Democracy is not a form of government, but is instead a more universal idea about how decisions should be made.
If you look at the actual implementations of the movement-without-a-name that circulates at places like Crisis Camp and City Camp and whatever Camp, it is not about dumping one government in favor of another, but instead about creating little pockets of opportunity for transparent, opt-in and inclusive decision making to create policy. No revolution! Just little tweaks, here and there. Better over time.
Where these solutions work well compared to older methods, they evolve, are replicated (or forked!) and sometimes prosper. But it does take problem solving and patience and creativity to start it up. In that respect, this is very much like FLOSS. If that sounds worthy of your energy and effort, hit the link below and find some people like you.
Given that US telecos are themselves rather reluctant to provide internet access to "everyone", I think we can safely assume that expecting adversaries to do this is more talk than action.
Ok, let me see if I've got this straight. You make two points: one to complain about corporate media consolidation, and the other to complain about the regulations that were once an effective barrier to media consolidation, before they were gutted by people who love them some corporate media.
Fear not: Egypt's government has hired Hill and Knowlton to promote the country "as an outsourcing location." Uh, money well spent, I'm sure now that Egypt is a case study in why not to outsource. (source: the US Foreign Agents Registration Act database, which is searchable online. https://twitter.com/Integrilicious/status/31803089807740928 )
All of this can change if Mubarak leaves and he country really opens up. Give it a few years: a timezone near Europe, a large English-speaking population, and a lot of enthusiasm. Who knows?
Either both piracy and seizing domains without due process are wrong, or neither is wrong. We can debate which is better. But the current arrangement is that imaginary property belonging to the powerful is protected by institutions, and imaginary property belonging to the regular folk is not. And that ain't my definition of rule of law.
... is a complete lack of due process and the right of appeal in regards to Internet censorship. This is appalling. The entire Western legal code is built on the idea that if you cannot be penalized for something without the right to defend yourself in court. I realize that the seizures are of property and not people, but it's not hard to argue, hey, maybe seizing someone's business and wrongly broadcasting that the owner is a criminal* might negatively impact the owner.
* I'm referring to the case of the hip-hop blogger, who was hyping unreleased material on the request of labels and accused of piracy. I don't know the details of the site in question here.
That's a weekend hack of some public data calls + the GPS lookup. Why can't I have that as a feature of an app called "Weather"? I want heroic, high quality apps that are light and fast and mostly don't suck. And I'd pay for them. But instead I have features federated around to a dozen weather apps, very few reliable brands of mobile apps, and devs wondering why they can't seem to make money selling 1/12th of a software solution anonymously.
The original vision for Wikileaks was much more decentralized. At the time, reasonable people asked how they would prevent the system from being gamed via social attacks and spamming. They never found an answer, and opened a newspaper instead.
Your smug superiority doesn't match the data. The New York Times has been agressively covering wikileaks material, and indeed is their preferred US outlet. While they are certainly not "as free as" Wikileaks itself, I would argue that an org with a little transparency and accountability (sometimes opposing interests to freedom) would be preferable to what Wikileaks has given us.
Or better yet, an ecosystem of many, many outlets to choose from. Which is exactly what the Times, and Al Jazeera are working towards. So why are you pissing on it, +5 Insightful?
So 100 people are getting 75% of the Internet's love from the downloaders. Researchers suggest that if we "disincentiveize" these people, we'll stop 75% of the downloads.
This is bonkers.
Sure, you could smother those 100 people with RIAA-issued pillows, but then the Internet would go to the next best 100 people providing content. Because this is a perfect marketplace, people can move to the best content. Get rid of the best content providers, and you might slightly diminish content quality, but consumer behavior would be the same: download the best available option. There'd be a new group of 100 people that get the download love, and we'd have to get more pillows..
Once again, our friends at the EFF are ahead of the curve. Their HTTPS Everywhere extension, released a few months ago, probably would have beaten this attack by Tunisian security services, or at least made their jobs much harder.
