I have to admit that I was one of the first volunteer editors when the DMZ project started. I edited the "Anarchism" categories until I decided that my time was better spent fleshing out my popular anarchism website. I spent several hours using DMOZ's excellent web-based software to add hundreds of links.
The first thing category editors should do is to start deleting the content they have added to the site. It's your intellectual work, so you can do whatever you want with it. If I still had access to the directories I was responsible for several years ago, I'd be in their right now deleting all of my work. It's pretty arrogant for a corporation to claim that it owns the work I did for what was once a volunteer-run project. Corporate arrogance is no surprise--thank god people are finally starting to fight back.
A few mollies through the windows of Steve Case's mansion might put him on notice. Ultimately, we'd be better of organizing AOL workers into a union and kicking Case and management out of there.
In the meantime, the idea of a collectively-run, decentralized disributed content directory is one worth pursuing. Several years ago, some fellow digtial anarchists and myself started the Freesearch project, which we envisioned as a distributed search engine which would have included a directory modelled on DMOZ. Our impetus for considering a distributed search engine project was worrisome news that the major search engines might start weighting searches towards paying clients. The search engines are one of the few things that ensure democracy on the Internet.
Needless to say, our project stagnated, mainly because we were working on other projects.
Then Napster and Freesearch came along and I had to laugh, because once again I had been involved in a project that was thinking ahead, but didnt' come to fruition. I'm glad that Napster developed critical mass and Freesearch is moving ahead.
If anybody is serious about creating a open source, public domain, distributed content directory, they should get together with the librarians who are working on similar projects. They can bring to the project their knowledge about metadata and DOIs (digital object identifiers). It's a real shame that librarians didn't develop Yahoo! in the first place, but know isn't the time to discuss what might have been. There is a group of librarians working on open source library software. They call themselves "oss4lib," but I don't have their URL handy.
DMOZ is dead. Let's create something that is truly free of corporate control.
Whoever they vote for, we are ungovernable
on
Should You Vote?
·
· Score: 1
First of all, can we vote on the future topics of Katz's columns?
I stopped voting years ago, but this isn't surprising given that I am an anarchist. What amazes me is that a minority of Americans still bother to vote when the rest of us are smart enough to sit on our hands. It's almost like some of these folks never learn. The candidates keep promising things which they'll never deliver on and the voters keep sticking their fingers in the electrical outlet.
When you vote, you sanction the system, which doesn't make sense if you feel like it doesn't listen to you. Voting sanctions the behavior of the politicians and it sanctions the things they do in your name, which ranges from selling national forests to the logging companies to bombimg pharmaceutical plants in Sudan. If you don't like these things, then it makes sense to abstain from participating in a process that makes it seem like this all is normal.
Anarchists don't vote because we are opposed to the state and capitalism. We don't want any leaders telling us how to live our lives, so it doesn't make sense to participate in a sham process to choose new masters. It doesn't take an anarchist to point out that the current American two party system is controlled by big business. In fact, if you look at any American foreign policy decision, the U.S. guvmint will always do what is best for business, even if it means supporting dictators like Suharto, Pinochet, Marcos, and our favorite bad boy, Saddam Hussein.
So, don't vote on Election Day. Instead, become an activist and start working with other people to make changes happen. You can whine about the corporations controlling the domain system through lawsuits, or you can create an alternative. You can wait for the guvmint to slap Microsoft's wrist, or you start working with thousands of others to create alternatives like Linux.
Actually, there are many digitial anarchists who are very much interested in improving the quality of the Internet and its organization. It's just that we don't want the government involved, nor the capitalists. The latter has been making headway in "enclosing" the Internet in recent years, but I still think that those of us who support the DIY, self-governing nature of the Internet are holding our own.
The comments from the new European ICANN member are very encouraging. Let's hope that ICANN can be convinced to someday add thousands of TLDs and at the same time find a way to defuse corporate IP claims over words on our languages. If this doesn't happen, we're going to have to start talking seriously about supporting and implementing open DNS projects like OpenNIC.
I could go on about what anarchists are doing in the area of computer tech, but you can find out more by visiting my website listed above.
If you are interested in how anarchist ideas relate to the anarchistic nature of the Internet, I suggest perusing the Anarchist FAQ.
Here's a response to your claims about Internet technology
bad patents: provide news stories for Internet journalists. help people see the stupidity in intellectual "property."
porn sites: helps technology innovates. satisfies the sexual needs of millions of horny people.
