Much of the open source community uses Freenode for IRC communication. The entire Ubuntu project uses it. I know that the Python community uses it quite heavily. The local hackerspace, Noisebridge, even has a channel (#noisebridge). In fact, every project that I know of that has a public face on IRC uses Freenode except Mozilla projects.

Given the cross-group nature of open source, where people often participate in many projects depending on their interests, I really think that Mozilla should move to Freenode. The current situation with irc.mozilla.org feels like a semi-private walled garden. It is a public server, yes, but it is cut off from many of our natural allies. Let’s face it, people are fundamentally lazy in many ways and the extra work that it takes to join another IRC server when someone is already active on Freenode means that many people probably don’t bother to come to the Mozilla IRC server.

A while back, as part of my work in the Mozilla QA organization, I set up #mozilla-quality on Freenode and submitted the paperwork to reqister Mozilla QA as the owner of that channel. We don’t have a lot of people drop into the channel but we get a few irregularly, often looking for help. I have personally seen that when, in response to questions that they want to direct at developers, they are directed to irc.mozilla.org, most of them do not go to the directed channels on the server.

It would be quite easy to register ownership of “mozilla-” on Freenode and to move the bulk of IRC conversations to that network. I think it would be a win-win situation for working with community there and would make Mozilla a lot more accessible to others.

This is something that will probably need to be debated and discussed in newsgroups but I wanted to post something here before beginning that discussion in order to see what the readers of planet.mozilla.org felt about the matter. If you have thoughts on this, please comment.

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All of this makes me a good candidate to go all digital, along with being a complete computer geek. I spend most of my time reading words on a screen for my day job. When the Kindle DX came out, I bought one because the high DPI screens are much nicer than reading an LCD (you do really have to see one to appreciate it) and because the DX had native PDF support. For my school program and scholastic interests, I wound up with a lot of PDF files of articles to read and this way I didn’t have to print them out. I’ve bought a lot of books for the Kindle since I got mine and I really have enjoyed using the device. One of the big problems of the Kindle and similar devices is the non-transferability of the books. I’d rather have books in an open format like EPUB or even PDF than the DRM-laden Kindle format. As has been pointed out, when you buy a Kindle book, you are really long-term leasing the book, not owning it. I’ve worked around this to some degree by seeking (and often finding) pirated versions of the same books that I own in more open formats. I don’t even feel vaguely bad about this. After all, I have already paid for the book. I’m just getting a more suitable archival copy of it. In fact, I’ve been doing this for paper books that I own as well. This gives me more room to clear out my shelf space from many pounds of dead tree.

I have been expecting for a while that the Kindle format would be cracked. Given the cracking of DVDs and even Blu-Ray, I knew it was only a matter of time. No DRM scheme will survive the interest of enough talented individuals. Only one person has to be smarter than the creators, as Cory Doctorow has pointed out, and then everyone else can learn from that person. Well, that day has come, at least partially. It has been reported recently that the Kindle DRM has been hacked. As it turns out, this is not entirely true. Kindle books, while externally looking the same, come in more than one format. The Kindle supports (and Amazon sells) books using the Mobipocket format without DRM (.mobi), Amazon’s topaz format books (.tpz), and Amazon’s DRM-restricted Mobipocket format (AZW). The Amazon topaz format has not been hacked yet. What has been hacked is the Kindle form of the mobipocket format that added DRM. This format is a format based on the Open eBook standard. Most Kindle books are actually the same .mobi books that you can possibly by from other retailers but tweaked for Amazon DRM. (Well, actually, Amazon has a LOT more than any other retailer but they are still mobiformat books for the most part…) Some publishers use the topaz format but it seems to entirely be up to the publisher to choose what they want to create based on the instructions for creating a Kindle book that I’ve read. There are a lot of tools for working with mobipocket format, which is basically just HTML with some special additions and tweaks.

The hack uses a combination of the Amazon for PC application for Windows and two python scripts. One script extracts the books from the Amazon for the PC application when it creates a session for reading the book and the other script strips off the mobipocket DRM, leaving an unprotected mobipocket format book. I tested this out by firing up a Windows XP virtual machines (since I run OS X), installing python and the Amazon for PC, and downloading the two scripts. You fire up the main script (called “unswindle“), which then starts the Amazon for PC application. You then open the book that you want to extract and close the application, unswindle grabs the book and fires up the mobidedrm script to strip off the DRM. I looked at my bought content, as an experiment, and it turned out that out of more than 50 books that I owned, only five or so were in topaz format. The rest were mobipocket books with DRM. I was able to extract a book that I had bought and then fire up Calibre, an open source ebook reader and reformatting tool, and view the book completely outside of any Amazon application.

It will be interesting to see what Amazon will (or can) do to stop this. They’ve updated their PC application once but the author of the script simply made an update and it worked again. While the Amazon application updates by default, users can turn this off. At that point, Amazon will have to make a choice between cutting off users who haven’t updated the application or letting the hack continue to work (since they can’t change the way they do DRM without cutting off users unless they update the application).

