Gunnar Wolf

I was invited as a panelist for the Laboratorio «Repensar el derecho de autor y el derecho de copia en la era digital:
diálogo sobre artes, regulaciones y disponibilidad de la cultura» at the beautiful Foro del Dinosaurio in the Museo del Chopo, located very centrally in Mexico City. The list of speakers is quite interesting, and makes me very interested and happy to be there.

The laboratory will be next week, Wednesday through Friday. I am scheduled to be part of the 17:00 table, Knowledge availability and regulation in Internet, coordinated by Pedro Mendizábal (Creative Commons Perú), and together with Juan Voutsás (Biblotecologic Research Institute, UNAM), Armida Aponte (Creative Commons México). The other topics that will be covered are:

• Rights, technologies and commons
• The culture and its industries in the digital age: What are the interests at stake?
• Intelectual, cultural and scientific works: Open access or availability?
• New business models around copyright-protected works
• nowledge availability and regulation in Internet
• Visual arts and copyright in the digital media
• Open governments and citizenship: Information, data and intelectual works

Sadly, it does not seem they have planned for remote people to follow along. I will ask and update here if there is any way for people outside Mexico City to tune in — For people able to attend, it's free entrance (and certificates will be given to people pre-registered, if you are interested, call 5535-2288 ext. 123)

For further details on the participants, go to the laboratory's web page.

Update: The talks will be streamed! http://www.chopo.unam.mx/chopoenvivo.html, via UStream.

Panama just underwent a nasty e-voting exercise: Electronic-mediated elections were held for the committee of the PRD party. It sounds simple - Even trivial! There were only 4100 authorized voters, it was geographically trivial (all set inside a stadium)... But it blew up in smoke. I won't reiterate all what happened, I'll rather direct you to our project's (the e-voting observatorium) page: News regarding Panama (for those coming from the future, search starting at 2012-08-27 — and yes, it's all in Spanish, but there are free-as-in-beer translation services.

Many e-vote proponents/sellers/pushers were very eagerly waiting for this election to brag about one more success... So much that they could not just ignore it, and started rationalizing it away. Anyway, while feeding the observatorium, I came across this opinion-article in the Voto Digital website, which makes quite a bit of pro-e-voting noise. I replied to it, and I think my analysis is worth sharing also with you:

So, lets make some simple numbers, rounding the numbers: The PRD vote in Panama was done for a universe of 4100 voters.

It took 10 hours (instead of the planned 4), so 410 people were processed every hour. There were 40 voting (electronic) booths, so each processed 10 people per hour. This means, each person spent 6 minutes by the booth.

A manual vote in this fashion is highly parallelizable: Each of the voters can be given ballots with anticipation, or many of them cna be allowed in to be given the ballots in situ (depending on the electoral scheme employed). The contention time is the time it takes to each voter to get near the booth and deposit his ballot (either folded or in an envelope) - And it will very rarely be more than a couple of seconds.

So, given that using electronic booths parallelism cannot grow (there is a fixed number of machines) and the queues grew wildly, with traditional voting it would have surely fitted in the expected four hours (they were expected, also, based on their past experiences).

As for counting, that's the slowest part of manual voting, it's also highly parallelizable: If each of the 40 booths has slightly over 100 ballots, the party personnel can easily count them in under 30 minutes. Capture and aggregation for the 40 partial results would take an extra 10 minutes, even being generous.

Manual voting would have saved them around five hours, without demanding additional resources (and being thus much more economical than having to buy 40 specific-purpose computers). And as an additional advantage, the physical and tangible vote proofs would remain, in case they were ever again needed.

I will sound monothematic, but I have been devoting quite a bit of work to this topic lately: Trying to stop the advance of e-voting in Mexico, Latin America and the world.

Why trying to stop it? Isn't technology supposed to help us, to get trustable processes? Yes, it's supposed to... but it just cannot achieve it, no matter how hard it is tried — I won't get into explanations in this blog post, but there is plenty of information. Feel free to ask me for further details.

Anyway — Yesterday (Sunday, 2012-06-17) was the fifth simulated voting that will lead to the first wide-scale deployment of electronic voting booths in my country: About 10% of the population of the state of Jalisco (that means, ~500,000 people) will cast their votes on July 1st electronically.

This particular case illustrates how simulated votings can be used to forge a lie: Pounce Consulting, the company that won the e-voting project for IEPC (Jalisco's voting authority), delivered their booths over 40 days late, just before the deadline for the project to be canceled. Oh, and by the way, it's the same company that just failed to deliver on time for another planned local authority (10% of the booths in the Federal District, where I live, where fortunately 100% of the votes will be cast on traditional, auditable and cheap paper).

After this delay, five voting simulations were programmed, to get the local population acquinted with them. The first ones just failed to get the population's interest and had close to 40% failure rates (mainly regarding transmission). Several other "minor details" were reported, including mechanical details that allowed subsequent voters to see the vote of who had just left.

