Jure Cuhalev » Rant

Slovenian government is trying to censor the Internet

Jure Cuhalev — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:22:09 +0000

Most forms of gambling is illegal in Slovenia with a few highly regulated exceptions that are given concession from the government. Most notable are Loterija Slovenije (Slovenian Lottery) and Športna Loterija Slovenije (Slovenian Sport Lottery) in addition to real-world casinos and gambling places.

With growing popularity of online gambling these organizations as well as government are facing a problem with how to deal with insanely popular betting sites like Bwin, Expekt.com, bet-at-home.com. Government already tried to order ISP’s to block access to these webpages in 2006, but it turned out that they didn’t have legal ground for it so it failed.

That is why they decided to fix the law that would, among other things, require ISP’s to prevent access to web pages that would offer gambling related services. Failing to comply would result in fines from 7.500 EUR to 52.500 EUR and 1.500 to 10.000 for the person in charge. Parliament already approved the law on 18th of December 2008, but it got vetoed at the next stage in the process so they will have to vote on it again.

There are many troubling aspects of these recent developments:

From legal aspect it introduces censorship at the price of freedom of speech because part of the government decided that they need it. Who will be next to demand blocking of unwanted content?

From technical aspect it’s really hard if not impossible to block web pages. The only real approach would be using Deep Packet Inspection technique, that requires ISP to analyze each internet package violating privacy of the communication in the process.

It’s now up to the citizens and experts in the field to carefully analyze answers and proposed government changes to the law to make sure that it does not pass in its current form.

If you can read Slovenian, there are three excellent articles on this topic that you have to read:

Naš veliki kitajski požarni zid (bigger political picture)

Zakon o igrah na sre?o uvaja cenzuro spletnih strani (legal)

Cenzura prometa na stranska vrata? (technical analysis)

Original version of this article appeared on Netokracija

A confession of newage virtual schizophrenic

Jure Cuhalev — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:09:05 +0000

Hi, I’m Jure and one of the things I do is to help people talk and work with their communities so they can improve their products or services. Often they want to outsource at least part of the talking to me, so I’m given a new online identity. The name is still the same, but you get a new email (with IMAP and everything) and often business cards with this identity. If you’re lucky it’s also a Google Account (via Google Apps) that you need to share calendars, gtalk etc.

As you help different organizations, you keep accumulating these identities that you can’t shut off because you never know who will decide to email you on that address or which account you’ve got registered. On top of that, you almost never completely stop helping them unless the project gets shut down.

So now you have tons of email addresses, that each connect to different identity that you use to talk to bloggers. The only problem is that there is a limited number of meaningful connections that you can have. So you email people from all these identities with different questions, forwards, reply-alls and so on.

This does at the end of the day mean, that I’ll have to talk to myself via different identities, CC other email or info@ accounts (that I control anyway) so that we can make sense of our world. That everyone knows who belongs to who, depending on the email domain.

I have yet to write multiple (personal) Twitter accounts or Foursquare logs, even though I’m sure that this day isn’t far away.

So if you see my replying to myself from a different domain, it’s all normal, it’s just that I don’t want to break online balance of identities.

UIE Virtual Seminar with Josh Porter

Laško Eliksir #fail

Jure Cuhalev — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:32:16 +0000

So apparently there is a new brand of Laško beer – Eliksir, a stronger beer that is normally known as bock. There are advertisements everywhere, urging you to skip your traditional cup of mulled wine and go for the “winter beer”.

The mystical bottle of Eliksir

So why #fail?

It turns out that it’s incredibly hard to find, so hard that we are yet to find a place in Ljubljana that actually heard of it and none actually have it in stock. We’ve tried a number of pizza places and bars around old Ljubljana city center and we failed. We did get lots of Guinness and other dark beers.

Reading their promo material it states that it’s available in supermarkets and in selected pubs. That’s perfectly fine, but you’re doing a good job of hiding a list of places where it’s actually available.

So Laško, if you’re actually spending this much money trying to convince me to try your new beer, make sure that I can actually buy it.

“Running is bad for your knees”

Jure Cuhalev — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:35:08 +0000

It always amazed me at how two-faced our society is. On one hand, everyone is talking about exercise and healthy living/eating/etc, while on the other they’re criticizing and discouraging anyone who actually decided to follow the advices everyone is so full of.

