Fsf-friends February 2004

fsf-friends@gnu.org.in

27 participants
47 discussions

To open software within three years
by Manjush G.Menon 26 Sep '05

26 Sep '05

Original Message ----- From: "IT@School" <itschool(a)asianetindia.com> To: <manjushmenon(a)hotmail.com> Sent: Saturday, October 05, 2002 5:08 PM Subject: Reply > Mr.Manjush G. Menon > We are not giving to depend totally on Ms. Products. Rather MS > Office is taught along with open office and Windows along with Linux > from this year. Arranging the resource persons for training an open > software, making available the software, the maintenance of a help desk > etc. are logistical issues which could not be immediately undertaken. > We plan switch out to open software within three years. > Executive Director > ---- Original Message ----- From: Manjush G. Menon To: itschool(a)asianetindia.com Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 5:46 PM Subject: Respected sir, From Manjush G. Menon, Sr.Programmer, Sofker Solutions Pvt Ltd, Kochi-18. To The Executive Director, 'IT @ SCHOOL' Project, SCERT Buildings, Poojapura, Thiruvananthapuram-12. Respected sir, SUB: In protest against the inclusion of products from multinational companies in the syllabus of 'IT @ SCHOOL' It's a very dissappointing fact that when the whole world is moving towards Free software, we at kerala are going behind a major MNC - Microsoft. I hereby register my protest in such an act from 'IT @ SCHOOL' Project team. Breaking of prototypes will definetly help us in finding economical and high quality products for our future generation. For students and programmers, the GNU Linux contains 'GNU Compiler Collections' which includes C, C++, FORTRAN, PERL, TCL etc. Also, for DTP and other publishing purposes, it includes GNU Office utilities like Abi-Word, gedit, and other worksheet utilities, all these with a nominal cost of Rs 700-800/-. The software as it is, is free and the cost is accounted towards the media (CD + Documentation) included. By this letter, I urge you to take this matter seriously and suggest necessary modifications in the action plan of 'IT @ SCHOOL' project. Wishing you all the best and wishing all 'Students @ SCHOOL' a bright future, Thanking you, Yours faithfully Manjush G. Menon. ______________________________________________________ Check out all the latest outrageous email attachments on the Outrageous Email Chart! - http://viral.lycos.co.uk

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PERUVIAN EFFORT COULD BAN MICROSOFT ON GOV. COMPUTERS (fwd)
by Frederick Noronha 16 Sep '04

16 Sep '04

Thanks to George Lessard for posting this across. FN ---------- Forwarded message ---------- PERUVIAN EFFORT COULD BAN MICROSOFT ON GOV. COMPUTERS Peruvian Congressman Edgar Villanueva is pushing legislation to obligate all public institutions to convert exclusively to open-source software. Open-source programs, embodied by the Linux operating system, have underlying code available to anyone who wants to modify or customize it. Such software, in unadorned form, can be downloaded from the Internet for free. Villanueva hopes his measure triggers activity in Peru's software industry by freeing programmers from the constraints of working with coding controlled by a few large companies. Open-source could take the expense out of software upgrades; which is important for a country like Peru that owes about $30 million in overdue software license fees. [SOURCE: San Jose Mercury, AUTHOR: Associated Press] (http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/3531007.htm)

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OFF-TOPIC] Will IT take away our freedom?
by V. Sasi Kumar 29 Feb '04

