Category: politics

Save Firefox(open standards for web browsers)

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drm-firefox2

Cory Doctorow explains :

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), once the force for open standards that kept browsers from locking publishers to their proprietary capabilities, has changed its mission. Since 2013, the organization has provided a forum where today’s dominant browser companies and the dominant entertainment companies can collaborate on a system to let our browsers control our behavior, rather than the other way.

This system, “Encrypted Media Extensions” (EME) uses standards-defined code to funnel video into a proprietary container called a “Content Decryption Module.” For a new browser to support this new video streaming standard — which major studios and cable operators are pushing for — it would have to convince those entertainment companies or one of their partners to let them have a CDM, or this part of the “open” Web would not display in their new browser.

This is the opposite of every W3C standard to date: once, all you needed to do to render content sent by a server was follow the standard, not get permission. If browsers had needed permission to render a page at the launch of Mozilla, the publishers would have frozen out this new, pop-up-blocking upstart. Kiss Firefox goodbye, in other words.

The W3C didn’t have to do this. No copyright law says that making a video gives you the right to tell people who legally watch it how they must configure their equipment. But because of the design of EME, copyright holders will be able to use the law to shut down any new browser that tries to render the video without their permission.

This W3C emphasis of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act also threatens Netflix-like services.

via eff.

EFF proposes a solution.

Toward an Anarchafeminist Manifesto

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“Bodies in Plural: Toward an Anarchafeminist Manifesto” by Prof. Chiara Bottici

Keynote Lecture delivered at the 2nd Annual Thinking the Plural Richard J. Bernstein Symposium at Muhlenberg College on September 25, 2015, in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

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Wark on Bottici’s Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary (Columbia University Press, 2014).

The Ferguson Commission released a people’s report

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Their website is the place to begin. NPR – Audie Cornish talks to Rev. Starsky Wilson.

This report is not in any way an investigation of what happened between Michael Brown Jr. and Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson on August 9, 2014, nor is it an investigation of the response to the uprising that followed. Other bodies have been responsible for those investigations.

Consistent with our charge, this report is a “a wide- ranging, in-depth study of the underlying issues brought to light by the events in Ferguson.” In other words, we have looked at a wide variety of factors—social, political, historic, economic, educational, and racial, among them—that contributed to the climate in which those events occurred.

Some of the things we look at may at first seem unrelated to the events in Ferguson. However, our work and the community feedback has shown that these factors have either a direct or indirect connection to the environment in the St. Louis region, and therefore must be considered when discussing any potential changes that might lead to progress.

The Uprising by Franco “Bifo” Berardi

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The Uprising – On Poetry and Finance by Franco “Bifo” Berardi via SEMIOTEXT(E).

The Uprising is an Autonomist manifesto for today’s precarious times, and a rallying cry in the face of the catastrophic and irreversible crisis that neoliberalism and the financial sphere have established over the globe. In his newest book, Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues that the notion of economic recovery is complete mythology. The coming years will inevitably see new surges of protest and violence, but the old models of resistance no longer apply. Society can either stick with the prescriptions and “rescues” that the economic and financial sectors have demanded at the expense of social happiness, culture, and the public good; or it can formulate an alternative. For Berardi, this alternative lies in understanding the current crisis as something more fundamental than an economic crisis: it is a crisis of the social imagination, and demands a new language by which to address it.

This is a manifesto against the idea of growth, and against the concept of debt, the financial sector’s two primary linguistic means of manipulating society. It is a call for exhaustion, and for resistance to the cult of energy on which today’s economic free-floating market depends. To this end, Berardi introduces an unexpected linguistic political weapon–poetry: poetry as the insolvency of language, as the sensuous birth of meaning and desire, as that which cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency. If the protests now stirring about the world are to take shape and direction, then the revolution will be neither peaceful nor violent–it will be linguistic, or will not be at all.

Below, he spoke of the end of the future and the need for better usage of time.

Bifo: After the Future from Preempting Dissent on Vimeo.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi on key concepts in his new book “After the Future”. Directed by Gary Genosko and produced by the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media, Ryerson University.