Archive for the 'Censorship' Category

Crony Capitalists deploy glove puppet schizophrenic luddite

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

The crony capitalist copyright monopoly has rolled out its latest delusional computer illiterate schizophrenic luddite, Jeremy Hunt, to try and cripple the internets.

First things first.

Culture does not need a secretary. The idea that the State should have a position to ‘have a say’ in matters to do with culture is absurd on its face. Art galleries, artists, authors, music makers, sculptors and anyone involved in culture in any way do not need to be overseen, managed, given ‘guidance’ or ‘represented’ by a ministry. Only States like the USSR have traditionally had such corrosive, totalitarian and frankly, disgusting posts. Actually, France has a Minister of Rock & Roll, but France doesn’t count.

Even if you accept that the State should have a ‘Culture Secretary’ the internet is a technical brief, not a cultural one. No doubt there are moves afoot to create a new ‘Secretary for Digital’. The State should not be able to produce these new positions willy nilly, since they are public servants.

OK, Lets do this.

Google should join fight on piracy, says Jeremy Hunt

Culture secretary calls on advertisers and search engines to ‘make life more difficult’ for those that ignore copyright laws.

What a disgusting, irrational and ridiculous call; to ‘make life more difficult’ for people. The internet exists to make life easier. What Jeremy Hunt is calling for is to cripple the internet, to make service providers divert capital away from improving their services into something that no one but a tiny group of venal beasts want. This is not the call of a human being, this is a call from a monster that wants to destroy progress, inhibit the utility of the greatest invention since fire, and to harm millions of people all over the world. Absolutely repulsive.

Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, is to tell Google and other search engines that they should play a greater role in the fight against online piracy. Mr Hunt will ask them to “make life more difficult” for pirates.

And they are all going to tell him, politely, to go straight to hell. Jeremy Hunt is in good company; he is spouting the same garbage that Andy Burnham used to on this matter.

Copying music is not piracy. It is not theft. The BBC even said so, in a grovelling apology after they aired a scandalous, unforgivable, stupid, retarded and evil attack on Bittorrent and were taken to task for it:

First though, an apology. File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We’re very, very sorry.

If copyright infringement was theft then I’d be in jail every time I accidentally used football pix on Newsnight without putting “Pictures from Sky Sport” in the top left corner of the screen. And I’m not. So it isn’t.

No where near enough of an apology, but as far as the BBC goes, this is grovelling, first class.

He is expected to tell the Royal Television Society’s Cambridge Convention that “reasonable steps” will make a significant difference, and also make the suggestion that if the industry does not help the Government it will legislate via the new Communication Bill. “We intend to take measures to make it more and more difficult to access sites that deliberately facilitate infringement, misleading consumers and depriving creators of a fair reward for their creativity,” Mr Hunt will say.

The world is changing. The number of people who know about crony capitalism, the abuses of the RIAA/MPAA and the rest is growing exponentially. Even the scumbag lying State shills at the BBC say that people like Hunt, “..(are) wrong and (have) unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases”.

Jeremy Hunt is on the wrong side of history, and he hasn’t got the brains to know it. If he does know that what he is saying is unfounded, illogical codswallop, then he is a coward for not stating the plain truth, which is that the internet has changed the way people consume media, these changes are benefits which will bring prosperity to everyone, and the old business models are dead as the Dodo.

The Government wants search engines to penalise website whose content is ruled unlawful. Less prominent results would have a direct effect on revenues from advertisers as well as sales.

If you removed all the links to any torrent site or site that provides links to other sites, what would happen is that someone would write an application that will absorb and re-distribute all those searches. It would spur the creation of a one stop place to find everything you need, and it could be designed in such a way that it can not be shut down. It would make the distribution of links more efficient, and this would mean more file sharing.

The internet sees Jeremy Hunt and his luddite ideas as damage and routes around him and them. Anything that is done to stop people communicating will cause more robust systems to be developed and deployed to bolster communication. We have seen this again and again. Napster was shut down and that caused gnutella to be developed. Then, the Bittorent protocol was developed as a direct answer to the problem of hosting files on central repositories. The same thing can be done with links. A distributed search engine, unstoppable, with no central point of attack will up the stakes and Jeremy Hunt would be the one that caused it to come into being. That is what is called an ‘own goal’ in the UK.

Mr Hunt will argue that online businesses deserve the same legal protection as physical ones. “We do not allow certain products to be sold in the shops on the high street, nor do we allow shops to be set up purely to sell counterfeited products. Neither should we tolerate it online,” he is set to say.

This is a fallacious, straw man argument. Physical goods are not the same as information and it comes right out of the MPAA script. When you copy a file or an idea, nothing is lost, and more to the point, Google does not facilitate copying, it merely points to resources that may or may not ‘infringe copyright’. There is no reason whatsoever to call upon business to take proactive measures against links that potentially point to items that are not even criminal in the first place.

He will add, however, “The government has no business protecting old models or helping industries that have failed to move with the times. But those new models will never be able to prosper if they have to compete with free alternatives based on the illegal distribution of copyrighted material.”

This is double talk. Government is protecting the old business models by insisting that there is such a thing as copyright. It is helping industries that have failed to move with the times, explicitly, the music and film industry. Secondly, Hunt says ‘free alternatives’ are bad; what if the new business model is the free model?. By saying that free is not acceptable, Hunt is picking winners, helping the dinosaur media and failing to move with the times. It is not the place of Jeremy Hunt or any public servant to determine which business models are and are not appropriate. Jeremy Hunt is talking nonsense on stilts.

Despite campaigns from internet freedom activists, the high court ruled in July, after a lengthy process, that the internet service provider BT should block a website that “flagrantly infringed” copyright, called Newzbin. Although the Internet Watch Foundation is able to use a sped-up legal process, it currently can only do so for sites relating to illegal online pornography. Google, however, claims that “takedown requests” from reliable copyright holders are dealt with in four hours. The government moving its pressure from ISPs to search engines marks a new approach to its multi-faceted attack on digital piracy.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8759414/Google-should-join-fight-on-piracy-says-Jeremy-Hunt.html

They will fail.

Since the advent of modems running at 14.4k people have been sharing files, and it has grown year on year without fail every year. The mainstream media and the copyright monopoly have lost both the war and the argument. The movie studios still pull in hundreds of millions for their blockbusters, and so the much reported death of their industry has not materialised, as it never does whenever they whine that a new technology is going to wipe them out.

It is nothing short of absurd that Jeremy Hunt and his cohorts want to turn Britain into a leader of all things internets, but in the same breath, they do everything they can to cripple the companies that work with it. You cant have it both ways; either you want your East End Fantasy to take root or you do not. If you do, get out of the way, and let business flourish. If you do not, carry on as you are, making these ridiculous paid promotions for the copyright monopolists and watch everyone write you off as a potential place to locate.

In the past, anyone thinking about writing an innovative service, like a CD Ripping service, would have run a mile from the UK. Only now, as the CD is dying as a format will it become legal for a company like this to set up… or will it? Who knows? What is for sure is that if you plan on starting an internet business in the UK, you are taking a huge risk that Jeremy Hunt & Co. are going to suddenly, at the behest of your competitors, put you out of business either by directly legislating against you, or scaring investors away by giving a speech.

One thing is for certain; the tide is turning against Jeremy Hunt and all the glove puppets who sound suspiciously similar. What do I mean by that? Hmmmm, Which one is Jeremy Hunt, and which one is Andy Burnham? can you tell?:

Hunt or Burnham?:
“We must ensure that copyright delivers maximum benefit to performers and musicians. That’s the test of any model as we go forward”

Hunt or Burnham?:
“Let me be absolutely clear so there are no misconceptions about where the Government is on this. We share a real support for artists and musicians.”

Hunt or Burnham?:
“Music has been hit hard over the last ten years, and if we don’t do something there is a real danger that parts of the music industry will be washed away.”

Hunt or Burnham?:
“Developments in communications have changed the music world and I think we are now at a time that calls for partnership between Government and the music business as a whole: one with rewards for both of us; one with rewards for society as a whole.”

Hunt or Burnham?:
“My job – Government’s job – is to preserve the value in the system.”

Hunt or Burnham?:
“What do we need to do to help our businesses grow and evolve between now and 2025? Where can regulation help and where is it a barrier? What can we do collectively to enhance the whole UK market?”

Hunt or Burnham?:
“We have an extraordinarily strong and diverse media landscape in this country, combined with a remarkable wealth of talent in our creative industries.”

They are indistinguishable are they not?

Honestly, I dont care about what these people think; the only thing that matters is that they have the guns. As long as they have the monopoly on violence, they will be able to distort, destroy, corrupt and damage. If they did not have the monopoly on violence, Jeremy Hunt might be a school teacher somewhere, harmless, quiet and of no concern to anyone.

Thankfully, the market, the internet, and the people on it are more powerful than Jeremy Hunt. No matter what he says, no matter what he asks for, and no matter who he can bully into obeying his luddite wet dreams, the internet and the market will route around him and his disease and the spice will flow!

Private View From Shanghai

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

 

 

The Outlook Magazine

From p.36

The text has, somewhat ironically, been redacted compared to the print version.

Still, a fabulous collection of images old and new.

Newest: UFO!

‘Unhappy Flying Objects’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Analysing the Anonymous ‘Open Letter to the Citizens of the United States of America’

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

That acephalous, elusive, networked, autonomous, intelligent and revolutionary construct Anonymous, has published a statement called “An Open Letter to the Citizens of the United States of America”, wherein they demonstrate that Anonymous is rapidly iterating towards Libertarianism.

They have a few more cycles to go however.

We have written about Anonymous before; it is interesting because it is a fulfilment of the prescient observations of Jean Baudrillard, with his assertion that there is a “mass”, with characteristics closely matching what Anonymous is and how it reacts to stimuli.

This statement is significant not only because it demonstrates that Anonymous is moving towards the locus of Libertarianism, it is also interesting in the type of thinking displayed at this iteration; Anonymous clearly understands far more than previous generations, but it is still hampered by some fundamental illusions, misconceptions and illogic, and this has prevented it from coming up with a coherent statement.

Anonymous has lofty goals. It clearly, explicitly, is seeking Natural Rights. This is a very specific goal, and one that is not compatible with some of the goals listed at the end of the statement.

Thankfully, Anonymous is full of highly intelligent, computer literate people who, once exposed to the truth, accept it as the truth, just as computer programmers must accept the syntax of a language if they are to use it, and mathematicians must accept that 1+1=2.

Let us parse through this announcement, correcting it and analysing as we go along…

Dear us citizens,

The people who live on the ‘North American Continent’ are human beings; they are not citizens or slaves of the United States Government, living in farms like cattle. It is crucial, when attacking these problems, that the persons thinking about them understand what human beings are, and what their true relationship to government and other human beings is.

Human beings are not the property of other human beings. They are individuals with inherent rights that do not come from government. Being ‘born a US citizen‘ is tantamount to being born into slavery. Anyone who wants Natural Rights for themselves rejects the idea of being born a citizen, of any state, no matter what it is called, or how that state came to be.

We, Anonymous would like to offer you, America, the opportunity to join and support our movement.

This offer cannot be made to ‘America’. It can only be made to the individuals who happen to live in what has come to be called ‘America’.

We are a group that formed on the internet – one that knows no constructs or absolutes, and one that has recently grown exponentially.

There most certainly are absolutes. There is right and wrong; stealing is wrong, for example. There are constructs also; Natural Rights is one of them. You cannot on the one hand, say that there are no absolutes or constructs, and then on the other, call for Natural Rights.

We would like to introduce an Operation. An Operation that involves Americans getting our Natural Rights and dreams back.

Your Natural Rights cannot be taken away from you. They can only be denied expression. For example, the property rights you have in paper can be denied to you if you choose to write an essay or print instructions that the state determines that you may not distribute. You have the absolute right, at all times, to own and publish; the state merely uses violence to stop you from exercising that right.

Right now, you can help by passing on the Information. Information is power. Share the power of the Information with other like minded individuals. The more people we represent, the more Power we have, both as individuals and as Anonymous. Thank you for your time and power.

I would suggest that information, that is true, needs to be shared between the like minded and the yet to be like minded.

CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Many events have taken shape over the course of only a few years, and slowly our system has been working towards the gains of itself rather than the gains of the people.

It is completely wrong to characterise the State as ‘our system‘. It never was, is not, and never will be ‘our system’. Even if it were to become some sort of collectively owned, internet mediated Communist Utopia, this is completely contrary to Natural Rights.

The State does not work towards the gains of itself; it is not a living entity with its own goals, separate from those at the levers of the controls. The State is the violent apparatus through which a small number of people (who are indistinguishable from Mafia gangsters save in scale), rob, steal murder and destroy for their own personal gain.

Before you try and understand any of the problems facing free people, it is essential that you understand the true nature of the source of the trouble; the State. It is also crucial, when trying to describe this problem, to not use collective pronouns when talking about it. It is not ‘our taxes’ or ‘our schools’ or ‘our government’. These things are the property of the State. You do not own them, do not control them, and should not refer to them with a collective pronoun. Ever.

While we have all watched and rallied against the system working against us, there have been other gains of the system that have gone without a peep as back-room deals and and bargaining allow for the passing of legislation and research funding that has resulted in the loss of more liberties such as censorship, phone and internet surveillance and eminent domain laws.

There is nothing wrong, in principle, with back-room deals. This message from Anonymous was, no doubt, written in such a back-room fashion; in private as it were. The assumption here is that the State is legitimate in principle, and that if its dealings were done in the light of day, this would ameliorate the problems faced by the human beings living under them. This is completely incorrect; the State is not legitimate, and wether or not its laws, deals and strictures are negotiated in public or private is immaterial to this fact.

Research ‘funding’ is of course, stolen loot redirected to corrupt scientists and crony capitalists. Censorship is the violent curtailing of property rights in paper, CD ROMS servers and bandwidth. Surveillance is a similar violation to censorship, since it involves interfering with private property to carry it out. Eminent domain is simple theft.

All of these violations have one thing in common; they all come from the State. When you peel away the layers of illogic, groupthink and brainwashing, the State emerges as the common enemy and problem behind all the usurpations, violence and evil that Anonymous opposes.

Not to mention the higher taxes, lower wages, and loss of work due to exports deals.

Taxation is violent theft by the State. Wages are a private contract between two people or a person and a company. You cannot on the one hand, call for Natural Rights, and then in the same breath, call for the violent State to guarantee you high wages by threatening violence to those who provide jobs. This is pure illogic.

Loss of work, in every form save natural disasters and entrepreneurial miscalculation, is caused by the State and its distortion of economic activity through its minimum wage laws right up to the Federal Reserve, fiat currencies, legal tender laws and monopoly on setting interest rates. Anonymous seems to understand this partially, as ‘End the Fed‘ is high up on its list of priorities, but you cannot call for the end of the Federal Reserve system, and then say that the State should guarantee wages or interfere in economics. There is some confusion here, that will hopefully be cleared away in the next iteration.

We repeat the history of our mistakes instead of evolving our society.

There is no ‘we’ in any of this, only individuals with Natural Rights. There are no collective mistakes, and there is no ‘our society’, collectively owned by everyone. These are collectivist brainwashing terms, used to prevent people from understanding the true nature of the problem by stopping them from identifying the State as the cause of all problems.

Generations in the past spoke of what we face as current issues, the only difference being that of our technological achievements. We have forgotten such words our society has found guidance and value in:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This is very problematic for anyone who wants to exercise their Natural Rights. The pursuit of happiness is not a right, and rights are not secured by or granted by government. The State cannot derive power from the governed; this is a fallacy. The State cannot do things that individuals cannot do, and cannot be ceded powers that individuals do not have. You cannot, by dint of a vote, cede the power to steal, murder and destroy to the State, because you do not have that power yourself.

The declaration of independence is a beautiful document, no doubt about it, but it is fundamentally flawed in its outlining of what rights are and where they come from, and what makes government legitimate.

No one has a right to institute a government that controls people who do not consent to be governed by it, no matter how it is formed. This document can only lead to tyranny, and that is exactly what has come to pass; a monolithic Federal Government that murders at will, like an out of control monster.

This document, and its ideas should be rejected by all people who desire the expression of their Natural Rights, for as soon as you accept its principles, you are on the way down a slippery slope to despotism, theft and every vile thing that decent people loathe today.

“In the past few months, Anonymous has made headlines through the actions of a few. The media tries to instill fear of which Anonymous is as a “group”, and in the process failed to recognize it as an “ideal” that is gaining momentum.

Ideals are good, as long as their foundation is sound.

Anonymous is an ideal that the people can use to further help other people.

People helping other people is good. Voluntarism and Natural Rights is the key to prosperity. Statism, collectivism and coercion are pure evil and should be rejected by all decent people.

In this case, you’re not being heard and transparency in government operations is non-existent in many matters.

Once again, if someone is stealing from you right in front of your face, transparently, it is still immoral theft. The fact that theft is hidden or not is not material. The meme of ‘Transparency‘ is Statist brainwashing designed to keep you from coming to the conclusion that the State itself is illegitimate. There are many such brainwashing terms, ‘have your say‘, ‘transparency’, ‘accountability’ – all of these are patent nonsense. If you are having your money stolen from you, and you have your say in where it goes to any extent, this does not mean that you have not been violated by theft. If the money that was stolen from you was accounted to you, i.e. “we stole 58% of your pay-check this year”, this does not erase the immorality contained in the fact that money has been stolen from you through violence.

All of this brainwashing must be eradicated and the actions of the State put into their proper context, if you are to attack this problem correctly.

Mobilize yourself to find your information, and we’ll be giving you resources to further help you. Take the information you find and tell your government your demands.

It is not ‘your government’. You have no right to demand that the State take its stolen money and do your bidding.

We want AMERICANS to wake up! We want AMERICANS to read! We want AMERICANS to think,and above all question all things! We want AMERICANS to analyze, criticize, critique and learn to read between the lines, to expose and to deconstruct! We want you to believe in the infinite power of the people! We want you to learn that we’re all truly brothers and sisters in humanity regardless of all the artificial barriers that have been set up to separate us!

Waking up is a good thing, but make sure that you wake all the way up and not just half way, like in Inception.

If you are going to read, read Murray Rothbard’s Libertarian Manifesto as a starting point to your complete awakening. Its easy to read and understand, and after you have read it, you will never think about government and rights in the same way again.

It is crucial to question all things, but you must make sure that you really are questioning from the correct frame of reference, and not inside a box provided for you by the State and its brainwashing schools.

“Think For Yourself, Question Authority” -Timothy Leary

Reject authority, end the State.

Inform. Educate. Guide. Evolve. Wake up the People. The time for the next step in our species’ social evolution has come!

Social evolution is nonsense. Man has one nature and one nature only. The people who call for social evolution are of the same ilk as the Fabian Socialists, who want to destroy the family and recast populations into inhuman morasses of degradation and total control.

To effectively reform the system that has enslaved us, we must consider following the advice and

The system cannot be reformed, because it is fundamentally flawed and immoral. Government cannot draw legitimacy from the people; this is a lie, and anyone that understands Natural Rights already knows this.

example of those who have preceded us. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and JFK are good places to start.

Abraham Lincoln was a monster, and should only be held up as such.
Teddy Roosevelt was pure evil.
JFK gave us the NASA moon landing.

All of this thinking is the result of brainwashing in government schools, especially the nauseating worship of Abraham Lincoln.

All took fierce positions against central banking, government corruption and corporate power.

This simply is not the whole story, and as you move towards the Libertarian position, the great historians who are Libertarians will dispel many myths for you. JFK through executive order 11110 tried to attack the criminal and fraudulent Federal Reserve System directly, and some say, this is why he was executed. Andrew Jackson put pay to The United States Bank that took root in the USA.

Finally, for the record, the moon project of John F Kennedy was a boondoggle where billions of stolen dollars were diverted to corporations to build the systems for NASA, for example. That is government corruption and corporate power writ large.

Americans and many other people are steeped in the myths dogmas and untruths found in the religion of the State. They accept as fact its assertions and its telling of history as related in its government schools, and it was very difficult before the internet to break through and get at the truth of it all. Now there is no excuse. You have the internet, you have the ability to read and can reason. You have no choice but to accept the world as it actually is.

The time has come for us to unite, the time has come for us to stand up and fight! You are Anonymous!

We are in the information era.
We are Anonymous,
We are Legion,
We do not forget,
We do not forgive,
Expect us.

For great justice.

Below: Grievances and demands
A starting point for reform could be established by citing a list of worthy objectives provided by ampedstatus.com;

These objectives are contradictory, based on violence, and stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what rights are and where they come from.

Enforce RICO Laws

RICO Laws are illegitimate:

Under RICO, a person who is a member of an enterprise that has committed any two of 35 crimes—27 federal crimes and 8 state crimes—within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering. Those found guilty of racketeering can be fined up to $25,000 and sentenced to 20 years in prison per racketeering count. In addition, the racketeer must forfeit all monies and interest in any business gained through a pattern of “racketeering activity.” RICO also permits a private individual harmed by the actions of such an enterprise to file a civil suit; if successful, the individual can collect triple damages.

It has been speculated that the name and acronym were selected in a sly reference to the movie Little Caesar, which featured a notorious gangster named Rico. The original drafter of the bill, G. Robert Blakey, refused to confirm or deny this.[1] G. Robert Blakey remains an expert on RICO;[2] his former student Michael Goldsmith also gained a reputation as one of the nation’s leading RICO experts.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act

And they are a perfect example of the illegitimacy of the state, for a number of reasons. Without listing all of them, you should be suspicious that the author of this odious piece of legislation is now one of the foremost experts in RICO law.

Break Up the Big Banks

The phrase ‘break up’ gives you a clue to wether this is moral or immoral. This is nothing more than a call for violence to be carried out by the state on behalf of the mob. The state should not be interfering with economics. If you want to run your own bank, that is your affair; the state should not have the power to license, regulate or control banks or deposits in any way whatsoever. They should not insure deposits, bail out banks or do any of those things. If you do not accept this, then you are not for Natural Rights.

End the Fed

The Federal Reserve System is a creature of the State, and it should be abolished. The State should not have a monopoly on the creation of money.

Break Up the Mainstream Media / encourage citizen journalists

Once again, this is a despicable call for violence to be carried out by the State on behalf of the mob. Decent people who are for Natural Rights do not call for violence to be done to others, under any circumstances. The State should not be interfering in people’s affairs by encouraging one type of trade over another; in the UK, they call this ‘picking winners’. If you want to be a journalist, that is an entirely private choice, where you exercise your right to own and distribute paper, or own space on a server connected to the internet. It has nothing to do with government whatsoever.

End Closed Door Lobbying

The state itself should be ended; lobbying is nothing more than a pimple on the hideous face of the real, and very ugly problem.

Increase Government Transparency

See above.

End Corporate Personhood

People who understand Natural Rights know that you have the right to contract with others on terms that are suitable to you and your partners. This is an absolute right, derived from your property right in yourself and what you have lawfully acquired.

The idea behind corporations is that groups of people create a vehicle through which they can invest in a project without fear that should the enterprise fail, the investors would not be liable for the debts of the project. Before this idea, if your business suffered losses, you could lose all of your stored capital which may have taken your entire life to accumulate. Limited Liability protects you from this sort of catastrophe, and anyone can take advantage of incorporation; its not just ‘for the rich’.

There is nothing wrong with this in principle, as long as everyone who deals with every entity involved knows what they are becoming involved with and enters into agreements voluntarily.

If you have a particular dislike of corporations, then it is your choice not to deal with them. What you cannot do is impose your personal opinion on others with violence.

The railing against corporations is one of the pillars of the socialists, who have insinuated their diseased thinking into the minds of otherwise right thinking people. As soon as you scratch the surface of this thinking with a Libertarian fingernail, the lie of the ‘end corporate personhood’ argument becomes abundantly clear; this is Statism, coercion and violence under the cloak of ‘power to the people’. Its nonsense from beginning to end.

Amend Campaign Finance

Democracy is illegitimate. Majority rule is illegitimate. This is a call from inside the framework that holds that government as it is currently structured is legitimised and made moral by voting. It is not, never has been and never will be legitimate or moral, and so how campaigns are financed are totally irrelevant, when we consider that the true aim should be the ending of the State itself.

Verify All Votes

Votes, wether they are verified or not, do not confer legitimacy to governments. Once again, this is a call from inside the matrix, within a framework designed by the State to stop you from understanding that voting itself is illegitimate.

Investigate War Profiteers

The State is the source of all war. End the State and you end war. Investigating war profiteers is pointless while the State persists.

Investigate War Crimes

Rubbish. End the State.

End the Wars

End the cause of war; the State.

Restore Civil Liberties

The State is what restricts your liberties. End it, and the restoration of your liberties will follow as day follows night.

Uphold the Constitution

The constitution is a document that binds people who have not given their consent to be governed by it. That is illegitimate on its face. Worship of the Constitution and the principle that a State is legitimate when it has one is deeply ingrained in the minds of the brainwashed.

Clean Air, Water & Food

See Lew Rockwell’s Environmental Manifesto. The State cannot provide these things for you.

Reduce Healthcare Costs, Profiteering

This is straight out of the immoral Socialist thought process. There is nothing wrong with Profit. If you want to help people, it is up to you to help them. You cannot call for the state to steal to help people.

Make Healthcare a Human Right

Healthcare is a good, not a right. Rights cannot be created out of thin air by the State.

Improve Education For All, Reduce Costs

Once again, like healthcare, education is not a right, it is a good. Literacy and academic achievement have been destroyed by the State and those who call for ‘Education for all’. Costs have skyrocketed precisely because the violent statists have brayed for the State to step in and make Education a ‘right’. The State should be completely removed from the business of education. If there even is a State.

Reform Prison System

Many of the acts the State defines as crimes are not crimes at all. America has the world’s largest prison population because prison is a business outsourced by the State. Without the State, this problem would, like many others, disappear.

Reform drug laws (Stop spending so much money on drugs! NYC spent $75million alone on marijuana arrests.

The source of this is, again, the State. All laws in this area are illegitimate. They should not be ‘reformed’ they should be abolished, along with the State that created and enforced them.

Immigration Reform

In a place where there is no State, immigration is not a problem. You need to understand that immigration is only a problem because there is a State. There are arguments to the contrary. Either way, the State is not the answer to any problem, no matter what it is.

Rebuild Infrastructure

Translation: “steal more money to give to contractors to fix roads and bridges and lay down fibre optic cable”. Be careful what you ask for, because by doing so, you create more of the problem that you are trying to get rid of. You cannot be against Eminent Domain, but at the same time, be for stealing property so that roads can be built on them by the State for ‘infrastructure’.

Protect Internet Freedom

There would be no problems of censorship, interception and internet freedom were there no State to cause these bad things like net neutrality.

Empower States’ Rights

No. States do not have rights, only men have rights. There are no gay rights, black rights, women’s rights or animal rights. Only man has rights, and all men have the same rights. Remember this quote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. That much of it is true. All men ARE created equal, without distinctions in terms of their rights. This is different to being entitled to any sort of service by your fellow man of course.

End Corporate Welfare

End the State that steals money to give it.

Fair taxes for everyone!

No. Stealing is never ‘fair’, and the word ‘fair’ is another brainwashing term.

Enforce corporate responsibility

There is no such thing as ‘corporate responsibility’, and in any case, you cannot be against the idea of corporations and FOR corporate responsibility at the same time!

Force corporations to apply local labor laws in their global operations

Which is it, for or against corporations? As for ‘labor laws’, they are all illegitimate strictures of the State, and unwarranted immoral interference in economics.

Strengthen environmental laws and force corporations to clean up their act

More calls for violence.

Work for a real separation of church and state – and a real split between corp and state?

There should be no State to separate from the church. And if there are no corporations, as is being asked for, there would be no corporations to separate from the State.

Reinstate Habeus Corpus

End the state that arrests people for non crimes like Prostitution and smoking marijuana.

Allow felons who have paid their debt to restore voting rights

Voting is not a right. End the State that creates felons in the first place. Realise also, that the idea of a ‘debt to society’ is completely fallacious.

Stop prison labor from competing with local businesses

End the State, and its prison industrial complex.

Additional objectives
End lifetime appointments to the SCOTUS

The Supreme Court of the United States is illegitimate, as are the laws it rules on.

Abolish the “Patriot Act”

Abolish the State that enacted it.

Abolish the lobbying system (no paid lobbyists)

Abolish the State that lobbyists attend to, and for whom they go to get their vicious laws passed, like the Mickey Mouse Copyright extension law and ACTA to name but two.

Close Guantánamo

End the state that owns it, and relinquish the illegitimately acquired property upon which it stands in Cuba.

Establish and define “financial terrorism” as a treasonous act and prosecute offenders vigorously

This is pure in the matrix thinking.

This is a call for the State to create a crime, based inside the financial system controlled by the State and its cronies at the Federal Reserve.

Without the Fed and the State, in a land where sound money flowed freely, this idea would be a nonsense. If you want to solve this problem, end the State that steals money through the printing press at the Fed, and switch to sound money in the form of gold and silver coins.

Treason is a crime against the State. Only the brainwashed and the Statists believe that such a thing is a ‘crime’. Calling for prosecution is calling for violence obviously, the end result being the perpetrators sent to the hell holes of the prison industrial complex, at the expense of the ‘taxpayer’.

This is a perfect example of thinking three levels inside the box; illogical, irrational and incapable of framing the problem correctly because all the givens are provided by the State.

If you REALLY want to do something to End the Fed and stop the criminal crony capitalist fractional reserve bankers, do what Max Kieser suggests as your next Anonymous Operation… GOLD FINGER!

Enshrine gender equality in the constitution

Freedom is not free, free men are not equal and equal men are not free. You cannot on the one hand call for Natural Rights, and then call for the constitution to enshrine ‘gender equality’ (the violent enforcement of laws upon free people) as an amendment. This error flows from the incorrect idea that women have rights that are separate from men; they do not. All human beings have the same rights; and these are all derived from the right of property.

End corporate money in the election process

See above, and pull the cable from the back of your head.

“Reduce non-emergency military funding”

The war machine is a creature of the State. There is no such thing as ‘funding’ it is theft, pure and simple.

And there you have it. There was only one item in that list that was legitimate; End the Fed.

For those who have not read any of the books, seen the lectures or read the articles cited above, you have alot of work to do, but you will be amply rewarded with an air tight way of thinking about the world at no cost to you other than your time.

As the iterations fold over and calculate in the hive mind GPU, Anonymous will come to these conclusions, as they are all inescapable now that the internet is everywhere. Thankfully Anonymous is iterating in internet time, and it will not be long before it will be calling for measures and thinking in terms that are consistent, logical and Libertarian.

Henry Porter mischaracterises the Wikileaks process

Monday, December 13th, 2010

In the Observer Henry Porter writes:

(Wikileaks gives us) “a snapshot of the world as it is, rather than the edited account agreed upon by diverse elites, whose only common interest is the maintenance of their power and our ignorance”.

Give me a break.

The 250,000 cables handed to Wikileaks are all being trawled through by The New York Times, El Pais and the Guardian, and other newspapers all of whom use their biased editorial filters to decide what shall and shall not be published. It is only AFTER this process takes place that Wikileaks posts what they have extracted and redacted.

The newspapers that are publishing these cables are precisely a group of diverse elites whose common interest is the maintenance of their power and our ignorance.

The players of the old, ‘dinosaur’ media have a common interest in maintaining their power as the gatekeepers of information and how it is disseminated. What they have done with these cables is pure pre-internet newspaper thinking; “we know best what you need to know”, “take what we give, do not think”. By doing this, instead of releasing all of the information into a system that can be crowdsourced, they deliberately maintain the ignorance of the public. At the current rate of release, it will take years for all the cables to see the light of day, if they ever do at all.

The Guardian on some level, knows that this is wrong and have asked their readers to give them search terms to run against the database.

How completely absurd.

“Tell us what to search for and we will let you know if we find anything interesting”. I’m sorry, but this is just so ridiculous you couldn’t make it up if you tried…. unless you worked at the Grauniad.

Bear in mind this is the same newspaper that built a brilliant crowdsourcing tool to facilitate the pouring over of MPs expenses. Its not that they do not know how to write or deploy software in innovative ways; in the case of Cablegate, they do not want you to know what is in there. There is no reason whatsoever why they cannot repurpose use the tools they have already built for the Cablegate data; in fact, it would work even better because we are not dealing with scanned receipts but with plain text

This blog has had issues with Henry Porter’s writing in the past and it seems that nothing has changed; he thinks he can type out “black is white” and everyone will simply believe it, because he printed it.

The facts are these, and this goes for all the newspapers gatekeeping the Cablegate files:

  • The Guardian is for the warmongering state.
  • The Guardian is a protector of the warfare state.
  • The Guardian is a gatekeeper whose job it is to keep you ignorant.
  • The Guardian is there to conceal the truth from you.
  • The Guardian is there to head off your ability to come to conclusions based on the facts.
  • The Guardian is there to aid the state in destroying your rights.

If none of these are true, then that newspaper should release the Cablegate files immediately, without equivocation or redaction or delay.

OR

At the very least, desist from printing the untruth that they are in any way separate from the ‘elites’ that seek to control the perception of the world.

I wonder if someone in the Gruaniad has the balls to MYSQLDUMP the cables and ‘do a Wikieaks’ on the gatekeepers…

Now THAT would be amazing!!

UPDATE!
As we told you, The Guardian is nothing more than a tool of the state, to the bone.

The Editors of the Guardian have allowed James Richardson, ‘journalist’, to publish a hit piece on Wikileaks attempting to shift the blame for a cable that they inspected and released which will now have real world consequences that they would rather they did not.

The Guardian has been one of the virulent rabid anti Mugabi newspapers calling for the ouster of that man for years. When they received the 200,000 plus cables, they naturally threw his name into the search box to dig up whatever dirt they could on him to further the agenda of destabilising that country and replacing Mugabe with a puppet.

Since Wikileaks does not actually leak these cables themselves, but instead, only publishes what their ‘media partners’ sanitise and publish they cannot be blamed for what is about to take place in Zimbabwe.

James Richardson however, wants to blame Wikileaks for this cable release, when it was his newspaper that did it. This is a deliberate, total and shameful misrepresentation of the facts.

The Guardian is clearly trying to separate itself from any harm that is to come out of this particular cable, placing all the blame for their vindictive actions on Wikileaks.

This is just what you would expect from a gang of traitors, liars and collaborators, whose sole aim is to bolster and reinforce the power of the state.

Unfortunately for them, the internet is here, and they cannot get away with an article like this; we all know the Wikileaks process, we all know who the criminals and their facilitators are, and no amount of lying and spinning can change that.

The Guardian and its Editors are responsible for the release of this cable, and no one else.

As for the whole idea of ‘media partners’, clearly The Guardian and its editors are the sort of people who cannot be trusted with an empty bottle of milk, let alone sensitive information of any kind, or a gentlemen’s agreement. Its extraordinarily naive and simple minded to put your faith in The Guardian, and anyone who has been paying attention to them over the last 13 years will know this. The Guardian will stab you in the back once it has what it wants. They will sell you out in an instant, without hesitation or remorse. They will lie about you, spin the truth and hang you out to dry. That is the lesson.

Expect Wikileaks to be hung out to dry by the Editors at The Guardian, and as their embarrassment over this ‘facilitating Mugabe’ affair becomes ever more painful, expect their denial, lying and spin to become more shrill, in the way they are so expert. Expect more salacious ‘revelations’ about Assange and ‘full coverage’ of his trumped up charges and kangaroo court trial.

In the end, Wikileaks is going to have to release all of the cables, either to protect itself from lying Newspaper Editors, or because its ‘leader’ has been renditioned. One thing is for sure; now that they have handed over all the cables to the Guardian, they cannot cease being ‘media partners’ with them without a full escalation from the Editors; Wikileaks has no cards left in this hand, the Guardian has them all.

Wikileaks should have released everything at once in the first place, but I suspect that they were seduced by the silver tongued ‘journalists’ at the world’s biggest newspapers, whose main objective is circulation and serving their master, the State.

Full disclosure is the only way to manage this sort of information. If you accept that State secrecy is legitimate in any way, then this sort of information should not be released at all. If you do not believe that the State is acting correctly or does not have the right to murder, steal and corrupt, then the only course of action is to give a warning and then release the information.

I’m sure that whatever happens in the future, no one with a brain cell who has been paying attention is going to trust the Editors and ‘journalists’ of The Guardian, who have once again, shown their true colours.

Teh Internetz Destroyz Politrickz?

Wednesday, December 1st, 2010

The Wikileaks output is being widely and heartily condemned by those with vested interests. Sarah Palin has called for Assange to be ‘hunted down’, ‘like al Quaeda’.  So, he won’t be found for a decade at least then..

However, Bob Aisworth, previously UK Defence Secretary, noted in this interview (from 1min50sec) a very interesting point. I shall quote:

There are no secrets any more. […] Anything goes. Nobody is prepared to take authority that you should not disclose this or should not tell people this and things systematically leak, and one must assume, whether you’re a politician or a security planner that anything and everything, every scrap of advice that you do is going to wind up in the public domain, not in 30 years time, but tomorrow or even later on today, and you have to do your business in that way, effectively, it’s as simple as that.

Mr Aisworth goes on to suggest that this will be damaging for the way diplomacy is done (he remains part of the old structure, but has at least seen the near-future clearly in this case). However, one could argue that it will not just be damaging, it will be absolutely and completely destructive for the way diplomacy is currently done . This can only be a Good Thing.

We may imagine a system in which there is less and less interference in the business of other nations and peoples, in which backroom deals can no longer be done to decide who invades whom and for what share of the spoils, in which influence would be curtailed, nepotism and corruption laid bare.  A system in which the state of paranoia is shifted from the populus to the existing elite, who will know that their every word is essentially broadcast to the world and there will no longer be any sub- to their -terfuge.

If all the political build-up to the Iraq invasion had been leaked at the time, it would never have happened. If all the internal motions of the gravy train that is the European Union and Council Of Europe were broadcast and available for dissection, the system would rapidly dissolve in its own digestive juices. At the very least, the populace may be reduced to pleading stupidity should they then allow these things to continue, but they would no longer be able to plead ignorance.

Business will, by necessity, be carried out on a small scale, with the requisite security controls in place. Business will no longer be allowed to exert self-serving interest over public servants – directing policies and law-making to their own benefit – and neither would government be able to interfere with business.

There is already an enormous propaganda war begun by those who stand to lose most from the “novyi glasnost”, from those who will be seen as naked emperors during the perestroika that will surely follow. We will be, and already are being, told that life cannot go on this way, that secretive dealings are the only way to maintain trust and international relationships, that secrets held by the few to wield power over the many are the only way to maintain a happy life.  “Go back to bed, your government is in control. Watch [$retarded_reality_show_for_retards]” (to misquote Bill Hicks).   These lies, that only through secretive government can one achieve happiness, are as much a fairy story as the ugly, evil troll lurking beneath the bridge.  An horrific fear existing simply to scare you away from the lush meadow on the other side. All that is required to break the fear is one small billy-goat… and one big billy-goat can destroy it forever.

Additional:  Should you require any evidence that They are extremely concerned with this situation, and the potential harm it may cause their future ability to do business in the way to which they have become accustomed (i.e. in secret, doing as they please), please note that there have been calls for Julian Assange to be assassinated, and he has already been branded a rapist (in a very poor quality smear) in order to alienate him from the public.  The person responsible for bringing the comments of public servants into the public arena has been branded a traitor and may be executed for his actions. In addition, the Wikileaks servers are being attacked, both digitally and politically.

All this is being done not to punish Wikileaks for facilitating this release, but instead is only to persuade any future leakers that it may not be in their best interest to do so.  Very reminiscent of the way North Korea, China, Iran et al. deal with dissent to prevent it spreading, isn’t it?

The boat is well and truly rocked!

Iceland: more statist fail in the guise of protecting freedom

Friday, February 19th, 2010

Iceland is at a unique crossroads.

So is everywhere else, but this situation is unique only in size not nature.

Because of an economic meltdown in the banking sector,

Without saying what the precise nature and cause of this ‘meltdown’ is, you will never be able to solve this problem.

a deep sense is among the nation that a fundamental change is needed in order to prevent such events from taking place again.

You will never be able to change anything correctly without knowing the cause of your problems.

At such times it is important to seek a collective future vision and take a course that will bring the nation and the parliament closer together.

FAIL.

It is violent collectivism the Icelandic state that the root cause of your problems, Icelandic people!

On February 16th a parliamentary resolution will be filed at the Icelandic parliament suggesting that Iceland will position itself legally with regard to the protection of freedoms of expression and information. This suggestion for a future vision has sparked great enthusiasm both within the parliament and among those it has been introduced to.

FAIL.

The state cannot create rights. Freedom of expression is the right of all men. When there is no state, you have this freedom by default. There is no reason why a state free Iceland cannot be a data haven for all free people everywhere, who pay for the privilege of hosting their information on servers owned by Icelanders. You do not need a state to protect this right. Also, if other states where servers are housed decide to block Icelandic IPs, what are you going to do about it?

The main goal with the proposal is to task the government with finding ways to strengthen freedom of expression around world and in Iceland, as well as providing strong protections for sources and whistleblowers.

We have heard this before; when the state says it wants to strengthen something, they actually mean they want to regulate and destroy it. There should be no laws whatsoever regulating speech. That means no laws controlling the contents of any server or publisher with equipment installed in Iceland.

To this end the legal environment should be explored in such a way that the goals can be defined, and changes to law or new law proposals can be prepared. The legal environments of other countries should be considered, with the purpose of assembling the best laws to make Iceland a leader of freedoms of expression and information. We also feel it is high time to establish the first Icelandic international prize: The Icelandic Freedom of Expression Award.

This is completely absurd. First of all, who is going to define these goals? The state; the very people who claim the power to be able to give and take away rights; think about it, all the time the Icelandic state has either had or not had laws about this on its books, were you or were you not free to host whatever you like? Why all of a sudden should the decision of a few people unlock your rights, or extend them? These people have no business telling anyone what they can or cannot do with their computers. Who they connect those computers to, what is on them, who controls them; none of this is the business of the state.

They say they are going to take into account the legal environments of other countries… what, like Saudi Arabia? If I were an Icelander, I would rather not leave my freedom to communicate in the hands of these incompetent and immoral people, whose dangerous vaguearies (yes, ‘vaguearies’) will end up curtailing my freedoms.

As for establishing a price for Freedom of Expression, freedom of expression is a prize in itself, you dullards.

This proposal does not belong to any single group or party, but should be considered a joint project of all parliamentarians to find a harmonious tone of reconciliation in order to pull the nation out of these difficulties with something to achieve together.

Tones of reconciliation will never and have never put out fires. The problems of iceland need to be addressed once and for all. Violent collectivism (if I were you) should be abandoned completely and permanently. Fiat currency, fractional reserve banking and your corrupt state should be abandoned permanently. You can then start to build the sort of place that will be the envy of the world, which will attract billions in investment and the brightest people in the world.

We have already been in touch with, and introduced the proposal to, various interest groups whom this new legislation package might affect, including industry, media and civil society. So far we have only received positive feedback from all levels.

They are all stakeholders in the state; its no surprise that they are for it. Industry uses the violence of the state to destroy competition and steal the money of the population. Media is licensed by the state, uses it to keep rivals out and steal money from the public. The same goes for ‘civil society’, who, despite the definition, exist as creatures of the state, especially the fake charities and other organisations, that receive stolen loot from the violent state.

A keen interest has developed among the foreign press in relation to this legislative proposal, perhaps because all over the world the freedom to write news is increasingly being smothered. In their mind Iceland could become a reverse to tax haven: a journalism haven.

This is interesting language isn’t it?

Tax havens exist to protect the rights of the individual against the predatory and violent state; how is it that protecting free speech is different to protecting a man’s right to his own property? A haven for journalism is exactly and precisely the same as a tax haven; both of the exist to protect the rights of the individual against the predations of the state.

If you needed proof of the bogus nature of this adventure, that is surely it.

Here it comes…

The suggestions in the proposal for a legislative package would transform the possibilities for growth in various areas. Iceland could become an ideal environment for Internet-based international media and publishers to register their services, start-ups, data centers and human rights organizations. It could be a lever for the economy and create new work employment opportunities.

THERE!

They want people to ‘REGISTER’ their services; why on earth should anyone have to register their service with the Icelandic state? Web hosting is a PRIVATE CONTRACT between the owner of hardware and an individual or other entity; there is no need for the state to interpose itself in this PRIVATE ARRANGEMENT. And you must remember; if the state can REGISTER (in other words, LICENSE your website) it can also DEREGISTER your site if they choose – that translates to “shut you down and take you off line”.

This is not guaranteed protection of freedom of speech, this is the state colonising a previously free and private set of services so that it can find a rich stream of fees to keep its disgusting leech body alive.

If this proposal became a reality it could improve democracy and transparency in Iceland, as firm grounding would be made for publishing, whilst improving Iceland’s standing in the international community.

http://immi.is/

Democracy is illegitimate state violence, and Icelanders should abandon it. Without a state, there would be no need for transparency, since that opaque and evil entity that ruined and ruins people’s lives in Iceland would be gone.

Iceland’s standing in the international community is of no concern to Icelanders, who if they have any sense, want only freedom, no state and sound money. If they have those, their reputation amongst free people will skyrocket, attracting, as I said above, investment and brains. The phrase, “The international community” actually means the opinion of the rulers in other states. They are just as illegitimate and violent as the operators Icelandic government’s apparatus; who CARES what they think, everyone with two brain cells in every other state from Greece outwards is desperate to get rid of their state and the violent thieves that man the levers of them.

Once again it is perfectly clear; the answers to any particular problem will not come from more government, or the state. They just want more legislation, registration, controls and leech streams to further entrench and embed themeless in the lives of every person.

They lie reflexively, steal, murder and destroy, and anyone who is for them is a FOOL!

State your preference

Friday, September 25th, 2009

Yet another politician fails to understand the problem of the BBC:

BBC ought to ‘actively look for some Conservatives to be part of their news-gathering team’, says shadow minister

The shadow culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, […] speaking at a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch today, said the BBC had acknowledged that those who wanted to work there had centre-left views and quoted its former political editor, Andrew Marr, who in 2007 described the corporation as having an “innate liberal bias”.
[…]

Guardian

Any political bias from a publicly funded broadcaster is a bad thing, but inevitable. The real issue is not that the BBC should engage in discrimination to ensure ‘balanced reporting’ but that a broadcaster is funded by a coercive licensing system and there is still a State broadcaster (i.e. one mandated by a Royal charter).

In fact as part of a broadly market based nation any sense of balance or ‘reality’ is compromised by reliance on what is essentially tax revenue – and it shows in the broadcasting.

As the State broadcaster it is no wonder that people with a bias towards State provision of services work there. Its governing structure is like a mini House of Lords; Government suggested officials being appointed with no public accountability.

The funding of the BBC through coercion has a noticeable effect on its broadcasting which is, especially the news, broadly antagonistic to private enterprise and supportive of governmental intervention in peoples affairs (viz. any article in the last year on economics).

If the BBC financed itself through a market mechanism (subscription, pay per view, commercials, syndication, investment options, etc.) then there would be no need for it to be ‘balanced’ or to address MPs concerns that their party is not fairly represented – it would be freed from the need to make checks and balances to its reporting and it would be free to interrogate politicians to a greater extent.

Naturally the BBC points to the poor programming by ITV and obvious bias of SKY when you make these points and it says it would degenerate to their level. There is no reason to expect this to be true unless their journalists and programme makers are so woeful they cannot survive competitively.

A report commissioned by the corporation in June 2007 found that while there was no evidence of conscious bias, “individuals exercise on occasion a largely unconscious self-censorship out of a misguided attempt to be ‘correct’ in their thinking”.
[…]

The problem with self-censorship and attempts at ‘impartiality’ is that these attempts are based on the perception of the broadcaster/journalist (and their working environment) and so the process is flawed. It is far better for journalists to report fully as they see the situation and any bias to be apparent and ripe for criticism (as in print media). A self-censoring mind is not one that can take on board new information unless it fits with the prepared template it cannot evaluate new information correctly – it cannot learn and therefore it cannot enable learning. Hence a self-censoring reporter censors not just themselves but against their whole audience.

“I think the important thing with the BBC is that it belongs to all of us. We have these debates because it is very important that the BBC is representative. […]

The BBC does not ‘belong’ to all of us, the public cannot sell their ‘share’ or demand changes of its content, it is not ‘property’.
The BBC cannot be representative (of the public) because individuals cannot truly represent others, it should stop trying and it should raise money in a way that its bias can be accepted, i.e. privately and without coercion.

