This open letter from local "hippie lawyer" Alan Graf to Tom Potter, the new mayor of Portland, about city police treatment of protesters, is really great. Graf is famous for defending protestors who've been wrongly arrested and abused by cops, and for suing the city for the same. His team won a $300,000 settlement a few months ago for a case dating back to the start of the Iraq War protests. Perhaps his successes, the new mayor, and the new police chief will all come together to make some noticeable difference around here.

Basically, we're probably doomed, and sooner than you think.

I spent most of inauguration day in the portland web radio studio helping out with our coverage. The contribution that I am most happy about is some interviews I did on the air with 5 different people in 4 different countries: Spain, Germany, Brazil and Bolivia. I talked with them about what people in their country thought of George Bush and the U.S., and it went very well. Best of all, we used internet telephony, so it was free. My friend Lenara in Porto Alegre used her internet phone to call, but for the rest we used Skype. The tech setup was pretty jury-rigged, as we didn't have the time to prepare an actual "phone patch" sort of a set-up. Instead I ran Skype on my powerbook with a line out, and used the built-in mic to talk to the caller, while holding up the regular studio mic close to my mouth also so I could be heard by listeners. It made for an odd posture, and others in the studio couldn't really take part in the discussion. But it was still very cool. The only other problem is the net lag, but we lived with it

For the last week or so I've been experimenting with a new, for me (actually the concept itself is only a couple years old), anti-spam measure called greylisting. The basic idea takes advantage of the fact that most spamming software doesn't retry when a message is temporarily delayed. So if you make all mail wait a while, and make a record of whether they already tried, you cut out most spam. You also keep a record of what sender/receiver pairs have already successfully undergone the process, and you don't delay them for future messages.

Well it turns out that it seems to work really really well. There's some kinks to iron out, but the fact is that it cuts down on 95% of spam. Some of my users are reporting various problems, but I think I'm working them out. It's really almost eerie how well it works, because the total volume of email is just so much lower coming into my email box. As far as I can tell I'm not missing anything, but it feels like I might be, because there's so little email -but that's because most of my email was spam before. Which, as a user pointed out, is sad, isn't it? I'm sure it's true of everyone these days.

I'm really happy to report that we're already halfway finished with building the 100 diskless terminals that is our goal, after only 2 days out of the 6 days planned.

Of course, more time will be needed making the terminal servers, but I think with the this week spent researching what software to put on them, we will have plenty of time next weekend to get them done, along with the rest of the terminals.

This is really exciting to see things go so smoothly and quickly, and it's been great to see so many volunteers show up.
The story I just posted to portland indymedia is here: http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/01/308252.shtml

Three other geeks joined me at Free Geek tonight to start assembling the computers that will be sent to Bolivia and Venezuela. It is great to finally be doing this, after over a year of planning and organizing. The low turnout was understandable, as it was a Saturday night and everything outside was sheathed in a coating of ice. The city is basically shut down and hardly anything is moving.
Hopefully tommorrow more will make it down there.

Despite these obstacles, just the four of us built 12 diskless terminals in about 4 hours. At this rate we will easily have 100 made by the end of our 6 days. Of course making the terminal servers will be the hard part. But I figure we will finish up on the 24th, and then on the 30th, we'll palletize everything that's going to Bolivia, about 50 machines, and on the 31st load the pallets onto the truck. This is my naive hope, at least. And then on February 1st I head to Tucson! The Venezuela machines, I'm not sure what will happen. Maybe they'll get stored somewhere till that project is ready to ship, which might be later in February.

Freezing rain is falling here in Portland. I can't wait to get out of here and head south in a couple weeks.

It's funny, the range of behavior in people here when it's cold. Some crazy wierdos wear shorts and t-shirts no matter what time of year. Others don't know how to deal with it. Drivers are all idiots here in this weather, they're so unused to these road conditions. I saw out my living room window this morning a woman getting her car ready to drive. She got out some can of some spray-on stuff and squirted it all over her windows. Like ice is some magically difficult substance that you need some weird chemical to get off your car? what ever happened to just a scraper and a little elbow grease?

Anyway, I'm from Iowa so I remember worse, but that doesn't change the fact that I hate this. I can have better, and I will. I was in Porto Alegre this time last year, drinking Brazilian beers on a floating bar on the shore of the Rio Guiua.

Oh well, at least I don't have to go far today. All I need to do is go a few blocks to Free Geek later today and build some computers to send to Bolivia.

but anyway, Fuck Winter.

It looks like Bolivia's 2nd Water War has already come to a satisfactory conclusion, in favor of the people of El Alto. President Carlos Mesa has agreed to cancel the contract with Aguas del Illimani, a French company. I've just discovered a blog by Jim Shultz, head of the Democracy Center in Cochabamba and the main reason the North found out about the first Water War in 2000. The latest entry of his blog has great details about the El Alto situation. He says that unlike the Cochabamba water war "To the government

It looks like a big hacker conference is happening
in Santa Cruz, Bolivia in early March. Seems like this would be a good way to find geeks who would want to help with the Computers for Bolivia Project. Hmm. We are very close to being able to ship the machines, but the big unknown is still: who will be there to set them up and train people at their destination?

A silly java applet lets you manipulate refrigerator magnets with dozens of other internet users at once. Warning: can be very frustrating.
UPDATE:
It's really quite an interesting lesson in complexity and emergent behavior.
To have a more controlled experiment, I installed one on my server.