It looks like the purpose of this CD is to protect users from Trojans, spyware, and other malware. The author of this page encourages users to click on anything they want on the web and not worry about the source of the executables that they are running. Encouraging users to continue to be ignorant and reckless sounds like a horrible idea. Sure, right now there doesn't happen to be much malware for Linux, but if more dumb people start running Linux, it will be produced. Even though Linux is more resistant than Windoze to being broken into by traditional exploits, if the user deliberately runs some malicious program, the system cannot protect itself. No system that allows the user to administer their own machine can protect from these kinds of attacks. We need to educate users AND give them Linux. Doing either one without the other will leave the our public Internet in worse shape and our fellow users just as bewildered and dangerous.
...many people think the New York Times is anti-corporate, and the Wall Street Journal is pro-corporate.
Both are pro-corporate. I also said that the NYT is somewhat left leaning. The Wall Street Journal is the leading publication of the Business press; they directly represent the largest earing organizations on earth. The New York Times is the leading publication of the literate elite, a group with is mostly comprised of the same professionals and leaders that run corporations, but which also includes some academics and other intellectuals.
Both publications are far to the right of the American people. Most Americans support greater unions representation, more government funding of personal health care, higher taxes on the wealthy, and a withdrawal from Iraq. You have to turn to more obscure publications to find these issues even discussed. Most Americans, however, don't read newspapers. They get their news and opinion from TV. Television marginalizes real issues even more than the press does. It's just infotainment.
There's still a small Socialist and Communist press in the US, but it just prints party line propaganda for the most part. You have to turn to something like Z magazine, if you're looking for a articulate anti-corporate reporting.
Every organization is biased. You can't report on any event without a point of view. Even if you try to be neutral, you will express your biases through what facts and events you choose to cover and which you leave out.
The FSF is biased towards promoting freedom of speech and improving software quality. Microsoft is biased towards crushing competition and dominating the market in order to maximize profit. The Bush administration is biased towards gaining strategic influence in key oil producing regions and will abuse human rights in order to achieve these goals. Amnesty International is biased towards exposing human rights violations. A decent newspaper aught to quote Microsoft, the FSF, the White House, and Amnesty International and hire columnists from which ever organization they feel best represents their editorial bias. The New York times is very pro corporate, so I could see them employing writers with ties to Microsoft and Bush, but they're also somewhat left leaning, so I would expect some more decent people to write for them from time to time.
The usual answer is that possession of child porn is glorifying or profiting from a criminal act, and even if the possession is not causing direct harm it should be banned because it encourages the (criminal) act of creating more. This covers rape etc. as well.
On the Internet, there are plenty of images and videos depicting rape and murder (and even worse crimes like aggressive war and genocide). People will pay someone to rape and murder just so that they can get off watching a film of it (snuff films). I don't know if possessing films of real extreme violence is technically legal or illegal, but they are quite common on many sites and I have seen no effort to crack down on them. It wouldn't make any sense. The people downloading them are just normal voyeurs. Most of us are drawn to the twisted and absurd but are not rapists or killers. If you want to stop such crimes, you go after the people committing murder or rape, or those paying others to do it. You don't go after the people learning about the crimes by seeing recorded evidence of them. They are just consuming primary source media (think of it as history or news documentation). Yet there's all this focus on banning underage porn. Most underage porn is produced for personal use or use among friends. If we are so afraid of commercial exploitation of young people, why not ban the sale of underage porn (but not possession)? Aren't teens also being exploited by being thrown in jail when they try to take pictures of themselves?
Kill the executives and management and take their offices.
Form a union and have a walk out and picket strike until you get what you want.
Break into the building at night and start a sit down down strike.....in the nice offices.
Blackmail and extortion against your bosses. (If you don't already have access to sensitive info, run a sniffer on the LAN for a few days, you should be able to pick up plenty of useful information)
Quit that job and form an anarcho-syndicalist collective with better working conditions.
In itself, owning such a picture isn't anything bad. But most of the pictures are taken because people *want* them. It's the free zarkin' market. Demand and supply. People make *money* (or other services) off of molesting children.
I'm sure there is a huge demand for pictures of consensual sex from people of all ages. So what if some people pay for these images? Creating a market for art depicting consensual sex is not a bad thing at all. Many people seam to think that most underage porn comes from Catholic Priests locking up some poor kid in their basement and then systematically abusing him or her. Sure this happens, but I think it's rather rare and only extremely rarely directly motivated by pure profit. Most porn is free in the age of the Internet. If you want to remove the profit motive, make selling porn illegal, but don't ban possession or sharing! I'm sure most underage pics of sex and nudity are taken by teenagers themselves. As a young person, I've found that most of my peer's have been sexually active for a while and many own digital images of themselves and their partners enjoying each other's company. Where do conservatives get this weird idea that people magically become sexual only after their 18th birthday?
