<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
<atom:link href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/index.rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
+ <item>
+ <title>Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 3 Nov 2015 13:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
+list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
+Internal notes should also be documented. The document list (called a mail
+journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
+to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
+journal is available for everyone. Most offices even publish the mail
+journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages. The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called
+<a href="https://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
+OEP</a>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list. Not
+all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
+use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
+journal entries .</p>
+
+<p>In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
+Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
+piqued my interest. The title of the document was
+"<a href="https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=4192362">Internet
+Governance and how it affects national security</a>" (Norwegian:
+"Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet"). The
+document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the
+"Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations". I asked for a
+copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
+(<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20,
+letter c</a>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
+of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
+Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar. I
+was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
+negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The
+explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU
+conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
+(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_.28WCIT-12.29">World
+Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12</a>) had just
+ended,
+<a href="http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/2012/12/18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote">reportedly
+in chaos</a> when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries
+including Norway refused to sign the new treaty. It seemed
+reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
+Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
+<a href="http://www.nkom.no/">Norwegian Communications Authority</a>
+and the <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/">Ministry of
+Transport and Communications</a>. This might be the reason the letter
+was sent to the ministry. As I was unable to find the document in the
+mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
+sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
+Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
+Geneva.</p>
+
+<p>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
+document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
+over now. This time
+<a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914">I
+asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
+receiver</a> and
+<a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p">asked
+the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender</a> for a
+copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
+public. The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
+reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
+different clause
+(<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20
+letter b</a>), claiming that they were required to keep the
+content of the document from the public because it contained
+information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
+that the information should not be made public. I asked the permanent
+mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
+an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
+nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
+of the meeting to be publicly known. They explained that giving me a
+copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
+the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway. They
+also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
+the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
+this had not listed it in their mail journal.</p>
+
+<p>Armed with this
+knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
+author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
+"sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications. The
+ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
+the document. According to
+<a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/">a
+government report</a> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
+Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I
+guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
+the report initially and
+<a href="https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu">asked
+them for a copy</a> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
+document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
+when the document was written. Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
+Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
+tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
+the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva. The Foreign Ministry also
+upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
+to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
+the Norwegian Embassy in Washington. I do not know if this is the
+same person as the author of the document.</p>
+
+<p>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
+inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
+meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
+Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
+by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
+negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
+ITU negotiations on Internet Governance. It is truly amazing what can
+be derived from mere meta-data.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
+And what exactly was said and done at the meeting? Anyone know?</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>New book, "Fri kultur" by @lessig, a Norwegian Bokmål translation of "Free Culture" from 2004</title>
<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_book___Fri_kultur__by__lessig__a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of__Free_Culture__from_2004.html</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 31 Oct 2015 09:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<description><p>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
-book Free Culture. It was published on paper via lulu.com, and is
-also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI format. I currently sell the
-paper edition for self cost from lulu.com, but might extend the
-distribution to book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble later.
-This will double the price and force me to make a profit from selling
-the book. Anyway, here are links to get the book in different
-formats:</p>
+book <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>. It was
+published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
+and MOBI format. I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
+from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
+Amazon and Barnes & Noble later. This will double the price and force
+me to make a profit from selling the book. Anyway, here are links to
+get the book in different formats:</p>
<ul>
</description>
</item>
- <item>
- <title>The life and death of a laptop battery</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2015 16:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description><p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
-But this do not last. The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
-within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
-and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
-all the time. Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
-about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
-more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
-
-<img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
-
-<p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
-battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
-by someone else. I found
-<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
-which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
-broken. I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
-write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
-from him. Via
-<a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
-blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
-discovered
-<a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
-available in Debian.</p>
-
-<p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
-battery stats ever since. Now my
-/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
-measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
-when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity. My
-collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
-
-<pre>
-#!/bin/sh
-# Inspired by
-# http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
-# See also
-# http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
-logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
-
-files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
- energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
-
-if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
- (
- printf "timestamp,"
- for f in $files; do
- printf "%s," $f
- done
- echo
- ) > "$logfile"
-fi
-
-log_battery() {
- # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
- # when several log processes run in parallel.
- msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
- for f in $files; do \
- printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
- done)
- echo "$msg"
-}
-
-cd /sys/class/power_supply
-
-for bat in BAT*; do
- (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
-done
-</pre>
-
-<p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
-change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
-and out of hibernation and suspend. In addition, it collect a value
-every 10 minutes. This make it possible for me know when the battery
-is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
-The code for the Debian package
-<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
-available on github</a>.</p>
-
-<p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
-
-<pre>
-timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
-1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
-[...]
-1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
-1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
-</pre>
-
-<p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
-over time. This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
-battery.</p>
-
-<p>But why is this happening? Why are my laptop batteries always
-dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
-satellites keep working year after year. If we are to believe
-<a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
-University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
-chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
-all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
-I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
-<a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
-the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
-100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
-like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
-story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
-Linux too.</p>
-
-<p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
-stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
-preparation for a longer trip? I found
-<a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
-recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
-80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
-load).</p>
-
-<p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
-at the start. I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
-times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
-back to design capacity. And I wonder if the discharge and charge
-speed change over time, or if this stay the same. I did not yet try
-to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
-level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
-those.</p>
-
-<p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
-acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
-packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
-initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
-and stop. I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
-and need to be replaced. The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
-specific.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
</channel>
</rss>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff