Privacy should not be a luxury. It should not be a bargaining chip. It should never have a price tag.
International Internet Day
International Internet Day is celebrated globally on October 29 every year. International Internet Day is celebrated to commemorate a momentous day in the history of telecommunications and technology. The day marks the sending of the first electronic message which was transferred from one computer to another in 1969.
Charley Kline, a student programmer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), transmitted the first-ever electronic message on 1969 October 29.
Kline, who was working under the supervision of Professor Leonard Kleinrock, transmitted a message from the computer housed at the UCLA to Bill Duvall who was using a computer positioned at the Stanford Research Institute’s computer.
The sender system at UCLA was the SDS Sigma 7 Host computer and the receiver was the SDS 940 Host at the Stanford Research Institute.
The message sent was the word “login”. Kline and Kleinrock managed to send “L” and “O” before the connection between the terminals crashed.
To celebrate, here’s the video of David Bowie talking about internet (courtesy of BBC):
New York’s Strand bookstore appeals for help
The New York Strand bookstore, one of the New York’s landmarks and probably one of the most important landmark of NYC in literary appeals for help due to financial crisis caused by coronavirus.
“We’ve survived just about everything for 93 years,” proprietor Nancy Bass-Wyden said in a statement, of the store her grandfather founded in 1927. “The Great Depression, two world wars, big box bookstores, ebooks and online behemoths. We are the last of the 48 bookstores still standing from 4th Avenue’s famous Book Row.
Please buy from your local stores and support local businesses instead of chain markets and Amazon. Specially, if you want a book, please buy it from your local physical bookstore if you can’t borrow it from your local library.
This way, you can be sure there’s no DRM involved and also local business won’t get shut down because of evil giants like Amazon.
International Day for the Eradication of Poverty
The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty is an international observance celebrated each year on October 17 throughout the world.
The first commemoration of the event took place in Paris, France in 1987 when 100 thousand people gathered on the Human Rights and Liberties Plaza at the Trocadéro to honor victims of poverty, hunger, violence, and fear at the unveiling of a commemorative stone by Joseph Wresinski, founder of the International Movement ATD Fourth World.
In 1992, four years after Wresinski’s death, the United Nations officially designated October 17 as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.
Early in his career as an activist, Wresinski recognized that governments often ignored the plight of those living in poverty, leading to feelings of rejection, shame, and humiliation.
As a result, one of the primary goals of the Day is to recognize the struggles of the impoverished and to make their voices heard by governments and citizens. Participation by the poorest of people is an important aspect of the observance of the Day.
Wherever men and women are condemned to live in extreme poverty, human rights are violated. To come together to ensure that these rights be respected is our solemn duty.
Joseph Wresinski
Hafez’s commemoration day
In Iranian Jalali calendar, today, Mehr 20, is Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī’s commemoration day. He is also known and famous as Hafez.
He is one of mythical poets of Iran not only known inside the country but well known in many countries.
His collected works are regarded by many Iranians as a pinnacle of Persian literature and are often found in the homes of people in the Persian-speaking world, who learn his poems by heart and still use them as proverbs and sayings. His life and poems have become the subjects of much analysis, commentary and interpretation, influencing post-14th century Persian writing more than any other author.
Hafez is best known for his poems that can be described as “antinomian” and with the medieval use of the term “theosophical”; the term “theosophy” in the 13th and 14th centuries was used to indicate mystical work by “authors only inspired by the holy books” (as distinguished from theology).
Hafez primarily wrote in the literary genre of lyric poetry or ghazals, that is the ideal style for expressing the ecstasy of divine inspiration in the mystical form of love poems. He was a Sufi.
See how the roses burn!
Bring the wine to quench the fire!
Alas the flames come up with us,
We perish with desire.
Hafez
Rewind (explaining free software): A video from the FSF
Microsoft will release Edge browser for GNU+Linux
Who would have thought that Microsoft, a company that once branded Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches” have condescended to adding its browser software in GNU+Linux?
This means free software world has definitely won, doesn’t it?
Microsoft will release its Edge browser for GNU+Linux next month, initially through the browser’s Dev preview channel.
The Windows giant, which has warmed to GNU+Linux in recent years, made the announcement at its Ignite 2020 conference, conducted virtually this week on account of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Our mission to bring Microsoft Edge to the platforms our customers use daily takes its next step: starting in October, Microsoft Edge on [GNU+]Linux will be available to download on the Dev preview channel,” said veep Liat Ben-Zur in a blog post. “When it’s available, [GNU+]Linux users can go to the Microsoft Edge Insiders site to download the preview channel, or they can download it from the native [GNU+]Linux package manager.”
Initially, Microsoft will provide Edge for GNU+Linux through Debian and Ubuntu distributions, with others to follow.
I don’t know what will be the license of the browser and if Microsoft releases the software under a proper license like GNU GPL but I’m not optimistic about it. Microsoft doesn’t like the free software world as we threaten its interests in violating people’s rights.
However, it’s still good news. It means Microsoft now knows more people are informed and interested in their rights. It means that they feel more and more people are using GNU+Linux as their operating system. I won’t use it though.
The sad decline of copyleft
One thing I should mention is that we are surrounded with proprietary software and companies. Almost all of the major tech and publishing companies are proprietary ones. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon (Big Tech) are constantly working to protect the proprietary software and patents of theirs.
Sadly, the majority of people use almost only proprietary software and these companies are benefiting from them. Now, what we do (supporting the free culture) is against their benefit so they have to advertise against it and target people with false accusations against free software world.
For instance, the Google page about the AGPL details inaccurate (but common) misconceptions about the obligations of the AGPL that don’t follow from the text. Google states that if, for example, Google Maps used PostGIS as its data store, and PostGIS used the AGPL, Google would be required to release the Google Maps code. This is not true.
These companies don’t like free software. This is actually one of the reasons that they use the term Open Source instead of free software.
Now, if they have to pretend to like a free software, they prefer the ones they can control, the ones like MIT that can be used proprietorially. An example is BSD. One of the major developers of BSD is Apple which benefits a lot from the weak BSD licenses.
Copyleft restricts big tech from benefiting and not giving back to community so these companies don’t like it and do everything they can to weaken the copyleft culture so they can survive on benefiting from our community and violating people’s freedom and rights.