If there is one big thing about the SOPA bill currently being discussed, in Congress and pretty much everywhere else as well, it is that almost nobody in Congress understands a damn thing about the Internet; or even how everday businesses function. A bunch of engineers and FOSS/IP lawyers writing up an open letter, discussing freedom and rights, may not be the best way to get the attention of a Congress who are obviously so willing to put such things aside, for the benefit of their corporate lobbies. People like Rep. John Flemming, may not quite understand such vague concepts as freedom, and rights. So, I thought maybe I could help people out when trying to tell their Congressmen to vote against SOPA/PIPA bills, by providing an analogy they might understand. One that is based on money, and classic businesses.

So, if you want to know why SOPA/PIPA are bad, here is why. Imagine for a moment, that you own a business; one which provides people with tasty sub sandwiches. Now imagine that you have 30 million customers, and serve up to 20,000 of them every day. Your business is unique, and flourishing, because you also have a feature which allows customers to create their own sandwiches, and share the recipes with everyone else. About 60% of your customers, all peruse this feature, and their custom recipes get posted into the electronic menu system at your shop. Now, imagine that a competing store, has a special recipe, which they pride themselves on. Several of your customers posted this same recipe to your menu system, with slight alterations, to fit their own tastes. The competing store finds out, but says nothing to you, or the customers who posted the altered recipes. Instead, they report that your store is violating their Copyright on the recipe, to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice issues a court order to the city, to remove the road which is allowing all of your customers, to reach your store. You wake up the next day, to go and open your store, but the road is gone, and you can no longer get to it. Nor can any of your 30 million customers. Any money you would make from having that store, is gone. You can't really move it to any other location, anywhere in the United States, as you have been put on a blacklist, and no cities are allowed to have roads leading to your store. You can move out of country, but all your customers would have to travel much further to get to your store. You will no longer make any money from having that store.

Do you really want anyone to be able to shut down your entire business, without any warning, whatsoever? I doubt it. This is exactly what SOPA/PIPA would be like for businesses, of any size, on the Internet. We must not allow this completely idiotic set of bills to pass. They are a complete and utter violation of the Constitution of These United States of America.

Tell your Representative, and Senator, to throw this garbage in the trash, where it belongs.

#include <stdio.h>

int main (int argc, char * argv[]) {
    printf ("Goodbye, world.\n");

    return 0;
}

Started working on finishing up some icons I'd started drawing a while back, to get some more practice in Inkscape. Finished up the app icon for Uplink, which is available in the Ubuntu Software Center.

Have been working a little bit in the evenings and weekends over the past month, to rewrite Encompass in Vala, using WebKit. It's coming along slowly, but surely. Here is a screenshot of what I currently have it at, almost up to par with the last code I have for the GtkHTML2 version.

If you know me, you probably know I once wrote a web browser using the gtkhtml widget for rendering pages, called Encompass. Well, after many years of not touching that code at all, I've decided it's time to bring it back from the dead. Web security has been an ever-growing issue over the past few years, and browsers haven't really done anything to improve it. Rather, they seem to only rapidly add very resource heavey features, and only deal with minor security flaws in their own code. Nor have any really sought to make drastic leaps in usability. Most all the UI differences across browsers is all for the sake of being different from the others. Why is it so hard to find a secure and usable browser, that integrates into the system?

Well, that's exactly what the new Encompass will do. Sadly, the gtkhtml engines have fallen drastically behind, and aren't up to the task of dealing with the modern era web. So I will unfortunately be required to use the webkit engine, as I am not interested in building a new rendering engine right now. Hopefully I will be able to build the browser how I want to, without having to make many changes to webkit itself; though I suspect some will be required. And hopefully it won't take too long to get a working version, as I am rewriting in Vala, to speed things up and simplify the code.