Christopher Hart Pwned by Old Holborn

Monday, July 20th, 2009

Right, that’s it. We now have a new category called ‘TC TI KB’ (The Cancer That Is Killing Britain) I would pronounce it, “Tick Tea Kay Bee”…. but thats just me:

Can a film critic claim to be libertarian while calling for the banning of a film he hasn’t watched?

This (oxy)moron thinks so.

There’s a new film out filled with sex and violence. Sounds like fun. I know there are those who think Libertarians would have infant-school day trips to watch it, but not so. It would be the parents’ responsibility to decide whether their child can watch it and once they’re old enough to join the Army, they’re old enough to make their own decisions. Joining the Army can be a life or death decision. No bigger decision is possible so if they’re judged old enough for that, they’re old enough for anything. Currently the Army takes recruits at 16 and a half years old and they could be killed defending the country before they’re old enough to go into the booze aisle of a supermarket. If you think that makes sense, I have a very nice bridge for sale.

Back to our authoritarian libertarian, Christopher Hart.

A film which plumbs new depths of sexual explicitness, excruciating violence and degradation has just been passed as fit for general consumption by the British Board of Film Classification.
General consumption? You mean they’ll shelve it with Disney films?

They have given the film an 18 certificate.

Aha, this is the restricted general consumption that goes along with compulsory volunteering, killing in the name of peace and A* grades without knowing the subject – also known as ‘freedom is slavery, war is peace, ignorance is strength’ in that order. I see.

As we all know, this is meaningless nowadays in the age of the DVD because sooner or later, thanks to the gross irresponsibility of some parents, any film that is given general release will be seen by children.
Ah, but Libertarianism is all about responsibility. Corrupting children harms them, and the central tenet of Libertarianism, ’cause no harm to others’, is therefore violated and the parents will be held responsible for their actions. As it is, they aren’t allowed to take responsibility, so many of them don’t. Besides, films like A Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist, Hellraiser and much stronger stuff is all on DVD now. If parents are likely to let their kids watch this one (which I doubt many would) then those kids have already seen some blood and boobs. I’m not saying it’s right, I’m saying it’s happened already.

You do not need to see Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (which is released later this week) to know how revolting it is.

Actually, I would need to see it to know how revolting it is. There’s no other way to judge. I’m not going to take your word for it just because you didn’t like it.

I haven’t seen it myself, nor shall I

Huh? So you’re telling me I shouldn’t be allowed to watch a film you have decided is utterly without merit, and you haven’t even watched it yourself? How did you come to this conclusion, pray tell?

and I speak as a broad-minded arts critic, strongly libertarian in tendency.

You’re not sounding very libertarian here. You’re sounding New Labour to the core, I’m afraid. Are you trying to give the impression that libertarianism is the same as Labour, Tories, Lib Dems etc? It’s an interesting new approach but it’s not working.

But merely reading about Antichrist is stomach-turning, and enough to form a judgment.

Is it? Depends who wrote what you’re reading, wouldn’t you say? Someone who didn’t like it, wrote a review and exaggerated? Someone in PR thought it might be a good idea to hype it up? The British Board of Film Censors actually watched it and let it through. They didn’t rely on second-hand reports. Neither will I. As a ‘libertarian critic’, neither should you. At this point I’d like to ask – isn’t watching films your, ah, job?

The husband and wife go to stay in a log cabin to recover from their grief. There, horrors the likes of which I have never witnessed unfold in graphic detail.

Well of course you’ve never witnessed them. You’ve never watched the film. You don’t know what these horrors are, how they are portrayed, whether they are on screen or off screen, nothing. Yet you deride the film and call yourself libertarian!

Now the anonymous moral guardians of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), in their infinite wisdom, have passed this foul film for general consumption

But you don’t like it, so the anonymous moral guardians are wrong. We must all bow to the Morals of Hart, for they are superior to ours.

Oh, and he doesn’t miss the ‘for the cheeldren’ part…

Another bizarre but typical judgment from this panel of experts whose names we don’t even know (and so we don’t even know if they are parents).

No, they are Augustine monks watching films on a remote Scottish island in a cinema powered by harnessing lightning with a big machine run by a hunchback called Igor. I don’t know if they are parents either but odds are, some of them have children. But we don’t know their names, remember, because Hart has said so twice. Then he says –

We do know that its president, Sir Quentin Thomas, gets £28,000 for 25 days’ work a year. Nice job if you can get it.

How can this be? The name nobody knows is here, in print before our eyes. What dark magic is this? And he earns £28,000 a year for 25 days of work. Shocking. He could be on triple that if he was an MP. But we cannot possibly know this man’s name, salary or working hours because he is an anonymous moral guardian. Mr. Hart, meet Mr. Logic. You haven’t met before.

I tried to find out more from the Institute, but to my small surprise they disdained to reply. But you can be sure that they in turn are funded by the EU and so by my taxes – and yours.

Possibly. But you’re assuming here, not declaring a definite truth. It would be wrong to carry on as if your assumption were true.

How do you feel about that? If not shocked, then weary, furious, disgusted? Well you can complain all you like, but no one is listening. Our arts mandarins, along with the rest of our lofty liberal elite, don’t work like that.

What, you mean how do I feel about your assumption that the film was paid for by taxes when you present no evidence? Shocked, perhaps. How would I feel if the film actually was funded by taxes? Well, our taxes are spent on much more wasteful and pointless things than films so I don’t mind all that much, actually.

Oh, and I don’t agree that our elites are ‘liberal’ in any sense of the word other than the doublethink one.

How odd that while government-appointed health czars are so obsessed with anything that might harm the nation’s physical wellbeing – hanging flower baskets, conkers, too much sunshine, not enough sunshine – any concern with the nation’s moral or spiritual well-being has completely vanished.

Ah, Mr. Pretend Libertarian, you seek to justify adding more control to our lives by saying ‘well, all that stuff is controlled so we should control this too’. That is not libertarian, that’s insidious Righteous creeping totalitarianism, which is what we’re going through now. Those things you mention cannot harm the nation’s well-being, only the individual’s, and the individual should be allowed to assess their own risks and make their own choices. You use these spurious examples to justify control of the entire population’s morality. Specifically, everyone must think as you do or they are immoral.

As for this –

Censorship today seems to have been reduced to the feeble principle that if it doesn’t harm children, then it should be allowed.

As soon as it’s released on DVD, Antichrist will harm children anyway, deeply and irrevocably. But when did this principle of protecting only children arise anyway? What about harming adults?
He’s extended ‘For the cheeldren’ into ‘For the adults too’ and he calls himself libertarian! He wants to decide what ADULTS can and cannot watch! Look, some people won’t want to see this film because it contains sex and violence and that’s fine. Nobody is going to pin their eyelids open and force them to watch it. It’s a matter of choice. A Libertarian would understand that.

A Righteous would not.

If I were to see Antichrist, I don’t believe for a moment that it would incite me into copycat violent behaviour or make me a danger to others. But it would poison my mind and imagination, with explicit, ferocious scenes of sexual violence that would stay with me for ever.

Then don’t watch it. Some of us have minds made of stronger stuff. We haven’t all lived permanently comfortable lives and some of the stuff I’ve seen – without choosing to – in real life means that nothing on film is going to ‘poison my mind’. I can tell what’s real and what’s not. Most adults can.

Isn’t that good enough reason to ban it, or at least demand extensive cuts?

No. Just because you don’t like a film you’ve never watched, funded from a source you imagine is taxes but might not be, passed as okay by nameless people you then name and give salary details for, is not a good enough reason for a ban. You don’t like the sound of it. Fair enough. Don’t watch it. Do NOT attempt to control everyone else’s morals and then have the gall to call yourself libertarian.

But have we – that is to say, the hesitant, fumbling, comfortably cushioned, value-free Leftish elite who now govern us – got the guts? I doubt it.
All I can say is – wow. What planet has this man been on for the last decade? Have the government got the guts to ban something? Look around, Righteous Hart. They’ve banned pretty much everything and you, calling yourself Libertarian, want to ban some more!

It seems ‘Libertarian’ has become a ‘cool tag’ now, and is used here by one of the most ferocious Righteous I’ve come across. He clearly has no idea what ‘libertarian’ means.

Here’s a clue for the clueless, Righteous Hart. It does not mean ‘total control’.

[…]

Old Holborn

Well said, I have to say.

I would like to distribute to every idiot that calls himself a Libertarian but who so clearly is not one, a copy of For ‘A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto’. There are several strains of libertarianism out there, but this Hart fellow is none of them. Not even close.

And you all know what we think of the BBFC.

A Handbook for Deniers

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Since the esteemed climatologist Al Gore declared that “the debate is over,” it seems the number of scientists denying both this fact and the accuracy of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis has continuously increased. Perhaps the “skeptics” have found the courage to speak out at this point when AGW has become universal religion and the movement’s leaders are calling for “global governance.” The threat from this movement is much clearer now and the ultimate goal of the AGW prophets is finally spelled out, which of course has nothing to do with environment or climate.

The “global warming” movement is now calling for enormous “investments” in certain public policies and new political institutions to supervise people’s and firms’ emissions of CO2. To most scientists in climatology this change in the movement’s agenda is most likely unexpected; if you are not used to the political game you are not prepared when your opponent makes his politically obvious (in normal situations denoted “irrational”) move.

Of course, the debate is not primarily between scientists even though such debates do exist. The literature in peer-reviewed journals in the relevant scientific disciplines have since long disproved the politicized Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios. It has even been established that the global warming according to reliable data sources ended in 2001, despite the fact that CO2 emissions are greater than ever and continue to increase.

The AGW hypothesis with man-made climate change through emissions of CO2 and other “greenhouse” gasses lives on, however, as politicians and the media find in it an extremely powerful thesis that makes people feel both vulnerable and defenseless and desperate for “help.” Politicians need a threat to increase their realm of power and make the masses cling to their belief in government, and the media needs disasters to attract readers and viewers (selling real news is a long-gone idea in mainstream media). To be honest, climate change is the perfect issue for the fascist state – it is a win-win game for powerful politicians, their buddies in the media, and big business.

Yet more people seem to realize that things don’t add up and that there is another side to the story, which is not generally allowed to be told. Even though most people still believe “we” are to blame, a thesis we are fed from cradle to grave by our all-too-mighty government through public schooling and media outlets, the number of people doubting the truthfulness of the theory is growing. This is why the mainstream posse needed to increase the level of blame in the overall blame game; people doubting man-made global warming were compared with holocaust deniers. People with no connection whatsoever with the study of weather and climate did not hesitate to join their fellow state worshipers, like the ignorant-of-economics-economist Professor Krugman.

Most of us laymen AGW skeptics have been dismissed with the proclaimed truth that “scientists all agree” (which really means “talking heads all agree”), but a lot of people are nevertheless beginning to doubt. We may be approaching a tipping point, at which politicians will be desperate to find another made-up disaster to rally support for their destructive policies. In other words, this may be an opportunity to not only get rid of the climate change scare – but also force the “noble” savages back to their Platonic caves.

One way of doing so is to be ready for and engage in the discussion – and do so wisely. This is the purpose, I believe, of Joanne Nova’s comic-book-style The Skeptic’s Handbook (PDF), in which she describes how to “[r]ise above the mud-slinging of the Global Warming debate.” The book shows how to use the existing and scientific facts properly and how not to accept non-answers such as referring to authority or cheap ad hominems. It also supplies the facts and the only points that matter. It is a short manual for constructively pursuing debates with AGWers and in that sense it is truly a “skeptic’s handbook.”

Perhaps Newton was right in that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” and that this is applicable to public political discourse. There is just a slight delay between the action and the reaction, just like there is a proven time lapse between increase in temperature to increase in CO2.

by Per Bylund

From Lew Rockwell.com

Shining Right Back At The Stars In A Freedom Unknown Thereto

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

It appears that the Swedish film censor is to be shut down and replaced by an ‘advisory body’ similar to the BBFC. However the interesting thing is that, unlike in the UK, submissions to the new board may be voluntary and so the cash-cow of vetting all movies is domesticated:

The inquiry also proposes that film companies be allowed to submit their films for review by the new agency voluntarily. However, films not reviewed by the new agency would automatically be classified as only appropriate for viewers 15 years and older.

This is a reasonably good thing as it means only films aimed at children will need to be classified, an improvement would be to make classifications advisory so that parents can decide what films they allow their children to see.
Unclassified films for adults are then free from restrictions and interventions (excepting real harm and exploitation which would be subject to existing laws anyway), this seems like a good thing!

Additionally just as health and safety standards can be applied without state intervention, so too can film classification.

Henry Porter: Intellectual Monopolist

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

Henry Porter has now completely discredited himself, with a shameful piece of luddite nonsense masquerading as a call for justice:

If indeed a new era of global responsibility has come into being with measures that actually restrain banks and isolate tax havens,

See this. The politics of sour grapes is alive and well at the grauniad. Irrational, illogical and destructive, like the rest of the ideas in this misguided, buggy whip cracking article.

it may be time for the planet’s dominant economic powers to focus on the destructive, anti-civic forces of the internet.

The greatest invention of the 21st century, equivalent in importance to the invention of the printing press, characterized as ‘destructive’ and ‘anti-civic’. The greatest force for empowering the little guy, thanks to which the playing field is made forever flatter; this is a ‘bad thing’. A set of devices and protocols that allow you to have a private conversation with anyone, anywhere in the world for free…and all the other myriad things it can do and will do. This is something ‘to be stopped’.

Only a total computer illiterate, luddite, anti-freedom, anti-human imbecile could believe such a thing.

Exactly 20 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the blueprint for the world wide web, the internet has become the host to a small number of dangerous WWMs – worldwide monopolies that sweep all before them with exuberant contempt for people’s rights, their property and the past.

The internet and the World Wide Web are two separate things, as this commenter points out:

1) Tim Berners-Lee created the WORLD WIDE WEB, which is a distinctly different thing than the Internet. The World Wide Web is a layer on top of the internet that provides the websites that we see, but the largest portion of the internet is not visible, and does not interact with home computers. The internet is hardware, software, protocols, servers, undersea cables, standards, repeaters, satellites and so forth, all operating on the same protocols (IP, Internet Protocol). Tim Berners-Lee certainly created a revolution with the World Wide Web, but the creation of the Internet is an even grander achievement, which took decades, cost billions, and was mostly the responsibility of three groups: AT&T, Cisco Systems, and The United States Department of Defense.

In the strictest sense, the internet was born in 1971, just under 20 years before Sir Berner-Lee’s breakthrough, when many of the standards and theories that became Internet Protocol were developed.

2) Google is at the very center of the information-economy, and to say it produces nothing is ridiculous. They’re purpose is to effectively organize, catalog and make searchable the sum of the information of mankind. Everything they have constructed has been purposed about this goal, from their basic search engines to Google Earth.

One day we will live in a world where everything that is quantifiable knowledge will be contained and indexed by Google. And it will be a good day for mankind, because all that information will be equally available, so long as you speak the English language.

What Google does, to put it stiffly, is vastly more important than some novelist exploring how much the human condition absolutely sucks.

Thanks to the commenter called ‘Netwrk’.

Google is the most prominent WWM,

Is that something like WMD (Weapon of Mass Destruction) I wonder? Hmmmmmmm…. Guilt by acronym association!

but let’s start with an American site that is making a name for itself in straightforward misappropriation. Scribd.com offers free downloads of every kind of book, magazine, brochure, guide, research paper and pamphlet to 55 million readers every month. Many have been uploaded illegally. Last week the publishers of JK Rowling, Ken Follett and Aravind Adiga took action to remove books that had been illegally published on the site.

First of all, Scribd is a wonderful service. It is being used by the computer literate to disseminate knowledge. Only the completely ignorant, imagination-less luddites are against it.

Mr. Porter, you are on the wrong side of history. You need, as a matter of priority, to read ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly‘. The arguments you put forward against ‘piracy’ are from an imaginary world before the internet (like buggy whip salesmen before the motor car). The ‘community’ you speak of would be much better off living in a world without patents and copyrights, and Against Intellectual Monopoly proves it. The new services like Scribd, are clearly more beneficial than harmful, even with the present copyright regime in place. No matter how loud you shout, and complain, copyright, like alcohol prohibition is dead, and we are all better off for it.

