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Pirates, Web 2.0, and Hundred Dollar Laptop
Update on the One Laptop per Child Project. dominique_cimafranca writes "Ethan Zuckerman gives a report on his visit to the headquarters of the One Laptop per Child project. Some details on practical design considerations such as the hinge, the rabbit ears, and why the hand crank was ultimately left out (apparently, Kofi Annan broke the crank on a prototype). Several pictures, and a look at the motherboard of the OLPC laptop."
TOR Calls Out Torvalds, Stallman on Web 2.0. theodp writes "In an unusual defense of partner CMP's trademarking of Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly points a finger at Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman in his rebuttal posts. TOR also says the blogger who posted the O'Reilly-approved cease-and-desist letter from CMP 'owes us an apology for the way he responded' (he got one)."
Fallout from The Pirate Bay Raid. Tyler Too writes "The Swedish national police website has been taken offline by a denial of service attack which started Thursday night. That's not the only fallout from the raid on The Pirate Bay: there's a demonstration planned in Stockholm on Saturday."
U.S. Government Ordered The Pirate Bay Shutdown? mkro writes "According to the Swedish government sponsored tv channel SVT, U.S. government officials -- after being approached by the MPAA -- requested the Swedish justice department to take down The Pirate Bay. According to the story, the Swedish justice department asked police and prosecution to act, but when they explained the laws are too vague, they turned directly to the state attorney and the chief of the national police force."
check out wednesday night on the weekly graph
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
As a Brit, I vote no to that. We've stuck by the united states through thick and thin. For stupid decision after stupid decision, we've had your back. As a result, the rest of Europe hates us. If the united states were removed from the UN and NATO, well, you might as well just hand our asses to the french and germans on a plate.
So instead of cutting out on us, why don't you just elect a president that doesn't suck next time, 'kay?
Oh no... it's the future.
A US interest has acted abroad previously. This Wikipedia article details the war that Scientology waged against anon.penet.fi.
From the article
In September 1996, an anonymous user posted the confidential writings of the Church of Scientology through the Penet remailer. The Church once again demanded that Julf turn over the identity of one of its users, claiming that the poster had infringed the Church's copyright on the confidential material. The Church was successful in finding the originating e-mail address of the posting before Penet remailed it, but it turned out to be another anonymous remailer: the alpha.c2.org nymserver, a more advanced and more secure remailer which didn't keep a mapping of e-mail addresses that could be subpoenad.
Facing multiple criticism and attacks, and unable to guarantee the anonymity of Penet users, Julf shut down the remailer in September of 1996.
Truly a chilling possibility.
Copyright as we know it was invented in England, but has existed in many other countries, like China, throughout history.
Let me requote from another thread (Thomas Jefferson):
"It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance."
"Pirate Bay will reappear in Ukraine, Russia, The Netherlands and three other countries."
Warez sites are moving about to other countries, and some are even popping up on Freenet now. I think anonymous p2p will be the next main phase.
The first phase was napster (centralized in many respects), then second generation p2p was gnutella and emule, and now the third generation has Freenet, I2P, GNUnet, Rodi, AntsP2P, Mute, etc. Even if you're not interested in the issue the back and forth conflict between the media companies and programmers is interesting - I wonder who'll win out in the end.
...why don't you just elect a president that doesn't suck next time, 'kay?
You're making the wild assumption that the American people actually elected Bush in 2000 and 2004. (How soon we forget!)
For simplicity's sake (!) we'll ignore US laws which bias our elections to favor only Republicans and Democrats. We'll also ignore that under the US Constitution the antiquated and undemocratic Electoral College selects the president and not the American people ('cause the American people clearly chose Gore in 2000). And, of course, we'll ignore that Corporate America funds our elections and politicians so effectively that corporations sometimes -- literally -- write laws that they then have their politicians enact.
As a Brit I don't expect you to be familiar with such dirty details like that.
But it was the BBC's own Greg Palast whose investigations proved that the 2000 and 2004 elections were blatantly rigged using a wide variety of techniques -- ground-breaking journalism confirmed by others much later.
You're implicitly assuming that most of the pirated copies are a forgone sale. Most of them are likely to be teenagers who never would've bought from you anyway. Most people downloading are time rich, money poor.
You're also assuming that all those copies provided you with no exposure. For all you know that piracy may've been encouraging, not depressing, your sales.
Bottom line is you have no idea. So don't get all uptight about it.
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New game: Spot the lying astroturfer on /.!