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Second Indymedia Server Seized in UK Within a Year
GarconDuMonde writes "For the second time within the past year, an Indymedia server has been siezed in the United Kingdom. This time it is the Bristol Indymedia server (currently redirected to the United Kollectives IMC site); this follows on from the Ahimsa siezure last October.
The current siezure was carried out using a search warrant by the UK police at approximately 16:30GMT on June 27th, 2005. This was despite being warned by lawyers "that this server was considered an item of journalistic equipment and so subject to special provision under the law" (press release). Bristol Indymedia is currently being supported by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), Liberty and Privacy International. Other media organisations have declared their support."
That's absolutely ridiculous - but gives (to me personally) credibility that Indymedia is seen as a force of change.
Word has it that they're going to move to Sealand/Havenco - Take that UK!
Dada Mail - Program, Art Project or Absurdity?
In fact, that just encourages scurrilous rumor mongering -- which is diametrically opposed to good journalism.
"One cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God, the British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there's no occasion to."
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Thanks for the heads up, but perhaps it's a good idea to mention the reason for these seizures alongside the fact that it just happened.
For those of you left wondering by the initial post these seizures are apparently related to an investigation of a bit of vandalism that cost somewhere around a hundred grand...
That's a little background, it's not like some evil government was seizing their servers simply because of a difference of opinion (although, depending on who you listen to, that may be the case)...
don't you mean. 1984 here we come?
to paraphase; hope lies with the proles (peasants/working class/majority), but the proles are incapable of seeing any alternative to the current society because none exists that they can compare the current system to, therefore a revolt will never occur.
Long story short, it's a worldwide network of internet resources for communists and anarchists usually located around local indymedia pages. They use these resources to organize social events and stuff like that. Sometimes I participate of such events, they are mostly orientated to civil rights and antiglobalization stuff.
Apart from that, they also provide hosting solutions to social and radical groups, specially local Hacklabs on which I partitipate frequently.
Your head a splode
And given they could easily build their own server for PEANUTS that would at least be able to get the minimum news out the door, they would have done this kind of redundancy the day after the last time this happened.
I'd be inclined to call them Stupid Hippies, but they're not Hippies or Stupid. I just guess they don't have the few hundred pounds per node to set up a back up server somewhere.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
It's not just for communists or anarchists. In fact I'd say its mostly filled with socialists. I admit its left wing, and I agree its news for people who support universal healthcare, education and other social programs. I wouldnt say the majority of people want anarchy or communism, thats the far fringe of even the left. Common sense, we will never have communism or anarchism for the basic reason that too many humans want power over another and it would eventually end up as corrupt as capitalism and the systems we have now.
The purpose of these networks are to give news to the working class, and if people can ignore all the crazy anarchists and communists who don't have a very realistic plan or concept of global government, theres some articles and news worth listening to or reading.
I think this site exists for the same reason FoxNews exists, and these outlets have to exist. The left factions overall are bigger than the conservative right, so I see this as their foxnews.
If you agree with their ideas then go ahead and listen to them, if not then keep watching FoxNews.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Yes, I was just admiring the wide range of communist and anarchist views on Fox News only the other day. It's good that the mass media is there to show us what unbiased and uncensored media looks like.
In the USA we don't have an Indimedia at all. There is no left wing media in the USA unless you want to call Air America and CNN liberal, but liberal is not the same as the socialist left you see on Indymedia. Most liberals support free trade and don't really care about helping the poor, the socialist left on the other hand is busy fighting against CAFTA and fighting for fair trade. Free speech only exists anywhere because of the internet, and while you think you have free speech in the USA, if you are too much of a socialist or communist here you could lose your job, and this is if the government decides to be nice and not declare you a terrorist.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Nowhere in the article does it highlight the reason the server was taken, which can eventually be found buried in the links, but the response by Indy is: "As the G8 summit approaches, threats to our freedom of expression, and action, appear to be increasing rapidly." So, Indymedia contacted the Police in the firstplace, and now something is being done, they're crying about it.
