creativecommons

identi.ca - a microblogging service based on Free Software, AGPL, and Creative Commons

Sun, 2009-09-06 19:09 — Uwe Hermann

After a long time of ignoring (or at least not using) micro-blogging services such as Twitter, I recently tried the Free-Software based identi.ca service, and I'm beginning to like it.

The choice of service was pretty obvious — while Twitter uses proprietary software and has custom Terms of Service, identi.ca is based on software under the GNU Affero General Public License, and the contents are CC-BY 3.0 licensed.

The code behind identi.ca is called Laconica (recently renamed to StatusNet) and is hosted at gitorious:

 $ git clone git://gitorious.org/laconica/mainline.git

My account details are available under http://identi.ca/uwehermann, where I'm posting smaller announcements and notes about random technical stuff I'm working on (slightly more regularly than in this blog). Sometimes I use the web interface for posting, but using the Jabber integration available at identi.ca is even more convenient. You can both be notified of new posts ("dents") in real time via Jabber, as well as post your own dents from within your Jabber client, which is nice.

identi.ca seems to become more popular every day, which will hopefully make the proprietary Twitter pretty much irrelevant sooner or later.

How to find copies or modified versions of your photos online, e.g. using TinEye

Tue, 2009-07-28 15:21 — Uwe Hermann

I found out about TinEye a few minutes ago. It's a nice little search engine which allows you to find exact copies of a photo or even similar versions of it. You can either upload an image for comparison with their database, or point TinEye to a URL of the image you want to check.

For instance, checkout this this search for my unreasonably popular "Sugar" photo. Or have a look at this list of sample searches.

The site is also used in Wikipedia for detecting the original source of uploaded images.

I know there is some other website which also allows similarity search of images, but I just can't remember the URL. Please leave a comment if you know of other such sites, thanks!

List of my Creative Commons licensed photos being used elsewhere

Sun, 2009-02-08 15:28 — Uwe Hermann

As you may know I maintain a Creative Commons licensed photoblog at my website. I'm also cross-posting some of the better photos to my flickr page.

Even with my humble, and not really widely-known little photoblog, you can already see the Creative Commons license's effects on media sharing and remixing/reusing kick in. Quite a number of my photos have already been used by other people for various different purposes (blogs posts, articles, even album covers), including some of the "bigger" sites such as the Wall Street Journal Blog or Cult of Mac...

Here's the list of places I know of where my photos are used. Please leave a comment if you spot more of them in the wild. I intend to keep this list updated as more of my photos appear elsewhere.

(Oh, and I have no idea why people seem to be so obsessed with my "Sugar" photo...)

Webcam

Mahalo: How to Install a Webcam ("human-powered search engine" entry)

Two Flowers

So She Tells You: The Flower (blog post)

Nine Inch Nails album "The Slip" released under Creative Commons license

Sun, 2008-05-11 00:59 — Uwe Hermann

You might have already heard of it — the new Nine Inch Nails album "The Slip" has been released by them under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 US license. Yep, that's right, it's totally legal to download it from the web — and use it for any non-commercial purposes!

It's a bit annoying that they want your email address, though. Nothing that bugmenot.com (or similar) cannot fix, but still. Luckily, the files are now also available from archive.org! This, and the fact that the music is CC-licensed allowed me to "play" one of the songs in my Creative Commons music podcast (RSS), and more will likely follow.

Donations for a good cause

Mon, 2006-12-25 01:51 — Uwe Hermann

You still got some money left after buying all those Christmas presents? How about donating some of it for a good cause:

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is entering 2007 as one of the 10 most visited websites in the world. That's a great proof of our success. However, with this success comes a new set of challenges and responsibilities. As we plan for the future of Wikipedia and all of the Wikimedia projects, our two most important goals now are the reliability of our content and the long-term sustainability of every project in which we are involved.

To meet these goals we have a lot of work to do, so I am asking for your help. In the coming year, the Wikimedia Foundation anticipates dramatically increasing spending to keep up with server and traffic capacity demands, add new staff on the organizational level, improve our software and develop methods to better ensure high quality content, all while making progress toward our goal of giving free knowledge to everyone.

-- Florence Devouard, Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation
Creative Commons

It's once again time to show your support for Creative Commons. Digital technologies are connecting people in ways that were never before possible – but that network is fragile. Creative Commons needs your support to help enable a participatory culture – a culture in which everyone can actively engage in the creativity that surrounds us. We need your support to assure access to cultural, scientific, and educational content that has been pre-cleared for use by its authors.
Free Software Foundation (FSF)

Freedom is more precious than anything else we have and we need to protect it while we still can.

-- Eben Moglen in his FSF year end video appeal (OGG, 24 MB)
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

EFF is a nonprofit group of passionate people — lawyers, technologists, volunteers, and visionaries — working to protect your digital rights.
Tor: anonymity online

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

Or how about some organizations not directly related to Free Culture or Free Software?

Amnesty International (AI)

Amnesty International (AI) is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights. AI’s vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards.
Red Cross

The International Red Cross (and Red Crescent Movement) is an international humanitarian movement whose stated mission is to protect human life and health, to ensure respect for the human being, and to prevent and alleviate human suffering, without any discrimination based on nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or political opinions.

Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Menu

Latest image

Recent comments

My identi.ca posts

My del.icio.us bookmarks

My Other Sites