ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is a proposed enforcement treaty between United States, the European Community, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, the Republic of Korea, Mexico and New Zealand, with Canada set to join in the near future.

Although the proposed treaty’s title suggests that the agreement deals only with counterfeit physical goods (such as medicines), what little information has been made available publicly by negotiating governments about the content of the treaty makes it clear that it will have a far broader scope, and in particular, will deal with new tools targeting “Internet distribution and information technology”. www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta

This agreement makes it more difficult to distribute free software. Without file sharing and P2P technologies like BitTorrent, distributing large amounts of free software becomes much harder, and more expensive. BitTorrent is a grassroots protocol that allows everyone to contribute to legally distributing free software.

It will make it harder for users of free operating systems to play media. Consumers will no longer be able to buy media without DRM — and DRMed media cannot be played with free software.

To date, disturbingly little information has been released about the actual content of the agreement. However, despite that, it is clearly on a fast track; treaty proponents want it completed by the end of 2008.

Many civil rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation oppose ACTA, calling for more public spotlight on the proposed treaty. A British study found that iPods owned by persons 14-24 today contain an average of more than 840 tracks downloaded on file-sharing networks, nearly fifty percent of all music possessed by this segment. The same study also found that 95% of individuals falling under this category have copied music in some way. Some critics argue that the ACTA directly incriminates the ordinary consumer activity.

I found an excellent article on the Knowledge Ecology Studies website written by Aaron Shaw. Its all about ACTA and what we can do about it.

ACTA would create unduly harsh legal standards that do not reflect contemporary principles of democratic government, free market exchange, or civil liberties. Even though the precise terms of ACTA remain undecided, the negotiants’ preliminary documents reveal many troubling aspects of the proposed agreement. For example, ACTA advocates intend to further criminalize non-commercial copyright and trademark infringements. They also aim to reinforce so-called “Digital Rights Management” (DRM) technologies that currently prevent the personal, legal reproduction of optical discs like DVDs and trample on “fair use” rights. In addition, rights owner lobby groups want the agreement to undermine legal safeguards that protect Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from liability for the actions of their subscribers. It would also facilitate privacy violations by trademark and copyright holders against private citizens suspected of infringement activities without any sort of legal due process.

All of these provisions threaten to reach far beyond existing U.S. and E.U. legal norms without any mandate from the appropriate, elected legislative bodies that govern them. As such, the trade officials involved in ACTA negotiations demonstrate a surprising disregard for their own countries’ democratic political processes and public welfare. They also threaten to overturn the existing balance of rights and regulations established through global governance institutions.

Popularity: 88% [?]

I’ve been thinking about what other useful tools I can introduce to educators in secondlife. Builders Buddy is useful for people interested in building. I put together a small package with a tutorial, you can get a copy of builders buddy in sl. Watch the Builders Buddy video on youtube to see what it is. Probably one of the cool things I didn’t mention was wearing it as an attachment and using it to rez a few seats that would follow you around. Maybe I’ll make a part 2 video that also looks at the configuration options at the top of the main script. People used to proprietary products in sl would probably know of something like this that’s usually called a rez box.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Useful Links:

• OS images for emulation
• OS images
• Using QEMU on Troubleshooting

$ sudo apt-get install qemu

Download the latest stable image. I downloaded this image.

Extract the image.

$ bunzip2 olpc-redhat-stream-development-build-193-20061203_1727-devel_ext3.img.bz2

Use qemu to launch the OLPC environment.

$ qemu -hda olpc-redhat-stream-development-build-193-20061203_1727-devel_ext3.img

Press the “a” key when you see this screen.

Press the “a” key again when you see this screen.

Append apm=off to the end of the line and press enter.

You can also replace vga=0×311 with vga=789 for 800×600(24bit color). Here’s more info on vga.

At the login screen your keyboard and mouse might not work.

Press Alt + Ctrl + 3 to enter the terminal mode of the OLPC, login with username root and press enter for password. Then type.

$ modprobe i8042

Bring your network up by typing

$ dhclient

Press Alt + Ctrl + 1 to return to the graphical mode of the OLPC.

If your using windows then my guides on running GNU/Linux on windows might help, my old video of OLPC Fedora Core on windows Video(flash) shows a skinny version of fedora core that was used in the early days of OLPC so I’m thinking about screencasting my latest efforts but if you just watch this video you can see the results.

Learn by doing, remember the OLPC project is an education project not a laptop project. I especially enjoyed playing with the Squeak Etoys Activity.

Matthew Fulmer has been hard at work putting together an annotated list of Squeak tutorials. Check them out, its the best list. Some software developers might be interested in PataPata, it’s a pythonic version of Squeak in early phase of development.

Popularity: 3% [?]