I'm sure a minority of porn consumers want pictures of rape and molestation and this demand may occasionally fuel some evil activities. However, pictures of rape are only illegal to possess if the victim is a certain age. It isn't the illegality of the action that makes the picture illegal, it is the arbitrary quality of age. Moreover, even pics of consensual sex are illegal if the person pictured happened to be a certain age! Young women have been prosecuted for taking pictures of themselves! This is unjust discrimination and no free society should tolerate it.
How do they plan on blocking any particular content? How can anyone who doesn't have an account on my machine know what is hosted and perhaps available to thousands of other people (who do have accounts) over ssh? How can anyone tell the origin of a IP packet sent over tor? How can an ISP block offending anonymous remailers or freenet sites? THEY CAN'T. Censoring the Internet is not possible without destroying the Internet.
Perhaps they want to censor the web, but most of the Internet would still be free. The dissidents will still get their message out and the porn lovers will still download whatever kink they desire. Attempts to censor the web will just make it hard for corporations to make money because the web is the user-friendly commercial face of the Internet and people will start using other services if they can't find the content that they want over http.
On a different note, what is so wrong about sharing "child" porn? People sexually mature several years before the legal age of consent, and during that "gap" they tend to have sex. Often they take pictures of these activities. Why should we throw innocent teenagers in jail just because they want to practice free love and share images of themselves doing thing that they enjoy? What if they want to share some of these images with a legal adult, what is wrong with that?
Certainly raping a young person is wrong, just as raping any person is wrong. But owning a picture of rape should not be illegal, just as owning a picture of any other crime (even murder or genocide) should not be illegal. If pictures were taken under conditions of coercion, it is the coercion that is wrong and illegal, not the pictures! If pictures of underage humans were taken under consensual conditions, no crime was even committed in the act of taking them. Why should these images be illegal?
When I use the word democracy mockingly, I mean the twisted definition put forward by the ruling class: a vision of democracy that involves a small minority with enormous economic and political power who maintain that power mainly through their ability to shape public opinion.
When I use the word democracy sincerely, I am not talking about majority rule or "fair" electoral politics. I believe that each person aught to have a say in a situation proportional to how much the results of the decision effects them.
So everyone should have absolute control over their own body because their person IS THEM and therefore "effects" them more than anyone else. You have a right to assemble, right to have any physical/sexual relations that are consensual, right to any medical or recreational drug desired, right to control any small personal property, etc. Workers and consumers aught to both have a say in the production and distribution of goods. Economic capital (land, machinery, investment funds, etc) aught to be owned collectively. Decisions of hiring and firing should be made by all workers in a business. The idea that a small group of individuals can own a factory or an airplane is absurd because so many other people must be involved to make these objects function. Those workers and consumers need to have an equal say in how their "shop" is run for democracy to mean anything. State and International issues should be decided on as close to a consensus basis as possible. Aggressive war and genocide must be intolerable.
These aren't extremist ideas, they are easy to understand, fair principles. Unfortunately hardly anyone is actually willing to stand up for them in the real world.
With the advent of the Internet, kids are frankly just learning that school is bullshit! The forces indoctrination and fear are starting to loose control as people find new ways of learning, including learning the dark history of the school system.
Young people are naturally curious. They want to explore and learn. High Schools use intimidation and boredom, as well as marginalizing viable alternatives through scheduling and censorship, to keep young people from being informed. Parochial, preparatory and public schools are not all that different. Religious schools enforce obedience to the dogma of church; Prep schools enforce obedience to whatever looks good on a college application; and public schools enforce the obedience to authority in general. Any learning outside of these constraints is rarely tolerated.
If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.
The major problem in successful teaching is just to not prevent students from being interested. Typically students come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children's normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don't understand. Some teachers genuinely want to help students in this way. Most school administrations don't let them.
Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control -- "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow. (apologies to Chomsky)
If Microsoft didn't exist at all, the IT industry would be far more energy efficient. Think of the stupidity of integrating the GUI into the Kernel for an OS that runs servers. Windows is bloated and it isn't getting any better. A look at the system requirements of Vista further proves just how inefficient Windows is. Think of all the CPU cycles, RAM, Disk Space, and other resources waisted on anti-malware, malware itself, license authentication, DRM decoding, and etc other bothers caused by the crap that this illegal monopoly has forced on us.