Anyway, making long story short: The fifth and last simulation was held yesterday. Officially, it was finally successful (about time). As these booths include the "facilities" to communicate the results via the cellular network, but the populations where they are to be deployed do not yet have cellular coverage, 10% of the booths will have to be carried back to the Districtal Header (that can be a ~10hr trip) to be counted. Also, in all places, traditional paper stationery and paraphernalia will be printed just in case it is needed (and when will they now? When half of the votes are cast and lost?)

Anyway... e-voting is still in its first stage in Mexico. Right now, I'm sure, no attempts to rig the election will be made (centrally). But every effort will be made (as it has been made) to dismiss the obviously big and nontrivial ways it has failed and will fail, and any problems will be labeled as "minor". And probably by 2018 we will be facing many more states (even nationwide) deployments.

But propaganda fails to see the obvious: E-voting is more expensive, more complicated, leads to more possible failure states. E-voting should not be deployed in large-scale (i.e. more than a couple of hundred voters) elections. Electronic voting is insecure, violates secrecy, allows for fraud. No matter how many locks are put into it.

Note: All of the information linked to from this post is in Spanish and related to Mexico… Part of it will be translatable via automated means, some will not. Sorry, that's what I have, and it's too much text to invest the effort to hand-translate

I have been following the development of the different e-vote modalities in Mexico for several years already, although I have only managed to do so methodically in the last half year or so. If you are interested in my line of reasoning as to why I completely oppose e-voting, you can look at the short article I published in 2010 or the slightly longer and more updated version published in our book in 2011.

Currently, in Mexico there are two different venues of e-vote that are being pushed: Bad and worse. The bad one will be carried out for about 10% of the population of the state of Jalisco and somewhat less for the state of Coahuila (Distrito Federal was also to be in this list, but the contract was cancelled due to the provider company delivering booths with too many problems and unable to deliver in the due time). The worse one is, fortunately, likely to have the least impact. Why? Because it regards votes cast by Distrito Federal residents (the capital entity, where part of Mexico City is located) living abroad. And it will have less impact because of the amount of the population registered for it: We are about 9 million residents in DF, and in the last election (first time IIRC there was the right to vote from abroad) there were only about 10,000 people registered for casting a (enveloped and sent by post) vote. Even if this year we the campaign for this was better (and I'm not yet sure about it), the number of voters will not be enough to make a dent on the results.

I'm not going into details as to why it is bad in this post — I requested information from the DF Electoral Institute (IEDF) with academic interest, to try to find more information about it, and I want to share my results with you — and, of course, to request for your input on how to continue with this. On May 3rd, I sent the following request (this I am translating to English :) You can look at the receipt for the request for the original redaction) to the official contact address, oficinadeinformacionpublica@iedf.org.mx:

• What company was hired to develop the system that will be used to receive the votes from Distrito Federal citizens residing abroad that have decided to use the Electronic Voting over Internet procedure ("Vota chilango")?
• What is the technical information for said system? That is, which technological basis was it developed on? Which operating base (hardware) will it be deployed on?
• How many revisions or security audits has the developed system ben exposed to? Which are the entities in charge of doing them? What has been their evaluation?

Of course, I wasn't very optimistic when receiving this information. Still, I have to share my results: My information request was largely denied:

(…)
III. The divulgation of this information harms the interest it protects
Given that, were it to be divulged it would affect the informatic security of the refered system. Anyway, we have to point out that said systems have enough measures and security provisions, so that the citizen can emit his vote in a universal, free, secret and direct way.
IV. The damage that can be produced by making this information public is larger than the public interest to know it
This is so because making this information public puts at risk the correct development of the Internet-based voting, because were the technical, purpose-specific information be made public, it could be misused to carry out informatic attacks.
It is also important to mention that a confidentiality agreement was signed with the company that developed said systems.
(…)
VI. The time for the information to be reserved
It will be seven years starting at the present resolution, this information will be made public when the reserve period is over or when the target is reached, except for the confidemtial information that it could contain. (…)

In case some other person is interested in following this information, the other two points were answered, and I'll try to get some relevant information from it:

• The company that provided the Internet-based voting solution was SCYTL SECURE INTERNET VOTING, S.A.
• The only entity in charge of conducting a security revision/audit is Telefónica Ingeniería de Seguridad de México S.A. de C.V.. The audit is still in process, and thus it is not yet possible to give any results from it.

So, I don't have any real conclusions yet. I'm just reporting how work is unfolding.

Tomorrow evening (Wednesday May 23) I'll give a talk on the "e-voting in Mexico 2012" subject in Congreso Internacional de Software Libre in Zacatecas, Mexico. I'll talk on the situation on this and the other topics I have been able to work on.

Around two years ago, the OECD presented a study on residential bandwitdth available per country that triggered quite a bit of debate all over the world — I have seen at least criticism to it in Mexico, in the USA and in Australia. It's very easy to take a simplified view of a statistic and bitch on how sorry the state of our country is. In our case, the outcry was that Mexico was the lowest of all of the OECD countries, and I have seen this repeated on so many topics that it what surprises me is that people keep getting surprised at it! OECD does not represent the ≥200 countries in this world (only the top 30, and the meaning of "top" is not unambiguous).

