8 January 2010

The following is a letter written to Choice, the leading Australian consumer advocacy organisation.

I urge Choice to speak out against products like the Amazon Kindle electronic book reader. They use Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology to restrict your basic freedoms.

The Kindle uses DRM technology to give Amazon full control over what the customer can and can’t do with the product. It allows many freedoms of traditional books to be stripped off, such as sharing the book with friend or giving the book away when you’re finished with it. DRM also allows monitoring and censoring of what you read. For example, Amazon recently remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984″. The customers involved were given no notice or choice. The breathtakingly irony is that “1984″ describes a fictional society where citizens are under constant surveillance and control.

Understandably, devices like the Kindle are widely considered to be unethical. DRM is also being added to many products like phones, music players, digital music, films and books. The result is we consumers lose. Please help defend our rights by considering these issues in future reviews and campaigns.

More information about DRM is available at the Defective By Design website.

16 July 2008

I’m very happy to now be using a computer with only free software — software that I have the freedom to use in any way, share with my friends, study its workings and modify to suit my needs.

For a few years now, I’ve been relying on pieces of proprietary (non-free) software to make my computer’s 3D graphics and wireless networking work properly. That’s a bad thing, but now I don’t need those proprietary bits any more. In 2007 I was able to replace my computer with one that could display 3D graphics using free software drivers. Recently (June 2008), I replaced my wireless network card with one fully supported by free software drivers.

The end result is that my computer operating system and the programs I use are all completely free software. It’s a real relief to me, because it’s an issue I feel very strongly about. I certainly felt hypocritical advocating free software but still requiring these proprietary drivers.

If you’d like to know more about free software, read Why free software is so important to society by the Free Software Foundation.

Nerdy details:
The computer I use has an Intel 965G graphics chipset and is supported by the i810 driver. The wireless card is a D-Link DWL-G520 version B4 and is supported by the ath5k/openhal driver.

19 August 2007

The supermarket “green bags” are a great idea, but they’re bulky and aren’t bio-degradable. I just wanted a couple of string bags to scrunch up and stuff in my backpack or bike pannier.

Who would have believed it would be so hard to buy string bags. I had no luck in retail shops or shopping on the Internet (within Australia). At one point, I even considered trying to make my own!

Then I recently came across Estring Bags. This Western Australian company sell bags by mail order, in a rainbow of colours. Prices are quite reasonable too.

31 March 2007

Please don’t buy or use Windows Vista. It’s designed to take away your freedom of control over your computer, your files and data.

We give up some freedoms to benefit our society as a whole. One such example is the freedom to drive cars at high speed. We give it up for good reason — less people die in car accidents.

Recently though, we’ve begun being encouraged to give up other freedoms for bad reasons — profit of large computer and media companies. Windows Vista is an example.

Vista is Microsoft’s new operating system. It is software to manage the basic operation of a computer. Vista is different to previous operating system software though.

Vista has been designed from the ground up to monitor and restrict what you do with your computer. Microsoft now gets to decide if you install that program. Microsoft choose if you can watch that video. They even control whether you can open your own files. Fear not though. I’m sure they have your best interests at heart. The multi-national company has only been involved in a handful of anti-trust violations, among other things.

Why do Microsoft want to control what you do with your computer? Simple. Money and power. Microsoft have colluded with large media companies to restrict our remaining “fair use” rights under copyright law. What are fair use rights? Take a book for example. When you buy a book you have the right to read it whenever you want. You have the right to keep it and read it again in ten years time. You even have the right to sell it or pass it on to your children. Microsoft are attempting to stem such freedom. As an example, Vista allows Microsoft to produce “electronic books” (or e-books) that can be read once and on only one computer. The same goes for programs, music, videos and other information. Sounds nasty, doesn’t it? But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Please don’t give away your computing freedom by using Vista. Make your statement for freedom firmly, by not buying Vista. Please inform your friends and encourage them to avoid Vista too.

I recommend you to use a free software operating system such as gNewSense GNU/Linux.

Lastly, please don’t just take my word on all this. See what the Free Software Foundation has to say about Vista. The Foundation has been working on such issues of computing freedom for over twenty years.