The NIH alone contributed 28% of medical research funds in 2005. There are other sources of state and federal funds. My statistical source for the roughly half number is from an article in Wired magazine (I couldn't find it online; do a lexus nexus search if your school or workplace will pay for it;-)). It stated that government money previously provided for the majority of the funding for medical research, and government funding for health science has increased, but industry funding has increased faster, so now private funds account for just over half. Not for profit private foundations also provide some funding (I've seen 10% attributed to them). Whatever the exact numbers, it should be clear that the fruits of this research is excessively ending up in for profit hands.
Only about half of all medical research is privately funded, yet most new medicines end up being patented and owned by private companies. Shouldn't the people (US! the public!) who pay for the research be the ones who decide how it is used? In a democratic society, the people would actually own what they pay for and would choose to use it for the good of the worlds population. Too bad we live in a corporate oligarchy. We subsidize (or socialize if that's your bad word) the costs and risks of research, but we privatize the benefits so that only a few rich shareholders can profit while millions die of preventable diseases. We need a revolution.
This is because genetics works on the level of species, not individuals, and for the species, fairness and reciprocity are more successful strategies than competition. We have to compete with every other species in nature, what sense is there in competing amongst ourselves for survival?
You aren't quite correct. Yes, it is evolutionarily better for organisms to cooperate, sometimes even at the detriment of the survival of an individual, than it is for everyone to compete to the death, but genetics does not work on the level of the species (or the "group" or the individual). Genetics works at the level of the gene, and this manifests itself in the behavior of the larger categories. An individual organism will tend to help others to the degree that they are genetically related to them (parents help their offspring a great deal, herds are basically a cooperative extended family, members of the same species are less likely to hunt each other than to hunt other species, and symbiosis can even develop across different clades). "fairness and reciprocity" are important behaviors, but in situations that reduce to the prisoner's dilemma, there is a strong incentive for an individual to cheat: to receive the benefit of a altruistic peer, but to not reciprocate. In these situations, the "sucker" organism tends to punish the cheat if they discover it's cheating, at the very least by not helping it in the future, or at most by harming it. Moreover, when it comes down to a choice between the survival of one individual and it's genes or the survival of several distantly related others of the same species--a zero sum game type situation like predators starving due to lack of prey and resorting to cannibalism, evolution will never favor an individual that sacrifices itself "for the good of the species". Please read Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene to learn more about situations where evolution must favor competition. If you are looking for situations where genetic survival is favored by cooperation, I recommend Sociobiology or other works by E.O. Wilson.
People will naturally both compete and cooperate in different situations. I do agree that our society has been shaped by the economic elite to destructively stifle cooperation and encourage competition. I don't know of any corporate leader that deserves to not be called a villain, much less a hero.
Linus has done a great amount to advance freedom, as has RMS. Their actions, however, were quite safe. They certainly are not in the same category as those who have risked their lives for human rights. However, the fact that a reactionary authoritarian like Thatcher is on the list totally discredits it. So, I guess Linus's inclusion is a non-event.
Most people have no idea what the difference between free software and proprietary software is. However, out of the set of those who have been informed of the distinction, a vast majority prefer free software. Most people have no idea what an operating system is. However, out of those who do, most know that they use GNU/Linux all the time--whether on their home PC, or on their TiVo, or every time they do a google search.
How can this law be enforced without massive repression? Whatever the law is, it must to allow media to quote someone without naming them. If you ban news organizations from making quotes without precise verifiable sources, you eliminate any semblance of a free press and a free society. Can't users just enter into a confidentiality agreement with a media source? The Internet user identifies themselves to the media entity, tells them the information that they want to post, and the media posts it with a generalized source, like a "woman from the estado (state) of Roraima".
If someone is truly anonymous, the government won't be able to find them. To stop anonymity, you must ban every service provider and user that enables others to be anonymous. Does this law ban any technology that could lead to anonymity? If so, doesn't that basically ban every protocol used on the Internet (you can tunnel, proxy, and relay over http, ssh, any p2p system, etc)? It seams like this law is practically useless, but may be provided as an additional punishment for criminals. So if you break the law online, and use naive methods to try to cover up your crimes, you get a harsher punishment than if you had just committed the crime and identified yourself while doing it. All this law will do is punish stupid criminals more harshly, and encourage smart criminals to use serious methods of hiding themselves. If it is really used to punish people for just trying to be anonymous, than almost every Brazilian Internet user could go to jail. Creating laws that everyone is guilty is a tool of totalitarian states to oppress whoever they want. If it were enforced, it would constitute a major breach of human rights and would put Brazil on the short list of repressive rogue states like the United States and North Korea.
