PC World: Google board opposes Net censorship ban, human rights review.

From the article:

At its annual meeting May 8, the board will recommend that shareholders vote against a proposal that would require the company to take steps to ensure freedom of access to the Internet. It also will advise a vote against a proposal calling for the company to form a committee to review its policies on human rights. The board, in the statement, did not give reasons for its positions.

And there you have it.

Apologies for the slow posting yesterday/today. It’s Spring Break, even for graduate students. So I’m taking the rest of today off… sd&if will be back on track Monday!

To honor the weekend’s arrival, there’s this:

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticism of the sober hours. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no: drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the yes function in man.

-William James, from The Varieties of Religious Experience

Happy weekending!

It’s a rock and roll kind of week here at sd&if…

Ars Technica: Music executive declaration: “Music 1.0 is dead.”

The statement, made at the Digital Music Forum East, could only have been followed by a unanimous: We have absolutely no idea what that means.

Things get even dodgier when the article uses the following to paraphrase iLike’s CEO’s entire speech: Music 2.0, meet Web 2.0.

That’s the kind of contemporary media-anthropomorphizing-meta-speak that makes the back of your eyeballs itch.

(more…)

Washington Post: Army blocks access to web-based library of doctrinal publications.

From the article:

Army officials moved the Reimer Digital Library (http://atiam.train.army.mil) behind a password-protected firewall on Feb. 6, restricting access to an electronic trove that is popular with researchers for its wealth of field and technical manuals and documents on military operations, education, training and technology. All are unclassified, and most already are approved for public release.

Is the move excessive? We think so. Is it surprising? Of course not.

(more…)

NYT Opinion article on last week’s court-ordered shut down of Wikileaks.org.

From the article:

Federal District Court Judge Jeffrey White ordered Wikileaks’s domain name registrar to disable its Web address. That was akin to shutting down a newspaper because of objections to one article. The First Amendment requires the government to act only in the most dire circumstances when it regulates free expression.

ABC News: Domestic spying: a double-edged sword. [via]

From the article:

By diverting the flow of so much domestic data into a few massive pools, the administration may have “[built] for its opponents something that would be too expensive for them to build for themselves,” say the authors: “a system that lets them see the U.S.’s intelligence interests…[and] that might be turned” to exploit conversations and information useful for plotting an attack on the United States.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: privacy and security are not mutually exclusive!

Guardian Unlimted: It’s time to overhaul copyright. [via]

From the article:

We copy each other to learn and to improve - it’s one of the things that makes us human, because we’re a lot better at it than chimps.

We absolutely agree, even though it’s a sweeping generalization that doesn’t necessarily hold true for all humans…or all chimps, for that matter.

I can’t even begin to imagine how much money I owe Mick Jagger & Co. for the many, many, many times I’ve battled intoxication and poor karaoke sound systems in order to “ape” his high notes in “Beast of Burden.”

And now I’ve said it online. And now they will sue me.

I can shrug it off!

Acton PowerBlog: The pope gets into the Intellectual Freedom fray.

…or he gets dragged into it, whatever. So he was supposed to speak at a public university. So some professors and students called foul. So he stayed away (but his speech was released and read in his absence anyway). So some Italian folks freaked. And now the academics are the bad guys?

But, according to the article (posted by Bernd Bergmann), the pope did say this along the way:

Benedict praised the academic community at La Sapienza for its high scholarship and particularly emphasized the importance of that “autonomy which, on the basis of its founding principles, has always been part of the nature of the university, which must always be exclusively bound to the authority of the truth. In its freedom from political and ecclesiastical authorities, the university finds its special role, and in modern society as well, which needs institutions of this nature.”

We like the quote. But we’re not sure we’ll really ever be able to wrap our heads around the whole thing. You know, the whole catholic thing.

Kudos to the Evening Sun online (Greater Hanover/Gettysburg) for publishing this look at censorship.

I would doubt the Littlestown parents in question actually read the entirety of the book they were challenging; all of their claims sound suspiciously like hollow reactionary rhetoric - the kind you usually find hovering around anything sexual…or relevant, for that matter.

I particularly like the earnest, unpretentious opening paragraph:

Censorship is such a powerful tool, it’s almost hard to imagine anyone willing to wield it. Hard to imagine anyone believing they have that kind of moral authority.

A simple, most eloquent defense of intellectual freedom if I’ve ever heard one.

Demonbaby has a really damn fantastic little piece about the ongoing “record industry suicide.”

It chronicles the journey many millions of us have made in the wake of digital filesharing technologies: So I can download this stuff for free? Let me try it. Damn, this doesn’t feel right. I should still pay something. What the hell? CD’s still cost damn near $20? Fuck this. *Click*

I also appreciate the passing treatment of copyright law in the essay:

At the top of all this is the rigged, outdated, and unfair structure of current intellectual property laws, all of them in need of massive reform in the wake of the digital era. These laws allow the labels to maintain their stranglehold on music copyrights, and they allow the RIAA to sue the pants off of any file-sharing grandmother they please. Since the labels are owned by giant corporations with a great deal of money, power, and political influence, the RIAA is able to lobby politicians and government agencies to manipulate copyright laws for their benefit. The result is absurdly disproportionate fines, and laws that in some cases make file sharing a heftier charge than armed robbery.

If iPods are outlawed, only outlaws will have iPods.

[via Sivacracy]