Anonymous Comrade writes:

Baghdad's Think-Tank Bomb

By John Chuckman, September 13, 2002

(YellowTimes.org) – An independent think-tank in Britain, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, has published a report on Iraq's nuclear capabilities. The report, which the Prime Minister's office termed "highly significant," was produced without access to the files of Britain's intelligence services. It made headlines in many Western papers. The BBC's Internet site made it top story.

The essence of the report is the sensational-sounding claim that Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon within months if it were to find a supply of fissile material. The report also says that Iraq has "probably" managed to conceal stocks of chemical and biological weapons and a small number of missiles.

KOP: "Kingdom of Piracy"


KOP is an online open workspace that explores piracy as the net's ultimate art form. The project includes links, objects, ideas, software, commissioned artists' projects, critical writing and online streaming media events. It is intended as an open-ended online exhibition; artists and authors will remain sole copyright owners of their works.


Co-Curators: Shu Lea Cheang, Armin Medosch, Yukiko Shikata

Project producer: Ray Wang; Project coordinator: Mia Chen



kop

http://211.73.224.150

hydrarchist writes

"Perhaps one of the biggest evils that government-sponsored capitalism produces is artificial scarcity. Effective drugs for treating AIDS and other deadly diseases can be produced and distributed cheaply, but they aren't. Instead, scarcity is maintained by enforcing patents internationally. Similarly, scientific and cultural information could be easily archived and distributed for free to everyone, everywhere. Instead, the "content industry", from music to movie to book publishers, is trying to maintain (and increase) scarcity by lobbying for mandatory copy prevention mechanisms, flooding the market with incompatible storage devices, and demanding harsh punishment for the millions who violate its idea of "intellectual property".

The war on (some) drugs, primarily fought by the United States, is currently the biggest motor of the booming prison industry, and has led to more death and suffering than the drugs it pretends to fight. But if the billion-dollar-heavy oligarchy of content producers has its way, the ongoing war on sharing may well put thousands of "pirates" of all ages behind bars. The coming information economy with its lack of scarcity is shaking the very foundation of capitalism (or at least perceived that way), and the old industries aren't willing to adapt -- they'd rather keep us all in chains to preserve their empires. They seek power and control, not progress.

In this article, I will discuss some recent developments, and try to outline strategies for peer-to-peer developers and individuals to counteract the maneuvers of the content industry. But I do not agree entirely with Declan McCullagh who recently argued that "geeks" should stay out of the political process and spend their time coding innovative world-changing software instead.

Read the resto of this story at Infoanarchy"

hydrarchist writes For a backgrounder on Hacklabs, please see the this earlier interview with LOA Hacklab Milan.

El Primero de Enero "Escuela Secondaria Rebelde Autonomo Zapatista" (ESRAZ www.escuelaparachiapas.org, www.schoolforchiapas.org) is the first autonomous secondary school in Chiapas. It is located in the educational and cultural center of the Zapatista movement in Oventic, the second Aguascalientes.

150 students and 25 promoters are studying and working there. Although there are no telephones nor connection to the Internet, the school has some computers stocked, and this will be our starting point..

A Contrarian View of Open Source

Bruce Sterling

(A Speech at the O'Reilly Conference in San Diego, California, July 26, 2002)

Thanks for showing up to see the obligatory novelist at this gig.

It's very touching of you to take the trouble to watch me get some emotional issues off my chest.

You know, I don't write code. I don't think I'm ever going to write any code. It just amazes me how often people who know absolutely nothing about code want to tell software people their business. "Why don't they just," that's the standard phraseology. "Why don't they just" code-up something-or-other. Whenever I hear that, frankly, I just want to slap the living shit out of those people.

hydrarchist writes "Information Feudalism in the Information Society *

Peter Drahos,

Faculty of law, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia

Introduction

"Information revolution", "information society", "information age" and "information explosion" are popular terms to describe social transformations that are linked to technologies which have changed the way that we work, live, and communicate with others. Increasingly the shape of these social transformations is affected by the work of global regulatory institutions like, for example, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (1), the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. This paper tells the story of how these institutions propelled information societies into a global feudal order.

