"The End of Oil"

George Monbiot, London Guardian, Tuesday December 2, 2003

The oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the government approved the
development of the biggest deposit discovered in British territory for at
least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is a "huge" find, which
dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in terminal decline. You begin to
recognise how serious the human predicament has become when you discover
that this "huge" new field will supply the world with oil for five and a
quarter days.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Nigerian Email Con-men Fall into Their Targets' Net"
Tony Thompson, crime correspondent
Sunday November 16, 2003, The Observer


  It has been described as the internet's first blood sport and is fast becoming one of the web's favourite pastimes. Fed up with having their inboxes clogged with emails from Nigerian fraudsters promising untold riches, the victims are finally hitting back.

Scam-baiting -- replying to the emails and stringing the con artists along with a view to humiliating them as much as possible -- is becoming increasingly popular with more than 150 websites chronicling the often hilarious results.

hydrarchist writes:

Is Capital taking over Linux?

byChris Croome

The latest version of Red Hat Linux will be out this week and it will be called Fedora 1 not Red Hat 10, also SuSE Linux has just been bought by Novell and this has been bankrolled by IBM. What is happening here and what does it mean for the world's most popular versions of the free GNU/Linux computer operating system?
@croome.net"

"Why Doesn't Nike Want To Play with Me?"

0100101110101101.ORG

Nike starts legal action against the European art group
0100101110101101.ORG and cultural Internet platform Public Netbase.

In mid September this group started a surreal art project called Nike
Ground (www.nikeground.com), a performance built around a fake
guerrilla marketing campaign: Nike was supposedly buying streets and
squares in major world capitals, in order to rename them and insert
giant monuments of their famous logo. A hi-tech container was installed
in Vienna, supposedly the first city to host a "Nike Square", as part of
the action.

" 'Wider-Fi' Widens"

Leslie Brooks Suzukamo, St. Paul Pioneer Press

It could have been a disaster when Otter Tail Corp. moved one of its corporate offices out of downtown Fargo, N.D., in 1999 and suddenly found itself beyond the range of high-speed, data-carrying telephone lines so vital to its business.

The local telephone company's offer of a slowpoke dial-up connection didn't meet Otter Tail's need for fast Internet traffic. So Joy Fetting, Otter Tail's information technology director, took a radical step.

She chose a wireless carrier, connecting the utility company's 20-person office to the Internet through a small rooftop dish antenna and bypassing the phone company's buried lines.

Four years later, Otter Tail's connection is still wireless and now faster than a T-1 landline — at less than half the cost.

hydrarchist writes:

"The dotCommunist Manifesto"

Eben Moglen

January 2003

A Spectre is haunting multinational capitalism -- the spectre
of free information. All the powers of "globalism'' have entered
into an unholy alliance to exorcize this spectre: Microsoft and
Disney, the World Trade Organization, the United States Congress and
the European Commission.

Where are the advocates of freedom in the new digital society who have
not been decried as pirates, anarchists, communists? Have we not seen
that many of those hurling the epithets were merely thieves in power,
whose talk of "intellectual property'' was nothing more than an
attempt to retain unjustifiable privileges in a society irrevocably
changing? But it is acknowledged by all the Powers of Globalism that
the movement for freedom is itself a Power, and it is high time that
we should publish our views in the face of the whole world, to meet
this nursery tale of the Spectre of Free Information with a Manifesto
of our own.

hydrarchist writes:

"Freeing the Mind:


Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture"

Eben Moglen, June 29, 2003

The subject matter we're going to talk about is variously named, and
the words have some resonances of importance. I'm going to use the
phrase "Free Software" to describe this material and I'm going to
suggest to you that the choice of words is relevant. We are talking
not merely about a form of production or a system of industrial
relations, but also about the beginning of a social movement with
specific political goals which will characterize not only the
production of software in the twenty-first century, but the production
and distribution of culture generally. My purpose this morning is to
put that process in large enough context so that the significance of
free software can be seen beyond the changes in the software industry
alone.

Anonymous Comrade submits :

"Santiago Dreaming"

Andy Beckett, The Guardian, September 8, 2003

When Pinochet's military overthrew the Chilean government 30 years ago,
they discovered a revolutionary communication system, a 'socialist
internet' connecting the whole country. Its creator? An eccentric
scientist from Surrey. Andy Beckett on the forgotten story of Stafford
Beer

During the early 70s, in the wealthy commuter backwater of West Byfleet in
Surrey, a small but rather remarkable experiment took place. In the
potting shed of a house called Firkins, a teenager named Simon Beer, using
bits of radios and pieces of pink and green cardboard, built a series of
electrical meters for measuring public opinion. His concept -- users of his
meters would turn a dial to indicate how happy or unhappy they were with
any political proposal -- was strange and ambitious enough. And it worked.
Yet what was even more jolting was his intended market: not Britain, but
Chile.

"Iranonymity," says Bruce Sterling...

"US Sponsors Anonymiser - If You live in Iran"

Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus, TheRegister
 

A pact between the U.S. government and the electronic privacy company Anonymizer, Inc. is making the Internet a safer place for controversial websites and subversive opinions -- if you're Iranian.

Whole story: TheRegister
 

hydrarchist submits:

"This seems relevant for many reasons, be they the expectations of Lula, the venerated position occupied by Gil because of his cultural capital, and the emerging recognition of the importance of free software in modern productive forces."

Speech of the Brazilian Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, in the
seminar "Free Software and the Development of Brazil."

"On the Way to Digital Democracy"

Gilberto Gil, Brasilia, 19th August 2003

We must not ignore the fact that digital culture extends its network
over the whole planet, and is going through decisive moments in
terms both of transformative thought and of utopia.

It's enough to recall the contercultural achievement of the microcomputer.
The counterculture was responsible for bringing the computer from the
industrial-military complex into the space of personal use, breaking the
monopoly of IBM in the area of computing. The writer Pierre Levy spoke,
correctly, of the countercultural detour of high technology, a 'high-tech
DIY', among little defined underground groups, observing that 'a picturesque
community of Californian youth at the margins of the system invented the
personal computer'.