WikiLeaks may be under attack.

You were generous enough to write to us, but we have not had the labor resources to respond.

Your support is important to us. Please read all of this email to understand what is going on. We apologize for not getting back to you before. It is not through any lack of interest on our part, but an enforced lack of resources.

One of our alleged sources, a young US intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, has been detained and shipped to a US military prison in Kuwait, where he is being held without trail. Mr. Manning is alleged to have acted according to his conscious and leaked to us the Collateral Murder video and the video of a massacre that took place in Afghanistan last year at Garani.

The Garani massacre, which we are still working on, killed over 100 people, mostly children.

Mr. Manning allegedly also sent us 260,000 classified US Department cables, reporting on the actions of US Embassy’s engaging in abusive actions all over the world. We have denied the allegation, but the US government is acting as if the allegation is true and we do have a lot of other material that exposes human rights abuses by the United States government.

Mr. Manning was allegedly exposed after talking to an unrelated “journalist” who then worked with the US government to detain him.

Some background on the Manning case:

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/06/11/transcript-daniel-ellsberg-says-he-fears-us-might-assasinate-wikileaks-founder/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-chat/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/state-department-anxious
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2010/06/143011.htm

[ note that there are some questions about the Wired reportage, see: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/13/video-wikileaks-foun.html#comment-809677 ]

WikiLeaks a small organization going through enormous growth and operating in an adverserial, high-security environment which can make communication time consuming and the acquisition of new staff and volunteers, also difficult since they require high levels of trust.

To try and deal with our growth and the current difficult situation, we want to get you to work together with our other supporters to set up a “Friends of WikiLeaks” group in your area. We have multiple supporters in most countries and would like to see them be a strong and independent force.

Please write to friends@sunshinepress.org if you are interested in helping with Friends of WikiLeaks in your area. You will receive further instructions.

We also have significant unexpected legal costs (for example flying a legal team to Kuwait, video production. Collateral Murder production costs were $50,000 all up).

Any financial contributions will be of IMMEDIATE assistance.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Special:Support

Please donate and tell the world that you have done so. Encourage all your friends to follow the example you set, after all, courage is contagious.

Julian Assange
Editor in Chief
WIKILEAKS

Downloadverbod. Filteren. Afknijpen. Three strikes out. Bewaarplicht. ACTA. Het vrije internet wordt van vele kanten bedreigd. In het Europees Parlement strijden Piraten en Groenen samen voor de rechten van internetgebruikers. Europa heeft een handvest van digitale burgerrechten nodig, vinden zij. Wat moet er in zo’n Internet Bill of Rights komen te staan? Daarover gaan Europarlementariër Christian Engström (Zweedse Piratenpartij), GroenLinks-Tweede Kamerlid Mariko Peters en GroenLinks-Europarlementariër Judith Sargentini in debat met experts (o.a. Bits of Freedom en Vrijschrift) en met de zaal.Maandagavond 22 februari 19.30 tot 21.30u. De voertaal is Engels. Pakhuis de Zwijger, Piet Heinkade, Amsterdam.
Gratis aanmelden [http://groenlinks.nl/piratendebat].

Met deze prijzen worden elk jaar personen, bedrijven, overheden en voorstellen te kijk gezet die de afgelopen jaren bij uitstek controle op burgers en inbreuken op privacy hebben bevorderd. Er was ook goed nieuws: Sophie in ‘t Veld (Europarlementariër D66) won de Winston Award, een positieve aanmoedigingsprijs.

Minister Ter Horst wint de prijs in de categorie Personen, vanwege haar gevaarlijke gebrek aan nuance in het privacydebat. Mede door haar
toedoen stevent Nederland in sneltreinvaart af op een controlemaatschappij, waar veiligheid altijd boven persoonlijke vrijheid gaat. De nieuwe vingerafdrukdatabank die Nederland aanlegt wint de prijs in de categorie Overheid, vanwege het risico op identiteitsfraude en omdat een hack van de database potentieel desastreuze gevolgen heeft.

