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Exxon's Brute Squad Hacks the Yes Men
tom_evil notes a story up on Infoshop.org about a parody site and the lack of a sense of humor in a large multinational. "One day after the Yes Men made a joke announcement of ExxonMobil's plans to turn billions of climate-change victims into a brand-new fuel called Vivoleum, the Yes Men's upstream internet service provider shut down Vivoleum.com and cut off the Yes Men's email service, in reaction to a complaint whose source they will not identify. 'Since parody is protected under US law, Exxon must think that people seeing the site will think Vivoleum's a real Exxon product, not just a parody,' said Yes Man Mike Bonanno. Exxon's policies do already contribute to 150,000 climate-change related deaths each year,' added Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum. 'So maybe it really is credible. What a resource!'"
These Artificial Legal Entities need to be re-enslaved.
When the owners sign on the line, begging The People to permit their incorporation, they agree to go by the regulation The People impose.
It is very much like your drivers' license.
You OWN your car, and theoretically, in a Free Nation , that Property Right is absolute, and you may do with your property, your car, whatever you wish.
UNTIL you sign your Drivers' license application. At that moment, when you AGREE to abide by the Regulations for Vehicles and Traffic, that you surrender your Rights.
Exact same thing with the incorporation of ALEs. We *could* make them do whatever we want, and if they don't like it, they can just close up shop, and liquidate their assets back to the shareholders.
But somehow, this idea of them being just as good as a Flesh-and-Blood came about.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
On the other side of the argument there are persons who believe corporations should have no rights at all. These people believe that they can say the Microsoft sponsors the mass killing of anyone who disagrees with them. This is ok a the accusation is so extreme that no one would believe, so it is clearly satire. The problem, of course, is where to draw the line. Is it ok to say that MS regularly sanctions threats of any medium ranking figure who threatens their monopoly? Where does satire end and stock manipulation begin?
Ultimately, I think we get into the nature of satire, and the death of the art form. Traditional satire abstracts some tyranical figure that is simply to dangerous to attack directly, and cleverly illustrates the tyranny and negative impact of the figure. Or satire highlights some social policy, and then proposes a ridiculous solution to it. Satire is useless when launched at figures that can be attacked directly or when is simply attributes characteristics that the figure probably does not possess.
It saddens me that meaningless verbal attack is put forth as satire. In this case the article could have proposed that ExxonMobile convert the people into a product. Such a modest proposal would not be original, but at least would be an attempt at satire, rather than just the ranting of thugs. Or they could have attributed the action to Butthole Petrol Incompentated(BPI), or EXpat Oil Nation MOBlized , or whatever. Just make it interesting satire, not school house insults.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I disagree. A hack is generally defined as using the rules of a system in such a way that it accomplishes something that the creators of the system never intended. The system doesn't have to be a computer (social engineering is a form of hacking as well.)
I'd say this qualifies.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Ok their internet connection was turned off at the request of unrevealed people, without a criminal charge or notification. There isn't even an attempt at establishing any kind of proper authority, just a command from someone powerful enough to make it happen. That's far worse than Exxon (or someone acting in Exxon's interests) being required to take this act publicly.
We are all just people.
Firstly, if the ISP received a DMCA section 512 take down notice for the content, they should give the customer the full details of that notice.
Secondly, if they didn't receive a section 512 take down notice, they should have asked for one (thats assuming that the ISP was told to take the content down for copyright reasons, if it was for other reasons, there are other procedures to be followed)
That's exactly how civil rights were won in the 50's and 60's. A few, rare people had these "Whites Only" signs on their doors, and then once the media made others aware of that, no one patronized those stores. After that, those establishments took down those signs because they realized that no one would eat at a restaurant that served "whites only". If it worked then, surely it would still work today!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Here's a better one.
Exxon grosses $360bn per year.
Their (world-wide record) profits are $36bn per year.
What retard thinks that oil companies make only 10% profit? A lemonade stand does better than that.
Exxon is a vertically-integrated company. They pump, refine, and distribute their own oil. If that yields only 10% profit, then screw the oil business. I'm going into foodservice.
Or: clever accounting.