rant

It's not really my intention with this blog to be excessively political, but it is my intention to use this blog to voice whatever is going through my grey matter (when anything is).

So apologies if you don't agree with my political views or are tired of hearing about the latest thing that offends me.

That said, nobody's putting a gun to your head to read this (and if someone is, it's probably a faster, kinder end to choose the gun), so... yeah.

Moving on.

Some good articles on just how scary the WikiLeaks censorship fallout is:

* An article by Dan Gillmor on Salon.

* A similar article posted on the EFF.

This entire (over)reaction to WikiLeaks is why I will never have faith in "cloud based" computing nor an excessive amount of faith in the Internet as a communication medium.

I find this an especially-damning argument against the excessive privatization that right-wingers espouse. The U.S. government has a legal obligation to uphold the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (such as freedom of speech). Private organizations are not obligated to do the same. Amazon is perfectly within their rights to tell WikiLeaks (or whomever else) to f*ck off.

Of course, Amazon was all in favor of selling a pedophile book until they bowed to pressure. Funny where they're interested in taking a "moral" stand, huh?

I think in its infancy, the Internet had a lot of potential for free distribution of information, but that time is now long-passed. If folks want some medium for free distribution of ideas and information, there's going to have to be another way. A return to radio? Something else?