General strike 27G

Usually I don't write this type of things in this blog, but today I'll do an exception (Like I did when we had protests in the synchrotron). In the future we will see if this is only an exception (looking on the "politics" tag). I hope I am no digging my grave.

Today is general strike in some regions of Spain (Euskadi, Nafarroa, Galiza, Balearic islands, and Catalunya) organized by some syndicalist organizations. In the case of Catalonia: CGT Catalunya, CNT Catalunya, COS and Solidaridad Obrera. I have to say: they are not the majority in workers union organizations in Catalunya.

The announcement of this strike has been silenced by the mass media. Yes, I say that because in the "main" tv news and the paper press, I saw almost anything about this strike. As an example, in the Catalonian tv, in the news I saw last Saturday (non web accessible) they told about an okupation (squat) in an abandoned cinema building. They explain that the police had to remove them due to some similitude with the squat of a building, a few days before the general strike of the 29th of September (2010), without telling "there's an strike planned for the 27th" until the last second of the report.

Today the video they have public is more impartial they explain the thing more in a fifty fifty way. But this was not what the people saw at the first moment that this happen. Also they publish another video about the Catalonian (new) government announcing a zero tolerance in the squatting. Even of the big problem we had in this country last months the government did not say anything about zero tolerance in politics corruption, police, or companies. A citizen can go more days to jail for being in a protest than for million euros corruption.

What the government announce yesterday is the derogation of an internal police rule about ethics. The reason: we can trust in our police. Then we can remove all the laws, because we can trust in our citizens. People is ideal! People is great from nature. I don't thing it's easy to be a cop, but without rules for them weird things happen. Why to remember all the press to dress the distinguish with a bracelet? Do I have to dress another bracelet telling the police that I am a good citizen?

The Spanish mass media are talking about Egyptian, Tunisian and Yemen protests. In local news they don't talk about any type of protest, only they explain the agreement about the prolongation of the age of retirement, even if this is the reason of the general strike of today, they don't talk about strike. In Europe we even don't have media information about Iceland revolution.

We cannot discuss the official speech. If you are not agree about what the capitalism and neoliberalism, the only option they give you is to be excluded of the system, to be against the system. With what is happening on this crisis, the best thing they can tell about the people is that the are anti-capitalist.

Kona's Gallaxy

This week, I shared with some friends the Astronomy Picture of the Day (there's a very nice Spanish translation). I like to share a bit more this picture.

Look the people at the other side of the galaxy, they are small from this perspective. Realize also: there is a bench close to the galaxy center! Assuming that this bench can be 2 meters long, who big this garden can be?

They have a few more pictures in the site of the garden, but the link with I enjoy much more is from the Spanish translation to a zoomed atlas of visible universe from the Earth.

What's next for the Fermilab?

One of the Fermilab's projects arrives knows when will be its last day: the Tevatron. This is the second biggest collider that the human beings build, and has been the the first one during many years before the start up of the LHC.

The machine was completed in 1983 being a collider of two beams of 512GeV, resulting collisions of about 1TeV (this is the reason of its name). An upgrade (I think in 1994, but I'm not completely sure) allows to have both beams close to 1TeV (meaning that the collisions are about 2Tev).

Many data has been collected with this machine and specially its bigger detectors: CDF and DØ. But meny more experiments are running in the Fermilab.

This news about close this project can be feel only like a budget cut, but I hope this is like the day that the LEP was closed. I hope this will mean a push on the ILC project.

Elliptic curves with a git repository

Good news, finally someone found time to do what has to be done asap, with the development of elliptic curves in the field of the free software.

Also the repository of the GnuPG has been successfully migrated to git (human readable in wikipedia), great. (good and short howto)

I have not enough time for the full development of the ecdh development and I feel really glad that some one founds it. Now is time for help in test.

Great job Andrey!

To work with the git sources, 5 projects must be cloned:

$ git clone git://git.gnupg.org/libgpg-error.git

$ git clone git://git.gnupg.org/libksba.git

$ git clone git://git.gnupg.org/libassuan.git

$ git clone git://git.gnupg.org/libgcrypt.git

$ git clone git://git.gnupg.org/gnupg.git

Then go the the branches for the elliptic curves:

$ pushd libgcrypt

$ git checkout ECC-INTEGRATION-1-5

$ popd

$ pushd gnupg

$ git checkout ECC-INTEGRATION-2-1

$ popd

Now you have the sources of the GnuPG with elliptic curves support.

Update:

$ libgcrypt-config --version

1.6.0-git8993868

$ libgcrypt-config --algorithms

Symmetric cipher algorithms: arcfour blowfish cast5 des aes twofish serpent rfc2268 seed camellia

Public-key cipher algorithms: dsa elgamal rsa ecc

Message digest algorithms: crc md4 md5 rmd160 sha1 sha256 sha512 tiger whirlpool

$ gpg2 --version

gpg (GnuPG) ecc 2.2.0-git5761a9b

libgcrypt 1.6.0-git8993868

Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later

This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.

There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Home: ~/.gnupg

Supported algorithms:

Pubkey: RSA, ELG, DSA, ECDH, ECDSA

Cipher: 3DES, CAST5, BLOWFISH, AES, AES192, AES256, TWOFISH, CAMELLIA128,

CAMELLIA192, CAMELLIA256

Hash: MD5, SHA1, RIPEMD160, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, SHA224

Compression: Uncompressed, ZIP, ZLIB