Episode: 211
Title: HPR0211: Copy fight Vol 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0211/hpr0211.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 13:55:26

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Hi, you're listening to Hacker Public Radio. I'm 330 and this is Copy Fight. Well, actually
this isn't a real episode of Copy Fight. This is what I'll call a stub for what will
be several episodes of Copy Fight. I'm in the middle of about three right now that I
just for some reason. One of them I'm having trouble with because I can't read
legalese out loud, no matter how hard I try. But it's about a document that I talked
about on the Linux Kranks podcast a couple of weeks ago, probably a couple of
more weeks ago now than when I started. But it's a document to help people with
GPL compliance. And it's written fairly straight that still suffer freedom law
center. So it's still in quite a bit of legalese. I hope to get that out soon. Real
life is a little hectic and the Ohio Linux Fest came up. So I hate to tell you
guys but I like drinking with a bunch of nerds rather than talking by myself in a
room. Sorry. Another thing that I'm on is... Well, I'm not quite working on it yet.
But while I was at OLF, the Ohio Linux Fest, Ian Robewitz was talking about it. He had
a whole talk on this. It was called Hacking the Legislature. Which it really got me wondering
about... About what, you know, just a title got me thinking, you know, as he's talking
about, you know, cracking deep old machines or any of that stuff. But in actuality what
he was talking about was a thing called Geekpack and find it on the web. It's g-e-e-k-
i-f-n-p-a-c-dot-org. And the end result is they want to be able to come up with a platform
that they can have someone, you know, have a candidate sign on to. And, you know, it could
be one of their talking points and they could go, you know, I'm into the Geekpack thing
and all of us nerds would know what he was talking about. It would be things like, you
know, an actual understanding of the DMCA and, you know, how the, how the Patriot Act
affects people trying to do legitimate business on laptops that need to fly. And the things
like that, unlocking cell phones and DRM and all those kinds of issues. But what they did
was, and this is just, this is coming from some horrible notes. I scribbled down once
I realized that this may be the most amazing thing I've ever seen. They've taken things
like maplight.org, follow the money, open congress, congresspedia, and the polyparsers. And
they've kind of aggregated all of this knowledge into one place. And what they give you is
a, is an easy way to, you basically have check boxes, you know, for, you know, what do
these people, you know, how they voted on nerd related issues before. And some of the, the
screen grabs he showed were really, really wild. And for people that are, they don't, they
don't quite get it, but they're still really worried. You can compare them to what the, what
the geek pack is a whole, would think. So it would be like, you know, if you, you know, if you
were into free software, but you really didn't understand what did installment think. You know,
that kind of thing. But one, one cool thing that they have, you know, you can, you can compare
candidates and stuff like that. And they're, they're really working on getting people, getting
people involved, you know, local people. So that you could have, you know, people that were running
that hadn't quite been in office. So you could have information about them based on interviews and
debates and things like that. And another thing they have is when there's a big bill or, you know,
a little piece of legislation that's going to come through either the House of the Senate, then
what it would allow you to do is plus, I'm having trouble explaining this. It would, it would do
something kind of like Google's Grand Central, where you would put in that you wanted to talk to
these people. And what it would do is it would try to ring them over and over. But once it actually
got through, it would call you. So you didn't have to spend all day one looking up all of the numbers
of all the representative that are involved in whatever bill it is. Yeah, they would have done
that part of it already for you. And all you do is take in your phone number, which would be
really awesome if you know you're a programmer or, you know, into web design or something like that,
something where you don't tend to be involved with, you know, people that see the sun and
odd things like that. I understand that, you know, most of us don't know that these people exist,
but they really do. But what it would do is it would call you. So as you picked up the phone,
they would be picking up the phone kind of thing and you could actually let them know how you feel
and you know, try to educate them because it's really nice when all of the legislators
are informed on the same thing. Not just, you know, there's one brilliant guy that no one will listen to.
So I think it could be a really interesting thing. Again, I haven't looked at it because I'm still
trying to get over the hangover, but we did a lot of drinking at OLF. But I still haven't gotten
a chance to look at it. I plan to look at it tonight, but probably after this app goes out. But
there will be a full, you know, nicely produced, hopefully kind of episode of HPR on it.
Hopefully I can get an interview with Ian and get the facts straight from the horses mouth,
so to speak. I should get the GPL compliance one done in the next week or so. I'm just going to
have to take it in small chunks and cut that all together. It's reading legally is out loud is not
easy. You all can go ahead and have a try at it, but I'm not fearing too well. And really don't
know much what else to say. Sorry again for the horrible sound here. I'm walking home from work.
And a lot of it's been down the wonderful and glorious old national road also known as US 40.
So yeah, that's why the sounds horrible and why you hear cars and
probably people screaming. I'm sure that'll happen eventually.
Yeah, this has been a 330 copy fight Hacker promo radio. That whole thing. I'll see you all later.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio. HPR is sponsored by Kero.net.
So head on over to C-A-R-O dot N-T for all of his community.