Mikey Boldt

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Archives for December 2011

SOPA Revisited

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A family member sent out an email with information on the new petition to veto SOPA, and he asked for my take from the technical side. This is based on my reply.

I am aware of SOPA, and the senate version called PROTECT IP. They are bad. There’s a good video at http://vimeo.com/31100268 that explains a bit.

I don’t know a lot about the technical details, but on a high-level, “The bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who requests the court orders, the actions could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites.”1

Frankly, I find the scary part to be giving US government and copyright holders the right to control what websites we can access. As if our media isn’t controlled enough already (see this for an example), this would remove the main open exchange of ideas and information we currently have. Sounds like China.

Since you asked about technical details, here is an article that looks at some of the ways SOPA could be implemented by ISPs. Pretty technical (I wouldn’t bother reading it if “DNS” doesn’t mean anything to you), but it gives a nice concise overview if you have the background.

Though I have admittedly not followed this very closely, and I’m typically not much of an activist, I have signed a prior petition and contacted my representatives, blogged about it, and posted on twitter and facebook about it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some good resources for doing more.

So, yes, I will be signing this new petition and contacting my representatives. Thank you for sharing the update and the new petition!

Disciplined Email via Emacs Gnus

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I’m a believer in the Inbox Zero philosophy; that is, I don’t like my brain to be in my inbox. If I have more than about 5 read emails sitting around, I get uncomfortable. I recently noticed myself getting sloppy with email, so I watched the Merlin Mann’s original Inbox Zero video for a refresher. The part of the video where Mann describes typical email processing as a deli chef who reads the orders multiple times, organizes them in different ways, but never actually makes a sandwich. Email is a support tool to help us actually do things. It is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

So, I took a look at the tools and processes I use for email. Since email is text, IMHO it belongs in emacs. I have been using emacs mew for a while now, since I like how it allows you to keep using emacs when it’s doing IMAP operations. I also use k9mail on my Android phone to check email hourly. My plan was to process email in mew daily, and keep in touch with the rest on my phone.

My analysis is I got sloppy in three aspects:

  • I read too much email on my phone. I was e.g. catching up on mailing lists on my phone, when really that should be done at my daily mew session.
  • In my daily mew check, I would leave mail for processing later.

To combat this, I started using Gnus instead of mew. The key feature of Gnus is that it reads email like a newsgroup reader–that is, once an email is marked is “read,” by default it no longer shows up in your inbox. This provides a constant reminder that email should be read once and processed, not left in the inbox to reread and process later.

As a side benefit, I find Gnus to display email beautifully. HTML emails show inline images properly. It displays messages properly threaded. I love the overall look-and-feel.

This is my current plan for disciplined email. In a month or two of using Gnus, I’ll check in to see how my email processing is going.

Fight SOPA and PROTECT IP

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For better or worse, I don’t get into political action much. However, this strikes a chord with me. Current legislation, namely the Stop Online Privacy Act (bill) and PROTECT IP (bill), aim to extend the reach of the US government and copyright holders against websites they believe to be in violation of intellectual property rights. Here’s a video explaining some of the details–watch it to the end, where there are some notes on more recent versions of the bills.  The EFF has some great resources to fight SOPA and PROTECT IP.

Emacs: ssh with Tab Completion

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Something that’s bugged me is that when I ssh into another machine inside a shell in emacs, tab completion gets still behaves as if I’m on the local machine. Just by chance, I once started a shell when using TRAMP to edit a remote file via scp, and noticed that the shell was on the remote machine and tab completion worked! So, I used this little in a function to start a remote with tab completion without manually opening a file on the remote machine first:

(defun remote-shell (&optional host)
  "Open a remote shell to a host."
  (interactive)
  (with-temp-buffer
    (let ((host (or host (read-string "Host: "))))
      (cd (concat "/scp:" host ":"))
      (shell (concat "*" host "*")))))

(defun myserver-shell () (interactive) (remote-shell "myserver"))