Meet Amelia Andersdotter, write poetry. Or, something.

HaIPu¶

Copyright Consultations
Blossoming Service Models
Elections are coming.

I had the pleasure of attending the Friends of TTIP Breakfast Debate #4, about data protection, privacy and TTIP. What’s symptomatic is that one of the questions posed in the information about the debate, was phrased:

• “What are the dangers of data protection for TTIP?”

What is clear from this little titbit are the priorities of people involved in TTIP negotiations. Namely, their main interest isn’t protecting rights and freedoms of EU citizens. It’s getting TTIP signed into law. Well, at least now we know, right?

Anyway, I was prepared by a friend with some interesting questions, that were both on-topic and probably quite stirring (we’re not great friends of TTIP ourselves). I was not prepared, however, for the surprise I was going to get.

Namely, panel speakers had many of the same questions!

The Panel: NSA, data protection and TTIP¶

The debate oscillated mainly around the question whether or not Snowden leaks and data protection are relevant to TTIP negotiations. There were some that claimed that these issues are separate and do not influence one another (namely, EPP MEP Axel Voss and Erica Mann, a Socialist MEP turned Facebook lobbyist). Mrs Mann went as far as to say that mixing privacy, data protection and TTIP discussions is dangerous. Mr Voss acknowledged however that safe harbour has its weaknesses.

Mrs Mann also stated, to my amusement, that “big ICT companies, like Facebook, are as European as they are American, as they operate here and have a lot of users here” and that there are already several EU companies building upon the infrastructure of Facebook (so, “Facebook is good for EU business” argument).

Kostas Rossoglou, a senior legal officer at BEUC, took a firm stance that data protection is a crucial topic for TTIP negotiations. Or, rather, that data protection is not for negotiations, as privacy is considered a human right in the EU, and cannot be waived in a trade treaty.

In no uncertain terms Mr Rossoglou stated that TTIP cannot be allowed to weaken existing EU consumer and data protection regulations, that arbitration processes regarding data protection and safe harbour are ineffective, and that it’s clear that the NSA scandal is connected both with data protection and TTIP – after all, how can we trust self-regulation by companies that have already broken our trust (by giving away users’ data to three-letter agencies, regardless whether it was legal in the USA or not)?

The conclusion is simple: safe harbour has proven ineffective at protecting EU citizens rights by being a de facto free pass for US companies and US agencies to work-around the EU personal data protection regulations, and US and EU privacy protection systems seem to be irreconcilable.

Rainer Koch, of Deutsche Telekom (and the fourth person in the panel) didn’t have much to say about data protection and privacy, being more interested in competitiveness that TTIP purportedly would strengthen.

Question time!¶

Then there were questions from the public. Several people spoke; notably, a representative of the European Commission commented on the topic by stating that NSA and data protection are not, in their opinion, topics related to TTIP, as TTIP negotiations are not concerned with fundamental rights (that’s an interesting take on the fact that TTIP simply seems to ignore data protection and privacy as fundamental human rights in the EU).

There was also a person from the US Department of Trade (the US party to the negotiations), explaining how well the arbitration actually works (hint: nope, it doesn’t, as a private citizen to actually start an arbitration process has to pay several hundreds of dollars, not returnable).

Many of questions I wanted to ask had already been brought up by Mr Rossoglou, but I still had a few up my sleeve:

Secrecy of negotiations¶

Around 5000 amendments, 100 compromise positions, but still 0 documents the public can read; how can TTIP have legitimacy when negotiated in such an opaque, non-transparent manner? I seem to remember other trade agreement that had been negotiated in secret…

To my surprise all the panelists agreed that more transparency is required. That’s a big step. Now we just have to make them follow up on that with concrete actions…

Facebook controls the economy¶

While many EU companies build upon Facebook, the power dynamic is extremely one-way – Facebook can unilaterally kill the whole industry with a stroke of a pen (just as Twitter has). Which European company has been represented in similar meetings in the US? Why isn’t there a European company here to support TTIP?

Of course, I had missed Deutsche Telekom’s participation to the panel, so I immediately retracted the last part – but the main question still stands. How can Facebook claim to be a boon to the economy if it can kill a whole branch of ICT market just by changing their API policy?

Does Facebook share as much with EU security agencies?¶

Do american companies whom Mrs Mann claims to be as European as American share as much data with European security agencies as they apparently do with NSA?

Mrs Mann’s reply was “we only give data upon legal request” – which leaves us to wonder if they heed such “legal” requests also in Belarus, Russia, China and Iran? After all, these countries also have courts and court orders, right?..