To add injury to insult, your type of ‘thinking’ is disrupting the flow of materials that are out of copyright. Our own Scribd account was the subject of an attack from your lobby this last week.

On our Scribd account, I publish some of our works, and other historical works that are free of copyright. Because Scribd is under attack from mentally retarded luddites, we were sent the following:

Subject:

Copyright notification

From Jason Bentley, on 2009-04-03:

Message:

Dear Irdial-Discs,

We have removed your document “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” because our text matching system determined that it was very similar to a work that has been marked as copyrighted and not permitted on Scribd.

Like all automated matching systems, our system is not perfect and occasionally makes mistakes. If you believe that your document is not infringing, please contact us at copyright@scribd.com and we will investigate the matter.

As stated in our terms of use, repeated incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your Scribd.com account and prohibit you from uploading material to Scribd.com in the future. To prevent us from having to take these steps, please delete from scribd.com any material you have uploaded to which you do not own the necessary rights and refrain from uploading any material you are not entitled to upload. For more information about Scribd.com’s copyright policy, please read the Terms of Use located at http://www.scribd.com/terms

Jason Bentley
Directory of Community Development
jason@scribd.com

People like you might believe that all works should be copyrighted forever no matter how old they are. The fact of the matter is that copyrights were originally tolerated in the belief that they served society, and rewarded the creators of content whilst promoting innovation and creativity. This is why the term of protection was short, so that the works would pass into the public domain, where they could spread and be of benefit to the public after the creators had reaped the benefit of protection via a state sanctioned monopoly over their ideas and how they could be used and copied.

The work in question above is by Adam Smith, published in 1776:

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist Adam Smith. It is a clearly written account of economics at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, as well as a rhetorical piece written for the generally educated individual of the 18th century – advocating a free market economy as more productive and more beneficial to society.

The work is credited as a watershed in history and economics due to its comprehensive, largely accurate characterization of economic mechanisms that survive in modern economics; and also for its effective use of rhetorical technique, including structuring the work to contrast real world examples of free and fettered markets.

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

In case you are unfamiliar with it.

I replied:

From Irdial-Discs,
on 2009-04-03:

Please restore this deleted document. It is in the public domain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

It would be an interesting project for Scribd to add the entire contents of the Project Guttenberg texts to your checking system, so that you can exclude documents like this from being flagged.

./akin
./irdial

Scribd.com complied:

Jason Bentley, Apr 04 10:33 pm:

Hi,

I’m sorry that our automated copyright protection system misidentified your document as infringing. We try very hard to protect the rights of authors, and sometimes our copyright robot get a little oversensitive.

I’ve restored your document and removed all references from your account.

Cheers,

Jason

***

Jason Bentley
Community Director and Copyright Agent
Scribd, Inc.

This is the sort of world Henry Porter wants; a world where everything is unavailable because of the incredibly small number of giant publishers and their prostitute luddite lackeys whining that the old days are over. At the very least, Porter is calling for a web where everything must be screened by copyright police before it is posted. This is the same voice that wants ‘civil liberties’; the very voice that is calling for a fascist regime to enforce the insanity of copyright transposed to the web.

Scribd.com complied, but what is interesting is the company’s institutional lack of guilt when the piracy was exposed.

‘Piracy’ (as it is defined today) only takes place when someone sells a book or movie; a ‘movie pirate’ is someone who copies movies onto DVDs and then sells them instead of buying discs from the manufacturer and re-selling them. People who copy movies are not ‘Pirates’, what they do is not ‘piracy’ and in fact the act of copying music, books and movies is beneficial to society even if they sell copies. Furthermore, the people who make movies, music and who write books are able to make a living without copyright laws (state enforced monopolies) in place. This might come as a shock to people like Henry Porter, who writes in the bosom of a nest of copyright brainwashed computer illiterate vipers, but it is a fact nonetheless. Against Intellectual Monopoly has some illuminating examples of why (in this case patents) are a bad thing:

In most histories, James Watt is a heroic inventor,responsible for the beginning of the industrial revolution. The facts above suggest a different interpretation. Watt is a clever inventor who, after getting one step ahead of the pack, remains ahead not by superior innovation, but by clever exploitation of the legal system. The fact that his business partner is a wealthy man with strong connections in Parliament, is not a minor help.

The evidence suggests that Watt’s efforts to use the legal system to inhibit competition set back the industrial revolution by a decade or two. The granting of the 1769 and, especially, of the 1775 patents likely delayed the mass adoption of the steam engine:innovation is stifled until his patents expire; and very few steam engines are built during the period of Watt’s legal monopoly. From the number of innovations that occur immediately after the expiration of the patent, it appears that Watt’s competitors simply waited until then before releasing their own innovations in an effort to avoid the fate of Hornblower. Also, we see that Watt’s inventive skills are badly allocated: we find him spending as much time engaging in legal action in an effort to establish and preserve a monopoly as he does in actual invention.

Indeed, this story contains most of the important elements of our argument Against Intellectual Monopoly. The sort of wasteful effort to suppress competition and obtain special privileges we have seen in Watt is one of the greatest dangers of monopoly. It is commonly referred to as rent-seeking behavior. Watt’s attempt to extend the duration of his 1769 patent is an especially egregious example of rent seeking: the patent extension is clearly unnecessary to provide incentive for the original invention, which had already taken place. On top of this, we see Watt using patents as a tool to suppress innovation by his competitors, such as Hornblower, Wasborough and others. Finally,there is the slow rate at which the steam engine was adopted be for the expiration of Watt’s patent. By keeping prices high and preventing other from producing cheaper steam engines, Boulton and Watt hampered capital accumulation and slowed economic growth. Intellectual property, as it is currently conceived, has other damaging social effects but the three listed here and exemplified in Watt’s story are the most serious ones: rent-seeking, innovation suppression, and slow-down in the process of economic growth. We shall see that Watt’s experience is the rule, not the exception.

[…]

Against Intellectual Monopoly

Anyone with even one brain cell can see the parallels between this story and the others in Against Intellectual Monopoly in the context of Google, Scribd, the services that run on the Bittorrent ecosystem and the other internet services today. The world, ‘the community’ that Porter is so eager to protect and serve would have been far better served if Watt had not been able to use government force to stop other inventors from improving the steam engine. As soon as Watt’s government granted monopoly ended, the efficiency and power of steam engines increased at a rate far greater than when Watt was able to stifle innovation with his patent, and what’s more, when his patent expired, Watt’s profits continued undiminished.

This is a very important lesson for everyone involved in any sort of creativity. We at Irdial knew instinctively that releasing our catalogue for free would benefit us more than keeping it locked up. That is why we freed our works for non commercial use in 1999. If we lived in a society where there were no copyrights at all we would gladly give up the commercial use rights in an instant.

Instead of fighting the reality, resisting the new tools and clinging on to broken models, it made sense to us to embrace it all and use it to get our works in as many places as possible. To us, it’s obvious. To people like Henry Porter, the future and its wondrous tools are a threat to be destroyed, and he doesn’t care about all the historical works that are burned in his insane quest to cleanse the internet of copyrighted works. We see the direct result of people like him in the erasure of Adam Smith’s work from Scribd.

Instead of admitting it and apologising, it issued a statement claiming Scribd possessed “industry-leading copyright management system which goes above and beyond requirements of Digital Millennium Copyright Act”.

So, Scribd should now apologize for innovating, for bringing millions of documents to millions of people, for nothing. They should apologize for having to invent a piece of filtering software thanks to lobbyist bought government pressure, which might never work accurately and which diverts time away from the software developers improving Scribd, and which diverts capital away from improving Scribd. This is totally insane, and exactly what is described in Against Intellectual Monopoly. Thanks to the luddites like Henry Porter and his distant cousin Watt, innovation is being retarded, as companies divert resources to satisfy monopolists.

That’s like a drunk driver protesting innocence because he’s covered by the best insurance company. What matters is the crime, the theft of someone else’s content, which has taken care, labour, money and expertise to publish.

This is wrong. What you are doing is protesting that the internet should not exist so that you can continue to collect a rent on your works at the expense of the entire world’s population and at the expense of the progress of mankind itself.

What matters here is that copying books is in no way ‘a crime’, is entirely beneficial to society, and in no way detracts from an authors ability to make money on the works that they have taken care, labour money and expertise to create. I have no doubt that some non-BLOGDIAL readers will not believe that this is even possible. Not only is it possible, but we have made money from giving our works away for free, and Against Intellectual Monopoly has examples in it where works that are not copyrighted have made millions for publishers; look at the case of the title The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States where the publisher (Norton) printed this rather large book at a huge profit, despite there being no copyright on the text and it being downloaded world-wide by millions of people:

[…] To be clear: what Norton received from the government was the right to publish first, and the right to use the word “authorized” in the title. What they did not get was the usual copyright – the right to exclusively publish the book. Because it is a U.S. government document, the moment it was released, other individuals, and more important, publishing houses, had the right to buy or download copies and to make and resell additional copies– electronically or in print, at a price of their choosing

[…]

Assuming that St. Martin’s has some idea of how to price a book to avoid losing money, this suggests Norton made at the very least on the order of a million dollars. We also know that their contract with the government called upon them to donate their “profits” to charity – and we know that they did in fact “donate $600,000 to support the study of emergency preparedness and terrorism prevention.”

Against Intellectual Monopoly

[…]

The point is that even if Scribd removes books, it still allows individuals to advertise services for delivering pirated books by email, which must make it the enemy of every writer and publisher in the world. In effect it has turned copyright law on its head: instead of asking publishers for permission, it requires them to object if and when they become aware of a breach.

Advertising a service is everyone’s right. The right to publish (or ‘freedom of the press’) is not ‘the right of newspapers and journalists to write what they like without restriction’. In this case, ‘The Press’ means not ‘the press corps’ but THE PRINTING PRESS as in a device to disseminate writing to a large audience. Journalists always make this mistake; they go berserk when their newspapers face censorship, but when its Bloggers or individuals who claim their right to print and distribute whatever they like, then it’s another story. Shameful.

Scribd is the friend of every writer and publisher in the world, wether they know it or not. Copyright law needs to be abolished, not just turned on its head, and the internet has made this progress begin to happen. If it does not take place before hand, the deaths of the luddites like Henry Porter and his employers and their replacement by ‘The Pirate Generation’ will spell the end of copyright, and the removal of all related legislation from the statute books. As it is, if these laws remain on the books, hundreds of millions of people will be and are being criminalized at the behest of luddites, lobbyists and the corporations they serve…people like Henry Porter.

Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community.

This is so absurd I actually LOL’d. Google makes it easy to find authors; easier than it has ever been before. It makes all sorts of research easier by orders of magnitude; every link on this page was found for me by Google. Henry Porter wants a world where this, the greatest research tool ever invented is deliberately broken, just like Scribd is being broken. This is the ‘benefit’ he wants to bring to ‘the community’, and it is laughable that he thinks that ‘commercial institutions’ work for the benefit of ‘the community’… only when they work for HIS benefit… which community PRECISELY is he talking about? I think it’s the community of published authors and publishing houses; the intellectual monopolists, who want to strangle innovation and hold humanity back.

One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

This is called ‘rent seeking‘; the artists concerned, Socialist Billy Bragg and his strange bedfellow, falsetto Robin Gibb, intellectual monopolists both, threatened Google that if they did not pay the rent for videos on YouTube they would face action. Google removes the videos, the infringement, and then is accused of ‘playing very rough’. Do they want their material infringed or do they not? They complained, and their wishes were acceded to; why are they complaining? The fact of the matter is that they want to collect rent. They would like their music to be posted and hosted on YouTube without them having to lift a finger, but they want the rent also. 22p per play is absolutely ridiculous, and if every rent seeker asked for and recieved this money, there would be no YouTube. YouTube is turning out to be one of the most potent political tools available from, the UK to Saudi Arabia. Henry Porter wants it killed so that his (completely irrational) rent seeking socialist friends can make money they do not deserve.

Socialists really are ridiculous creatures; they claim that they are for the masses being empowered, but when something comes along that gives them more power than anyone has ever had EVER, they are AGAINST IT, and want to DESTROY it. The fact is that Socialists are not for anyone other than themselves; they want to be the bosses, the controllers with absolute power. Billy Bragg is a perfect example of this. A luddite that would smash the internet so he can collect rent. Robin Gibb is at least consistent; he is a rich man who doesn’t want the party to end – at least he is honest.

It does this with impunity because it is dominant worldwide and knows the songwriters have nowhere else to go. Google is the portal to a massive audience: you comply with its terms or feel the weight of its boot on your windpipe.

This is total garbage. Google can in no way be characterized as putting a boot on anyone’s windpipe…though in the case of Billy Bragg, that would save us from hearing his ‘singing’.

Secondly, songwriters have everywhere else to go. This is because the internet is essentially infinite; they can set up their own site and sell their wares; they have had over a decade to do it, and have failed miserably to meet this new challenge. Instead of buying Napster, they destroyed it. Instead of working with Mininova and The Pirate Bay, they are trying to outlaw them. Even Apples iTunes store, where they were making money, met with fierce resistance from them. The fact of the matter is, these people, Henry Porter, Billy Bragg and the entertainment industry are collectively unintelligent and unimaginative. Were this not the case, they would have seen the opportunity for super-distribution of their works and embraced the internet at the beginning.

Despite the aura of heroic young enterprise that still miraculously attaches to the web, what we are seeing is a much older and toxic capitalist model – the classic monopoly that destroys industries and individual enterprise in its bid for ever greater profits.

That is incorrect; what we are seeing IS heroic young enterprise, being misunderstood and slandered by old rent seeking luddites, who are the REAL monopolists in this story, the Intellectual Monopolists. It is Henry Porter that is trying to destroy industry’s enterprise – new industries – Google, Scribd and all the other content services empower individual enterprise by allowing the creative to circumnavigate the luddite gatekeepers at the Guardian and the major record labels.

Google make profits and the entire world benefits from a tool unprecedented in human history, that no one has to pay for to use, and which helps authors and publishers make more money and reach more people than they ever dreamed possible. Only a total fool would be against it, and given the facts of the history and nature of copyright and patents, only the evil and utterly selfish would try to destroy it.

Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time.

This is covered by the comments on this very bad and revealing article:

2) Google is at the very center of the information-economy, and to say it produces nothing is ridiculous. They’re purpose is to effectively organize, catalog and make searchable the sum of the information of mankind. Everything they have constructed has been purposed about this goal, from their basic search engines to Google Earth.

[…]

To say that Google produces nothing is ridiculous. As many people have mentioned the search algorithms they have developed make the internet useful for millions. One might as well dismiss Dr Johnson for compiling a book of other people’s words.

Beyond search they have produced some of the easiest to use and most compelling software available. GMail, Google Maps, Google Docs and Google Calendar have reset expectations for what can be done in internet applications.

They may not be the perfect institution and I love to know if one ever existed. I want to live in a world of Newspapers and Google but if Newspapers don’t survive it won’t be Google’s fault.

[…]

“… Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time”.

This is utter blindness. It’s like arguing that the Ordinance Survey have never done anything useful, because everything on their maps was created by other people, or that Henry Ford added no value because he only shuffled around metals, wood and leather into different shapes.

Google have made searching on a vast scale incredibly easy, and they are the only company who has done so, covering everything from Ethiopian restaurants to the notebooks of Leonardo, at any time, from anywhere. In fact, for absolutely nothing, they provide me with a service worth several times more than any other company does, bar none. If this puts them in a position to earn a lot of money, good on them. If Billy Bragg would still prefer to be back in the workers’ paradise of the GDR, he’s welcome to it.

Closer to home, I note that 95+% of what the Guardian provides overlaps several times over with what is provided by the Daily Telegraph, the Irish Times, the Economist, etc, and that the marginal value of any one of these is minimal. The challenge for newspapers is to make themselves distinctively useful, (e.g. the New Yorker’s employment of Sy Hersh), rather than, like the Guardian, recycling a huge amount of content from the AP in manner that makes it, “in the final analysis, a parasite …”.

[…]

What a bitter and twisted load of oldschool, oldfashioned, defensive Fleet-Street-Journalist dinosaurian rubbish this article really is.

