We will be showing “The Net at Risk,” a recent episode of Bill Moyers’ PBS series Moyers on America, on Monday, Dec. 4 at 6:30 pm in the Orange & Brew, on the ground floor of the Reitz Union. Come join us!

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Thanks to the extraordinary James ‘J.C.’ Jones, we have this short video about our celebration of Software Freedom Day 2006 from September. Watch the video on blip.tv, or download it from archive.org.

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Update: We have photos of the event on Flickr . Thanks to everyone who helped out!

(Re)Create is happening on Monday the 27th and Tuesday the 28th from 10:00am til 4:00pm at the Reitz Union Colonnade. Participate in creating derivative artwork and engaging in the fair use of the media around you. We’ll have tons of media to mash up and glue and scissors to put it together. Come by to engage in remix culture or just to chat about intellectual property law gone mad.

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Our guest speakers this Monday will be from Grooveshark, a Gainesville-based music sharing/social networking-type Web site run by several UF students and alums.

We’ll also have elections for each officer position and vote on proposed constitutional amendments.

The meeting will be Monday, Nov. 20 at 6:30 pm in room 276 of the Reitz Union.

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“Keep the Net a free market,” op-ed, by Brad Ashwell, Gainesville Sun, Nov. 13, 2006.

The genius of the Internet, and the catalyst of economic growth, democratic discourse, and social opportunity it has become, is based on a foundation of nondiscrimination. The Internet market has worked beautifully because the barriers to entry were low and the status of every actor in the marketplace remained equal. This is a competitive market at its finest, but it is premised on that neutral platform. Remove the neutral footing, and the market tips in favor of network owners.

Ashwell is the Democracy and Consumer Advocate for the Florida Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), based in Tallahassee.

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Update: This has been completely rewritten after getting feedback from a much larger group of readers than I expected. The points
raised in the comments following this post and in Erik’s reply to the original may therefore not seem make much sense.

Earlier this week I went to Peer 2 Peer to hear Erik Schmidt of the UFAD team talk about “Windows Vista at UF”. I left with the feeling that the costs of upgrading to Vista do not make up for what benefits it provides. I’ll outline some of the more interesting things that I heard.

• “Sleep” mode - Vista will use a low-power sleep mode as the default “power-off” function. Apparently this is a hybrid between suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk - if the computer is unplugged while sleeping, it loses what it stored in ram but is able to boot from the image written to disk without data loss. That’s pretty neat.

  What caught me off guard was that the computer can be patched while “asleep”. I’m still not completely clear on how it pulls this off. Erik said that it isn’t able to be woken up remotely, so does it wake up periodically by itself to check for new patches? UF and other large enterprise users use local patch/update distribution servers, so are these machines specially privileged to be able to push patches out? I’m also wondering how this applies to home users who don’t run local patch servers.

  But those details are really tangential to the primary concern I have. A member of the audience asked if a sleeping machine can be hacked - the answer is yes. However this isn’t actually a step backwards because computers running Windows XP on campus are apparently powered on 24/7 to get patches anyway. So in both cases the machine can be hacked, but with Vista, you can save substantial amounts of energy. While enterprise users break even, home users who never used to leave their computer powered on constantly are now potentially more exposed. Erik has pointed out that he’s primarily concerned with Vista on campus, but I’m still wondering how this will play out for both campus and home users as employees bring their new personal Vista laptops to work.

• 7 clicks vs. 2 - Vista has been much maligned for their new User Access Control system that is supposed to help make Vista the most secure Windows ever. If it takes the users just two clicks to install a piece of malware, then of course it’ll happen! But if it takes the users seven clicks, they will carefully read and evaluate each pop-up.. right?

  Bruce Schneier of Applied Cryptography fame calls it “Cover Your Ass” security and Paul Thurrott from the Windows Super Site says it’s “a sad, sad joke” and “the most annoying feature that Microsoft has ever added to any software product”.

  This was obviously designed for less knowledgeable users. However, I have the feeling that those users will simply get used to clicking through 7 pop-ups instead of 2. And for experienced users, this feature will mostly be an annoyance that gets turned off quickly.

  I’m glad Microsoft is working on improving the security of Windows, but I don’t think they fully understand the “human” side of security. Asking users to click “OK” to verify that they’re fine with viruses being installed isn’t useful security.

• Licensing - UF has a site license with Microsoft for Vista as it did with XP, so there is one license key that all computers can use. Along with “answer files” that contain configuration options, this simplifies the deployment of Vista because users don’t have to manually configure anything or enter in a license key by hand. However, unlike XP, Vista computers licensed with the campus-wide key will need to be reauthenticated every 6 months. UF is running its own Key Management Server that will handle the authentication.

  Computers that roam about or which aren’t intended for on-campus will need to be licensed with a Manual Activation Key that doesn’t require reauthentication every six months. Computers that are prohibited from having a network connection (because they process secure data) presumably can also be installed with a MAK.

  The point is not that Vista phones home to Microsoft every six months (the desktops talk to the local KMS; I would assume only the KMS needs to talk to Microsoft). The point isn’t that it’s impossible to run Vista without an Internet connection (you just need to use a MAK to install). The point is that every copy of Vista doesn’t trust its user to be honest. This is a business decision by Microsoft and, one can argue, a necessity for all proprietary software. But specifically in Vista, more infrastructure and complications will be involved in an already complex authentication system.

I was unimpressed with the presentation of Vista. The benefits listed in the presentation included better security (which I find questionable), enhanced productivity (I don’t know enough to evaluate this claim), and sexiness - it’s so shiny!

Now, I like shininess as much as anyone (I’ve been playing with Sun’s 3D desktop environment and Compiz/Beryl for the past few days). However, I personally don’t believe these claimed benefits outweigh the costs which include licensing complications, increased hardware requirements, possible application breakage, end-user training, and, of course, the site license that UF has paid for. I don’t presume to be wise enough to make policy decisions for UF (managing IT for myself and my family is taxing enough), I just have some concerns about the upcoming Vista roll out.

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Florida Free Culture president Gavin Baker (that’s me) snagged the win for week 1 of Creative Commons’ CC Swag Photo Contest.

The contest runs through December 18; one winner will be chosen each week. To enter, add your photos of CC swag to the group pool on Flickr.

Thanks to CC’s generous support of our club, I know there are plenty of you with CC swag. Snap some photos and upload away!

CC ftw!

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