Facebook mixes the discussions itself¶

How can you claim, Mrs Mann, that privacy, data protection and TTIP topics are dangerous to mix while working for a company that actually builds its business model on this very mix? Private citizen data are your trade secrets! There was a time when Facebook didn’t even want to give users’ data to users that created the content themselves!

Somehow Mrs Mann was not willing to reply to this question.

Wrap-up¶

During the wrap-up panel session all the panelists agreed that more transparency is needed. What was remarkable was that Mr Voss said that TTIP can be a good used to renegotiate safe harbour, and that the US has to understand how important an issue personal data protection and privacy is in EU, and has to acknowledge that, as apparently the US government does not respect EU privacy regulations; that deep-mining and analysing data taken by US government from Internet giants is simply not acceptable; and that safe harbour has to be improved, “otherwise we are not willing to go forward as we have in the past.”

These are some strong words, strong positions on important issues that seem so much better than what we had heard during the ACTA process. Hopefully they will influence the policy in the right way.

My not-too-optimistic (to say the least) evaluation of the Polish Pirate Party is not a secret to anybody, including their members and activists. All in all, my assessment of the Pirate movement in general is not clear-cut: much good came out of it, but it does seem like it’s time to move on (where to – that’s a whole different story).

One of the main points I tend to quarrel with the “P3” (as Polish Pirates choose to call themselves) is a certain popular social media portal. I can understand, of course, the need to reach out to people wherever they are (and for the most part they indeed tend to be on Failbook). I do feel, however, that the proper relationship (if any) between P3 and FB should be one getting people off of FB to P3, not advertising FB on P3’s website…

Once somebody is already on your website, dear Pirates, why oh why do you see it the right thing to do to get them back to the portal that is in the midst of most of the issues Pirates officially get themselves involved in (like privacy, surveillance, censorship and enacting walls – pun not intended – within Internet, by privatisation of this once-free and open area for ingenuity, art and entrepreneurship)?

There is Diaspora, after all. A simple search there points to several active Pirate Party profiles. Most of them also use Zuckerberg’s roach motel of a social network], I’m sure, but at least they try to lessen its grip on human communication by offering a way for people not caught in walled-garden trap to get information and interact with them in a decentralised way.

Why am I writing all this? Well, I find it curious, amusing, and very, very sad that while the Chilean Pirate Party started sharing with me on Diaspora today, the Polish Pirate Party doesn’t even seem to have a profile there.

Swedish Pirates are deciding today whom they put on the #1 spot on the ballot for the coming elections. The choice is between Christian Christian Engström and Amelia Andersdotter.

I believe Amelia is a much better choice: she’s a good leader and a very effective lobbyist, having been incredibly active in copyright reform, privacy, transparency and other debates. She also has a deep and intimate understanding of issues that arise in these debates. She’s an avid public speaker, and has great connections with the backbone of the Pirate movement – hackers, hackerettes, hackerspaces all around Europe.

Rick Falkvinge decided to put his weight behind Christian – and that’s perfectly fine, of course. There are two eerie things about his support, however.

First of all, Rick based his support for Christian mainly in money:

The reason is simple: between him and the other candidate for the ballot’s top position, Christian is the only one funding my keynoting and evangelizing.

Secondly – and that’s a biggie! – Rick (a pirate!) decided to censor the comments on his blogpost, and commented:

(If you want to campaign for the other candidate, use your own damn blog. A number of rude comments deleted.)

So, hereby I am using “my own damn blog”. And for the record, here’s my “rude comment” that got censored along with other comments:

I’m with Asta on this one. I am following your site, Rick, for years, and you have inspired many people, including me, to act and to get involved in the copyright reform debate — and with solid results (to mention the anti-ACTA movement in Poland).

But this is dismal. I understand the need to finance your activities, but this is not the right reason for political decision of this weight, by no means!

In my opinion, the right person for the No 1 spot is, unsurprisingly, Amelia Andersdotter. You may believe otherwise. But the discussion should be based upon merit, not on who pays whom what.

I stand by my comment, as do the other “rude commenters”. This is no way to act for a pirate.

I was planning to attend TEDx Warsaw Women (it happens to be coming up soon), as it looks like an interesting event. Unfortunately, its Organisers decided that:

1. they don’t give squat about attendees’ privacy;
   
2. they ignore completely those of us who do not have an acconut with a certain social network.