The first one I always hear is:

running is bad for your knees, you’ll have trouble later if your running on pavement/dirt/at all.

Sadly, this is often the most encouraging thing people can say once they learned that someone decided to start exercising and already went for a few runs. There is often no alternative suggested, beside the one where you go for a beer with them instead.

I imagine the world is full similar excuses for other sports and this is not limited to running.

The second one, that I love is that once I start thinking about the food I eat. Mind you, just thinking and wondering what’s healthy. The answer is usually:

you have to eat meat and diary products because otherwise you’ll get malnutrition and sick

once again, coming from the people who survive their days on pizza and fried steaks, as you suggest that maybe having a more vegetable rich lunch might be a good idea (and I’m not talking about salads). Based on my anecdotal experience, the abuse received from conformist eaters must the be the hardest part of such diet.

Feel free to comment with the excuses you hear for not doing something that is good for you.

Arrr, Slovenia, the land of pirates!

Jure Cuhalev — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:00:23 +0000

After a very sad performance of Slovenian quasi Pirate Party last week, where we could see that they have no idea how copyright works, we now have even more evidence that Slovenia is a land of pirates that have no respect for other people’s intellectual work.

@skatey and @Zealoth point out to a blunt copyright infringement on two very important web pages in our online space.

First is University of Ljubljana, that should act as a basic building block of our society. Evidently, they have no problems with stealing a stock-photo that costs less than a cup of coffee, that has still a watermark on it! That’s the same institution that will gladly expel a student for copying a paragraph of text without proper citation.

Second example is a Startup competition at startup.si (they don’t deserve a link), that once again had no problem with taking stock photo with a watermark:

These two sites, and the institutions that they represent, send a clear message to our students and entrepreneurs:

We don’t respect intellectual property and you don’t need to either. Take note of that in your future professional work and when you form your own business.

Arrrrrrr!

Why Slovenia wonâ€™t get iPhone anytime soon

How to get back your Opera 10b3 preferences when upgrading to Opera10 RC

Jure Cuhalev — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 07:53:21 +0000

I’ve been using Opera 10 on OS X for a few months now. Even though it crashes a few times a day I’m still kind of attached to it, not exactly sure why.

Interesting thing happened with latest upgrade from Opera 10 beta 3 to their Release Candidate. They’ve decided that I don’t really need my bookmarks anymore and that I want to revert to 9.63 bookmarks for some reason, even though I’ve never used that version of Opera. To make it nicer on end user, they say: This RC will no longer use the Beta preferences we’ve been using throughout the development cycle, but upgrade your old 9.64 preferences if you haven’t already done this.

: Image by sachman75 via Flickr

Anyway, what happens if you actually _want_ to get your Beta preferences on OS X?

Simple, go to:

1. Quit Opera

2. Go to ~/Library/Preferences/ and look for “Opera Preferences 10″ and “Opera Preferences”

3. Rename “Opera Preferences” to “Opera Preferences.old”

4. Rename “Opera Preferences 10″ to ” Opera Preferences”

5. Start Opera

This will give you back your Opera 10 beta Preferences, allowing you to continue your normal work. Too bad Opera doesn’t provide a transition path and makes us seek out configuration files. I’ve also failed to find this information in their Knowledge base, hence this blog post.

Anyway, if this RC crashes just a couple a times a day (compared to beta versions), I’ll be a happy camper. Maybe they’ll even get proper Unicode working on of these days.

Full disclosure is important

Jure Cuhalev — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 23:16:49 +0000

In last few months I started playing with idea that Microsoft products might be worth checking out again. The last time I used their stuff was in Windows 2000 era. After that it was just Linux and then with years more and more OS X until I also stopped bothering with Linux.

: Image by Selene Farci via Flickr

This effectively means that my perception of their stuff and experience is almost over a decade old. While we’re always happy to bash the people that haven’t tried alternatives like Linux and are dismissing open source as a viable business opportunity, I think we should be equally critical of our own insight.

In this regard two interesting things happened:

I started wondering loudly if we should rethink some of our open source strategies in favor of new offerings from Microsoft. Maybe their featureset can actually battle the religion of open source?
Microsoft Slovenia for some reason decided to reach out to me and enabled me to go to MIX’09.

