For those not in the know: This law dictates that ISPs must block sites with child pornography on it based on a list created by the BKA.

So first what is wrong with the law:

• It creates an infrastructure that allows for censorship
• The block-lists are not checked. The BKA is the only instance with any control over it
• There are no know countries where it is not possible to delete the content instead (which is obviously better
• Its not even possible to effectively block a website
• This is not something the Bundestag may actually decide. It’s prevention which is federal state law

All good reasons to be against this law. And many people are, but there is something that everybody claims that is just wrong. This is not censorship. The law itself dictates blocking illegal content, that in itself is by no means censorship. The law allows for unnoticed censorship, because the lists are not checked and it creates an infrastructure that allows for censorship, which once available makes the lobby want to block all kinds of other things (file-sharing etc.).

Now why do I emphasis this so much? Claiming it is censorship doesn’t do our cause any good. It just gives the opposition ammunition, enabling them to claim we are the bad guys. Who else would claim that blocking evil child pornography is censorship, right? So please everybody, try not to go on about Art. 5 GG being dead, etc. (BTW I’m relatively fine with Zensursula as all this is about enabling censorship, but I’m against claiming people are trying to introduce censorship)

Any suggestions for additions or corrections welcome.

Now what is Wave? Wave is a planned Google service. It is said to be able to replace Mai, IM and whatnot.

What is the Wave Federation Protocol? It is a XMPP extension allowing for collaborative real-time XML editing. Before saying anything else let me just point out that I think this is great. Such a protocol is something that has been wanted in the XMPP community for a long time and a big player publishing and pushing one is just great. The protocol does still need some refinement and I hope Google will work together with the people at the XSF and the XMPP community on this front.

What Google has opened up is mostly the second. They have to some degree opened up how their service works, but right now it seems mostly proprietary, which is interesting given that what most people seem to perceive as one of the big features is the possiblilty to federate. Federation between Waves is indeed possible, but the XML used therein is currently not openly defined making it impossible to display it in a useful way.

However that’s not what I really want to talk about. What really kind of crushed me is that large parts of the community building around Wave seem insane to me. I’m just going to name some examples (not connecting them to people) of ideas people have and just point out what scares me about them. Let me also say that those ideas do not come from Google employees AFAICT. As an aside those are mostly not really protocol related.

1. Introducing a new scheme for Wave addresses (note that what is meant is not the address of the wave, but the address of someone participating in one). To anybody that has been paying attention it will be pretty obvious what is wrong with this. Wave is just an extension to XMPP. Therefore each participant in a Wave will be a XMPP user and his address will be his XMPP address. If you actually build a service and make user addresses user~example.com this fundamentally breaks the protocoll Google build on.
2. Embedding voice. What scared me here is mostly was the seemingly total lack of technical understanding. To elaborate a bit: What they basically wanted is to be able to do VoIP in the Wave and possibly play it back later. The idea is to embed this in the protocol somehow. Until Peter Saint-Andre went in nobody did even mention Jingle. My personal stance is that this is possible and should actually be easy to archive, but not by linking it deeply in the Wave protocol (which is as already said for collaborative XML editing). I would put a hyperlink to an on going conversation (this would need finishing up Muji and would just be a link to a MUC [i.e. xmpp:conversation@example.com?join]) and another hyperlink to a speex recording. No real magic involved. The part that nearly gave me a hear attack though was that somebody actually offered money for an implementation of very basic Asterisk integration. Which is scarry because the protocoll is actually not at a point where I wold deem an implementation of anything really useful and the amount of money was IMHO way to much for the amount of work that would be involved.
3. Using it for health care patient cards. In the ligt of the Gesundsheitskarte you might understand what may problem with this idea is, but to make it quick: This is data i do absolutely not want in a wave or anything similar. Of course the basic idea is perfectly right. Healing a patient can be a collaborative effort between multiple doctors. Reviewing other peoples ideas and getting other peoples points of view is a perfectly sane idea, but it still has to be the patient who decides what personal data he wants to show whom and who needs to be rest assured that nobody that he doesn’t want to know about his heath issues doesn’t learn about them. Putting it in a Wave is just very wrong  (It’s a little wrong to say to say a tomato is a vegetable, it’s very wrong to say it’s a suspension bridge- Stuart/Big Bang Theory).

So, I’m just going to hope that the Protocol turns out good and is put to good use and that some saner people keep on improving it. (I could say “No offence” at this point and really I don’t want to offend anyone, but it’s just that it is too easy for me to get worked up about such things and I had to get it out.)

I have now started hacking on a web application as a proof of concept.  It’s nothing fancy yet (especially not very social), but I think it looks kind of nice already. Current features are: Showing roster, vCards (not all information though) and User Tune (including disco and caps). Things missing: Receiving messages, everything social.