With ssl, shouldn't this kind of thing be a non-issue? If a cyber squatted site doesn't have a legitimate certificate, I won't be able to log in to the https server without being presented with a window telling me who published the cert. I wouldn't log in to a bank http server; I would only use https. I would never continue to log in if the cert was self published in Nigeria or something like that. Am I missing something? It doesn't seam like the url has any purpose in terms of authentication at all. Evil frauds can buy microsoft.com*, citibank.com and even google.com for all I care.
*some would say evil frauds already own microsoft.com;-)
Check out Edward Markey's voting record. He's one of the most liberal members of congress. His call to arrest this innocent security researcher further proves that the Democrats are authoritarians just like the Republicans. Only Greens and Libertarians appear to have any respect for free speech and other civil liberties.
No intelligent executive* would throw a sensitive memo into the company trash or recycling can without shredding it. Any janitor can fish papers out of the bin and read them. Any competitor employing industrial espionage or any SEC investigator could fish the papers out of the dumpster and read them. No intelligent executive would keep confidential documents laying around public areas of the workplace. He would keep them in a locked office in a locked file cabinet or even a safe. When transporting them he would use a locking briefcase. Why would the same executive that shreds his discarded files throw the same digital files in the his windowing environment's trash/recycle bin? Any IT guy could recover the files easily enough. Any IT staff, competitor, or legal investigator might obtain them off of resold or released hard disks if they are not stored in an encrypted form. Deleted files should be shred. Stored files should be kept under lock and key (encryption). Files transported over any network (LAN, WAN, or Internet) should be use encrypted by some layer of the network stack. Some execs may trust some members of IT enough to share high level information with them. If the execs care at all about security, this should only be done deliberately.
How are copyright holders identifying whoever uploaded a given video? By their username (I thought everyone faked that info)? By their IP address (what if they used tor, a public library computer, or an open access point)? I would think that hunting down individual uploaders would be impossible. Shouldn't the copyright holders be going after youtube since they are a clearly identifiable hoster of material that they do not have the rights to archive and/or distribute? Yet no one will go after youtube because youtube will just remove the particular offending video, and two more of the same video will be uploaded the next day. If they media companies were to sue youtube out of existence, another service would just take it's place. This is no different than the p2p wars of the past. I suspect that the corporate media companies are just spreading FUD to scare people away from using youtube.
Free shell, mail, and web accounts are already a good deal. Can shell users install and run graphical applications (VNC or X11 over ssh)? If not, that's something you could do with your extra resources. You could run a tor entry node to let users anonymously route their Internet traffic. You could run any number of distributed computing clients. You set up some kind of virtualization and let users have root accounts on their own virtual machine, perhaps after making them sign yet another usage agreement. You could also give me an account. I'm sure I can find a use for some extra computing power!
If you are looking for tips on site design or a CMS, I don't have any. You can choose whichever popular (probably PHP based) CMS you are familiar with or whichever one's style appeals to you.
As for video hosting, I think the Internet Archive is a good start. However, they have been known to censor videos in the past, so you might want to have on site backups that you could quickly switch to. I would also recommend google video because of it's searchability, support for many video formats, and lack of a file size limit. Don't use youtube. Youtube doesn't support many media formats, has ads, and forces you to split up your video into tens of little clips. It's impossible to watch a feature length documentary on youtube. Youtube got popular because it appealed to kids on myspace with ADD who enjoyed watching ten second clips of people getting kicked in the nuts (although there is some useful content if you wade through the crap). The Internet Archive or google video is a much better choice for a serious, hour+ long project.
You might also want to host a torrent and post links to it on a few of the popular torrent search sites. The big name sites like http://isohunt.com/ and http://thepiratebay.org/ are good. A socio-politically oriented torrent site like http://www.chomskytorrents.org/ might obtain viewers for you as well.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like the purpose of this CD is to protect users from Trojans, spyware, and other malware. The author of this page encourages users to click on anything they want on the web and not worry about the source of the executables that they are running. Encouraging users to continue to be ignorant and reckless sounds like a horrible idea. Sure, right now there doesn't happen to be much malware for Linux, but if more dumb people start running Linux, it will be produced. Even though Linux is more resistant than Windoze to being broken into by traditional exploits, if the user deliberately runs some malicious program, the system cannot protect itself. No system that allows the user to administer their own machine can protect from these kinds of attacks. We need to educate users AND give them Linux. Doing either one without the other will leave the our public Internet in worse shape and our fellow users just as bewildered and dangerous.