Umm, thanks for playing, but your concept of "green" sucks. Sustainability, permaculture, whatever green -ism you care to mention all have a concept of utility at their core, where we are in fact trying to create good outcomes for people. We want more planetary goodness because it makes for a nice place to live. There are outliers, of course, but pretty much all sustainability thinking boils down to managing our lump of rock so it is interesting and safe and pleasant.
Killing everyone you find is not a useful route to "nice place to live".
Regarding all the "WON"T WORK" statements, can someone explain why this isn't already provided by the excellent Ghostery extension? For example: It's running now, set up to run without notifications and block all known bugs. To me, it's mostly invisible. Hovering on a status bar icon tells me that it's blocked Slashdot's use of Google Analytics and Doubleclick scripts.
I appreciate the effort by Mozilla to drumbeat this issue (ahem) but I'm not sure I get it.
I think this misses the point somewhat. Don't we all hate DRM because those schemes are a real bitch for data portability and long term archives? Which is it, then?
The reason you put a timed kill switch on an archive is not because people in the present will use it in ways you dislike -- if that were true, why create or share it at all? The point is rather to piss off and disrupt the people in the far future who are post-facto digging through archives on you. Internet research hinges on how easy it is to find things. This would probably make it harder to find things that have expired.
Security exists in an ecosystem. Everything can be broken. But the only questions that matters is will it actually happen most of the time?
Yeah, it turns out that the founders of the country had rather peculiar ideas about mail. They thought the easy and reliable access to periodicals (ie, information) was essential to the continuation of democracy in America. Their was a raging debate early on between the pragmatists, who felt that newspapers should get deeply discounted mailing rates, and the idealists, who argued that newspapers should be able to use the US mail service for free.
They also argued that mail service should go to everyone, not just urbanites, for much the same reasons. Those inconvenient postal rules are a legacy of this passionate advocacy for free information.
This is all mostly forgotten today, but I wish it wasn't. The illustrative points about the utility of free exchange of information in a democracy. The illustrative lessons for last-mile broadband and an open Internet are so obvious I don't have to mention them.
Yes. The inequality of information access is usually why we worry about privacy. We are quite comfortable operating in public places. It's the selective and unaccountable use of information about us that freaks people out.
Information that is truly public isn't nearly as scary as information which is selectively used by people working in secret. Most corporations, of course, prefer that the data you turn over remains entirely private. And we have no corresponding view into the corporation's inner workings (Facebook, News Corp, etc). This sucks.
I suspect that the growth of public feeds (video or otherwise) will grow and expand, but unequally. The rich will continue to live and work in opaque, gated communities while those who use public services (like a subway) will be living fully in the public view and permanent, searchable memory.
If you worry about privacy, fight for transparency into institutions of power. Only then will they make fine tuning the boundaries between public and private life a priority.
Meteorologists aren't paid be right. They're paid to get ratings. Eyeballs. Pageviews. And in this respect, Bastardi is doing his job. It's a sucker's bet because in ten years if Some Dude on the Internet is proved wrong, no one cares. But if SCIENCE is proved wrong, well then that just ices his book deal, doesn't it?
He's doing his job. I encourage climatologists to keep doing theirs and just ignore the teevee.
Anyone who has ever worked in Information Design can tell you that paper, with it's stunning contrast ratios and 1200 dpi printing is a far more precise medium than screens. WTF?
The point is that the logic and lawfulness of this request applies to anyone to government is treating as a criminal suspect with due process, and that the specific details of this case aren't the issue.
Agree that easy unofficial sourcing of apps is important.
That said, I think the rise of "apps" as a term for pay-to-play web page is still a problem. Nearly all the Apps out there are just web pages that do things on small screens and can access some system resources like the GPS. The whole paradigm is bullshit, even without the Apple nannys running the App Store(TM). I use the World Wide Web. I LIKE the World Wide Web. Quit fucking with it.
My mother keeps asking me if her favorite websites are going to start charging for access. I tell her, uh, sort of.
Slashdot Mirror
Democracy is not a form of government, but is instead a more universal idea about how decisions should be made.
If you look at the actual implementations of the movement-without-a-name that circulates at places like Crisis Camp and City Camp and whatever Camp, it is not about dumping one government in favor of another, but instead about creating little pockets of opportunity for transparent, opt-in and inclusive decision making to create policy. No revolution! Just little tweaks, here and there. Better over time.
