Spain: Political censorship

First they came for the ... The slippery slope of censorship, surveillance and oppression expressed through variations of Martin Niemöller's...

Expanding police and surveillance powers across Europe

In January, two interesting and thorough reports on expanding police and surveillance powers across Europe were published: Amnesty International published a 70 page report which summarizes its research into expanding...

Privacy attacks and government surveillance continue

At the Symantec Government Symposium on Tuesday, FBI director James Comey said he "can't resist talking about encryption and going dark", and will continue an "adult" discussion into 2017. What's...

The Negative Effects of Lead

There have been several studies over the last years which investigate the correlation between lead exposure and crime. Just last week, Feigenbaum and Muller (2015) [PDF] published another, looking at...

6 May : International Day Against DRM

Today has been designated International Day Against DRM. Free Software Foundation Europe has a brief leaflet to print and handout [PDF]. Defective by Design has a campaign and event page,...

Thirty years of GNU

In a brief and accurate article, The New Yorker commemorates Richard Stallman's work on the GNU project, and the history of the GPL. It was thirty years ago this month...

30 years of GNU

It's been 30 years since Richard Stallman announced his project to create a free alternative to Unix. The world has changed a lot since then, the Internet had changed and...

Zeitgeist

zeitgeist: The defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time. Source: http://twitpic.com/d279tx

Hollywood Studios Censor Pirate Bay Documentary

TorrentFreak is reporting that the Creative Commons licensed documentary about The Pirate Bay, "TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard", is being "censored" by several Hollywood studios through DMCA...

Tell W3C: We don't want the Hollyweb

defectivebydesign.org is organization a petition against DRM in HTML5. With some 16.000 already signed up, the goal is to reach 50.000 by 3 May which marks International Day Against DRM....

Internet Censorship and Fragmentation

Two Google brass, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and Director of Google Ideas Jared Cohen, have co-written an interesting piece on Internet censorship in today's Guardian. They warn that the Internet...

iodine - IP over DNS

A recent stay in a couple of Germany hotels revealed a few things: First, American cultural imperialism has spun out of control, to the point where hotel receptionists are now...

Mobile lockdown?

In his insightful piece on Andy Rubin's departure from the helm of the Google Android division, Charles Arthur looks into the future to see what's next for the Android platform....

The fragile cloud

It was less than two months ago that I echoed John Naughton’s warning that "nothing lasts forever". Naughton was talking about the "empires" of Facebook and Apple, but it is...

DIY Internet - Fiber by Farmers

The online magazine Motherboard recently ran a feel-good story about a community of British farmers in Lancashire who dug their own ditches to put down Internet fiber. The background was...

The CitizenWeb Project

At the end of last year, I wrote about DIY "cloud" services; how to get started with your own web server, blog, e-mail server, chat server, VOIP server. Add to...

Buying music online is a bad deal

An insightful comment by Richard Stallman, originally published in the Guardian: Danny Kelly says good riddance to HMV because it was sickly for some years before it died. I suggest...

Freedom is not a matter of principle

In today's news, the terms of the Android SDK has changed. However, it seems it was not open source in the first place. What's always interesting though, is the discussion...

The Do-It-Yourself Cloud

"In the cloud" The buzzword "cloud" seems to be here to stay for quite a lot longer. The problem is that it is rather ill-defined, and sometimes it is used...

4th of July: Higgs boson found, ACTA rejected

Big news today: The scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern could report today that they have observed a particle that is very likely to be the previously only...

FSF on Secure Boot

There has been a lot of heated discussion about the upcoming Restricted/Secure Boot requirement from Microsoft for its new Windows 8 OS, and how it will be implemented in the...