...were you trying to be neutral and failed, or did you simply give up on any chance of neutrality from the start?
I titled my post "Everyone is biased". Why would you suggest that I started from a neutral position!?
...many people think the New York Times is anti-corporate, and the Wall Street Journal is pro-corporate.
Both are pro-corporate. I also said that the NYT is somewhat left leaning. The Wall Street Journal is the leading publication of the Business press; they directly represent the largest earing organizations on earth. The New York Times is the leading publication of the literate elite, a group with is mostly comprised of the same professionals and leaders that run corporations, but which also includes some academics and other intellectuals.
Both publications are far to the right of the American people. Most Americans support greater unions representation, more government funding of personal health care, higher taxes on the wealthy, and a withdrawal from Iraq. You have to turn to more obscure publications to find these issues even discussed. Most Americans, however, don't read newspapers. They get their news and opinion from TV. Television marginalizes real issues even more than the press does. It's just infotainment.
There's still a small Socialist and Communist press in the US, but it just prints party line propaganda for the most part. You have to turn to something like Z magazine, if you're looking for a articulate anti-corporate reporting.
Every organization is biased. You can't report on any event without a point of view. Even if you try to be neutral, you will express your biases through what facts and events you choose to cover and which you leave out.
The FSF is biased towards promoting freedom of speech and improving software quality. Microsoft is biased towards crushing competition and dominating the market in order to maximize profit. The Bush administration is biased towards gaining strategic influence in key oil producing regions and will abuse human rights in order to achieve these goals. Amnesty International is biased towards exposing human rights violations. A decent newspaper aught to quote Microsoft, the FSF, the White House, and Amnesty International and hire columnists from which ever organization they feel best represents their editorial bias. The New York times is very pro corporate, so I could see them employing writers with ties to Microsoft and Bush, but they're also somewhat left leaning, so I would expect some more decent people to write for them from time to time.
http://www.google.com/patents?q=slashdot&btnG=Sear ch+Patentsa tentsl ya tents
http://www.google.com/patents?q=wtf&btnG=Search+P
http://www.google.com/patents?q=peanut+butter+jel
http://www.google.com/patents?q=drm&btnG=Search+P
WTF is up with this web reversioning trend?
The usual answer is that possession of child porn is glorifying or profiting from a criminal act, and even if the possession is not causing direct harm it should be banned because it encourages the (criminal) act of creating more. This covers rape etc. as well.
On the Internet, there are plenty of images and videos depicting rape and murder (and even worse crimes like aggressive war and genocide). People will pay someone to rape and murder just so that they can get off watching a film of it (snuff films). I don't know if possessing films of real extreme violence is technically legal or illegal, but they are quite common on many sites and I have seen no effort to crack down on them. It wouldn't make any sense. The people downloading them are just normal voyeurs. Most of us are drawn to the twisted and absurd but are not rapists or killers. If you want to stop such crimes, you go after the people committing murder or rape, or those paying others to do it. You don't go after the people learning about the crimes by seeing recorded evidence of them. They are just consuming primary source media (think of it as history or news documentation). Yet there's all this focus on banning underage porn. Most underage porn is produced for personal use or use among friends. If we are so afraid of commercial exploitation of young people, why not ban the sale of underage porn (but not possession)? Aren't teens also being exploited by being thrown in jail when they try to take pictures of themselves?
Kill the executives and management and take their offices.
Form a union and have a walk out and picket strike until you get what you want.
Break into the building at night and start a sit down down strike.....in the nice offices.
Blackmail and extortion against your bosses. (If you don't already have access to sensitive info, run a sniffer on the LAN for a few days, you should be able to pick up plenty of useful information)
Quit that job and form an anarcho-syndicalist collective with better working conditions.
Get a promotion?
In itself, owning such a picture isn't anything bad. But most of the pictures are taken because people *want* them. It's the free zarkin' market. Demand and supply. People make *money* (or other services) off of molesting children.
