The Null Device
2002/3/26
Europe is about to establish a .eu domain, giving European businesses and organisation a choice other than national domains (such as .uk or .de) and top-level domains (such as .com). Though didn't the .eu domain exist for a while, only without many sites in it for reasons of bureaucratic inertia?
More on Internet access in the Workers' Paradise of Cuba: the Cuban government has just banned the sale of computers to individuals without special authorisation; this is believed to be to control the spread of underground media, and maintain strict control over the flow of information.
Do new US postage stamps (allegedly based on the logo of the Roman Prætorian Guard) signal the rise of fascism in America, or is that a paranoid fantasy fnord? Come to think of it, if those Neighbourhood Watch commercials are real, they sound pretty scary... (via Leviathan)
I picked up Hope Sandoval's album Bavarian Fruit Bread last week, and it has been growing on me. Very lovely stuff, in a very laid-back sort of way.
A piece on the effects of the SSSCA CBDTPA. Nice. Not only will it essentially outlaw open-source software development, but it will surround the USA with a virtual "national firewall", by criminalising the importation of non-compliant software. (And that includes downloading Linux kernel sources from the Free World.) All this in the name of protecting Disney's right to keep harvesting the bucks.
Remember the "model democracy" of Cuba that those nice young people from Resistance told you about outside the Nike store one Friday afternoon, and how much more free and happy Cubans are than the oppressed serfs of McWorld? Well, for one thing, the free, happy Cubans are not allowed access to the Internet, lest they become infected with counterrevolutionary ideas. Internet access exists, but is only available to foreigners and trusted members of the Communist Party hierarchy. Not that that stops determined dissidents, who buy access cards from foreigners and use them surreptitiously, or even use accounts and passwords from resourceful hackers who steal them and sell them at a hefty price. (via Techdirt)