"created the Internet" quote: who cares?
Napster: helps artists be tearing down the media monopoly system that promoted a few bad artists as "culture." Exposed millions of people to new artists who couldn't get on the radio or on major labels because they couldn't get past the marketing departments. Turning the rest of music culture into something resembling DIY punk, which has been doing peer-to-peer networking for years (usually over a table at a punk show). Napster has also helped challenge antiquated IP ideologies which had convinced millions that copyrights protect artists, when they actually protect the profits of the companies who *own* the intellectual property which was *cough* created by the artist.
"volunteer source" and "free support": the way software will be done in the future. recognizes the economic wisdom that open cooperation is more efficient and has higher quality than closed privatized systems. Higher quality commercial software must mean my Windows 98 computer at home that won't shut down without giving me the BSOD.
Slashdot: spawns an online community where geeks can talk about policy issues and organize together to have an impact on decisions that affect them. more democratic than pulling a lever and sending some rich white dude to Washington, DC
Since when is going against a judge's ruling considered "childish behavior?" Have you ever heard about civil disobedience? There's a long tradition of people illegally resisting stupid, arbitrary and violent laws. I see no difference here.
Besides, none of us here are mentioned in court papers, so we're not bound by the decision.
Slashdot has already provided an answer to this problem in another story.
We could just terraform Mars. Hook a rocket up to Mir and sent it, fungi and all, crashing into Mars. In a thousand years, the planet will be all green and fuzzy and the streets will be lined with penicillan.
The quality of life issue has to be the one were IT workers have their managers by the balls. If they are having so much trouble finding IT workers, then that means we are in the driver's seat, right? So why don't we organize together to strike for a 40 hour work week (at the smae pay rate).
You know, over a hundred years ago people died for the 40-hour work week. It's a shame that so many contemporary tech workers have forgotten what it was like to have free time for their families, friends, lovers, hobbies, and LIFE.
It's not like this stuff needs to be coded right away. The silly CEOs can wait a few more months to squeeze millions out of people. As soon as the economy gets bad they'll start laying IT people off left and right. If you think that your company really cares about you, wait until they ask you to start packing because the company has to make a profit.
Are these guys still around? I remember mixing it up with them onlin back in the early 90s. My assessment of their kookiness then sounds like it is still true today.
Sorry, it may legal for the government to require that stores not sell magazines to minors, but that is still a free speech violation. If you read your constitution is says that the "government shall pass NO laws..."
Whatever. We all know that the government doesn't give a damn about civil liberties.
The problem with your cute solution is that librarians aren't being paid to be censors or hall monitors. Why not suggest that the library station librarians in the stacks so that young people won't read the wrong words or see the wrong pictures?
Librarians are paid to help people FIND information, not keep it FROM them.
That policy would violate international law which says that minors have the same free speech rights as adults. It also goes contrary to the Library Bill of Rights which cautions against infringing the free speech rights of somebody because of their age.
Liability issues? There are no liability issues. If there were, your typical public library wouldn't have any books or other content. People keep forgetting that in terms of content, the Internet doesn't really add much that is different from a standard library collection. It's traditionally understood that libraries don't endorse the opinions and information found in the books on the shelves. Libraries exist to provide a full range of free speech to the community. Most of the controversial information on the Internet (except for porn) that folks get upset about has always been available in libraries. In fact, the guy who wrote the Anarchist Cookbook--a title that gets many idiots up in arms--admitted recently that he compiled the information for that book from visits to his local library.
That was an interesting article over on Salon.com. It amuses me that techies and other "citizens" get all exercised about the possibility that we may "lose free speech." Well guys, we lost free speech many years ago.
The DeCSS case is another example of what happens when the courts treat corporations as humn beings. This concept originated about a century ago, so it's still a fairly fresh ideological development. But the corporations have been highly successful, using propaganda, in convincing most Americans that this is the natural state of things. Fortunately, new Internet technologies have been pretty useful is getting more folks to see that the emperor has no clothes. Now folks are finally beginning to understand that intellectual property laws like the DMCA don't exist to protect the little artist, they exist to protect profits.
Intellectual property law is incompatible with free speech. IP law says that commercial concerns trump the rights of the individual.
