Aside from content sharing, I can see a lot of practical use for peer to peer mechanisms like this in a future where primitive nations attempt to impose their views on the client-server model Microsoft and its cohorts fashioned the Internet into. The Internet was initially built of peer to peer nodes, unstoppable even by nuclear Holocaust, and so it should be again. http://torrentfreak.com/tribler-makes-bittorrent-impossible-to-shut-down-120208/
“I know that some of the people working for Twitter were activists … If we look at countries like Egypt, like Syria, like Yemen, of course all our tweets are breaking the law. And that’s what activists do, they break the law because they want to make changes to these unjust laws. They have the right to do that, and if you prevent them from this right then you are attacking human rights itself.
Think that’s your phone in your hand? Think again. The below article proves that all communications in and out of contemporary cellphones is actively monitored, either by heuristics or agents or a combination of both. http://ca.news.yahoo.com/muslim-man-workplace-quip-made-terror-suspect-211334769.html
“The seven step, ten minute download process (which will be about ten seconds when US internet speeds catch up with the rest of the world) is the real enemy the studios should be trying to tackle. Right now, the industry is still stuck in the past, and is crawling oh-so-slowly into the future. They still believe people are going to want to buy DVDs or Blu-rays in five years, and that a movie ticket is well worth $15.
“I share the opinions of those who from the beginning said that consultations were not complete,” Tusk said, according to a report in Wirtualna Polska. The 54-year-old prime minister added that a Polish rejection of ACTA is now on the table, and admitted that he had previously approached the agreement from a “20th century” perspective, due to his age. http://torrentfreak.com/polish-protests-put-acta-on-hold-120203/
Our society teaches people to judge programs solely based on practical convenience. To ask: - How easy to use is it? - How reliable? - How efficient? - What does it cost? And to ignore more important, deeper questions, like: - If I use this program, what does it do to my freedom? - What does it do to my community? The mere fact that people are using a non-free program is a social problem.
This is a good thing. All current antivirus vendors are snake-oil salesmen. A team of security experts working for the OS vendor itself should be responsible for this. Mind you, it is Microsoft, so the implementation will be horrendous and half baked. But it’s still a good idea on paper, and it’ll be as effective as anything else.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/11/21/1814228/ms-to-build-antivirus-into-win8-boon-or-monopoly
**"**Everyday we Make Compromises in the Face of Privacy, and None of us Have as Much Privacy as we Want." This article paints a pretty good picture of the various ways in which new technologies pry into our personal lives in ways most people don’t suspect. New products and technologies are adopted every day by consumers without consideration of the possible consequences those technologies may have on their lives, good or bad.
The message behind #Occupy Wall Street, a movement against social inequality which has spawned clones in cities around the world, appears quite multi-tonal. Ask any individual protester and you’ll receive, seemingly, a different set of reasons this is taking place. There are a lot of reasons, even now, that people would want to get up and speak out about a world gone mad around them - the over-arching message: That we’ve made too many sacrifices, as hard-working individuals, for the sake of supporting a flagging financial system that makes victims of us all.
GNU Grub 1.99 has been released and includes a long list of enhancements over its preceding version. I’ve been using its beta and release candidate versions for the past two years to boot my GNU/Linux systems directly with /boot on LVM and MD RAID, and it’s been flawless at doing that. GRUB is of course a requisite part of the boot process for anyone using 64bit systems, as the old LILO bootloader is 32bit only.
