INTERNET in DANGER

La rivalidad entre sistemas operativos llega hasta el espacio.

When I talked about technologies impacting human rights and democracy in 2009, people looked at me as if I was speaking a different language.“

The thing you forget about the man with 23 books to his name, books that have been translated into 30 languages, the man who cofounded the Free Press - one of the most important media reform organizations in the country - is that he has kind of crazy hair. Despite that, he's also one of the most respected scholars of the history and political economy of communication in the United States. Robert W. McChesney got started in the same way I did in media - in the punk-rock trenches of independent print publishing. As founding publisher of The Rocket, the underground cultural rag in Seattle that fostered an enduring music scene that still helps define American culture, McChesney has thoroughly tested the enduring impact of independent media.

Yet the Internet has scant room for non-corporate voices, a concern that drives McChesney's latest New Press title, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. It's an important extension of his to-date oeuvre, tracking the privatization of communication in the digital age, as well as a vital stand-alone resource. (Full disclosure: McChesney and the Free Press have been very supportive of my work in the past, but I'm sure you'll agree I haven't let that keep me from a close interrogation of his ideas in the interest of expanding his audience.)

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As Game of Thrones smashes download records this week, an extra act of sharing will soon come from a most unusual source.

Citizens band together to arrest former British prime minister over involvement in Iraq's invasion a decade ago.

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Un estudio publicado esta misma mañana por el Joint Research Centre de la Unión Europea afirma algo que ya ha sido comentado en otras ocasiones: que la piratería de música en Internet no afecta negativamente a las ventas en los canales de pago o legales.

El estudio de la Unión Europea llega a estas conclusiones después de analizar el comportamiento de 16 mil internautas de UK, Francia, Alemania, Italia y España. Este análisis se concentra en conocer los hábitos de los europeos, midiendo la relación entre las visitas a páginas web de descarga de música frente a opciones legales y de pago o streaming.

We need to rethink the distinction between open sources and secrets. Too many policymakers and intelligence officers mistake secrecy for intelligence and assume that information covertly acquired is superior to that obtained openly. Yet, the distinction between overt and covert sources is less clear than such thinking suggests.

Open sources often equal or surpass classified information in monitoring and analyzing such pressing problems as terrorism, proliferation, and counterintelligence. Slighting open source intelligence (OSINT) for secrets, obtained at far greater expense when available at all, is no way to run an intelligence community.

Also, we must put to rest the notion that the private sector is the preferred OSINT agent.  In the end, I would contend, the Intelligence Community (IC) needs to assign greater resources to open sources.

Piracy. Is it stealing or sharing? Join Ghost Beach’s social experiment that sparks the debate over piracy in the world today. Are you for or against it? You tell us.

What does the US's relentless pursuit of internet activists say about the priorities of Obama's Department of Justice?

The United States Department of Justice is under increasing scrutiny over its unwavering determination to prosecute internet journalists and activists, especially those who challenge what appears to be the abuse of power by corporations and the government.

Those accused of the alleged crimes - described by many as trivial - face years in prison and relentless pursuit by the authorities.

The latest example involves the sentencing of 26-year-old online activist Andrew Auernheimer to three-and-a-half years in prison for obtaining the personal data of thousands of AT&T's customers.

But his supporters argue that he was exposing a flaw in the firm's security system that had already endangered the personal information of customers, and that he did no actual "hacking" himself.

Then there is the pending prosecution of journalist Barrett Brown who has been in jail for six months and potentially faces decades in prison. 

Hay que reconocer que han tenido éxito. En muy pocos años nos han hecho creer que, ciertamente, todos somos piratas. Todos, de una forma u otra, hemos copiado o bajado de la red alguna canción, película o programa de ordenador vulnerando las leyes de propiedad intelectual. A esa actividad la industria la ha denominado “piratería” y llama “piratas” a quienes la llevan a cabo. La palabra “pirata”, peyorativa y relativa a personas que comenten actos delictivos, ha calado tan hondo en la sociedad que, a día de hoy, todos nos sentimos un poco piratas y todos tenemos un par de pecados que ocultar celosamente. Esta facilidad con que la industria ha criminalizado a la práctica totalidad de la población es algo que me repugna profundamente.

Tal y como todos los que sabían un poco del tema auguraban la Ley Sinde ha resultado ser un fracaso, lo que no quita para que nunca debiera de haber sido aprobada.

Así que ahora el gobierno de España, presionado básicamente por la industria audiovisual estadounidense, vuelve a la carga con una reforma de la Ley de Propiedad Intelectual, reforma que nadie duda que sea necesaria para ponerla al día, pero desde luego no en la forma de la que se conoce como Ley Lassalle, que le parece una barbaridad a casi todo el mundo.