29 Feb '04

Sorry for this off-topic mail. Just could not resist this. This is a delightful takeoff on how IT could spoil our lives. Not just funny, it talks of our freedom to ignore our health too! A 40 year old middle class man wants to buy pizza, this mail shows what he experienced.. Operator: "Thank you for calling Pizza Hut. May I have your..." Customer: "Hi, I'd like to order." Operator: "May I have your NIDN first, sir?" Customer: "My National ID Number, yeah, hold on, eh, it's 6102049998-45-54610." Operator: "Thank you, Mr. Sheehan. I see you live at 1742 Meadowland Drive, and the phone number's 494-2366. Your office number over at Lincoln Insurance is 745-2302 and your cell number's 266-2566. Which number are you calling from, sir?" Customer: "Huh? I'm at home. Where d'ya get all this information?" Operator: "We're wired into the system, sir." Customer: (Sighs) "Oh, well, I'd like to order a couple of your All-Meat Special pizzas..." Operator: "I don't think that's a good idea, sir." Customer: "Whaddya mean?" Operator: "Sir, your medical records indicate that you've got very high blood pressure and extremely high cholesterol. Your National Health Care provider won't allow such an unhealthy choice." Customer: "Dang . What do you recommend, then?" Operator: "You might try our low-fat Soybean Yogurt Pizza. I'm sure you'll like it." Customer: "What makes you think I'd like something like that?" Operator: "Well, you checked out 'Gourmet Soybean Recipes' from your local library last week, sir. That's why I made the suggestion." Customer: "All right, all right. Give me two family-sized ones, then.What's the damage?" Operator: "That should be plenty for you, your wife and your four kids, sir. The 'damage,' as you put it, heh, heh, comes to $49.99." Customer: "Lemme give you my credit card number." Operator: "I'm sorry sir, but I'm afraid you'll have to pay in cash. Your credit card balance is over its limit." Customer: "I'll run over to the ATM and get some cash before your driver gets here." Operator: "That won't work either, sir. Your checking account's overdrawn." Customer: "Never mind. Just send the pizzas. I'll have the cash ready. How long will it take? Operator: "We're running a little behind, sir. It'll be about 45 minutes, sir. If you're in a hurry you might want to pick 'em up while you're out getting the cash, but carrying pizzas on a motorcycle can be a little awkward." Customer: "How the heck do you know I'm riding a bike?" Operator: "It says here you're in arrears on your car payments, so your car got repo'ed. But your Harley's paid up, so I just assumed that you'd be using it." Customer: "@#%/$@&?#!" Operator: "I'd advise watching your language, sir. You've already got a July 2006 conviction for cussing out a cop." Customer: (Speechless) Operator: "Will there be anything else, sir?" Customer: "No, nothing. Oh, yeah, don't forget the two free litres of Coke your ad says I get with the pizzas." Operator: "I'm sorry sir, but our ad's exclusionary clause prevents us from offering free soda to diabetics." --- Will information technology really improves our life, or will it take our freedom of life from us. is it a good idea to give IT tremendous influence on our lives.. Choice is yours and its your fundamental right, choose wisely. -- V. Sasi Kumar <vsasi(a)hotpop.com>

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CIA’s flawed software caused 1982-Siberia gas explosion
by V. Sasi Kumar 29 Feb '04

29 Feb '04

Here is an interesting bit of news about how a piece of software can be used to sabotage a country's economy. This is from http://jang.com.pk/thenews/feb2004-daily/28-02-2004/world/w17.htm. A Google search would give a number of pages on this issue, including an article by William Saffire (the guy who writes about the English language in Frontline) who gleefully narrates the background of the incident which "was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space." Can we trust their software? ‘CIA’s flawed software caused 1982-Siberia gas explosion’ WASHINGTON: The CIA exploited the Soviet Union’s desire to pilfer western technology to send it flawed software that resulted in a huge explosion on a natural gas pipeline in Siberia in 1982, The Washington Post said on Friday. Nobody was killed in the blast, but it did significant damage to the Soviet economy, said the daily quoting the memoirs of Thomas Reed, a former Air Force secretary who served in the National Security Council. Approved by then US president Ronald Reagan, the plan was part of ‘cold-eyed economic warfare’ against the Soviet Union that the Central Intelligence Agency conducted under Director William Casey, said Reed, whose book, ‘At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War,’ will be published next month. Reed said the Soviets in 1970 had created a special KGB section to plumb Western research and development for badly needed technology. The secret programme was later disclosed by a Soviet engineer to French intelligence, who in turn alerted the Reagan administration in 1981. Shocked by the knowledge the Soviets were stealing abundant Western technology and aware the United States at the time was trying to block Western Europe from importing Soviet natural gas, the CIA came up with the idea of slipping the Soviets technology that would work for a while, then fail. "In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds," Reed writes. The resulting explosion in the summer of 1982, said Reed, was observed from space by US satellites and caused concern for the US military who feared it was a missile liftoff. A CIA agent quickly told the military what had happened. "While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion, there was significant damage to the Soviet economy," Reed writes adding, "Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end." -- V. Sasi Kumar <vsasi(a)hotpop.com>