One can tell optimistic or pessimistic stories about the social consequences of technology. Pessimistic stories have as their themes the loss of our capacity to control our technological creations, as in the case of Frankenstein's monster, or the increased capacity which technology gives to some powerful group to control the consciousness and lives of others, as in the case of Orwell's 1984. Optimistic stories have as their principal theme liberation; technologies of automation and robotics will free us from jobs that are dangerous or simply full of drudgery; communications technologies will enable us to work with others anywhere in the world; information technology will enable us to time shift our consumption of services and information; these same technologies will enable us to space shift, because, amongst other things, places of work can be accessed from home.

This paper tells a pessimistic story. It tells it in the form of a historical sketch about how the information age reinforced old inequalities and invented some new ones. It tells the story of what is possible, not what will happen. There is no desire here to lend the story a Hobbesian certainty or confidence about the plot. Rather the purpose is to use the scenario to stimulate some critical thought about important global policy initiatives in relation to information and its distribution. This is an issue worth exploring, because if it is not, if there is no lively debate about the options, the information society may turn out to be a more unequal place than we might have hoped.

Anonymous Comrade writes

TECHNOLOGICAL
DESPOTISM

By Ian Tillium

Part One : RAISING THE HIGH GROUND

In 1991 two American business professors, including one from the Harvard Business School, published a book called 2020 Vision: Transform Your Business Today to Succeed in Tomorrow's Economy. (Davis and Davidson 1991). Although riven through with a kind of Parsonian functionalism, it's nonetheless a very readable bourgeois account of the info revolution, and in addition it's a good source on where exactly this society thinks it's going and wants to go. In this article I want to use it as a peg on which to hang various thoughts on the question of present and future technological change.

hydrarchist writes:"Should have released this months ago but Blicero and I never managed to find the time to do the corrections. This interview was conducted in summer 2001 and subsequently published in issue 5 of Multitudes, and is available at Samizdat in french. Much has happened in the meantime and our intention is to do a second interview in the coming months.Please send any queries or connections to hydrarchist at yahoo.com, or append thems as a post to the article.

A Space of Construction and Deconstruction

Interview with blicero about the experience of the LOA
Hacklab in Milan

Q.What is a hacklab? And more specifically, what is the
LOA Hacklab in Milan?

A Hacklab is a place where we try to combine the hacker attitude,
that is to say the act of understanding the functioning of complex
machines in order to deconstruct them and reconstruct
them in a non conventional manner, with the ambition
of analysing the real. A place of relations where
people, brought by a marked interest in the new forms
of electronic communication, by the digital and the
telematic, can meet to construct a different way of
understanding things and intervene in the processes
that determine reality. A Hacklab is in some way a
meeting place for the various entities and
determinations of digital antagonism.

hydrarchist writes"This story was posted by a participant at www.zeropaid.com, the hub for file sharing news.

Overpeer Poisoning P2P on Behalf of Labels, RIAA

A stealth-mode company called OVERPEER has been flooding the p2p networks with fake Eminem files in an attempt to stop the trading of "unauthorized" mp3s. If you've encountered the "loop" files, in which a section of the chorus or hook is repeated over and over, you've been tricked by
OVERPEER.

OVERPEER are doing this with the full knowlege and consent of Interscope and Universal Music, in fact they are under contract to Universal and other
major record labels, and will be doing a LOT MORE of this type of "interdiction" in the near future.

Anonymous Comrade writes "

What's Gnu: RMS on UnitedLinux, Free Software

Richard M. Stallman is the founder of the Free Software movement that created the basis of the GNU/Linux operating system. Since founding the project back in 1984, Stallman, known by the community as RMS, has spent his time programming and promoting free software in the hopes of eliminating the need for non-free software completely. RMS graciously agreed to be interviewed by OfB's Timothy Butler. You can find the interview, in full, below. .

Open for Business: Would you give our readers a brief summary of what Free Software is and how it relates to Open Source Software?

Richard M. Stallman: Free software is the name of a category of software; it is also the name of a movement.

The "free" in "free software" refers to freedom, not price. A program is free software if users have certain basic freedoms in using it. You should have the freedom to run it as you wish, the freedom to study the source code and modify it to suit your needs, the freedom to redistribute copies to others, and the freedom to publish an improved version. The freedom to sell copies is also included. If the program allows users these freedoms, it is free software.