It is an interesting problem. As a number of people have pointed out, having no ebooks doesn’t really get rid of piracy either. There have been text file or PDF versions of popular books floating around the net for more than ten years. You can’t really stop a dedicated person from either typing a book in or scanning a book and running OCR on it. For a lot of people, a scanned OCR’d book is “good enough” for them. There is no DRM in the world that can stop that from happening, which makes books an entirely different problem than say music or movies. The printed book is not an analog hole that can be plugged. I’ve ripped the spines off of paperbacks and scanned them before, not for distribution but simply because I was tired of having the paper copy of a reference book on my shelf taking up space. I never bothered to OCR mine, just leaving them as high dpi image-based PDFs. Most books are still under 10 megabytes in size and this isn’t much in an age when people have giant music collections where a single song is easily three to to eight megabytes in size. Print is cheap. I found the process to be tedious but pretty easy if you own a scanner.

Like I said, it was only a matter of time until the DRM was hacked and this is probably the first salvo in what will be another ongoing DRM war between publishers of media and their own customers.

Update: Updated to clarify that there are two book formats, not three. I was confusing Amazons mobiformat with DRM with unprotected mobiformat. The only currently uncracked format is topaz.

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Towards the end of helping Iranians get access to the Internet, I want to link to some resources, both specific and general.

Here are two ways to set up proxies (one for Windows, one for OS X):

1. How to setup a proxy for Iran citizens (for Windows!)
2. How To Set Up An Anonymous Proxy For Iranians Using Squid on Mac OS X

I would also suggest the easy option of setting up a Tor node. This adds to the overall goodness of the Tor network anyway.

Anonymous, strangely enough, seems to be interested in helping as well (http://iran.whyweprotest.net/). Their site has a nice forum with all sorts of information geared more towards the less skilled (which is really necessary), as well as helping people track what is going on. They are using Tor Hidden Services as well, which is a sort of parasitic Internet running within the Tor network.

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He said:

“I don’t know if Tor is the end-all-be-all, but the basic point would be: browser-based, quasi-auto-configuring anonymous darknets (that set up and tear down without a trace), and look something like other (e.g. HTTP) traffic would be a boon to free speech.

Until the government decided that it was aiding and abetting pedophilia, and banned it. Thankfully the first amendment does not apply there.”

On Twitter, Vinay Gupta, of Hexayurt fame, suggested:

“http://guptaoption.com/cheapid == identity backbone for dealing with things like distributed voting. You want timestamping and good, clear access to the HTTPS certificate chains to be able to encrypt messages to other users using client side certs.”

I had figured that I’d get more commentary than that on something that is very relevant to current news. I mean that this is blue sky territory, people. I know that there are more ideas on enabling openness and freedom through Firefox, Thunderbird, and in the platform than none at all. There have to be ideas out there on how to extend these to enable, for example, anonymous communication, routing around censorship, etc.

Meanwhile, I heard two stories while driving from work in the car on NPR yesterday relating to the use of Twitter, social networking, and the Internet in the current protests. I found the pieces immediately brought to mind the importance of the Internet and enabling openness as a core necessity.

Check out In Iran, A Struggle Over Cyberspace and The Challenges To Turning Off The Internet In Iran. The latter story even has the obligatory Jonathan Zittrain quote.

Update: Now Zittrain has posted in relation to this matter as well. I seem to be timely as this just went up: Why the PC matters.

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Watching the twitterstorm around the current situation with the Iranian elections has been fairly thought provoking. The Iranian protesters are completely shut out of the official media in the form of newspapers, radio, and television in Iran. These are under the thumb of the state at the service of a man that may (or may not) have stolen an election for himself. The only viable option is the use of the net and other direct media communication, such as SMS. Of course, the state can block access to net resources and has turned off the cell networks at various points. Like the situation in China at times, people have found ways around these blockages to continue to report and communicate with each other.

Going back to my day job here at the Mozilla Corporation, I wonder what role, if any, we, the Mozilla community, can play in enabling freedom and openness. We aren’t specifically political as a group in the sense that we have no vested interest in battling specific governments. In fact, it is often in our best interest to be and be seen as neutral in such things. That said, we are also interested in an open Internet and an open Internet, by its very nature, has a political component because it is the antithesis of the state controlled firewalls and mechanisms of control that various authoritarian regimes like to put into place.

To the end of promoting an open Internet, is there more that Mozilla could do with software to help enable that process? Opera Unite has gotten some press during the last few days for facilitating the direct sharing of information over the net, though it reminds me of the defunct AllPeers software that went away last year. I have friends that work on the Tor Project, which has the explicit goal of allowing anonymous communication between people. Tor actually targets itself to helping dissidents, bloggers, and others that need to route around state blocking and tracking.

What kind of tools could Mozilla incorporate into Firefox, for example, with its more than 100 million users, that could help people in the future? I’ve advocated for Mozilla to support the Tor Project before (which didn’t really get beyond getting more Firefox bugs fixed). I’d like to see us help create the next generation of tools or even support and build in the next generation for anonymous communication, networking, encryption and other mechanisms. I’ve pointed out before how painful it is to send and receive encrypted e-mail within Thunderbird (or through webmail services like gmail) even though it has become clear that governments routinely snoop on e-mail (even the American NSA) well beyond what people have suspected.

One of the reasons that I work at MoCo is that we aren’t driven by a profit motive, being owned by a non-profit, and have an idea of social good built into what we do. I’d like to see how that could be explicitly expanded. I’d love to hear suggestions as I have only the most basic of ideas (such as making encryption for communication easier or transparent or adding jabber support into the Mozilla platform) and I’m sure others have far better thought out ideas.

Of course, I could be out to lunch and most people don’t care about such things. I somehow doubt if this is true though.

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I encourage people to watch it. I’ve embedded it below but you can find it here as well. (The link at fora.tv is to a much higher quality streaming version.)

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I encourage people to go take a look at them if they are interested in this sort of thing.

You can see the Other Al doing his presentation on the use of Real Names below (unless you’re reading this through a Planet, which nukes embedded video…):

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Luckily, I found a great team to work on – I’ll be working in the Developer Division (a first for me), on the team that works on JavaScript but also has a broader charter to help make the open web platform great.

What does this mean? From the outside, some things will certainly change – I’m no longer an appropriate person, for example, to give talks on specifically about IE – but a lot of things won’t. I still expect to attend and participate in a fair number of web conferences, and still plan to speak at a number of them – but not just about IE. I still intend to continue as HTML WG chair, at least for the time being – in fact, as part of focusing more holistically on the web platform as a whole (and defocusing on IE product delivery), I expect I’ll start participating more in a couple of other groups.

I’m not sure what to make of this. I like Chris a lot. He’s a good guy and I’ve known him for about 13 years. Part of me wishes that he’d leave Microsoft but contribute to the open web somewhere else, unencumbered by Microsoft’s issues or agenda and visibly separate from IE and its history. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

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Fennec has hit a nice milestone today. As Brad mentions on his blog, Alpha 1 is available for Windows Mobile now. This is a big step as we’ve only previously shipped versions for Nokia’s Maemo platform based on Linux. Given the installed based of Windows Mobile for cell phones, the amount of people able to try out Fennec has gone up by a couple of orders of magnitude. Brad gives instructions on his blog for installation but I wanted to include Madhava’s video below demonstrating Fennec on Windows Mobile. I’ve been quite pleased with our switch to a CSS-based user interface in the last two weeks. There is a lot of work ahead but this is a big step.

I also want to call out to Joel Maher and Clint Talbert for their excellent QA work on this Alpha. They’ve been working like crazy on this for a while.

Fennec – alpha 1 for Windows Mobile from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

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When I had a first generation phone, I admit that I jailbroke it, installed third party applications (including things like ssh) and generally had a good time with it. About two months ago, I bought the iPhone 3G (and my wife will be getting my old iPhone when her contract with T-Mobile is up in the next month). At that point, I started using applications from the app store. First the free ones but now I’ve paid for a few, like Colloquy, the IRC client. We use IRC as an essential part of our work at Mozilla and being able to get into a channel is very useful. I have Enso the meditation timer, Twitterific, Facebook, iGo the Go app, and others. I find myself using it all the time.

One thing that continues to bother me is the lack of a real keyboard. I used to have a Sprint Treo, which is what the iPhone replaced, and I loved many aspects of it. I didn’t appreciate the chiclet keyboard except that it was an actual keyboard of sorts, which made a huge difference for me. I typed out a multi-paragraph e-mail to a Mozilla higher-up this morning in a coffee shop on my iPhone and, let me tell you, the experience there blows chunks.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I realized when I was typing (and I’ve realized it before) that if I could use any one of a number of small, portable and foldable Bluetooth keyboards that are available, that I wouldn’t even need my laptop on many occassions. The iPhone screen is very nice, the connectivity is pretty good and can use wifi, 3G, or EVDO networks. What it really lacks for me is a an input method that doesn’t suck. Why is this the case? Well, Apple purposefully cripples the Bluetooth stack that comes with the iPhone in order to only work with Apple designated hardware or various headsets and nothing else. There is no real reason to do this. What damage would it do to let me use a stowaway keyboard with my iPhone so I could write real e-mail or, my word, blog posts? I’ve got a Wordpress app that will let me post to my blog here but I never use it? Why? Well, hunting and pecking for 30 minutes on a soft-keyboard to write a post that would take me five minutes on a laptop is a complete waste of time.

I know that there are people out there hacking the Apple Bluetooth stack in order to open it up but I really don’t want to go back to having to jailbreak my phone (and possibly bricking it on the next update) simply to use a freakin’ keyboard with it.

All right, Saturday anti-Apple rant (written on a new Macbook Pro) done. Enjoy your day! :-)

Update: As one commenter noted, I should have said “Edge” instead of “EVDO” since the iPhone doesn’t support the latter. My mistake.

Update II: I don’t care if it makes battery life worse (ha ha) on my iPhone or somehow degrades the “Apple experience.” I just want to be able to type on a freakin’ portable keyboard with real keys so I don’t have to lug a laptop around in order to write a freakin’ blog post or e-mail. Am I in crazytown here?

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