Registration is performed via a Google form only, and current info is published exclusively on Facebook.

I rarely receive such a clear and unambiguous information regarding my persona non grata status on any event, so I would like to thank Organisers for being so frank on this. I am not inclined to pay for attendance with my privacy, my data.

While we’re at it, however, I’d like to point the Organisers to some other TEDx and TED talks. For example Bart Jacobs’ Fat, Dumb, Happy & Under Surveillance and Mario Rodriguez’s Facebook Privacy & Identity - Exploring your digital self.

Chris Soghoian also made an interesting talk on Why Google won’t protect you from big brother, and Eli Pariser offered a birds-eye view on What FACEBOOK And GOOGLE Are Hiding From The World.

Had TEDx Warsaw Women Organisers seen any of these talks they might have come to understand why requiring potential attendees to surrender their privacy to companies that are well-known for their hostility towards it is, simply put, not cool.

Would they then decide otherwise? Hard to say. Operant conditioning, employed by these companies, tends to be very effective. Not only on rats.

When a copyright reformist NGO organizes a conference together with (among others) one of the biggest collection societies in Poland, Google, and the Warsaw Hackerspace, you know stuff is going to happen. Especially when Eben Moglen is the keynote speaker, with Jérémie Zimmermann and many of the Polish “opennists” of anti-ACTA fame following closely.

And had you been there you would not have been disappointed!

You’d see a Google rep talking about open innovation and complaining about how Amazon complicates life for Kindle users, and how it’s all fault of the European Union – just minutes after Eben posed a question about how the 20th century could have worked out if “books reported who reads them to the central authority”.

You’d see a copyright maximalisation lobbyist from a collection society trying to teach Eben about the free software movement and libre licensing of culture (the highlights: free software is an anti-copyright movement; Creative Commons licenses have been created by the users to force authors to give up their rights and their works).

You’d see talks about the history of copyright, the Internet master switch, the complicated relationship between copyright and privacy and many, many more (including mine, on how the Internet is not a problem).

One thing you would not have expected, however, is that the most important talk would be given by a politician. And that it would be…

…The Talk EU waited for 1.5 years¶

After the anti-ACTA protests and 4th of July, 2012 vote to reject the treaty, it was obvious that the time for copyright reform has come. People have spoken, and politicians have heard them – or so it seemed, at least.

It also seemed obvious that just as anti-ACTA protests have started in Poland, and just as the political will to reject it by the EU have started to form first in Poland, such copyright reform initiative should come from Poland. And so, everybody waited for any Polish politician to pick that topic up and run with it.

The wait was long, but apparently it is finally over: Paweł Zalewski, a Polish MEP, announced at CopyCamp that he shall propose a pan-European copyright reform initiative (yes, the quality is ghastly), with four major points:

• shortening the copyright term to 50 years after the death of the original author (the minimum that is allowed by the TRIPS treaty);
• introducing so-called open norm for fair use in EU;
• legalizing non-commercial remix;
• removing criminal sanctions for infringement, legalizing non-commercial sharing of culture.

I had the opportunity to provide an opinion on Mr Zalewski’s ideas on behalf of the FOSSF (along with a few other pro-copyright-reform NGOs in Poland), and am quite happy with it: it’s actually close to my copyright reform wishlist for what can be achieved within the terms of binding international treaties (like TRIPS or the Berne Convention).

Mr. Zalewski is now working out the exact shape and form of his proposal; it is to be presented in Brussels in November (and will almost certainly include proposed changes to InfoSoc directive). So we may now hope that there finally is a politician that intends on pursuing this topic.

WARNING: This is a rant. You have been warned.

This bragpost has been growing on me for some time now. About since the very day I had the questionable pleasure of trying out Akonadi-based KMail2. That would be about 2 years, and back then KMail2 was buggy and slow.

Today it is buggy and on the verge of being almost possible to consider as trying to be usable. That’s how far this project has gone in these 2 years.

Good Ole Days¶

In the Good Ole Days, and by that I mean “pre-KMail2”, there were more or less two kinds of FLOSS e-mail clients out there.

Bad UI, decent engine – Thunderbird was an example here; compared to KMail 1.x, Thunderbird had completely absurd layout of configuration options and doing simple things (like creating a new e-mail identity and connecting it to SMTP and IMAP/POP accounts) seemed daunting.

Completely subjectively I include in this group also Evolution and Mutt, simply because I use KDE (hence GTK is bad mojo) and am a GUI afficionado (yeah, yeah, so shoot me).

