There will be a meeting for volunteers for OpenCity 2005 Thursday, August 4 at 7:30 PM at the University of Winnipeg Room 2M70. Room 2M70 is on the second floor in Manitoba hall (up the main escalators to the second floor, turn right and go through the corridor to Manitoba hall, then turn left. 2M70 will be on your right).

We need people for the following and more:
Poster
Door
Push tickets
Security
Setup/Takedown
Run A/V equipment
Conference registration
Fair Copyright evangelists / petition signature collectors
Art Exhibit security and setup
Free Software demonstrators and evangelists (anything - linux open
office firefox)

Background on OpenCity:

OpenCity 2005 is a festival of participatory culture bringing together artists, musicians, members of the Free Software movement, and activists. Participatory culture is the culture of involvement and activity rather than consumerism and passivity. Be part of the movement that puts culture back in the hands of the creators, rather than just a product to be bought and sold in a global economy.

The event takes place between August 17th and 20th at various locations in Downtown Winnipeg. There will be a kickoff Town Hall on the Future of Copyright at the West End Cultural Centre August 17th at 7:30 PM. The kickoff will feature an
adress by Russell McOrmond, Canada's most respected authority on fair copyright and the editor of http://digital-coypright.ca website. The conference and music events will take place at the Kismat Banquet and Conference Centre Aug 18, 19, and 20th. The spoken word performances (Thurs Aug 18 7:00 PM) and art exhibition (ongoing) will be at the Pool Room in the basement of Artspace 100 Arthur Street.

For more information see our website:
http://www.freeculture.ca
or call 633-3259 and leave a message in the PLUG (Press 3) mailbox.

There has been a long standing bug in the French Canadian Keyboard layout for Red Hat and Fedora Core systems. If you try to set the keyboard layout to French Canadian in Gnome Keyboard preferences applet, you get the error:

Error activating XKB configuration.
Probably internal X server problem.

Unfortunately, because this is considered an "upstream bug", Red Hat has labelled the keyboard layout bug as "WONTFIX". Here is a solution to the problem for anyone who isn't willing to wait for Red Hat to fix the problem.

The PLUG website runs on Geeklog, which is a php-based weblog with a plugin framework and numerous plugins. A vulnerability was discovered recently which would allow an attacker to use SQL injection to determine the MD5 hash of any user's password, which could then be used offline to find the real password. The vulnerability was discovered by Stefan Esser at the Hardened PHP Project. You can read the full Geeklog announcement also. All of the site customizations were preserved in the upgrade.

PLUG is considering switching to a new day for the monthly meetings, starting in September. Currently it is 3rd Thursday of the month. Discusion is taking place on the Sparkplug mailing list. Two issues are under discusion. How do we pick a day? What day do we pick?

Open source is a popular term invented in 1998 as a marketing alternative to Free Software. We in the Free Software Movement continue to say "free software" because we do not want to deemphasize our values of freedom and cooperation for the shallow goal of being popular.

Advocates for "Open source" argue that the vagueness of "free" causes problems. Open source has the same kind of problems. Taken literally, one could easily think that open source means "you can see the source code". Anyone familiar with The Free Software Definition or The Open Source Definition knows that being able to see the code is not enough.

Unfortunately, there are companies who abuse this misunderstanding and call their proprietary software "Open Source". Today I discovered one such product. Centric CRM.

The Canadian Commission for UNESCO is hosting a conference in preparation for the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society. They are gathering views from a "Canadian Civil Society perspective". Free Software seems to be given a high profile in the conference agenda, with the likes of organizations like the Linux Professional Institute and Creative Commons Canada making presentations at the workshops. Unfortunately, there seems to be very little local representation. The event starts tomorrow, May 13th, at the Delta Winnipeg. The description of the conference follows. A programme is available online.

I went to the Steve Kurtz speaking at Mondragon last night and found it very a interesting talk. The talk was about Steve Kurtz who I will give more background to follow the story.

Early morning of May 11, Steve Kurtz awoke to find his wife, Hope, dead of a cardiac arrest. Kurtz called 911. The police arrived and, after stumbling across test tubes and petri dishes Kurtz was using in a current artwork, called in the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Soon agents from the Task Force and FBI detained Kurtz, cordoned off the entire block around his house, and later impounded Kurtz's computers, manuscripts, books, equipment, and even his wife's body for further analysis. The Buffalo Health Department condemned the house as a health risk.

I like the way CAE is challenging boundaries of free speech, critical dialog of cultural, dna, and patent ownership, and the freedom to tinker. They are being exposed in a way that is challenging law, culture and society I fully endorse. He spoke many many times about "owning your tools" and how he endorsed computers during the 80's when the left and artists were suspicious of it.

I have been scheduled as the speaker at the May PLUG meeting.

details:
UserLinux
www.userlinux.com
This is a project that Bruce Perens has been working on recently. UserLinux is a subset of Debian GNU/Linux (Sarge), tailored for business environments. The UserLinux approach to building a distribution and the
concept of a custom Debian distribution will be examined, including their support model. Presentation will include demonstrating a live running system, and the default software installed.

Mall of Freedom
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~umjenki5/mallOfFreedom/
One of Mark's summer projects. Mall of Freedom is a web based package management front end (installation, removal). The goal is to provide an extremely simple web based tool for end users to browse and install
applications provided by their distribution.

Swag included.
UserLinux installation CDs and live CDs
Debian GNU/Linux (Sarge) installation CDs.
Richard Stallman audio CDs

Have you ever received a file attachment from a Mac user in MacBinary or BinHex format? Those formats are actually "wrappers" that Mac uses to send binary files via email. For instance, files such as image files and executables are often encoded in this manner. I have received recently received several files in this format and didn't know how to decode them so that I could get to the attachments. I was searching the internet for programs to deal with this problem, one of which is mcvert, but it didn't seem to work properly. But luckily I discovered that most GNU/Linux distributions come with a command line program called megatron that will convert your files back into their original form.