Where did things go wrong? In programming, a lot of the time, things went sour roughly around the place where you made the last change. If a program you're developing suddenly, for no apparent reason, breaks down, you can always look towards the last place where you changed something and trace your problems from there.

This week I had the opportunity to listen to a panel debate on the EU proposal about censorship of child pornography on the Internet. Rikard has written extensively on the debate already (in Swedish), and I can definitely recommend reading it. My own reflections can perhaps be summarised in that the question is indeed a complex one.

As most non-profits, the Society for Free Culture and Software, as well as me personally for projects I would like to engage in, are always struggling to find money. Quite often, we make do with quite limited means: some money for someones trip here, a hotel night there, some printing material, or so on. I don't count time here, because while we all spend a considerable amount of time on various projects, it's not something which is regularly funded.

I tried to login to a web site today. It's the kind of site which I rarely visit, but I still keep my account there for the times when I do come around. Actually, when I think about it, I'm not even sure if I could delete my account even if I wanted to. As always happened, I had forgotten my password. In order to reset my password, the site asked me to verify who I was by typing in the name of my elementary school.

This is completely unsecure!

The name of my elementary school is pretty much public information. Anyone can find that out with very little effort.

The latest book I purchased is "Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming" by Peter Seibel. The book offers interviews with some well known, and other less well known, programmers. Jamie Zawinski, Douglas Crockford, Joe Armstrong, Guy Steele, L Peter Deutsch and Donald Knuth are some of the names in the book, but it's unclear to me exactly how Peter selected the programmers in question for the interviews.

The negotiating countries in the ACTA agreement today released their current public consolidated text. In principle, there is not a whole lot of difference between this one and the version which was leaked previously, except that the public version contains far less information than the leaked one in terms of the individual countries' position on various parts of the text, and reflects changes during the last round of negotiations.

Chris Grams wrote yesterday on the issue of
"open source" and crowdsourcing. Essentially, his idea is that both open source and crowdsourcing engages a large community and have many contributors, but crowdsourcing differentiates itself from open source by having only a few beneficiaries, whereas most open source projects have many beneficiaries:

I just made this tag cloud of the January 18th 2010 consolidated text of ACTA (thanks to Wordle for making this easy). It's the raw text including the individual comments from the bodies involved in the negotiation. While it makes a pretty picture, it has perhaps limited value, although I do appreciate "Party" taken out of context!

This is really excellent: Universal Subtitles is launching a project aimed at create a subtitle widget for web videos, as well as a subtitles protocol. I've been wanting this for FSCONS videos for a while now, and this is a good step in the right direction. Combine this with that YouTube is adding automatic subtitles, we could be on to something big here.

This is the current view of my social network, from a purely technical point of view. For instance, posts from Twidge to identi.ca gets migrated to Twitter, from where it in turn spreads to my web page, Facebook and LinkedIn. Isn't technology wonderful?