I happened to see the 2010-02-18 Rachel Maddow show and the 2010-02-25 Democracy Now!. Both discussed Andrew Joseph Stack III, the man who flew his plane into Building I of the Echelon office complex in Austin, Texas which killed Stack and IRS manager Vernon Hunter. Stack left a suicide note (local copy) published on his website. These shows covered Stack in a remarkably different way which is telling about the power to frame an issue.
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Monthly Archives: February 2010
Eben Moglen’s talk on Freedom in “The Cloud”
Prof. Eben Moglen, head of the Software Freedom Law Center, gives another must-not-miss talk on software freedom with hosted services (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other third-party services run on behalf of their users), colloquially known as “the cloud” (a purposefully vague reference to hosting services somewhere else, a virtual place that contains your data). What are the social and civic consequences of letting these services watch as you place your information (email, calendaring, private chats, etc.) into these services? How do we in the free software movement rise to the challenge of services users don’t control?
This recording comes to us courtesy of the Internet Society New York chapter The recordings are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Speech
Download Audio: hosted at Punkcast, hosted at Columbia University, hosted locally
Download Video: hosted at Punkcast, hosted at Columbia University, hosted locally
Q&A
Audio: hosted at Punkcast, hosted at Columbia University, hosted locally
Video: hosted at Punkcast, hosted at Columbia University, hosted locally
When Moglen talks about what your server should do, he talks about the kinds of services you should be free to host yourself. I’m reminded of how useful it might be to control your file sharing yourself without placing your faith in those who are untrustworthy by default.
Update 2010-02-10: The Software Freedom Law Center posted highlights from Eben Moglen’s talk.
Sita Sings the Blues vs. Ink: How licensing treats us differently
“Sita Sings the Blues” is an independently produced movie that is widely legally copied on the Internet. Writer/director/producer Nina Paley released “Sita” under a license that allows sharing (and far more, actually, but the details of how much more are beside the point of this article). Sita is also for sale on her store and anyone may download the movie from countless sources online (including locally—DVD ISO). The Internet Archive lists over 153,000 downloads from their site alone.
You can also download the soundtrack online and share it with anyone you choose (not all the tracks are sharable, but that’s not Nina Paley’s fault, the copyright holder for some music is not willing to share).
“Ink” is an independently produced movie that is widely illicitly copied on the Internet. Ink stands out because unlike chiefs of more famous movie studios, Ink’s writer/director Jamin Winans and producer Kiowa K. Winans wrote to TorrentFreak to thank them for promoting the movie and to say that the illicit sharing has made the movie far more popular, including increasing sales of home video copies.
But how do these movie makers treat you, the audience?
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