Expect to see further erosion of free speech in coming years as the state becomes more and more arrogant. The corporations have reached the peak of their arrogance; they know understand that people are pissed at them, thanks in no part to the anti-capitalist movement. (BTW, Bill Gates had to be helicoptered in to his WEF speech yesterday in Melbourne. The casino was surrounded by activists).
If you really want to see how far the state will go when it wants to shut people up, just check out what the City of Philadelphia did to GOP convention protesters last month. It charged several with felonies and million dollar bails for SIMPLY USING A CELL PHONE!
In activist circles this is called "organizing the opposition." I believe Saul Alinsky's "Reules for Radicals" explained how this works. The recording industry doesn't quite understand that they are fighting a tar baby that can absorb all of their punches. The bigger a stink they make about free music services, the more publicity they give to them.
Since we don't have high-priced lawyers to defend our free speech, the best weapon we rabble have in a case like this is a consumer boycott. Mattel understands one thing: money. So let's hurt them where it counts.
I will be pursuing a resolution within my professional association that will condemn Mattel's involvement with censorship.
I'm sure that many of those who visit Slashdot on a regular basis understand this truism, that piracy puts money into the pockets of corporations. It's just that they don't get it, or understand the economics and want to obfuscate about IP laws.
We all know how Microsoft became a software giant because so many of us geeks back in the early 90s were so eager to put a GUI on the crappy DOS machines in our offices. Many of us had ulterior motives: games, desktop publishing, email, and eventually, web surfing. This huge illegal installed base of Windoze was eventually superceded by each company legally bying site licenses and the like.
On the music side, we all know how illegal taping of records and CDs owned by friends introduced us to music that the corporate stations wouldn't play, because of their top 20 lists, or need to play Foghat for the 3oth time that day. We got into some of those artists who we had taped and eventually BOUGHT their CDs and records when they issued new ones.
I like minimalist design when it comes to search engines. All around, Yahoo does pretty well on this account, especially when it comes to their clubs. There is one pretty glaring screw-up design feature in their clubs, but I won't go into that.
I always fume when I see Geocities on any list of "most popular" websites. The Geocities site, in general, is NOT the destination of that many people. BUT there are many people who visit SITES that are hosted by Geocities. Most of the surfers to Geocities sites get there via a surf engine, so they experience the page design of the the pages Geocities designs are lean and load fast, but let's separate site traffice here, which unfortunately the web ratings services don't do.
Geocities should get tons of negative usability points for those annoying pop up windows, which used to crash my browser every time I closed them. But we should give Geocities credit for killing off the idea of using pop-ups to sell eyeballs to ad buyers.
I agree. These are perhaps the two most important questions, given that the Slashdot forum is a community of users who, by and large, support the free software movement.
It's a shame to see a wise web guy like Nielsen associating himself with the antiquated, 20th Century, intellectual property law system.
I'm a bit disappointed in the questions that Jakob Nielsen answered. None of them are that critical of Nielsen's ideas or challenged some of his assumptions.
Let me mention that I'm a professional webmaster who has been at it for 5 years. I first experienced the web in 1993 at a demo that Marc Andreeson gave at NCSA for a group of librarians. I've also been through one day-long human factors workshop with Ben Schneiderman. Yes, I've read Tufte too. So, I constantly strive for web designs that are user friendly, logical, and attractive.
I'm in the middle of Nielsen's new book, which I'm quite enjoying. He has plenty of sage advice, which I wish that more web designers would follow. However, I think some of his advice is rather fascist, if you really look at it. I think he really downplays the importance of graphics on websites, which is the main reason why the web is popular in the first place. Sure, content is king, but surfers want to experience attractive websites. I understand the importance of lean pages, but I think that Nielsen overemphasizes this too much--this design need will become less important as bandwidth increases.
Nielsen's advice, while applicable to all web designers, tends to encourage to creation of look-alike e-commerce websites. The needs of a user buying stuff at E-Bay are different than a person checking out an online art gallery.
We should also face the fact that the web inherently encourages the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethic--I often compare the web to the zine world translated online. Yes, it would be nice if every website put their logo in the upper left hand corner, but at what point does this become elitism? Ok, user studies show that people prefer this, but are these simply consumers, or an audience used to a different language. You can put together a nicely done magazine, but you have no right to complain about a free form punk zine that was assembled with rubber cement and scissors. Punks are used to a certain vocabulary; slick DTP don't cut it with them. The same goes for web design--the expectations for a particular website isn't the same for each audience.