Where these solutions work well compared to older methods, they evolve, are replicated (or forked!) and sometimes prosper. But it does take problem solving and patience and creativity to start it up. In that respect, this is very much like FLOSS. If that sounds worthy of your energy and effort, hit the link below and find some people like you.
http://forums.e-democracy.org/
Given that US telecos are themselves rather reluctant to provide internet access to "everyone", I think we can safely assume that expecting adversaries to do this is more talk than action.
Ok, let me see if I've got this straight. You make two points: one to complain about corporate media consolidation, and the other to complain about the regulations that were once an effective barrier to media consolidation, before they were gutted by people who love them some corporate media.
Do YOU see any inconsistency there?
Fear not: Egypt's government has hired Hill and Knowlton to promote the country "as an outsourcing location." Uh, money well spent, I'm sure now that Egypt is a case study in why not to outsource. (source: the US Foreign Agents Registration Act database, which is searchable online. https://twitter.com/Integrilicious/status/31803089807740928 )
All of this can change if Mubarak leaves and he country really opens up. Give it a few years: a timezone near Europe, a large English-speaking population, and a lot of enthusiasm. Who knows?
Noted.
Either both piracy and seizing domains without due process are wrong, or neither is wrong. We can debate which is better. But the current arrangement is that imaginary property belonging to the powerful is protected by institutions, and imaginary property belonging to the regular folk is not. And that ain't my definition of rule of law.
... is a complete lack of due process and the right of appeal in regards to Internet censorship. This is appalling. The entire Western legal code is built on the idea that if you cannot be penalized for something without the right to defend yourself in court. I realize that the seizures are of property and not people, but it's not hard to argue, hey, maybe seizing someone's business and wrongly broadcasting that the owner is a criminal* might negatively impact the owner.
* I'm referring to the case of the hip-hop blogger, who was hyping unreleased material on the request of labels and accused of piracy. I don't know the details of the site in question here.
That's a weekend hack of some public data calls + the GPS lookup. Why can't I have that as a feature of an app called "Weather"? I want heroic, high quality apps that are light and fast and mostly don't suck. And I'd pay for them. But instead I have features federated around to a dozen weather apps, very few reliable brands of mobile apps, and devs wondering why they can't seem to make money selling 1/12th of a software solution anonymously.
Yes, apparently it's difficult to make money off software that doesn't get "heavily used". It's a feature.
I don't want 500,000 apps on my phone. I want about 20, and I want them to work really, really well. This has implications for the software industry.
The original vision for Wikileaks was much more decentralized. At the time, reasonable people asked how they would prevent the system from being gamed via social attacks and spamming. They never found an answer, and opened a newspaper instead.
Your smug superiority doesn't match the data. The New York Times has been agressively covering wikileaks material, and indeed is their preferred US outlet. While they are certainly not "as free as" Wikileaks itself, I would argue that an org with a little transparency and accountability (sometimes opposing interests to freedom) would be preferable to what Wikileaks has given us.
Or better yet, an ecosystem of many, many outlets to choose from. Which is exactly what the Times, and Al Jazeera are working towards. So why are you pissing on it, +5 Insightful?
So 100 people are getting 75% of the Internet's love from the downloaders. Researchers suggest that if we "disincentiveize" these people, we'll stop 75% of the downloads.
This is bonkers.
Sure, you could smother those 100 people with RIAA-issued pillows, but then the Internet would go to the next best 100 people providing content. Because this is a perfect marketplace, people can move to the best content. Get rid of the best content providers, and you might slightly diminish content quality, but consumer behavior would be the same: download the best available option. There'd be a new group of 100 people that get the download love, and we'd have to get more pillows..
Nicer for who?
Once again, our friends at the EFF are ahead of the curve. Their HTTPS Everywhere extension, released a few months ago, probably would have beaten this attack by Tunisian security services, or at least made their jobs much harder.
Here's the extension: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Work that donate button a little while you're there.
