Slashdot Mirror
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....
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..."
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.
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.
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
Huh? Unless I'm missing something Taco made no mention of left vs right, nor did he say anything reasonably interpretable as involving partisan politics whatsoever. In fact at the moment most pf the posts here seem to be about TrueCrypt, and the one-any-only post I can find from anyone that can even be remotely interpreted with a partisan implication is that the anti-crypto attempts "started trying in the 90s under Clinton's reign, with Al Gore as the point man... over 10 years later, I guess it's time for another round of facists to try it again". If anything, that would tie this sort of attack to the left, and the "another round of facists" is entirely ambiguous or entirely non-denominational as the rapidly approaching "next round of facists" is a tight presidential race between Dems and Pubs.
Maybe it's just an anomaly, but I've been seeing a bit of a repeating pattern lately. Borderline paranoid delusional people with a persecution complex about partisan political bias. They themselves are wildly biased, and it takes the form of baseless accusations of opposite bias, even against entirely non-political non-partisan statements complete strangers. They literally just imagine things and hang them on other people like Christmas tree ornaments, and by themselves imagining biased things about the other person it somehow "proves" that other person biased.
It was pretty interesting when someone went on a "bias" rant against me with all sorts of stuff that came out of their own imagination, especially when they managed to effectively toss in an accusation that I was sexist. A really neat trick considering that no one had even menentioned gender prior to that point. Chuckle.
One of the critical aspects to creating and protecting extreme bias is psychological filtering, uncritically embracing anything that serves that bias, and finding ways to automatically disregard anything that might challenge that position. For example if you decide someone is wildly biased and everything they say is completely unreliable, and they say 23+38=61, you don't have to waste any thought seeing if it's true or not. The source is "biased", therefore one can automatically send the untrustworthy information to the trash heap without wasting any mental effort evaluating it at all.
Baseless accusations of bias are themselves bias, are themselves a powerful psychological mechanism of creating and perpetuating that person's own bias.
I have some speculations on why I think this might currently be a particularly common issue, but such speculation would be particularly fertile ground for bias and accusations of bias. Heh.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.