Activist Network in New York City Evicted from Internet by Dow, Verio

Thing.net assistance page: Thing.net

Contact: Thing-group

Bowing to pressure from the Dow Chemical Corporation, the internet
company Verio has booted the activist-oriented Thing.net from the Web.

Internet service provider Thing.net has been the primary service
provider for activist and artist organizations in the New York area
for 10 years.

Anonymous Comrade writes "A San Jose, California jury on Tuesday cleared software firm ElcomSoft of charges it violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) with its program that cracks the copyright protections in Adobe Systems eBooks.

The landmark decision, which comes after a week of deliberations, clears ElcomSoft of five counts of criminal violating of the controversial DMCA in one of the most closely-watched cases in the technology sector. Officials from ElcomSoft could not be reached at press time for a reaction to the ruling.

hydrarchist writes:

You could not make this shit up.

In a press release today, where they gloat at three prosecutions in course against children for warez activity brought to the attention of their 'European Internet Investigation Team', the Business Software Alliance also impart some real pearls of business ideology. And some cautionary words for parents:

Young people are often enthusiastic users, particularly of interactive services like email, chat and instant messaging. These are great tools that have been developed by the software industry so we do not want to limit children’s learning and enjoyment of the Internet. In short, the danger of ‘hanging-out’ in cyberspace is the same as loitering in the wrong part of town. Teenagers can just as easily fall in with the wrong crowd and unintentionally become involved in other serious crimes.

The software industry has been determined to refashion social norms around copyright for quite a while now, and they even managed to have it endorsed as State Doctrine (fear!) during the assembly of the National Information Infrastructure Report between 1993 and 1995. Somewhere out there exist hilarious websites dedicated to teaching children that sharing is wrong. Theft. Criminal.

hydrarchist writes:

"Taking Instead of Buying:

Towards an Economics of Free Software"

Stefan Merten

What is free software?

There are other ways of acquiring software than just buying the commercial software that's available on the free market like any other goods. There are, for example, the so-called Shareware models whereby customers wanting to use the software pay a fee to the producer. There is also the possibility of bootleg copies, an illegal means of acquiring software.

This article doesn't deal with any of these but is about free software, which is not only almost cost-free; it also, more significantly, incorporates regulations that guarantee freedom for the user. Besides the right to use the software, the user also has the right to study the sources of the software, modify them, and pass the original or modified version on.

hydrarchist writes Prior to the publication of "Art of Deception", the publishers Wiley and Sons received a letter threatening legal action on the part of John Markoff, the New York Times hack (sic) who played a key role in Mitnick's demonisation. As a result this chapter was pulled from the book. Fortunately the lost lines appeared miraculously in a yahoo group earlier this month, and it is provided below for your edification.

The account is interesting in several respects. First it demonstrates the shortsightedness of security through obscurity, or a reliance on smart technical fixes for the provision of assurance and safety. Given the continuing tendency towards security culture in political circles the sections on social engineering should act as reminder that most vulnerabilities are human. Secondly it demonstrates the connivance in the criminalization process between respected media mouthpieces and the state. Mitnick's case, along with those of LaMachia and Morris, were seminal from this point of view and established the trend for the decade. Third, he is candid about the very superficial nature of hacker rebellion, which often morphs into betrayal and collaboration with the state and businness without skipping a beat.

Enjoy.

"Chapter 1: Kevin's Story"

by Kevin Mitnick

I was reluctant to write this section because I was sure it would sound self-serving. Well, okay,
it is self-serving. But I've been contacted by literally hundreds of people who want to know
"who is Kevin Mitnick. "
For those who don't give a damn, please turn to Chapter 2. For everybody else, here, for what it's
worth, is my story.

This story is pilfered from the British-based technology web-site, The Register. In related news see the new Know_Dump site. Time to Napsterise everything boys and girls....

File swap nets will win, DRM and lawyers lose, say MS researchers

Anonymous Comrade writes"

THE KN0W_DUMP *SSK@moiqmdTgWN21JLN8sXhdM1P3PJEPAgM/KNOW_DUMP//*

------ Information Liberation / Distributed Disobedience -------

........................knowdump@hushmail.com..... .................

1/ WHAT IS THE KN0W_DUMP?

The KN0W_DUMP is a list of usernames and passwords for proprietary
knowledge databases, currently inclduding Lexis-Nexis, ProQuest and
Arden Shakespeare. It is an anonymous, secure resource residing on the
Freenet . The KN0W_DUMP provides proxied,
anonymised access to otherwise 'enclosed' sources of information.

The KN0W_DUMP is: information liberation; distributed disobedience.

SSK@moiqmdTgWN21JLN8sXhdM1P3PJEPAgM/KNOW_DUMP//

hydrarchist writes "This article was published in the Make World Magazine.

The resurgent question of the intellectuals hides the contemporary
problem of "what is to be done?", the problem of the auto-organisation
of cognitive labour. Space has re-emerged for the question
of the intellectuals, in the discussion of the Italian left. But the
question is badly posed, and the word itself (intellectual) elaborates
extremely badly the contemporary socio-mental geography.

Social entropy and
recombination

Franco Bifo Berardi

Lenin related to the figure of the intellectual
the problem of what to do, in the political
direction of the collective action. The intellectuals
are not a social class, they do not have
specific social interests to sustain. They are generally
the expression of parasitical income, they
can make "purely intellectual" choices, making
themselves out to be the means of revolutionary
consciousness. In this sense they are what is
most similar to the pure becoming of the spirit, in
the Hegelian development of self-consciousness.
On the other hand, the workers whilst being the
bearers of a homogenous social interest, can not
pass from the purely economic state (the Hegelian
in itself) to the politically conscious state
(the for itself of self consciousness) only through
the political form of the party which embodies
and hands down the philosophical heritage (the
proletariat as heirs of classical German philosophy)

hydrarchist writes, this review as published in the second edition of the Make World Magazine. "For many years, Geert Lovink has carried out his work as net-critic
wandering across the territories where the net meets the economy,
politics, social action and art. Years of fast writing on mailing lists,
analysis, polemics, replies and reports have been collected and
elaborated in a way that maintains the rap-style of e-mail debates:
short sentences, ironic slogans, cuts and returns, allusions, cita-tions...
but what emerges from this mosaic is a coherent overall
view on the first decade of digital society.

This book is the first complete investigation of
global netculture, an analysis of the evolution
and involution of the web during the first decade
of its mass expansion. But Lovink goes beyond a
sociological, economic and anthropological survey.
Many of the essays in the book outline the
theoretical positions of various agents in the cyber-
cultural scene: Wired's libertarian ideology,
its economistic and neoliberal involution, and the
radical pessimism of European philosophers.
Outside of such confrontation, Geert's position is
that of a radical and pragmatic Northern-Europe-an
intellectual close to autonomist and cyber-punk
movements, who has animated the cyber-cultural
scene for a decade with his polymorphous activity as writer and moderator of
connective environments such as nettime.org,
and as organiser of international meetings.

themanwithnoname writes:

The Mechanics of Social Control

By themanwithnoname

Most of us have heard the rumours circulated by conspiracy theorists concerning a secret world order, and their "big brother" plans to monitor every man women and child by means of a tiny microchip, (supposedly “smaller than a grain of rice”), injected under the skin.

Personally, it would come as no big surprise to me if ultimately, such rumours proved to have some foundation after all; but I find it strange why these researchers, (many of whom are of the armchair variety, I might add), mostly neglect to underscore another, more obvious and immediate parallel as they go about their fear-mongering.