Group items tagged

Is the Internet free? Certainly not, just the fix pricing gives the virtual buffet of digital content that seemly and resonablly free to us, but is it really? Files sharing has reached the point that entertainment workers saying, enough is enough and they will do whatever it takes to ease this trend. Is our free culture of the Internet about to over though? Not quite, after years of habits enjoying content freely, it's not a over night change for people to accept to be charged.

This article discusses a report which looks at the possibilities of applying an open source model & culture which has been associated with building and proliferating the Mozilla browser to the Obama administration's initiatives to be "more transparent, participatory and collaborative".  

Interview with Jason Lanierm, an apparent "digital guru" who has changed his view of open culture to that which promotes a "digital maoism". He proposes that we need to pay people for the brain work that they do instead of encouraging them to be labourers of sorts. 

Blog which writes about issues relating to open access media and links to actual open/free media. 

There has been some controversy about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's comments in an online chat from 2006 that surfaced recently. He told a friend that Facebook users were dumb for trusting him and submitting private, personal information on his then-fledgling website. An initiative by four young programmers to counteract the negative effects that Facebook has had on privacy and the ability of users to control the data they put online is Diaspora. It is a decentralised, open source social network that wants to compete with centralised social networks that allow "spying for free". It will be interesting to see whether the initiative really takes off as a viable alternative to Facebook.