Umm, thanks for playing, but your concept of "green" sucks. Sustainability, permaculture, whatever green -ism you care to mention all have a concept of utility at their core, where we are in fact trying to create good outcomes for people. We want more planetary goodness because it makes for a nice place to live. There are outliers, of course, but pretty much all sustainability thinking boils down to managing our lump of rock so it is interesting and safe and pleasant.
Killing everyone you find is not a useful route to "nice place to live".
Regarding all the "WON"T WORK" statements, can someone explain why this isn't already provided by the excellent Ghostery extension? For example: It's running now, set up to run without notifications and block all known bugs. To me, it's mostly invisible. Hovering on a status bar icon tells me that it's blocked Slashdot's use of Google Analytics and Doubleclick scripts.
I appreciate the effort by Mozilla to drumbeat this issue (ahem) but I'm not sure I get it.
I think this misses the point somewhat. Don't we all hate DRM because those schemes are a real bitch for data portability and long term archives? Which is it, then?
The reason you put a timed kill switch on an archive is not because people in the present will use it in ways you dislike -- if that were true, why create or share it at all? The point is rather to piss off and disrupt the people in the far future who are post-facto digging through archives on you. Internet research hinges on how easy it is to find things. This would probably make it harder to find things that have expired.
Security exists in an ecosystem. Everything can be broken. But the only questions that matters is will it actually happen most of the time?
Yeah, it turns out that the founders of the country had rather peculiar ideas about mail. They thought the easy and reliable access to periodicals (ie, information) was essential to the continuation of democracy in America. Their was a raging debate early on between the pragmatists, who felt that newspapers should get deeply discounted mailing rates, and the idealists, who argued that newspapers should be able to use the US mail service for free.
They also argued that mail service should go to everyone, not just urbanites, for much the same reasons. Those inconvenient postal rules are a legacy of this passionate advocacy for free information.
This is all mostly forgotten today, but I wish it wasn't. The illustrative points about the utility of free exchange of information in a democracy. The illustrative lessons for last-mile broadband and an open Internet are so obvious I don't have to mention them.
Yes. The inequality of information access is usually why we worry about privacy. We are quite comfortable operating in public places. It's the selective and unaccountable use of information about us that freaks people out.
Information that is truly public isn't nearly as scary as information which is selectively used by people working in secret. Most corporations, of course, prefer that the data you turn over remains entirely private. And we have no corresponding view into the corporation's inner workings (Facebook, News Corp, etc). This sucks.
I suspect that the growth of public feeds (video or otherwise) will grow and expand, but unequally. The rich will continue to live and work in opaque, gated communities while those who use public services (like a subway) will be living fully in the public view and permanent, searchable memory.
If you worry about privacy, fight for transparency into institutions of power. Only then will they make fine tuning the boundaries between public and private life a priority.
Meteorologists aren't paid be right. They're paid to get ratings. Eyeballs. Pageviews. And in this respect, Bastardi is doing his job. It's a sucker's bet because in ten years if Some Dude on the Internet is proved wrong, no one cares. But if SCIENCE is proved wrong, well then that just ices his book deal, doesn't it?
He's doing his job. I encourage climatologists to keep doing theirs and just ignore the teevee.
Anyone who has ever worked in Information Design can tell you that paper, with it's stunning contrast ratios and 1200 dpi printing is a far more precise medium than screens. WTF?
Mod parent up. Fascinating paper linked deserves to be be Slashdotted in it's own right.
The point is that the logic and lawfulness of this request applies to anyone to government is treating as a criminal suspect with due process, and that the specific details of this case aren't the issue.
Agree that easy unofficial sourcing of apps is important.
That said, I think the rise of "apps" as a term for pay-to-play web page is still a problem. Nearly all the Apps out there are just web pages that do things on small screens and can access some system resources like the GPS. The whole paradigm is bullshit, even without the Apple nannys running the App Store(TM). I use the World Wide Web. I LIKE the World Wide Web. Quit fucking with it.
My mother keeps asking me if her favorite websites are going to start charging for access. I tell her, uh, sort of.
I'm sorry, as an iPhone owner, new Android developments do not penetrate my reality distortion field.
Good for Android, actually. I'm not shocked that Google isn't in a hurry to develop new features for iOS.