Great UI, great engine – in my book, this group consisted of just one project: KMail 1.x. It had everything: IMAP/POP/SMTP, TLS/SSL/STARTTLS, Sieve, advanced local filters, multiple identities connectable not only to specific accounts but to specific mail folders, proper standards support, proper quoting, and everything configurable via a sane interface with predictable results. All mail kept nicely in standard Maildirs so that KMail’s mail was the easiest to handle by any standard Maildir tool.

And from verions to version there actually were incremental improvements still. What’s not to love!

What the hell happened?¶

Since then the KMail2 team apparently decided to take a different route, which I would guess was something along the lines of:

1. take the best e-mail client out there;
   
2. mangle in ways nobody would believe were possible;
   
3. ???
   
4. PROFIT!!

And thus today KMail2 lands squarely in the “WTF UI, WTF engine” category (at least retaining the “the only one in that category” title).

So, what’s wrong with KMail2, exactly?¶

Well, what isn’t?.. Not really even sure where to start. So let’s start with the “migration assistant”.

Migration assistant¶

The first time a user runs KMail2 over an existing KMail 1.x setup, a “migration assistant” appears. Not much to it, it just informs the user about the need for migration and then attempts to migrate all the accounts and e-mails from KMail 1.x. this takes a lot of time, usually, but hey, that’s the price of progress, right? Once the migration is finished the user is set up and are ready to go.

What the user doesn’t know, however, is that the end of the migration is just the beginning of fun times. During the next few days the user will notice many entertaining facts.

Like the fact that the migration assistant does not migrate e-mail filters. Got 200+ KMail 1.x filters set-up to help you stay afloat on the flood of everydays e-mail activity? Tough luck, buddy, that’s history. Good luck re-creating them all.

Like missing e-mails (or duplicate e-mails). Or that viewing e-mails that actually got migrated will be unbearably slow at times. Some folders will just get marked as “corrupted” (yes, these folders that were created by the “migration assistant” itself, why do you ask?) and will cause KMail2 to block the whole account entirely (with a nice red tint on all folder names) until KMail2 and Akonadi get restarted…

As it turns out you can actually skip the migration and import messages from KMail 1.x store later on, and that seems just a bit better idea (caveat: “better” does not mean “perfect”, or even “good”).

But wait, why the heck do I need to migrate my 10GiB of e-mail history from a perfectly working (and standard!) set-up of MailDirs at all, just to use KMail2? And what the heck is Akonadi?

Akonadi¶

Akonadi is supposed to be the data engine behind all PIM (Personal Information Manager) related content in KDE. It handles contacts, calendars, e-mail and possibly other data (the list is growing). And it was released as stable as soon as it achieved more-or-less alpha status. At least that’s what I can tell from how well it does the job at hand.

The fun part with Akonadi is that it has to have a database back-end set-up. By default it uses MySQL, so when you have Akonadi, you have MySQL instance running.

But hey, relational databases are a true and tested technology, why not use it, instead of some internal, in-memory data store that Akonadi would use either way? And of course now Akonadi doesn’t have to use any internal, in-memory data store for data retrieved from such a database. Surely, the additional abstraction layer won’t change much, at least not to a point where it’s evident Akonadi is a problem.

Finally, it’s not as if keeping everything in nice, editable, standards-compliant files on disk makes anything (backups? trying a different e-mail client? export/import? data recovery after a failure?) easier and safer, right?..

(un)Usability¶

Some problems with KMail2 are related to Akonadi; some are clearly the fault of KMail2 itself. Of both kinds there are many.

The first biggie is the slowness. KMail 1.x displayed the list of e-mails in a given folder instantly. And I mean instantly. Same thing with displaying the contents of an e-mail once clicked. In KMail2 I have to wait several seconds for the list to appear and be usable (i.e. the list can be visible, but not clickable). That is probably related to the fact that e-mail data are now retrieved from Akonadi, but why do I care? From the end-user perspective this is worse.

Now, displaying the folder contents is one thing. Moving a folder with a few hundred or thousand e-mails from one place in a folder tree to another – that’s a whole different game. This can take about a minute (yes, I have actually timed it) before it’s done and the interface is usable again.

Oh, and you get no visual cues that that’s the case – the folder list looks perfectly normal. You can try to click a folder, only you’ll not see the contents. You’ll also notice that your CPU fan goes berserk and the whole interface grinds almost to a halt… and then magically, the folder being moved appears in the place it’s being moved to and the interface is almost usable, again – with no visual cues to that effect.