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[Fsf-friends] [OFFTOPIC] Radio suffers as Colombo bosses call the shots
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 29 Feb '04

29 Feb '04

Please excuse the posting of a completely off-topic posting here. This is a campaign that is underway since the mid-nineties. FN ---------- Forwarded message ---------- DO YOU believe that radio has a role in enhancing communication among the common(wo)man in India? Join a network meant to campaign for the opening up of genuine community radio in India. Click on the link-below to sign-up on the 'Community Radio-India' mailing list. FN (Frederick Noronha) _______________________________________________ cr-india mailing list cr-india(a)sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/cr-india PFM2058 | 22/10/2003 | 970 words Radio Suffers As Colombo Bosses Call The Shots By Nalaka Gunawardene COLOMBO (PANOS FEATURES) -- Soon after conquering Mount Everest half a century ago, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay turned on their transistor radio -- and the first thing they heard was an overseas broadcast of Radio Ceylon, from more than 3,000 kilometres away. They joined millions of people across the Indian subcontinent who regularly tuned in to these broadcasts. A pioneer in broadcasting in Asia, Radio Ceylon for decades informed and entertained an overseas audience many times the population of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. How times have changed. The once influential, popular and monopolistic state-owned radio in Sri Lanka has been completely sidelined in the past decade. A cacophony of privately-owned channels now crowd the airwaves -- albeit only in the FM band -- competing with each other to inform, entertain and sell consumer goods to the island nation's 19 million people. The product of media and economic liberalisation, these channels are operated by half a dozen companies, each struggling to make money in a market that until recently was depressed by a protracted civil war. Loss of listenership and advertising revenue are not the only problems that plague Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC), successor to Radio Ceylon. Over the years, successive governments have misused the station for political and state propaganda. Inconsequential and boring speeches of politicians were broadcast in full. Not that the private commercial channels have completely fulfilled their expectations: after the initial novelty had worn off, discerning listeners found that they could take only so much of the popular culture dished out by young announcers endlessly chattering in a mix of Sinhala or Tamil with English. Yet, on balance, many have come to the conclusion that even bad FM radio is better than SLBC. Private channels moved closer to their audiences by presenting news in colloquial and friendly Sinhala. Not so SLBC, which insists on using an imperious and archaic version of the language. *Our listeners immediately welcomed news in spoken Sinhala, and only a few pundits raised objections,* recalls Asoka Dias, news director at Sirasa FM which pioneered this innovation. *Now everybody does it -- at least in selected news formats.* It was Sirasa FM -- the first private channel started in 1992 -- that turned broadcasting in Sri Lanka upside down. Nimal Lakshapathiarachchi, its founder director, recognised the critical need for new formats to make radio more engaging and relevant in the multimedia age. Arguably some of these were in the *tabloid* mould, but Sirasa -- and other FM channels -- have lured back a whole new generation of listeners. Major gaps remain. Most FM signals can only be picked up in urban areas, and their profit-oriented owners are unlikely to invest further to achieve rural coverage. SLBC is the only station broadcasting on medium wave, short wave and FM bands -- and, in spite of considerable media freedom granted by the current government, it remains *His Master*s Voice* on all key political, social and economic matters. And in spite of having more choice than ever before, many Sri Lankans regularly listen to foreign broadcasts. By far the biggest gap concerns community radio. SLBC