There’s a huge amount of stuff which has been programmed for Flash, for which we probably don’t have the .FLA sources anymore. What do we do with that in several years, when there isn’t an easy way to get an official Flash player which properly interacts with compiled .swf files?

For years projects like Gnash have been tried to build a free player that allowed people to run SWF files without having to go the Adobe route. But reverse engineering .swf is certainly a huge task, and sadly Gnash doesn’t support the latest SWF format versions.

At the same time, what do we do with .FLA files when we no longer can execute the Flash IDE? How do we export the assets, the code, the tweenings, and everything else?

Should we just wave goodbye to everything? Install virtual machines with old versions of operating systems? Isn’t all this a bit sad?

In any case this is an excellent example of why proprietary formats are bad, and is also a compelling reason to avoid them in the future.

I’m glad I just have a few .FLA based projects that I’d like to recover at some point, and they are relatively old anyway, so maybe with some sort of FLA to JS tool they can be easily reconstructed/exported, as they don’t use much fancy stuff.

Or so I think hope.

It’s less than x days for Christmas! Buy now or regret later!

Or maybe we’re already salivating at the thought of new shiny gadgets for Christmas. The Kinect, which was recently hacked? Or maybe a new phone? Or…

It’s amazing that even in these times of gloom and doom, we can always make room in our budget and houses for another new device. After all, they aren’t that expensive, aren’t them? And how fun they are!

But is that right? Ethically, economically, environmentally, humanly right?

I wrote about this matter a few months ago, when I realised that pretty much all hardware we own comes from China and nearby countries. A friend, Zarate, got equally concerned, and wondered: Can we do something? Surely we can do something?

I’m glad to say we finally did: Fair trade hardware.

There’s already Fair Trade food, clothes, and furniture, so why isn’t anyone promoting fair trade hardware yet? As an IT professional I’d like to be able to work in my field without feeling guilty of promoting and funding slavery, and I guess you’d like too.

I know it’s a little, tiny, almost insignificant start, but hopefully it will help people become aware of what’s behind the devices we interact with every day.

It was kind of amusing –because I could indeed follow it–, but it’s also very sad to assume that only because I’m female I can’t follow a “technical” discussion.

It’s also funny that “technical” means “traditionally male-dominated topics”, such as software development. But that is absurd: as any sane person will agree, if you want to excel at a field you have to master the technique, whatever your genre is.

Thus, CSS are as technical as knitting, which is a traditional female-only field, but yet you don’t get to look at the only male caught by accident in the middle of a knitting discussion by passionate female knitters and tell him Sorry, technical discussion. No, it’s more like: Oh dear, women’s things! *giggles*.

I say, stop perpetuating the stereotypes. Keep on talking about your preferred subjects and let your audience decide whether it’s too technical for them or not. But don’t make erroneous judgements, please :-)

So I wondered: if I wanted, could I get a computer with parts which had been manufactured exclusively in the EU? I began to search for EU component manufacturers and meanwhile I threw an open question in Twitter:

Does anyone know of computer/electronics stuff made in the EU? (NOT assembled in the EU)

Only Andy Lemon was able (or willing?) to answer! Unfortunately he was going more into the prototyping, embedded systems and robotics direction, which wasn’t what I meant. My goal was simple, but still, it seemed unattainable.

All my searches were fruitless. It seems there are no manufacturers of commonly required computing devices in the Western world.

The chip designs might have been done in the UK (for example, ARM, whose processors are powering most of the smartphones in use, has its basis in Cambridge) or the USA (Intel, AMD), but ARM doesn’t manufacture anything (only licenses designs), and I have yet to see an Intel processor whose box doesn’t reveal a “Made in China” label.

Same for the hard drives. The only non-Far East hard drive manufacturing companies I could find were Seagate (Ireland based, but manufacturing in Singapore), and Western Digital (California based, but manufacturing in Thailand). As for the rest, Hitachi is Japanese; same with Toshiba, and both manufacture in Asia, as one could expect.

I could go on and on, but it seems pointless to keep searching for computer parts made in the EU if you don’t have a processor and/or hard drive.

And from what I have been investigating, it seems to have always been like that, even in the golden computing era when British companies dominated the home-computers market (Sinclair, Amstrad, BBC Micro…): the computers might have been designed in the UK, but their components were of Asian origin.

