References

To all of the ignorant idiots of the UK, and sadly, the western world at large, will you celebrate the onset of what you've been, through your idiocracy and ignorance building? Huh?

Where are you now?

When is anyone going to realize that Orwell's "1984" is not science fiction anymore? Read this and celebrate... or weep, weep hard for letting your ignorance, stupidity and self-betrayal mark your contribution to the reality you're living in:

Jono Bacon who is an Ubuntu Community Manager at Canonical announced a rather brilliant idea, to replace the "example-content" on Ubuntu live CDs and default installations with an Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase, a set of chosen content that is given under terms of Creative Commons Attribution - ShareAlike. This way they can both show what can be done with Ubuntu, as with the "example-content" folder and promote Free Culture.

There is apparently a club in Berlin, called Breipott which plays only music offered under terms of one of the Creative Commons licenses and including only licenses which fit the definition of free as in freedom software (so basically, the four freedoms).

They've just had a party on July 25 celebrating "the adaption of the latest CC-BY-SA (version 3.0) to the German jurisdiction".

Cool stuff.

A libertarian radio talk show and podcast, Free Talk Live featured an interview with Cory Doctorow, a science fiction writer, founder of BoingBoing and a fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, mainly about his new book called Little Brother which one of the co-hosts of the show calls the most important book in his life.

Enjoy.

Revolution March, organized for July 12 2008 in Washington DC is an event that may send shockwaves throughout the world, with the awoken voices of thousands saying that we are not giving up, that we will fight for our freedoms and against tyranical governments forming in what used to be a beacon of freedom, the USA, but unfortunately in Europe as well, as some fellow europeans know.

An Open Source unconference that aims at creating a platform for discussing FOSS and Mobile Technologies in India. The unconference isbeing organised as a part of the International Conference on Communication, Convergence and Broadband Networking.
Come and Join us on 19th July 2008 and be a part of a phenomenon that is changing FOSS and India at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.

Visit: OSSCamp Bengaluru Mobile! 2008

This is just another example of some of the threats we are facing as already quite oppressive governments who let their power be heavily abused by corporate interests increasingly turn to the use of technology to regulate everything we do, against our freedom.

When they start using technological locks, just civil disobedience wont do. The only way to fight back against technological locks is by technological means. This is one case where Freedomware plays a crucial role, not so much because "copyleft" licenses state you have certain rights, but because it usually comes with source code.

an insightful essay about internal freedom of speech

While this is not directly technology related it is quite alarming for our freedoms. I wouldn't say I believe every word in this article, but it is still quite intriguing and I do believe that the EU can hardly lead to good. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we soon find that the EU is de facto becoming a single state, as United States of Europe.

Someone accidentally posted this link in an IRC channel and since I was curious I checked it out. It's a pretty nice and functional map of freedom in the world, mapping countries in three categories: not free, partly free and free.

From a quick survey of the map it looks like the half of the world, and counting such highly populated places like China, even more than half live without essential freedoms, which is quite sad.