The combined process of both things made a sell-out at the end of the day. Probably some stronger words were also used in the process. At least this is how it was perceived by the part of the community.

Lesson learned

: Image by _Blaster_ via Flickr

Transparency and full disclosure are important when you’re trying to play an active role in community. While nobody says anything about my job @zemanta or things I say about blogging, I haven’t earned my reputation in regards to Microsoft related technology and it makes me suspicous.

When someone as big as Microsoft shows you some attention it’s important to talk to them what this actually means so it’s easier to do a full disclosure about your affiliation.

Oh .. the full disclosure

Right now there’s nothing much, they sponsored MIX’09 conference ticket and we’ve had some great talks about possible cooperation on a number of different projects. Hopefuly I’ll be able to bring some of their expertise and insight to the community with time, but everything is very much in brainstorming phase.

Now stop bashing and help me learn some new things!

Acrobat Reader 8 for Mac Full Screen mode tip

Am I the only one having this problem?

Jure Cuhalev — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:54:05 +0000

World of technology is often full of weird things and you often can’t tell if you’re supposed to scream at your ISP, computer or just curse the full moon.

Yet, there’s a simple solution to figuring out part of the problem: crowdsourcing

Today I wanted to check out some statistics on Crazy Egg, a site that generates a heat map of what your users clicked, and it kept timing out. Wondering if I was the only having the problem, I decided to do a Twitter Search for keyword crazyegg

This is what I got back:

CrazyEgg search on Search.Twitter.com

It’s clear that I’m not the only one having problems and that I actually should consider removing their tracking code until they fixed their servers.

Thanks Crowd!

No related posts.

Are you flying? Something WILL go wrong

Jure Cuhalev — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 07:37:29 +0000

I’m typing this from Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, as the final leg of my two week 7 planes journey. it went suprsingly well, except for a couple of minor disaster on the way, as it happens usually on all my flights.

What went wrong this time, you ask? When I tried to check-in they told me, I’m not in the system. Further running around the airport showed that someone from my air career canceled my flight ticket back, on the day I started my trip to New York (about two weeks), for a ticket that was bought one month earlier.

Image by Matt Biddulph via Flickr

Luckily this time, it just meant that I had to pay 100â‚¬ to get myself back on the plane, together with one hour adrenaline rush to figure out correct bureaucratic process just to do that.

This is not the first time something like this happened to me, basically every time I fly I can expact that something will happen, usually not catastrophic but annoying and very time consuming. They’ll figure out something is wrong with the ticket, need some extra money, want to shift your plane route, etc.

The advice in this case is really simple, and something that saved me many times my flight:

Be at the Airport at least 3 hours early.

Airports have great coffee shops and bookstores and extra adrenaline rush is not worth your youth.

Why removal of gaming videos from Vimeo is dangerous for the web

Jure Cuhalev — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:26:04 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

A few days agoo Vimeo, popular service for video hosting, announced on their staff blog, that they’re no longer going to allow gaming videos on their service. The full policy of their removal is:

The Vimeo staff has decided that we are no longer going to allow gaming videos on Vimeo. Specifically, we are no longer going to allow game walk-throughs, game strategy videos, depictions of player vs player battles, raids, fraps, or any other video gaming videos that simply depict individuals playing a video game. Videos falling into this category will be subject to deletion as of September 1st; new videos of this type will be removed.

Full blog post at vimeo staff blog.

I think this is really bad for the service and their social contract with the web in general, since it breaks all the web-pages that embed their videos. The fact that Vimeo decided to remove the old videos means that after 1st of September, a lot of old blog posts, forum links and such will be suddenly broken. As such I think that they should keep old files, just disallow uploads of new ones.

Why am I concerned with this? The truth is, I’m not uploading any gaming videos or even understand the idea behind it. I am on the other hand the person who decides for Zemanta, where we should host our online content, like our screencasts.

The fact that there are already a lot of reviews out there that embeed our screencast, makes me worried what could happen in the future if the Vimeo team decides that screencast is not artistic expression enough, or that our videos do not foster proper community. Will they ask us to remove the videos, in turn breaking old blog reviews?

While I’m not ready to move away from Vimeo for now, it does make me feel somewhat uneasy about the choice in first place and I’ll watch out for an alternative video site for new uploads.