"Consider events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire. There, in the aftermath of a long civil war, the government is currently zoning its forests — which cover as much as 316 million acres, an area nearly the size of France, Germany and Spain combined — in preparation for their mass allocation to logging companies. Old European timber conglomerates want to reactivate their concessions, some dating back almost to the brutal days more than a century ago when the entire country was run by King Leopold of Belgium. Logging newcomers from Malaysia and China also want a slice of the action."

"Libraries are a recognition that scholarship and culture are more than the business of creating and consuming. They are a human conversation, and libraries provide common ground where that conversation can take place and be remembered. By taking aim at the right for the public to maintain this conversation and its memory, publishers have shown us what we have to lose. It’s time we resisted the outsourcing of our common heritage by occupying the library."

"Microblogging services such as Twitter are an increasingly important way to communicate, both for individuals and for groups through the use of hashtags that denote topics of conversation. However, groups can be easily blocked from communicating through blocking of posts with the given hashtags. We propose #h00t, a system for censorship resistant microblogging. #h00t presents an interface that is much like Twitter, except that hashtags are replaced with very short hashes (e.g., 24 bits) of the group identifier. Naturally, with such short hashes, hashtags from different groups may collide and #h00t users will actually seek to create collisions. By encrypting all posts with keys derived from the group identifiers, #h00t client software can filter out other groups' posts while making such filtering difficult for the adversary. In essence, by leveraging collisions, groups can tunnel their posts in other groups' posts. A censor could not block a given group without also blocking the other groups with colliding hashtags. We evaluate the feasibility of #h00t through traces collected from Twitter, showing that a single modern computer has enough computational throughput to encrypt every tweet sent through Twitter in real time. We also use these traces to analyze the bandwidth and anonymity tradeoffs that would come with different variations on how group identifiers are encoded and hashtags are selected to purposefully collide with one another."

"The friction between the quant and the poet could be represented by focusing on a few bickering individuals, or by trying to divide the greens up into Two Cultures. But it could also, perhaps more honestly and productively, be represented as a tension that is present within all. None of us is wholly, or even primarily, rational and analytical, and none of us is quite devoid of poetry either, though it is sometimes hard to find it. These divisions are themselves stories that we, in this particular culture, tell ourselves about how humans work. The quants and the poets are both needed, but I would argue that, right now, the poets ought to take the lead – if indeed that is ever something that poets are capable of. We have no shortage of arguments about numbers and machines, but we do have a great shortage of workable stories. That is to say: stories that don’t just have happy endings, but have convincing plots as well."

"Nonetheless, the anti-poverty organization of 400,000 low- and middle-income member families in 75 cities was successfully targeted and put out of business by Republicans; the long, concerted smear campaigns intended to do little more than undercut ACORN's successful voter registration drives. Those drives had succeeded in legally registering hundreds of thousands of low- and middle-income voters, many of whom tend to vote Democratic. For that, for enfranchising Americans to participate in their own democracy, the GOP had to put them out of business.

Mission accomplished."

"One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success. Had the zero rupee note reached the old lady sooner, her granddaughter could have started college on schedule and avoided the consequence of delaying her education for two years. In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen."

"The Chamber has pulled out all the stops in its effort to silence the activists. First, it sent an improper copyright takedown notice to the Yes Men's upstream provider, demanding that a parody website posted in support of the action be removed immediately and resulting in the temporary shutdown of not only the spoof site but hundreds of other sites hosted by May First/People Link. Next, the Chamber filed suit against the activists in federal court, claiming among other things the activism infringed their trademarks."

"Well, those copyright assertions are back, this time by the Attorney General, who asserted ownership over the (for real!) Attorney General's Public Record and Public Meeting Manual. I spent last week in Oregon meeting with law school faculty and giving lectures at 3 universities on the topic of who owns the law."

"If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience."

"Where we are now, and we already know that we are there, is in a much more permeable and fluid society and a much more permeable cultural environment where the difference between producers and consumers is much more blurred. Where this category of users has become absolutely central to everything we do. So when we talk about newspapers, we have to think about the users who communicate with a commercial organization like TPM, the users who basically get together and make their own new party presses, like DailyKos or Townhall, like the users who make up YouTube, like the users who make up Wikipedia. Suddenly you have radically decentralized practical capacity to act. And what do people do? They act."

"Finally, in the spirit of cooperation and sharing, and by agreement with our interviewees, we are making this footage available to others who want to make films on this subject, and who may not have the resources to travel to and meet these exceptional individuals. We hope the HDV Torrents we have provided are of sufficient quality. If you have any issues, please contact us.

Steal This Film is a work in progress, incomplete, open to contradiction and response. The task of talking back to our point of view is one we leave at the feet of you, the viewers, users and produsers of the film."

"RiP: A remix manifesto is a documentary film about copyright and remix culture. You can contribute to the film, and follow the conversation on the social networks below."

“Hi all. Over the last day or so I have talked about your project with a few DDA members and what arose from these conversations was a shared concern that because the project was not an initiative created by/run by the DDA there are no controls in place for this at present. For instance, there is no DDA policy about how to allow /or even if it should allow an outside group to use the DDA’s parking data for a private enterprise. There is a concern about how unsecure/secure the DDA website is made when sharing this data. And finally, a concern that if the project had value to parking patrons, that the DDA itself should consider providing this service as an extension of what it is already doing on-line.”

