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Al Gore:

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our countryâ(TM)s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn:

Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development...as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.

source. I don't know why people were so gleeful to misrepresent Gore's words on the subject then, but it's just bizarre to hear it repeated here of all places nearly two decades later. Then again, you're also seemingly arguing that ARPANET wasn't a DoD project, so perhaps this confusion is expected.

"internet" != ARPANET. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/L... indicates that Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn agree with Gore.

and yet you missed the part where it rated it "false", and gave the background on it.

Although Vice-President Gore's phrasing might have been a bit clumsy (and perhaps self-serving), he was not claiming that he "invented" the Internet in the sense of having designed or implemented it, but rather that he was responsible, in an economic and legislative sense, for fostering the development the technology that we now know as the Internet. To claim that Gore was seriously trying to take credit for the "invention" of the Internet is, frankly, just silly political posturing that arose out of a close presidential campaign. Gore never used the word "invent," and the words "create" and "invent" have distinctly different meanings: the former is used in the sense of "to bring about" or "to bring into existence" while the latter is generally used to signify the first instance of someone's thinking up or implementing an idea.

Emphasis added.

But a spirited defense of Gore's statement penned by Internet pioneers Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf (the latter often referred to as the "father of the Internet") in 2000 noted that "Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development" and that "No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution [to the Internet] over a longer period of time"

If President Eisenhower had said in the mid-1960s that he, while president, "took the initiative in creating the Interstate Highway System," he would not have been the subject of dozens and dozens of editorials lampooning him for claiming he "invented" the concept of highways or implying that he personally went out and dug ditches across the country to help build the roadway. Everyone would have understood that Ike meant he was a driving force behind the legislation that created the highway system, and this was the very same concept Al Gore was expressing about himself with his Internet statement.

He was one of the early visionaries to see the potential of these projects.
He did secure the passage of key legislature (ie, they were his bills) that led to it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
He is one of the key figures in its history, such that even the fathers of the internet acknowledge his role:
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/L...

Al Gore, March 8, 1999, interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Al Gore, March 8, 1999, about 0.2 seconds later in the same interview "...I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth, environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." Wired magazine yanked that quote out of context and it has never been the same since.

You may want to look up the "High Performance Computing Act of 1991", also known as the "Gore Bill". That's the one which, among other things, funded the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, without which we wouldn't have all of the nice toys we enjoy today.

Don't take my word for it. Why not ask Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, the computer science gurus who did get the Internet up and running? While they had been working on it for some time, the RFCs describing TCP and IP weren't published until 1981, and the "Flag Day" on which the old ARPANET switched to running on Internet Protocol was in 1983.

The internet was up and running before he ever got elected to any office

Al Gore was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 1976 and was pushing the ideas of high speed telecommunications in his first term. Unless you are counting the 57 computers on ARPANET at that time as "The Internet" it looks like you may want to revise that statement.

He kept the tax money flowing to the right rich people and the kept the campaign contributions flowing right back.

That's what tax money does. Taxes pay for things like civilized society, or in this case The Internet. And Al Gore was the guy who paid the bills for the people who created the Internet. He also paid the bills for the initial development of Internet Explorer and letting AOL users onto Usenet, so he does have a lot to make up for, but when he said that he was the man behind much of the US government's support of computing and telecommunication research which led to the modern Internet, he was right.

weren't you the same guy who said that Bill Clinton and Al Gore were great for the internet?

Clinton not so much, but Al Gore absolutely was. But don't believe me, believe Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn:

Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking, where multiple separate networks could be joined together into a network of networks. ARPANET became the technical core of what would become the Internet, and a primary tool in developing the technologies used.

First ARPANET IMP log: the first message ever sent via the ARPANET, 10:30 PM, October 29, 1969

The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990

Senator Albert Gore, Jr. began to craft the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (commonly referred to as "The Gore Bill") after hearing the 1988 report toward a National Research Network submitted to Congress by a group chaired by Leonard Kleinrock, professor of computer science at UCLA. The bill was passed on December 9, 1991 and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII) which Al Gore called the "information superhighway".

