Date/2010/12

as leaks come and go, for now most are superfluous, shallow comments on international leaders and the good stuff is yet to be seen. by having an action hero portrayed as the savior of the poor, and the state lockdown on it, we have the perfect distraction maneuver.

during this past month, behind the distractions, a lot of internet liberties are being taken away. starting with net neutrality, continuing with the mafiaa is taking down websites via copyright claims (something that wasn’t legal and was completely unseen before), entire countries are blocking websites, google is now filtering results based on copyright claims too. and using wikileaks as an excuse, new laws are being made to outlaw such websites and undermine internet horizontal design. the wikileaks dns company deleted the record via some powerful lobbying (it’s back up in switzerland ), not soon after the amazon cloud hosting service had canceled their account, again after some lobbying.

thanks to wikileaks, we might lose the “free for all” internet like it used to be. online freedom of speech can now be outlawed easily in terms of “national security”. it’s over. it started with people giving away their data to private companies (google, amazon, facebook, twitter), in such high volumes it can be used for high resolution personal analysis. then, with the “great firewalls” of china, australia and some other countries. service providers do packet filtering depending on the protocol being used, effectively stopping certain online activities. now, using the reichtag fire wikileaks, we lose the remaining freedom online. you can be revoked of your online citizenship by arbitrary lobbying. wikileaks.org is gone. their dns record was deleted thanks to some powerful people. soon, probably ip addresses will be seized too, rendering any “dangerous” website useless.

alternatives exist, such as running other dns services, but it would be naive to think it would do anything. we use a private infrastructure to go online (usually owned by the service providers and telecom companies). it’s only a matter of time until this “hacker heaven” becomes outlawed and turns into another television channel. you are still “free” to choose your website, like your channel on tv. out of sight will be the right to broadcast and speak your mind.

it will be interesting to see what countries choose an open, public net and what countries choose a privately held, privately produced, web. my guess? all western countries will go for the private one, and nobody will even notice. after all, youtube is still up, we can still watch our cats flushing the toilet. we’ll slowly boil like a frog in a pot .

this is just a short notice, we are starting a new project (you know how it is, a new one a week). this time, it is devoted to preserving some of the stories we collect. this time, we called it “anonymous and beautiful”. it is about anonymous people we meet, mostly through CS. we are not going to connect it to anyone or sign under anywhere, in fact, one of our ideas is to allow people to add their own interviews. the main point is that the interviewer is not only unknown, but not even heard. our focus is on the people themselves.

the website is http://anonymousandbeautiful.wordpress.com/ and our vimeo channel is http://vimeo.com/user5369722. we have about 20 coming, we produce them faster than we can upload them. that’s one vimeo feature i don’t enjoy. we’ll see if it works out. if it does, we might go pro. we also need better lighting for the night shots. for now, it looks really extremely candid and homemade, we want to keep it that way.

we also gave it a slight esoteric “exuberantist church” tone. that’s where we are headed with the exuberantism thing. it’s neither religious nor spiritual, but structurally and in many of the expressions used, it piggy backs on some of the rights religion has earned along the way. a simple form of “mental phreaking”, like atheists are doing with calling themselves “brights”, or homosexuals did with the word “gay”.