Radical media, politics and culture.

hydrarchist's blog

GNU position paper in opposition to W3C software patents policy.

Reflections on the Hub experience by Alien8.

And Uri's notes on the final plenary.

When it comes to disgusting behaviour, you can't plumb an Irish politician. Apparently the governemt is proposing a law to require information retention of email, web-browsing, phone-clls etc for four years. Who the fuck do they think they are kidding.

Here's the story from the Irish Times, and here's the "discussion" from slashdot.

stupid discussion on same: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=a0e754fdb35c1e1ab14b0bfe...

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Interesting story about news.google.com from indymedia, running on algorithms that select and pool news storeis from thodands of different sources each day and delivers them in a searchable format akin to the search engine itself. Seems that they're currently pulling pieces from Ireland and San Francisco IMCs.

Probably something that we should do to.

Disappointed partisans of the Republican movement focus their attacks on Gerry Adams, alleging deception, connivance and mainpulation. Historical antagonists of Sinn Fein polemicise against him as the emblem of a shift to the right of a party they never supported, but which had gathered a working class constituency around it. When they speak, implicit in their claims is the sense that they sense a misdirected radicalism.

Those whose 'republicanism' nis built around Adams will never be swayed by such ad hominem attacks. Rather their sense of partsianship will be consolidated. Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, the Newspapers, Sticks etc will continue their assault, built on the preservation of the status quo, simultaneously so that any left critique will go unnoticed in the snowstorm of reaction.

The seperatist movement in Ireland has always been the receptacle of a hybrid radicalism, powerful becasue of the primitive nature of its artciulation, continual confrontation with legality, incessant demonisation, persecution and criminalisation by the state. Those who have identified as republicans however, identify with a radical anti-state politics and are somewhat open to alternatives. The fans of the last decades media stars will remain unmoved by the ideological broadsides, but the activists will bhe in a state of continuous assessmet of where they stand, especially as the fruits of cooptation generate internal manipulation and new factions.

Against this background, the only useful approach is to constitute an alternative which delivers, manitains contact with the millenarian tradition in Irish politics, the physionomy of permanent rebellion, but establishes its alternative choice as practice. Libertarians need to think this through, rather than being seduced by the simplistic traditional polemics practiced by leftist elements.

http://www.opentheory.org/ox2-bericht/text.phtml From Greame

electronics (http://opencollector.org,

http://erste.oekonux-konferenz.de/dokumentation/texte/index.html)

http://www.thinkcycle.org/tc-notes/?topic_id=35724

Personal fabbers... Actually, not so science fiction: each one is a: - a tabletop cnc milling machine - a vinyl cutter - low-cost high-end instrumentation tools + uv-vis spectrometer + a network analyzer - two full tower systems - oscilloscope - a computer - a digital microscope - a collection of design software packages

but still v. cool.

Graham

Petri Pöyhönen

Marko AHTISAARI http://www.aula.cc/~marko/

Utterance, Accreditation, Distribution

Ny nameless friend writes .........I wanted to call everyone's attention to a nascent peer-to-peer project that seems to be very interesting, especially from our perspective. I met Christian Grothoff at DefCon this year and I was able to talk to him a bit about the system. It is intended to be "a peer-to-peer framework for anonymous distributed file-sharing." The system is interesting because it incorporates a reputation system by which nodes determine how to allocate their own resources. Unlike Mojo Nation, for example, it does not rely on a trusted centralized entity. The system was designed from the ground up to be resistant to malicious nodes. It needed to be, because it was designed from the start as free software. Below is a link to a paper which describes the "economic aspects" of the network.

By the way, Christian Grothoff has expressed a willingness to come to NYU for a talk. Could this be something we could sponsor with the CS department? (probably just travel costs from Chicago).

GNUnet -- An Excess Based Economy: http://www.ovmj.org/GNUnet/download/ebe.ps

Other papers by the GNUnet group: http://www.ovmj.org/GNUnet/papers.php3

Yochai wants to limit the peer production analysis to public goods and not to claim other economic goods. Ease of accessing relatively optimal labour.Decline in transaction costs inherent to the coordination of that labour.

The U.S. Copyright Office announced on Tuesday that President Bush on Saturday signed into law the 21st Century Department of Justice Appropriations Authorization Act (H.R. 2215), which includes the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act.

Of importance is the new law's amendment to the Copyright Act, which provides increased flexibility for accredited, nonprofit educational institutions to use the Internet to provide copyrighted materials to students enrolled in distance education programs. The amendment allows professors to use online music, movies and other copyrighted materials for "mediated instructional activities," without permission from or payment to copyright holders. It also re-establishes this particular "fair use" of a copyrighted work -- still preserved for non-digital copyrights -- that was made illegal under 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Prior to the publication of "Art of Deception", the publishers Wiley and Sons received a letter threatening legal action on the part of John Markoff, the New York Times hack (sic) who played a key role in Mitnick's demonisation. As a result this chapter was pulled from the book. Fortunately the lost lines appeared miraculously in a yahoo group earlier this month, and it is provided below for your edification.

The account is interesting in several respects. First it demonstrates the shortsightedness of security through obscurity, or a reliance on smart technical fixes for the provision of assurance and safety. Given the continuing tendency towards security culture in political circles the sections on social engineering should act as reminder that most vulnerabilities are human. Secondly it demonstrates the connivance in the criminalization process between respected media mouthpieces and the state. Mitnick's case, along with those of LaMachia and Morris, were seminal from this point of view and established the trend for the decade. Third, he is candid about the very superficial nature of hacker rebellion, which often morphs into betrayal and collaboration with the state and businness without skipping a beat.

Enjoy.Kevin's Story

So the New Media Times is styling itself a peer to peer news site based upon the model of the Open Directory. Essentially this means that they are seeking people to assume responsibility for specific areas as editors, which doesn't make much sense to me. The strength of collaborative journalism lies in the elements of self-selection of the writers, and post-publication editorial review. Rusty is interested in launching something of this type.

Someone in a position of technical authority will soon be hearing from me, as having attempted ftuitlessly to post a jpeg of a Real Doll, I gave up dejected and disgusted.

Social Software meant that I could not get up to Yale for the Revenge of the Blogs session organised by Ernie Miller form Lawmeme. Too bad, lucky that they've left more documentation than a young cat unable to control her bowel movements.

Bitzi Openbit Catalog http://bitzi.com/openbits/

Bitzi General Discussion: Is there a proper license for the catalogue? http://bitzi.com/bboard/message?message_id=3823&forum_id=1667

License http://bitzi.com/openbits/openbits-license.txt

... and another thing, getting a low ID on emule/edonkey is one major pain in the ass, watching thjose partial downloads sit there for hours doing notjing, bandwidth that's already paid for sitting there unused. Well here's some help from the sharereactor forum on how to remedy this desultory state of affairs.

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