I'm sure there is a huge demand for pictures of consensual sex from people of all ages. So what if some people pay for these images? Creating a market for art depicting consensual sex is not a bad thing at all. Many people seam to think that most underage porn comes from Catholic Priests locking up some poor kid in their basement and then systematically abusing him or her. Sure this happens, but I think it's rather rare and only extremely rarely directly motivated by pure profit. Most porn is free in the age of the Internet. If you want to remove the profit motive, make selling porn illegal, but don't ban possession or sharing! I'm sure most underage pics of sex and nudity are taken by teenagers themselves. As a young person, I've found that most of my peer's have been sexually active for a while and many own digital images of themselves and their partners enjoying each other's company. Where do conservatives get this weird idea that people magically become sexual only after their 18th birthday?
I'm sure a minority of porn consumers want pictures of rape and molestation and this demand may occasionally fuel some evil activities. However, pictures of rape are only illegal to possess if the victim is a certain age. It isn't the illegality of the action that makes the picture illegal, it is the arbitrary quality of age. Moreover, even pics of consensual sex are illegal if the person pictured happened to be a certain age! Young women have been prosecuted for taking pictures of themselves! This is unjust discrimination and no free society should tolerate it.
How do they plan on blocking any particular content? How can anyone who doesn't have an account on my machine know what is hosted and perhaps available to thousands of other people (who do have accounts) over ssh? How can anyone tell the origin of a IP packet sent over tor? How can an ISP block offending anonymous remailers or freenet sites? THEY CAN'T. Censoring the Internet is not possible without destroying the Internet.
Perhaps they want to censor the web, but most of the Internet would still be free. The dissidents will still get their message out and the porn lovers will still download whatever kink they desire. Attempts to censor the web will just make it hard for corporations to make money because the web is the user-friendly commercial face of the Internet and people will start using other services if they can't find the content that they want over http.
On a different note, what is so wrong about sharing "child" porn? People sexually mature several years before the legal age of consent, and during that "gap" they tend to have sex. Often they take pictures of these activities. Why should we throw innocent teenagers in jail just because they want to practice free love and share images of themselves doing thing that they enjoy? What if they want to share some of these images with a legal adult, what is wrong with that?
Certainly raping a young person is wrong, just as raping any person is wrong. But owning a picture of rape should not be illegal, just as owning a picture of any other crime (even murder or genocide) should not be illegal. If pictures were taken under conditions of coercion, it is the coercion that is wrong and illegal, not the pictures! If pictures of underage humans were taken under consensual conditions, no crime was even committed in the act of taking them. Why should these images be illegal?
When I use the word democracy mockingly, I mean the twisted definition put forward by the ruling class: a vision of democracy that involves a small minority with enormous economic and political power who maintain that power mainly through their ability to shape public opinion.
When I use the word democracy sincerely, I am not talking about majority rule or "fair" electoral politics. I believe that each person aught to have a say in a situation proportional to how much the results of the decision effects them.
So everyone should have absolute control over their own body because their person IS THEM and therefore "effects" them more than anyone else. You have a right to assemble, right to have any physical/sexual relations that are consensual, right to any medical or recreational drug desired, right to control any small personal property, etc. Workers and consumers aught to both have a say in the production and distribution of goods. Economic capital (land, machinery, investment funds, etc) aught to be owned collectively. Decisions of hiring and firing should be made by all workers in a business. The idea that a small group of individuals can own a factory or an airplane is absurd because so many other people must be involved to make these objects function. Those workers and consumers need to have an equal say in how their "shop" is run for democracy to mean anything. State and International issues should be decided on as close to a consensus basis as possible. Aggressive war and genocide must be intolerable.
These aren't extremist ideas, they are easy to understand, fair principles. Unfortunately hardly anyone is actually willing to stand up for them in the real world.
With the advent of the Internet, kids are frankly just learning that school is bullshit! The forces indoctrination and fear are starting to loose control as people find new ways of learning, including learning the dark history of the school system.
Young people are naturally curious. They want to explore and learn. High Schools use intimidation and boredom, as well as marginalizing viable alternatives through scheduling and censorship, to keep young people from being informed. Parochial, preparatory and public schools are not all that different. Religious schools enforce obedience to the dogma of church; Prep schools enforce obedience to whatever looks good on a college application; and public schools enforce the obedience to authority in general. Any learning outside of these constraints is rarely tolerated.
If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.
The major problem in successful teaching is just to not prevent students from being interested. Typically students come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children's normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don't understand. Some teachers genuinely want to help students in this way. Most school administrations don't let them.
Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control -- "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.
(apologies to Chomsky)
If Microsoft didn't exist at all, the IT industry would be far more energy efficient. Think of the stupidity of integrating the GUI into the Kernel for an OS that runs servers. Windows is bloated and it isn't getting any better. A look at the system requirements of Vista further proves just how inefficient Windows is. Think of all the CPU cycles, RAM, Disk Space, and other resources waisted on anti-malware, malware itself, license authentication, DRM decoding, and etc other bothers caused by the crap that this illegal monopoly has forced on us.
The NIH alone contributed 28% of medical research funds in 2005. There are other sources of state and federal funds. My statistical source for the roughly half number is from an article in Wired magazine (I couldn't find it online; do a lexus nexus search if your school or workplace will pay for it ;-)). It stated that government money previously provided for the majority of the funding for medical research, and government funding for health science has increased, but industry funding has increased faster, so now private funds account for just over half. Not for profit private foundations also provide some funding (I've seen 10% attributed to them). Whatever the exact numbers, it should be clear that the fruits of this research is excessively ending up in for profit hands.
Only about half of all medical research is privately funded, yet most new medicines end up being patented and owned by private companies. Shouldn't the people (US! the public!) who pay for the research be the ones who decide how it is used? In a democratic society, the people would actually own what they pay for and would choose to use it for the good of the worlds population. Too bad we live in a corporate oligarchy. We subsidize (or socialize if that's your bad word) the costs and risks of research, but we privatize the benefits so that only a few rich shareholders can profit while millions die of preventable diseases. We need a revolution.
This is because genetics works on the level of species, not individuals, and for the species, fairness and reciprocity are more successful strategies than competition. We have to compete with every other species in nature, what sense is there in competing amongst ourselves for survival?
You aren't quite correct. Yes, it is evolutionarily better for organisms to cooperate, sometimes even at the detriment of the survival of an individual, than it is for everyone to compete to the death, but genetics does not work on the level of the species (or the "group" or the individual). Genetics works at the level of the gene, and this manifests itself in the behavior of the larger categories. An individual organism will tend to help others to the degree that they are genetically related to them (parents help their offspring a great deal, herds are basically a cooperative extended family, members of the same species are less likely to hunt each other than to hunt other species, and symbiosis can even develop across different clades). "fairness and reciprocity" are important behaviors, but in situations that reduce to the prisoner's dilemma, there is a strong incentive for an individual to cheat: to receive the benefit of a altruistic peer, but to not reciprocate. In these situations, the "sucker" organism tends to punish the cheat if they discover it's cheating, at the very least by not helping it in the future, or at most by harming it. Moreover, when it comes down to a choice between the survival of one individual and it's genes or the survival of several distantly related others of the same species--a zero sum game type situation like predators starving due to lack of prey and resorting to cannibalism, evolution will never favor an individual that sacrifices itself "for the good of the species". Please read Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene to learn more about situations where evolution must favor competition. If you are looking for situations where genetic survival is favored by cooperation, I recommend Sociobiology or other works by E.O. Wilson.
People will naturally both compete and cooperate in different situations. I do agree that our society has been shaped by the economic elite to destructively stifle cooperation and encourage competition. I don't know of any corporate leader that deserves to not be called a villain, much less a hero.
Linus has done a great amount to advance freedom, as has RMS. Their actions, however, were quite safe. They certainly are not in the same category as those who have risked their lives for human rights. However, the fact that a reactionary authoritarian like Thatcher is on the list totally discredits it. So, I guess Linus's inclusion is a non-event.
Most people have no idea what the difference between free software and proprietary software is. However, out of the set of those who have been informed of the distinction, a vast majority prefer free software. Most people have no idea what an operating system is. However, out of those who do, most know that they use GNU/Linux all the time--whether on their home PC, or on their TiVo, or every time they do a google search.
How can this law be enforced without massive repression? Whatever the law is, it must to allow media to quote someone without naming them. If you ban news organizations from making quotes without precise verifiable sources, you eliminate any semblance of a free press and a free society. Can't users just enter into a confidentiality agreement with a media source? The Internet user identifies themselves to the media entity, tells them the information that they want to post, and the media posts it with a generalized source, like a "woman from the estado (state) of Roraima".
If someone is truly anonymous, the government won't be able to find them. To stop anonymity, you must ban every service provider and user that enables others to be anonymous. Does this law ban any technology that could lead to anonymity? If so, doesn't that basically ban every protocol used on the Internet (you can tunnel, proxy, and relay over http, ssh, any p2p system, etc)? It seams like this law is practically useless, but may be provided as an additional punishment for criminals. So if you break the law online, and use naive methods to try to cover up your crimes, you get a harsher punishment than if you had just committed the crime and identified yourself while doing it. All this law will do is punish stupid criminals more harshly, and encourage smart criminals to use serious methods of hiding themselves. If it is really used to punish people for just trying to be anonymous, than almost every Brazilian Internet user could go to jail. Creating laws that everyone is guilty is a tool of totalitarian states to oppress whoever they want. If it were enforced, it would constitute a major breach of human rights and would put Brazil on the short list of repressive rogue states like the United States and North Korea.
With ssl, shouldn't this kind of thing be a non-issue? If a cyber squatted site doesn't have a legitimate certificate, I won't be able to log in to the https server without being presented with a window telling me who published the cert. I wouldn't log in to a bank http server; I would only use https. I would never continue to log in if the cert was self published in Nigeria or something like that. Am I missing something? It doesn't seam like the url has any purpose in terms of authentication at all. Evil frauds can buy microsoft.com*, citibank.com and even google.com for all I care.
;-)
*some would say evil frauds already own microsoft.com
Check out Edward Markey's voting record. He's one of the most liberal members of congress. His call to arrest this innocent security researcher further proves that the Democrats are authoritarians just like the Republicans. Only Greens and Libertarians appear to have any respect for free speech and other civil liberties.
No intelligent executive* would throw a sensitive memo into the company trash or recycling can without shredding it. Any janitor can fish papers out of the bin and read them. Any competitor employing industrial espionage or any SEC investigator could fish the papers out of the dumpster and read them. No intelligent executive would keep confidential documents laying around public areas of the workplace. He would keep them in a locked office in a locked file cabinet or even a safe. When transporting them he would use a locking briefcase. Why would the same executive that shreds his discarded files throw the same digital files in the his windowing environment's trash/recycle bin? Any IT guy could recover the files easily enough. Any IT staff, competitor, or legal investigator might obtain them off of resold or released hard disks if they are not stored in an encrypted form. Deleted files should be shred. Stored files should be kept under lock and key (encryption). Files transported over any network (LAN, WAN, or Internet) should be use encrypted by some layer of the network stack. Some execs may trust some members of IT enough to share high level information with them. If the execs care at all about security, this should only be done deliberately.
*Do intelligent executives exist?
How are copyright holders identifying whoever uploaded a given video? By their username (I thought everyone faked that info)? By their IP address (what if they used tor, a public library computer, or an open access point)? I would think that hunting down individual uploaders would be impossible. Shouldn't the copyright holders be going after youtube since they are a clearly identifiable hoster of material that they do not have the rights to archive and/or distribute? Yet no one will go after youtube because youtube will just remove the particular offending video, and two more of the same video will be uploaded the next day. If they media companies were to sue youtube out of existence, another service would just take it's place. This is no different than the p2p wars of the past. I suspect that the corporate media companies are just spreading FUD to scare people away from using youtube.
Free shell, mail, and web accounts are already a good deal. Can shell users install and run graphical applications (VNC or X11 over ssh)? If not, that's something you could do with your extra resources. You could run a tor entry node to let users anonymously route their Internet traffic. You could run any number of distributed computing clients. You set up some kind of virtualization and let users have root accounts on their own virtual machine, perhaps after making them sign yet another usage agreement. You could also give me an account. I'm sure I can find a use for some extra computing power!
If you are looking for tips on site design or a CMS, I don't have any. You can choose whichever popular (probably PHP based) CMS you are familiar with or whichever one's style appeals to you.
As for video hosting, I think the Internet Archive is a good start. However, they have been known to censor videos in the past, so you might want to have on site backups that you could quickly switch to. I would also recommend google video because of it's searchability, support for many video formats, and lack of a file size limit. Don't use youtube. Youtube doesn't support many media formats, has ads, and forces you to split up your video into tens of little clips. It's impossible to watch a feature length documentary on youtube. Youtube got popular because it appealed to kids on myspace with ADD who enjoyed watching ten second clips of people getting kicked in the nuts (although there is some useful content if you wade through the crap). The Internet Archive or google video is a much better choice for a serious, hour+ long project.
You might also want to host a torrent and post links to it on a few of the popular torrent search sites. The big name sites like http://isohunt.com/ and http://thepiratebay.org/ are good. A socio-politically oriented torrent site like http://www.chomskytorrents.org/ might obtain viewers for you as well.