A potential turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program initiated by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 also known as the Gore Bill.

The Internet was commercialized in 1995 when the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.

http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00311.html

This was attempted before with Free-Pc.com (Now it is just a parked domain). This was back in 1999. 10000 free Compaq computers were given away. In return people gave up personal information/demographics/hobbies/etc in return for a PC that had advertising on the screen 24/7. Source.

The attempt was a bust if I recall right.

But this is 10 years later; we have come a long way in targeted advertising. If anyone can do this, it is Google.

If it didn't help for Cerf to say "No, really, without Al Gore, we wouldn't have an Internet"^ in the middle of all the laughing about Gore having make the claim in the 2000 election, then how is his support going to help Obama?

Gore's bill where he supposedly "created" the Internet was put into law in 1991.

You persist in misquoting him. Again, he did not say that he "created" the Internet.

Really, go read the Wikipedia article I mentioned earlier. Read the statements by Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Newt Gingrich, et al. And learn a little more history. Gore's initiative in the Senate didn't begin with the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991; it went all the way back to his work as a representative in the 1970s. Note, for example, a few tidbits from this statement from Vint Cert and Bob Kahn (you should read the whole thing):

Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development... No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time... The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening... As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept...

And it goes on like that.

The facile, misquoted interpretation you are regurgitating is exactly the sort of distortion that was used to undermine Gore back in 2000.

Al Gore INVENTED the internet you know.

Well, according to Vint Cert, who actually did invent the Internet, Al Gore played no small part: http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00311.html

"Their government does not wiretap their citizens' phone calls or endorse torture, and their taxes do not go to supporting a massive military industrial complex or a set of oil cartels."

I beg to differ on wiretapping here.

As for torture its more a domestic thing.

Military industrial complex here? I think petrolium cartels are equally obvious.

"When you are in public, you are in public." should not equal "When you are public, you are presumed to have criminal intent." This is yet another symptom of the growing perceptual gap between the police and the community they are supposed to "protect and serve". There are new stories every day about the effects of the increased militarization of the civilian police forces. Some of the stories are about SWAT teams kicking in the wrong door and terrorizing and/or shooting innocent people in their own homes. http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/10/06/tennessee.shooting.02.ap/index.html http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,188934,00.html http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/1107/474003.html
Some of the stories are about police view everyone they don't like as a "badguy" and then using that to justify violence. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tOVkT2YESU&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e2-qi0Rc3w&feature=related
And some of the stories are about police purposefully criminalizing citizens when they want to protest peacefully (another right fading away) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/28/SURVEILLANCE.TMP http://www.notinourname.net/restrictions/infiltration-19feb04.htm http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0101/msg00193.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/22/nyregion/22police.html

Why do we want to add power to an already out of control aspect of our government? When did the police stop serving the people of the community and start serving political masters?

Any investor who buys a stock based solely on the ticker symbol ... needs to check out the prospectus for my new company Silicon Emerging X-factor, York.

Seriously, SUNW used to be well known to investors, now it just sounds like NetJ" (a company at the dotcom boom that had a descriptions that said (roughly) "we don't do anything, nor do we have immediate plans to do anything". )

Bruce Perens warned us all this would happen 6 years ago in his "Napster Hurts Free Software" essay.

I'm not surprised by the text the GP pasted in. The last time /. covered this topic I pointed to this link which you may find interesting reading. It's a Reporters Without Borders report on the state of freedom in the countries (including Tunisia) that sought to oust control from ICANN.

I'm *not* American, but my bullshit detectors go off hard when I see China and Saudi Arabia slavering for control of the free-est communication network known to man. And it's sad to see elements in the EU joining with these countries to promote their own bureaucratic agenda (and many Europeans have noticed).

