Cell Phone As USB Modem

Well, I don't know if you already know this or not but you can use your cell phone as a USB Modem so you can have Internet Connection wherever there is a network coverage for your cell phone.

I discovered this by mere concidence, I plugged my Nokia 5200 to my laptop and was copying something from the memory card and after I finished the Data Storage mode I clicked quit then every thing happened !!!

My nice Ubuntu 8.10 notified me that it can connect me to the broadband that it provided by my cell phone so I clicked yes and I choose Mobinil as my service provider (the list included Vodafone and Etisalat), after that a network was added to the available networks so I turned off my router and wireless device on the lap and connected to the broadband.

I couldn't believe that I was able to go to Google and search with a keyword using the broadband Internet, I can't deny that it was slow actually very very slow but I think if you have a better cell phone than mine (something of the N series) you can do good browsing especially if you disable images and Java Scripts.

Try it and tell me how it went with you ...

First Day

At last Software Freedom Day (SFD) has started !! to day we the organizing team went to college early to prepare thing, we had to get tables, stands and chairs, we also prepared registration lists and hanged the posters. The great thing that people came early and they were excited, actually the number was larger than we expected, we had about 500 registration and about 300 people showed up today, some of them were registered but some made on-site registration.

The day started with an opening that was delivered by Eng.Hamdy Khalil from eSpace, he explained what is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and everyone liked it, then they had a 30 minute break to get the program, register their attends and claim their prizes: bags, CDs and pens.

At 12:30, Eng.Mekkawy also known as linuxawy from EGLUG started his session about the Free Software explaining the Main Four Freedoms, he also gave them his email and asked their questions.

Well after that people made some inquiries at the stands and registered for the study groups which actually have so many registered attendees (almost everyone!!).

If you haven't been there today, you missed alot but don't worry you still can come and join us even if you haven't yet registered.

Getting Close

It's only week before Software Freedom Day !! so we the organizing team made a meeting yesterday discussing what we had done so far and what we should be doing in the coming period. The meeting actually started with bad news about our funding and suddenly we found ourselves having very little time to finish many things, any way after 2 hours of discussion, we found our way out and we made a work plan, each team had a task to finish by night.
Thank God we were able to finish on time because we really want this event to be the best and the biggest in Alexandria.

The speakers in our event differ in their knowledge and backgrounds, we have Eng.Mohamed Sayed from Yahoo!, Abderlahman El KAfil from Morocco, Ahmed Mekkawy from EGLUG and others more.
we have computer security presentations, linux (day to day usage), Open Source and GIS and more, we have also a presentation about Wikipedia along with a stand for the Arabic Wikipedia Team.

So why not register and come with us??
Register here and have the chance of winning one or more of our prizes.

The program is really nice and rich ... check it here

Hungry Nukes

All over history, man developed weapons to protect himself and his country from others, that's reasonable and even nukes made sense when they were first produced may be because conventional weapons at that early time were not sometimes capable of causing enough destruction and death to enemy targets, also attacking cities and civilians by savage force was a daily act done by aircrafts, destroyers, artillery and infantry.

Now at the 21st century, every one knows that there is no “right way to use nukes” because when fired must cause massive death tolls and great environmental damages to targeted areas, despite all of that countries are still spending trillions of dollars making nuclear and biological weapon, without counting money spent on transporting, securing and maintenance of already existing nukes. Reports say that the US spent 5.5 trillion $ on making nukes while it has been estimated that fixing every thing – I mean: poverty and illiteracy elimination , improving health care, providing clean water and shelters, debt relief of developing countries and creating sustainable energy resources – on this planet would cost only 260 billion $ annually for 10 years !!

Leaving these stunning economic facts about nuclear weapons and thinking about the security issues we find that some countries have nuclear weapons though they lie in “very hot spots” like Pakistan, Israel and countries which were part of the Soviet Union, these countries along with others were able to build hundreds of nuclear war heads, they surely have good security measures to protect their war heads, but who can guarantee that none of the hundreds would fall in the hands of any extremist or terrorist group? Imagine that Taliban was able to reach a nuclear facility in Pakistan or steal a nuke war head, they won't hesitate to blow it up any where in the world. Imagine an extremist government reached power in Israel that already kills civilians with internationally forbidden weapons. For previous Soviet Union nations, I will not say imagine because it's already known that there are hundreds of missing missiles and nukes.

This doesn't mean that other great powers like the US and Russia have the right to have nuclear weapons, they should stop making nukes and also follow a scheduled disarming process to demolish the existence of nuclear weapons, the problem that you cant' just get rid of a nuke by blowing it up and the disarming operations cost much of money, but we should do it fast or one day our life will be like one of these movies where people live in crumbled cities and starving to death but they have nukes at their backyard.

