OneWebDay 2008
We decided, since the 22nd of September this year, it is also 100 years from the declaration of the Bulgarian independence and the peak of the celebrations will be precisely in Veliko Tarnovo, to make the Internet Day even more exciting and we will invite 100 people to release 100 balloons with messages on the 21st of September, apart from the other programme, now being prepared in Veliko Tarnovo. This way we want to wish for the Internet independence to be inviolable.
Firefox BarCamp Sofia
Sofia Firefox Camp will be held on the 11th of May in Sofia. The event will gather Firefox fans, developers, users and even enemies of the software. This will be the first Barcamp, devoted only to Firefox. Everyone is invited! More info can be found here (in bulgarian only)
Help to bulgarian team @ SeoContest2008
What is the differences between whitebox and blackbox testing? - Read and help SeoContest2008
A Month Later
It’s been a month and a few days since the protest against the regulation of the Ministry of Foreign and the State Agency for Information Technologies and Communication, also known as The Regulation for Internet-bugging. I collected many impressions and many reactions. The protest, even though not numerous, released a lot of reactions from the press, televisions, radios and more than 4000 websites.
We participated in talk-shows, morning shows; we met members of the Parliament, attorneys, the Ombudsman and many experts.
The problem is serious and it goes beyond the violations imposed by Regulation No 40.
The question is to what extent the citizens’ rights should be limited in the name of security and what do we have to sacrifice in order to be sure that we are living safely?
This question has many aspects, of course, and when the society is frightened it is ready to pay whatever it costs just to prevent a tragedy or not to repeat it.
An example? After the train-tragedy, Bulgarian State Railways rushed a bill for listing the passengers’ names and gave rights to the station staff to rifle the luggage and thus to forbid carrying alcohol. In the common tragic and panicked thinking the bill was accepted without complaints from the society, but we all know that this measure is more than useless.
One-way presentation of news is another big problem, which is not recognised by the society and that’s why it is very easily manipulated.
An example? The Ministry of Foreign Affairs says: “We caught this paedophile and that drug-boss by using Skype, it’s so good that we are collecting data”. And the herd follows the leader.
Levels
Another big and typical Bulgarian issue is that everyone wants to dig his own hole. Before the protest nobody had heard of the regulation and nobody recognised the problems it carried. After there was some noise around it, many “organisations” started “working” on it in their own direction and understanding or not the issue they keep “digging” and instead of uniting in the name of civil rights or in the name of abrogation of the regulation, they are trying to become great as being the first ones trying to do something and thus preventing others from overtaking, but they lack the thought of doing the job.
Unification of interests is impossible in Bulgaria. Is it because of our culture or because of the confidence or the power of division it is just not working here and that’s why “Divide et impera!” is straight in the target, because we fight the big problem with small weapons instead of uniting and getting the big weapon on our side.
The Regulation No 40 problem is not only legal one, it is social and psychological; it goes to another dimension of confidence. Fighting it only with legal terms and arguments is a loss and it will only make it stronger and bigger in the future.
These are the things that impressed me.
If you are constructive persons, who are willing to help and work in the area of digital freedoms, you can join e-Frontier Bulgaria.
We need people from every single part and town in the country. Join us so we can defend our rights together. We need help.
A protest against Directive 2006/24/ЕC about data retention
A protest against Directive 2006/24/ЕC, which allows traffic data to be gathered for every single Internet user, was held yesterday (07.02.2008) in Sofia.
The demonstrators made it clear, that retention of e-mail correspondence, Internet traffic and any similar information, which is to be kept for 1 year, is directly violating the rights, laid in the Constitution of the Republic of Bulgaria and it cuts across all moral principles.
The demonstrators were also against the requirement, which states that the user should be identified by his/her IP address, together with other information such as personal citizen number, address on which the service is being used and the user’s full name.