Finally, I want to address one of Nielsen's statements.
"What do all the big sites have in common? Minimalist design."
This is an illogical argument. What the big sites have in common is that most of them got started on the web at an early stage. Think of Yahoo or any of the search engines. E-Bay was one of the first auction sites. They had time to build name recognition as popular websites. In Yahoo's case, it benefited from incredible word of mouth promotion, because nobody had bothered to do a large directory of the web (the librarians missed a big opportunity here).
The "big" sites maintain this advantage now through massive amounts of advertising. That's what big sites have in common these days. Yep, they all look like portals, but that's a fad thing, not a design consideration. In fact, since so many of these sites look alike, new users have a hard time telling them apart. They've lost their personality, because they've become big, bloated with IPO money for advertising, and are designed by marketing departments. Why is Slashdot popular? Because it still has people behind the website, like Hemos and Commander Taco.
With that being said, I really recommend that every web designer have their boss buy Nielsen's book for them. Despite my criticisms, this book is very helpful.
Where is the student input on these issues? Don't we live in a democracy. Sure, it's annoying if the badnwidth is being hogged for one purpose, but aren't there some compromises? How about if universities set up a few official Napster servers?
I suspect when universities object to this obvious compromise, the true nature of their reasoning for banning Napster will come to light. Simply, concern over lawsuits from the RIAA mafia.
Quite frankly, I don't pay taxes so that my local university can act as a policeman for some industry group. Let the RIAA thugs come after people pirating crappy pop albums.
This takedown of Internet tools also amounts to an infringement of academic freedom. Who's the university to decided what is an appropriate intellectual or entertainment interest of the student? Perhaps the widespread use of Napster servers is akin to somebody checking out half the books from the library. The solution is to put a reasonable limit on the amount of books, not ban them entirely from the library.
The real alternative to the RIAA and their heavy-handed tactics is for people to support truly alternative bands, who aren't on major labels. Think about the alternative zines provide to those slick corporate magazines and you'll see what I'm talking about.
I'm a librarian/webmaster who has been fighting against filtering software for several years. As I predicted last Fall, to some colleagues, filtering the Internet for youngsters finally became a campaign issue, mainly because nobody is paying attention to these loser candidates.
The good news is that the filtering forces are losing badly (except in Australia, those damn upside down contrarians). Less than 13% of public libraries filter and that number will drop once the anti-censorship library techies realize that the politicians in their local towns aren't looking. What's more, the pro-filtering forces never demonstrated that kids were harmed by seeing Net porn, nor could they figure out how to organize a decent grassroots campaign.
I'll let Slashdotters in on another dirty secret the Relgious Right doesn't want to talk about: their numbers are dropping and they are out of cash. This became pretty apparent in December when the GOP announced that they weren't donating money to the Christian Coalition because most of the C.C. local chapters were just letterheads. In short, NOBODY IS AT HOME.
I imagine that the same thing is true for the rest of the Religious Right. Their 20+ year run is over with. They enjoyed a limelight way out of proportion to their actual numbers. They are out of cash and they can't compete with a liberalizing society. Heck, I'll bet that the money that used to be donated to the Christian Coalition and the AFA is now being sent, via credit card, to Danni's HotBox. Those conservative types were always sexual hypocrites; I wasn't the only one who noticed their tendency to locate their conventions next to strip clubs.
It will be amusing when the hopes of the pro-censorship crowd go down in flames when McCain drops out of the race.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to belabor the obvious, but I put up a page several months ago explaining why anarchists won't be voting in November.
Choose and Lose 2000
I have to admit that I was one of the first volunteer editors when the DMZ project started. I edited the "Anarchism" categories until I decided that my time was better spent fleshing out my popular anarchism website. I spent several hours using DMOZ's excellent web-based software to add hundreds of links.
The first thing category editors should do is to start deleting the content they have added to the site. It's your intellectual work, so you can do whatever you want with it. If I still had access to the directories I was responsible for several years ago, I'd be in their right now deleting all of my work. It's pretty arrogant for a corporation to claim that it owns the work I did for what was once a volunteer-run project. Corporate arrogance is no surprise--thank god people are finally starting to fight back.
A few mollies through the windows of Steve Case's mansion might put him on notice. Ultimately, we'd be better of organizing AOL workers into a union and kicking Case and management out of there.
