So at first few words on what’s going on… Since 6th of January all businesses are required to have their services for Belarus citizens hosted on Belorussian servers. All ISP’s and internet-cafes are ordered to gather all data about their customers and logs from their usage of internet.

It’s quite obvious that the biggest businesses will do it. But we cannot say that for smaller ones having casual customers from Belarus (shops and other services). So they’ll basically have to shut down the access for Belarus citizens which gives us the same result as site blocking, but (I really hate to say this) done right (meaning not via DNS blocking which is still bad). For now we cannot say for sure how hard this law is going to be used, and if and which businesses are going to respect it. As we’re said punishment for breakin’ it won’t be so big for them (as in scale). One thing is sure, that bringing those services to Belorussian servers will make them really easy to shut down if it’s necessary.

After spending few hours on looking through data obtained by Anonymous and published on pastebin (you can find them while reviewing @YourAnonNews account on Twitter) during #LulzXmas action I felt concerned about the privacy of all those ppl which data are flying now all around the internet.

It’s obvious for me that if someone had to put his hands such data like this held by Stratfor (I really can’t find a better words than complete idiots to call them) Anonymous group is the best option (it doesn’t really matter if those were Anonymous or Lulzsec or Antisec, their ways are really close). They at least are talking and spreading the news all around instead of using the data. If it was someone else I bet it’d take a really long time for Stratfor “specialists” (have their ever heard of the thing called data encryption?) to find out what has happened and by then really big amount of money’d be gone from their client accounts.

By looking at their facebook fan page (yea, the best, safest and privacy friendly service to spread this kind of news) I lost all my hope about them telling their clients what really happened and what they should do in this case to save their privacy and money (just look at this). After looking at two more archives published by Anonymous from next companies I thought about an open source software/script/service which’d allow to send anonymously an email informing about a leak, current situation and steps which should be taken to increase clients/users (which were hit by the leak) privacy, safety and get their current and future situation straight.

Since Ilya died it’s really hard not to notice how joindiaspora.com pod slowed down and it’s kind of annoying and frustrating. From obvious reasons after information about Ilya and his work on Diaspora hit the mainstream media, its first and official pod started to be overloaded with new users.

As I written on my D* account:

Ability to move account from #Diaspora one pod to another would be awesome. Most new users while trying out D* uses joindiaspora.com, they make friends and post stuff. Once they discover how D* really works it’s kind of too late to delete one and create new account on a pod that suits you.

Recently joindisdpora got much slower and it’d be great to move my whole account to another, faster and less loaded pod without creating completely new account. Just transfer all my posts, aspects and still be in aspects of those who are following me already and sharing with me.

It’s sth between #feature request and #bug report.

I’m in that state, building new account as useful as current one will take definitely too much time and I’m sure that it’s not only my problem.

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After making this kind of decision to implement account transferring there are many more problems to be solved in order to achieve this. What to do with the data on the old pod? Should we keep it? How long?

But I really feel that we need to start to discuss about it and find a solution for this problem.

I was invited to Open Radar Conference in Szczecin to speak about Diaspora* project. This definitely wasn’t my best presentation but here are my slides:

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I have to say that I’m really proud of the feedback I received at the after party. I did also an interview for Polskie Radio Szczecin, they really want to help us spread the word about D* in Poland. After this short – not so good – presentation we’ve got now many new possibilities as diaspora.pl to promote Diaspora and it’s just going to be an awesome experience, but I’ll post more news on that later.

I’ll post the video of me stammering about D* when OSworld.pl will put it on YouTube.

UPDATE:

So here is a video with my presentation… yyy… yyy… yyy… yyy…

Looks like after reddit effect of users requesting CDs with their data Facebook allowed them to request download of all their published data. So for now there are two ways to get your data, but to have them all you still have use both.

Download all the data you’ve published so far.

This is simple, log-in to Facebook and go to your Account Settings. You’ll see there the option Download a copy of your Facebook data.at the bottom of the page. After gettin’ there you have to click on request and wait patiently a few hours for your email with download link.

A few days ago, Google+ project had its premiere. It brings a nice breath of fresh air, but also presents a few elements that we already know. I think the most important message so far is that we are dealing with the first social networking Google service which has been well thought out and has good chances to go into mainstream.

Public, all, extended

Circles – a perfect solution to help take care of our privacy, indisputably better implemented than a group of friends on Facebook. Many see in them as an innovation, but once I saw them I knew they found this idea at Diaspora* project. The difference is, that G + presents it in a form that aspects should be done from the beginning. Firstly, management – in the Diaspora* has always been for me simply inconvenient. G+ presented two ways to manage contacts, but we have seen them both in Diaspora* already. You can see who has the gurus of usability, and who still have a lot to learn… The current way of contact management from Diaspora* can be found in notification system and former based on moving contacts into and between aspects can be seen on your circles page.

Alter Bridge @ Ursynalia 2011 by Marcin Jarecki

Alter Bridge was for the first time in Warsaw. As Myles said they expected to play in some small club, but it turned out to be one of the biggest Rock festivals in Warsaw this year (Ursynalia). So I’m proud to be a part of their one of the biggest surprises in their carrier – great concert, hope to see them soon again, because from now they’re one of my favorite bands. (;

Myles & Mark @ Ursynalia 20011 by Marcin Jarecki

It was also great to hear Guano Apes live. They’re much much better on the stage! They are coming back to Poland later this year, so I think I’ll be there.

Henning, Sandra and Stefan  @ Ursynalia 20011 by Marcin Jarecki

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P.S. – As I can see on Alter Bridge Facebook fanpage this surprize was really big for them ([1], [2], [3] and [4]). 



If You’re having troubles with Bazaar plugin for Eclipse on Ubuntu resulting in following message:

bzr: ERROR: exceptions.TypeError: _escape_cdata() takes exactly 2 arguments (1 given)

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You should install one of these daily builds of bzr-xmloutput. After that it should be working without restarting anything.