Last weekend, the German Pirate Party had their federal party convent and managed to add two amendments out of hundreds of proposals to their agenda. My text about a free democratically controlled technological infrastructure which includes Free Software, Open Standards, no Software Patents, nor DRM was one of the two accepted. More information can be found in my German blog post. … Continue reading
As some of you might have heard, Google released an experimental player for Youtube that works without Adobe Flash, last Wednesday. While they are “very excited about HTML5 as an open standard” (from the announcement), they surprisingly chose not to offer the content as such and instead serve videos in a patent-encumbered format. As Google has not yet stated whether it will add videos in an unencumbered format, this clearly strengthens the stand of proprietary solutions in the ongoing debate about the future of video in HTML and disappoints those of us who expected Google to live up to their … Continue reading
My recent blog entries were about Skype and about how companies might eventually abuse the power they have over some of our technology. Many of my arguments against Skype also apply to Microsoft’s instant messenger. Now Microsoft gave one more example that this abuse actually happens. Ars technica writes: Microsoft this week decided to turn off its Windows Live Messenger service for five countries: Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan, and North Korea. […] The user is not informed as to the actual reason for the block. Currently, it’s not clear how broad the block is or how long it will last. … Continue reading
A vigilant reader of my blog challenged my earlier criticism of Skype thoroughly and even though I felt his remarks could have been tempered a bit, here is my thoughtful response. I am very thankful for all of the comments I receive and encourage more people to express their opinions here. It is only when our opinions are constantly challenged, are we forced to rethink them and are less likely to believe in aged and false dogmas. Below I intend to counter the main points of his argument, but only after I have refashioned and strengthened my main argument. The … Continue reading
The Mozilla Foundation just released native support for the free (as in freedom) audio and video codecs Vorbis and Theora in Firefox. These codecs are possibly the best free codecs existing. Encoding (producing) and decoding (consuming) audio and video files using these codecs is unrestricted by EULAs or license fees for patents. Currently, the largest archive of free audio and video material is Wikimedia Commons. They will greatly profit from this move. The Wikimedia Foundation applauded to Mozilla’s announcement. They see great potential in free media codecs: This could never make it into the mainstream without the groups developing and … Continue reading