In the meantime, the idea of a collectively-run, decentralized disributed content directory is one worth pursuing. Several years ago, some fellow digtial anarchists and myself started the Freesearch project, which we envisioned as a distributed search engine which would have included a directory modelled on DMOZ. Our impetus for considering a distributed search engine project was worrisome news that the major search engines might start weighting searches towards paying clients. The search engines are one of the few things that ensure democracy on the Internet.
Needless to say, our project stagnated, mainly because we were working on other projects.
Then Napster and Freesearch came along and I had to laugh, because once again I had been involved in a project that was thinking ahead, but didnt' come to fruition. I'm glad that Napster developed critical mass and Freesearch is moving ahead.
If anybody is serious about creating a open source, public domain, distributed content directory, they should get together with the librarians who are working on similar projects. They can bring to the project their knowledge about metadata and DOIs (digital object identifiers). It's a real shame that librarians didn't develop Yahoo! in the first place, but know isn't the time to discuss what might have been. There is a group of librarians working on open source library software. They call themselves "oss4lib," but I don't have their URL handy.
DMOZ is dead. Let's create something that is truly free of corporate control.
First of all, can we vote on the future topics of Katz's columns?
I stopped voting years ago, but this isn't surprising given that I am an anarchist. What amazes me is that a minority of Americans still bother to vote when the rest of us are smart enough to sit on our hands. It's almost like some of these folks never learn. The candidates keep promising things which they'll never deliver on and the voters keep sticking their fingers in the electrical outlet.
When you vote, you sanction the system, which doesn't make sense if you feel like it doesn't listen to you. Voting sanctions the behavior of the politicians and it sanctions the things they do in your name, which ranges from selling national forests to the logging companies to bombimg pharmaceutical plants in Sudan. If you don't like these things, then it makes sense to abstain from participating in a process that makes it seem like this all is normal.
Anarchists don't vote because we are opposed to the state and capitalism. We don't want any leaders telling us how to live our lives, so it doesn't make sense to participate in a sham process to choose new masters. It doesn't take an anarchist to point out that the current American two party system is controlled by big business. In fact, if you look at any American foreign policy decision, the U.S. guvmint will always do what is best for business, even if it means supporting dictators like Suharto, Pinochet, Marcos, and our favorite bad boy, Saddam Hussein.
So, don't vote on Election Day. Instead, become an activist and start working with other people to make changes happen. You can whine about the corporations controlling the domain system through lawsuits, or you can create an alternative. You can wait for the guvmint to slap Microsoft's wrist, or you start working with thousands of others to create alternatives like Linux.
For more info: http://www.infoshop.org/voting.html
Actually, there are many digitial anarchists who are very much interested in improving the quality of the Internet and its organization. It's just that we don't want the government involved, nor the capitalists. The latter has been making headway in "enclosing" the Internet in recent years, but I still think that those of us who support the DIY, self-governing nature of the Internet are holding our own.
The comments from the new European ICANN member are very encouraging. Let's hope that ICANN can be convinced to someday add thousands of TLDs and at the same time find a way to defuse corporate IP claims over words on our languages. If this doesn't happen, we're going to have to start talking seriously about supporting and implementing open DNS projects like OpenNIC.
I could go on about what anarchists are doing in the area of computer tech, but you can find out more by visiting my website listed above.
If you are interested in how anarchist ideas relate to the anarchistic nature of the Internet, I suggest perusing the Anarchist FAQ.
Here's a response to your claims about Internet technology
bad patents: provide news stories for Internet journalists. help people see the stupidity in intellectual "property." porn sites: helps technology innovates. satisfies the sexual needs of millions of horny people. "created the Internet" quote: who cares? Napster: helps artists be tearing down the media monopoly system that promoted a few bad artists as "culture." Exposed millions of people to new artists who couldn't get on the radio or on major labels because they couldn't get past the marketing departments. Turning the rest of music culture into something resembling DIY punk, which has been doing peer-to-peer networking for years (usually over a table at a punk show). Napster has also helped challenge antiquated IP ideologies which had convinced millions that copyrights protect artists, when they actually protect the profits of the companies who *own* the intellectual property which was *cough* created by the artist. "volunteer source" and "free support": the way software will be done in the future. recognizes the economic wisdom that open cooperation is more efficient and has higher quality than closed privatized systems. Higher quality commercial software must mean my Windows 98 computer at home that won't shut down without giving me the BSOD. Slashdot: spawns an online community where geeks can talk about policy issues and organize together to have an impact on decisions that affect them. more democratic than pulling a lever and sending some rich white dude to Washington, DC
Don't vote, it only encourages them
http://www.infoshop.org/voting.html
Since when is going against a judge's ruling considered "childish behavior?" Have you ever heard about civil disobedience? There's a long tradition of people illegally resisting stupid, arbitrary and violent laws. I see no difference here.