Just listen to the decription of the Internet and Google: “amoral”, “destructive, anti-civic”, “exuberant contempt”, “threat to livelihood of individuals”, “a parasite that creates nothing”, “delinquent”, “sociopathic”, “invaded the privacy of millions”, “needs to be stopped in its tracks”.

This is the typical rant of the dying newspaperman – yes, mate, your “power” as a “journalist” with your beholden readers IS on the wane, your influence IS falling, your role IS diminishing – I can understand why you see the Internet and Google as bad.

But this isn’t journalism – like so much we now see inthe papers against the Internet, it’s massively ill-informed, superficial, frightened, self-serving invective. I fear it will do nothing more than to confirm the authors as dinosaurs who have received the last rites.

[…]

And there you have it.

On the back of the labour of others it makes vast advertising revenues – in the final quarter of last year its revenues were $5.7bn, and it currently sits on a cash pile of $8.6bn. Its monopolistic tendencies took an extra twist this weekend with rumours that it may buy the micro-blogging site Twitter and its plans – contested by academics – to scan a vast library of books that are out of print but still in copyright.

Twitter, if they want to be bought by Google, is a private matter. It’spurchase will benefit the users of that service…in any case, that has nothing to do with the thrust of this article, intellectual monopoly. It does point however shine a light on Henry Porter’s hatred of the rich and innovative, his sour grapes politics. As for ‘contested by academics’, this is ‘some people say‘. That is the company that Henry Porter keeps.

One of the chief casualties of the web revolution is the newspaper business, which now finds itself laden with debt (not Google’s fault) and having to give its content free to the search engine in order to survive.

Newspapers are dying because they do not provide what people need. If the Guardian provided what people want, the truth, then it would be a thriving business. The fact of the matter is, as the commenter says above, the Guardian’s content overlaps with every other newspapers content. they run the same stories, from the same point of view, and everyone is sick of it. This is why readers have turned away from newspapers:

Definitely the most ill-informed piece of propaganda I have read in a very long time and a great example of why nobody wants to pay for newspapers

Well said commenter. This is an absurd article that flies in the face of reality and the truth; why should anyone PAY to be lied to when they can get the truth for free and unfiltered from the internets?

Newspapers can of course remove their content but then their own advertising revenues and profiles decline. In effect they are being held captive and tormented by their executioner, who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google they would be almost certainly in breach of competition law.

Newspapers, if they were to remove their content, would be committing suicide. They should do this, and go out like an hero instead of whining like spoiled brats. They have executed themselves by prostituting their non advertising column inches for anyone with money, and the Guardian is the biggest whore of them all. Were newspapers to combine to take on Google no one would notice; the content in all the papers is the same, and so it is already like there is only one newspaper… no breach of competition rules is possible between those bird cage liners.

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” A moment’s thought must tell us that he is still right: newspapers are the only means of holding local hospitals, schools, councils and the police to account, and on a national level they are absolutely essential for the good functioning of democracy.

I think this Thomas Jefferson quote is more appropriate:

“Knowledge is like a candle. When you light your candle from mine, my light is not diminished. It is enhanced and a larger room is enlightened as a consequence.” Thomas Jefferson

Quote found by Google of course.

Sharing knowledge is just like sharing a light from a candle; Henry Porter and the intellectual monopolists want us all to live in darkness.

If, at a time of profound challenges, newspapers fall out with Google, it could be pretty serious for British society, which is why I referred earlier to anti-civic forces.

British society is in trouble because the newspapers have utterly failed to raise the alarm about the police state. They have failed to rally the people into revolt. They have failed in the very task that Henry Porter believes is their raison d’etre and sacred duty. The internet has done more than any newspaper to galvanize inform and solidify the revolt against the police state, as we are well aware; even email circulars are more powerful than newspapers in properly informing the public. Then there are the Blogs which have changed the game entirely. And now, YouTube, which shamed television news into playing catch up on one of the most important speeches delivered in front of a sitting Prime Minster ever. That is a blog post, by the way, NOT a newspaper article. No, newspapers are an irrelevance now thanks to their prostituting their power, and this article, this shameless, vulgar piece of transparent propaganda, is a perfect example of it.

Of course the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 – now reckoned to be the world’s most powerful brand – does not offer any substitute for the originators of content nor does it allow this to touch its corporate conscience. That is probably because one detects in Google something that is delinquent and sociopathic, perhaps the character of a nightmarish 11-year-old.

The only delusional people in this story are Henry Porter and the lobby he represents and is shilling for. The only people without conscience are the ones who would retard or destroy man’s progress for their personal profit. It is Henry Porter who is acting like a breast fed 11-year-old, whining that the world is changing and he can no longer get his ‘bitty’….”I want my rent mummy!!! WAAAAH WAAAHHH WAHHHHH

This particular 11-year-old has known nothing but success and does not understand the risks, skill and failure involved in the creation of original content, nor the delicate relationships that exist outside its own desires and experience.

Henry Porter is painfully unaware about the history and true nature of intellectual monopoly, and how it is damaging to society. He wants to prevent failure of fossilized and sclerotic businesses by strangling innovators so that methods can never change and business and culture remain in stasis.

There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny.

Henry Porter perfectly conveys spoiled and ignorant immorality that poses as righteous indignation. He chastises Google for obeying the laws of other countries while whining that Google does not better obeying the insane laws of the UK. This is hypocrisy, but when it comes to China, all journalists at the Guardian are in the same boat.

And, naturally, it did not exercise Google executives that Street View not only invaded the privacy of millions and made the job of burglars easier but somehow laid claim to Britain’s civic spaces. How gratifying to hear of the villagers of Broughton, Bucks, who prevented the Google van from taking pictures of their homes.

And yet, all the journalists who jumped on Google for Streetview, which everyone can use equally, did not make so much noise when the CCTV started to go up, which no one can access but the state. How is it that CCTV, ANPR etc is not as bad as Google Streetview? Henry Porter has been making the right noises about CCTV to be sure, but the newspapers as a whole have totally FAILED to make the right noises about CCTV. Google Streetview is NOTHING compared to the real-time CCTV and ANPR that the state has, and yet, where is the universal moral outrage? Where are the pig ignorant little Britain villagers taking down the surveillance cameras en masse? Oh, I remember, Henry Porter says:

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always believed that the democratic state must be given power to act on behalf of us

[…]

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1499

which means that he is FOR CCTV as long as the democratic state is behind it, acting on behalf of us. Those villagers are FOR CCTV as long as its the government behind them! They are all as thick as two short planks.

We could do worse than follow their example for this brat needs to be stopped in its tracks and taught about the responsibilities it owes to content providers and copyright holders.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/05/google-internet-piracy?showallcomments=true

I am happy to say that articles like this are the death rattle of the pure evil that is newspaper journalism.

I am also happy to report that the majority of the comments on his article are entirely against it, for all the right reasons.

Farewell newspaper journalism, don’t let the door slam behind you.

Whistleblowers: get some gloves!

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

Whilst trawling around on the interwebs, I cam across this amazing story, and a reason to award some brass balls:

Up Yours Carter-Ruck

Guido is with the in-laws for Christmas and only has internet access via a dial-up or his mobile. So the megabyte size attachment from libel solicitors Carter-Ruck received a few days ago has only this morning been downloaded. Guido emailed Carter-Ruck back at the time to explain he was driving and only had mobile internet access, so what were the contents of the attachment? No reply from Carter-Ruck.

The email contains a Court Order by Mr Justice Tugendhat, threatening Guido with contempt of Court if Guido even reveals the existence of the Order.

Guido believes that he is not the only leading blogger to receive the injunction. He is however the only one willing to break it. Unfortunately for Carter-Ruck they seem to have forgotten that since 1922 the orders of British Judges have been happily ignored by us Irish in our own country. So Carter-Ruck have merely tipped Guido off to a case of which he was previously unaware and Guido will, as a consequence, now share what little he knows with with his co-conspirators as a Christmas treat.

Somebody (unknown) hacked into the email accounts of Zac Goldsmith and his wife Sherazade, Jemima Khan also appears to have had her email accessed. They thieves tried to sell the illegally obtained information to the Sunday Mirror and the Mail on Sunday. Not really that interesting politically, though Goldsmith is a Conservative candidate and presumably Zac is his father’s son…

This particular case isn’t really a matter of principle and Guido isn’t claiming it as such. As fascinating as Zac’s love life probably is, it isn’t really hypocritical. It does illustrate how Britain is increasingly heading towards the French situation of a politically cowed client media injuncted and restricted by privacy laws from reporting on the rich and powerful. The government has also been making a lot of noise about curtailing online publishers and Stephen Carter is gearing up with legislation to attack bloggers. Freedom of the press is soon going to be even more curtailed in Britain.

So we will have a situation where offshore bloggers broadcast the truth to Britons in much the same way as Radio Free Europe kept the citizens of the Soviet Empire informed. The legislation won’t succeed, only Chinese style internet censorship will prevent the truth getting out. Is that the path politicians want to go down?

Guido Fawkes

Now there is a man who has a pair. Sadly, he calls Scientists, Architects and Engineers who have learned that the official story of the mythical ‘911’ is false, “Troofers“.

But hey, no one is perfect, right right right?

Here is a link to the Wikileaks page.

It is right that people should not have their private email sold to and then printed in newspapers. It is however, entirely wrong that secrete (yes, ‘secrete’) hearings and secret orders be used to silence people. Those same secret orders, like the National Security Letters being used in the USA are immoral and WILL ALWAYS result in an abuse. These National Security Letters have been used to stop librarians from disclosing that the government has investigated who has been borrowing what books from the library. When you get one of these letters, you are not allowed to say that you have received one.

The only correct response to these letters and orders is the one that Guido Fawkes made; to immediately release it to the public. If everyone who got one did this, they would be rendered useless.

This takes us to the subject of leaks and the recent government plans stupid idea to get into your hard drive remotely.

One of the comments at that SpyBlog post lead to this site that has a list of what to do’s to be an effective and safe whistleblower. One of the tips is as follows:

Anti-forensics precautions

  • Licking a Postage Stamp is likely to leave both your fingerprints on it, and to preserver a sample of your DNA from your saliva.
  • Sealing a letter envelope or parcel affixing a postage stamp using sticky adhesive tape or glue etc. will also tend to trap possibly identifiable fibres, dust particles, hairs, skin cells and fingerprints (which may contain sufficient DNA for analysis) , or even a characteristic scent which could be used by tracker dogs.

Commercial Postal Box rental, either from a private company or for an extra fee from the state postal service, has its place, but there is always a financial paper trail to the person who rents the box, and often CCTV video footage of anyone picking up mail from such boxes.

Wikileaks.org offers a supposedly secure Postal Whistleblowing service, for whistleblower leaks to them, but they do not seem to recommend many anti-forensics precautions. except regarding the serail numbers embedded into batches of CDROMs, and the unique Recorder IDs which most CD or DVD burners embed in each copy which they produce.

Interesting…lets think some more about it.

Most stamps today come in the form of a white adhesive label, laser printed behind the counter and then stuck on to your mail by the Post Office worker:

As you can see the date is on there as well as a serial number.

The other types of stamp are the ones that are sold in booklets and which have peel adhesive as the backing. Licking stamps rarely happens today, but it is good advice not to lick stamps nonetheless.

A bigger threat to you is the time-stamp of these stamps combined with the CCTV that is found in most Offices. In order to see who mailed the package, all they have to do is look at the time-stamp from the serial number, and then go back to the time index on the CCTV footage to see your face.

If you want to minimize the effectiveness of a forensic attack, use gloves. Use gloves when you buy your envelopes. Use gloves when you make your photocopies in a public place. Use gloves when you buy your adhesive stamps and use gloves when you stick them to the envelope.

Do not use envelopes from a sealed pack. There are many places where you can buy packs of envelopes that are not sealed. In fact, these are often displayed adjacent to the Post Office queue. Why should you do this? If you use one of these loose envelopes, you can be sure that the sneezes, browsing touches, hairs and and breath traces of tens of thousands of people are going to be on them. These envelopes will be hopelessly contaminated, and that is good for you.

Now you can see yet another reason why setting up a National DNA Register would be such a bad thing. If they had such a register, not only could they catch a whistleblower who was not careful, but they would falsely accuse and then investigate tens of thousands of people simply because they stood in a queue in a Post Office.

I have updated our own additions to the SpyBlog post the most important one being to dump winblows if you are still using it. In the light of govenrments wanting to gain backdoor access to your files, why make it easy for them by running an operating system that is insecure by design?

Ubuntu is massively peer reviewed, and as soon as any flaw is found, it is announced immediately and patched very soon after for free. It is like being a part of a huge body with a self aware immune system that by its nature, cannot lie to itself. This is the first time ever that the vast majority can take advantage of this high level of security and openness without needing any technical prowess.

Once the penny drops about how secure Ubuntu is, several things are going to happen.

First, there is going to be a mass adoption and abandonment of windows.

Second, there will be moves to outlaw Ubuntu, since it is secure by default.

We can make the second prediction because we remember l’attitude Fraiçaise and how they had to change 180° from their previous total ban on encryption. After all, it would look ridiculous if every browser had 128 bit SSL and it was illegal to use it; it would mean no credit card transactions online etc etc. They had no choice but to cave in, and in fact, this is always true; when governments are faced with an entire population that point blank refuses to obey, or they are faced with a massive loss of revenues because they will not adapt to a new way of doing business, they cave in and ‘change course’.

If everyone switches to Ubuntu, then banning it means banning computing itself and destroying commerce, learning and communication completely. There is no way that any government would allow that to happen, so as long as Ubuntu remains under the control of its thousands of developers there would be nothing that anyone could do to stop it. All attempts to poison it would fail, any attempt to attack it would strengthen it – it would be game over for mass automatic surveillance.

By adopting Ubuntu to replace windows everyone gets:

  • Unprecedented security
  • Unprecedented stability
  • Unprecedented ease of use on a Linux system
  • Freedom to copy and distribute ad infinitum
  • Free updates forever
  • Free extension of the useful life of hardware
  • Free world class applications (Gimp, Open Office, Evolution etc)
  • Ownership of the software
  • Permanent exclusion of governments ability to taint the OS

Ubuntu is a massive win for everyone. It is a game changing event, and every move to violate our privacy will simply push more and more people away from windows and to Ubuntu.

Fascist Andy Burnham is at it again

Saturday, December 27th, 2008

This guy doesn’t know when to quit.

Andy Burnham is trying to become Britain’s version of Al ‘I invented the internet’ Gore. This time, after lying about the ID card, trying to blackmail ISPs to send threatening letters to their users and just being a lying shetbag he now wants to bring the utterly fascist BBFC regime to…

TEH INTERNETZ!

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Andy Burnham says he believes that new standards of decency need to be applied to the web. He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites.

What Andy Burnham believes or does not believe doesn’t amount to a hill of beans to me. When he connects to the internet and I connect to the internet we are peers. He doesn’t have any more say in anything than I or any other user does, unless he provides some useful service that someone can either use or reject. Andy Burnham hates the internet because it is something that he and his fascist neu labour scumbag control freaks cannot control because it is beyond their ability to censor, manipulate or give orders to.

The Cabinet minister describes the internet as “quite a dangerous place” and says he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents “child-safe” web services.

The internet is a dangerous place; it is a place that is dangerous to liars like Andy Burnham, who lie and lie and lie and lie and think that they can get away with it. The internet has changed all that; he cannot lie with a loose tongue. Someone somewhere will use Google against him and then write it up on their blog and then the whole world will see him for the liar he is, for decades to come. They have woken up to this very real threat to their lie machine and will now try anything to shut it down.

This is only the beginning.

Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, he confirms. When asked directly whether age ratings could be introduced, Mr Burnham replies: “Yes, that would be an option. This is an area that is really now coming into full focus.”

The only thing coming into full focus here is the depth of the insanity of Andy Burnham. Giving ‘film-style’ ratings to websites is completely unworkable. Even if it was workable, the idea is immoral. Who is going to sit and trawl through the millions of English language websites? Who is going to pay for it all? (see below for the answer to that one)? Obviously this means a massive power grab for the BBFC, who would need a new huge building filled with cubicles and an astronomical budget.

The British Board of Film Censors watches every film that is released in the UK, and then blackmails directors into making cuts of what it deems inappropriate before issuing a rating and a certificate:

They were and are total villains:

Historically the Board has faced strong criticism for an over-zealous attitude in censoring film. Prior to the liberalising decade of the 1960s, films were routinely and extensively censored as a means of social control. For example, Rebel Without a Cause was cut in order to reduce the “possibility of teenage rebellion”. Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night was cut to remove “overtly sexual or provocative” language.

