The EU Commission has decided to refer the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement to the European Court of Justice, halting for now ratification of ACTA by 22 EU countries. The Commission's moved was welcomed by leading European political parties that fear the international accord would trample rights and freedoms.
The Commission is going to ask the EU's highest court to assess whether ACTA is incompatible with the EU's fundamental rights - such as freedom of expression and information, protections of personal information and intellectual property.
"I’m confident that there is nothing wrong with ACTA, not at all, that it is a fine treaty, and that it will protect our intellectual property…" says Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht.
In this interview, Shareable publisher Neal Gorenflo, John Robb of Global Guerrillas, and P2P foundation's Michel Bauwens talk to David de Ugarte, one of the originators of the Spanish cyberpunk scene about his more recent work developing a multinational worker cooperative, Las Indias.
David de Ugarte: Las Indias is the result of the Spanish-speaking cyberpunk movement. Originally a civil rights group, during the late 90s it became strongly influenced by Juan Urrutia's “Economics of Abundance” theory. Very soon, we linked “abundance” with the idea of empowerment in distributed networks. We are very clear on this point: it is not the Internet by itself, it is the distributed P2P architecture that allows the new commons. As one of our old slogans put it: “Under every informational architechture lays a structure of power.” Re-centralizing structures – as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Megaupload, etc. do around their servers – weakens us all. The blogosphere, torrents, freenet, etc. are tools of empowerment.
Governments and corporations have more control over the Internet than ever.
Mesh networking is a relatively young technology, but the “magic” Kaplan talks about is nothing new: it is the same principle that has long underpinned the Internet’s reputation for infrastructural resilience. Packet-switched store-and-forward routing—in which every computer connected to the network is capable not just of sending and receiving information but of relaying it on behalf of other connected computers—has been a defining architectural feature of the Internet since its conception. It is what creates the profusion of available transmission routes that lets the network simply “route around damage.” It is what makes the Internet, theoretically at least, so hard to kill.
If the reality of the Internet today more closely matched the theory, mesh networks would be superfluous. But in the two decades since the Internet outgrew its academic origins and started becoming the ubiquitous commercial service it is now, the store-and-forward principle has come to play a steadily less meaningful role. The vast majority of new nodes added to the network in this period have been the home and business computers brought online by Internet service providers. And in the ISP’s connection model, the customer’s machine is never a relay point; it’s an end point, a terminal node, configured only to send and receive and only to do so via machines owned by the ISP. The Internet’s explosive growth, in other words, has not added new routes to the network map so much as it has added cul-de-sacs, turning ISPs and other traffic aggregators into focal points of control over the hundreds of millions of nodes they serve. For those nodes there is no routing around the damage if their ISP goes down or shuts them off. Far from keeping the Internet tough to kill, the ISP, in effect, becomes the kill switch.
Sepp: thank you. Some suggestions as it gets harder to appreciate your contribution from the originator's.
Please distinguish somehow what you write from what you cite. It is not clear right now.
Format content by chunking it more or it becomes hard to read for anyone.
Highlight and pinpoint key ideas or takeaways instead of giving a long blurb with shallow content.
Synthesize and highlight, no full text copy with nothing from you.
Let me know what else, if anything, is in the original article and whether it's worth going to check it or if you have already got the best of it here.
All these would greatly help make your curated selection much more useful and credible.
Actually Robin, when I write something, I mostly, if not always, write it at the end of the excerpt I take from the article, and I precede my comment with
"My comment:"
It is a bit difficult to distinguish if you have no formating options at your disposal, which is unfortunately one of the drawbacks of having a free account with scoop.it
Yes, maybe I rely too much on the original for what's being said. I could make more informative personal comments...
In am in Athens whilst it burns, in Europe while it scrambles to find its ground as its foundations shift, and in the East in this year of citizen-led movements that have cracked things open to an uncertain but oxygenated future.
"I mean, along with growing food, we are growing culture. We're growing community... to make sure that our existence is no longer threatened because of being marginalized in a system that's killing us and we ain't got no say-so in our existence or how we live as human beings. So developing consciousness, I think, is very important. It's just not a warm and fuzzy garden, you know. We're not just growing food, we're becoming part of this process of existence in the whole ecology system that exists not just in the garden, but has existed since the beginning," says Wayne Curtis, co-founder of Feedom Freedom Growers.
"The internet, as a living being which is part human, should have rights of its own."...
From understanding the internet as a life form that is in part human, it follows that the internet itself has rights. These rights must be created from scratch, thinking simultaneously in terms of the rights of metal, code, and flesh. With this framework we can start building an enduring barrier to permanently deter surreptitious attacks on the life in the network, such as those used by the SOPA mob.
What would this barrier look like? Perhaps as a multinational treaty, a multi-stakeholder organism, and a declaration of the "Rights of the Internet", following the example of Bolivia's 2011 breakthrough declaration of rights of the environment.
