The afternoon schedule of the three day conference was packed with on average 23 lectures in three different rooms which lasted 30-45 minutes each – not too long to bore the audience, and not too short to prevent presenters from delivering their message. After the tightly packed talks it was party time with Share hosting on average 30 bands each night, on nine different venues in downtown Belgrade.

The lectures were incredibly inspiring. Tunisian blogger Sami Ben Gharbia rightfully scored one of the biggest applauses for talking about the Tunisian revolution; Peter Sunde charmed the audience with his stories about the inside workings of the Pirate Bay website; and Jacob Appelbaum spent his time on stage showing how the Tor project helps people thwart internet censorship. Aside from these three, it would be borderline criminal not to mention Barack Obama’s chief campaign blogger Sam Graham-Felsen, Chairman of the Dutch Pirate Party Samir Allioui, Senior Staff Attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Matt Zimmerman and Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico who, in their project Face to facebook, stole one million facebook profiles thus making many people think twice about online privacy.

With this list of presenters the conference was bound to be successful, but with many organizational flops it was far from perfect. Some of the lectures were in Serbian and without a translator, and you really didn’t know that’s the case before the beginning. If you don’t speak Serbian you were sure to feel unwelcome at some point, and the only thing you could do was leave the room and go to another one, in hope of English. At an international conference it’s not too much to ask for lectures to be in English, or at the very least for schedules that indicate otherwise.

Not only did the lecture schedules lack language and topic details, but the little information they did provide was often misleading. A day before the conference started the official web site hosted at least two different versions of the schedule, and instead of getting their stories strait the organizers printed out the outdated version and handed it out to the audience. To make matters worse, neither the people handing schedules nor the people issuing admission bracelets knew it was outdated. And the handed schedules were far from what actually happened: some lectures were postponed, others canceled and some new ones introduced at seemingly the last minute.

To further spice things up, on the last day of the conference the organizers announced that the program in one of the rooms will start 40 minutes late due to technical issues. After returning 40 minutes later, I found out there was a lecture I missed. What happened there seems like a job for the CSI. The only way to avoid a detrimental headache was to go with the flow and not think about the schedule at all. That plan however required running around a lot and not having a clue when to take your lunch break, as you really don’t know when the interesting stuff will actually take place.

Speaking of lunch breaks, even tough it’s logical for a program that lasts eight hours to have a lunch break, they didn’t schedule one. They did however anticipate people being hungry, thirsty and not wanting to leave the venue, and so sandwich stands were available that also sold coffee and drinks, but all of it was three times the regular price. Now, any sensible public relations officer would have gone berserk at the idea of making money this way, and I would have started beating the idiot who came up with it with an actual sandwich for effect. How do you want people to remember Share is what I’d ask him: by your hospitality or by your intent to mug them for a cup of coffee?

Just to prove how totally incompetent the person in charge of Share public relations was, I’ll mention that journalists were accredited only if they covered the conference before it actually started. I find this incentive to encourage journalists to write announcement stories and thus generate publicity and free advertising totally despicable. When organizing a conference like this you want as many journalists as you can get and the last thing on your mind should be limiting media access.

When I first heard about the Share conference a couple of months ago I was impressed by the list of lecturers. It was obvious the conference is more than promising, especially having in mind it’s not going to be done by a bunch of first time event organizers, but by the same people behind the famous Exit festival. Granted, the organizers must have gone to great lengths to bring all those people to Belgrade at the same time, but that success does not justify all the childish mistakes that followed.

On June 11, 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) raised the worldwide pandemic alert level to Phase 6 in response to the ongoing global spread of the novel influenza A (H1N1) virus. A Phase 6 designation indicates that a global pandemic is underway.

Yes, we should do our best to protect our children, but is it really time to break out the masks and enter full panic mode?

