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Nominations Open For "Most Likely to be Shut Down By Government"
The corporate overlords at SourceForge asked me to name a Slashdot category for their upcoming
Community Choice Awards and to let you guys select the winner. I have named my category "Most Likely to be Shut Down by a Government Agency." We're going to run this like we do an Ask Slashdot call for questions — post your nominations into the comments here. Use moderation to send up good ideas. In the upcoming days we'll post another story where you can vote on the actual winner. Nominations need to include the project name, a link to some sort of official website, and a paragraph of why you think they deserve to win. The project that wins will gain fame, notoriety, and maybe a cease and desist order that they could print out and frame if they had that kind of time.
It's basically only a matter of time before the fear-mongers and political demagogues in the U.S. and elsewhere outlaw any form of encryption that doesn't include a backdoor for the NSA and other "trusted" government agencies. There has already been evidence of commercial encrytption (such as Windows encryption) including such backdoors. And when the commercial companies all cave, how long do you think it will be before the government comes after the open source projects too?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I would think just about any anti-government project in Zimbabwe, North Korea, China, Russia, Cuba, Syria or Iran would be about 100 times more likely to be shut down than one in the U.S....
don't give yourself too much credit taco... by and large the fear mongers on the left have been proven just as much a bunch of retarded flakes as the fear mongers on the right. neither side of the political fence in this arena has any real credit left at this point.
They're the next allofmp3 -- they're getting named by name in international treaty talks.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I would like to nominate Slashdot as being most likely to be shut down. After all, free thought is anathema to government control.
"Feel a glory in so rolling / on the human heart a stone" --E. A. Poe, "The Bells"
wikileaks - since it already was (sort of) shut down by government.
Tor, Freenet, and I2P are probably on the top of the list. There is no way that government wants difficult to trace communication to be availble to the general public.
I suspect that FreeNet is something that many, many governments would like to shut down. In the west, pretty much all they have to do is say "klddy pr0n" and it's gone. In China and other such countries, they don't really have to say anything at all.
This website, supported by the states, offers its citizens affordable medications from Canada and Europe. I predict the federal government will shut it down, citing "safety issues" with foreign drugs.
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
I think the question then becomes which government? By now there are any number which have taken note of their existence (and some which have acted upon that knowledge), so my guess would be that more will do the same.
www.gao.gov
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
Shouldnt anyone eligable (ie: those with +1, or +2) have been given at least 1 Mod Point so they could be included in the vote?
Which, is probably not possible with the current point system, but maybe in the future you could alot eligable people a mod point on a specific topic/poll/etc.
Well, it worked for jfk...
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
... this is, for the powers that be.
I didn't think the EFF's site needed any explanation but I'll provide it here for Taco since it was asked for in the summary.
I think this site should win because it's very likely to actually shut down if Patent Reform comes through. However, even if patent reform fails, I think it would be interesting to see what the lobbyists and congressional members do to come up with to try and take them down, because this site is one of the few out there that do a damn good job of calling out the patent trolls. In addition, it's one of the few that make the public aware of what all of us on Slashdot have known all along: that the patent system sucks, and these are the people that take advantage of it.
http://thememoryhole.org/
http://wikileaks.org/
http://cryptome.org/
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
They're getting closer all the time, it seems...
I haven't seen this listed yet and a lot of great ones have been mentioned but I'd just like to throw Tor out there.
http://www.torproject.org/
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Uh huh. You realize that by saying Republicans, you're actually suggesting that the Democrats (only real people who could pull that off) are as evil as many of us suspect they are, by silencing anyone who criticizes them.
The real answer is probably Libertarian Party, which pisses off both (D) and (R) types.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Whereas before you needed to be able to plug a crystal into a socket in order to do this. Geez. Hams have been accidentally or on purpose wandering around the frequency spectrum since radio began.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Assuming there's an election, and the USA doesn't find itself in a state of emergency so Dubya doesn't have to call an election.
My nomination for "most likely to be shut down by government" would have been the US Constitution, but I may be too late so I'll nominate the US Supreme Court.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Then why hide?
Seriously. If they want people to slow down, why hide behind billboards and bridges and other stuff and pop out and snag people?
If they honestly wanted everyone to slow down they'd just park on the side of the road in the very most visible spot. Watch your fellow drivers on the freeway sometime. They see a cop car, they hit the brakes. Even if he has someone pulled over and its obvious they could fly right by him.
They hide because it helps them write tickets. That's the goal of a speedtrap. Income. I'm sure the PR people love to smile at the camera and talk about how their just saving lives, but their actions simply do not agree. You can't tell me that having all this ticket revenue pouring in means nothing.
If they really want people to drive the speed limit, park out in the open.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Do the mega corps want patent trolls around? I doubt it.
They want patents to stop small companies competing with them. If a small company sues them for patent infringement, they find lots of other patents in their portfolio that the small company is infringing, and come to some cross licencing deal. They can't do that with patent trolls because they don't have a business.
AutoPilot: DIY Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
http://autopilot.sourceforge.net/
Perhaps not the first to go down, but I think the odds approach 100%. The peer-to-peer Internet, with its implicit equality for all servers, lacks the degree of barriers to entry that corporations need to "create" wealth. It is already dying through direct corporate action (protocol throttling, port blocking, etc), and there will be government intervention soon enough. Look for copyright, child porn, botnets, etc to be the excuses used to require licensing of servers.
Radio was unrestricted in its early days. Unrestricted mass communication is extremely detrimental to authoritarian governments. Net neutrality prevents ISPs and backbone providers from getting their vig. Nobody benefits from a peer-to-peer Internet except We The People, and most of us don't know that is the case, nor why. Show me something that does not have populist support, and does stand to allow profiteering and control if destroyed - and I'll show you a very tenuous place to stand.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
FreeNet is not a centralized server, however, so there really is no way of "shutting it down." It's the same thing as the RIAA playing "Whack-A-Mole" with current p2p file sharers. It's just another type of that, similar but different.
Here's a hint about the American system: the president doesn't call elections in the first place, so he can't stop one from happening in the second. He has no legal authority to do so, so no one would listen to him if he tried. There's a reason no one's ever tried that before. Even Lincoln had to run for re-election during the Civil War (and almost lost!); there's simply no way to stop the process.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
RIAA / MPAA
www.riaa.org www.mpaa.org
Please?
I am surprised that this has to be explained:
If you don't know where the traps are, you have to be careful everywhere.
If you know where the traps are, you only have to be careful where the traps are, and you can drive like hell everywhere else. Good for public safety, huh?
NASA. Perhaps they aren't "shutting it down" but they're letting it bleed to death.
He probably doesn't. But who will some law maker listen to, him or the RIAA?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.