Rickard Falkvinge: Net Generation Votes in a Year — Stand By for a Purge of Arrogant Ignorant Legislatures

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy

Rickard Falkvinge
Rickard Falkvinge

Why Can’t Offline-Borns Tell Difference Between Voluntary And Forced Actions?

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 03:24 AM PDT

Repression:  The conflicts and tensions between the net generation and the offline legislators are just escalating. The legislators are sitting on all the force, but the net generation is sitting on all the future. With the recent revelations of wholesale spying and surveillance by the United States’ NSA, these tensions have been brought to light again.

People and legislators who were born into the offline world were so through none of their choice. Nobody holds, or should hold, them responsible for being an offline-born. However, people should – and do – hold them responsible when they’re not even making an effort at understanding the net generation and dismissing their demands of privacy and dignity. Listening to lobbyists of big corporations does not count, even if those lobbyists call themselves “stakeholders”. They, too, are offline-born, and will just tell the legislators that the net needs to be curtailed more because it disrupts their business by allowing the competition to do the same thing at one-tenth the cost.

It isn’t just the United States and the NSA spying on their citizens in this manner. The European countries’ security forces do it too, and we know it all too well, even though it probably won’t mentioned too much in election campaigns.

The demands from the net generation of basic privacy, basic respect – even basic dignity – is just getting louder in the face of these egregious privacy violations. Unfortunately, it is usually met with undeserving disrespect from the offline-borns, legislators and lobbyists alike.

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Mini-Me: $75 Billion a Year, and US IC Still Cuts and Pastes Without Updating Years’ Old Information

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Impotency, Military
Who?  Mini-Me?
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

US Intelligence Report a Cut-Paste on Chinese Missiles

College students can be flunked for cut-and-paste reports, think tankers can be embarrassed, Defense News staff writers can be fired, but not, apparently, members of the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC).

Most of its so-called “updated” report, 2013 Ballistic and Cruise Missile Threat, which contains contributions from the Defense Intelligence Agency Missile and Space Intelligence Center and the Office of Naval Intelligence, was largely a cut-and-paste job from its 2009 report. Some of the material is identical to the 2006 and 1998 report.

Though it was reformatted and photographs rearranged with some being enlarged or decreased, the 2013 report appears verbatim from the 2009 report. This clever reordering and reformatting with new color schemes for boxes and graphs is embarrassing since there is more impressive data on Chinese missiles on Wikipedia.

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Berto Jongman: Synthetic Biology Next Battleground?

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Will synthetic biology become a GM-style battleground?

David Shukman

BBC, 11 July 2013

Will the emerging science of designing and engineering new forms of life receive the same hostile reception as genetically modified food and crops?

This is the question facing the growing community of academic and commercial researchers exploring the potential of synthetic biology.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

For those pioneering this new field, the science offers a whole realm of exhilarating possibilities – dreaming up and building new organisms that will perform exactly what's ordered. It is a vision for taking control of nature.

Synthetic biology is a dimension beyond genetic modification.

While GM involves taking genes from one organism and inserting them in another, synthetic biology involves designing and creating artificial genes and implanting them instead – not just borrowing from the natural world but rewriting it or even reinventing it.

I used virtual reality to try to explain it last year.

At a major conference this week in London – the BioBricks Foundation SB6.0 – excited talk suggested that synthetic biology could become the next big thing in everything from energy to medicines to industry.

Read full article.

Richard Stallman: #CancelNetflix

Commerce, Corruption, Government
Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman

For the last few months, we've been raising an outcry against Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a plan by Netflix and a block of other media and software companies to squeeze support for Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) into the HTML standard, the core language of the Worldwide Web. The HTML standard is set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which this block of corporations has been heavily lobbying as of late.

The proposed adoption of EME is disturbing for what it says about the way decisions are made relative to the Web, but what does it mean for you as a free software user?

DRM and free software don't mix. All DRM software relies on keeping secrets, like decryption algorithms, from the user, so that users cannot design their own method to modify it. The secrets are stored on users' own computers in places users cannot access or even read. This practice inherently tramples Freedom 1 of the Free Software Definition: the freedom to study how a program works and change it so it does your computing as you wish.

This means that each time a part of the Web starts requiring DRM software to decrypt it, it becomes inaccessible to free software. And if influential companies like Netflix, Google and Microsoft succeed at jamming DRM into the HTML standard, there will be even more pressure than there already is for people distributing media to encumber it with DRM. We'll see an explosion of DRM on the Web — a growing dark zone inaccessible to free software users. This threatens to happen at a time when the state of free software-friendly media on the Web was starting to improve, with the increasing quality of free video codecs and the decline of Flash accompanied by the rise of the HTML5 video tag.

Netflix's lobbying in the W3C is paid for by subscription fees, so we're asking you to help pull that money out from under them by boycotting their services. If you have an account, use this link to cancel it. Whether you're canceling an account or not, you can help the boycott build momentum by spreading the word with the hashtag #CancelNetflix.[1]

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Berto Jongman: Top 20 Data Visualization Tools

Advanced Cyber/IO
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

The top 20 data visualization tools

From simple charts to complex maps and infographics, Brian Suda's round-up of the best – and mostly free – tools has everything you need to bring your data to life

One of the most common questions I get asked is how to get started with data visualisations. Beyond following blogs, you need to practise – and to practise, you need to understand the tools available. In this article, I want to introduce you to 20 different tools for creating visualisations: from simple charts to complex graphs, maps and infographics. Almost everything here is available for free, and some you have probably installed already.

List with links below the line.

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