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Don't give Amazon your money. They avoid paying tax and they treat their staff like dirt. Choose an alternative.

Does that EVER work?

I've personally been involved in several successful protests. Make enough of a show, and representatives can plainly see what their constituents want. On the commercial side, yes, protests also often work.

DDoS isn't harm, it is interruption, in much the same way picketing is.

Picketing works because it's visible. A DDoS harms because innocent bystanders, with nothing to gain from either side. To quote another poster in another thread, "what about all those mom-and-pop online stores that lost a day's business because of the attacks?" A DDoS is less like picketing and more like setting off a bomb inside the store. It's an interruption for a while, with no concern for consequences.

On the nature of Wikileaks

There is a major difference between honest reporting and actively seeking to cause damage. Did Wikileaks consult with the U.S. military to make sure its many war documents didn't reveal troop placement? Did they verify that the embassy cables didn't jeopardize diplomatic relations? Wikileaks isn't just punishing bad activity. They're pushing a political agenda that punishes anything Julian Assange doesn't like, with no concern for consequences.

That's not to say I approve of everything my government is doing, but I don't think Wikileaks' policy of bridge-burning is an appropriate mechanism for change. I'd rather stick to the more civil methods of protest, that don't involve putting others needlessly at risk.

Offhand, a protest I participated in during 2009 helped reduce a 30% budget cut for libraries down to 10%. Every three years, the Librarian of Congress determines DMCA exceptions, primarily based on public letters. A bit more research shows many successful protests. These companies rely on either being necessary or popular. Make a protest visible enough, and they'll change their minds.

If we quit buying everything but food, energy, and our clothing, watch how fast every other economy on the planet would suffer. ... Consumers ARE all-powerful, no matter how corporations try to spin it.

... and the world's insects have the power to join together and destroy humanity, but it's not going to happen. Hypothetical power and real power are two different things. As long as a company can control enough consumers, then the others can vote with their wallet all they want-- it won't do much. That's the problem with a lot of arguments for free market. They assume that large groups of consumers will act with the same cohesion as their corporate counterparts. This rarely holds true.

If only there was some organization by the people and for the people that could represent us in a more unified way... oh wait, we have something that is supposed to do that... it's government. We just need to stop thinking of the government as the enemy and start thinking of it as a tool that needs to be maintained and fixed when it is broken.

Think about how many times large companies have behaved poorly. Now think about how many times those behaviors have been stopped by consumer boycotts. It's very lopsided. Changes are more often achieved by pressuring the government than by simple consumer power. In cases where there have been successful boycotts, they usually relate to a small aspect of a company rather than a fundamental change.

I do like the idea of consumer power. It's comforting to think that we can fight an entity much more powerful than any one of us alone. But we need to be realistic about what can be achieved and how. A nice idea without practical teeth is just a placebo.

Here is a list of successful product boycotts: http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/boycotts/successful boycotts.htm

The differences between these boycotts and an RIAA boycott is that the successful ones were more tied to ethical reasons.

Nobody really wants to boycott the RIAA's artists. The problem is simple. We simply want a different product, but the RIAA people are so stuck into pushing expensive plastic disks on us that we have to then take home, possibly illegally rip them to a usable format. Trash the stupid tracks that we paid for, and then contend with issues like labeling the tracks correctly and getting the relative gain right between different tracks.

The thing that sucks is that there is a clear market for a new method of music distribution and playback, but the asshats that control the content to make this market happen are a decade behind the market, and the only thing they can think of to satisfy the new market is to sue people into submission and force a decade old technology onto willing and potential customers for a new product.

Imagine if the RIAA was suing people for using CDs in the 90s, and only selling LPs, cassettes, and 8 tracks?

That is what they are doing today. CDs in the 90s had advantages over other technologies, and the consumers voted with their dollars to have that format as the dominant one. Today, customers want digital files so they can have more variety in a smaller space than CDs can provide.

The market has spoken, and I don't recommend quitting downloading and buying of RIAA music, but rather I recommend downloading the stuff as you please. I cannot recommend buying a plastic CD, taking it home, and wasting your time to convert the thing so you can play it on your computer and/or digital music player. If you are happy with the CD format, then by all means don't change. But I have hundreds of CDs that I simply don't listen to anymore because they are too much of a PITA to use. I've gone digital with my music, but I am still dissapointed in the effort it takes to get the labeling and the relative track volumes correct, and getting the album art, and all that.

Even "stealing" music for me takes a bunch of my time that I would rather not have to do vs just buying a product or service, but nobody will sell me those, so I'll keep doing what I'm doing.