Bovendien gaat de Nederlandse overheid hiermee veel verder dan de ons omringende landen. T-Mobile en Vodafone winnen de prijs in de categorie Bedrijven, omdat ze willens en wetens en in strijd met de wet maandenlang de volledige inhoud van smsjes hebben doorgesluisd naar opsporingsdiensten. Het voorstel van de politie om mobiele naaktscanners in openbare ruimtes in te zetten, wint de prijs in de categorie Voorstellen. De jury is van mening dat ‘function creep’ nog nooit zo snel plaatsgevonden: van een middel om terroristen te vangen, naar een middel dat in alledaags politiewerk kan worden ingezet.
De publieksprijs gaat dit jaar met een nipte overwinning naar de vingerafdrukdatabank, met Ter Horst als een goede runner-up. De Winston, een positieve privacyprijs, is uitgereikt aan Europarlementariër Sophie in ‘t Veld (D66).

Honderden geïnteresseerden waren aanwezig op het Awardsgala, waar ook hoogleraar Vincent Icke, slachtoffer van identiteitsfraude Renate Tromp en security expert Jeroen van Beek spraken. De winnaars zijn door een deskundige jury geselecteerd uit een recordaantal inzendingen van het Nederlandse publiek. De jury bestaat uit de publiciste Karin Spaink, Prof. dr. Bart Jacobs, Prof. dr. Nico van Eijk, Dr. Bart Schermer, Prof. dr. Valerie Frissen en journalist Bart de Koning. De jury heeft haar keuze volledig onafhankelijk gemaakt. De publieksprijs is uitgereikt aan de kandidaat die het meeste stemmen via de website www.bigbrotherawards.nl heeft gekregen.

De Nederlandse editie van de Big Brother Awards wordt georganiseerd door Bits of Freedom. De Big Brother Awards wordt mede mogelijk gemaakt door
De Balie, Brinkhof, Stichting NLnet en SURFnet.

Juryrapport nominaties:

http://www.bigbrotherawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Juryrapport-Genomineerden-Big-Brother-Awards-2009-28-01-10.pdf

Privacywaakhond Bits of Freedom heeft Minister Hirsch Ballin van Justitie gevraagd om de bodyscan niet in te voeren. De bewindvoerder liet na overleg met de Amerikaanse minister van Binnenlandse Veiligheid weten dat hij de naaktscanners voor alle vluchten naar de Verenigde Staten wil verplichten, om dit later voor alle vluchten van en naar Nederland in te voeren. Volgens de digitale burgerrechtenbeweging laat een “rationele kosten-batenanalyse” zien dat de invoering van naaktscanners niet wenselijk is. Het veiligheidsbeleid zou niet op angst, maar op rationele analyses gebaseerd moeten zijn.

“Het verlies van privacy en individuele vrijheid speelt daarbij een belangrijke rol”, aldus Ot van Dalen, directeur van Bits of Freedom. De organisatie stelt dat de inzet van naaktscanners het risico van aanslagen tegen vliegtuigen in de lucht slechts deels kan beperken. Tegelijkertijd maken de apparaten een stevige inbreuk op de privacy en de lichamelijke integriteit, brengen hoge kosten met zich mee en de gezondheidseffecten staan niet vast. “In plaats daarvan moet het kabinet onderzoeken waarom bestaande maatregelen hebben gefaald.”

Privacy versus veiligheid
De Vereniging van Nederlandse Verkeersvliegers en de Vakbond van Nederlands Cabinepersoneel lieten eerder weten dat “de balans tussen veiligheid en privacy in principe altijd in het voordeel van de veiligheid dient uit te slaan”. Die opvatting noemt Bits of Freedom kort door de bocht. “Iedere beveiligingsmaatregel moet worden onderworpen aan een evaluatie van de voor- en nadelen, waarbij ook het verlies van privacy en dus van individuele vrijheid moet worden meegewogen.”

Als advies verwijst de privacywaakhond naar het stappenschema dat beveiligingsexpert Bruce Schneier in zijn boek ‘Beyond Fear’ beschrijft. Allereerst moet worden vastgesteld wat men probeert te beschermen. Vervolgens moet worden beoordeeld wat de risico’s zijn. Daarna moet worden onderzocht in hoeverre de maatregelen deze risico’s kunnen beperken en welke nieuwe risico’s ontstaan door de maatregelen. Tot slot moet worden onderzocht welke kosten of andere nadelen de maatregelen met zich brengen. Aan de hand van deze analyse blijkt volgens Bits of Freedom dat de introductie van naaktscanners onwenselijk is.

