When we have the right to free speech, communities will self-organize to fact check the government thus creating the most important balance in the system.
Looking for older articles? See the old website.
Live news - times in EST:
News for the day:
2012 is here and it is costomary to set goals for the new year. Here are my goals.
Free speech and privacy are being increasingly diminished and it will soon have a negative effect on the functioning of our democracy. Although I have previously written about the seemingly dormant nature of people in todays politics, I believe that it is critical to maintain the proper infrastructure for a true democracy - this includes promoting free and anonymous speech rights.
I have taken on a few projects in order to help achieve these goals. One of these projects is an overlay network which seeks to eventually transform into a viable mesh network platform. This project will integrate with the Tor project and hopefully be able to create increased accessibility to the Tor bridges which are being blocked by the Chinese government.
Another project which will enhance communications security and privacy is CryoJS. CryoJS escalates the internet communications and surveillance arms race to the level of actively intercepting traffic rather than passive sniffing and monitoring. This project can make it possible for websites to enhance the security of the login pages on their websites to more acceptable levels rather than sending the passwords in plain text.
The Occupy Movement has done much to create increased interest in democracy but there is much which has yet to be accomplished. Corporate greed and media bias have been exposed but now the question is, what do we do with it?
I have previously advocated crowd sourced media and it would be hypocritical of me not to help supply it. The truth is, I have not been doing my part in this area and it is time for me to finally do it.
Some of this can be accomplished through the creation of the overlay network which I mentioned as part of my plan to promote free speech. This has the potential to be a huge enabler of crowd sourced media in countries where revolutions are currently in progress or where internet access is censored.
In my unending pursuit to better my writing skills, I set out to accomplish something which will probably challenge me in many ways - I am co-authoring a book. I expect that this book will become a collection of stories with themes similar to those found in the works of many great authors including George Orwell and Cory Doctorow.
Cory Doctorow is my favorite author. Following in his footsteps, I have decided to release my book for free under a Creative Commons license.
Ah, the simple merriment brought about by the holiday season. Nothing compares to watching the facial expressions of someone who is deeply satisfied with a gift they have received. But to those with skills with computers, the holidays are a source of work. I was tasked with the installation of Ubuntu on an HP Pavilion g6 laptop - oh what fun it is to reformat an entire hard drive, modify grub configs, install wifi drivers, all from the comfort of an office chair. (I intended that to me a musical parody but it seems today is not the day for that)
nomodeset to boot options by pressing F6 after selecting your language.After you restart, you should have a working installation and working wifi. You may also want to install the proper ATI graphics driver.
CNET has recently been blasted by the developer of the Nmap software, Fyodor for including malware with the Nmap software download on their website. This issue which was reported to Fyodor by the Wireshark developer, Gerald Combs, has infected numerous computers with malware. CNET has placed malware in many of the downloads available on their website, download.com.
It seems that nobody is safe from this attack, even the Kea Coloring Book software is infected with malware. Microsoft even pulled its support from CNET when it discovered that CNET was bundling Microsoft software with their downloads in order to convert the downloads into cash.
The worst part is, they have not changed the message on their website where they promise that al the software is malware free. Will they change their ways? Probably not, at least not until there is a noticable decrease in traffic to their website.
The following post was a comment made in reply to a post on The Free Network Foundation blog. To summarize the post, a member of the FNF was assulted by masked men (police) in a park. Everything of value to him was stolen by these theives. He was arrested and released to find that his stolen property would never be returned.
Thank you for an excellent post. I sit here from the comfort of my home watching the numbers flicker across my dual-monitor setup. It shows the various data I scrape from the automated unit tests of some censorship evasive projects I am working on to the posts of those brave people who are out occupying.
This post struck very deeply within me. Material objects do not define us or who we are; if they do, the very corporations we battle against win. We are not fighting over our possessions, they are fighting us to keep their possessions and their lives of luxury. They make enemies every time they do this. They take away everything which has any value from you but that which is left is the only thing they can not stand against. That which is left will never come to value the material again and it will oppose oppression with a newly found vigor.
Their attacks may have weakened us temporarily, but we always prevail. But at the same time, I would like to propose something to the movement. What good is a park, a street, or a bridge to us? They are naught but material constructs which were erected by our government. This movement is not about taking back the parks. This movement is about fixing the corrupt system which regulates speech within these parks. The park itself means nothing. If the police ask you to leave, I would suggest that you leave. When you can come back, return if you so wish. The police have to operate within certain confines and if they ask you to get out of the park and you do, it would be unreasonable for them to attack you. In other words, you flow through the police almost as if they are not there. They can not attack you and the movement lives on – elsewhere, everywhere, inside everyone.
I understand that a certain amount of dedication is owed to your friends, family, and this place which has come to be known as your home. Your family and your friends will live on and your home will become mobile. The movement will no longer be tied to the physical space but only to the very people which support it and it is in this state that it will never die.
But then again, I was not there - I did not experience what you did. Take my advice for what it is worth to you. We are the 99%, our time is now.
In a brutal display of police violence, the students at UC Davis were pepper-sprayed by police because they were protesting. This would not last much longer, however, as the crowd forced the police slowly out of the park after this attack. This is a true display of what a police state looks like as well as a demonstration of what can be achieved through sheer people power.
The following content is a post made up of live content, news, and events from the Occupy Movement. Times are given in UTC-5.