Copyrighteous

I'm giving a talk today as part of Media in Transition 5 (MiT5) conference organized by the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. The topic this year year is right up my alley: "creativity, ownership, and collaboration in the digital age.

Everyone else is talking about free culture issues so I'm branching out a bit and delivering a paper I wrote with Harvard Law School and Harvard Free Culture's Elizabeth Stark on "the politics of piracy" with a focus on political action around P2P filesharing. We'll have a paper in the proceedings which I'll post with our talk notes and slides.

You can find information on our talk on how to attend on the conference website.

Today's weather report for Eastern Massachusetts includes both a flood and fire warning.

At DebConf7 in Edinburgh, I'm going to moderate a derivatives round table. At DebConf5 I put on a similar sort of panel. Here's the description I submitted (please ignore the placeholder list of panelists on the DC7 site):

The Debian-Derivers round-table will bring together representatives of organizations involved in producing Debian derived distributions to discuss the political, organizational, and social barriers to collaboration with Debian and with each other.

The idea is to bring together a representative group of folks from our derivative community -- groups like Ubuntu, Linspire, Knoppix, Guadalinex, Maemo, etc. etc. -- and provide a space where they can describe their successful and unsuccessful experiences working with Debian and with each other. On the other side, it will give Debian developers a chance to ask questions of the group, both individually and as a whole.

My first step, of course, is to build that panel. If you have worked on or represent a Debian derivative and think you will be at DebConf, you may have a spot on my panel. Give me an email at mako@debian.org and lets talk!

With the Debian 4.0 (etch) release parties out of the way, it's time to devote a little energy to celebrating the forthcoming release of Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn).

A few of us from the nascent Massachusetts Loco Team in the Boston/Cambridge area have planned a release party -- a Feisty Fiesta if you will -- for Saturday April 21, 2007 19:30 at the Cambridge Brewing Company.

For more details, answers to your questions, or to RSVP for the party so we can reserve a big enough table, please visit the party wiki page.

I think it's good exercise to write on ruled or graph paper but to attempt to ignore the lines on the paper completely.

Bostonian and Cantabrigian Debianistas should waste no time in celebrating Etch's release. Join a group of us celebrating the release tonight (April 8) at Grendel's Den in Harvard Square.

Things you should know:

• We'll meet up at 21:00.
• Directions are online.
• Food is either half-price or $1 with a drink.

Call me if you're lost in the neighborhood or have questions. I hope to see a few of you there. New faces are, of course, welcome.

Last November, I used a Venn diagram to complain about (and explain) the fact that there while there were several RFID blocking wallets for sale, they were all made of leather. Many people, who like me prefered to eschew leather wallets, left comments, blogged, and emailed me in strong agreement.

Mike Aiello, the proprietor of DFIRWEAR, found my blog. He emailed me not longer after my post to tell me that he had started looking into vegan materials to make a wallet that would fit my needs! Today, a vegan RFID-blocking wallet made it onto his site and is now available to be ordered!

It's very exciting to see that what started out as a mild and humorous expression of dissatisfaction could quickly culminate in the creation of a new product.

Mika and I each just ordered one. If you care about your privacy, you should too!