Technology must be used to aid politicians in making ethical decisions. This is why ethics, election reform, and sustainable economics are all important. When you have sustainable big business, and you focus on ethics and people actually get involved things change. Voting is not the same as being involved and most voters don't understand anything about economics or politics. If they stopped shopping and giving money to unethical businesses they wouldnt have unethical governments. If they actually organized around this instead of just vote they'd elect their own representitives. Right now in most countries, people blindly buy anything thats on sale without any awareness of what say Walmart does politically to their community.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
When the UK servers were seized, I was the first techie to put up a mirror. FYI, I was shipping around 200k/s for over 40 odd days. The UK mirror alone is around 9Gb in size, not to mention the other sites that the original UK server was hosting. The fact is that we now have 8 servers handling www.indymedia.org.uk, spread globally around the world. Hosting a mirror takes serious amounts of good will.
One thing governments appear to miss is the fact that we DON'T log IP addresses.
Tim Brown
Anybody get the feeling this has something to do with the G8 summit being held in Gleneagles in a short time? Considering Indymedia's past association with AntiGlobalization maybe the Police thought they could take some of the pressure off the inevitable protests which will occur outside and around the summit by taking out an information hub, or maybe Indymedia were inciting violence, which IANAL but in the UK is a reason for a court injuntion.
("Public safety" tends to overrule civil liberties in the UK, just look at the banning of Hoodies in shopping centers.)
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
and over in the US, you have Fox News, and are not allowed to show the flag draped coffins of your war dead.
hang on, which one has the free press?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Congo was the personal empire of King Leopold II of Belgium, whose colonial excesses sickened Europe and led to the Belgian government seizing control of the colony from the monarch.
So even Belgium has a colonial past. But hey, so does America (war with Spain, the Philippines, anyone)?
"If he were a plant, people would roll him up and smoke him."
A footnote in the Evening News today hints that the server was suspected of being used to organise 'civil disorder' in Edinburgh during the G8 summit. Living in Edinburgh and watching the City bracing itself for full on riots, offices and shops closing, wide spread road closures, non critical surgery being canceled to deal with possible injuries, local - family run businesses going to the wall, supermarkets saying they may not be able to sufficently stock their shelves with food.... I'm happy at any steps being made towards limiting the anarchy that some groups are planning.... Even Edinburgh Castle (realy nothing more than a tourist attraction now...) is stepping up security. How would you like it if the world Invaded (and I use that word deliberatly) YOUR town, shutting it down for a week, potentaly destroying a large part of it and making the residents lives hell? Everyone seems to assume that everyone that claims to support freedom of speech should also have freedom to do whaterver they dam well please... With Freedom comes responobility, Freedom to state your views also comes with the need to consider the concequences of those views on others... If you incite a riot you must accept to be held accountable....
[The Universe] has gone offline.
The ahimsa seizure last October:
- Swiss and Italian authorities made a request ot the USA under Mutual Legal Assisstance Treaties
- The FBI issue a supoena to Rackspace (A US-based hosting company, who were hosting the Indymedia servers in their UK facility.)
- Rackspace co-operate with the FBI, and hand over the servers
As far as I know, no information about what the Swiss and Italians wanted from the servers was released, but it has been suggested that is was relted to photos from the 2003 Switzerland G8 summit.The Bristol seizure yesterday:
- An anonymous author post this message, on 17th June:
(copy & paste from my Firefox cache.) This post was hidden within 24 hours, for violating Bristol Indymedia (BIM) policy. (I don't know exactly when it was hidden.)
- An individual with a history of conflict and disagreement with BIM then contacted police about the post, since it hints that the poster threw rocks at trains, or the cargo on trains, or the train tracks ("dropping rocks onto useless pieces of metal.")
- Police initally contacted BIM last monday, 20th June. BIM take legal advice.
- Police request IP logs from a BIM member on 21th June.