broadcasts from all corners of the country, including stations located in remote areas. The channel involves local people in programme production, and it maintains a strongly agrarian audience. But listeners have no say in running the stations -- these are managed by a tight bureaucracy in the capital Colombo, whose rigid guidelines control content: strictly no politics, and nothing remotely against the government in office. But, although touted as such, SLBC is not community radio, which is supposed to promote access, public participation in production and decision-making and listener-financing -- where each listener contributes a small amount towards the running of the radio station. In Sri Lanka, ironically, only armed rebels have challenged this state dominance by running clandestine channels. The Marxist People's Liberation Front ran Rana Handa (Sound of Victory) in the 1980s when it spearheaded a youth insurgency. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) -- the guerrilla group now talking peace with the government after two decades of war -- ran Voice of Tigers which made a mockery of Colombo's broadcast regulations. In November 2002, the government granted a license for LTTE to continue its broadcasts legally, a move that has since been contested in courts by other citizen groups. But that's the first -- and so far only time the state has accommodated such a request. Four successive governments since 1992 have refused to grant broadcast license to non-profit, non-governmental or cooperative groups. Organisations such as Sarvodaya -- the country's largest development NGO -- are keen to use the airwaves for public benefit, but their requests have been ignored. A major bottleneck is the discretionary broadcast licensing system that lacks transparency, accountability and consistency. As a result, the electro magnetic spectrum -- a public property -- has been plundered by officials and politicians who have granted licenses to relatives and business cronies. Some licenses have been traded for huge sums of money. The FM band is now saturated. Governments have never explained why community groups are not given broadcast licenses. Senior officials have sometimes cited fears of media misuse for 'anti-social' or political purposes. Strangely, such concerns don*t seem to extend to profit-making companies, some of whose channels are openly aligned with political parties. Meanwhile, the smokescreen of so-called 'community radio' has been used by bureaucrats hand-in-glove with commercial interests to block the evolution of broadcasting to the next stage * where community media are owned, managed and sustained by the people. 'Colombo Calling' was the station call in the early days of radio broadcasting in colonial Ceylon. Eight decades on, Colombo is still calling the shots. A few token rural transmissions of the state cannot redress this huge imbalance, no matter how they are dressed up. The first step towards truly community media is to demand the real liberation of the airwaves./PANOS FEATURES Nalaka Gunawardene is a media commentator and a director of Panos South Asia. This feature is published by Panos Features and can be reproduced free of charge. Please credit the author and Panos Features and send a copy to MAC, Panos Institute, 9 White Lion St, London N1 9PD, UK. Email: media(a)panoslondon.org.uk Photos (c) Panos Pictures except where otherwise credited. Panos London is a registered charity number 297366 Site development by viplondon. Design by John F McGill. CIRCULATED VIA: -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- February 2004 | Frederick Noronha, Freelance Journalist Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa | Goa India 0091.832.2409490 or 2409783 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | ---------------------------------------- 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | Email fred at bytesforall.org 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 | Writing with a difference 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 | ... on what makes *the* difference 29 | http://www.bytesforall.org -------------------------------------------------------------------

