Martins blog

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Welcome to Glocalnet.
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Welcome to Glocalnet.
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Welcome to Glocalnet.
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Glocalnet, my name is (promptly forgotten). How may I be of service?

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*click*

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2! 2! 2-2-2-2-2! 222222222222222222222222222222!

...

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Hello, we've got a reminder about the latest bill but according to our bank it was paid already the 21'th.

Can I have your bill- or social security number?

I've already entered that.

Hm. Something must've gone wrong then because it's not visible on my screen.

(Quietly counts to ten) (Tells the operator my social security number)

Ok. Apparently we've got the payment after that reminder was sent out so you can just ignore it. Have a nice day.

Thankfully, 4WD and gravel road is a very good way to blow off some steam...

...like today. I have an old ABC802 (you can read more about it here) which I wanted to do something fun with, only problem is that the disk drive that came with it didn't work and even if I have other disk drives I don't remember anything about what controller that works together with what drive. So I decided to do a small hack instead, adding an AVR micro controller to the keyboard connector and simply "teach" the AVR to "write" the program "manually" every time the ABC 802 is started. This is how it turned out:

The connector in the upper right is for flashing new software into the AVR. Here's a close up where you can see the AVR (it's on the other side of the board, glued to the original circuit board):

It's an AVR ATmega48 in a DIL28 format.

And it even works! Here's an example:

Closeup of the text:

The AVR wrote the "load v24..." which turns the ABC 802 into a serial terminal and then my Linux workstation gave it a login prompt with the help of agetty. And yes, you can log in and all but the character set is a bit odd (Swedish ASCII, or, as it's also called, SWASCII) and there's no terminal emulation (more than CR, LF and BS). I'm thinking of writing a small BASIC program that emulates VT52 (VT100 and above gets too complicated so I think I'll settle for VT52) and then it'll actually be possible to use the old ABC for running, for example, emacs!

I guess what's a bit silly is that I use this AVR, with a computing power equaling about 8 MIPS, to start up the ABC 802, about 0.75 MIPS. But, well, never let facts like that ruin a interesting little project like this!

Fun? Yep. Waste of time? Probably. Pointless? You bet!

It's now been two days since the Swedish Government voted for scrapping privacy and integrity on the internet and other electronic media and I don't think I've still grasped the impact of it yet. For you that don't know about it, you can read a pretty good summary here: http://www.thelocal.se/12534.html

What that article doesn't tell is the background to the new law, because it's history is a very sneaky and smelly one. Back in the year of 2006 the then government of Sweden, which was led by the socialist party, was trying to create a new law that would allow FRA (short for Försvarets Radioanstalt, roughly translated it means National Defence Radio Establishment) to surveil all electronic communications in Sweden to protect us from terrorists, ignoring the fact that Sweden hasn't seen an act of terrorism since before 1980. After massive critic from the public, the press and, also, from the then opposition they had to redraw the suggested law from the agenda.

Partly because of this, but also partly because they were openly suggesting that all ISP's would have to surveil their customers and help RIAA, MPAA etc to catch file sharers they lost the election in 2006 when the opposition formed an alliance and, among other things, promised that they would not criminalize a whole generation (they must've lived under the impression that only teenagers know enough about computers to share files over internet) and that you can't put an entire nation under surveillance.

Now, let's fast forward to December 2007 when the former government had lost the election and the then opposition now is in charge. The 22:th of December, when most politicians already had gone home to celebrate Christmas with their families, försvarsdepartementet (the Department of Defence) tried to coup through a remittance for a new law that would allow FRA to surveil all electronic communication (yep, same ol' stinky), to be answered before the 8'th of January and then the parliament would vote about it the 11'th. The coup was, however, unfolded by SÄPO (the Swedish security police!). The remittance was cancelled and no voting was performed.