I found this graph that helps me illustrate this point:

While that graphic is part of a report illustrating how sorry the USA should be for their low position, it shows the OECD member countries. And yes, the only country Mexico could be compared in general terms from those in the list is Turkey. Coherently, they are located at positions 28 and 30.

But what prompted me into writing this post? That some weeks ago I was reading a viewpoint article at the Communications of the ACM magazine: What gets measured gets done: Stop focusing on irrelevant broadband metrics, by Scott Wallsten (might be behind a paywall for you — If you are interested, I can share a copy with you, just ask me by email). Wallsten's article contains the following graph:

I found it pretty telling that, although Mexico sits at the extreme of the graph (and the height of our bar makes it very hard to get a real value out of this particular rendering), our ISPs join a very select group of countries (Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and Ireland, in my very subjective measure) by delivering what they promise.

In 2010, the dominant broadband offering was 1Mbps, although higher options have long existed. I always got basically the 100% of what my ISP (Telmex) has promised, even though I have always had the cheapest package available. Some months ago, I got a call announcing we were being pushed 5x into the future, and starting right then, I had a 5Mbps connection. And although I didn't really expect it to be true, I have had a clean 6Mbps (yes, 6 instead of 5) connection.

So, that's it. This post contains no hidden truths, but just what grabbed my attention from a series of data points :-)

Every year, on January 1st, new material ceases to be protected by copyright and enters the public domain. This means, every year, more knowledge, literature, paintings, music, movies and a long etcetera becomes collective property, instead of being artificially held by the current holders of their rights.

As this image shows (source: http://publicdomainday.org/node/39 ), I have the honor(?) to live in the country with the longest copyright protection term in the world. Copyright in Mexico does not only last for 100 years — It lasts for the natural life of the author plus 100 years. This means that the popular corridos that tell the stories of the 1910 revolution are still not in the public domain. La sucesión presidencial, the book which Francisco I. Madero wrote to justify that a peaceful political change was needed for the 1910 elections, will not enter the public domain until 2014 (president Madero was killed during 1913). Does it make any sense to kidnap cultural, political or artistic works for over a century?

Not only that: Material that is legally sold as public domain in other countries is illegal in ours. Take as an example the recordings of Enrico Carusso, the great Italian tenor who died in 1921. Over 15 years ago, I bought a couple of CDs with his recordings (even if the sources were quite low-quality, as they had been copied over from wax cylinders to magnetic tapes to optical media). I bought them surprisingly cheap, as they were genuine public domain. But they are still protected in my country. That means, I ilegally have some stolen(!) works of art which I lawfully bought outside my country.

Copyright law needs to be revised to match reality. Technological advances have strongly changed reality since 1717's promulgation of the first copyright laws. The solution is not to extend the terms, but to rethink the whole process.

(yes, this rant was mainly made as an excuse for me to copy this image and put it in a location I can easily refer to later. But I hope it is interesting to you!)

This is an update to my last post regarding the «Construcción Colaborativa del Conocimiento» book.

The book is, as we have repeatedly stated, available online for download — Both as a full PDF or chapter by chapter. In the website you will also find videos of all of the conferences held.

But holding a printed book in your hands is just a different experience, isn't it? :-) Anyway, I said I would give here an update on how to get your hands on it. The main venue would be through my University's e-store. I recommend it to anybody interested in buying the book in Mexico. The book's list price is MX$300 (around US$27), but it is currently sold at half price — I don't know how long will that price be offered.

On the other hand, we also uploaded it to the lulu.com self-publishing service. Of course, given I have not seen the printed results, I cannot assure you the resulting product will be of the same quality as the one we got here, but I have a couple of books I have bought at lulu, and their quality is quite acceptable. So, you can also buy it from lulu.com. Note the 20% discount it shows will be permanent — That's what I would get as an author, a payment I decided to forefit given we are 11 authors and it would be unfair to collect it all myself. So, the price at lulu.com is US$12.64 plus shipping — Very similar to the price at UNAM.

Enjoy!

Finally!

Last Friday, after two years worth of work, I finally got the first box of books for the Construcción Colaborativa del Conocimiento (Collaborative Knowledge Construction) project I worked on as a coordinator together with Alejandro Miranda (pooka), and together with a large group of 11 authors:

Translating over from the back cover text (and this is just a quick translation from me — It reads better in Spanish ;-) ):

What defines us as humans is our ability, on one side, to
create knowledge, and on the other, to share or communicate it with our neighbors. Both features have worked together over tens of thousands of years, and, working together, have led the knowledge to transcend the individual, avoiding the need to rediscovery or reinvention of is already known. Sharing knowledge is what has taken our species to the dominant role it occupies today.

