What does that community mean to me, a person who has to walk by the ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] offices every day on my way to my own office just down the hall — who was watched, noted and reported, all in a day's work? Today, we gave in willingly and wholeheartedly to a culture of fear and blaming and profiling. It is deemed perfectly appropriate behavior to spy on one another and police one another and report on one another. Such behaviors exist most strongly in closed, undemocratic and fascist societies.
— Kazim Ali, an Indian-ethnic professor of poetry at a university in Pennsylvania, after being reported as a terrorist for leaving a 'suspicious' box next to the bin to be recycled (which turned out to contain manuscripts that he was recycling). It's not his race that caused it, it's the culture of paranoia that exists over there. America is quite plainly not a free country any more.
The content industries have a choice. They can suffer a painful restructuring as the full force of the move to digital unmakes all their plans and invalidates their business models; or they can suffer the same painful restructuring with a far smaller chance of success by alienating their one-time customers as they try to shore up their position with restrictive rights management.
— Bill Thompson, BBC World Service Commentator, quoted at p2pblog.com (via Boing Boing). The reason DRM is attractive is that it allows content creators to delay thinking about business models that actually work in the presence of P2P.
If this is a good idea now, then why won't it still be a good idea in a year? A decade? After all, terrorist plots will always exist in potentia (can you prove that no terrorist plots are hatching at this moment?) Until they handcuff us all nude to our seats and dart us with tranquilizers, there will always be the possibility that a passenger will do something naughty on a plane (even then, who knows how much semtex and roofing nails a bad guy could hide in his colon?).
Cory Doctorow (from Boing Boing) on the recent ban on hand luggage on UK flights. I'm glad I didn't book my flight for any later or I'd have had to leave half my luggage behind!
Ugh. I take it all back.
France has just passed a new copyright law which essentially makes it impossible for anyone to safely develop open source software there.
Someone needs to smack the pro-DRM lobby upside the head and make them realise that their approach is totally short-sighted and counterproductive. Or just forcibly disestablish it.
P.S. I swear, the next thing I post about will have nothing to do with politics.
The Bush doctrine views the rule of law as our enemy, and claims it is allied with terrorism.
From Groklaw, an extract from the Free Software Foundation Europe's statement on Microsoft's recent fine:
"If we are to believe Microsoft's numbers, it appears that 120.000 person days are not enough to document its own software. ... For users, this should be a shock: Microsoft apparently does not know the software that controls 95% of all desktop computers on this planet. Imagine General Motors releasing a press statement to the extent that even though they had 300 of their best engineers work on this for two years, they cannot provide specifications for the cars they built."
It's long been my opinion that closed "standards" (including protocols and file formats) are an unmitigated loss for many reasons, though most especially because they lock the user into the first vendor's solution. It's gratifying that the European Commission has the intelligence to realise this, though given the trend in European (and other) governments towards open standards, perhaps not too surprising.