tata's blog

From: here

Will American society continue to exclude ordinary citizens from important choices about the design and development of new technologies and information systems? Most likely there will continue to be unequal power over decisions about what is built and why, intensive efforts to hem in and control people’s lives in both work and consumerism, and present our future as something nonnegotiable.

Businesses will demonstrate accomplishment in what could and should be choices only to be decided by public investigation and debate - a disguised form of economic plunder. They conceal their strategy by designs that appeal to individual gratification which complicate social issues. Those with the understanding of what is happening must choose to protest or at least inform groups willing to take action on behalf of the community.

From: Publico.es

Rebelion.org is a means of information-their editors prefer to call it "counter" - composed of a dozen volunteers, as can be read on its website, "published the news that are not considered important by traditional media." Today, one of his colleagues had noticed that Wikipedia has blocked access to this newspaper since the free encyclopedia.

One of those responsible for Rebellion, Carlos Martinez, explains: "We reached an email from one of our colleagues is that, while publisher usual articles on Wikipedia. He told us that, after writing a text, when tried to put a link to our site, the program prevented him from saving it. "

The editing system of the free encyclopedia, which allows the provision of Internet, check all pages you want to put a reference to an article and compares them with a blacklist of sites. If you get the list prevents save the article. The cause appears as block reasons is that Rebellion is considered "non-neutral source nor verifiable."

"We are not neutral"

from Dailyradical

Madrid .- The world of piracy is extensive. Especially when the world of computers involved. Within this field that lies beyond the line of legality, but that many dare to exceed, is that of piracy of pay-TV broadcasters. That question must respond Murdoch before a jury this month in California, in a process that, strangely, nothing discussed in the United States.


The case is worthy of a Hollywood movie. Its protagonists include former secret agents, pirate Canadian television, 'hackers' Bulgarians and Germans, emails stolen and the mysterious suicide of a' hacker 'Berlin, who had been both by the Murdoch company shortly before his death, according to the Web describes Wired.

from Dailyradical

In the Information Technology world, the Free Software Foundation is the organization that struggles against the drive to convert knowledge itself into a capitalist commodity known as Intellectual Property. The emergence of Linux, the fastest growing computer operating system (OS), has done much to validate the FSF work. Today, the FSF and the Linux movement have given rise to an increasing number of politically active programmers, including the Progressive Programmers League, based in the United States.

How It All Began...

Computer programmer Richard M. Stallman left MIT and launched the GNU Project in 1984. His goal was to develop a complete UNIX style operating system free of the restrictions associated with commercial software. UNIX is the industrial strength operating system (OS) that dominates servers on the Internet and in the corporate sector.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a non-profit charity that distributes the GNU Project’s software and accepts donations to keep the Project alive, was founded in 1985.

Phone and cable company lobbyists are attacking Internet freedom again in
Washington. But people from every corner of the country are rising up to stop
them.
The FCC recently launched an official inquiry into Net Neutrality. They're
already hearing plenty from AT&T, Verizon and Comcast -- who want to be the
gatekeepers deciding what you can do online. Now they need to hear from you.

The FCC needs to hear your story about why an open Internet is important to your
life, work and family -- and to our democracy.

http://www.savetheinternet.com/yourstory

Busy day for binaryfreedom activism. From eleven am in the morning, to five pm in the afternoon binaryfreedom enjoyed a day of activism at the Wake up the Earth festival in Jamaica plain/Boston. As our opening act Christian Fernandez wore the computer puppet hat and danced. With his breaking moves and "I want to be free" shouts many people approach to our booth asking about freesoftware. As the day went by the puppet head passed from Angela to Dan Jared' head.

We the activists of BinaryFreedom created a coalition to link all of our issues relating to computing freedom at here.
Please Digg this story

Why Virginia Tech shootings happened

April 18, 2007--Yet another rampage has occurred at a school, this time leaving 33 people dead at Virginia Tech—the worst such incident ever at a U.S. college campus.

The news media seem stunned and surprised, yet their coverage sounds so similar to the stories about Columbine eight years ago. They dwell on the personality of the young man the police say did the shooting, before killing himself. They talk about him being a “loner,” depressed, perhaps angry at women.

Clearing up anti-GPL3 FUD

There's been a lot of talk about GPL version 3: whether it goes too far to be acceptable to business, whether the Linux kernel developers will ever switch to it, whether our community will fork or undergo unrest over it. Much of that talk is based on a poor understanding of the GPL3 terms, and with release of the new license imminent, it's time to clear that up.

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FSF aims for partnership with hardware manufacturers

Boston, MA—March 1, 2007—The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today released a paper entitled, “The road to hardware free from restrictions”, detailing ways major hardware manufacturers with power in the market can work with the free software community to establish a “mutually beneficial relationship.”

The freedoms built in to the net are under attack like never before, argues regular columnist Bill Thompson.
The launch of Windows Vista last week was accompanied by widespread criticism from advocates of open systems, open networks and the free flow of information.
Particular attention was lavished on the digital rights management (DRM) features of the new operating system, the tools that determine whether you can play or copy video or audio on your computer.
Vista's DRM even aroused the wrath of the Green Party, which condemned it for requiring "more expensive and energy-hungry hardware".

Dear Friends—

This is an invitation to help start a movement--to take one spring day and use it to reshape the future. Those of us who know that climate change is the greatest threat civilization now faces have science on our side; we have economists and policy specialists, courageous mayors and governors, engineers with cool new technology.

But we don't have a movement—the largest rally yet held in the U.S. about global warming drew a thousand people. If we're going to make the kind of change we need in the short time left us, we need something that looks like the civil rights movement, and we need it now. Changing light bulbs just isn't enough.