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Notices by Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net), page 79
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bloquear a toda la red Tor porque recibes ataques de un usuario es como prohibir todo el dinero porque alguien te ha robado.
si supones que bloquear toda la red Tor tiene algún sentido que no prejuicio, imagínate que alguien bloquea todo el internet. es sólo una red un poco mayor, pero la lógica es igual de ausente, y de dañina. para unas personas que Tor se diseñó para ayudar, no hay opción de "no usar Tor"; es usarlo, o no acceder a Internet. no hay otra opción. no hay una vpn. es una realidad que claramente no conoces, y por eso lo llamo prejuicio
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funny, my recollection was that openmoko came first, before the iphone. wikipedia to the rescue: the company preannounced the neo 1973 and offered it for pre-sale back in 2006, before the eye-Phone. I'd ordered one through a friend who lived in Europe, but never got it. eventually I got a freerunner, and then I bought another one as a backup because the earlier one seemed to be failing. and yet it's still living and kicking, despite all the abuse I've put it through.
anyway, yeah, we still have plenty of work to do. I'm not a supporter of open source (I identify with free software), but there are lots of things that open source and free software supporters can do together. it's harder with the hostility I perceive coming from you, though. am I misreading that? why do you seem so hostile to me? have I wronged you somehow?
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I'm not familiar with 9276/96, it doesn't seem to be related; 9279/96 is about patents, also unrelated, but maybe that's the one you meant?
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I know that's your field of work, yeah, though not on software or free software specifically. (9609/98 is lei do software, 9610/98 is direito autoral, that 9609/98 "specializes" for software)
you'll find special provisions about moral rights on software in 9609/98, but nothing about kinds of contracts. I don't know whether fitting licenses (or any other unilateral grants) as contracts is by custom or by law, but lawyers in the field have insisted that this is how brazilian justice has dealt with them forever, while I argued (under influence of the US legal system) that the GPL was not meant to be a contract. in the end I understood pt_BR("contrato") just meant something broader than en_US("contract"), and then it all made sense to me
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gplv3 is so good we don't need gplv4
(at least for now)
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well... the first smartphones (openmoko) ran free software. I still use my neo freerunner as my primary phone. I can ssh into it, run emacs, git and gcc on it. so that power was ours, so we can take it back
I've been speaking about, and working on and off (mostly off, alas) on the 0G project, that intends to offer people non-abusive AKA freedom-respecting ultraportable communicators running free software on free hardware on free networks. see https://www.fsfla.org/0G
besides trying to build the infrastructure to enable people to choose freedom, privacy, human and civil rights over surveillance, we've got a lot of education work to do so that they are more likely to make choices in line with these essential values, and less likely to be distracted and betrayed by opposing ones. unfortunately, this is not a hollywood movie: there's no silver bullet that will solve the problem all of a sudden just before the credits, it will take a ton of work by many parties
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thanks for the suggestion. I've just started a conversation that might or might not lead to action on this front. let's see where that leads :-)
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risky as they may be, and as much as we might wish for vaccines that offered even better protections against covid-19, we've already got more than enough information to conclude that they are safer than catching the virus, and that they lower risks of death, of complications, and of transmission for yourself and for others around you. unless you have medical reasons that suggest that taking it would be very risky for you personally, because of your individual circumstances, your refusal to take it renders you analogously dangerous to society at large as someone who insists on driving under the influence of alcohol, claiming without any medical or otherwise scientific rationale that the alcohol does not impair your ability to drive safely
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ahí coincidimos ;-)
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I should probably have pointed out earlier that, though I've learned a lot about free software licensing and copyrights from lots of lawyers and practitioners, IANAL: I haven't got a law degree, and I'm not licensed (unilaterally or not :-) to practice law anywhere, so none of this is to be mistaken as legal advice
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in Brazil, every copyright and software license is a unilateral contract. software is governed by a different law, that differs from other copyrightable works in several details, including constraints on moral rights. when I speak of every ... license, I mean pure license, unilateral permission grant, not a permission grant that is part of a larger agreement. the latter are also contracts, of course, just not this special case of unilateral contracts
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e.g., a lot of people seem to believe that copyleft depends on licensees' acceptance of obligations established in the license. that is not the case. contrast a hypothetical "if you distribute the work as object code, if a recipient asks you for the corresponding sources within 5 years, you must distribute it to them", which would create an obligation and thus require acceptance to make the obligation effective, with "if you distribute the work as object code, you must accompany it with a written offer of corresponding source code", in which distribution is only permitted in a certain fashion, and it is that mode of distribution that creates the (recipient-)enforceable obligation to offer sources in case the offer is indeed included in the distribution. if it isn't, the distribution was unauthorized, thus it amounts to copyright infringement, whether or not a contract was formed for the authorized mode of distribution, and if you rejected it, you had no right to distribute
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whether or not copyleft licenses are contracts depends on jurisdiction, and that isn't really settled matter anywhere. in some jurisdictions, every license is a contract, even if it's a unilateral grant rather than a part of an agreement. such special kinds of contracts are called unilateral, or beneficial contracts. they express commitments by the licensor, and permissions for the licensee, and they hardly fit in the usual notion of (bilateral) contract, but in those jurisdictions, (unilateral) contracts they are. then, there are jurisdictions in which copyleft licenses can be interpreted as (bilateral) contracts, or as unilateral grants of permissions. this makes for different paths for enforcement, and not all of them have been tested. but GPL and AGPL specifically have been drafted so as to not remove any of these paths. realizing that is tricky, and there are plenty of misconceptions about how copyleft actually works (to be continued)
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in one of the most beautiful songs ever, Beatriz, Chico Buarque hid a few other pearls: the lyrics at the lowest note of the song say "floor", and at the highest note they say "sky". in another of his moments, he wrote "Joana Francesa" with lyrics that mix and rhyme Portuguese and French, with a line that repeats "acorda" (wake up) a few times until it sounds like "d'accord"; and after a verse in French, starts another with "Geme", in Portuguese, that sounds just like "J'aime".