And the ironic bit is that Tunisia, where this free-the-DNS-from-US-shackles gabfest was held, has an extremely lousy record on Net freedom.

Yeah, well, that's what Norman Angell thought too. It's was what he argued in "The Great Illusion", published at a time of unprecedented levels of world trade. In 1910. Four years before the First World War. Oops! Nothing daunted, he updated his book in 1933 and again in 1938, and of course, we all know what happened in 1939 ...

Actually, I think the basic idea is sound enough, in the long run. But history shows that rational self-interest will not always be enough, that sometimes madness, stupidity and/or greed will lead to war, despite the interest of commerce.

PS There may be more truth to that saying about the US not bombing countries with McDonalds than people know - but it's not actually true. Eg Serbia in 1999.

The forces of evil in Colombia have shown they are at the cutting edge of technology--and has happened in previous occasions.

Katz's typewriter notation was noted in detail in Deconstructing Katz.

Routers.
Scientology links.
Open protocols.
Free music.
Post-9/11 web responses.
Chat hosts and BBS admins.
Ancient packet switchers.
Executive buzzwords.
Open Source.
Online directories.
Cyber greed.
That guy who just fragged you in Wolfenstein.
The Imperial Domain Droids.
Well-meaning POW/MIA industry dupes.
The Hamster Dance.
Paranoid cartoon fantasy diagrams.
War, damnation and hypertext.
Swedish fiber stations.
Statutory IRC.
Beepstalkers.
Geeks.

The feds have been accused of this before, though it's unclear to me whether or not the accusations are valid. Still, this would be a great way to deliver the application, and, as another commenter astutely noted, it would get the justice department to look at the convicted monopolists a bit less negatively.

Certainly, it wouldn't the first time that the US government had aligned themselves with nasty people...

Are you even reading this thread? How in the world are you tagging this fork of the thread as offtopic? It was an answer to a relevent strain of precedence that would have direct effects pertaining to any lawsuit brought against developers of GPL'd software.

If it's correct, that no successful suit has even been brought against a manufacturer of personal weaponry for the actions of the customer base, then it's logically extensible to the software industry with proper licensing agreements.

If this is not the case, then Microsoft is responsible for any network intrusion using unauthorised installations of SMS, or the cDc for any intrusions made with Back Orifice, or Symantec for surreptitious use of PC anywhere (Example argument here).

Do you honestly think either case is going to happen? In the same universe that neither of those cases would occur, lives software coded under the GPL and distributed without warrantee, as accepted by the user each and every time they use that product.

A good example exercise would NetStumbler, an exquisitely useful diagnostic tool which just happens to be a large double edged claymore of a sword. Are the authors of this software responsible for any use that leads unauthorised parties into a poorly configured (read: Unsecured) 802.11b network?

If you'd like to kick the ball about in left field, is Ford or Budweiser responsible for any deaths at the hands of a drunk driver? The answer is, vehemently, no, because humans possess free will and can do stupid or illegal shit at anytime. They accept responsibility for their actions anytime they turn a key, pop a bottle cap, or click a mouse. The differences in prosecution will lie wholly in the intentions behind the action, and the consequences of the same. The bottom line remains, however, that the manufacturer/developer is NOT responsible for the actions of (arguably) sapient users in possession of power tools.

Unless you live in Japan, at which point you can patent things that were invented by another civilization, while you were still poking fish with sharp sticks (i.e. the guys in Japan that tried to patent curry)...

France is protecting state interests not individual rights. Just consider that France recently passed a law that requires ISPs and other access providers to gather the full names of their users, effectively making it impossible to use a French services to publish anything anoymously.

The Leonardo issue was also discussed at Monday's press conference at the MOMA, hosted by RTMark.

Roger Malina is in fact the editor of Leonardo, and Leonardo has been around for a long time. I used to subscribe to it in the late 80s.

you thought the cadenhead / theobvious.com piece was bad; did you ever see what lloyd wood had to say about it?

-t