Then there’s inconsistency. Duplicate e-mails. E-mails that magically become unread again. Folders that have their whole contents disappear after deleting a single out of many e-mails they contain, only to show the missing e-mails after the user starts pondering, frantically, when was the last time a full backup was made…

Like the e-mails in the outbox waiting for user’s explicit “send now”, that get sent automagically once a new Internet connection is available. In the outgoing accounts configuration there even is an option of configuring what should happen with messages in the outgoing folder. This setting is completely ignored. Messages get sent out when KMail2 (or Akonadi?) decides so and that’s that.

Like new e-mail accounts that, upon failure, display random failure messages – sometimes it’s “Authentication failed”, sometimes it’s “KWallet access denied” (even though KWallet was never used, or was explicitly instructed to permit its use and is open), sometimes only a cryptic “Account misconfigured” even though the account worked just minutes ago.

Then there’s mail importing. Supposedly a different, better way to import KMail 1.x e-mails into KMail2 than the “migration assistant”, it does a decent job of importing your e-mails from the old KMail 1.x store and marking them all unread. One would think that if KMail2 is importing e-mails from KMail 1.x store, it would be possible for it to properly import also the status of messages. Apparently, one would be mistaken.

In my case that meant I had 140k (no, not a typo) unread messages I had to sift through and find the few messages that actually were unread. And then mark all the rest as read – which, unsurprisingly, took a lot of time, mainly because even marking a mail folder as unread takes much longer than in KMail 1.x.

And after I’m done with that, there’s the joy of moving the imported folders (conveniently put in a “KMail-Import-mail” folder) to their correct accounts and places in the folder hierarchy. Which, as we already know, is excruciatingly slow.

Finally, the protocol or what-have-you changes. Even though KMail2 and Akonadi are being shipped as stable, the protocol and formats of the internal storage changes just a tiny bit with some minor releases. And that means that you can have all the fun and all the entertainment with “migrating” your e-mails more than once. Indeed, you can be sure you will.

But apart from these important problems, there are scores of smaller annoyances, discovery of which brings endless joy to a happy KMail2 user. I won’t be able to go into detail and describe them all – mainly because there are so many of them. But here are some of my favourites.

Handling of ignored threads – that’s a great feature for mailing lists: the user marks a thread as “ignored” and all future e-mails in that thread get automagically marked “read”. If it only worked! In KMail2 if a thread is marked “ignored” you get 50/50 chance a given new e-mail in it will get marked “ignored” and “read”. You can have (and indeed, I do have) threads marked “ignored” with several unread, un-ignored e-mails inside. Which, of course, defeats the purpose.

But wait, there’s more! Once the user gets annoyed and un-ignores, pretty much all e-mails in it get marked “unread”. Yay!

Password prompt for each and every outgoing e-mail. KMail 1.x had a nice, simple and very usable feature: during sending the password for a given account (if not stored) only had to be supplied once; after all messages have been sent, the password was being forgotten again. So, for 20 outgoing e-mails from a given account the user had to supply the password only once. Usable and safe.

Of course, KMail2 improves upon this idea by asking for the password separately for each and every e-mail.

Which wouldn’t maybe be that annoying had the password prompt been focused properly.

Un-focused password prompt. So, you want to send your e-mail, but the SMTP password is not stored in KWallet? No worries, KMail will display a password prompt for you; but be careful, if start typing your password instantly as soon as the prompt appears, your password will land in the random other application accepting focus, as the e-mail prompt is un-focused (and there seems no way to make it focused by default).

So, instead of:
Ctrl-Enter -> type-in-password -> Enter -> sent
…you get:
Ctrl-Enter -> find-the-damn-prompt-window-and-click-on-it -> type-in-password -> Enter -> sent.

Or, well, you would, if only the following was not the case…

“Send now” means “ask when to send”. In KMail 1.x the “Send now” button and short-cut meant just that: send the message being composed immediately. KMail2 usability experts decided that simple actions like “Send now” are too simple and they need to ask the users what they really want to achieve. Once you click “Send now”, you get a nice dialog box asking you, if you really want to send now, or maybe send layer, or cancel the whole ordeal.

To add insult to injury, there is a setting in outgoing accounts configuration called “Default sending method”, with two options:

• send immediately;
• send later.

This option is also completely ignored.

This is completely bollocks. If the user clicks “Send now”, what makes you think, pray tell, that they want to do anything different than, you know, sending the e-mail immediately?.. This adds the need for additional (and completely unnecessary) click for each outgoing message. Usability FAIL.