last night, I had another such epiphany that got me overwhelmed by emotion. I realized that Life is Beautiful, the wonderful movie by Roberto Benigni, had what I believe to be an Easter egg hiding in plain sight in the original title in Italian: La Vita è Bella. bella means beautiful indeed, but in Latin, it is related with both bellus (beautiful) and bellum (war, thus bellic). I cried for minutes after it hit me, and cried again as I told wife about it
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Chico Buarque famously disguisedly addressed the military dictatorship with verses such as "in spite of you, tomorrow is going to be another day", "you can't stop the sun from rising". in "Vai passar", he purports the song to be about carnival parades; the title seems to refer to each of the groups that will parade on a most traditional carnival avenue, but an alternate meaning is that "it will be over", again referring to the dictatorship; the imagery of dawn returns, again as an alternate meaning: the verses are about the whole city partying "the evolution of liberty until dawn", where evolution is the term that refers to how a samba school presents its theme in the carnival parades, liberties being often taken in carnival, and sunrise marking the usual end of the parade. the other day I realized the alternate meaning: that the pursuit of liberty (vs the dictatorship) would grow/evolve/develop towards the end of darkness" genius!
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one of my favorite apropos feelings are the epiphanies of finding easter eggs hiding in lyrics. this was often used by genius poets in Brazil during the dictatorship, to escape censorship. Chico Buarque and Gilberto Gil famously sang Cálice (=chalice) for Easter, with a refrain that went "father, push away from me this chalice of blood-red wine". Cálice also sounds like cale-se, that means "shut up". the song got censored, and the gutsy musicians played it with instrumentals and lyrics reduced to "cálice/cale-se". another epiphany I had was when I realized the underlying meaning of "Não sonho mais" (I won't dream any more). in the surface, it sounds like wife telling her spouse of a horrible nightmare in which he was persecuted by an enraged mob, with scatological lyrics such as wetting the bed because of the dream, and begging to be pardoned for dreaming that, in stark contrast with the music. the hidden meaning came out by taking it as torture victim speaking to torturer
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*agreement* is key for your reasoning to apply. there's been a campaign from proprietary software licensors to conflate the notions of license and licensing agreement. a license is a unilateral grant of permission, it doesn't involve acceptance because it's unilateral, but it can't take away any rights you had before, it can only give you rights, even if those rights are constrained. an agreement, otoh, is a contract in the traditional sense, it requires explicit assent before it takes any effect, and normally obligations, commitments and/or limitations to preexisting rights accompany any rights added by it. I can see how a choice of jurisdiction can be effective in a contract, because of the explicit assent by all involved parties, or even an adhesion contract, because of the explicit choice by the adhering party, but I can't see how a license, as a grant of permissions, could take away the right of choice of jurisdiction that licensees had before
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hay los que ayudan a los censores de unos países a impedir que sus ciudadanos obtengan y compartan información, y hay los que no bloquean Tor
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smartphones *are* computers, but in disguise so as to better serve their true masters. we have to take them back. even laypeople would benefit from learning how to automate their boring mechanical tasks, but these devices have turned into attention sinks that turn people into event-processing systems. which may have got beyond rushkoff's notion of program or be programmed. people are being programmed to serve the smartphone's masters
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tipo, eu tenho quase certeza de que quando as crianças dizem que não podem pegar que tá no pique, também não é nesse sentido de "pegar" :-D
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
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