That quote is what I think Master Yoda would say about being trained to use proprietary software at school. One of my young friends likes Blender and Star Wars, I think he is going to be really happy because the image above was created using a rigged model of Yoda. Rigged basically means the model has a skeleton so its easier to pose and do animation. Matt Hoecker released it as a dot blend file. How good is that. Star Wars fans would also like his short Planet Approach clip. I think you would also like to check out Wookieepedia - The Star Wars Wiki.

For learning about modelling, rigging and animation here’s some really nice dot blends:

• Squeek, blend file released under Creative Common License
• Ludwig a fully rigged and animation ready character for Blender

I learned so much so quickly from playing with Ludwig, its user friendly and would be pretty easy to do some cool character animation. As usual you can always check my bookmarks for the resources I’ve found useful, the other one I would recommend is BlenderArt Magazine - Your online source for 3D news and information about the Open-Source 3D Program and related open-source software

Popularity: 10% [?]

I put together a lesson on how to Vlog with Free Software. I thought about doing the whole thing as an instructional video but that would end up being a huge file so this is enough to get you up and running. Below is the screencast for introducing the software thats used in the lesson.

• Download video clip for play on a Free system 4.4Mb
• Download video clip for play on Windows 8.2Mb
• Download video clip for play on Mac/Apple 8.0Mb

Its an early release so hopefully it will be useful to some people. Here’s my Videoblog examples, thanks to Blender and Stephen Downes they received some attention. I”ll add them to the Multimedia Library soon.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Check out noiesmos podcast. I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts from all kinds of people, experienced public speakers, professional educators, complete newbies and everything in between. I think noiesmo did an excellent job for his first podcast. I’m guessing he would be critical of the intro where he adds an aussie hiphop spin to it but I thought that was funny in a cool way so keep it up.

Download the MP3, Download the Ogg.

[audio:http://ia331327.us.archive.org/0/items/noiesmo_podcast_09102006/podcast_noiesmo_09102006_01_64kb.mp3]

Popularity: 2% [?]

This guide is very nice. Its definitely one to bookmark. If your clueless about installing software in Ubuntu check this out.

How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Issue 13 of the Free Software Magazine has an article on how to tranform the stock Ubuntu desktop into whatever you like. Here’s screenshots of the Mac look and the windows look. Check out this post on Pascal Kleins Blog. lol.

Apple + knife + GNOME + boredom…

…equals?

Although I messed up the first toe’s size so this foot only has three toes instead of the usual five the apple still tasted good.

Got to love GNOME.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I finally looked at Cortado and got it working, a bit of a milestone, it means I dont have to bother doubling up anymore with the flv(flash video). The screencast shows and tells you all the details. Here’s the main topics.

• Screencasting in Edubuntu and windows with Libre Software
• Converting AVI to Ogg and flv
• Displaying the video on a webpage using Cortado for the Ogg and an open source flv player for the flash video(flv)

Click on the image or watch Cortado playing the Ogg on my Mediawiki and/or watch the flash video. You can also download the Screencasting with Libre Software Ogg. You can also watch them on my blogger blog.
I decided to setup an account with the Internet Archive and Ourmedia.org because I simply cant afford to host all the screencasts I plan to create. If your not familiar with either of those sites then just look them up in Wikipedia. I’m a little disappointed with the Internet Archive because you can only choose a creative commons license or public domain and I prefer to use the GNU GPL or GNU FDL, Ourmedia has the GNU GPL as an option. Here’s the Ourmedia pages for the Screencast with libre software and I’ve also added the Tux Paint video. They’ve already been downloaded 31 times.

I thought about using the Wikimedia Commons because Ogg is the official file format of Wikipedia but I’m not so sure the screencasts are suitable for an Encyclopedia project. Ourmedia has a personal learning centre project and I think it would be good to contribute my work, for a grassroots media project you would think they wan’t to use Ogg multimedia container format. Maybe I could have a section something like Screencasts for learning with libre software and libre knowledge.

I would like to stream live video on the internet and display it on the web using Cortado, I’ll have to try and convince Noiesmo to look at doing that or get a webcam.

So please watch the Screencast and also watch the Tuxpaint video on mediawiki, I want to only use Ogg and Cortado but I really need some feedback about things like the sound and picture quality, do people have Java installed and I want to get a general idea of what I need to work on. The wonderful thing is with libre software comes freedom and freedom is produced by control so I can try to adjust my setup till its really nice. I think I’ve been doing pretty well, the screencast is 8 minutes 25 seconds long 504×392 and only 7Mb.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’ve created a screencast lesson on the basics of blogs, how to setup a free Wordpress blog and use BloGTK. Click on the image below to watch it or click watch blog,Wordpress and BloGTK video.

Popularity: 1% [?]