But knowledge creation and sharing has seen a deep transformation in recent decades, thanks to the quick evolution of telecommunications, specially the massification of Internet and cellular telephony. We are transiting towards the so desired –and at the same time so feared– knowledge society.

In this book, eleven authors from very different disciplinary backgrounds and geographic origins ellaborate on how a hyper-connected world has modified the basic rules of interaction in areas as diverse as artistic creation, social organizations, computer code development, education or the productive sector.

This book is the result of a year worth of work for in the "Collaborative Construction of Knowledge" seminar, during which we
used the same new forms of knowledge production we have studied.

The videos of the sessions, electronic participations and the full contents of this book are available under a permisive license at
http://seminario.edusol.info/seco3/

We will soon have the book ready in IIEc's e-store (which is mostly meant for national requests). I am also uploading the book to the lulu.com self-publishing service, and we are working on a epub-like edition. Right now it is still not available, but it should be there in some days. I will keep you posted.

Meanwhile, the full contents can be read online at http://seminario.edusol.info/seco3

There's something brewing, moving in Jalisco (a state in Mexico's West, where our second largest city, Guadalajara, is located). And it seems we have an opportunity to participate, hopefully to be taken into account for the future.

Ten days ago, I was contacted by phone by the staff of UDG Noticias, for an interview on the Universidad de Guadalajara radio station. The topic? Electronic voting. If you are interested in what I said there, you can get the interview from my webpage.

I held some e-mail contact with the interviewer, and during the past few days, he sent me some links to notes in the La Jornada de Jalisco newspaper, and asked for my opinion on them: On September 23, a fellow UNAM researcher, César Astudillo, claims the experience in three municipalities in Jalisco prove that e-voting is viable in the state, and today (September 26), third generation of an electronic booth is appearingly invulnerable.

Of course, I don't agree with the arguments presented (and I'll reproduce the mails I sent to UDG Noticias about it before my second interview just below — They are in Spanish, though). However, what I liked here is that it does feel like a dialogue. Their successive texts seem to answer to my questioning.

So, even though I cannot yet claim this is a real dialogue (it would be much better to be able to sit down face to face and have a fluid conversation), it feels very nice to actually be listened to from the other side!

My answer to the first note:

El tema de las urnas electrónicas sigue dando de qué hablar por acá en Jalisco... nosotros en Medios UDG hemos presentado distintas voces como la del Dr. Gabriel Corona Armenta, que está a favor del voto electrónico, del Dr. Luis Antonio Sobrado, magistrado presidente del tribunal supremo de elecciones de Costa Rica, quien nos habló sobre los 20 MDD que les cuesta implementar el sistema por lo que no lo han logrado hasta el momento, pudimos hablar hasta argentina con Federico Heinz y su rotunda oposición al voto electrónico y por supuesto la entrevista que le realizamos a usted.

Sin embargo este día La Jornada Jalisco publica la siguiente nota

http://www.lajornadajalisco.com.mx/2011/09/23/index.php?section=politica...

nos gustaría saber cuál es su punto de vista al respecto,

quedo a la espera de su respuesta

Hola,

Pues... Bueno, sé que el IFE hizo un desarrollo muy interesante y bien hecho hace un par de años, diseñando desde cero las urnas que proponían emplear, pero no se instrumentaron fuera de pilotos (por cuestión de costos, hasta donde entiendo). Se me hace triste y peligroso que el IEPC de Jalisco esté proponiendo, teniendo ese antecedente, la compra de tecnología prefabricada, y confiando en lo que les ofrece un proveedor.

Se me hace bastante iluso, directamente, lo que propone el título: «comicios en tres municipios prueban la viabilidad del voto electrónico en todo el estado». Pongámoslo en estos términos: ¿El que no se caiga una choza de lámina con estructura de madera demuestra que podemos construir rascacielos de lámina con estructura de madera?

Ahora, un par de párrafos que me llaman la atención de lo que publica esta nota de La Jornada:

la propuesta de realizar la elección en todo el estado con urnas electrónicas que desea llevar a cabo el Instituto Electoral y de Participación Ciudadana (IEPC) es viable, pues los comicios realizados en tres municipios son pruebas suficientes para demostrar que la urna es fiable

y algunos párrafos más adelante,

“Cuántas experiencias más se necesitan para saber si es confiable, 20, 30, no lo sé (...) Pero cuando se tiene un diagnóstico real, efectivo y serio de cuándo técnicamente procede, se puede tomar la decisión”

Como lo menciono en mi artículo... No podemos confundir a la ausencia de evidencia con la evidencia de ausencia. Esto es, que en un despliegue menor no haya habido irregulares no significa que no pueda haberlas. Que haya países que operan 100% con urnas electrónicas no significa que sea el camino a seguir. Hay algunas -y no pocas- experiencias de fallas en diversos sentidos de urnas electrónicas, y eso demuestra que no puede haber confianza en las implementaciones. Aunque el equipo nos saliera gratis (que no es el caso), hay que invertir recursos en su resguardo y mantenimiento. Aunque se generara un rastro impreso verificado por el votante (que sólo ha sido el caso en una pequeña fracción de las estacione de votación), nada asegura que los resultados reportados por el equipo sean siempre consistentes con la realidad. El potencial para mal uso que ofrecen es demasiado.