Through this framework, for example, we can understand the DMCA, which mandates the atrophy of media players, as legislation that violates the rights of hardware. SOPA and PIPA, which attempted to kidnap for ransom the already imperfect DNS (Domain Name Service) protocol, as being in violation of the rights of code. ACTA, detached from democratic process under the veil of "trade agreement" negotiations, and created by powerful nations to lock in their domination over the rest of the world, is in this sense in dual violation of the rights of flesh (ie humanity).
Adventures in New Giving is about discovery, storytelling and community-building.
On the discovery side, this is a field research project. What is going on? Who are these New Givers? Why are they giving? And what can strengthen their impact?
This is a compelling story that deserves to be shared widely. Why are people doing this in the depths of a recession? How can we help more people follow their lead?
On community: Often, people are not networking beyond their particular New Giving project circles. What we have now is an organic uprising of a self-organized giving communities and platforms for organizing crowds. How can we build a mutual aid network to help New Givers can learn, share and enhance their impact together?
Bulgaria and the Netherlands have put the brakes on approving the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA.
On Tuesday, Bulgaria followed some of its European neighbors, including Germany and Poland, in halting approval of the controversial intellectual property treaty.
Bulgaria will “practically stop its participation” until it sees a clear and unified European stance on the treaty, according to Traicho Traikov, the Bulgarian economy and energy minister.
“I’m a pessimist when it comes to regulating an industry, which hasn’t adapted to the digital age, through sanctions rather than market means,” Traikov told the press.
Joe Justice presents at TEDxRanier how Team WIKISPEED has accomplished amazing results in producing a 100 Mile per Gallon (MPG) car using processes borrowed ...
...from the software world; Agile, Lean, Scrum and Extreme Programing. The result is that WIKISPEED now sells an affordable car that achieves 100 MPG that is is fast, fun and beautiful while also achieving a five star crash test rating equivalent.
Yesterday I was honored to be one of the featured speakers at the TEDxReset Conference in Istanbul, Turkey where I predicted that over 2 billion jobs will disappear by 2030. Since my 18-minute talk was about the rapidly shifting nature of colleges and higher education, I didn’t have time to explain how and why so many jobs would be going away. Because of all of the questions I received afterwards, I will do that here.
When I brought up the idea of 2 billion jobs disappearing (roughly 50% of all the jobs on the planet) it wasn’t intended as a doom and gloom outlook. Rather, it was intended as a wakeup call, letting the world know how quickly things are about to change, and letting academia know that much of the battle ahead will be taking place at their doorstep.
Here is a brief overview of five industries – where the jobs will be going away and the jobs that will likely replace at least some of them – over the coming decades...
Media Psychology Review: Research on Internet Hero Archetypes...
ABSTRACT:
Although the bulk of psychological research continues to focus on the negative uses of the Internet, i.e., cyberbullying and the cyberbully, the total number of people engaging in acts of digital altruism and other forms of pro-social digital activism exceeds 100 million (Klisanin, 2011). Who are these people? While there has been little investigation in this area, Klisanin (2010a) theorized that the most dedicated among them represent the first incarnation of a new archetype: the cyberhero. Embodying a transpersonal sense of identity, as ideal forms, the cyberhero represents individuals motivated to act on behalf of other people, animals, and the environment using the Internet and digital technologies in the peaceful service of achieving humanity’s highest ideals and aspirations, e.g., world peace, social justice, environmental protection, and planetary stewardship. To investigate this theory, a self-report questionnaire was designed and distributed on-line to individuals engaging in digital altruism, a form of digital activism considered to result in benefit to others. The results support earlier theory, suggesting that the cyberhero is a viable embodied archetype worthy of further investigation.
A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more.
The concept of a food forest certainly pushes the envelope on urban agriculture and is grounded in the concept of permaculture, which means it will be perennial and self-sustaining, like a forest is in the wild.
So just who gets to harvest all that low-hanging fruit when the time comes?
“Anyone and everyone,” says Harrison. “There was major discussion about it. People worried, ‘What if someone comes and takes all the blueberries?’ That could very well happen, but maybe someone needed those blueberries. We look at it this way—if we have none at the end of blueberry season, then it means we’re successful.”
Money follows, like everything else here on this physical plane, the principles of yin and yang. There is "hard" (yang) money and there is "soft" (yin) money. At this time, the world is dominated by yang money. My purpose with this article is to convince you that we need to find a better balance in matters of exchange and economics.
The Global Square has gained traction in recent months as we have secured the support of an independent team of developers, coordinated by Ed Knutson of the Occupy movement in the US and Johan Pauwelse in the Netherlands. Pauwelse directs the Tribler P2P research team at the Technical University of Delft, which — with a budget of 26 million euros — is the world’s largest experimental research group working on self-organizing internet systems.
Meanwhile, we are being assisted by the legendary hacker and free-software activist Richard Stallman, who as the main author of several copyleft licenses, including the GNU General Public License — the most widely used free software license in the world — has agreed to contribute his GNU platform to the project. Furthermore, we are now drawing on the direct support of a number of hackers and free software activists associated with Wikileaks and Anonymous.
From April 27 until July 1, The Global Square will be featured at the 7th Berlin Biennale, where we will organize a ‘hackathon’ with leading online activists, coders, developers and designers from around the world to build the platform and ensure its resilience against attempted crackdowns. The decentralized P2P nature of The Global Square will make it virtually impossible for governments to neutralize the network without completely shutting down the Internet.
To many, Facebook is social networking. It is the medium that brings us together in ways that we couldn't have imagined before, delivering on a promise that was always implicit in the World Wide Web but only partially realized. Facebook offers us a space in which to talk, connect, and share music, pictures, and the stories of our lives, a space to express who we are and learn about one another and our world. We like it. A lot. We spend nearly eight hours a month on the site. By August, 1 billion human beings will be on Facebook.
And now, after building a network unprecedented in history in its breadth and penetration, Facebook is enjoying a further triumph: It's going public with an expected valuation of as much as $100 billion.
"The thesis behind the Facebook IPO is we now have 1 billion people trapped, and soon we'll have 2 billion," Moglen says. "But that's not going to happen. We're going to have federated social networking in a matter of months—probably more than 12 but a lot less than 120. So somewhere between 12 and 120 months from now, Facebook is going to cease to exist."
Ordinary consumers can be encouraged to behave more sustainably without lowering their quality of life...
There are many advantages to this complementary path to global sustainability. First, the rich live in both developed and developing countries, so the idea cuts across country boundaries, thus reducing the potential for deadlock due to nationalistic self-interest. Second, since they account for over 80% of consumption and pollution (including carbon emissions), small shifts towards more sustainable consumption can significantly reduce the burden on the environment and free up more resources to raise the consumption of the poor. Third, by relying on influencing the behaviour of large numbers of individual households, the approach has the potential to yield quicker results compared to top down government policies and large, long term industrial investments. Fourth, it mobilizes, empowers and links up sustainable consumers and producers (many of whom operate global supply chains) into a virtuous cycle that could spread quickly.
Thich Nhat Hanh explains why mindfulness and a spiritual revolution rather than economics is needed to protect nature and limit climate change...
He believes we need to move beyond talking about the environment, as this leads people to experience themselves and Earth as two separate entities and to see the planet in terms only of what it can do for them.
Change is possible only if there is a recognition that people and planet are ultimately one and the same.
"You carry Mother Earth within you," says Thay. "She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment.
You are about to become obsolete. You think that you are special, unique, and that whatever it is that you are doing is impossible to replace. You are wrong.
BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen demonstrated his P2P live sreaming protocol at the SF MusicTech Summit on Monday, arguing that it would be much better suited to stream large sports events that existing CDN-based solutions.
...he said [this technology] could potentially stream live video to millions of computers with no central infrastructure. Cohen said that the protocol could potentially be used for video conferencing, live streams of video game tournaments or even live sports events. “My goal here is to kill off television,” he joked.
We are training local technicians to build wind turbines from scratch, using scrap metal and car parts that they source locally. We need your support. We’ve already received an award from the President of Kenya for our work, but its financial support that we now need in order to keep this powerful dream alive. The wind turbines:
+ Are 3 times cheaper than equivalent solar panels
+ Do no harm, unlike disposable batteries or kerosene smoke
+ Help create skilled jobs
Most other energy projects in Africa rely on importing products to sell or distribute. With your support this project will develop local production capacity - renewable energy technology built by Kenyans, for Kenyans.
Update:
Thanks to you and many others, the target of raising 25,000 $ was achieved in time, and the money will be put to good use in further spreading local energy self sufficiency both in Kenya and other countries of Africa.
Unless we have a powerful groundswell of movement, grass roots movement of consumers and farmers, we can't take on the paid agents in the Governmnt of India to save us and protect our health from th neo-liberal onslaught on our survival as a nation. The women of Zaheerabad showed one way of doing it.
Wealth has been so successfully kept out of the political debate until recently that there wasn’t even an agreed-upon definition of what constitutes rich. And by that I don’t mean how much wealth, but rather what kind: assets or income? Though related, there’s a crucial, often overlooked distinction between the two, a gap in which stagnant wealth can easily hide.
But there are wealthy taxpayers who are never included in such debates, whose contribution to the public coffers is never increased by higher rates on income. It’s not loopholes or high-priced tax lawyers that spare them—it’s the form of their wealth. They have a lot of assets but relatively modest income.
I know because I’m one of them. Call us the “stealthy wealthy.” ...
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