The Anarchist in the Library: an interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan

Good discussion of how “democracy and creative culture share this notion that they work best when the raw materials are cheap and easy and easily distributed. You can look at any cultural development that?s made a difference in the world?reggae, blues, crocheting?you can look at any of these and say, y?know, it?s really about communities sharing. It?s about communities moving ideas between and among people, revision, theme and variation, and ultimately a sort of consensus about what is good and what should stay around. We recognize that?s how culture grows? In the last 25 to 30 years, the United States government made a very overt choice. The United States government decided that the commercial interests of a handful of companies–we can name them as the News Corporation, Disney, AOL-Time Warner, Vivendi–these sorts of corporations were selling products that could gain some sort of trade advantage for Americans.

You can look at any cultural development that?s made a difference in the world–reggae, blues, crocheting–and say, y?know, it?s really about communities sharing. Therefore all policy has shifted in their favor. That means policy about who gets to own and run networks, who gets to own and run radio stations, how long copyright protection will last, what forms copyright protections will take. We?ve put ourselves in a really ugly situation though, because we?ve forgotten that a regulatory system like copyright was designed to encourage creativity, to encourage the dissemination of knowledge. These days, copyright is so strong and lasts so long that it?s counterproductive to those efforts….”

Stopping spam by redesigning SMTP from the ground up?

Interesting column by Larry Selzer. Quote:

“Sometimes I look at the Internet and I see so many different ways being used to compromise security that I wonder whether we’d be better off trashing a lot of the existing infrastructure. After all, the Internet was designed to be secure from nuclear attack, not its own users. The whole idea of network security probably never occurred to the designers of the Internet and the main applications that run it.

In my mind, the biggest failure in this regard is SMTP, the dominant mail protocol of the net. Spam is as pervasive as it is because of weaknesses in SMTP. We know how to fix these problems; the problem is that doing so would break existing applications, which means e-mail in general. This is always a bad thing, but it’s not always a deal-killer. I think this is one area where, in the long term, it may make sense to move away from a protocol that has allowed e-mail to get out of control….”.

The REAL Napster story

From the Boston Globe . It seems that behind Shawn Fanning stood the curious figure of his uncle John. And thereby hangs an interesting story…

Votester: new P2P technology for digital activism

Smart idea for creating virtual demonstrations. Possible in principle, but — alas — only vapourware at present.