This blogger certainly thinks so. “Holy crap! 141 H1N1 deaths worldwide! Good grief people,” he wrote on June 11. Even though that number tripled since then, and even though some 400 families lost a loved one we still shouldn’t panic as, according to the CDC, on average 36,000 people die from flu every year in the United States alone.

A total of 436 people have died in the United States from H1N1 as of this Friday (CDC). As a matter of fact, since the WHO declared the pandemic on June 11, the trend of new U.S. H1N1 deaths has been nearly linear, with on average 45 new deaths each week. Even if that trend tripled next week and stayed the same until the end of the year, the number of deaths would still be incomparable to the average number of flu deaths. And even if it were comparable, how many people you know died of flu?

Photo courtesy of thegtworld.com.

The installation of 7 on my Dell Inspiron 1520 ran smoothly. Nowadays, and despite common misconceptions, operating system installations are quite simple (even Linux ones) and anybody can do them, so the smoothness of 7′s doesn’t really stand out. Being exited (as only a geek such as myself can be when installing a new operating system), I didn’t measure the installation time but it certainly was fast.

After the installation was completed I was immediately surprised by how fast it booted up. After three weeks, I am still not used to these blazingly fast start-ups. Shutdowns are also fast too, and unlike all other Windows operating systems I used (98, Me, XP and Vista), so far I am still to experience frozen programs delaying shutdown indefinitely. I did experience programs freezing a couple of times during shutdown (which is normal as after the shutdown process is initiated, non-system program’s permissions are harshly restricted), but in each case Windows was able to force those programs to quit, and shutdown the computer.

The first thing I did after the installation was completed was open the Task Manager, where I found out that my laptop’s physical memory usage was around 32% of my 2GB of RAM, which is not even close to Vista’s 48% at start-up. In fact as I’m writing this, iTunes is running in the background together with around a dozen Chrome processes and the physical memory usage is 42%, still bellow Vista’s at start-up.

As for hardware support, the release candidate’s driver library did not include drivers for my memory card reader, nor for my Nokia E51 phone; but having in mind the number of devices on the market, that cannot really be taken as a flaw. What impressed me though is the way Windows handled this issue. I was presented with a window informing me about the lack of drivers, and a download link to a specific driver in each case. I was done in just a couple of clicks. And as if that didn’t make my life easy enough, after the installation of my Nokia drivers I was presented with another window that informed me that I am missing Nokia’s PC Suite. It also had a download link, so Windows did all the work for me. No CDs, and no searching on Nokia’s web site.

Truth to be told, I did experience a couple of annoying problems with the hardware support, but having in mind I am running just a release candidate I am sure those will be fixed before October 22, when Windows 7 is due to come out. The first one is a real pain in the neck as it involves drivers for the USB interface of my iPod which freezes when I try to sync it with the Disk Mode disabled (but simply enabling that mode solves the problem). The other problem I have is with buttons on my touchpad. Under Vista that was shipped with my Dell, a middle click is achieved by pressing both touchpad buttons at the same time and that doesn’t work anymore in my case.

As for system stability, it did not crash once in the past three weeks.

As for usability, Microsoft obviously put a lot of work into user interface which really stands out from Vista. The traditional taskbar withstood heavy modifications. It does take some getting used to, but when you do, you will wonder how could you ever use the traditional one without a headache.

One of the main things new Vista users complained about were the so-called “cancel or allow” messages which proved to be a great idea for this Get a Mac Apple ad Windows 7 offers several levels of security, and that setting sets the frequency of these messages. You rarely get them by default.

A lot of tools were drastically changed as well. For example, the Resource Monitor is now more detailed, and much better organized than its Vista counterpart. The integrated backup program was also changed and works great too.

Microsoft took a great blow with Vista’s failure because of bad PR. I have been a Vista user for two years and I do not think it is half as bad as people made it to be. Although a good product, it wasn’t released polished which allowed unsubstantiated rumors to spread. With the Mojave Experiment Microsoft did try to combat these rumors, but its PR department obviously failed. Unlike Vista, the release candidate of Windows 7 appears to be almost perfectly polished. As history repeats itself, I am sure that Vista will be remembered as Me of its time, and as for 7, come October 2010 Microsoft will probably declare it to be its lucky number.

