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Archive for the ‘Human Rights’ Category

Discrediting transparency

September 1st, 2011 No comments

… ouch!
“Wikileaks: Guardian journalist negligently published password to unredacted cables (Update: Guardian denies)

… ouch that one hurts:
WikiLeaks Sues the Guardian Over Leak

… nooo!! don’t hit me again, I’m bleeding!
“The decrypted file is “z.7z,” 368MB, which unzips to “cables.csv,” about 1.7GB in size, dated 4/12/2010″

… perfidy? – Gimme a break!
Wikileaks wirft OpenLeaks-Gründer “Niedertracht” vor

Julian! Daniel! Stop this fucking act of deception and heteronomous self-distruction!

Cordiality

August 30th, 2011 No comments

“I like the progressive detriment of your cordiality in your emails.”

by EM

Categories: Culture, Human Rights, Quote Tags:

“Yes we can”? – WFT! – No he can’t!

August 26th, 2011 No comments

The current president of the U.S. was dazzling his “fellow citizens” during his election campaign in 2008 with promises about change, making the citizens believe “they can”. Turns out that the holder of the nobel peace prize, which he got just for raising hope and not for his actions, is another hypocrite acting as warlord in the interest of neo-imperial terrorism, causing exploitation, indoctrination without respect to human laws and international agreements. – Just not keeping his promises.

Guantanamo Bay is still not closed, the war in Iraq has not ended, international corporations not held responsible for their financial and ecological disasters, but protected by the administration, the U.S. still have not accepted and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, Osama Bin Laden a hoax, etc. Now he’s the one to invoke the “Patriot Act” (ref.), – what a silly name for a law btw, – against Wikileaks to ensure his misgovernment remains intransparent. Total LULZ! Didn’t he promise he’ll dump this Act once he’s President?

Whether the United States are directed by a Democrat or a Republican, the jankies remain a horde of imperialists, culture destroyers and terrorists. In two weeks these creatures are going to celebrate their 10 years self-deception at “Ground Zero” and zero ground is the average intellectual level this country is being governed upon…


Source

Copy me: Technological change and the consumption of music

August 26th, 2011 No comments

… worth reading:

Copy me: Technological change and the consumption of music

CC-by-sa 3.0 2009 by Nick White

For those who worry about the cultural, economic and political power of the global media companies, the dreamed-of revolution is at hand. The industry may right now be making a joyful noise unto the Lord, but it is we, not they, who are about to enter the promised land. (Moglen 2001)

Introduction

Technological changes have political implications. Changing the way we interact with things encourages a reconsideration of the rules and institutions that have governed previous interactions with them.

The current debate about copies of recorded music using the Internet is an excellent example of this, and by examining it one may better understand the relations between people and recorded music, and between listeners and the traditional publishers of music.

While undoubtedly a great deal may be usefully said and examined in other technological changes in music recordings, I will here focus primarily on filesharing, as it is something I have been somewhat involved in myself, and hence I have significantly more knowledge ‘from the inside.’

I will begin by discussing traditional definitions of ‘commodity,’ and then move on to a very brief overview of historical trends in copying and music recording. I will also touch upon the printing press in order to discuss the creation and rationale behind copyright laws, which form a major part the present filesharing debate. I will then go into greater depth into the current practises of people who share music on filesharing networks, and the response by the recording industry, before embarking on an analysis of the meaning and significance of some of these new practises and dialogues.

It should be noted that I’m speaking primarily of England and the United States of America, and the situation will be somewhat different in other parts of the world.

[]

Download the paper
or visit http://njw.me.uk/pubs/2009-copyme

Promoting DuckDuckGo

August 22nd, 2011 No comments

DuckDuckGo is a beautiful, fast and secure search engine, which actually cares about the users privacy and does not track you.
As too few people yet know about that amazing search engine I thought about a way how to promote it.
Here’s my solution for sysadmins and webmasters:

Include the following rewrite rule into your .htaccess on the Apache Server.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

SetEnvIf Referer "google.([_a-zA-Z-]+/)" promote_duck
SetEnvIf Referer "yahoo.com" promote_duck
SetEnvIf Referer "baidu.com" promote_duck
SetEnvIf Referer "bing.com" promote_duck

Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=promote_duck
ErrorDocument 403 http://duckduckgo.com/?q=$1&kz=-1

This will cause that every referrer request by Google, Yahoo, Baidu and Bing will be redirected to DuckDuckGo, showing the according search results.

=^.^= Lx

P.S. Here’s the forum discussion regarding this issue.

Africana Critical Theory

August 22nd, 2011 No comments

Rabaka_2009_Africana Critical Theory – Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, from W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral

Rabaka, R. (2009). Africana Critical Theory – Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, from W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. New York.

Why Net Censorship in Times of Political Unrest Results in More Violent Uprisings

August 19th, 2011 No comments

A Social Simulation Experiment on the UK Riots

Abstract:
Following the 2011 wave of political unrest, going from the Arab Spring to UK riots, the formation of a large consensus around Internet censorship is underway. Beyond all political consideration of consequences in terms of freedom of expression, the present paper adopts a social simulation approach to show that the decision to “regulate” or restrict social media in situations of civil unrest results in higher levels of violence. Building on Epstein’s (2002) agent based model, several alternative scenarios are generated. Systemic optimum, represented by complete absence of censorship, not only corresponds to lower levels of violence over time, but allows for significant cant periods of social peace after each outburst.

Antonio A. Casilli
Telecom ParisTech

Paola Tubaro
University of Greenwich

August 14, 2011

Source
Download study

[Update 20th August 2011]
Article by Slavoj Žižek on the meaning of the riots

“Are hackers a problem, where you live?”

August 19th, 2011 4 comments

A Palestinian schoolbook says: “Are hackers a problem where you live?” 😎
They probably live next door…

everybody wants one

August 18th, 2011 No comments

Cory Doctorow’s talk on Freedom

August 12th, 2011 No comments

This week Cory Doctorow gave a great talk about this (*sigh*) boring old issue of Freedom and Human Rights in the age of the knowledge society at the ACM Siggraph Conference in Vancouver.

For further reading:
EFF
Cory’s Blog