Data retention gives the State enormous powers. With this tool it is able to watch and control its citizen’s personal lives, and this is in violation of the fundamental right of inviolability of personal life and protection of the secret of documentation. It is formally justified with the necessity of protection of the national security and crime prevention: namely terrorism and child pornography distribution
This regulation makes it obligatory for the providers of Internet services to keep and submit data on their expense, thus indirectly terminating smaller Internet providers and making the others invest huge amount and efforts to fulfill the requirement. The process of data retention is impossible without filtering all the packages which is risky, because the content may be read and directed in another direction; that was one of the numerous comments, heard at the protest.
People in Bulgaria don’t trust the authorities, who are supposed to keep and access the information, because of the number of violations done while keeping other personal data and because of the special characteristics of our political system. All these things add some more worries for our rights in the global net.
The campaign was covered by all majour Bulgarian TV networks, newspaper and electronic media. Electronic Frontier Bulgaria (EFB) representatives took part in several TV talk shows, debating the very same problem.
Electronic Frontier Bulgaria, who organized the protest, stated that next week they were going to attack the regulation in the Supreme Administrative Court and they were going to start discussion with political parties in order to find adequate answer to the Directive, which violates basic human rights. The Constitutional Court is expected to be approached, as well as broader informational campaign on the subject, which will be targeted on clarifying the seriousness of the regulation’s requirements.
What is Enterprise 2.0 Manager
This is the topic of my first article (in bulgarian) in a very new professional blog platform named MyKinda. My profession is Enterprise 2.0 Manager with some Community management obligations and I will describe in few articles what I do exactly.
MiKinda?
Lee Wilkins, a British entrepreneur living in Romania, soft launched a new eastern-European blog network called MyKinda. The network currently has blogs in just Romania, Bulgaria and Russia, but Wilkins says he’ll be launching in ten more eastern European countries soon, and eventually will cover the whole region. Each country will have six blogs, each one focused on a single topic: business/media, culture, lifestyle, politics, science and tech/gadgets. The blogs will be written in local languages, and English translations of most blog posts will be made available on separate blogs.
Bloggers are being paid a flat fee for their work - a base pay of €300/month with bonuses for longer and more frequent posts. The company is being bootstrapped right now, and Wilkins is looking for angel funding.
WebTech goes Creative Commons
From this year on the WebTech conferences may be organized by anyone who is willing to do it. In the last four years (since 2004) they were organized by me and other people, sharing the idea to present innovations, to invite foreign lecturers, to represent companies and services in the IT field and anything else that can be included in this broad field.
There have been 5 WebTech conferences so far: two were held in Varna and three in Sofia. We wish that this year there will be at least one more. There were numerous lecturers, both Bulgarians and foreigners, among whom Richard Stallman, Derek Retans, Kaj Arno and many more from all over Europe.
And now
WebTech is under creative commons license (it has always been, but this is the official notification).
What does that mean?
- 1.You can use the name, which is now well known in Bulgaria and Europe.
- 2.You can organize the event whenever and wherever you want, as long as you keep its organizational level.
- 3.You can earn from the event as much as you can.
- 4.If you want, you can use my contacts and ideas for finding lecturers and/or sponsors.
- 5.You can use the conference’s website to create your own site for 2008.
How to install flash plugin to Firefox on Fedora
If you want to install a flash plugin to your Firefox on Fedora, here is a way:
wget http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
rpm - Uvh adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
yum –enablerepo=adobe-linux-i386 install flash-plugin
If you have different arch, please see the information on the Adobe website. After the installation, don’t forget to restart your FF.
Firefox Personas
I have just discovered this great tool for Firefox. You can easily change your skin, just with a few clicks. Oh, yes you don’t have to download news skins or to update them. This will be done automatically. Cool isn’t it?
Well, let’s change the default theme. Click. Ohhh, perfect.
Let’s change it again. Click. Wooow :
If you want to download Personas, please do it.
PHP on Sybmian after January 12th 2008
Well, well, it seems my dream will soon come true 
Nokia announced that their PAMP will be available in few weeks (on January 12th). PAMP stands for Personal Apache, MySQL and PHP. I am ready for an early adopter and tester. Well, I know that I will not be able to control and access some of the phone’s specific functions and content , but I am sure we will see more on this topic very soon. Let’s imagine ….
php_sms module for PHP with following functions:
send_sms();
int smsid();
array sms_elements($smsid);