MEER:
Bits of Freedom
hele artikel

Quotes From the article:
Post-Mortem Conference Mashup: The Internet as Playground and Factory 
by Trebor Scholz scholzt@newschool.edu

…
Frequent reference points in the animated conversations included practices like gold farming, game modding, blogging, “turking” on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk, gaming in World of Warcraft, outsourcing through LiveOps.com, collaborating on Wikipedia articles, reputation scamming through SubvertandProfit.com and sweating in “captcha sweatshops.” Theoretical cues were repeatedly given to Paolo Virno, Harry Braverman, Hannah Arendt, Dallas Smythe, Jean Baudrillard, Bernhard Stiegler, Maurizio Lazzarato, Johan Huizinga, and Tiziana Terranova.

…
Shifts in labor markets have drawn attention to places where labor does not look like labor at all. The Internet has created new markets that can be accessed from anywhere with a net connection. While managerial royalty like Don Tapscott celebrated the business potential of “crowdsourcing” in books like “Wikinomics,” scholars such as Andrew Ross see digital labor as a non-surprising continuation of exploitative capitalist modes of operation. At the prelude to the conference Ross stated that “those who see the digital realm as a technology of de-skilling, outsourcing and work degradation are far outnumbered by those who see it as a medium of reskilling, innovation, and common value creation.” Interactive input is just another transfer of work from more regulated kinds of labor markets, Ross stated. There is a great deal of overlap between intensified forms of expropriation of digital labor and traditional economies of unpaid work, especially in the home.      
Several speakers claimed that we are all falling victim to a technocratic fetishization of the Internet that takes away from a full acknowledgment of the “real” places of exploitation: the heavily populated slums in what some participants called the “global south.” Are the discussed processes of monetization and coercion of “free” relations of exchange on the Social Web, as discussed at the conference, in fact a luxury problem in the overdeveloped world alone? The fact that cell phones are now widely used all throughout economical developing countries like Brazil, Russia, India, and China should lead to a re-evaluation of the worldwide participation gap.

…
In the session “Ideology and the Erotics of Playbor,” Jonathan Beller correctly stated that the word “digital” does not sum up our entire condition. At the same time, however, the questions created by new expressions of labor markets in the financial-crisis world are increasingly urgent. There is a participatory turn in online sociality; the scale of participation is unprecedented. It is true that it is only a small segment of people with Internet access contributes material to the Web but this “small segment” of you-sers posted more than 150,000 videos a day to YouTube in 2008. Questions of expropriation of net users have a great deal of urgency given that the data of 350 million people are locked up under the rule of a single private entity like Facebook. 
Sisyphus might have ultimately been convinced to pay a monthly fee for the pleasure of pushing that rock up the hill.
- Scott Rettberg on iDC, http://is.gd/39X7S

We decide with one click what’s “hot” and what is not, we “follow,” or like, we save, refer, and bookmark. Why do we upload our boredom or perform our addictions online?  I quoted Tim O’Reilly who stated that “…they are participating without thinking that they participate. That’s where the power comes.” (Scholz, http://is.gd/5jQm2) There are manifold reasons for social participation online but fun is one of them.
…
It’s fun, right?

Chris Kelty continued Martin Robert’s line of inquiry. Kelty started by outlining how crucial fun is to get people involved in working with computers and software. There is an endless stream of books with fun in the title. “Programming is fun.” “Computer literacy is fun.” The argument of many of these books is that your new paid job with computers is more fun than your old job delivering pizza, for example. Few books would be called “The serious labor of software programming.” Fun has often dominated the discussion about how to activate people and much research funding has been funneled into social psychology research for that reason. Some of this mentality is a hold-over from William Whyte’s “Organization Man” (1956) and Ted Nelson’s “Computer Lib” (1974). Fun is also used as category to explain why people contribute to free software. Linus Torvald’s autobiography is titled “Just for Fun.” It’s fun to stay up all night and see if you can get Linux to run on your machine. People seem to like fun better than not-fun. Even if they have to work to have fun, they’ll do it to avoid not-fun work or no work at all,” Kelty said. With regard to free software, it is especially important to understand why people are working without having been paid to do so. Why do hacker-types produce high quality software and then give it away for free? That still surprises some skeptics. Why do people work? Individuals do Free Software work for a plurality of reasons. Kelty emphasized that some of them do it for “Free Software reasons”: creating something for the public, making something freely available. Others want to “stick it to the man,” so to speak. Yet others do it for the fun, the joy, the pleasure, the fame, or the Boy Scout badge, or they are learning new skills and meet new people. With Free Software, people do not just argue about the way the world should be, they provide a proof of concept. Kelty introduced Hannah Arendt to think about the various ways in which we are dividing up the problem of labor, and that at least some at the conference seemed to think that Marx might be getting in the way of conceptual progress with this topic.

read more on http://www.collectivate.net

A idéia é de que cada um de nós façamos a promoção dessa carta e a coloquemos em prática.