Saludos,

And to September 26th:

Disculpe que lo molestemos otra vez, pero este día fue publicada otra nota más sobre el tema de las Urnas electrónicas en Jalisco donde se asegura que la urna es invulnerable.

http://www.lajornadajalisco.com.mx/2011/09/26/index.php?section=politica...

¿nos podría conceder unos minutos para hablar con usted, como la vez pasada, vía telefónica sobre el caso específico de Jalisco, en referencia a estas notas publicadas recientemente? si es posible ¿podría llamarle este día a las 2 pm?

Quedo a la espera de su respuesta agradeciéndole su ayuda, apreciamos mucho esta colaboración que está haciendo con nosotros

Hola,

(…)

Respecto a esta nota: Nuevamente, ausencia de evidencia no es evidencia de ausencia. Se le permite a un pequeño segmento de personas jugar con una máquina. ¿Significa eso que fue una prueba completa, exhaustiva? No, sólo que ante un jugueteo casual no pudieron encontrar fallos obvios y graves.

Un verdadero proceso que brindara confianza consistiría en (como lo hicieron en Brasil - Y resultaron vulnerables) convocar a la comunidad de expertos en seguridad en cómputo a hacer las pruebas que juzguen necesarias teniendo un nivel razonable de acceso al equipo.

Además, la seguridad va más allá de modificar los resultados guardados. Un par de ejemplos que se me ocurren sin darle muchas vueltas:

• ¿Qué pasa si meto un chicle a la ranura lectora de tarjeta magnética?
• ¿Qué pasa si golpeo alguna de las teclas lo suficiente para hacerla un poquito menos sensible sin destruirla por completo? (o, ya entrados en gastos, si la destruyo)

La negación de servicio es otro tipo de ataque con el cual tenemos que estar familiarizados. No sólo es posible modificar el sentido de la votación, sino que es muy fácil impedir que la población ejerza su derecho. ¿Qué harían en este caso? Bueno, podrían caer de vuelta a votación sobre papel - Sobre hojas de un block, probablemente firmadas por cada uno de los funcionarios, por ejemplo. Pero si un atacante bloqueó la lectura de la tarjeta magnética, que es necesaria para que el presidente de casilla la marque como cerrada, despojó de su voto a los usuarios.

Sí, se tienen los votos impresos (que, francamente, me da mucho gusto ver que esta urna los maneja de esta manera). El conteo es posible, aunque un poco más incómodo que en una votación tradicional (porque hay que revisar cuáles son los que están marcados como invalidados - no me queda muy claro cómo es el escenario del elector que votó por una opción, se imprimió otra, y el resultado fue corregido y marcado como tal)... Pero es posible.

Sin embargo, y para cerrar con esta respuesta: Si hacemos una corrida de prueba, en circunstancias controladas, obviamente no se notarán los muchísimos fallos que una urna electrónica puede introducir cuando los "chicos malos" son sus programadores. ¿Podemos estar seguro que este marcador Atlas-Chivas-Cruz Azul tenga el mismo índice de fiabilidad como una elección de candidatos reales, uno de los cuales puede haberle pagado a la empresa desarrolladora para manipular la elección?

Y aún si el proceso fuera perfecto, indican aquí que están _intentando_ licitar estas urnas (y nuevamente, si lo que menciona esta nota es cierto, son de las mejores urnas disponibles, y han atendido a muchos de los señalamientos - ¡Qué bueno!)... ¿Para qué? ¿Qué nos van a dar estas urnas, qué va a ganar la sociedad? ¿Mayor rapidez? Despreciable - Media hora de ganancia. ¿A cambio de cuánto dinero? ¿Mayor confiabilidad? Me queda claro que no, siendo que no sólo somos cuatro trasnochados los que ponemos su sistema en duda, sino que sus mismos proponentes apuntan a la duda generalizada.

La frase con la que cierra la nota se me hace digna para colgar un epílogo: "en ese futuro quizá no tan distante la corrupción también ocurre y ésta se debe siempre al factor humano". Y el factor humano sigue ahí. Las urnas electrónicas son programadas por personas, por personas falibles. Sin importar del lado que estén, recordarán la polémica cuando se hizo público que la agregación de votos en el 2006 fue supervisada por la empresa Hildebrando, propiedad del cuñado del entonces candidato a la presidencia Felipe Calderón. ¿Qué evita que caigamos en un escenario similar, pero ampliamente distribuído? Y aquí hay que referirnos a la sentencia de la Suprema Corte de Alemania: En dicho país, las votaciones electrónicas fueron declaradas anticonstitucionales porque sólo un grupo de especialistas podrían auditarlas. Una caja llena de papeles con la evidencia clara del sentido del voto de cada participante puede ser comprendida por cualquier ciudadano. El código que controla a las urnas electrónicas, sólo por un pequeño porcentaje de la población.