Piracy

How many times have you payed for a downloaded application or operating system? Never, then welcome aboard you are a Pirate, if you have uploaded files that others downloaded then you are a Captain !

Copyright laws protect software from piracy, but in some countries piracy rate is up to 95% of all running software, this due to legislation that is not aware enough and leaves pirates unleashed or in best conditions leaves back doors opened for them.

Losses are estimated by billions for software companies and stores which lose markets due to their software being accessed through the Internet, United States comes on the top followed by China, Russia, India, France and United Kingdom, they lost more than $27 billion in 2008.

Although many countries cooperate fighting piracy, still global piracy rate rose in 2008 from %38 to %41, but looking at the bright side, piracy rates dropped in little bit more than half of 110 studied countries and rose only in 16 countries. Egypt has done well as it dropped from %65 to %59 in the period between 2004 – 2008.

After that cops talk, let's be honest, is piracy so bad? No. Well, we know it violates copyrights and steal others' work but it doesn't destroy markets as we claimed earlier simply because these markets never existed from the beginning; no one in a third- world country would pay 300$ for Windows Vista Ultimate when that person lives on less than 2 dollars a day.

From that we find that piracy destroyed no markets, contrary they made companies and software more famous in parts of the world where these companies couldn't reach the public. This is not defending piracy but in a no piracy world - which is almost impossible, companies will be making little extra money, but millions of people will have no access to technology, then is it a Robin Hood act? No , it's still a theft and must be stopped and contained as much as it could be, but in a way that guarantees copyrights for producers and cheap access to technology for public. Companies should contribute more in Open Source communities to provide basic software for free or at least adjust prices in countries according to local standards of living.

Tell us what you think about piracy and what is the best way to fight it without depriving the poor from accessing technology and still not destroying IT industries?

IT Making Money

IT companies like all companies have one target which is making money but in IT field there are many ways to make money, some of these ways are traditional like selling licensed software and hardware and some are not like advertising and producing open source software, the common thing between them is that they all make huge money.

Microsoft, Apple, hp and Dell all follow the traditional way and it has kept them the highest profit making companies – though hp has highest revenues, Microsoft has highest profits. These companies are rather old, they produce laptops, operating systems, video games, smart phones and everything you can imagine. Yes they make big money but still not so popular especially with people that care about Open Source and freedom of choice, you may not feel it but these companies collaborate with each other to keep the market and IT media masses under their control, they issue implicit and explicit agreements to support each other's software and hardware. Example of this is hp and Dell selling laptops with a pre-installed version of Vista. These marketing behaviors made them face many lawsuits, Apple was sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for trying to stop and remove online forums discussing iPhone. Microsoft also was fined $794 million for including Windows Media Player with Windows XP installation, imposing it on the user instead of letting him choose the media player he wants to use.

Leaving the giants and heading to the new stormers like Yahoo!, Google, MySpace and Facebook. All are less than 15 years old and all represent the ideal advertising model of making money. Google alone made about $10,491 billion in 2006 only by ads on their pages, this money represents 99% of total revenues of the company, this proves that ads can make big money.

The main idea in the advertising scheme is providing users with free or cheap - charge services and keeping them attached to them all day, then fill the site with tons of ads, this approach always needs more pages to support more ads and make more money, these pages can be applications, news or search results with ads relevant to your keywords. It also needs the company to spread its name in any way by producing anything: toolbars, gadgets and mail services. Attaching users to pages is taking a new approach that depends on making the page more personal as your own: like iGoogle, My Yahoo! and of course profiles on social networks. Any way, this is highly criticized for damaging the users' social interaction in real life, making them addicted to the Internet and wasting their time.

When we discuss making money using Open Source this does not mean that all Open Source applications are produced to make money, some of them are produced by normal people who have the passion to help others by coding.

Anyway, companies still can make money from Open Source. It may seem impossible but when you think deeply, you find that it might be the easiest way of making money, you can simply sell that software, the GNU license under which most open source projects are released doesn't forbidden selling the project, but to make people pay for what they can get for free, you have to provide support and packaging where you sell collection of configured software that can be installed easily with their manuals on CDs. The software can also be used as an advertising tool, you can place ads on the project's page on the Internet or use it to promote another version that has extra features but is not free.

What is this label?

In this label, I will put articles that I wrote in Aimun 09 newsletter, hope you all like them.
AIMUN is Alexandria International Model Of United Nations, it is a conference held in bib Alex every summer where young people discuss some issues and play as decision makers and head of states.
I wrote few articles in the NewsLetter that belongs to the event.