A Cultura Livre amplia drasticamente os espaços de participação cívica, expandindo o leque de indivíduos e grupos capazes de contribuir para os debates públicos. Trata-se, portanto, do fortalecimento da democracia em um momento de crise, justamente quando o exercício em modelos mais consistentes de democracia são urgentemente necessários. A Cultura Livre é uma condição para a liberdade de expressão, e por si só um pré-requisito essencial da democracia. Ela ajuda a reduzir a exclusão digital, permitindo assim a realização do potencial democrático das novas tecnologias.

A Cultura Livre abre espaço para novos modelos de envolvimento dos cidadãos no fornecimento de bens e serviços públicos. Estes são baseados na perspectiva dos ‘bens comuns’ — o ‘commons’. A ‘governança dos bens comuns’ se refere a regras negociadas e limites para a gestão da produção coletiva e gestão do acesso a recursos compartilhados. A governança do dos bens comuns honra a participação, a inclusão, a transparência, a igualdade de acesso, e a sustentabilidade a longo prazo. Reconhecemos o espaço comum como uma forma distinta e desejável de governar. Ele não está necessariamente ligado ao Estado ou outras instituições políticas convencionais e demonstra que a sociedade civil é hoje uma força potente.

Reconhecemos que essa nova economia social, para além do mercado privado, é uma importante fonte de valor. A nova reflexão sobre os ‘bens comuns’ (’Commons’), revitalizada pela tecnologia digital (entre outros fatores), alarga o espaço que constitui ‘a economia’. Neste momento da história, governos dão apoio considerável à economia de mercado privado; é urgente que seja dado à economia dos bens comuns o mesmo apoio extensivo que é oferecido ao mercado privado. Tudo o que esta nova perspectiva precisa para prosperar é uma economia com regras equilibradas para todos os modelos.
A atual crise financeira demonstrou os limites estritos do fundamentalismo de mercado. As consequências sociais e econômicas devastadoras do colapso financeiro também demonstram que os mercados descontrolados, guiados apenas pela competição e pelo interesse individual, representam uma ameaça à civilização. A filosofia da Cultura Livre, uma herança dos movimentos pela livre circulação originados no software livre e aberto, é a prova empírica de que um novo tipo de ética e uma nova maneira de fazer negócios são possíveis. Este movimentos criaram uma nova e viável forma de produção, com base em ofícios ou profissões, onde o autor-produtor não perde o controle do processo produtivo e não necessita da mediação dos grandes monopólios. Esta forma de produção se baseia na iniciativa autônoma em solidariedade com outros, em trocas configuradas de acordo com as habilidades e oportunidades de cada pessoa, na democratização do conhecimento, da educação e dos meios de produção, e em uma distribuição justa dos ganhos de acordo com o trabalho realizado.

Declaramos nossa preocupação com o bem-estar dos artistas, pesquisadores, autores e produtores criativos. Nesta Carta, propomos uma série de possibilidades para a remuneração coletiva da criação e da inovação. O software livre e aberto, a Wikipedia, e muitos outros exemplos mostram que o modelo de cultura livre pode sustentar a inovação, e que os monopólios não são necessários para a produção do bens culturais e de conhecimento. Na produção cultural, o que é sustentável depende, em grande medida, do tipo de “produto” (os custos de um filme, por exemplo, são diferentes daqueles de uma enciclopédia colaborativa on-line). Projetos e iniciativas com base nos princípios da cultura livre utilizam uma variedade de maneiras de alcançar a sustentabilidade para além da economia voluntária. Algumas destas formas são consolidadas. Algumas estão ainda em fase experimental. A princípio generalizado é o de combinar várias fontes de financiamento. Este abordagem tem a vantagem de garantir a independência.

