I just wanted to chime in very quickly about the hacker mentality and ethic.
In theory, hackers hack to make things better. Security, speed, effeciency, clock cycles, whatever. I just heard a story on NPR tonight about "prius hackers" who have doubled the effeciency of their Prius's by adding additional batteries and a plug-in. I'm digressing.. Red boxes, blue boxes, tron boxes...home cable descramblers...it's a rocky path. I used to use a red box while I was away at college to call my friends, still have about 6 of them, haha. When radio shack stopped selling tone dialers I bought all their remaining stock. I did it because I was poor, and stealing from "the man" seemed legitimate. "The man" had lots of money, and was so automated he couldn't tell the difference between a quarter and the tone I generated. We experimented with one of the boxes that prevents the line voltage from dropping when you pick up a call too, although our use was to prevent telemarketers from being able to hang up. I've recently done a lot of thinking about how FEW people do the thinking for SO MANY. From law makers to engineers, whatever. However, with people like the EFF (electronic frontier foundation) floating around, I don't believe that we're in true danger of losing our "internet", per se. If anything, I see it becoming LESS centralized, and LESS controlled. The MPAA/RIAA are fighting a losing battle against a community that's consistently outpacing them in terms of privacy and anonymity. To a google search on Tor, I use it personally. The main point for me I guess is that the fattest pipes out there are NOT on american soil, and the technology is NOT american. I don't doubt anyone's desire to inflict greater control or profit margin on American internet access, I just don't see it happening any time soon. True privacy on the internet is a fallacy anyway, but not even Google will listen to the government telling it not to put satellite imagery of bases, etc, up free on googleearth. Pakistan and India are suing....but...who? It takes about 6 months for a pharmacy lab to learn to copy someone else's drug. It took 72 hours to break the DRM on iTunes. It took 24 hours to break the "ultimately encrypted" dvd encryption. It took 12 hours to break Arista's new CD protection scheme. It took 6 hours to break sony's illegal DRM. Fear not fellow subverts, the underground will keep us safe. Sort of. _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
