Decentralized platforms such as Usenet, email and IRC were not controlled by any one organization, and do not directly capture profit. The web has been the focus of the commercialization of the internet due to it’s client-server architecture that gives full control to the website operator. This control is required by the logic of Capitalist finance in order to capture value. Without such control profit-seeking investors do not provide funds.

However, this control comes at a cost. Centralized systems are far less efficient at managing online communications than decentralized systems. The corporate, web-based communication-platforms that emerged under the Web 2.0 monicker are hungry for more than just Capital. The huge datacenters required to run them also consume massive natural resources and energy, and cause massive amounts of pollution. Yet, desipite all, these platforms still commonly experience scaling issues and frequent outages, straining under the profit-imposed need to centralize control. And this in a world where the majority of the global population does in practical terms not have access to the internet. Of course, environmental concerns are not the only issue with overly centralized systems. Perhaps even of greater concern are the implications for privacy and freedom of speech and association when control of our social technology is held by only a few private corporations.

Lost in the hype of the Social Web is the fact that the Internet has always been about sharing: Usenet, email and IRC have for a long time enabled social connections, including citizen journalism, photo sharing, and other features of recent web-based systems.

Thimbl demonstrates the potential for integrating classic internet technologies into the Open Web. On the surface, Thimbl appears to be yet another microblogging service, similar to Twitter or identi.ca. However, Thimbl is a specialized web-based client for a User Information protocol called Finger. The Finger Protocol was orginally developed in the 1970s, and as such, is already supported by all existing server platforms.

Thimbl offers no way to sign up. It is up to your own webhost, internet service-provider or system administrator to provide accounts. Virtually every server on the intenret already has Finger server software available in its software repository. All that is required for any organisation to provide Thimbl accounts is to simply turn their Finger service on. In most cases, this would take the server administator no more than a few minutes, after which all of their users could log in to thimbl.net and participate. So Thimbl is a call to arms for users to demand this option.

Most importantly, Thimbl has embedded within it a vision for the Open Web that goes beyond the web. For the web to be truly open it must integrate pervasivaly in to the internet as a whole. The internet has always has been much more than the web.

via Thimbl

This project proposes an alternative economy based on Peer-to-Peer architecture for a more equal sharing of wealth in society. It offers an innovative participative system using counterfeit virtual money.

Promotional AD:
Go on http://P2PGiftCredit.com and get your P2P Gift Credit Card instantly, just by typing your email or cell phone number. When you activate the card you get your first £100 of gift credit! Other rewards come every time you introduce a new friend!

About the P2P Gift Credit Cards:
By issuing a visionary type of credit card, the project introduces the P2P Gift Finance system based on Peer-to-Peer free credit shared across digital networks. The P2P Gift Finance is a democratic creation of money directly regulated by ordinary people in order to redistribute wealth in society. Power to create virtual money with a multiplier effect should be restored to the people, and regulated by democratic participation. It is recognised that the perpetual creation of money is necessary, however, since there is a private monopoly on the monetary system, it is proven to be unfair and is unlikely to ever change without intervention. Indeed many theorists have pointed out that allowing banks to create money is fundamentally unjust, unethical and immoral.
Find out more about it:
http://P2PGiftCredit.com/about.php

More details:
The website P2PGiftCredit.com allows people to generate unique virtual card numbers to send to others via digital devices and platforms. In order to activate and use the P2P Gift Credit Cards users must generate new virtual credit card numbers for friends. Rules like this underline the idea of ‘Sharing’ a concept which defines the basis of P2P Gift Finance and enables a viral spread of free credit among people, generating a real alternative virtual credit that anyone can own. This approach also simulates the distribution of free credit by people as a form of “Basic Income”, which may help to stimulate the entire economy.
Find out more how it works:
http://P2PGiftCredit.com/how.php

A limited edition of physical plastic P2P Gift Credit Cards are available by request on the P2PGiftCredit.com, and they will also be distributed through public actions in London during the month of January 2011.
You can see a preview of the printed card and its holder in this picture:
http://P2PGiftCredit.com/press/P2PCC_carrier_HD.jpg

Purpose of the project:
- Researching alternative virtual currencies, peer-to-peer lending platforms and electronic payments as a positive step in reshaping the future of sustainable finance in the contemporary digital networked scenario.
- Underlining the consequences of private speculative lending institutions and explaining how they often determine economic crises due to the deregulated creation of credit.
- Calling people to sign petitions to shut down tax havens, and to investigate the bailout money that taxpayers recently paid to major banks by supporting ongoing campaigns on this issue.
- Bringing “Basic Income” (as a form of universal, guaranteed, minimum income) to public attention and the inequities of current patterns of the redistribution of wealth into question.
- Targeting social classes vulnerable to the deceptive marketing of the credit card industry (such as university students, artists, the unemployed and people with low incomes) in order to highlight the inherent dangers.
- Increasing awareness about global credit and debit owned by people and banks during the recent so-called global recession, as well as issues related to the creation of money.

If you would like to have more information about the recent so-called “economic recession”, the victims of global fraud, the artificial scarcity of money, or, if you would like to know more about the credit card industries, their criminal interest rates (which cause depression and suicides), and more besides, you should have a look at the Infoshop section which is a real treasure trove of information:
http://P2PGiftCredit.com/infoshop.php

A project by Paolo Cirio.
http://www.paolocirio.net
(This project is commissioned by an anonymous arts organisation in the UK)

Il Freaknet Medialab ed il Poetry Hacklab, in collaborazione
con l’Ass. Cult. VERDEBINARIO di Cosenza
e la Fondazione Dyne.org di Amsterdam
sono lieti di invitarvi al

TROPPO CAFFE’ POCO CERVELLO 12

Patrocinato dall’UNESCO in adesione alla
Settimana dello Sviluppo Sostenibile
http://unescodess.it/

Il meeting sara’ dedicato alla MOBILITA’ SOSTENIBILE!!!

Idee:

- Ciclofficina e Gruppo di studio sulle biciclette
- Proiezioni di video sul ciclismo urbano!
- Ciclata extraurbana in zona, passeggiata con biciclette
- Visite e lavoretti al Deposito del Museo dell’Informatica
- Funzionante
- Catalogazione e classificazione hardware storico
- Esperimenti
- Scambi di idee sul recupero e la valorizzazione di hardware storico
- Riunioni e discussioni
- …e tanto altro ancora!

Per info:

http://poetry.freaknet.org/index.php/Troppocaffepococervello12

poetry @ freaknet.org

In January, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg declared the age of privacy to be over. A month earlier, Google Chief Eric Schmidt expressed a similar sentiment. Add Scott McNealy’s and Larry Ellison’s comments from a few years earlier, and you’ve got a whole lot of tech CEOs proclaiming the death of privacy — especially when it comes to young people.

It’s just not true. People, including the younger generation, still care about privacy. Yes, they’re far more public on the Internet than their parents: writing personal details on Facebook, posting embarrassing photos on Flickr and having intimate conversations on Twitter. But they take steps to protect their privacy and vociferously complain when they feel it violated. They’re not technically sophisticated about privacy and make mistakes all the time, but that’s mostly the fault of companies and Web sites that try to manipulate them for financial gain.

To the older generation, privacy is about secrecy. And, as the Supreme Court said, once something is no longer secret, it’s no longer private. But that’s not how privacy works, and it’s not how the younger generation thinks about it. Privacy is about control. When your health records are sold to a pharmaceutical company without your permission; when a social-networking site changes your privacy settings to make what used to be visible only to your friends visible to everyone; when the NSA eavesdrops on everyone’s e-mail conversations — your loss of control over that information is the issue. We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure.

via CRYPTO-GRAM

What gave Microsoft the keys to the kingdom was partly the way it embraced an open platform based on the Intel processor plus slots for other manufacturers’ components to plug into. Even more important, though, was the vast number of applications written by independent programmers that worked exclusively with Microsoft’s operating systems.

