Skyfaller.space

I’m going to be speaking at Yale Law School this Friday (the 10th), at this event called “Digital Mix“, so if you’ll be in or around New Haven, CT then, please swing by!  Also, if you’re at Swarthmore, and you don’t have any finals that day, you should come with me… Luke is planning to arrive back at Swarthmore on Thursday and take the train up with me as well, so it should be a rocking time!

Also, check out this great essay on what’s wrong with the environmentalist movement and what green activists can do to improve things.  It’s definitely worth reading, since we at FreeCulture.org call ourselves “an environmentalism of the information commons” sometimes… We can learn from the environmentalist movement’s successes and mistakes.  Like the environmentalist movement, we must bring together hundreds of seemingly disparate issues and unite them under one banner. 

There are several differences between their cause and our cause, however… one significant one is that the golden days of the environment are irretrievably far behind us, and while we can work towards a progressive environmentalism, where we carefully steward the planet and use high technology to keep it clean and beautiful, it will never be the same as it was before humans had a population of many billions on Earth.  However, while we must fight to protect the tradition of free culture that we’ve had, which has been losing ground in the past several decades, the fact is that the internet and digital technology give us the greatest promise for a truly free culture that the world has ever seen.  If we can preserve our freedom, great changes will happen and the future will rock.  The problem that we face is that it’s hard to get people excited about bills like the Induce Act, which threaten future innovation but which may do little to destroy our current comforts.  Our opponents are clear-cutting the future, and the negative results will not be lost forests replaced by wastelands, but creativity that never has a chance to come into being.  How do you measure the loss of something which has yet to be?  If someone went around with a time machine and killed all our greatest proponents of peace and justice when they were still children, would we miss them?

On the other hand, what we are battling very much resembles a loss of biodiversity… a world in which only those who sign up with big corporations are allowed to create is very much like an environment that consists only of squirrels, sparrows, starlings and suburban lawns.  There are many parallels which we can explore, but the point is, examine the differences, play with them, and see what insights we can draw from comparing the nascent free culture movement with 50+ years of building environmentalism into a worldwide movement.

Perhaps I’ve underestimated Kerry. (Think Kerry Is Not Involved In This Fight?  Think Again.)  Maybe he’s still quietly working on making sure that election fraud didn’t turn the election in Bush’s favor, and maybe refusing to concede until every vote is counted wouldn’t have been the best strategy after all.  If Kerry still manages to emerge as president after conceding the election, then he will deserve the office.  And if it does turn out that the election was fixed, then we’re in for some interesting times.

I’ve decided that the first chance I get, I’m going to upload my brain into a computer, make lots of copies of myself, and then share myself over a p2p network under a Creative Commons license.  Then I wouldn’t have to eat, sleep, or talk to girls in person.  That would truly be geek heaven!

I could also probably take over the world, unless there are lots of other sentient beings on the p2p networks, but that’s just a pleasant side effect…

Oh yeah, and I’m in this article in Wired News about FreeCulture.org.

UPDATE – I expressed this a little more eloquently in our school newspaper,but not much: Kerry ignored e-voting problems.

I wish that the mainstream Democrats took the e-voting problems seriously… why was Kucinich the only one to take up e-voting as an issue? I wish that the American media covered our e-voting problems better… I still can’t believe that I’ve been on German TV and Japanese TV to talk about the Diebold case, but not American TV! Why do the Germans and Japanese care more about our elections than we do? People in other countries are convinced that our elections are a farce, that we live in a banana republic, and I’m not sure that they’re wrong. Why did ABC call me, and then fail to call me back despite my repeated attempts to reach them before November 2nd? It’s kind of late now, but if the e-voting problems had received more attention before election night, maybe Kerry wouldn’t have conceded so quickly and easily.