Besides, none of us here are mentioned in court papers, so we're not bound by the decision.
Slashdot has already provided an answer to this problem in another story.
We could just terraform Mars. Hook a rocket up to Mir and sent it, fungi and all, crashing into Mars. In a thousand years, the planet will be all green and fuzzy and the streets will be lined with penicillan.
The quality of life issue has to be the one were IT workers have their managers by the balls. If they are having so much trouble finding IT workers, then that means we are in the driver's seat, right? So why don't we organize together to strike for a 40 hour work week (at the smae pay rate).
You know, over a hundred years ago people died for the 40-hour work week. It's a shame that so many contemporary tech workers have forgotten what it was like to have free time for their families, friends, lovers, hobbies, and LIFE.
It's not like this stuff needs to be coded right away. The silly CEOs can wait a few more months to squeeze millions out of people. As soon as the economy gets bad they'll start laying IT people off left and right. If you think that your company really cares about you, wait until they ask you to start packing because the company has to make a profit.
Are these guys still around? I remember mixing it up with them onlin back in the early 90s. My assessment of their kookiness then sounds like it is still true today.
Extropians are libertarians who need to get laid.
Upload this!
Sorry, it may legal for the government to require that stores not sell magazines to minors, but that is still a free speech violation. If you read your constitution is says that the "government shall pass NO laws..."
Whatever. We all know that the government doesn't give a damn about civil liberties.
Clipper chip anyone? Carnivore? Echelon?
The problem with your cute solution is that librarians aren't being paid to be censors or hall monitors. Why not suggest that the library station librarians in the stacks so that young people won't read the wrong words or see the wrong pictures?
Librarians are paid to help people FIND information, not keep it FROM them.
That policy would violate international law which says that minors have the same free speech rights as adults. It also goes contrary to the Library Bill of Rights which cautions against infringing the free speech rights of somebody because of their age.
Liability issues? There are no liability issues. If there were, your typical public library wouldn't have any books or other content. People keep forgetting that in terms of content, the Internet doesn't really add much that is different from a standard library collection. It's traditionally understood that libraries don't endorse the opinions and information found in the books on the shelves. Libraries exist to provide a full range of free speech to the community. Most of the controversial information on the Internet (except for porn) that folks get upset about has always been available in libraries. In fact, the guy who wrote the Anarchist Cookbook--a title that gets many idiots up in arms--admitted recently that he compiled the information for that book from visits to his local library.
That was an interesting article over on Salon.com. It amuses me that techies and other "citizens" get all exercised about the possibility that we may "lose free speech." Well guys, we lost free speech many years ago.
The DeCSS case is another example of what happens when the courts treat corporations as humn beings. This concept originated about a century ago, so it's still a fairly fresh ideological development. But the corporations have been highly successful, using propaganda, in convincing most Americans that this is the natural state of things. Fortunately, new Internet technologies have been pretty useful is getting more folks to see that the emperor has no clothes. Now folks are finally beginning to understand that intellectual property laws like the DMCA don't exist to protect the little artist, they exist to protect profits.
Intellectual property law is incompatible with free speech. IP law says that commercial concerns trump the rights of the individual.
Expect to see further erosion of free speech in coming years as the state becomes more and more arrogant. The corporations have reached the peak of their arrogance; they know understand that people are pissed at them, thanks in no part to the anti-capitalist movement. (BTW, Bill Gates had to be helicoptered in to his WEF speech yesterday in Melbourne. The casino was surrounded by activists).
If you really want to see how far the state will go when it wants to shut people up, just check out what the City of Philadelphia did to GOP convention protesters last month. It charged several with felonies and million dollar bails for SIMPLY USING A CELL PHONE!
Wake up America, it's worse than you think!
Well said, Erotus. You are spot on about this.
