily tag entries with just a single command line. For example, I'll tag this posting by typing: nbeta about-this-blogs-tech 1 nbeta is my shell script to add tags to an entry. It seems a bit hard to remember but:

about-this-blogs-tech is the tag name. 1 is the entry ID number. I'd like it to be the entry name but that isn't done yet and seems of lower priority as the newest entry is always entry #1.

Well, it appears this actually does work. I seem to be having a few issues integrating with NanoBlogger but I'm sure I'll work those out. The problems that I've seen are:

1. It seems that adding or even updating a new entry is as costly as rebuilding the entire blog from scratch. Right now, that's OK. But what am I going to do when I have 10, or 100 postings? I hope NanoBlogger can handle this.
2. NB seems to assume that its input files are hand-written in some legacy text editor called Vim or something :-). While my strategy of using GNU Emacs' Org Mode keeps the flavor of NB in that it is written in a simple markup language, it doesn't seem to fit the NB model perfectly. There is nothing wrong with NB's markup, it is just that Org Mode's markup can easily be exported to virtually every other markup on the planet. So I just need to learn Org Mode markup, write my content in Org Mode, and then publish that data into whatever format I choose. Seems a better solution but NB isn't quite prepared for it.
3. I would still like better integration with Org Mode and NB. The steps I've used to produce this entry are:
   • Ran a little shell script I wrote to create a new NB entry. All I do is give the shell script the title of the Org Mode file I want to store the new entry in and it does its magic, leaving me with an Org Mode skeleton for NB.
   • Edit the Org Mode file just created.
   • Use Org Mode to publish the entry. This just stores it in my local NB folder.
   • Run nb update to have my changes put into the local copy of the blog.
   • Run nb preview to view the changes before publishing.
   • Run nb publish to update my blog.

So, while they're are still some problems, I have to say I love it. The advantages of using Org Mode and the simple NB blogging engine on both my local and production server is way cool.

Org Mode is actually way cool. I've only started using it in the past year and will likely spend years learning it as it supports so many features. But, like all well-designed pieces of software, you don't need to learn it all at once. I'll yabber about Org Mode another day. In any case, I'm real happy with my blog and the ease with which I can add postings to it.

My hope is that I can write this entry in GNU Emacs' Org Mode and have it auto-published into this blog. If you are reading this, then I have succeeded.

This is a static blog. That is, the server side is all HTML. It can be served by virtually any web server. This makes it incredibly convenient for testing and deploying. When I am writing blog entries, I'm just typing in Emacs. I then save the entries and use Org Mode plus some personalized tweaks to publish them to a local directory as something close to HTML.

These HTMLish files are then fed into NanoBlogger. NanoBlogger is the magic tool that turns a few HTMLish files into a fully functional website. NanoBlogger accepts HTML for the text af entries but wants some simply formatted metadata added to the file.

The Metadata is needed to help NanoBlogger out because, as its name implies, is a teeny-tiny blog engine. As a comparison, my installation of NanoBlogger is 768K (yes, that's "K"). I also have installations of Drupal at (14M) and Joomla (107M).

The .txt source for each NanoBlogger posting is a file with the body of the entry in HTML embedded but all the cruft that tends to come before and after the body of a web page is simply not there. The easiest way to get an understanding of it is to view the metadata source for this sample posting.

So you're saying "Big deal." or "Who needs yet another file format?" But it is a big deal. What most younglings have never learned is that WYSIWYG is a distraction from actual content production. Content production is not the same as formatting and editing and, at least in my experience, uses very different parts of the brain. So the less formatting you do while producing content, the better your content will be (at least if you have my brain :-).

While it has largely been lost with the popularization of the Wikipedia, initially, Wiki markup was intended to simplify editing but also served to separate the content production from formatting. While NanoBlogger expects these HTMLish files as input, it is designed to generate them from any number of simpler input formats.

These simpler input formats are quite unlike HTML as they are, well they're simpler. The default input format is the rather famous Markdown though many other formats are supported by NanoBlogger or the community. This article seems to do a good job explaining the benefits of simple languages such as Markdown.

It took me but a few hours to create a converter for GNU Emacs' Org Mode to NanoBlogger.

While not nearly as cool as what I've discussed above NanoBlogger has yet another advantage: it produces a static site. On my local machine (17" MacBook Pro), I can view the entire site without running a web server. I simply go to Firefox (actually Firefox Aurora) and visit the URL, specifically, the file URL of my blog. For me, I visit file://Users/neil/www-nb, and then I can see my entire blog through the magic of a static websites, file URLs, and relative URLs.