Read this Daily KOS article: Which is more credible: exit polls or Diebold? I don’t really believe in a conspiracy theory, but what is disturbing about this situation with the electronic voting machines (with no paper trail) is that we’ll never know whether there was any hanky-panky in Florida and Ohio this year. Even if there is any evidence of election fraud to be found, only conspiracy theorists will be researching it now. If Kerry hadn’t conceded, you could have had serious organizations with serious funding doing serious research. But no mainstream organization is going to bother looking for evidence of fraud if it doesn’t matter because Kerry has already conceded.

I voted Libertarian, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t wish the Kerry Democrats were better at life.

I got tired of my bookmarks always building up until they reached the point where they were too big to fit in one screen, and then my switching computers or Linux distros and leaving those bookmarks behind, only for them to build up again…

Therefore I got an account on this awesome social bookmarking website, del.icio.us! I like it a lot already, I’ve subscribed to my friend Andy Smith‘s del.icio.us bookmarks.

Incidentally, this is a great experiment in collecting metadata for links, just as the ESP Game attempts to collect metadata for images.

You should pre-order this book, because I’m quoted in it in multiple
chapters:

Freedom of Expression (R) : Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other
Enemies of Creativity
by Kembrew McLeod

Amazon link: http://tinyurl.com/6kcpj

Specifically:

hey, just an update on the book. it’ll be out in wide distribution
through doubleday/random house on feb 15, and you ended up being
mentioned and quoted three times, in three chapters (ch. 4: free
culture & barbie in a blender; ch. 5: diebold; ch. 6: free software,
etc.)

Kembrew interviewed me during the Knowledge Held Hostage conference, and he seemed pretty cool. He gets bonus points for trademarking “freedom of expression”.

And I get quoted!

Diebold Coughs Up Cash in Copyright Case!

It’s always nice when papers just print your press release verbatim… what disturbs me is the thought that perhaps papers carry verbatim press releases from less scrupulous people and treat them as stories written by reporters.  What does “By IPR”  in this article mean?  Whoever IPR is, I don’t think they wrote the EFF’s press release.  I’m stumped.   It appears that they’ve basically subscribed to the EFF’s press release page, which is awesome, because these issues never receive as much mainstream attention as they ought to.  I guess we must just have an EFF supporter on the newspaper staff in Millinocket, ME.

I’m never sure which blog I should post to about news articles.  This article mentions  and links to FreeCulture.org… should it go on the Free Culture Blog?  It’s about Diebold, should it go on the SCDC livejournal?  I’ve decided that since today’s article mostly consists of an interview with me, and it has a pretty picture of me in Swarthmore’s library, it’s more about me than anything else and should go on my blog.

So check out the latest article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Students win court ruling – along with measure of fame.   Sadly, it’s one of those annoying news sites that requires registration.  Happily, there is a site, bugmenot.com, which, if you type in the URL of the registration page, will provide a username and password to log in with that some kind user has donated, to save you the pain of going through the whole registration process yourself.  Even more happily, there is an BugMeNot extension for Mozilla Firefox that will automatically fill in one of these user/pass combos when it comes across a registration page, which means that you can breeze through thousands of annoying registration-requiring news sites without giving away all your private info (or taking the time to invent a fake identity).  Yet another reason open source software rocks!

Update: The Washington Post also mentioned our suit, in a difficult to link to page called Electronic Voting: the latest news.  Look for us under “October 13, The Philadelphia Inquirer profiled Nelson Pavlosky”…

Is there any better place to toot my own horn than on my blog?  Until I find a better place to exercise my bragging rights, check out this 3m25s clip from NPR’s All Things Considered about our victory in the Diebold case.  I get to say about 3 sentences, but they are fun sentences 🙂  It’s very flattering to share airtime with Wendy Seltzer from the EFF, John Zittrain from Harvard, etc…. I’m not worthy!  I’m not worthy!  Seriously, all of the credit for this victory goes to our lawyers, especially Jennifer Granick and Cindy Cohn, they rock the house.  If you see them, tell them that I gave them mad props.