Slashdot Mirror
The Internet Power Grab
Maple Syrup writes: "Fast Company has an interesting article written by John Ellis about the power shift on the Internet, as large corporate interests use political means to take over what had been a populist medium. The most interesting material comes at the end: 'There are no grass-roots efforts on the Web. The Internet army, which is enormous, hasn't been engaged or conscripted.'"
The EFF is hardly opposition, while they do some great things they are hardly going to topple big business any time soon.
/doing/ things. Hell, do you realize how quickly companies would fall if all of the Nerds went after their asses? Bank records, personnel files, social security numbers, telephone systems, security systems, ordering and tracking systems, even the damn air conditioning wouldn't be safe!
/least/) group of intelligent people dedicated to overcoming any obstacle in their way. Funding? No problem, any half ass can steal funds, and anybody better then a half ass can manage to not get caught (too quickly at least!), you want secrecy? Hah, simple, once you step up from having script kiddies being the main threat to people with actual PhDs even the news media would learn exactly how hard it can be to catch somebody who knows what they are doing.
What is needed is a large group of people who are not afraid of actually getting out there and
Nobody could stop a large (few thousand at
And in the very least, what the fuck could the government do if the entire tech sector turned up against big business all at once? Throw them all in jail? Heh, and watch the rest of the economy go down hill and leave the nation to rednecks and whitetrash? Fat chance. Imagine what the headlines would be "Colleges and universities around the nation shutdown due to seriou staff shortages after FBI raids. In addition, IBM, HP, Compaq, Intel, AMD, and a large number of other companies listed on the Nasdeq have had at least temporarily shutdown due to lack of employees."
They would have no choice but to give in to academia and science as a whole.
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Why? Simple...because it's easier to regulate a few big companies then millions of individuals.
The Internet scares the Govt., because it's (now) a populist medium. Joe Citizen...or G.W. Bush are equals on the net, because an IP address is what it is regardless of who's on the computer connected to it. The Governnment can't regulate the 'net, and they want to. In some ways, the pendulum has swung all the way to the right. The communist block imploded because their govts. (try as they did) could not control their access to information about the rest of the world.When the USSR jammed RFE broadcasats, they shifted to another frequency. When Khomeni was kicked out of Iran, he used the Long distance telephone system to dial into Iran from France and disseminate his message, which was playing on thousands of cassettes within Tehran within hours. Now our Government wants to pull the same crap...Problem is, they can't.
Information is a virus that can't be controlled. Just ask the former Soviets.