Modelos de economia social comunitários já estão oferecendo um número de opções cada vez mais viável para manter a produção cultural. Estes incluem:

• doações não-monetárias e escambo (ex.: gift-economy, permutas);
• financiamento direto (ex: subscrições e doações);
• capital compartilhado (ex: fundos de contrapartida, cooperativas de produtores, interfinanciamento / economia social, Banco P2P, moeda virtual, crowd financing, capital aberto, cooperativas de investimento de base comunitária, e cooperativas de consumidores);
• fundações garantindo infra-estrutura para os projetos;
• financiamento público (ex: renda básica, bolsas, prémios, subsídios, contratos públicos e comissões);
• financiamento privado (ex: investimento de risco, ações, patrocínio privado, associações empresariais de infra-estrutura e investimento);
• atividades comerciais (incluindo bens e serviços) e combinações entre distribuição P2P e transmissão (streaming) de baixo custo.

A combinação dessas opções é cada vez mais viável, tanto para os criadores independentes como para a indústria. Não apoiamos a maneira como as empresas comerciais têm explorado o trabalho voluntário como estratégia para obter lucros a partir do valor gerado coletiva e voluntariamente. Acreditamos também que não deveria ser permitido que conglomerados tenham oportunidade de dominar parte substancial de qualquer setor do mercado.

A era digital traz a promessa histórica de uma ampliação da justiça, e de promover um ambiente econômico gratificante para todos.

Veja também: http://culturadigital.br

WEB 2.0 Suicide Machine Promotion from moddr_ on Vimeo.

from their website:

What shall I do after I’ve killed myself with the web2.0 suicide machine?
Try calling some friends, talk a walk in a park or buy a bottle of wine and start enjoying your real life again. Some Social Suiciders reported that their life has improved by an approximate average of 25%. Don’t worry, if you feel empty right after you committed suicide. This is a normal reaction which will slowly fade away within the first 24-72 hours.

Published in the NYT on November 13, 2009
When, in late September, rumors surfaced that Comcast was trying to buy NBC Universal from General Electric, Wall Street reacted with dismay. Grandiose attempts to combine media production and distribution — programming and plumbing — are nothing new in the entertainment business, but they almost always end in disappointment. Witness AOLTime Warner. So what in the world could be prompting the Comcast chief executive, Brian Roberts, to start down this accursed path?

I fear that I’m to blame.

A few months ago, while stalking the aisles of my local Best Buy, I gave in to techno-temptation. I bought a Blu-ray player. What I didn’t realize until I unpacked the gadget was that it does a lot more than just spin high-definition discs. It is, as they say, Web-enabled. As soon as I plugged it into an outlet in my living room, its built-in WiFi antenna sniffed out my home network and logged on. The Blu-ray player became a gateway between the Internet and my television set.

Ever since, and much to my surprise, I’ve been using the device more to transmit Internet content than to play discs. I stream TV shows and movies fromNetflix, music from Pandora and videos from YouTube. Beyond my existing $11-a-month Netflix subscription, I haven’t forked out a penny for any of this programming. It comes flowing out of the Web, whenever I summon it, free.

My new viewing habits must make Brian Roberts very nervous. The more I play movies and TV shows from the Web, the less I use my cable TV service. I almost never order pay-per-view movies anymore. And I recently canceled my premium Showtime subscription. Most of Showtime’s best programs, including “The Tudors,” “Weeds” and “Dexter,” are available to stream through Netflix, as are a lot of the movies currently playing on the network. Why pay $23 a month when I can get the stuff for almost nothing?

I have a feeling that it won’t be long before I and a whole lot of other people start asking similar questions about pay-TV subscriptions in general.

Until recently, the TV business was shielded from the turmoil that the Internet has visited upon other media industries, like music and publishing. The reason was largely a matter of network capacity. Sending high-quality video through the Web requires a lot more bandwidth than sending text or music, and until 2007 most Americans lacked high-speed Internet connections at home, according to the Pew Research Center. The Net simply wasn’t a viable alternative for distributing the signals traditionally sent over cables or beamed down from satellites.

That’s changing, and fast. With broadband becoming the norm and connection speeds continuing to quicken, what has happened to music companies and newspapers is beginning to happen to broadcast networks and cable companies. People like me are using the Net to bypass the customary providers of television programming, along with the ads they show and the fees they collect.