Photo courtesy of www.itsmywindows.com.

You can also check out the movie trailers here.

For those of you who don’t know, Russia limited its gas exports through Ukraine on Tuesday evening (January 6), and completely stopped it early Wednesday morning thus leaving a lot of people from those European countries that don’t have significant gas reserves drinking rakia (local, and often homemade beverage with a high alcohol content), or other such spirits to keep warm. In a nutshell, the disagreement between Russia and Ukraine quickly enveloped Serbia which was plunged into an energy crisis. Even though it was Christmas, the Serbian government scrambled and held emergency meetings on the crisis, and even created an emergency crisis center that is in constant session.

And where were Serbian newspaper reporters; did they do their duty and diligently report on the crisis; and were they there to oversee the way the government is handling it? No. All of them were probably enjoying Christmas Eve with loads of food, wine, and rakia.

All newspapers I came across on Wednesday morning were printed on early Tuesday morning and were editions for both Tuesday and Wednesday. To the best of my knowledge, for 48 hours no newspapers were printed despite a major gas crisis that is taking place in the middle of the winter.

While I understand that it takes a significant number of people to get to the end product of the newspaper industry (from reporters and editors, all the way to printing house workers), it is way too important to any free country to just take a day off just because it’s Christmas.

Yes, not all media took a day off. Radio and TV stations kept broadcasting but some people, like myself, simply don’t watch TV (some maybe don’t even have a TV set), and don’t listen to the radio. Those people were left clueless and were wondering why are their radiators working at a reduced rate, if they were working at all.

The newspaper industry taking a day off is not at all strange in Serbia. Every year, two day editions of major newspapers go out on January 6, and three day editions go out on December 31. I don’t know what they are thinking. Perhaps they believe that the whole population is drunk enough not to care. One thing is sure though, they are not doing their duties properly.

Photo courtesy of longwood.edu.

I shared their view until very recently when I read about a new computer virus, Gpcode, which uses RSA to encrypt a victim’s hard drive and demand ransom for data on it. Kaspersky Lab, one of the most prominent anti-virus companies seems to be panicking. I can’t blame them. It would take years and years to crack the key used by the virus.

A few days ago I was strongly against a cryptography ban of any sort. Now, after finding out it can be used in such a sinister way, I am uncertain. What do you think, should cryptography be controlled?

On April 7, theater professor Nedyalko Delchev, together with van Lynden and about a dozen students, opened this semester’s theater season with Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!

Guards! Guards! follows a plot of the Supreme Grand Master Lupine Wonse (van Lynden) to overthrow Lord Havelock Vetinari (Delchev) and install a puppet king. Wonse plans to achieve his goal by summoning a dragon to instigate mass panic, using the only copy of a book that explains the process.

The local librarian (Shpatar Morina) later reports that the book has been stolen to a new volunteer of the city guard – Carrot (Ilya Petrov), who tries to investigate the matter.

The play mocks today’s world by illustrating it in a rather hilarious way. Wonse, like an average politician, would do anything to overthrow the current head of state. After the dragon, which was meant to replace Lord Vetinari, proves not to be as obedient as he hoped, Wonse becomes the servant of the dragon King. He seems careless about all the people that have died just because of his hunger for power.

The “Thieves’ Guild,” an allusion to today’s mafia, is closely integrated into Lord Vetinari’s government. The thieves’ actions seem to be unrestricted. When Carrot, who seems to know the book of law by heart, and is still uncorrupted, puts the leader of the Guild under arrest, a huge scandal ensues.

Unlike other AUBG plays, Guards! Guards! is spiced up with some special effects and professional looking lighting. The acting performance was good enough to cause the whole hall to laugh at least a couple of times. Actors definitely did a great job having in mind most of them are not professionals.