“Send later” means “ask me in detail”. There is also the “Send later” action. In KMail 1.x it simply saved the composed e-mail directly in the outgoing mail folder, waiting for user to initiate sending.

In KMail2 the user gets an additional dialog box containing a date and time picker, an option to configure repetition of sending of this e-mail (with no explanation if it will be attempted until successful at configured times, or is the same e-mail going to be sent again, and again, and again…), and an option to just “move to outbox”.

While I can see the potential usefulness of an option to configure in detail when a given mail will get sent, this should be a separate option. Users accustomed to the good old perfectly functional “Send later” action are only going to find such a “feature” annoying. That’s another click on every mail they send each day. That’s a lot of unneeded clicks.

End of Rant¶

I have been a loyal KMail 1.x user for almost a decade. Started using it in KDE 3.x series, I always admired the standards-compliance, the configurability and adaptability, the feature set, the speed. It was so good, indeed, that no other Qt-based clients gained traction. They were unneeded. KMail 1.x simply did the job best.

Compared to KMail 1.x, KMail2 is a sad excuse of a rewrite. It’s all KMail 1.x has never been to me – unstable, buggy, slow, unpredictable, with daunting configuration that has options that get ignored; nigh-unusable with the over-engineered Akonadi under the hood.. This is very sad, as there are no other Qt-based, KDE-integrated, configurable and advanced e-mail clients to choose from.

KMail2 has been in development for years now, and effects are far from satisfactory. Users want to be “saved” from it, bloggers warn about it; the question everybody asks is “Anyone succeeded with kmail2?”.

I am still using KMail2 now, but am on the look-out for some sane Qt-based e-mail client. Trojitá is still too basic for my needs, but at least it’s usable. If you have any suggestions where to look, please do drop a line or comment on Diaspora.

Today I had the pleasure of attending the Safer Internet conference. Among educators, IT specialists and NGO activists galore present was also Gabriela Cseh, Facebook’s Head of Public Policy for Central and Eastern Europe, with a talk on how Facebook can be useful in classrooms.

I find the idea dangerous. The main argument used by Mrs Cseh was that Facebook makes it “easy” to do things together in a class, while also keeping it “safe” and “privacy aware”. I am not sure about the “easy” part, but “safe” and “privacy aware” this simply cannot be.

As there was time for questions at the end of the talk I took the liberty of asking some of my own.

Private interests in public schools¶

First of all, using a single, centralised tool throughout the education system seems dangerous, rather than safe. It exposes the whole education system to policy changes and decisions made by a single privately-owned entity that is in no way influenced by the local education board. In other words, it exposes public education to private interests.

You said that Facebook is “not top-down control tool”. Of course, from the perspective of the teacher, that holds true. However, this tool is top-down controlled by Facebook itself.

Facebook’s answer: “it’s not mandatory”.

This is not enough, not even close. Vendor lock-in is a real problem, causing real damage; once a school invests (time, money, knowledge) into building their curriculum around a given technology (here: Facebook’s offering) and once students and teachers all have their accounts there, the school would be very strongly disinclined from changing, even if some policy decisions on Facebook’s part are not in line with school policy.

The only way around it would be using open protocols so that other companies can offer similar, compatible service, and hence schools would have a real possibility to change a provider should there be a policy conflict. This, of course, makes no business sense for Facebook.

Censorship in classrooms¶

One of such policy clashes is immediately visible. Facebook has blocked New Yorker’s profile for a benign cartoon that had female breasts visible. How, in that context, can Facebook be used in biology class? And what if Facebook’s board of directors decides at some point that teaching, say, evolution is not exactly compatible with Facebook’s corporate policy?

The only answer that was given was that “Facebook decided nudity is not allowed on the platform”. Full stop. Want to use the platform? Play by the rules.

Not only do we have an example of a policy clash, we already get a taste of how it would get resolved. Bottom line: it should not be Facebook (or any private entity, for that matter!) setting the rules by which children are educated.

Privacy¶

Mrs Cseh spoke also about “deep privacy tools”, and how they are geared towards protecting privacy of users (including students) from other people on the Internet and on Facebook itself. Problem is, they in no way protect privacy of citizens from privacy-hostile organisations like the NSA. This is a serious question in light of information about the PRISM programme.

This question was met with an emphatic retort that “Facebook has never been a part of PRISM”. Which does not change much – had it been a part of it, it could not admit it.

