I don’t know of a more crucial text to read in this epochal transition. Republished from Michael Hudson: “Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into… Continue reading
Date archives "December 2011"
To #OccupyWallStreet, an open letter on tactics and strategy, from Starhawk
Excerpted from the Alliance of Community Trainers, (Starhawk, Lisa Fithian,Lauren Ross) : “Now we are wrestling with the question that arises again and again in movements for social justice—how to struggle. Do we embrace nonviolence, or a ‘diversity of tactics?’ If we are a nonviolent movement, how do we define nonviolence? Is breaking a window… Continue reading
No Copyright Intended
Interesting stuff by Andy Baio on his Waxy.org – go to the post to check out all the comments On October 26, a YouTube user named crimewriter95 posted a full-length version of Pulp Fiction, rearranged in chronological order. A couple things struck me about this video. First, I’m surprised that a full-length, 2.5-hour very slight remix of a popular film… Continue reading
Fight the Blacklist: A Toolkit for Anti-SOPA Activism
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Fight the Blacklist: A Toolkit for Anti-SOPA Activism Congress is debating dangerous legislation that would give the Department of Justice unprecedented power to “blacklist” websites without a trial and give Hollywood copyright holders a fast-track way to shut down a website’s financial services for alleged copyright infringement, endangering sites like Vimeo and… Continue reading
WikiLeaks working on new whistle-blowing platform
WikiLeaks on Thursday released a study of the brisk global trade in surveillance products, which founder Julian Assange claimed exposes a broad risk to peoples’ privacy, while also continuing work on a revamped submissions platform. Assange said the study, which encompasses 160 companies in 25 countries, was undertaken as part of an obligation to sources… Continue reading
Counterfeiting electronics: what it really means
Hardware hacker extraordinare Bunnie Huang explains why the new defense bill, which makes it a crime to sell a “counterfeit” chip to the US military, is going to place an impossible burden on retailers, importers, and suppliers: To better understand the magnitude of the counterfeiting problem, it’s helpful to know how fakes are made. The… Continue reading
Open source team creates apocalypse survival kit
A team of open source enthusiasts is putting together instructions for how to build 50 tools essential to establishing – or reestablishing – a civilization. The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is being developed by the Open Source Ecology (OSE) group, and includes such basic tools as a well drill, steam engine, and brick making… Continue reading
How scary are GPL violations?
Since the source code is usually available, software under a free or open open source license can be re-used within another software project rather easily. That is, after all, the whole point of FLOSS. But the potential for FLOSS license violations within software projects is, like any other license, always there. Critics of FLOSS licenses… Continue reading
Net neutrality is too regulatory — but Stop Online Piracy isn’t?
Several Republicans in the U.S. Congress who voted this year to overturn Net neutrality rules — with most opponents arguing the rules would create the first-ever regulation of the Internet — have now signed on to sponsor one of two bills that would allow the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders to shut… Continue reading
Dmytri Kleiner against the ideology of gold
Republished from Dmytri Kleiner: “The Ideology of Gold. You all know them, the “Gold Bug,” often using words like “fraud” and “debasement of our money,” they decry government issued fiat money as a big scam to rip off the masses! We need “sound money” or “real money,” meaning gold. Gold has real value, it’s not… Continue reading
Premises for a new p2p economy
Paper.li, a community of 300k+ self-pubishers/curators on the internet, interviewed me for the CulturaDigital.Br festival in Rio. Here’s the interview: “Many of us think of P2P as a kind of file-sharing. But it’s more than that? Above all, it’s a relational dynamic in which people exchange not with each other as individuals, but with a… Continue reading
Michael Hudson: outlines of a post-#OccupyWallStreet progressive presidency in the U.S.A.
(HT to Tadit Anderson) The pretense is that privatization is more efficient. But privatizers add on interest and financial fees, high executive salaries and bonuses, and turn the roads into toll roads and other infrastructure into neofeudal fiefdoms to charge monopolistic access fees for people to use. This is what has happened in Chicago when… Continue reading
Open Education Resources: Feedback from the Social Web
The movement toward creating and using open education resources–OERs–has been percolating for years, and a vast amount of open materials for education is now easily accessible for online course developers to incorporate in their designs. But some key questions persist about mining this growing resource for online courses. Campus Technology‘s recent conversation with Michael Cottam,… Continue reading
Why Wireless Meshworks don’t work at scale
Excerpted from Sha.ddih: ” After a couple years I developed a pretty good understanding that wireless mesh networks aren’t actually a good way to build a real network. These are a few of those reasons. * Reason 1: Management is hard and expensive. The biggest cost for the networks I ran was actually maintaining them… Continue reading
Stallman: Facebook IS Mass Surveillance
The father of free software philosophy spoke to RT on evil developers, spying social networks, the almost-legitimacy of Anonymous hacks and the condition under which he would take a proprietary program and a million dollars. Stallman is the man behind the concept that every computer program must be free for users to study and modify… Continue reading
Raising money For “Lunatics” with Kickstarter
We’re putting the finishing touches on our initial Kickstarter campaign for our free-culture science-fiction web series “Lunatics”, which is being made with free software tools in a process very similar to free software development. This is an experiment in commercial free culture, using the platform that has quickly come to be the standard for this… Continue reading