Guards! Guards! allowed AUBGers some cultural time off before the ugly finals’ weeks of the semester. Even though some might label it as too long, and thus boring, the play is a “must see” because of its comedy, special effects and of course the cast.

Make sure you take full winter gear to survive through the over-an-hour-long play, as Blagoevgrad’s Opera Hall is an unbelievably cold place.

Originally posted on www.defactobg.com.

More than 70% of people would reveal their computer password in exchange for a bar of chocolate, a survey has found.

This is completely unbelievable! Most of the time, passwords are the only thing protecting us from identity theft. There is a reason there are so many articles on the internet that deal with strong passwords. You should do your best to have one, and then you should do your best to keep it to yourself.

You should N E V E R share your passwords with other people. If you do, con-artists could steal your identity.

[And results of an identity theft] can be far-reaching, difficult to rectify, and financially devastating.

Armed with your credit card information, fraudsters could charge thousands of dollars to your account before you ever see a statement from your credit card company. They can open new credit card accounts in your name.

Using your identity, they can open a bank account and write bad checks on that account. They can authorize electronic transfers in your name, draining your bank account. To avoid legal action against debts they’ve incurred using your identity, they might even file for bankruptcy under your name.

They can take out a loan, buy a car, and get a driver’s license — all in your name. They may use your name to get a job or file fraudulent tax returns. And if they’re arrested, they may give your name to the police and fail to show up for their court date. Then, a warrant for an arrest is issued — in your name. (Yahoo! Security Center)

The article raises several interesting questions and a privacy issue. Even though the need for privacy is a part of human nature, sometimes people want to share parts of their private lives, but only with some people. For example party pictures: a lot of people would share them with friends, but only a few with employers or parents. By forcing their kids to be their ‘friends’, parents might be forcing their kids to reveal those pictures, and that’s a clear violation of privacy.

Photo courteously of libizblog.wordpress.com.

The crisis I am referring to was caused by Kosovo’s declaration of independence that happened on February 17. Serbian authorities were quick to label the declaration as illegal; however, that did not stop the United States and many EU countries from recognizing Kosovo’s independence. Russia and China are backing Serbia in its quest to keep Kosovo.

During the first couple of days after the declaration, it became clear that Serbs got split between those who deeply care about Kosovo and those who don’t. Those who don’t were silent, while those who do – protested. During the protests, many diplomatic missions in Belgrade were attacked. The embassy of the United States was set on fire thus presenting Serbia’s population in the most derogatory way to the international community. Moreover, the scarce presence of police forces in front of the embassies during the protests makes me believe Serbian authorities sponsored those attacks.

Now, two weeks after the protests, the situation is still critical. Serbia’s radical party, supported by the majority of the parliament, is calling for a resolution that will give EU an ultimatum: treat Kosovo as a part of Serbia or we will stop our negotiations concerning EU membership. The radicals believe this is a small condition on Serbia’s side, however it is a condition the EU cannot fulfill. It is up to its member states to recognize Kosovo and since many of them already did, it is naïve to assume all of them will change their stance just because of Serbia’s “small condition.”

Having that in mind, if the resolution is approved, Serbia will most probably never join the EU and will probably never become a decent member of the international community, with or without Kosovo.

Because it is an issue of great controversy, we will most probably never see Serbian parliament voting on that resolution. Serbs will most probably get to decide about it in a referendum. Having in mind how close the victory of pro-western Boris Tadic was on the recent presidential elections, I am concerned about the outcome of such a referendum. Serbia is split and that split is most probably even.

Nationalists say Serbia should not become a member of a union that stripped it of its own territory. They would rather isolate Serbia than accept the reality that is bitter for them. Kosovo is gone, and gone it is for good.

Originally posted on www.defactobg.com.
Photo courtesy of The New York Times.