My Blu-ray player is just the tip of the iceberg that the TV business is about to hit. Today you can watch snippets of shows on YouTube or entire episodes on sites like Hulu or Yahoo TV. You can view news reports at CNN.com, sports events at ESPN360.com and documentaries at PBS.org. You can download shows, sometimes without charge, from Apple’s iTunes store and watch them on your iPod, iPhone or PC. Or you can stream them through your Xbox or Wii.

Television is escaping the TV set and the cable box. We no longer watch the tube. We watch, to borrow ex-Senator Ted Stevens’s memorable conceit, a series of tubes.

As the technology of television changes, so, too, does the experience of watching it. In the past, TVs often served as the focal points of communal gatherings. Families or groups of friends would collect around the set to watch the prime-time shows or the weekend games. They would laugh at the sitcom slapstick, cheer for their local teams, chat through commercials and, during the duller stretches, keep one another from nodding off. TV may have been a vast wasteland, as Newton Minow, the F.C.C. chairman in the Kennedy administration, said in a speech in 1961, but at least it was a wasteland we shared.

The communal mode of TV viewing isn’t gone, but it’s becoming less common. As screens proliferate and shrink, and as the Web allows us to view whatever we want whenever we want, we spend more time watching video alone. That’s one funny thing about the Internet: it’s an extraordinarily rich communications system, but as an information and entertainment medium, it encourages private consumption. The pictures and sounds served up through our PCs, iPods and smart phones absorb us deeply but in isolation. Even when we’re together today, we’re often apart, peering into our own screens.

Television companies, desperate to protect their sources of revenue, are trying to figure out ways to control or at least influence the shifts in our viewing practices. If a transmission company like Comcast — although it owns a few cable stations, Comcast’s main business is providing cable TV, Internet and telephone service — were to own more of the programs it distributes, it could, at least theoretically, wield more power over how that content reaches viewers. In buying NBC Universal, for instance, Comcast would gain a stake in Hulu, whichNBC owns with ABC and Fox. It could impose limits or even fees on the shows streamed through that popular Web site.

Such opportunities reveal the conflict of interest that’s built into the TV business. The companies that supply us with pay-TV subscriptions — not just cable operators like Comcast but telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon— also tend to be the ones that provide us with Internet service. By blocking or slowing certain Net transmissions, they could shunt us toward their own programming and prevent us from viewing alternatives, particularly free ones. If my Internet provider degraded my Netflix signal, I would almost certainly go back to watching more cable programs.

That scenario is not as far-fetched as it may sound. In 2007, Comcast was caught throttling back its customers’ links to BitTorrent, a file-sharing network often used to trade bootleg copies of TV shows and movies. Comcast argues that heavy BitTorrent users were taking up too much bandwidth, to the detriment of other services. Looked at another way, Comcast was using its Web-access franchise to protect its pay-TV franchise.

But, as the company soon found out, impinging on “net neutrality” — the principle that Internet providers should treat all data the same — is a good way to make enemies. Internet purists went ballistic. Consumer advocates denounced the move. The government began an investigation. In 2008, the F.C.C. decided that Comcast had broken its rules, and it ordered the company not to impede access to BitTorrent and other such services. Comcast is appealing the ruling.

Under its new chairman, the Obama-appointee Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. is becoming even more aggressive in defending the openness of the Internet. Last month, it voted to begin preparing regulations aimed at giving net neutrality the force of law. Though controversial, the commission’s move will be welcomed by most Web users. I know that I don’t want my Internet provider to control the sites I visit or services I can use when I’m online. Unimpeded access to the Net has come to feel like a right.

In the end, and whether they gobble up content producers or not, network operators like Comcast may be fated to be in the plumbing business. They’ll turn tidy profits by maintaining the pipes through which we get Internet service, even if we use those pipes to bypass their pay-TV offerings. We’ll go on gorging ourselves on free Internet video. We, the viewers, will be the winners.

Or will we?

The smartest, most creative TV shows, from “Deadwood” to “Mad Men” to NBC’s own “30 Rock,” tend to be the most expensive to produce. They have large, talented casts, top-notch writers and directors, elaborate sets and generally high production values. If the changes in our viewing habits stanch the flow of money back to studios, producing those kinds of programs may no longer be possible. In their place, we’ll get more junk: dopey reality shows, cookie-cutter police dramas, inane gab fests. The vast wasteland will become even vaster.

Even “free” has a price.

Nicholas Carr’s new book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” will be published next spring.

