politics

Last month I earned 7,26€ through my Flattr account (Flattr is a voluntary payment service where people can make micropayments if they like something - after enjoying it). The flattrs came in through just 4 items:

• The incremental Mercurial guide, “Learning Mercurial in Workflows”.
• The Freenet promotion “I hope French Filesharers turn to Freenet” (written in reply to news about millions of hadopi letters).
• The Esperanto version of my free one page pen-and-paper roleplaying game: The “Slipoj-Rolludo”.
• And my free software song “Infinite Hands”.

Thank you very much for your flattrs, dear supporters¹! Thanks to you I could pay most of my server cost this month via the money from flattr - and that’s great!²

Some thoughts¹ on how the humble Indie Bundle managed to get more than 1.25 Million Dollars² in one and a half weeks — more than one quarter of that from GNU/Linux users.

→ A comment to The Effectiveness of Political Assassinations.

Another answer why this doesn’t work is really simple: Consider that you were in a terrorist organization. You work with people in secrecy, but the ones you know are close to you, because they know your most intimate secrets.

Short: You fight alongside friends (though probably assholes by most ethical standards).

Now someone kills one of your friends.

A man in the streets faces a knife.
Two policemen are there it once. They raise a sign:

“Illegal Scene! Noone may watch this!”

The man gets robbed and stabbed and bleeds to death.
The police had to hold the sign.

…

Welcome to Europe, citizen. Censorship is beautiful.

→ Courtesy to Censilia, who wants censorship in the EU after it failed in Germany. You might also be interested in 11 more reasons why censorship is useless and harmful.

PS: This poem is free licensed. Please feel free to use it anyway you like, as long as you provide a backlink.

-> written in reply to Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation on techdirt.

This shows painfully how the powers are currently distributed.

<5% of the people have >90% of the resources, so they have more influence on the media which then influences which people are elected into positions of power, and then these elected pass laws which shift more power towards the <5%.

-> A comment on The Importance of Managing Your Online Reputation.

I read your article, and I found the points you make very interesting, though not only in a positive way.

You tackle the “we have a network others can see” from the active side: “How can I make sure my employer likes what he sees?”.

in reply to You do know you can't rely on Gmail, right?

You're citing some of the reasons why I dislike SaaS, but there's one more:

Whenever I use a SaaS application, I trust someone whom I really can't reach, and I trust him without being able to exert any kind of control.

A reply to a comment on slashdot named Can we fight the trend?:

There was a trend to having only proprietary software (by former free software being enslaved in the job contracts its creators took) and to having the hacker community die out.

That trend was reversed by GNU with the invention of the GPL and the GNU System.

And today millions of people use free software and we have organizations like the EFF and FSF who work for a free software society.

a comment to: Embattled ACTA Negotiations Next Week In Geneva; US Sees Signing This Year:

I didn't yet manage to get really safe information on what ACTA actually does (that's a marker for 'this is dangerous' in itself), but what I see on wikileaks sounds horrible:

-> a comment to BT to cut off file sharers from TechWatch.

I can read this article in two ways:
1) They took part in sharing/downloading that music file
2) They just had a bittorrent or Gnutella program running.

1 is unlikely, because not every fourth internet user will have downloaded that song.

And if 2 is the case, BT should be sued to its knees.

Having a Gnutella program is not illegal, and blocking access to Gnutella means vastly reduced service.