I have recently attended a talk given by Michael Geist on the subject of “E-Publishing and the Law” through the Canadian Journalism Foundation. Here are some of the things that Dr. Geist spoke about, as well as some of my observations.
In the wake and more and more unpleasant things being hosted by WikiLeaks, more and more censorship is attempted and judicial action has ruled that wikileaks.org be removed from DNS. But, thanks to the forethought of the admin, the site already has an extensive list of alternative names. To that list I now add the following redirects:
http://wl.hackd.net
http://wikileaks.hackd.net
The direct address is http://88.80.13.160/
There also exists a comprehensive list of alternate names.
The most recent WikiLeaks content archive is available at The Pirate Bay.
On another note, is there a possibility that the recent fire at PRQ (the hosting company of WikiLeaks and under ownership of Pirate Bay administrators) wasn’t all that accidental?
Information wants to be free, bitches =)
Zune maker Microsoft pays royalties to the RIAA for every unit sold in the idea that all these devices may be used for copyright infringement.The RIAA, in turn, has continued to sue its customers under the pretext of bringing criminals to justice, although so far it managed only to alienate people. They are also generally assuming that because they don’t make as much money as they want to, somebody must be stealing from them. So who else but their own customers are the criminals. Screw evidence.Entering the US means you have to prove, somehow, you are not a criminal. Apparently, at some point it was decided that only terrorists and thieves1 want to visit the US to do bad things to its people and/or its economy. So even if you are not being interrogated by customs officers, you are treated like a common criminal: fingerprints, possibly retina scans, background checks and data retention and mining to asses your danger levels. But of course, why should it be different? A country must protect its assets. Security and economy. Freedom. Freedom for corporations to strengthen their share prices and get a better grasp on their target demographics. Unfortunately, there are signs that the US is not a democracy anymore. It is not a free country. Certainly, there aren’t many “free” and “brave” people making house here. The foolishly brave fight wars to serve the puppet government of multinational corporate conglomerates. Those that want to be free quickly become terrorists, radical and dangerous activists, nuts, crazies, freaks. I sound like a broken record because I don’t have the strength or the indifference to change the track.
Time for a little weekend-end ramble session. Today we’re focusing on Facebook’s follies, Department of Homeland Security’s new massive profiling campaign and The Pirate Bay’s support of artists.
Kevin Rose had a marvelous idea when it came to creating Digg: steal an existing idea - social news - and dress it up in something geeks like. Give the impression that users have all the power while you make money off their content. Fine, why not, after all we’ve all come across dirtier business ideas. Though with so many users, some risks were taken and now they’re coming back to bite mister revision3 in the behind.
There are at least to major recorded events where Digg banned some of its top stories, then went back, restored them and Rose apologised. That doesn’t work. It’s biting at the trust that users have in Digg and it’s telling them some of the effort they’re putting in the site goes to waste - especially when it has the possibility of damaging Kevin’s business ventures. An unregulated conversation medium, free of censorship and problems? Nope. More like a site that funnels stories to keep us busy. I always found only proto and pseudo geeks to hang around Digg anyway, so it’s more of a way for webmasters to get some nice traffic surges to their website. “Writing for Digg”, as some have called the phenomenon.
So I would personally hope Kev and co. develop a set of guidelines that covers in detail what kind of things are or are not appropriate, and abide by them. Otherwise Digg will lose even more of its reputation and, with that, mister Rose stands to lose a lot of money.
When most of us begin using encryption, the intended goal is to be able to protect certain types of data from certain types of individuals. You might be interested in saving your trade secrets from would-be industrial spies and I may be interested in hiding unfinished novels from prying eyes. But the strength of commonly-available encryption aims at giving governments some trouble in getting to that data. Well, the technology is available, but now they’ll just force us to hand over the keys or face jail time.
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natas of DDP fame just launched a website dedicated to caller ID spoofing. In his original blog post he mentions that every time he has posted information to Wikipedia, it got removed. As a direct result of that, all information on the aforementioned website is clearly protected, by copyright, against copying by Wikipedia.
I understand that not every piece of information deserves to be “out there”. While I tend to subscribe to that whole notion of “information wants to be free”, I do acknowledge the fact that certain kinds of information do not deserve attention1. But, from quickly browsing his new website, I neither find the information to be inaccurate - mind you, I have yet to test it out extensively - nor in any way bordering on illegality. He actually deals with some of the legal issues that revolve around CID spoofing and what the future - if any - might be. Which begs the question of why did Wikipedia decide to remove it. I know the online encyclopedia does not necessarily aim to be, in and of itself, an activist website. Information is gathered, compiled and presented so as to best reflect what are thought to be facts regarding a given subject matter. In that sense there is already a minor form of activism - trying to filter out disinformation and rumours and keep to the facts is not something everybody, everywhere really wants2.
Wikipedia must either go all the way or drop itself completely. Either compile and collect all this information - indeed, be an encyclopedia with all the glory and the responsibility - or blow the smoke screen. I know there have been previous controversies regarding [paid] vanity biographies, deleted users or facts that were deemed too “out there” to be posted publicly. I guess what I’m doing here is - remember to be skeptic in life. Everywhere. Even if 95% of the information on Wikipedia is of good quality - always push to find out more if it really matters. And always push those that would try to censor information that deserves to be public out of society’s way.
I ‘m also plugging natas’ website because I never thought phreaking is dead =)
Now, it’s very easy for me to comment on how stupid some people are. How easily they get offended about things that shouldn’t even be an issue in the first place - because they misunderstand the message, because they think it’s addressed to them, because they see it as such a huge deal when it’s not.
I was recently debating with someone on the topic of freedoms and how - obviously, at my age - I am very idealistic and somewhat foolish. I was told that running after certain freedoms is a fool’s errand and I am better off just getting into the system and along with the program.
