The IFPI (read: Hollywood) is increasingly pushing for placing the onus of prosecuting infringements of their imaginary property to internet service providers. I am happy to see Telenor refuse to do someone elses business. If I build a road, I should not be responsible for drunk drivers who might drive on it. Or as Telenor puts it,

“This would be the same as demanding that the postal service should open all letters, and decide which ones should be delivered.”

The court ruled in favor of Telenor’s sanity, against IFPI’s distorted view of society, property, justice, and business. The ruling is not about whether or not the Pirate Bay may remain online in Norway, it is about Norwegian and every other country’s critical infrastructure.

Applause!

Update: now the Danish Antipiratbyron is throwing in the towel, for another reason: courts in Denmark still require evidence before convicting anyone, and they remain unable to acquire it. This is a good move as well. Let’s spend the money to producing some good art instead of suing fans.

The supposedly big news yesterday was Skype suggesting that their Linux client will be liberated shortly. However, I feel that in communications, open, standard protocols are more important than client implementations, so the news did not make all that big an impression.

The correct way to handle VoIP calls is using open protocols such as SIP or XMPP, no matter how the client side is arranged. Gizmo and Google have gotten this right: both have their own respective desktop and mobile clients, while the protocols are standard enough to allow us to hack together our own client implementations such as Empathy or Ekiga.

I wanted to see how our distinguished community feels about this and decided to start a debate on #ubuntu-offtopic. I failed miserably, and the discussion ended up being rather short. Please allow topyli and gord to demonstrate, if you will.

What this means is a change in priorities. I like having all my chat in one place. This means you have to compromise. I’ve enjoyed irssi‘s awesome IRC capabilities but suffered from Bitlbee‘s (and gTalk’s) poor Jabber support. Now I’m trying full Jabber with poor IRC support. Lets’s see how it goes.

Before: All-In-One, Always-On remote irssi session on my server.

On the desktop I’m now using Gajim because it lets me enjoy every feature provided by the server. On the mobile phone I’m trying out BombusMod. It’s very complete, but it’s also Java. Couldn’t find a better option. Tips for a good Jabber client for S60 phones are welcome. Needs to have MUC and transports at least, preferably account editing with full vCard support.

After: All-In-One, On-Demand, local Gajim session. The Gnome Do build on the background has nothing to do with it :)

Which reminds me, while the jabber.fi domain is fortunately secured by a cool Finnish Jabber and Free Software fan, we don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know of any concrete plans about a server. This needs to be fixed.