Lately more or less the same remittance showed up again but despite that this is a horrible blow to democracy and integrity media has been next to silent. Except for a few editorials the head lines has focused on more important things like soccer, which we, btw, lost against Russia anyway (and good riddance I say!). The blogosphere, however, has been in rage and so was Piratpartiet (http://www.piratpartiet.se/). Then suddenly media actually realized that the government actually is trying to turn Sweden into a police state and media finally caught on. The last days before the vote the protests were intense and the politicians got hundreds of e-mails every day telling them not to vote for the law.

A debate followed by the actually voting was originally meant to be held at 9:00 this Wednesday, in good time for everyone to get home as planned for the parliaments summer break (recognize the tactics?), but since it was obvious that the law would not be accepted since too many in the ruling alliance had declared they would vote no (it was only a handful but that would be enough to tip the balance), the bill was withdrawn and "improved" during the day. It's doubtful if the changes that were done during the day really does improve anything since nothing regarding the surveillance is altered, the so called improvements simply means increased surveillance of the surveillers. The best simile I've read on the net about that is that a rape is still a rape no matter the amount of layers of condoms the perpetrator is using.

During the day most of the criticism got quieter and rumor has it that the dissidents were simply bullied into conformity or at least silence in a 2 hour long meeting. Some of the earlier critics afterwards claimed that with the recent changes they were satisfied and would change their vote, others simply abstained from voting and with 143 votes against 138 the law was accepted. Only one member of the alliance, Camilla Lindberg, had the courage to follow her personal belief and vote against the law.

In 1'st of January 2009 Sweden will officially turn into a police state (or as Wikipedia puts it 'A Contemporary State with "Police State" like structures') and in 1'st of October 2009 will FRA get their access to key points of the internet and telephone networks.

So who's to blame?

Alliance:

• Moderata samlingspartiet (right wing party, 97 seats): Voted yes. Bad guys.
• Kristdemokraterna (Christian party, 24 seats): Voted yes. Bad guys.
• Centerpartiet (undefined middle party (my opinion), 29 seats): Voted yes. Bad guys.
• Folkpartiet liberalerna (the liberal party, 28 seats): Voted yes with one exception. Really bad guys since they should know better, being liberals and all.

Opposition:

• Sveriges socialdemokratiska parti (the social party, 130 seats): Initially came up with the stinker. Bad guys despite voting no, especially since they really aren't against the surveillance, they're probably just pissed that the other guys stole "their" law.
• Vänstern (communist party, 22 seats): Has been against it since day one. Voted no. Good guys.
• Miljöpartiet (environmental party, 19 seats): Has been against it since day one. Voted no. Good guys.

It's also worth noticing that all (or at least most?) of the major parties youth leagues were against the law (it's not often you can see communist youth protest side by side with the right wing youth, but this time you could) and the law has got massive criticism from almost every organization worth mentioning (including serveral ISP's, Google Sweden, SÄPO etc, the list is long and very diversified). Despite that it was forced through in a hurry with big parts of it to be filled in at a later time.

My mothers reaction is that we're now living in a banana republic, some friends of mine that has experienced former Soviet union first hand (especially former DDR) compares it with how Stasi monitored and controlled the people and personally I fear this might only be the beginning.

The question I ask myself is how you know when it's time to leave the country if it will go that far. I bet many that were against the nazis in Germany in the 30's asked the same question. Some managed to leave in time while others...

This is important:

Best speech I've heard in a long time.

This can't be said often enough:

The simple fact is file sharing is here to stay. You might hate it, you might love it, but like cars, electricity, internet and other inventions we now take for granted it simply won't go away again. Fighting in, like the record companies are doing now, will not change anything and they'll just die trying, but if they're prepared to adapt and embrace it, like Magnatune has, they might be able to stay in business. What we all risk by this conflict is that the laws they're proposing will turn democracies into surveillance societies where freedom of speech isn't any longer something that can be taken for granted in any country!

You might think that there's no risk for that where you live, but many countries, among them Sweden, are trying to add laws that makes routine surveillance of, for example, your internet traffic an every day business. If they succeed that will stay for a very long time, long after the CD, and possibly the record industry, is commercially dead. Is the record industry worth the death of democracy and integrity?

I think not.