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Tag: campaign

September 23, 2014

Event Report: Public Screening of Internet’s Own Boy

by viggy — Categories: FSMK, social — Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

As the first activity of We The Goondas Campaign, we organized a public screening of Internet’s Own Boy, a biography of Aaron Swartz, a hacktivist in US who worked actively to promote internet freedom and in a true sense, the first martyr of Freedom of Internet/knowledge movement. We The Goondas campaign motive is to raise awareness amongst public about the recent amendment to Goonda’s Act which was passed by Karnataka Legislative Assembly and then when there are sufficient number of people mobilized, we will decide on how to take the campaign forward. The screening was organized in Institute of Agricultural Technologists, Queens Rd, Bangalore on 21st Sept 2014 at 2:00 pm. Over all close to 60 people attended the screening. The screening was followed by a discussion led by Lawrence Liang from Alternative Law Forum on the whole knowledge based movement that Aaron was a major part of and also his role that should be a major inspiration for all of us from the developing countries. Lawrence emphasized on the absurdity of various laws which are being passed across the world to regulate internet. Aaron was a martyr of such an absurd law. With respect to Goonda Act, he talked about how it is completely absurd because it tries to weigh in completely diverse range of people in the same pan, right from people involved in boot-legging, land-grabbers, drug offenders to copyright violators. He emphasized on the point that where else can you find such comparisons if not in absurd laws. Like a statement by Aaron in the movie, Lawrence also emphasized on the fact that books and other content is not just about a certain idea being represented, it is also a representation of the culture and tradition of the society which shouldnt be locked up. He mentioned a question that Suraj, a delhi based, working class boy had asked him, “माना ये किताब आपकि हॆ, इस किताब कि परछाई किसकी हॆ?”(“Even though I agree that the books is yours, who owns the shadow of the book?)”. He mentioned how he was pretty sure that Aaron would have put up all the content of JSTOR into torrent and that was the sole motivation for him to download it and how laws actually stopped him from doing such a generous thing. He mentioned that any law which doesnt allow us to be generous to each other, is not an law to follow. The discussion also led to interesting questions on how the campaign should be taken forward, what we can expect etc. As of now, we currently do not have a clear idea on how to take the campaign forward and hopefully with more and more groups and people joining us, we will be able to come up with the clarity on what realistically can be expected out of the campaign.

Over all, a very good start to the campaign. ALF was very generous to have contributed towards the cost of the hall which was close to Rs. 18,000/- We definitely were not able to mobilize as many people compared to the money put in and hopefully we will be able to do a much better participated event next time.

Photos of the event: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/124841002@N04/sets/72157647495245607/

 

September 22, 2014

No more reinstall campaign #AvoidedReinstall

by viggy — Categories: FOSS, FSMK, linux, ubuntu — Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

How often do you screw your GNU/Linux based system such that you decide to reinstall your system? Are you the go-to person in your group for any issues with any GNU/Linux based OS? How often do you suggest to people who come to you that there is no other way to recover than re-installing?

I have been helping people to migrate to GNU/Linux based distribution, mainly Ubuntu. And its quite often that I come across people who while doing something or other have messed their system and need to help to fix it up. More than often, I used to give up quite quickly and ask them to take a backup using live-boot and reinstall the system. Many times, I would just search for first error I noticed and see if I could get solution online and if that didnt work give up and ask to reinstall. Though this is quick, it actually meant that I wasnt learning anything new. It also meant that many things in Ubuntu which might have been actual bugs might not be getting noticed due to this.  And it also contradicted one of the popular examples I used to mention as to why Free Software is better than proprietary? Have you noticed the Blue Screen of Death, Can you fix it on Windows? Because Free Software allows you to study it and play with it, you can know why your system has actually crashed and try to understand how to fix it. Really? How often do we do that?

Hence I have decided to start this self-campaign and if possible motivate others to also follow it where in I put my maximum whenever I come across a messed up system to recover it without reinstall. The way the success of this campaign will be judged is by maximum number of systems I can avoid reinstall before coming across a system I am forced to reinstall as I cant find any other way around it. Hopefully as time goes on, the gap between every two systems forced to reinstall will increase which would mean I am improving/learning and avoiding many more systems from re-install.

I am already successful in doing it for 1 system. Hoorrrraaaayyyy!!!!! Hence #AvoidedReinstall 1 I spent 3 nights on it, close to 8-10 hours in all but finally it is recovered and system is now working without having to re-install Ubuntu. Hope to find sometime and blog about it also.