Cindy Sheehan announced she is stepping down from her peace movement work and in so doing the US is losing a leading anti-war voice. We will be worse off for her departure. Sheehan spoke with Amy Goodman on today’s Democracy Now! (low-bandwidth audio, high-bandwdith audio, video, transcript). I am sympathetic to her reasons for leaving, [...]
I was working on my own response to the recent Mark Helprin op-ed in the New York Times when I learned that Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and blogger, maintains a wiki where a response is being edited. There are some uniquely American aspects to this discussion (such as the unconstitutionality of an infinite term [...]
John Stauber lays out the argument against the Democrat’s support for the bipartisan war in Iraq and Stauber doesn’t leave out their water carriers (such as MoveOn.org). Very few Democrats are talking about impeachment and war crimes trials. Yesterday, Rep. Kucinich (D-OH) spoke on Democracy Now! on this topic (video, audio, transcript). One can only [...]
DefectiveByDesign.org is mounting a day of action against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and digital restrictions management (“DRM” framed from the point of the user) when Disney releases their new movie: On Monday, Gonzales called on Congress to enact a sweeping new bill entitled the “Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007″ (IPPA) that would amongst other [...]
The Free Software Foundation has started a new campaign to convince people to support Ogg Vorbis with PlayOgg.org. Other formats (such as MP3, AAC, and many others) are patent-encumbered or only available with proprietary software. You shouldn’t have to lose your freedom to control your computer just to play audio and video. Long-time readers of [...]
Seventy MPs have now signed an Early Day Motion calling for retrospective extension to the term of copyright. Despite much evidence to the contrary and a study which concludes that “The European Commission should retain the length of protection on sound recordings and performers’ rights at 50 years.” and the ruckus raised the last time [...]
AMD owns ATI, a computer videocard manufacturer. Recent ATI videocards have no free software drivers. The proprietary ATI driver which works with a typical GNU/Linux system is poor quality and as a result many users have problems with it. At the Red Hat summit going on right now, an AMD representative discussed the situation and [...]
One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is progressing and the folks at OLPC have put together another video with interviews of the people behind the project. If you’re unfamiliar with their work, you can search for “OLPC” on this blog and find their other video. As before, the new video is licensed to to share under [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley