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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.
If you're going to abbreviate things like that, make sure they don't abbreviate to actual technologies.
It only took a second or two for me to figure out you weren't talking about EFF, but it was still annoying.
If you haven't foed me yet, what are you waiting for?
...and get to puppetteer your own US foreign policy today!
MPAA: get Heathrow drug dogs sniffing DVDs!
RIAA: get Swedish police shutting down torrents!
GNAA: get chocolate buttsecks!
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Seems the DDoS has stopped and it hasn't been slashdotted yet, see while you can!
http://www.polisen.se/
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
And the guy's writing the article for IEEE Spectrum. Good luck in your next job.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
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)."
If one reads O'Reilly's post, the entire endeavor undertaken in the post is to explain how USUAL the cease and desist letter that was issued is when defending a trademark. And then he cites Torvolds and other as examples of other people who have trademarks they wish to defend. There's no finger pointing going on, nor is there any oddity in his defense. Which again, is the whole point of O'Reilly's discussion. This entire thing has been blown way out of proportion, and i'm amazed that someone can read O'Reilly's piece and then go ahead and incorrectly convey the content.
What irony.
There are lives at stake here!
I sincerely hope that other governmental bodies of the world come to realize that the political influence of the U.S. is simply poison to them. They threaten every democratic society they influence with their agenda. I am increasingly ashamed, embarassed and angered by the tactics used by our government. While I believe it would be painful or maybe just disruptive, but I think that, for starters, the US should be excommunicated from the U.N. and N.A.T.O. alliances for their behavior. Talk about your "monopoly abuse" cases...
It's time other nations started to shun the US even more than they already do. Perhaps then some sort of balance could come from this. The next bout of elections will not come soon enough but even then I'm unsure of how much damage will be reversed.
The fallout from the Pirate Bay seizure is that the minister of justice (Thomas Bodstrom) has been accused of ordering the police to take action after pressure from the US government. Bodstrom, who is the initiator of the EU data retention directive, IP spoofing on Swedish main nodes, extended bugging laws etc., and also known as a proponent of a totalitarian big brother society, has been requested for constitutional hearings.
Pirate Bay will reappear in Ukraine, Russia, The Netherlands and three other countries. People have been very generous with equipment and hosting as soon as they heard it was the Pirate Bay folks asking for assistance.
The Swedish Police site, www.polisen.se, was taken out for a day with a sustained DoS attack. An investigation has been started.
The public is in favor of the Pirate Bay in numbers like 90-10 or so, and most are extremely critical of the action against the Pirate Bay, especially since the police used 50 police officers to seize two computer nerds and their legal representative. A whole slew of innocent operators were also having their machinery seized, in an unconstitutional manner.
The action may have a real political effect, come the September elections.
The Ombudsman of Justice has decided to launch an investigation to determine if there were any wrongdoings in the raid, including whether the swedish government pressured the police to take action.
And that's how these things should be handled. Tim O'Reilly doesn't deserve an apology. The people with the fulltime lawyers need to learn that they can't send out threats and expect that mistakes are not made public. These actions have a tremendous chilling effect. Therefore any abuse must be brought to light. I can't believe Mr. O'Reilly thinks he deserves confidentiality after his lawyers sent an unjustified letter that could very well kill another man's business.
Days of the US hegemony are numbered. The writing is on the wall. At the moment soverign states pay lip service but when the Euro shift comes and the dollar tanks US arrogance is going to be left screaming at the skies. Don't be ashamed of your govenment, do something about it. The USA was once a bastion of liberty and freethought, it's not too late to save your nations reputation from the ugly minority that weild disproportionate power.
The Swedish national police website has been taken offline by a denial of service attack which started Thursday night.
Because nothing increases support for your cause like DoSing a police website...
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
I can't be the only one who first read that as TOR Publishing. I almost had a heart attack. I mean, I can deal with boycotting eBay, MPAA, RIAA, for their IP idiocy, but TOR? Do not play so cruelly with my fragile nerdy heart.
Seriously, I have never heard any one abbreviate Tim O'Reilly TOR.
I was pleasantly surprised to see GNOME running on that thing...it looks like they'll really be able to pull off what they want to do even with the laptop's limited hardware capabilities. It's amazing how much effort Negroponte is putting into thinking about the design...he's even correlating colors to emotions that they invoke...geez. He and his team are doing a good job, they've managed to create a laptop that looks much more attractive than the crap companies like Dell spew out, no wonder people want to buy their own.
They threaten every democratic society they influence with their agenda.
Because the concepts of intellectual property and copyright were invented by the US, and the only people who benefit from those concepts are Americans (it's funny that you are actually implying that Americans are the only ones who produce decent intellectual property).
I think that, for starters, the US should be excommunicated from the U.N. and N.A.T.O. alliances for their behavior.
The US is supposed to pay 1/4 of the UN's expenses, and they get what in return? I don't think they'd mind all that much. As for NATO, the US provides almost all the logistical support for most NATO missions; it would be quite funny to see NATO try to operate without the US. Considering how and why NATO was formed, it would also be quite humorous to see the US kicked out of that one.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
It might also be worth to mention that by Swedish law it is highly illegal for a politician in the government to give orders to the police or other institution in specific matters such as this. It is called "ministerstyre" (minister's ruling?), and the law is in place as a means to stop corruption.
We can't insult TOR or ODN may get angry
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Dang-it... with the pirate bay shutdown, global warming is sure to pick up speed now.
I am d3matt
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.
Did you intentionally miss the posters point?
The fact is the US pressured another government to take down a site that was LEGAL in the country it was in.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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."
apparently, Kofi Annan broke the crank
Ouch, I hope Kofi didn't need surgery for his crank!
Ba-Dum-KSSCH!
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week, try the fish!
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
CBC.ca had a story this week on the TV news too, where the MPAA is suing a young man in Vancouver for operating isoHunt. I guess they are stepping up the attacks on torrent sites.
Oh You POS
"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.
And i quote:
2.
MediaLive filed for the trademark on the Web 2.0 Conference back in November 2003, when they first entered into the partnership agreement with O'Reilly on this conference. This was before Web 2.0 became such a popular term -- the filing actually preceded the first conference. However, I wasn't personally aware of this trademark filing till this past February, as a result of discussions with CMP after the MediaLive purchase.
Next, is the issue of proportional response. O'Reilly as an INSTUTION apologized for the gaff that resulted in sending this man a C&D. The shit storm that resulted from his blog, and then the rest of the half-cocked idiots such as parent post was not warranted, accurately sourced, or anything more than mis-reported hearsay. Please, for the love of mike, READ before posting. The apology issued to O'Reilly was justified.
Finally, if you'd read the other comments before posting, no finger pointing has taken place. O'Reilly CITES Torvolds and others as examples of trademark holders who also want to protect their trademarks. Again, if parent post had RTFA (s)he'd know that. But parent post clearly did not.
There are lives at stake here!
This is getting on my nerves: The RIAA and MPAA are not part the US Government. They hold no particular codified legislative, executive, or judiciary power, nor are they agencies a kin to the 3-letters (FBI, EPA, FDA, FCC, CIA, NSA, and so on).
The fact is that they are lobbyist groups; simply petitioners to the US Government. Sadly, they are wealthy, numerous, and well connected petitioners, so they get preferential treatment, but neither of them is a government body any more than any group of citizens. They way they "win" their cases is by having enough money and fear tactics at their disposal to dodge court time and exploit holes in the American judiciary.
"My heart is in the work." - Andrew Carnegie
...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.
u can go down 2 circuit city TODAY and get a decent laptop for 300 - 400 bucks; this means it costs about 150 - 250 or so to actually make the damm things, which means that if anyone cared, they could produce a 100$ laptop to day, rounding off the numbers for the real world.
Apparently, of all the millions of wealthy people in the world, including all those in China and India and OPEC, not one cares enuf to step up to the plate, but has to have some publicty hound from MIT do it.
I say if hte poor people of hte world are so ill served by their own leaders, screw em - better to buy rifles for the revolution
In other news, I've trademarked "404" (my slashdot user id number).
From now on, all use of "404" on the internet is subject to licensing fee.