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GNU Libidn 0.4.0 alpha released (fwd)
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 28 Feb '04

28 Feb '04

---------- Forwarded message ---------- GNU Libidn is an implementation of the Stringprep, Punycode and IDNA specifications defined by the IETF Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) working group, used for internationalized domain names. The library contains a generic Stringprep implementation that does Unicode 3.2 NFKC normalization, mapping and prohibitation of characters, and bidirectional character handling. Profiles for Nameprep, iSCSI, SASL and XMPP are included. Punycode and ASCII Compatible Encoding (ACE) via IDNA are supported. A mechanism to define Top-Level Domain (TLD) specific validation tables, and to compare strings against those tables, is included. Default tables for some TLDs are also included. Here are the compressed sources: ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/libidn/libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz (1.6) http://josefsson.org/libidn/releases/libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz (1.6MB) Here are GPG detached signatures: ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/libidn/libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz.sig http://josefsson.org/libidn/releases/libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz.asc Here are the build reports for various platforms: http://josefsson.org/autobuild/libidn.html Here are the MD5 and SHA1 signatures: 71f3db9892848073c0c76b4d3326fd9a libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz 61c126e7a889ab571b62a547505ead02b0f5b84c libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz Noteworthy changes since version 0.3.5 (last version announced here): * Version 0.4.0 (released 2004-02-28) ** Support for TLD restrictions on IDN strings, contributed by Thomas Jacob. Many TLDs restrict the set of characters that can be used, from the full Unicode 3.2 range that is normally available. This contribution make it possible for you to test strings for TLD conformance locally. The code can be disabled by --disable-tld. If enabled (the default), the new API "tld.h" is installed which can be used to check a string for conformance to TLD specific rules. This add a new self test, and a new chapter in the manual. People responsible for maintaining TLD tables are hereby encouraged to contribute them (under reasonable licensing terms) for inclusion in future versions of Libidn. Be warned that the API for TLD checking may change throughout the 0.4.x series as we get feedback on it. ** Kerberos 5 stringprep profile macro is no longer documented. The macro itself will probably be removed in the future, if the specification is dropped from the Kerberos WG agenda. ** API and ABI is backwards compatible with the previous version. stringprep_kerberos5: DEPRECATED. Tld_table_element: Tld_table: Tld_rc: ADD. New data types. tld_get_4: tld_get_4z: tld_get_z: ADD. New functions to extract TLD from string. tld_get_table: tld_default_table: ADD. New functions to get TLD table from TLD name. tld_check_4t: tld_check_4tz: ADD. New function to provide core TLD operations. tld_check_4: tld_check_4z: tld_check_8z: tld_check_lz: ADD. New functions that combine all TLD operations in one call. * Version 0.3.7 (released 2004-01-22) ** The command line parameter '--' idiom is documented. ** The iSCSI stringprep profile now recognized as "iSCSI". The earlier name "ISCSIprep" is still recognized, for backwards compatibility. ** DocBook manuals no longer included (the tools are too unstable). ** API and ABI is backwards compatible with the previous version. * Version 0.3.6 (released 2004-01-06) ** The manual now contain a troubleshooting section for the command line tool. ** The PHP interface pass the string directly on the command line. ** The macro that create 'idn-int.h' has been updated to latest version. ** API and ABI is backwards compatible with the previous version. _______________________________________________ GNU Announcement mailing list <info-gnu(a)gnu.org> http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu

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Free Software Badges
by Rishi Gangoly 28 Feb '04

28 Feb '04

Hello Friends, When RMS was here last, he had a badge which said : "Free Software ... Want to know more" or something like that... With the 3 logos of BSD, GNU & Linux. I was thinking that we should make badges like those for us to use. I mean how many of us actively talk about Free Software in trains or buses? Hardly... right? I'm thinking maybe wearing these badges may help instigate others to ask what this is and that would start the ball rolling? Any comments? Regards Rishi

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what is free software movement about?
by Mahesh T. Pai 27 Feb '04

27 Feb '04

Eben Moglen speaks at Harvard. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040226003735733 Summary:- Free Software Movement is not about software alone. -- +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+ Mahesh T. Pai, LL.M., 'NANDINI', S. R. M. Road, Ernakulam, Cochin-682018, Kerala, India. http://paivakil.port5.com +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+

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RMS speech at CESS
by Arun M 27 Feb '04

27 Feb '04

Hi All, Audio of RMS speech at Centre for Earth Science Studies, Kerala. Topic: Scientific Journals and freedom of knowledge. http://www.gnu.org.in/rms1.ogg regards, arun.

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A Q&A session with Richard M. Stallman
by Dileep M. Kumar 27 Feb '04

27 Feb '04

GNUHeads, RMS' answers to questions put forward by Samuel Abraham of `The Week'. These questions were mailed to RMS and he patiently answered them in great detail. He was asked these questions after his talk at the CUSAT campus in Kochi, January 23. http://puggy.symonds.net/~fsug-kochi/rms-interview.html Regards -- .''`. Dileep M. Kumar <dileep(a)kumarayil.net> : :' : http://www.kumarayil.net `. `'` Mobile: 98474-47437 `- Debian GNU/Linux - Choice of the Freedom Lovers

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Fsf-friends February 2004