Cineast and Free Culture activist Nina Paley wrote some days ago a rantifesto on why the FSF has a double standard: Why are the Freedoms guaranteed for Free Software not guaranteed for Free Culture?, by not following its own very strict rules on software when it comes to culture as a whole. Her post was widely circulated, and got (at least) one reply by fellow Debian Developer Wouter Verhelst, largely agreeing with her, and an anti-rantifesto by Joe Brockmeier — Which was promptly answered again by Wouter with a very fun and inspired post, written from the right angle: From the viewpoint of a person who is both a programmer and a musician, and understands the concepts at hand.

I'd love to write a longer, better thought post — But I'm tired and frankly stressed by many things, so I am just echoing their very interesting discussion to other people who might want to read it.

I have been thinking and writing bits on that subject over the last couple of months. An example of that was the talk I gave at the Senate ~6 weeks ago. Following that talk, I wrote a short article for Revista Zócalo (a widely circulated magazine mainly dealing with Mexican politics and social issues) called simply Software libre, cultura libre (full text available, but in Spanish only — You can try reading an automated translation if it suits you). I wrote the article, mind you, with very limited time, and I'll be the first to recognize the prose was quite poor this time :(

Anyway — My point is that our nature is to share culture, to build it in a collaborative fashion, and having the Internet as a practically zero-cost, zero loss medium with which we can interchange our creativity with other like-minded people will naturally boost creativity. Free Software emerged before other Free Culture groups just because programmers had privileged access to Internet in the 80s and early 90s; as network access –and digital creation tools– have got to more people, it's just natural for all kinds of free culture to grow.

Software is just a form of knowledge. Code is just a notation for a certain kind of ideas, just as the mathematical or musical notations. I believe (and hope) it's just unavoidable for us all to eventually switch to a mainly free cultural creation system.

I was invited to be part of one of the panels to be present this Thursday (June 2) in a forum that promises to be interesting. The forum is organized by the Science and Technology comission of the Senate of the Republic (of Mexico ;-) ), Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana and Mozilla México. The day will be opened by Sen. Francisco Javier Castellón Fonseca and Richard Stallman; starting at 10:00, we will have thematic panels on:

• Education
• Government
• Industry
• Civil society

The full program (as well as details of interest of those that can physically attend) is attached to this post.

I am looking forward to this forum. Not only it is a good opportunity to get our work known in one of those places where it matters, but it's also being organized by several interesting people I'm sure will have something interesting to contribute. And of course, we lacked time to build a better, more complete and more coherent proposal — but there is a good probability we will have further such contacts.

You might find interesting to read on the list we have been discussing; subscription seems to be open (although access to the archives is not — Maybe it will be later on? In any case, I'm saving a mbox ;-) )

Today we had a very interesting demonstration. People who know me for some time know I like to be a part of demonstrations, adding my voice to the people. And even though I know most demonstrations, as massive as they might be, have no real and tangible effect... Well, I try to be there.

Today we had a large demonstration in Mexico City of people angry with the government's tactics on the war on drugs — Have you been to Mexico before 2007? You will remember we have always had our problems, but violence was basically limited to keeping an eye open, not flashing your money/jewels, and not looking too touristy. We were, all in all, a quiet country — Known even as "the country where nothing happens, even if it happens".

Five years later, a good portion of the country lives really in war-like conditions, and close to 45,000 people have been killed. At some point about a year ago (where the body count was at ~22,000), our oh-so-bright de-facto president said that "only" 10% of them were civilians. If that is still the case, and if proportions are held, we can now talk about ~4,500 people killed just because they were there — Oh, but remember the country is not at war, and death penalty has very long been abolished, so we cannot give the other 90% a different status. We have had over 45,000 killed people. That means at least ~200,000 torn lifes.

About six weeks ago, the cry from a father who lost his son started getting heard. And no, I do not want to talk about specific names or anything like that — It is just the voice-bearer of many people who are fed up. Four days ago, he and a group of people left Cuernavaca city on a caravan and walked to Mexico city. Yesterday evening they arrived to the National University (UNAM), and were greeted by an amazing open-air concert: Mozart's Requiem.

Today, our day started very early. My mother wanted to help, as many more anonymous citizens did, so we started making and packing sandwiches and apples at ~5:30AM, delivered them to the camp where they were staying and grouping with other people, and came back home for our breakfast. Later, at around 9AM, as the demonstration started going by our house (we live a block from UNAM), my girlfriend, father and me started walking with them.

Why do I say this was a different demonstration than others I have been to?