- Later on the 21st, BIM inform police via their solicitor that they will not voluntarily hand over and information. (NB: for non-Brits, a solicitor is a type of lawyer.) BIM also inform Indymedia UK at this point, and contact Liberty
- Yesterday, 27th June, police visit the home of the BIM member who hosted the server with a search warrant, and seize the BIM server and the individual's own computer, and arrest the BIM member.
Various posters on Indymedia sites have suggested that police may be trying to shut down Indymedia sites in the run up to the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, next month. I doubt that, in general, that is the case (Indymedia sites can be quite helpful to police, since they can use them to find out about planned actions, and spot people bragging about what they've done.) This appears to me to be more like someone with a grudge against Bristol Indymedia causing the police to act a bit excessively in a criminal investigation.There are a whole bunch of reasons Indymedia can't really deal with backup servers competently.
1) It costs money. Every server in another hosting company costs bandwidth, rack space, hardware and maintenance. Indymedia is a bunch of Hippies in the sense that even the slightest cost seems to be too much for them. Even when presented with a donated old PC in the bottom of a rack with a solid but shared internet connection, the idea that one of them might have to do some work drives them away.
2) It requires some technical competence. The Indymedia folks are not exactly stupid, but most of the ones I've met dropped out of school as early as they possibly could. They prefer poorly educated ignorance as a way of life. I'm sure there are some highly educated agent-provacateurs leading these dolts around by their nose jewelry, but those people couldn't care less about keeping web servers up.
3) There is a victimisation ideal among Indymedia type folks. They think its much better press to have a server seized during a police investigation and make a big stink about it, rather than saying "the Bristol server was seized, but since it was mirrored on 3 continents nobody noticed one gone missing".
This has turned into a big, trolling rant. Sorry, but their anarchist, nobody-responsible-for-anything attitude wore thin a long time ago.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I can't think of any EU state other than Belgium that doesn't have a colonialist, imperialist or otherwise expansionist past. Europe had a very violent middle-ages.
t huania, Estonia, Latvia
Hmm, let's see - as pointed out, Belgium does have a particularly nasty colonial past in Africa. But the EU states that don't have any colonial nasties in their history include:
Finland
Ireland
Luxembourg
Malta
Cyprus
Li
Poland?
Slovakia
Slovenia
Czech Republic (unless you count expelling the Germans after WW2, and, er, the defenestration of Prague).
Certainly, Finland, Ireland, Slovakia and the Baltic states (and others) were themselves the victims of colonialism, as was Poland, for long stretches of their history.
I've never understood the need for these marches and must admit that I find the concept of "marching season" fairly amusing.
We should just ban them and be done with and in fact a much better law than this Religious Hatred Bill would be a law which banned any public display or expression of religious belief in circumstances where non religious or people of opposite religions may be exposed to it.
You may get a bit of whining to start with but in the long run it would be a good thing.
This link is representative of typical Indymedia content - judge it for yourself.
uglf communique 05.01.2005"
"I worked hard for it. I deserve it. And I have it," Campbell said. "It's all mine."
Isn't "libertarian" a right-wing thing? I'm sure the "left-wing" "equivalent" would be "anarchist".
:-)
:-)
:-)
Don't take this the wrong way, but it's really funny to watch someone's brain asplode as they try to artificially twist real-world politics down to a mere two pidgeonholes.
The reason you can't do it is because politics is not one-dimensional. The childishly crude left vs right garbage is something you only get in obsolete or broken political systems incapable of supporting anything other than two main parties. Having only a lousy two reference points, a line is the result - and from that is drawn left and right, a retarded one dimensional political concept.
You wouldn't happen to be American by any chance?
(Fisher's deduction states: "The more issues a person crudely shoehorns down into a liberal/conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American"
Anyway, if you haven't already seen it, check out Political Compass, which at least expands things to two dimensions, and will make your brain stop hurting
(No offense intended in all this, I'm not exactly being entirely serious here. Hence the liberal sprinkling of smileys
If you are running an indy newspaper, and you want to have public forums, for God's sake, put the public forums on a separate server. That way, when someone commits a crime on the forums, the police will only sieze the server the forums are hosted on.
This is a case of not having the proper disaster strategy in place.