On Hacktivism

z84976 writes "Oxblood Ruffin, of cDc fame, has produced a nice article discussing various aspects of hactivism and some of the approaches used by their own Hacktivismo group in supporting freedom (of thought, mainly) on the internet. Check it out over at The Register when you get a chance."

Comments

Open source Food

[RealisticWeb.com]

I have two things to say about this article.

1) It was VERY VERY long

2) I really liked the analogy of OSS to Resturants.

Think about it. The majority of people never think twice about never seeing the ingrediants, but there are some who feel "I'm putting this stuff in my system, I have the right to know what's in it!". Some even have good reasons like peanut reactions and so forth.

The resturant will say "If we tell you how we made it, we will lose business". I think that's nonscence personally. Ten to one, I'm not going to be able to cook that by myself anyway, and I'm just going to come back to the restaurant to get it donecorrectly. Plus if I do make it and feed it to all my friends and they say "where did you get that recipie?" and I tell them, don't you think they are going to go check out the menu for themselfs?

And finally, what if the majority of the people eating at your restaurant wanted the food cooked a different way, but didn't have any other choice on the menu? They are going to take those ingrediants and make the food better. If the cook was smart enough, he might be able to learn from what the other cook did, and make his own product better!

Am I making my analogy clear here, or is this just gibberish?

back in 1995

[Syre]

Back in 1995 I had some arguments... that is um... discussions (in Cannes at Milia) with Nicholas Negroponte and John Perry Barlow. Both Negroponte and Barlow believed that the Internet was an unstoppable force that would inevitably make countries like China become free.

My argument was that the Chinese and other repressive governments would be sure to set up national proxies with filtering that blocked out sites the government didn't want people to see and kept track of what people were accessing.

Both Negroponte and Barlow told me that was impossible and would never happen. They also pointed out that the TCP/IP is designed to route around obstacles.

Well, I've been proven right (so why am I not running Media Lab or flying around the world giving speeches?). China and other countries (Singapore, etc.) have in fact put in national proxies and are blocking thousands of sites, tracking people's usage, and putting people in jail.

On the other hand, I think that there is a hope that Barlow and Negroponte will eventually turn out to be right in the end, as hackers and other renegades put in alternative links via satellite and other means, which bypass these government blockades.

If enough of that happens, the blockades will come down, since they won't be useful any longer.

But I think there will be a long hard struggle befoe that happens.

Thoreau on Activism vs. Civil Disobedience

[lkaos]

I am of the opinion that activism is amoral whereas civil disobedience is not only moral, but one's duty. I think a good portion of hackitivism is not civil disobedience but instead just activism. At any rate, here is a quote from Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" which is probably the most elegant statement I've ever read regarding the limits (and requirements) of protest.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

So, in my mind, hacking a web page can never really be justified--no matter what the cause is. On the other hand, refusing to obey government censorship (in places like China) by hacking through their censors is, in my mind, is a very noble thing.