ralpress.org

Oh, and I forgot controlling, deluded and greedy.

Jeff Jarvis writing in The Guardian: News Corp is foolish to block linking

“Linking is not a privilege that the recipient of the link should control - any more than politicians should decide who may or may not quote them. The test is not whether the creator of the link charges (Murdoch’s newspapers will charge and they link). The test is whether the thing we are linking to is public. If it is public for one it should be public for all.”

Mr Murdoch, if you really dislike the Web to this extent, to the extent where you are comfortable negating its most fundamental and essential feature, then why don’t you do us all and yourself a huge favour, confine yourself to what you’re best at: producing expensive, wasteful and redundant print-outs of yesterday’s news. Thx.

Links:

• right2link.org
• right2link.org campaign sign up page

Post updated: 20/01/2010 10:58

Can you guess which one is my wi-fi network? (Click for larger version)

As Pete Doherty has found out, one has to be very careful in Germany with regard to 1930s/40s history and its legacy. Back in 1994/95 or thereabouts, I took a green version of this jacket with me on a visit to my girlfriend’s family who were living near Sinsheim at the time. Having swanned around in it for a few days I was eventually asked by a friend of the family why I was wearing a “neo-Nazi jacket”. I was quite shocked and embarrassed. In the UK in the 1980s, the collarless green MA-1 combat jackets had been associated with skinheads and neo-Nazis, but that was then. Besides, this had a collar, faux flight patches, pocket flaps (instead of zips) and everything, and was quite trendy in London at the time. But not surprisingly, few people in Sinsheim knew or cared about how a tiny subset of Londoners had come to regard the jacket. Of course, it went straight into my suitcase and didn’t see the light of day until I was safely back in Blighty.

If you are unaware of the existence and nature of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) this article “ACTA — A Patriot Act For the Internet” by James Love in the Huffington Post is a good one for getting your spidey sense tingling. Some choice quotes:

“The term “counterfeiting” is designed to demonize the agreement critics as friends of organized crime, much like the name of the Patriot Act seemed better than the “Elimination of Civil Liberties Act.”

…

“[On the subject of ACTA] The entire U.S. tech sector has been publicly silent”

…

“If you are a lowly member of the public, the text is secret. The names of persons who attend the meetings are secret. The titles of the documents are secret. If you represent a big firm or law firm — pretty much any big firm it seems, the U.S. government will show you documents after you sign a non-disclosure agreement - curbing your right to speak out on the contents of the documents you see.”

…

“There is a lot at stake. Civil rights, privacy, rules for injunctions and damages against businesses and individuals, chilling of speech, the first sale doctrine, the global movement of medicines and other commodities, etc, will all be impacted by this ridiculously secret negotiation.”

Source:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/acta—-a-patriot-act-for_b_345000.html

Concerned yet? I thought so. Anyone living within a putative democracy would be.

Given that the article is so short, my quotes almost certainly stretch the (endangered) notion of “fair use” to breaking point. As should be obvious, I am making no attempt to pass off the above as my writing, I run no adverts on this blog and do not gain commercially from it in any way. The quotes above are from an article that is, in effect, a political rallying cry and I reproduce them here in that spirit. The ACTA conspiracy (for that’s what it is) is a cynical betrayal of the culture of democracy, transparency and openness. Please forward links to the Huffington Post article, or any of those listed below, to people that you know.

Other useful articles on ACTA (in no particular order) that have been published in the last few days:

• The Great ACTA Lie Revealed
• More ACTA Details Leak: It’s An Entertainment Industry Wishlist
• Leaked ACTA Internet Provisions: Three Strikes and a Global DMCA
• The ACTA Internet Chapter: Putting the Pieces Together
• ACTA: Choking Digital Economy By Increasing Liability Risks For Intermediaries.
• ACTA’s All-out Assault on the Internet
• WIPO Boss: ACTA Should be Open, Transparent
• Copyright Treaty Is Policy Laundering at Its Finest

As the world and his dog now knows, Tim Berners-Lee has a Twitter account.

The Open Rights Group wiki has a useful guide to writing to your parliamentary representative:

http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Letter_writing

If you were to give people the power to fly helicopters over your home at 04:00 am, to discharge firearms in your direction, to handcuff you, to electrocute you, to arrest and detain you, to “kettle” you, to exceed vehicle speed limits, to wrap duct tape around your wrists and ankles, to walk into your home or business and  ransack it, removing anything they wish, to surveil your data without your consent or knowledge, to take your children away from you should you fall foul of the latest theories regarding parenting, and so on and so forth, then just how trustworthy and accountable would you expect such people to be?

How trustworthy and accountable indeed

A single example less than compelling? Try some of these:

http://delicious.com/rlancefield/police

Twitter is like, totally down.