Trecho inicial do longo artigo no iG Tecnologia:
O SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center), uma organização sem fins lucrativos fundada em 2005 com o objetivo de fornecer apoio legal a desenvolvedores de software livre e open source, está movendo um processo contra 14 grandes fabricantes de eletrônicos por violação da licença GPL. Mais especificamente, por se utilizar de código GPL no “firmware” de seus aparelhos sem redistribuir o código-fonte e modificações associadas, conforme exige a licença.

O software em questão é o BusyBox (www.busybox.net), um utilitário muito usado em distribuições Linux para sistemas embarcados, que de uma vez só substitui inúmeros comandos que o usuário espera encontrar em modo texto, consumindo menos espaço em disco e memória RAM. Originalmente escrito por Bruce Perens, o software atualmente é mantido por Denys Vlasenko, Erik Andersen e Rob Landley, todos conhecidos ativistas na comunidade de desenvolvedores de software livre.

O SFLC alega que o Busybox é utilizado no firmware de produtos que vão de players de Blu-Ray e TVs de alta-definição a câmeras de segurança conectadas à internet, produzidos por empresas como a Samsung, Best Buy, Westinghouse e muitas outras. Como o BusyBox é software livre, não haveria dinheiro envolvido: a única contrapartida que se espera das empresas acusadas, antes que se apele para a via judicial, é divulgar o código-fonte de seu firmware.

Segundo a organização, o processo (em nome de Erik Andersen, um dos desenvolvedores do BusyBox, e da Software Freedom Conservacy, que hospeda o projeto) só foi movido depois que as empresas ignoraram ofertas para uma solução amigável do problema. (via tecnologia.ig.com.br)

Hoje soube que o Estadão foi censurado porque apresentava uma gravação mostrando o ex presidente Sarney dando emprego a um familiar. Censura no Estadão? Antigamente, ninguém ia saber o que deveria estar no jornal que deu lugar a paginas brancas ou receitas de comida. Hoje estou feliz em ver que a censura do Estadão e que a notícia que foi censurada está lá para todo o mundo ver, sem censura e pode ser vista por até mais pessoas do que seria caso se a notícia não tivesse sido censurada no jornal:
O youtube está populado com as gravações do ex presidente Sarney dando emprego para o namorado da neta, o que foi censurado no Jornal Estado de São Paulo. O mais gostoso em ver essas gravações no youtube é que saber que a censura brasileira não vai conseguir coagir a Google, o Youtube a tirar as gravações de lá. Fora que além do Youtube tem o Twitter, o Facebook, e mais os futuros web2.0 e adiante.

Me dá também um grande alívio em pensar que não dependemos mais dos grande jornais, da imprensa e midia ‘ main stream. Nós, usuários da internet temos os usuários do youtube, os blogueiros, ou twitteiros, os facebooks, os orkutes, e assim vai para nos informar quando as empresas de mídia, grandes e compromissadas nos falham.

Por essa razão é de extrema importância que todos os povos cuidem da internet, que não deixem cartéis, governos, estrangular ela. A internet é de todos nós e a nossa garantia de cidadania decente.

Aqui um video da gravação mostrando empregismo da parte do ex-presidente Sarney que foi visto até esse momento, visto 12.622 vezes:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Sarney+grava%C3%A7%C3%A3o&search_type=&aq=f

Existem mais videos contendo essa gravação no youtube. 58 videos retornam com Sarney+gravação, com titulos como ‘ Gravação Compromete José Sarney’, Neta de Sarney pede emprego para namorado no Senado, Neto de Sarney zombava com benesses, revela gravação, Ouça os diálogos que ligam a família SARNEY a favores de AGACIEL MAIA e etc.

Mesmo assim, esse ‘post’, não é sobre o Sarney, não é sobre a censura do jornal ‘ o Estado de São Paulo’. Esse ‘post’ é sobre a necessidade de que todos, todos os indivíduos do planeta protejam, guardem e defendam isso que é a internet.

Tando nos Estados Unidos como na Europa existem tentativas sérias em ameaçar a independencia e a abertura da internet, com desculpas como filtrar pornografia e defender os direitos autorais. Odeio os pedófilos e quero proteger todas as crianças, mas censurando a internet não só não ajuda as crianças como faz de todos nós criminosos. Voce não protestaria caso os Correios abrissem e lessem todas as cartas para pegar ‘aquela’ que é contra lei?