In activist circles this is called "organizing the opposition." I believe Saul Alinsky's "Reules for Radicals" explained how this works. The recording industry doesn't quite understand that they are fighting a tar baby that can absorb all of their punches. The bigger a stink they make about free music services, the more publicity they give to them.
Here you guys go. Our contribution to this fight:
http://www.infoshop.org/octo/mattel.html
makhnolives
Since we don't have high-priced lawyers to defend our free speech, the best weapon we rabble have in a case like this is a consumer boycott. Mattel understands one thing: money. So let's hurt them where it counts.
I will be pursuing a resolution within my professional association that will condemn Mattel's involvement with censorship.
VOTE WITH YOUR MONEY!
makhnorulez
www.infoshop.org
I'm sure that many of those who visit Slashdot on a regular basis understand this truism, that piracy puts money into the pockets of corporations. It's just that they don't get it, or understand the economics and want to obfuscate about IP laws.
We all know how Microsoft became a software giant because so many of us geeks back in the early 90s were so eager to put a GUI on the crappy DOS machines in our offices. Many of us had ulterior motives: games, desktop publishing, email, and eventually, web surfing. This huge illegal installed base of Windoze was eventually superceded by each company legally bying site licenses and the like.
On the music side, we all know how illegal taping of records and CDs owned by friends introduced us to music that the corporate stations wouldn't play, because of their top 20 lists, or need to play Foghat for the 3oth time that day. We got into some of those artists who we had taped and eventually BOUGHT their CDs and records when they issued new ones.
Support DIY media! Become the Media!
maknolives
www.infoshop.org
I like minimalist design when it comes to search engines. All around, Yahoo does pretty well on this account, especially when it comes to their clubs. There is one pretty glaring screw-up design feature in their clubs, but I won't go into that.
I always fume when I see Geocities on any list of "most popular" websites. The Geocities site, in general, is NOT the destination of that many people. BUT there are many people who visit SITES that are hosted by Geocities. Most of the surfers to Geocities sites get there via a surf engine, so they experience the page design of the the pages Geocities designs are lean and load fast, but let's separate site traffice here, which unfortunately the web ratings services don't do.
Geocities should get tons of negative usability points for those annoying pop up windows, which used to crash my browser every time I closed them. But we should give Geocities credit for killing off the idea of using pop-ups to sell eyeballs to ad buyers.
makhnolives
I agree. These are perhaps the two most important questions, given that the Slashdot forum is a community of users who, by and large, support the free software movement.
It's a shame to see a wise web guy like Nielsen associating himself with the antiquated, 20th Century, intellectual property law system.
The Internet was built on sharing.
Jakob: Share your toys!
I'm a bit disappointed in the questions that Jakob Nielsen answered. None of them are that critical of Nielsen's ideas or challenged some of his assumptions.
Let me mention that I'm a professional webmaster who has been at it for 5 years. I first experienced the web in 1993 at a demo that Marc Andreeson gave at NCSA for a group of librarians. I've also been through one day-long human factors workshop with Ben Schneiderman. Yes, I've read Tufte too. So, I constantly strive for web designs that are user friendly, logical, and attractive.
I'm in the middle of Nielsen's new book, which I'm quite enjoying. He has plenty of sage advice, which I wish that more web designers would follow. However, I think some of his advice is rather fascist, if you really look at it. I think he really downplays the importance of graphics on websites, which is the main reason why the web is popular in the first place. Sure, content is king, but surfers want to experience attractive websites. I understand the importance of lean pages, but I think that Nielsen overemphasizes this too much--this design need will become less important as bandwidth increases.
Nielsen's advice, while applicable to all web designers, tends to encourage to creation of look-alike e-commerce websites. The needs of a user buying stuff at E-Bay are different than a person checking out an online art gallery.
We should also face the fact that the web inherently encourages the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethic--I often compare the web to the zine world translated online. Yes, it would be nice if every website put their logo in the upper left hand corner, but at what point does this become elitism? Ok, user studies show that people prefer this, but are these simply consumers, or an audience used to a different language. You can put together a nicely done magazine, but you have no right to complain about a free form punk zine that was assembled with rubber cement and scissors. Punks are used to a certain vocabulary; slick DTP don't cut it with them. The same goes for web design--the expectations for a particular website isn't the same for each audience.
Finally, I want to address one of Nielsen's statements.