For the social part I will probably have to think a bit about needed features and talk with XSF people about possible XEPs.

As for development I’ve used strophejs (Which is really great. Nearly all problems I’ve had were generic JavaScript not XMPP related, which has to say something about the strophes quality I guess) and Prosody to have a local test server (which is really great too, but I could’ve used PubSub ).

You can find a screencast here and code here.

• Jennifer Rostock rocks
• Bill Mockridge is cool, even if it was only for founding Die Springmaus
• The Dubliners are unbearable to listen to, even though I do like Irish Folk in general
• Some people just suck

So suppose there is a person you really like and would like to be friends with. Now let’s assume three things about this person:

1. the person has a reasonable amount of (very) good friends
2. The person is pretty busy in his/her everyday life and therefore has only few free time

So let’s state the obvious:

If that person is going to spend his/her free time with anybody it’s going to be her good friends and not you.

The premise for being able to build a friendship is spending time together. You fail. Find somebody else and forget you like that person. Or at your oppinion become insane.

Which reminds me that I really want a recording of Insane by The Velvet Plastic.
*Wanders of singing: “I am insane, I am insane, I am insane, I am insaaaaaane[...]“*

As part of the process of upgrading ICQ users to our newest, most advanced version, ICQ6, we have added a new user name to your contact list “ICQ System”. The newly added user is intended to improve ICQ’s line of communication with our users and assure you continue to enjoy talking to everybody, everywhere

Of course they did not tell anybody they would do that. So some people thought it would be funny to spread the rumour that ICQ has been hacked by some superhackers and (of course) everybody believed them.

For me personally this shows how unprofessional ICQ does business and what Jabber/XMPP, due to it’s decentralized character, does a lot better then proprietary IM services.
In Jabber/XMPP world

• most server admins wouldn’t do such a thing without telling their users
• it would be pretty easy to contact your server admin, because (if you choose a server the way you should) you trust him and know at least that he is responsive and friendly

</ICQ bashing>

I personally like the idea of user rated results a lot. It is not yet as complete as Google or Yahoo or whatever, but the new version alows adding results directly from the web interface, so it doesn’t relly completely on a (slow) crawler anymore. Results should be getting there if enough people use it.

I think it’s fun to use it. Now I only need to get it in my Firefox search box so I remember to use it…

This year I totally failed to remember to do that, because I was busy studying for my Abitur. Actually I noticed it was Open Discussion Day 3 hours into the day reading a blog post on Planet Jabber. So all I did this year was to set my Jabber Servers Message Of The Day (MOTD) to tell all my users about the Open Discussion Day.

So I didn’t actually expect to have any success or converters this year (the people I talk to most actually already use Jabber/XMPP, but there are some people I really enjoy talking to that are not, so there would have been some potential ). But I had a small success. Setting the MOTD actually got one of my friends to do some work trying to convince people to use open protocols. From what he told me he wasn’t very successful, but for me it is a success to see that I have convinced someone in a way that he starts spreading the word.

So I said he wasn’t very successful. Neither was I in the last years. I’ve been asking myself a lot why that is. I have to different theories on this.

1. People are resistant to change

For some reason people really don’t want to switch from what they know as long as it more or less does it’s job. This is true even if they are not really satisfied (I have heard a lot of Windows users get very angry about how bad their Operating System is and how many errors and problems they’ve had, but most of them didn’t even try an alternative system).

The problem is you can’t really convince this people by reasoning with them about the benefits of open protocols, because their solution works well enough for them. To convince those users one would have to first create a killer-feature and then create a demand for it amongst those users. Note that this would probably convince them to switch to open protocols, but they’d do it for the wrong reasons. If a legacy IM implements the same feature they might be gone again very fast.

2. People don’t want freedom

While I personally think it’s relatively easy to grasp, many people don’t understand why openness/freedom is desirable. Many people just want to be told how to do things, they don’t want to have a choice or freedom. Life is a lot easier if someone else tells you what to do.

Where I live what you should do on the internet is (according to what the majority will tell you to do) “Get a schülerVZ/studiVZ account, get ICQ/MSN, use Google and look for bands on MySpace” (side note: Maybe Jabber/XMPP just lacks a catchy TLA? ). So that’s what people will do. If the majority does it, it must be good, no individuality needed, right?

Of course I need to put the FreeSoftware/free culture evangelists (my ) point of view here to: “Get a noserub account (if you really want social networking, maybe you’d actually rather write a weblog or a maintain a homepage), use Jabber/XMPP and IRC, support Wikia Search and look for bands on netlabels and Jamendo“