Call me a tree hugger if you will but there are a lot of things you can easily do to make the office more environmentally sound.

Provide facilities for recycling
Cans, paper, plastic cups etc. can all be deposited in seperate bins and taken to recycling facilities or collected by local authorities/charities.

Encourage people to lift-share/walk/cycle to work
In the UK there are a number of websites like this one where people can register and volunteer to lift share with others.
If you think there's any chance of getting people to cycle to work, make sure there's a safe place they can lock up their bikes.

Buy environmentally/ethically sound products
When stocking up on coffee/copier paper/whatever, spend some time looking at sites like this to ensure that you're not giving money to companies which disrespect the environment.

From article http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/research/corporate_ researcher.html

Something like 2800 hits for "china". It's gonna be lound if that's in counts per second. I wonder if it has an overload protector. Contiuous discharge can make the a poorly consturcted meter fall to zero. As the background is never zero, go back from where you came, call the control room and check your battery. If the battery is good, it's time for first responders and you need one for yourself. SCO, it's like prompt critical - over in notime but hurts to be around. China, is more like lingering waste - you know where it is and stay away.

The article states that the instrument's response is based on a pollution database, http://www.scorecard.org/ and a corporate ethics database http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/research/corporate_ researcher.html

I think it's more of a (witty, IMO) satirical stunt item than anything that the guy thinks would actually be useful.

We have to distinguish here between

• 'politics' as a large and fuzzy-edged strand of human activity

• party politics - the mainstream political scene

The latter may well be under threat, but will likely continue to evolve in its characteristic hyper-darwinian way to "meet the challenges" of a "wired world". The threat is real, however, because there are some necessary relations between politics, power and information. With luck, in this limited sense of "politics", Jon Katz may be right.

Cynics have long held that politics is the applied science of lying and there is a grain of truth in that view - in real politics control of information is, if not all, at least a very great deal. Remember the 'science of lying' is a branch of information theory.

From the point of view of the politician, sustaining power is a matter of "getting the electorate to agree" - the news media are partners and sometime adversaries in the delicate game of defining what's important, what's out to lunch and what's irrelevant for the electorate.

It's a read-only client/server model, with very many clients and very few servers. Controlling the agenda effectively ('lying') is easy in this model.

With enhanced communications through computer networks, many other models are possible. Now this is a bit of a truism in the hacker community - and is often taken to mean some form of 'electronic democracy' where the government kindly devolves power through online referenda and focus groups and the like, but I think these other models are likely to be implemented over the (dead or horribly maimed) bodies of the old ones or expire themselves (viz the recent "vote auction" fiasco.)

At this relatively early stage of the game, where everyone is still waking up to what is happening, a lot of chips have still to fall and it's pretty much impossible to guess the specifics of the outcome. But as the information spectrum broadens, as it becomes easier and easier for information sharing, opinion forming and mass action to be co-ordinated by self-selecting groups, it's possible that strategies and models will emerge that actually challenge the power base of the existing poliitical system.

So what would be the napster / gnutella killer app for online activists?

Well, if Freenet delivers then that is probably going to help (the yet to come legal struggle over freenet - for which the recent cases can be seen as limbering up - will be interesting because it will identify those whose vested interests are threatened by it...) but I think by and large we already have the software tools in web media (you're looking at one!). We are still waiting for the concepts and 'forms of life' that will make these effective political tools.

One area that comes to mind is 'active consumerism' - buying according to ethical criteria - which if enacted on a really large scale can certainly have impact. Like the man said: "Get organised."

BTW: Politics is still very important to some people, eg microsoft - enough to spend a few million dollars on anyway. See: this article (based on this report) (just give me the report, already!)

I seem to remember a previous thread on a similar subject on /. a few months ago. It's getting a bit like usenet these days... the same threads/subjects popping up.

Getting back on topic, I think it does go to show that no matter how much you research the products you buy, whether that's a pair of trainers or a computer, you can never be entirely sure that the company concerned doesn't have any skeletons in it's cupboard. Although that said, this particular article is a little bit patchy in places.

M.

There are also matters to be considered, such as whether the materials used are recyclable, how 'componentised' the computer in question is (i.e how much you can upgrade it before you dump it and get something newer) and how energy efficient it is, along with the ethical policies of the manufacturer (i.e labour practices, pollution, etc....).

See here for more information. The reality is that there is no such thing as an ethical and environmental computer. All we can do is make informed choices that allow us to minimise the damage we do. That goes for virtually any product that has come about through the use of new technology.

M.