1. Much longer. We walked for close to 16Km, for about five hours. Most demonstrations I have been part of are 3-5Km long
2. A different kind of support. I was surprised, even laughed at first when I saw a lady standing by us with a sign that read, «I cannot join you today, but I'm there in spirit». But then I saw more, more people that just went out of their houses to a point close to where we walked on, and just stayed there on the streets. Not walking, yes, but being part of it.
3. The march was silent — And yes, this is the first time I see it for true. At the very beginning we heard some people chanting, cheering, but the cheerers were requested not to be noisy. People wearing political parties' logos were requested not to wear them (as political parties are at an all-time low prestige). No, we were not silent for the whole 5 hours; we were talking with each other, but it felt... just very different from any other times.
4. Not only were people supporting, but this is the first time I saw this amount of people wanting to materially help. As I said, my mother delivered a little breakfast for 50 people, for those that slept at the camp, for those that had already walked ~70Km. But all along the road we were offered oranges, cookies, water, bread... Whatever people were able to offer, to somehow help. Very nice feeling of solidarity.
5. Contrary to all other times, we were really spread out, it was a very low density walk, os it was quite pleasant. Of course, I have not even seen an estimation of the number of participants... And I doubt anyboy can be decently close to it

Will this change anything? I doubt it. I am happy that for the first time, the de-facto president (remember a large percentage of Mexicans still believe he lost the presidential election, and it was only due to his lack of legitimacy that he pushed the army to the streets to start this war on drugs) is recognizing that this might not be the best strategy but it is the only one he has... People are still, despite what I saw many felt, very far from organized. And, yes, no short-term concrete proposals are made on how to stop the killing — I feel the population agrees that drugs should be legalized and regulated, that would at least shift the problem, reduce the direct violence (and money) related to it... But, of course, it is plainly not feasible with our current reality.

Anyway, after a 5hr walk today (and even after a nice nap and shower), I don't want to dig into hypotheses anymore. I just wanted to share about a very interesting and different experience I had the opportunity to be part of.

As you know, I very often advocate using the bycicle as the main means of transportation in Mexico City. The city is very apt for biking through it, and contrary to the fears of mostly everybody, the city is neither aggressive nor as dangerous as people say.

However, I have seen cyclists which seem to be looking for the best ways to be hit by a car, or to hit a pedestrian.

Yesterday, I read this note in La Jornada: The local Environment Secretary calls cyclists to respect vial regulations.

Many cyclists assume they are a special case of pedestrians, and zig-zag as they please between the road and the walkway, or just stay in the walkway. That is dangerous, both to pedestrians and to themselves. You might find children, elderly or motion-challenged people on your way. Also, not only will pedestrians only expect other people in the walkway, moving at their pace or slightly more, but cars will also not expect somebody moving at 10-20Km/h. A car driver pulling out of his garage, or crossing a street, will not have enough warning when he sees you, and you are very likely to end up in an accident.

Since ~5 years ago, Mexico City is growing a grid of Metrobús and confined trolebús cero emisiones (trolleybus) lanes. Many cyclists use those lanes — That is VERY dangerous. Public transport vehicles are large, have a lot of inertia, and will take longer to react to finding you ahead of them. Besides, they can go way faster than a regular bike (~60Km/h for metrobús, ~40Km/h for trolebús), and have to stop every couple of blocks. So, you will be uncomfortable if trailing them, and you will be a liability to ~100 people if you go ahead of them. Besides, it is illegal to drive in the confined lanes if you are not a public, semimassive transport vehicle!

Surprisingly many people have argued they prefer riding their bicycles against the traffic — I think they prefer staring at Death into its blue, glowing eyes (or into its long, thin whiskers)... By far, most cars that hit a bicycle do so from the side, when crossing a road. And if you arrive at a crossing from the wrong way, the way a driver does not expect you, don't expect the driver to be aware of you. Also, in the much less likely event of a car running into you, would it be better to be hit at 80Km/h (60Km/h of the car plus 20Km/h of your own speed on a full frontal crash), or at 40Km/h (substracting instead of adding)? Yes, some people say that looking at the car will allow you to maneuver – How far in advance would you know a car coming from the front will hit you? One second? That's 22 meters at 80Km/h (again, if you realize the 60Km/h car is heading straight to you, at 20Km/h). Too short notice for you to do anything — Any maneuver will most likely end in an accident. And the driver would not be so much to blame, as he would not be anticipating you riding against the traffic.

Make sure you get seen. By night, always use proper lights (red on the back, white on the front, and reflective material to the sides). Day or night, wear bright, reflective clothes (or over-clothes material). Act in a predictable fashion. Remember you are riding a vehicle and are subject to the same rules any driver is — A cyclist is not exempt from driving correctly! Do not jump red lights. Never ride on the walkway. Do your best to enjoy the ride.

And ride. Yes, ride, take the streets, enjoy the streets. But don't attempt to drive the traffic out of it — The streets belong to us all, and we can all share them.

PS — I also saw this note in the same paper: Sunday Rides in "Campo Militar Número Uno". The main military field was open as a park this weekend! I have to make sure it is regularly open — I am definitively going there!