It was a site that hosted torrent files.
:)
Some light reading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_torrent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hasselhoff
There are two demonstrations tomorrow (Swedish content) (Saturday, June 3; one in Stockholm at 15:00 and one in Gothenburg at 15:30. The location in Stockholm is Mynttorget, and in Gothenburg they're keeping the demonstration at Gustav Adolfs Torg.
Ok. Here is a crappy translation of the swedish article to english.
The US government behind closing of site
The US government was behind the raid against the filesharing network Pirate Bay yesterday, according to sources to the SVT news program Rapport.
In april a delegation with members of the justice department and the police met up with american authorities who brought the issue up by request of the MPAA. The interest organisation of Hollywood.
The justice department then requested the police and prosecutors to act. When they replied that the legal issues where unclear the minister of justice's secretary of state contacted the state prosecutor and the state chief of police who in turn ordered action.
Minister rule
The Pirate Bay has openly challenged right-holders within the film and music industry. Nevertheless many in the internet society are surprised of the actions of the swedish authorities.
This is what happened according to sources. The american interest organisation MPAA contacted the gorvernment in the white house. The american department of foreign affairs then contacted the swedish department of foreign affairs and demanded the issue with Pirate bay be solved.
According to the source the prosecutor and the police was ordered to act and describes the actions of the secretary of state as minister rule.
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.
---
New game: Spot the lying astroturfer on /.!
Ok, how about every just start calling these things Web 2.1 an we'll be done with it already...
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
...for all their "new" servers!
Usually, newspapers and letters to the editors go on here saying that "...we dont blame the American people, we blame the American government...". Considering that the American government is a democratic one (so much so that it thinks it right to "impose" its democratic vision to other countries) it is correct to blame the people as they are the ones who elected the governemnt. And those who didnt vote are to blame as well, because the government represents them and its their responsibility to elect the right one. Otherwise, they are responsible for the elected governments actions and should share the blame.
The fact is the US pressured another government to take down a site that was LEGAL in the country it was in.
The travesty of this situation is not what the US did, but what Swedenish politicians did (if early reports are to be believed). Many nations bitch to the US all the time about hosting web sites that are illegal and the US merrily ignores them. The US in turn gives China crap about the websites that they take down and China merrily ignores the US. Governments leaning on other governments to enforce their values is pretty normal. Hell, I expect my government to try and nudge other governments to hold similar values through diplomatic means.
The real crime here is if the Swedish authorities bent to US pressure; or more specifically, if Swedish politicians bent to US pressure and in turn pressured Swedish law enforcement agencies to take an illegal action.. The crime is not the US trying to get the Swedish authorities to take action. The crime is that the Swedish authorities responded illegally to pressure from another nation.
I am not saying I am a fan of US copyright law. US copyright law in fact sucks mightily. That said, I am far more worried that another nation's politicians would cave into US pressure and order their police to enforce a law that doesn't exist and Sweden.
Seems that The Pirate Bay is up and running again.
Ssshhhh!! I'm trying to trademark Web 3.0! ;)
According to the Swedish government sponsored tv channel SVT...
This statement is misleading. SVT is funded by the people, more specifically every household with a TV reciever, which must pay 5 SEK each day (~70 cent) to SVT. There is no money flow from the swedish government to SVT.
They don't have that many friends either! Apart from the UK and even thats restricted to Mr Blair. The population / Media here in the UK are very critical of Tony Blair and Gerorgy Bush's close "Relationship". Often it's the butt of jokes.
America would find it very hard to embargo (blockade) Sweden because it's illegal to prevent free trade between EU member nations. Sweden will just import goods via another EU country. America would have to cut trade with the whole of the EU. I don't see that winning many friends.
Yes and now Iraq is in turmoil to the point of near civil war. Al-Qaeda now has a new base of operation (Saddam as brutal as he was, was no friend of Osama). The Muslim world is enraged at the West making the world a far more dangerous place and the US has left itself impotent in the face of Iran's Weapons program.
Either you are ignorant of world affairs. A Republican with a Nationalist complex or I've just fed a troll. Either way your statements are so far from reality they can't even see it.