One question I haven’t asked is: how are the “deep privacy tools” protecting citizens (including schoolchildren, as is being proposed) from being profiled and exposed to having a full dossier by advertisers Facebook cooperates with? We already know that Facebook profile data can influence credit ratings, for example. Is making children’s school history a part of such dossier is really such a great idea?..

Not only Facebook¶

Of course, these problems are not Facebook-specific. Using Google Docs or Microsoft SkyDrive brings up many if not all of these questions. Schools (indeed, public institutions in general) should not use for their data closed, proprietary and incompatible services they do not control.

Ideas for porn filtering (“regular” porn; this time not talking about child pornography) tend to return like a boomerang. Hard to tell if members of Polish parliament, affiliated with United Poland, just discovered porn on the Internet, or cannot get enough of it and need some help getting that monkey off of their backs.

Either way, United Poland parliamentarians decided to introduce a draft resolution that calls upon the Minister of Administration and Digitization to guarantee parents a right to porn-free Internet.

The more he looked inside the more any sense wasn’t there¶

The title itself is delicious – in proposals like that it’s usually about the children. But not here. Here, surprisingly, the title claims it’s parents whom members of parliament worry about. Parents that, supposedly (and I’m guessing here), can’t control their own lust for porn. Do members of parliament base on their own experiences here?

The document offers so much to a careful reader! I, for one, had no idea that “pornography (…) generates an estimated 30% of the whole Internet traffic”; to be honest, I’ve been convinced it’s much, much more! But what do I know, after a paltry few years as a systems and network admin at the Warsaw University of Technology. Not really proper for me to question the authors here, is it? Yes, the number’s been pulled out of a rectum (as providing any sources is way below the dignity of a parliamentarian, of course), but it’s been pulled out of a rectum personally by a parliamentarian!

It also turns out that the “estimated value of Internet porn market is in the range of 5bln. dollars”, which again is a number supported only (or even?) by parliamentarians’ authority. “5bln. dollars” is a lot of money, maybe instead of blocked, porn should be taxed? United Poland claims economic solidarism (as one can read on its Polish Wikipedia page; not being a parliamentarian, I should source my claims), and yet – such hostility towards entrepreneurs, working hard for a loaf of bread.

Let’s move on, shall we? “Taking into account that pornographic Internet websites are readily available, also for children”… Okay. So it’s about children, after all. Children, whose “average age of first contact with such materials is 11 years”. Just wondering here what was United Poland parliamentarians age of first contact with completely non-Internet-based top-shelf magazines…

It’s a bit better further on, thankfully: “expert sexologists opine that contact with pornography at such an early stage of human sexual development causes a number of adverse effects, including warped perception of sexual sphere, and raised numbers of sexual harassment cases in schools”. So, United Poland seems to notice the sex-ed problem in Poland? Can’t be! Can’t wait for them to also listen to expert sexologists on how dearly needed sex-ed classes in Polish schools are.

Back to “worse”, though, as “current technology-based solutions, including parental filtering applications, are ineffective, as they require IT competences from parents and are costly, and in effect not broadly used”. First of all, no technical solution can be 100% effective here, there’s simply too many circumvention methods – regardless whether it’s implemented on home router or core network level. Secondly, it would seem to be a good idea to provide members of parliament with some basic Internet search use training; here, let’s start with a simple search for “free parental filters software”.

Let’s finish it off with a positive! “At this time parents have no way of providing their children with safe Internet access, that is access to Internet without pornography”, and that can only mean that all other true or imaginary threats have been cleansed from the Internet. Champagne and kudos all around!

The important part¶

That was just the intro, as at this point in our lecture we encounter the magic words: “resolves the following” and the concrete solutions extracted by United Poland parliamentarians from the immense depths of their wisdom. What are they, then?

Let’s quote the whole thing…

1. Sejm of the Republic of Poland moves for the Minister of Administration and Digitization to prepare technical and legislative solutions which will guarantee parents a right to access the Internet network free from pornography.
2. These solutions should follow these guidelines:
   1. Any person should have the right to demand their Internet service provider to block transmission of pornographic materials;
   2. An internet service provider should be responsible for creating effective filters enabling blocking transmission of pornographic materials;
   3. An internet service provider is required provide the right to Internet without pornography free of charge;
3. Minister of Administration and Digitization shall present a proposal of such technical and legislative solutions within 6 months from the date of adoption of this resolution.