Hrmh... I am listening to a local news radio station. Of course, what I am about to write lacks information and insight — but it follows a conversation I have had with several groups of friends.

Our de-facto president has decreed that the tuition for private schools will be deducted from the Impuesto sobre la renta (revenue/profit tax) up to a given tuition level (IIRC up to MX$2000 a month per child per school). The interviewed subsecretary said they expect this deduction will reach MX$13,000 million, around US$1,000 million. This is, about a third of what is assigned to the National University (UNAM).

At a first sight, this sounds good. However, I just thought about a discussion I have had with many friends. This money the government will hand back to the taxpayers has to be cut from somewhere (after all, we are not in a country with huge superavit or anything like that).

Why does this sound unfair ot me? Because it benefits the few in perjudice of the many. I did a quick search, and found this work based on numbers published by INEGI ten years ago: According to the last table, the money spent on private education was between 5% and 10% of that spent on public education — Of course, it is almost impossible to infer the number of students from this alone. I know I could find authoritative data on this regard by searching a bit more, but after all I don't want to spend all (work!) evening on a blog post unless it creates some discussion. Lets say, just for the sake of the exercise, that this means that ~3% of the country's students learn in a private school.

In Mexico, the quality of the basic public education (primary/secondary, ages 6 to 18) has fallen hugely in the last decades. Even when I was to school (but not when my parents), the first subjective sign that a family had broken the low-income barrier is that they were finally able to send their children to private schools. Because, no matter how bad they are, public schools are perceived to be worse. Of course, I was among the "lucky" ones to be in a private school. Higher education (universitary level) is still way better ranged.

Anyway... I want to get this post over with. Why do I oppose this subsidies/tax devolution? Because it will lead to widen the difference between private and public education. And because it will be benefical only for medium-high and high classes — People who are formaly employed (as I am) do not present a tax declaration, so we won't get any deductions. Between ⅓ and ½ of the country's economically active population work informally (from selling in the street to covering up huge transactions in large locals). Most of the population don't (directly) pay "impuesto sobre la renta", and will not get the benefit of this subsidy.

This money has to be taken from other sources in order to be given to private education. If the government wants to improve the education for everybody, why not assign it to the public sector? To specific areas in the public sector, if they don't want to hand it over to the (yes, very, incredibly) corrupt SNTE (National Union of Education Workers)?

For those of you who follow me through anything other than Planet Debian (who will surely tolerate this repetition):

Interesting but frightful things are happening in North African countries. We saw what happened in Tunisia some days ago. Now, Egypt is a way larger, way more populous... And, dare I say, way more important country. Also, it is a country which borders Israel, where I lived in for ~18 months, and to which –although I am today unaffiliated– is very important for me. And what happens in Egypt will surely shape the whole mid-East.

So, here goes a copy of Mohammed Sameer's post — Not just a link to it, as he might have to take it down. Of course, Mohammed, if you in any way think I should delete this, please please tell me, and I will comply immediately.

Egypt has been fighting for freedom already for 3 days now.

The whole country has experienced a large number of street demonstrations and protests within the last 3 days to be continued also on Friday, the 28th of January and afterwards.

The protests' main goal is to oust dictator Hosni Mubarak's regime, which has been in power for almost 30 years.

We want him out.

A massacre has happened in Suez. Police used live ammunition and tear gas. There are unconfirmed rumors that the army might interfere.

Even a bigger protest is supposed to take place a few hours from now. After the Prayer on Friday.

The internet has been shutdown completely. Egypt is no longer online since Friday, the 28th of January 00:45 AM.

Text messages to cell phones have been cut off too and all cell phones services will be following. No one knows exactly the intentions of the regime but it doesn't sound good.

Please help us.
Please blog about it in English and in all languages.
Please spread the news everywhere.
Please talk to media.
Please petition your government if that will help.

If there's anything that you can do, please do it and help us save the country and the people.

More news from twitter #jan25.

...From what I read from Israeli sources, what worries them –and many people around the world– is that, although Egypt is formally a democratic country, the ruling party has seen towards having basically no oposition — Besides the stubborn Islamic Brotherhood (very akin to Hamas). Now, the Islamic Brotherhood (as well as Hamas, and as well as most other Islamic regimes I know off, although I might be way mistaken) have got huge popular support because... They are true to their beliefs. In short, they are not corrupt — Something that cannot be said about many political organizations around the globe. They are true to their word. And although many of us shiver at thinking of their word getting more power... It is only the Egyptians who should have a say on who rules Egypt.

I honestly hope the Egyptian people get their long-owed self-determination. Of course, I hope Tunisians also get it, and not just a mirage of it. And every people, including us poor Mexicans who have neither had a chance to rule our destiny. And I hope it is a change for good, for tolerance, for peaceful coexistance with the neighbours, even if they are in many ways the rivals.

[Update] I just found out that, as expected, the news have reached Slashdot: Egypt shuts off all Internet access. I'm sure you will find lots of more information there.