"Even if the golden age of "interactive fiction" has passed, and its feelies are now the glorious preserve of only the most committed boffins, I can't shake the feeling that feelies have a future, too. It's curious that seeking antecedents to the future artifacts meme takes us down an overgrown path into the not-too-distant past, there to find that feelies -- tangible auxiliaries to a cutting-edge storytelling technology, concessions to meatspace -- may have a transreality staying power that as a practice, seems timeless, compared to the wonderfully quaint electronic games they were created merely to supplement."

"You didn't have the time to read the 1100 page stimulus bill. And neither did members of Congress—by their own choice. Most lawmakers—on both sides of the aisle—were only given 13 hours to read the bill before it was passed."

"“What becomes clear to participants is we are facing some major economic and ecological changes,” said Andree Zaleska from the Boston office of Institute for Policy Studies, who is coordinating clubs in the Northeast. “We are not going back to some golden age of economic growth based on empire, unfettered capitalism, and cheap energy—nor do we want to! We have to prepare ourselves and our communities for transformation.”"

"These businesses have the right to support whatever ballot measures they want, but fair-minded citizens of all sexual orientations also have the right to take their money elsewhere and not patronize businesses that support bigotry. This site is not a witch-hunt but is a tool intended to help people make informed decisions when they shop for products and services. This site hopes to overcome some of the limitations of existing Prop 8 donor databases on the web and in time hopes to become a useful repository of all companies in the U.S. with anti-gay policies.

Using publicly available information from the California Secretary of State’s website, DontBuyFromBigots.com strives to be the most comprehensive business-specific listing of donors to Prop 8. This site is a work in progress created and maintained in the spare time of one person, so forgive the spartan appearance. Contact me if you want to help improve the website."

"Who would be invited to a social charrette in a technocracy? One thinks of blue ribbon panels and legislative hearings, but those are not public deliberations in most cases…they are public hearings. A charrette is a publicly deliberative process. It has rules and structures that are pliant and disruptive influences are addressed by a combination of rhetoric and interest, not “leadership,” which is a term I find increasingly dubious. "

"In upcoming posts, we'll review some of the ways people are starting to organize online and look at the key design elements of self-organizing, whether online or off.

Jean pointed out that some of you are already experimenting, so please let us know what you are doing by responding to this post!"

"The essential problem is the tragedy of the commons. Global warming and concern about CO2 emissions is a global, social problem that has extraordinary long term impacts, but when you look at it on an individual level, the marginal returns that a selfish individual can gain by ignoring the greater good far exceeds the marginal cost to that individual in the short run. In the long run, though, everyone pays more."

"Wouldn't it be nice, every once in a while, to read some sort of evidence of heart? An occasional 'We kid, the guy's okay??' Unless you really don't, in which case you won't be sorry when that bear shoots me with a rocket launcher. Mark my words: the gossip-monger whose style closest resembles that of Don Rickles' mastery of tension and release will stay successful the longest. Because the salient rules of entertainment will always apply. And Don Rickles should know, because he helped write them."

"In an attempt to make up partly for that information deficit, I’ll suggest that we put together an online survey available here on The Chronicle to serve two specific purposes. The first goal would be to add citizen input to Fraser’s directive to staff: how do you think we could save 15% over the next two years? The second goal would be to supplement the picture of Ann Arbor that the National Citizens Survey gives.

So until the end of the year, we’ll take suggestions in the comments section of this article for survey questions along those lines. We’ll launch the survey on Jan. 1, 2009. Thanks in advance for your help."

"My problem is that I don't think there are good guys and bad guys. Things are the way they are for a reason, and there is always a reason, even when the result is atrocity and outrage."

"The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do some- thing more specific. At this point they usually floundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their task. Women had thoroughly accepted the idea of 'structurelessness' without realising the limitations of its uses. People would try to use the 'structureless' group and the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything but oppressive."

"This suggests to me that the Templeton Foundation's pretensions to belief in the free exchange of ideas are fraudulent. And John Templeton, Jr.'s support of the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign suggests to me that the foundation he runs is willing to blur the line between church and state in order to deprive a minority of the civil right of marriage. Until the Templeton Foundation addresses the issue of its chairman's antagonism to gay civil rights, either by dismissing him or by issuing an apology, backed by equivalent funding to a group advocating gay civil marriage, I strongly discourage writers and intellectuals who believe in the free exchange of ideas, the separation of church and state, gay rights, or the protection of the civil rights of minorities from working with or accepting money from the Templeton Foundation."

"Elected officials don’t run our government. Government employees do. Every citizen interested in changing our country must understand this."

via Boingboing

The key: "...it needn't be bureaucratically untenable."

via:Sivacracy

"All it takes is one person to stand up and say 'fuck this.'"

via: Brand Flakes for Breakfast

"The city is working very hard to turn New Orleans into a vacant lot. The city is keeping the information sequestered in City Hall. The work of Karen Gadbois, Sarah Elise Lewis and Matt McBride is nothing less than forensic."

Distinguish the level of evil of your favorite artists and music labels.

"From personal experience I can tell you that the big labels are beyond clueless in the digital world - their ideas are out-dated, their methods make no sense, and every decision is hampered by miles and miles of legal tape, copyright restrictions, and co

Free ≠ Open

"Perhaps you could try harder next time out. Pay a little more attention to the procedural questions, maybe."

Quick, pointed typographic Spider Jerusalem rant video