"What do all the big sites have in common? Minimalist design."
This is an illogical argument. What the big sites have in common is that most of them got started on the web at an early stage. Think of Yahoo or any of the search engines. E-Bay was one of the first auction sites. They had time to build name recognition as popular websites. In Yahoo's case, it benefited from incredible word of mouth promotion, because nobody had bothered to do a large directory of the web (the librarians missed a big opportunity here).
The "big" sites maintain this advantage now through massive amounts of advertising. That's what big sites have in common these days. Yep, they all look like portals, but that's a fad thing, not a design consideration. In fact, since so many of these sites look alike, new users have a hard time telling them apart. They've lost their personality, because they've become big, bloated with IPO money for advertising, and are designed by marketing departments. Why is Slashdot popular? Because it still has people behind the website, like Hemos and Commander Taco.
With that being said, I really recommend that every web designer have their boss buy Nielsen's book for them. Despite my criticisms, this book is very helpful.
makhnolives
http://www.infoshop.org/
Where is the student input on these issues? Don't we live in a democracy. Sure, it's annoying if the badnwidth is being hogged for one purpose, but aren't there some compromises? How about if universities set up a few official Napster servers?
I suspect when universities object to this obvious compromise, the true nature of their reasoning for banning Napster will come to light. Simply, concern over lawsuits from the RIAA mafia.
Quite frankly, I don't pay taxes so that my local university can act as a policeman for some industry group. Let the RIAA thugs come after people pirating crappy pop albums.
This takedown of Internet tools also amounts to an infringement of academic freedom. Who's the university to decided what is an appropriate intellectual or entertainment interest of the student? Perhaps the widespread use of Napster servers is akin to somebody checking out half the books from the library. The solution is to put a reasonable limit on the amount of books, not ban them entirely from the library.
The real alternative to the RIAA and their heavy-handed tactics is for people to support truly alternative bands, who aren't on major labels. Think about the alternative zines provide to those slick corporate magazines and you'll see what I'm talking about.
This is my favorite part of the account about the library filtering meeting:
"She held aloft a printout of the Slashdot page and shook it. From my chair I could see the yellow streaks of highlighter."
What immediately sprung to my mind was Arlo Guthrie's song Alice's Restaurant, especially the part about the meticulously marked-up "crime photos."
All this account needs is a good folksinger to put a tune around it.
I'm a librarian/webmaster who has been fighting against filtering software for several years. As I predicted last Fall, to some colleagues, filtering the Internet for youngsters finally became a campaign issue, mainly because nobody is paying attention to these loser candidates.
The good news is that the filtering forces are losing badly (except in Australia, those damn upside down contrarians). Less than 13% of public libraries filter and that number will drop once the anti-censorship library techies realize that the politicians in their local towns aren't looking. What's more, the pro-filtering forces never demonstrated that kids were harmed by seeing Net porn, nor could they figure out how to organize a decent grassroots campaign.
I'll let Slashdotters in on another dirty secret the Relgious Right doesn't want to talk about: their numbers are dropping and they are out of cash. This became pretty apparent in December when the GOP announced that they weren't donating money to the Christian Coalition because most of the C.C. local chapters were just letterheads. In short, NOBODY IS AT HOME.
I imagine that the same thing is true for the rest of the Religious Right. Their 20+ year run is over with. They enjoyed a limelight way out of proportion to their actual numbers. They are out of cash and they can't compete with a liberalizing society. Heck, I'll bet that the money that used to be donated to the Christian Coalition and the AFA is now being sent, via credit card, to Danni's HotBox. Those conservative types were always sexual hypocrites; I wasn't the only one who noticed their tendency to locate their conventions next to strip clubs.
It will be amusing when the hopes of the pro-censorship crowd go down in flames when McCain drops out of the race.
Relgious Right: R.I.P.
MakhnoLives
AnarchyYouth
Gee, the bigger they get, the harder they fall.
The East Coast anarchists were looking for a good corporate target for our MayDay 2000 actions and it looks like AOL is the best target at this time.
It's time to send a clear message, Seattle-style, that the Internet is not going to be *owned* by one megacorp.
Stay tuned. We'll soon find out how many black clad anarchists we can fit on the Metro to Vienna.
If you find that anti-trust trials take too long and strengthen the government too much, you are welcome to join us.
Our resistance will be as transnational as capital.