Mr Jobs has no intention of ever opening Apple’s hardware for others to mess with. But software that meets a minimum standard is a different matter. At the last count, the App Store (Apple’s online outlet for iPhone software) listed 185,000 applications for users to choose from. So far, some 4 billion software utilities, games, maps and music tracks have been downloaded by owners of iPhones, iPods and lately iPads—all of which share the same operating system and can therefore use many of the same applications. The App Store offers Mr Jobs his best chance yet of creating a global franchise on a par with Microsoft’s Windows. From Apple’s perspective, the last thing it should therefore do is allow that unique source of customer satisfaction to be threatened in any way.

No surprise, then, that Mr Jobs has banned programmers from writing iPhone apps using cross-platform programming tools like Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s .NET, which make it easy to write an app for many different devices and operating systems at once. Flash plug-ins, running inside web browsers, can be found in Macintosh computers, but in none of Apple’s mobile toys.

Were Flash ever to find its way in through the back door to the iPhone operating system, Apple’s armlock on its customers would be severely weakened. If most apps are built to run on Android and BlackBerry phones, as well as iPhones, then Apple would lose the advantage of being able to offer the widest choice of apps. With all smart phones able to do similar tricks these days, there would be less compulsion to buy an iPhone in the first place.

But there is a big problem with banning Flash: without it, people cannot play most of the videos, animation and games encoded on websites using the industry’s most popular tool. Adobe’s Flash software powers the vast majority of multimedia clips seen on the web—from YouTube videos to the simplest animated chart or advertisement. Apple’s devices include software that can play YouTube videos when needed. But apart from that they are incompatible with content built in Flash. (Bad luck, Farmville fans.)

Still, Mr Jobs remains adamant. In his view, Flash is a rat’s nest of buggy software that hogs processor cycles, drains battery life and causes needless crashes. That is why he has just blocked an end-run Adobe was planning around his ban on mobile Flash. Henceforth, developers creating applications for the iPhone and its ilk will have to sign a revised agreement that forbids them from using any programming tools other than Apple’s approved set.

The move was prompted by the arrival of Adobe’s latest programming aid, Flash Pro CS 5. This threatened to turn Flash applications of the kind seen on the web into stand-alone iPhone apps capable of slipping onto the App Store undetected. Adobe even boasted—rather rashly, as it turned out—that over 100 such programs had already done just that.

Does Apple’s latest clamp down on Flash mean that people who have bought iPhones, iPods and iPads are now stuck with a crippled version of the web? For the time being, yes—though there are partial workarounds that might yet help. Eventually, though, a technology known as HTML5, which has been in the works for the past six years, promises to render Flash largely irrelevant. Among other things, the attraction of HTML5 is that it is designed to handle audio and video internally, without the need for browser plug-ins such as Adobe’s Flash (or others like Microsoft’s Silverlight and Oracle’s JavaFX).

Unfortunately, HTML5 remains a work in progress. Where, today, Flash can seamlessly handle a variety of “codecs” for compressing and decompressing the video’s data stream between the web server and the viewer, HTML5 is experimenting with two distinctly different codecs for video playback: one, called H.264, is used in Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s forthcoming IE9 browsers, while the other, known as Ogg Theora, has been adopted by the Firefox and Opera browsers; Google’s Chrome has embraced both.

Experts agree that the H.264 algorithm produces a superior picture, but it is a proprietary technology—though free to license, at least for the time being. For internet purists, Ogg Theora’s attraction is that it is open source. A religious war has broken out between the two camps over which codec to standardise on.

The good news is that a solution may yet be in sight. By all accounts, Google is poised to open-source its highly regarded VP8 video codec. The search giant has hinted as much ever since acquiring the codec’s maker, On2 Technologies, earlier this year. Insiders reckon VP8 uses only half the bandwidth of H.264 while delivering an even better picture. Mozilla, the open-source organisation behind Firefox, would welcome VP8 into the fold.

But would Apple, after having backed H.264 so enthusiastically? If it promised a quick and certain death for Flash, Mr Jobs would doubtless be delighted to go along. For deprived iPhone users, the crippled web might then be a thing of the past.

via The Economist

A different world is possible!