Or, in other words, “honestly, we have no idea how to do that; let the Ministry handle that along with ISPs, and the ISPs should foot the bill”.

I am impressed, though. United Poland parliamentarians make up for their lack of technical understanding with political prowess. A resolution built like that (if, by a twist of fate, it passes the parliament) makes the Ministry do the heavy lifting and ISPs pay; not only that, but it also forces the Ministry (not the parliamentarians, after all!) to conduct uneasy public consultations of the proposed Internet censorship solutions, which are (we know this after RSiUN and ACTA) a minefield. And in case of a failure, the blame goes to… the Ministry, of course, as the drafted solutions were bad!

Finally, one more tasty bit: nowhere, not in a single point of this resolution, is pornography defined. Which means that along with RedTube, Wikipedia and Polish National Museum website might get blocked.

Seriously on porn¶

Seriously, though, children’s access to pornography on-line is a problem which needs a solution, nobody is going to argue with this.

Preventive censorship on the Internet is not the solution, however – it’s uneconomical, technically nigh-impossible, and raises serious questions regarding basic human rights: freedom of speech, secrecy of correspondence, right to privacy.

The British example (or our own, Beniamin) shows such filters will be overused and abused, the catalogue of blocked content will be expanded to contain other topics, other kinds of content. Creating such a tool once will mean that it can and will be used for political struggle in the future…

Besides, it’s simply impossible to introduce Internet censorship without introducing Internet surveillance – can’t censor traffic you don’t read, just as you can’t censor snail mail without opening and reading it.

The right approach to finding a solution here is education. Sexual education and media competences for children and youths. Educating parents about existing technical solutions for blocking their kids from accessing porn, including free software and gratis solutions.

The sheer number of complaintivists – people that complain about things without doing squat about them – I interact with daily starts to get to me.

Take PayPal’s recent MailPile SNAFU – we’ve all known that PayPal is not a good solution, to say the least, for years. Unsurprisingly I do not have a PayPal account. But while discussing that with fellow hackers (and not only) I was met with standard form of complaintivism – some of them complained about how evil and bad PayPal is, but are they going to do anything about it? Nah, that would mean paying few cents more for their Humble Indie Bundle (I am not making this up!). Why bother.

So please treat this post as my anti-complaintivism manifesto.

Identifying Complaintivists¶

The main characteristic of a complaintivist is twofold:

• there is an issue they seem to care about, as they will complain about it;
• yet they will not do anything about that issue, regardless of how small a personal sacrifice (or even lack thereof) would be required of them.

Complaintivists have much in common with slacktivists. In fact I’m convinced that there are many people that are both at the same time: in general they’re complaintivists that can’t be even bothered at all, but if there’s enough peer pressure they will indeed “engage” by slacktivism/clicktivism – and after clicking a “Like” button will consider their job done.

Please note, complaining about an issue can constitute “doing something” about it, as long as it’s done in a way that can influence the issue. Consider the following:

• complaining to me about PayPal – if not accompanied by other actions – is complaintivism;
• complaining about PayPal in your favourite on-line shop’s contact form (“please introduce some alternative to PayPal payment methods as PayPal has a very bad track record”) is just barely not;
• complaining in a on-line shop’s contact form that they just lost your business as you refuse to use PayPal is the preferred course of action.

But afterall, what can a single person do?..¶

Ah, clicktivist’s favourite refuge: “I can’t possibly influence the outcome myself” (with the implicit second part “(hence I shall not even try”)!..

If I had a BTC0.01 each time I heard this phrase used in a discussion, I would be a rich, rich man. Incidentally, that also means that had all the complaintivists actually done something about issues they claim to care about, there would be an army of people doing something about these issues.

All activists have that thought now and then – but we draw a different conclusion: “okay, let’s find a way to get other people involved!”

If you can’t be bothered to even send an e-mail, use a contact form, write a letter to people that can have some actual influence in issues you claim to care about, stop bothering me with them. Because what this means is: you do not care about those issues. I mean, come on! How many hours have you spent choosing just the right shoes, or just the right phone (or even standing in line for just the wrong one)? Now, compare it to the amount of time you have spent actually doing something about the issue you claim to care about.

And now please come back and tell me again how much you “care”.

Not a single flying frak is given by me about how you “feel” about something if you are not prepared to do something about it. You can “feel” whatever the hell you want about anything, I am not your psychologist. You want to talk to me about some issue? Be prepared to act.

You don’t have to do a lot, for starters just do something. If everybody does, that will be a lot of people doing something. And that’s already a lot.