[…]

and they have and do disrupt commerce:

19 June 2007, the BBFC has refused to certify the PlayStation 2 and Wii editions of Manhunt 2, meaning that it would not be legal to sell in the UK (though it would still be legal to own), unless Rockstar made extreme changes and resubmitted it,[4] or appealed the ruling.[5] Rockstar appealed to the independent Video Appeals Committee and finally won the case in March 2008, forcing the BBFC to grant an 18 certificate against its will.[7]

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Board_of_Film_Classification

Now.

Rockstar were prevented from selling a game in the UK by this arbitrary gaggle of imbeciles, and they lost one year of sales thanks to the BBFC. They were not compensated for these loses of course.

More importantly to this post is the fact that every game film and advertisement that is given a rating by the BBFC has to be PAID FOR BY THE SUBMITTER, who they rather ridiculously call ‘the customer’.

Manhunt 2 cost million to develop. If they had caved in and ‘re-cut’ it, it would have increased their costs dramatically in terms of development and then having to sell two different versions instead of one. What is so galling about the BBFC is that they one day say that you cannot play this game, and then the next, say that you can. It was the same with ‘Video Nasties’; you could not watch ‘The Evil Dead‘ or ‘The Driller Killer‘ in your own home, but now you can watch all of these government censored films on free to air TV. Their censorship of these games and movies costs untold hundreds of millions of pounds in lost revenues, and all of it for no reason, since they almost always subsequently back down and allow people to watch movies that they previously banned or ordered cuts to.

But this is primarily a financial scam in the making.

Here are the rates that people have to pay to have their works certified.

As you can see, Features, trailers and advertisements have a ‘handling fee’ of £75 per submission plus £6.00 per minute for full length of work.

If we are talking about Bladerunner for example it would cost:

(117*6) + 75 = £777

to get a certificate. Now multiply that by all the films that come out every year.

Then, they rate Video Games. The rates are ‘Handling fee’ of £300 per submission plus £6.00 per minute for full length of work.

Legend of Zelda “A link to the past” takes 5 to 15 hours to complete. That means:

(15*60*6)+300 = £5700

I’ve taken the maximum of 15 hours because I am assuming these old geezers are as thick as shit.

Now, you may say that Nintendo and Ridley Scott can afford this money. So what? It is completely immoral that the BBFC can arbitrarily block them from releasing their films and games based on their own prejudices…but that is not what I am ultimately aiming at.

If Andy Burnham were to be successful in getting the BBFC to rate websites, HMG would be in for literally hundreds of millions of pounds. They would charge fees to everyone with a blog or a website, and blogs would no doubt be subject to regular re-certification, since the content changes regularly. If you do not pay your fee and accept a government rating, you go off line. Period. They would either ask require your ISP to delete your site or simply add you to the list of unrated sites that cannot be accessed. the result is the same; you become inaccessible.

This, my friends, is a TAX on the internet, pure and simple.

ISPs, such as BT, Tiscali, AOL or Sky could also be forced to offer internet services where the only websites accessible are those deemed suitable for children.

Yet another pointless burden on the beleaguered ISPs. Parents need to monitor their children’s internet use, or simply forbid them from using it.

Putting a child on the internet alone is like giving a 13 year old a Glock, £1000 in cash and a Harley and leaving them in the middle of SOHO at 1AM on a Saturday night.

YOU JUST SHOULDN’T DO THAT.

Mr Burnham also uses the interview to indicate that he will allocate money raised from the BBC’s commercial activities to fund other public-service broadcasting such as Channel Four. He effectively rules out sharing the BBC licence fee between broadcasters as others have recommended.

The license fee’s days are numbered. Mark my words.

His plans to rein in the internet, and censor some websites, are likely to trigger a major row with online advocates who ferociously guard the freedom of the world wide web.

They will never work. He does not understand the internet, computers, how and why the internet has become so successful, and how those forces will prevent anyone like him from destroying it.

He would do well to study the phenomenon of Anonymous. If he DARES to try and implement this, he will find out first hand what the words “quite a dangerous place” means when it comes to teh internetz. If he continues to even talk about this garbage he is going to face an Anonymous style flood of actions the likes of which he cannot even BEGIN to imagine.

The internet does not belong to government, or to anyone. No one can control it, and anyone who tries gets bitten in the ass.

However, Mr Burnham said: “If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now. It’s true across the board in terms of content, harmful content, and copyright. Libel is [also] an emerging issue.

The only issue here that he is concerned about is the internets ability to instantly transmit the refutations of and permanently store the facts that refute lies.

The people who created and who continue to maintain the internet understand how powerful a thing this is, and they will do literally anything to keep it clean; i.e. free from the dirty hands of liars like Andy Burnham. There is no such thiing as ‘harmful content’. The actions of the BBFC prove this categorically in their arbitrary and always reversed rulings on what does and does not constitute ‘obscene material’. We will not allow our internets to be subverted, corrupted or interfered with by computer illiterate liars and control addicts. It is designed to resist control, to route around censorship as damage and there is NOTHING that the likes of subhuman monsters like Andy Burnham can do about it.

If he thinks that he can run to 0bama to help him in his quest, he is more than delusional. America has a written constitution with guaranteed rights of free speech. There is already case law preventing government from rating newspapers and other such nonsense. Anyone who wants to operate an English language website away from Andy Burnham’s fascist regime can simply move their content to a USA server; most of the Blogspot blogs are hosted in the USA already….but Andy doesn’t know any of this…is is a totally clueless luser, an ID10T of the first order.

“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical.

And you can take that view and shove it up your arse.

This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it;

yes it is, you LIAR.

it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people.

This is yet another LIE.

Anyone who does not want to see something simply doesn’t look at it. The internet doesn’t push things that people do not want in front of their eyes; Andy Burnham is one of those people who DELIBERATELY goes out of his way to find the most repellent things unimaginable to prove his point that the internet needs his control, when in fact, it is only HIM and 200 other people who are watching that filth, and the other 200 are journalists writing salacious stories about how bad the internet is!

We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it.”

The public interest lies in YOU having nothing to do with the internet. Period. You and your fellow animal Mandelshon – yet another chinless wonder out of the same mold that spawned you – who wants to nationalize Nominet, the body that organizes (very successfully without interference from Government) .co.uk domains is another example of how you want to totally control the internet. That particular scumbag’s department wrote the following letter to Nominet:

“In a letter dated October 15, senior civil servant David Hendon, BERR’s Director of Business Relations, asked Nominet chairman Bob Gilbert: “What arguments would you employ to convince my Ministers that the present relationship between government and the company is appropriate in ensuring that public policy objectives in relation to the management of the domain name system and the standing of the UK in the internet community are understood and taken into account?”

Im not making that up; “justify why we should not incorporate you into the government” and if they think the reasons are not good enough? Well then, I guess you just have to bend over Nominet.

You people just DON’T GET IT.

The internet was created without you, thrives because you are not involved in it, and it will RESIST every effort you make to control it. If you think its bad when companies leave Britain because the business climate is so bad here, wait till you try and control the internet. With a few simple commands websites that are money making enterprises can flee britain at no extra cost to the business and transparently as far as the user is concerned.

Mr Burnham reveals that he is currently considering a range of new safeguards. Initially, as with copyright violations, these could be policed by internet providers. However, new laws may be threatened if the initial approach is not successful.

Nothing that this lame brained luser can devise will work. All it takes is a single developer to write a single protocol and the whole world changes.

Take the example of Napster (who we supported). If no one had tried to shut them down, there would have been little incentive in finding a solution to the problem of how to help people share files. Sadly, the imbeciles shut it down.

And the war started.

The first salvo came in the form of Gnutella, an attempt to decentralize the filesharing service so that there was no single point of attack for the buggy whip luddite Andy Burnham’s of this world….then came the Tzar Bomba: Bittorrent and the super popular trackers like Suprnova, Mininova and The Pirate Bay, and the countless other smaller trackers out there. One man, Bram Cohen created Bittorrent by himself. It now accounts for one third of all internet traffic.

I guarantee you, right here, right now, that if ANY sort of concerted effort to censor or rate the internet comes to pass, that someone is going to release a protocol that sits on top of the internet and brings everyone what they want without interference from any third party. People have already started working on projects that do just this. They will become infinitely more efficient once there is a real need for the software. It will work on all devices, in all places, and no one will be able to stop it.

Andy Burnham is on a hiding to nothing. He is on the wrong side of history. He is a total fool, and a laughing stock, and if he is ‘successful’ he will be personally responsible for bringing about exactly the sort of internet that he does not want.

“I think there is definitely a case for clearer standards online,” he said. “More ability for parents to understand if their child is on a site, what standards it is operating to. What are the protections that are in place?”

This is another lie. There is no case for government to take this role, there are already ways for parents to know what their children are doing online, and some operating systems have this BUILT IN. The fact of the matter is that Andy Burnham is not only not wanted for this role, he is not needed.

The OPPOSITE of what he is saying is the truth; the appalling record of the BBFC is proof that government is there merely to censor and harvest money from industry. They do not actually care about what is or is not ‘decent’. If they did, the list of banned films would not change. While we are on the subject, did you know that they CUT TNG to remove mention of peace in Ireland?

He points to the success of the 9pm television watershed at protecting children. The minister also backs a new age classification system on video games to stop children buying certain products.

TV is not the same as the internet.

This is just another example of how confused Andy Burnham is; he cannot distinguish between TV broadcasting and and internet websites and services accessed from a computer. The fact is that computers give parents absolute control of what does and does not display on their screens. TV never did that, although they tried to make it happen in the usa. Internet access now gives fine grained control to parents in a way that they never had previously. They can select only the sites that they want their children to use, and block everything else. This happened without anyone having to tell the makers of OSes that they needed to do it; people are responsible and do not need government to manage them. They can find the right balance for themselves, create the services and tools they need for themselves and Parental Controls in the major OSes is proof of that.

Mr Burnham, himself a parent of three young children, says his goal is for internet providers to offer “child-safe” web services.

I wonder how he controls internet access for his own children? I’m sure that he DOES control their access; if he can do it, what makes him think that other parents need his help?

“It worries me – like anybody with children,” he says. “Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you can do.

And so….DONT DO THAT.

This isn’t about turning the clock back.

To when? A date before the internet was in most homes?

The internet has been empowering and democratising in many ways but we haven’t yet got the stakes in the ground to help people navigate their way safely around…what can be a very, very complex and quite dangerous world.”

ROTFL.

The only stake that needs to be put somewhere is into the heart of this vampire. No one needs your help to navigate the internet you piece of garbage. The internet is very simple to use, and the world is NOT dangerous you fear-mongering sack of shit.

Mr Burnham also wants new industry-wide “take down times”. This means that if websites such as YouTube or Facebook are alerted to offensive or harmful content they will have to remove it within a specified time once it is brought to their attention.

Not going to happen. Facebook has over 100,000,000 uers. If someone writes ‘fuck’ on their profile, there is no way that the Facebook staff will be able to respond to a takedown notice on short notice. And even so, the sky is not going to fall because something that Andy Burnham, Catholic, thinks is offensive or ‘harmful’. These words my friends, are those of a delusional miscreant looking for a job; a perfect example of idle hands doing the devil’s work. And for the record, both Facebook and YouTube are based in the USA, where they have RIGHTS, which you cannot in your idle imaginings erase ‘for the greater good’.

He also says that the Government is considering changing libel laws to give people access to cheap low-cost legal recourse if they are defamed online. The legal proposals are being drawn up by the Ministry of Justice.

Judge Dredd is way too busy to be dealing with that dontcha know.

Mr Burnham admits that his plans may be interpreted by some as “heavy-handed” but says the new standards drive is “utterly crucial”. Mr Burnham also believes that the inauguration of Barack Obama, the President-Elect, presents an opportunity to implement the major changes necessary for the web.

See what I mean? DELUSIONAL.

These plans are utterly crucial to him maintaining some sort of relevance and nothing more. They will not work, will not be adopted, and are further eroding the paint layer of usefulness from his unctuous body.

“The change of administration is a big moment. We have got a real opportunity to make common cause,” he says. “The more we seek international solutions to this stuff – the UK and the US working together – the more that an international norm will set an industry norm.”

It will not happen. There are too many computer literate people, too many countries with written constitutions to allow this to happen, and finally the internet itself will not allow it to come to pass, for technical reasons.

The Culture Secretary is spending the Christmas holidays at his constituency in Lancashire but is planning to take major decisions on the future of public-service broadcasting in the New Year. Channel Four is facing a £150m shortfall in its finances and is calling for extra Government help. ITV is also growing increasingly alarmed about the financial implications of meeting the public-service commitments of its licenses.

TV is dead.

Mr Burnham says that he is prepared to offer further public assistance to broadcasters other than the BBC. However, he indicates that he does not favour “top-slicing” the licence fee. Instead, he may share the profits of the BBC Worldwide, which sells the rights to programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing to foreign broadcasters.

“I feel it is important to sustain quality content beyond the BBC,” he said. “The real priorities I have got in my mind are regional news, quality children’s content and original British children’s content, current affairs documentaries – that’s important. The thing now is to be absolutely clear on what the public wants to see beyond the BBC.

“Top-slicing the licence fee is an option that is going to have to remain on the table. I have to say it is not the option that I instinctively reach for first. I think there are other avenues to be explored.”

[…]

Telegraph

Blah blah blah Bollocks.

I have to say, I really do enjoy watching these morons make total asses of themselves. Whenever they talk about the internet or computers, they expose their complete lack of understanding, their lack of insight, their incompetence and inability to think.

We can see just what sort of people they really are, how useless, pointless and dumb they are, and most importantly, how weak they are.

Articles like this should make it abundantly clear that the world really has turned in our favor, and that it is only a matter of time before ‘people’ like Andy Burnham are consigned to the scrapheap. We will simply do without them. And their pronouncements, if they are even there to make them at all, will just be ignored or deliberately sabotaged, like the unbelievably cool people at The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea are doing right now by giving parents the option to ‘shield’ their children on ContactPoint.

This is how fragile their control is; I have always said that their control and power is an illusion. It only takes a handful of people to change everything. These councilors are just a small number of people with principles and now they are going to potentially bring down ContactPoiint single handedly!

Now imagine Andy Burnham against the entire internet.

What a joke!

St Pancras Station Wi-Fi Censorship

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

The other night, I listened to the great Alex Jones, who complained rightly and bitterly that his websites are ‘on a government blacklist’, making them inaccessible on the free wireless network at St Pancras Station. thinkprogress.org is also blocked as are many others. These websites are not blocked in China, “public enemy number one” when it comes to web censorship so we are told.

I decided to see for myself what the precise details of this blocking are, and made a few google searches and phone calls.

My preliminary research shows us the following:

St Pancras Wi-Fi is run by a company called ‘CitySpace‘.

This is the press release announcing the contract from 2007.

and here are some of the people they work with:

Cityspace is proud to work with many clients and partners to deliver sustainable urban digital networks, including:

BAA
BBC
Bracknell Forest Borough Council
Bristol City Council
City of York Council
Clear Channel
Cornwall County Council
Department for Transport
Department for Work and Pensions
Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council
Ealing Council
Essex County Council
First Group
Gateshead Council
GNER
Hampshire County Council
Islington Council
Kent Fastrack
London Borough of Havering
London Borough of Sutton
London Borough of Tower Hamlets
London Borough of Waltham Forest
London Underground
Met Office
National Rail Enquiries
NEC
Newcastle City Council
Newham Council
Norfolk County Council
North Tyneside Council
Plymouth City Council
Portsmouth City Council
Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
Royal Borough of Kingston
Serco
South Tyneside Council
South Yorkshire PTE
Southend-on-sea Borough Council
Suffolk County Council
Sunderland City Council
Surrey County Council
Transport for London
Traveline
West Sussex County Council
Yahoo!

Lots of government contracts.

CITYSPACE Company Info:

Industry Consumer Services
Employees 100 – 250
Revenue $50 – 100M
Owership Privately Held

I telephoned CitySpace, and asked wether or not there is a blacklist on the St Pancras station Wi-Fi.

I spoke to a polite man who told me without any hesitation that the people who run St Pancras requested that the service be flittered, and that the list of sites to be blocked comes from a company that provides the blocking software, “it’s an off the shelf product” is how he described it.

He said that he would find out all the details for me and then let me know the who and what and where.

St Pancras Station is run by London & Continental Stations and Properties.

Here is the Wikipedia entry:

London & Continental Railways (LCR) is a railway company based in the United Kingdom.

History

Created at the time of the Privatisation of British Rail it bid for and won the contract from the UK government in 1996 to build and operate High Speed 1 between London and the Channel Tunnel. As part of this deal the European Passenger Services (EPS) and Union Railways sections of British Rail were handed over to LCR as well as key pieces of railway infrastructure including St Pancras railway station and Manchester International & North Pole depots.

EPS was the British arm of the joint Eurostar operation, along with SNCF and NMBS/SNCB. LCR renamed EPS as Eurostar (U.K.) Ltd. (EUKL). Union Railways had been developing plans for HS1 since before the opening of the Channel Tunnel and continued this role as part of LCR.

The original shareholders of LCR were National Express Group, Virgin Group, SBC Warburg, Bechtel and London Electric. As part of the 1996 contract LCR were to finance and construct the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) themselves, funding it from income received from the Eurostar operation.

In 1998 LCR ran into major financial difficulties and appealed to the UK government for support. It admitted that income from its share of the Eurostar operation was not at the level it expected and would therefore not be able to undertake construction of HS1. At this time the future of the high speed line looked in doubt. See here for more details.

In 2006 LCR put forward a proposal to build a domestic high speed line north of London — see High-speed rail in the United Kingdom.

2006 shareholders & status

The current structure of LCR is complex due to numerous reorganisations, for example SNCF is involved in the Eurostar operation at three different levels. Current shareholders in LCR are:

  • Rail Link Engineering (RLE)
  • National Express Group
  • SNCF
  • EDF Energy
  • UBS investment bank

The construction of the CTRL is being project managed for LCR by RLE. Current shareholders in RLE are:

  • Bechtel
  • Arup
  • Systra
  • Halcrow

Since the 1998 reorganisation the operation of EUKL has run as under a management contract by InterCapital and Regional Rail (ICRR). Current ICRR shareholders are:

  • National Express Group (40%)
  • SNCF (35%)
  • NMBS/SNCB (15%)
  • British Airways (10%)

Operation of the line will be undertaken by Network Rail under a contract lasting until 2086, when LCR’s concession ends too, and all rights return to the British Government.

Now what we have to hear is which ‘off the shelf product’ is being used as the filter list.

I will update this post tomorrow.

I the mean time, if you ever find yourself in St Pancras or any other place where the internetz are blocked in some way, like a public library, you can get around the censorship very easily. There is no excuse for passively accepting censorship in the age of the internets, and it is up to you to be active, computer literate, and to know the tools you are using so you can free the information that you require for yourself.

First of all, open Firefox (ummm you ARE running Firefox on Ubuntu arent you?) and then, and then do the following:

 

Install Stealthy for your browser.

You can use Whatismyip.com to check your ip address. http://www.whatismyip.com/

It should display the IP you are using as your proxy and not the IP your ISP allocated to you.

UPDATE 1: August 7th

I spoke to CitySpace today, to the same person I spoke to originally.

He told me that he conferred with people in CitySpace, and they said that, “it was not for them to confirm this” and that “I would have to speak to St Pancras about it. There are 25 people in blue coats at St Pancras to answer these sorts of questions”.

I said, “so there are 25 COMPUTER LITERATE people in blue coats who are able to tell me what blocking software is being used to filter their Wi-Fi network? I think we both know that is highly unlikely!” He agreed. I thanked him and hung up.

On to St Pancras, phoned them, got the reception, passed to some upper guy, transferred up again, spoke to a woman, who said, “they took advice that certain websites should be blocked.

I said, “well I would like to know who gave you that advice”.

She said, “we chose to block certain websites like pornography, ‘hate sites’ and such…”

I said, “Let me make myself absolutely clear; I accept that this is a private network, and you have the right to block whatever you like on it. What I want to know is why you are blocking certain sites, who sold you the blocking list and why innocuous websites are on that blocking list”

She said, “what website were you trying to get to in particular? Were you a customer of St Pancras or a passenger?”

I said, “I was a passenger and I tried to get to thinkprogress.org”

She said, “and what sort of website is that?”

I said, “its a news website, like bbc.co.uk” ( :o )

She said, “do you have a personal interest in this site, because you seem to be quite agitated about this”

I said, “no, I’m not agitated, I had a double espresso at lunch! I simply want to know why these websites are blocked.”

She then said that she would look into it, and that this is a service that just recently went live and that if there are things that are blocked that should not be they would need to look into that, and that if members of the public call them to comment on the service they would look into how it is working.

She said that if I call her tomorrow morning, she should have some answers for me.

Update to follow!

UPDATE 2: August 8th

I spoke to the woman at St Pancras who told me to call her today. She said that she had spoken to someone about this, and that she had not been given the information, but she was told to give me the mobile number of a person who did have the information.

I spoke to this person for 25 minutes, and during the conversation he divulged the following:

  • They are running an off the shelf software product.
  • St Pancras, has direct control over the list, and can block and unblock any site.
  • They have a review system, whereby people can appeal to have their site unblocked. They then take a decision to keep a site blocked or to unblock it. They will do this on a case by case basis, and in order to make an appeal, a site owner should contact Media at St Pancras.
  • They were advised by “independent third parties” as to what shape the provision of the free Wi-Fi should take.
  • It is possible that certain political websites may be “caught up in the trawl” of blocked sites.
  • He refused to say who provided this list of blocked sites, or who the vendor of the software was.

That last call was the longest of all, taking the total time of all the calls to around 55 minutes.

The fact of the matter is (and this is me talking) that St Pancras free Wi-Fi is a private network, and as such, they can block whatever they like on it. They are under no obligation to provide access to anything whatsoever, and if you want free and unfettered internet access, you have to retain and use the skills and tools that are freely available to you to make the magic happen.

If you rely on the providers of train stations and rail services or anyone other than a pure ISP to connect you with the internet, then you are submitting to the prejudices, ignorance, guidelines and the ‘third party advice’ that govern their networks. It is up to you to find out how things really work and then take the appropriate steps so that your experience is unfiltered.

Think about it this way; if a publisher rejected an advertisement you wanted to publish, you wouldn’t think you have a right to have it displayed in their newspaper or magazine? You absolutely do not have a right to be published in anyone’s magazine, and you also do not have a right to have your content re-transmitted over someone’s private network. You DO have the right to publish what you want, and to distribute it to whoever you like…its up to you to make sure that your content is deliverable. In the past, this meant finding a distributor to get your content to the shops. Now it means making sure that your readers and listeners are well versed in proxy tools so that no matter where they are, they will always be able to connect to you.

You do not even have to write the software to do this yourself. There are toolbars and addons out there that make getting around censorship as simple as a single click of a button.

The distinction between a private and public network, between private and public space, is very important, and many people have a blurry / fuzzy idea in their heads about what these concepts actually encompass.

Censorship in China, which is by the GOVERNMENT and censorship of a PRIVATE WI-FI NETWORK are two different things; it is the difference between self censorship and censorship from above that covers everything everywhere. If what I have been told is true, then this is a case of the former; even if the people who offer the software are a government front, and even if the ‘independent third parties’ are compromised in some way, St Pancras have the final say and fine grained control on what is blocked. This is fundamentally different to China blocking everything at the network level.

Could someone telephone them and tell them to keep certain sites blocked? Of course. But all of this is moot if you are able to use your computer to get around blocking software, which is why it is so important to spread information about how to get around filtering with tools like TOR and setting proxies.

You can expect more and more filtering on private networks that are accessible to the public. The people who run these private networks are not interested in providing access to everything, will actively suppress ‘inaccurate information on blogs’, swallow wholesale the advice of third parties, will deploy banning lists provided to them by third parties unquestioned, see no value in the free flow of information, and in the case of St Pancras specifically, do not think much about it as they are more interested in running trains on time. They feel they are doing you a favor (and really, this is correct) by letting you have access to anything at all for free in the first place; they make no money out of it, it has nothing to do with trains and it means they have to employ people to bluster about their service when something isn’t right.

Finally, do read this page about filtering:

4) INDUCED SELF-CENSORSHIP
Another common and effective strategy to limit exposure to Internet content is by encouraging self-censorship both in browsing habits and in choosing content to post online. This may take place through the threat of legal action, the promotion of social norms, or informal methods of intimidation. Arrest and detention related to Internet offenses, or on unrelated charges, have been used in many instances to induce compliance with Internet content restrictions. In many cases, the content restrictions are neither spoken nor written. The perception that the government is engaged in the surveillance and monitoring of Internet activity, whether accurate or not, provides another strong incentive to avoid posting material or visiting sites that might draw the attention of authorities.

And there you have it!

ABC: Always Be Closing: Art War

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

Are you man enough to take it?

Gæoudjiparl Van Den Dobbelsteen goes to war:

01. On Monday the 5th of May 2008 Gæoudjiparl van den Dobbelsteen opened up this temporary Myspace profile in order to declare war on the Scandinavian education system and to bring a new radical education program for modern computer music into being.

02. Later on Monday the 5th of May 2008 a manual for Goodiepal’s autonomous radical computer music education program, now called Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra, was set into production.

The new school book can be ordered online from Smallfish in London..

www.smallfish.co.uk

and a full manual for the magnum work plus a strategy guide will soon be available for FREE download via.

www.brainwashed.com/vvm/micro/parl

03. On Wednesday the 7th of May 2008, 44 pictures of visual Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra scores, unscannnable by computers and done by young students at Krabbesholm, were uploaded to the Krabbesholm website

www.krabbesholm.dk/courses/art/08goodiepal.html

04. On the 10th and 11th of May 2008 Gaeoudjiparl van den Dobbelsteen completed a two day course of radical computer music at Engelsholm Castle in Jutland, Denmark. Another 40 students agreed to complete grafic scores.

05. On Tuesday the 13th of May all Goodiepal’s bachelor students scored excellent points at their composition examines with examiners Jens Hørsving and Ejnar Kanding.

www.hoersving.dk

www.kanding.com

06. On Wednesday the 14th of May a huge sign was placed in the window of Route 66, the record shop closest to the Royal Academy of Music. The sign reads, “The music school book, which was too much for the Royal Academy of Music, can now be ordered here” – so all students, who cannot receive education in the fields of radical computer music, have a place to go.

07. When Saturday the 17th of May dawned the first part of the audio walk through, or manual, was uploaded to this Myspace profile as promised. The next parts will be uploaded when finished.

www.myspace.com/gaeoudjiparlvandendobbelsteen

08 On Sunday the 18th of May photo documentation for the Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra was uploaded to this temporary Myspace profile as Snappidagg’s. Just look under pictures.

09. When Wednesday the 21th of May dawned the second part of the audio walk through, or manual, was uploaded to this Myspace profile.

www.myspace.com/gaeoudjiparlvandendobbelsteen

10. On Thursday the 22nd and Friday the 23th of May Uglemads, Goodiepal and Tordis did put the final touch to all the Under Byen In The Flip Flop Mix 12-inches and send 140 copies off to the band. The rest is to be shipped next week, if you fancy any of the vinyls contact the band at:

www.underbyen.dk

11. On Sunday the 25th of May new snappidagg’s were uploaded, sorry for the delay.

12. Later on Sunday the 25th of May Sara Black tried to sell some Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra education books on Ebay but flopped completely.

13. At the end of Sunday the 25th a one-off auction of the complete Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra box limited to 45 copies was made for sale at Ebay, this was done to raise some money for the war on the Royal Academy of Music.

www.ebay.com

14. On the 27th of May new snappidagg’s were uploaded to the picture section of this temporary Myspace profile. And the second part of the Under Byen IN THE FLIP FLOP MIX was put into production in the Blue House by Tordis, Uglemads and Goodiepal.

[…]

http://www.myspace.com/gaeoudjiparlvandendobbelsteen

At last, someone who actually HAS a pair.

News Sniffer: So Cool!!!

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

I just came across a site called News Sniffer, whilst looking for examples of the stamps of Rudolph Hess manufactured by the Deutche Post custom stamp service. They produced twenty stamps, and that is enough to send them into a blind panic. But I digress.

New Sniffer came up in a google search and provided this page:

http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/124994/diff/1/2

Which does a ‘diff’ between two different versions of a BBQ piece on this story.

Absolutely brilliant.

What this means is that we now have a service that will cache BBQ propaganda, and all of the revisions that they do to try and cover their tracks, and ramp up the lies. We can go back and see how they lie, how they censor and what a bunch of scum they really are.

News Sniffer, in addition to, “monitor(ing) corporate news organisations to uncover bias.” Tracks BBQ ‘have your say’ to see how many comments are being censored. They are currently monitoring 1,186,509 comments and found 15,120 censored.

Check out the comments that they retrieved and cached before they were censored.

And, quite appropriately, they have an image of Pinocchio in their header.

Look at this page, where an article from ‘bbc’, was first published or seen on Fri May 23 14:37:14 UTC 2008 and has 13 versions.

THIRTEEN VERSIONS IN ONE DAY.

No newspaper has the luxury of re writing their pieces THIRTEEN TIMES. Interestingly this is a story about MP’s expenses.

A fabulous idea, beautifully executed, very useful….well done boys!!!!!!!

Liberté, égalité, fraternité

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

Liberté, égalité, fraternité, French for “Liberty, equality, fraternity (brotherhood)”, is the motto of the French Republic, and is a typical example of a tripartite motto. Although it finds its origins in the French Revolution, it was then only one motto among others and was not really institutionnalized until the Third Republic at the end of the 19th century. Debates concerning the compatibility and order of the three terms began as soon as the French Revolution.

We can now strike off the first word for sure:

PARIS (Reuters) – French former film star Brigitte Bardot went on trial on Tuesday for insulting Muslims, the fifth time she has faced the charge of “inciting racial hatred” over her controversial remarks about Islam and its followers.

Prosecutors asked that the Paris court hand the 73-year-old former sex symbol a two-month suspended prison sentence and fine her 15,000 euros ($23,760) for saying the Muslim community was “destroying our country and imposing its acts”.

Since retiring from the film industry in the 1970s, Bardot has become a prominent animal rights activist but she has also courted controversy by denouncing Muslim traditions and immigration from predominantly Muslim countries.

She has been fined four times for inciting racial hatred since 1997, at first 1,500 euros and most recently 5,000.

Prosecutor Anne de Fontette told the court she was seeking a tougher sentence than usual, adding: “I am a little tired of prosecuting Mrs Bardot.”

Bardot did not attend the trial because she said she was physically unable to. The verdict is expected in several weeks.

French anti-racist groups complained last year about comments Bardot made about the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha in a letter to President Nicolas Sarkozy that was later published by her foundation.

Muslims traditionally mark Eid al-Adha by slaughtering a sheep or another animal to commemorate the prophet Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son on God’s orders.

France is home to 5 million Muslims, Europe’s largest Muslim community, making up 8 percent of France’s population.

“I am fed up with being under the thumb of this population which is destroying us, destroying our country and imposing its acts,” the star of ‘And God created woman’ and ‘Contempt’ said.

Bardot has previously said France is being invaded by sheep-slaughtering Muslims and published a book attacking gays, immigrants and the unemployed, in which she also lamented the “Islamisation of France”.

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL1584799120080415

There is no liberty in a country where you cannot think, say and publish what you want.

This is the country that gave us Voltaire, (insert list of great French writers and philosophers), but which now prosecutes people for uttering opinions.

And I can guarantee you that many French people will be cheering in the privacy of their own minds, these words of Brigitte Bardot; but wether or not her words are popular is not the point. All human beings have the right to free speech in countries that claim they are free countries. If a country does not allow free speech, then that country is not a free country. Full stop.

Listen to Ezra Lavant explanining to an ignorant pig exactly what free speech means. You should watch all the parts of this.

The lie of ‘hate speech’ is a disease that is spreading all over the civilized world. There is no such thing ashate speech‘; there is only speech, and you have the right to it. This is non negotiable, and Ezra Levant sums it up perfectly. Brigitte Bardot has the right to hate, she has the right to express that hate, and in a free country, no one should be able to muzzle her or stifle her or question her.