Whuffie Stream
October 2011
10 posts
“In other words, just to spell it out, the copyright lobby is spending millions and millions pushing for legislation that explicitly hides egregious crimes against children just so they can restrict freedom of speech and introduce censorship to protect their neomercantilistic monopolies. There are no words that meet my level of contempt for this.”
—
Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party.
(via jonprins)
Meanwhile, on an uncensored network: Anonymous takes down darknet child porn site on Tor network.
(via papyromancer)
"New Era" for Klout →
corp.klout.com
The problem with this whuffie system for me, is that as long as it is a commercial enterprise, it will be gamed towards sales.
True trust metric, is always vulnerable to gaming, but it cannot start with sales revenue as it’s model.
In otherwards advertisers don’t really want an accurate picture of the market as much as they want access to the market.
And I am not going to participate in a metric that is inaccurate, and that is fueled by my data.
Google and Tumblr have the biggest opportunities for creating a pure trust currency in my mind.
“One of the rare one’s where you talk about everything from UAV’s to how UAV’s could be used to monitor eggs in bird’s nest to export regulation of UAV’s.”
—DIY Drones London Meetup - DIY Drones (via iamdanw)
Wall Street’s Second Occupation: The Rise of the NYPD's Homeland Security State →
alternet.org
And then there’s a third possibility: that two quite separate universes are simply located in the vicinity of each other and of what, since September 12, 2001, we’ve been calling Ground Zero. Think of it as Ground Zero Doubled, or think of it as the militarized recent American past and the unknown, potentially inspiring American future occupying something like the same space. (You can, of course, come up with your own pairings, some far less optimistic.) In their present state, New York’s finest represent a local version of the way this country has been militarized to its bones in these last years and, since 9/11, transformed into a full-scale surveillance-intelligence-homeland-security state.
Their stakeout in Zuccotti Park is geared to extreme acts, suicide bombers, and terrorism, as well as to a conception of protest and opposition as alien and enemy-like. They are trying to herd, lock in, and possibly strangle a phenomenon that bears no relation to any of this. They are, that is, policing the wrong thing, which is why every act of pepper spraying or swing of the truncheon, every aggressive act (as in the recent eviction threat to “clean” the park) blows back on them and only increases the size and coverage of the movement.
Though much of the time they are just a few feet apart, the armed state backing that famed 1%, or Wall Street, and the unarmed protesters claiming the other 99% might as well be in two different times in two different universes connected by a Star-Trekkian wormhole and meeting only where pepper spray hits eyes.
Which means anyone visiting the Occupy Wall Street site is also watching a strange dance of phantoms. Still, we do know one thing. This massive semi-militarized force we continue to call “the police” will, in the coming years, only grow more so. After all, they know but one way to operate.