Even worse, this is not the 80′s any more; we have now a huge industry which entirely relies on technology: Information Technology, or IT for the friends. Yet it surprised me to realise we are fully dependant on the Far East for these matters. Had all the Far East nations decide to constitute an Anti Western World Alliance and decline to provide us with our beloved electronic equipment, what would we do?! The horror!

All these devices have to be assembled and packaged somehow, at an extremely low price, so that the Western companies have a good margin to boast about to their board of investors. Now, replace ‘somehow’ with in huge plants where thousands of people are crammed in together like herd and paid next to nothing by the hour, and you’ll get a better view of what I mean.

I’m sure most of you have heard of the Foxconn manufacturing plant where Dell, Apple and Microsoft (for example) get their cheap tat manufactured, packaged and converted into expensive gadgets while submitting their workers to modern slavery. You haven’t? There you go. Surely that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

And this is when one realises that manufacturing technology in the EU (or the USA, depending on where you live) is not just a whimsical, closed-minded idea that I just happened to have, but it reveals itself as series of ethical and ecological issues instead: Do we want to keep funding this hypocrisy? Is it really sustainable? What’s stopping us from manufacturing our own technology in our own countries? Manufacturer’s greed? Isn’t it possible to balance workers’ rights and companies’ profit? Or is it a lack of raw materials?

Ultimately it all boils down to a single question: can we do anything about it?

Anyway, I had –as a friend described it– nuked my Facebook account a month and a bit ago, after having to dive into several quite hidden pages, fill in two captchas, re-enter my password and promise I really, really, really, REALLY wanted to delete the account.

And I find it quite liberating. Although I don’t believe they have deleted anything at all (instead they have simply set the ‘deleted’ flag to true), it’s great to feel totally disconnected. I’m not an active node in their potential advertising targets database. I won’t have nasty surprises every year, when they decide to open a little bit more of data so that it’s crawled by Google and they get more advertising revenue thanks to my actions.

Also, it’s fantastic when you meet someone, physically, face to face. People filter everything irrelevant and only talk to you about interesting stuff that they did or that happened to them; they won’t detail to me how many videos they have posted and how many news they have linked to and how many status messages they have liked in the last three hours. Truth is, I don’t need to know that. Those things are actually irrelevant to me. And since I’m an average person, it’s quite possible that they are irrelevant to you as well. Think about it.

Besides, I don’t want to be held accomplice of the ‘friend’ and ‘like’ terms depreciation. I can’t have one hundred or more friends. No one can have so many friends, actually. Plus this total alienation of the ‘dislike’ term seems like an attempt to implement Newspeak amongst web users, and my love for words can’t repudiate that tactic more vehemently.

But ‘deleting’ the account is not enough: there are now thousands of web sites that are following the ‘Facebook like’ buttons trend, and will show one of those annoying buttons at the bottom of each article they post, so that you can ‘like’ the article (never dislike it). Those buttons are served directly from Facebook’s servers and as such are a great tracking device: if you’re logged in and visit those sites, Facebook can take note and add it to your profile, so that advertisers know that you also visit websites X, Y and Z.

Since I didn’t want to get redirected to any Facebook page while the designated 14 days for ‘deleting’ an account lasted (which would therefore reactivate my account and force me to start again), I added the following rules to my /etc/hosts file:

… and it redirects every request to my computer.

The requested paths don’t actually exist in my computer, so it’s easy to spot where the ‘like’ buttons and Facebook widgets would have been: I get ugly “Not found” messages instead. But this is reassuring: it proves that the rule works and it’s yet another futile tracking attempt truncated by the mighty power of /etc/hosts!

Don’t feel terrified by the ‘Facebook void’. You know, before it existed and sucked everyone up into their massive data-centers, people did communicate. There’s e-mail, IM, SMS, phones, snail mail, or if you’re into that sort of thing, you could even use a fax or a telex!

There’s also the diaspora project which is meant to be an alternative to Facebook, but although it looks like a good idea, I’m not sure how it is going to work when some non-tech-savvy people want their own server, not a public wordpress.com-like server. Still, it’s a step in the right direction: to take back our data.