Online activists are innefectual at affecting convenional wisdom without institutional hooks. This is clearly true.

Those hooks are not going to be developed in time to meaningfully impact the 2006 elections. It's time to start looking at what will actually make a big difference for real hacktivists.

For these and other reasons I don't have time to explain right now, I've come to the conclusion that some tech-savvy activists should hack the vote in 2006 as an act of civil disobedience to force meaningful reform of the electoral system. It seems to me that this is the best possible use resources.

Gut reactions?

Note to Dotster and any other site that has "live chat" as part of their customer service operation:

If your "customer care" system crashes your customer's browser, you're not taking very good care of them.

I didn't even know Fox owned MySpace. This is all sorts of interesting.

The buzz is about censorship, but this reinforces several ideas/themes I've been feeling. First of all there's the ham-fisted way in which the corp is dealing with "community." Perhaps they don't realize that the technology they purchased has very limited novelty. There are already open source tools that would let you build something as sophisticated as myspace at a delivered cost of under $100k.

You need to spend some money to host 43 million users, yeah, but the code isn't really very valuable. What they bought was a community. No quicker way to drive those people away than to start restricting what they can do and say.

The traditional media is woefully out of touch. The Independent calls MySpace a "filesharing" site. Ha!

Also, this casts MySpace Music in a rather different light, being owned by a global media conglomerate and all. A little less indie, you might say. It now looks more like the imprint wave of the 90s. Can we expect more of this? Maybe. Musicians are a fairly exploitable population.

Finally, I wonder if that means NewsCorp has prepared for the legal contingency families seeking civil damages as a result of statutory rape. When it's a random chat room, or something being run by a couple kids that's one thing, but if Rupert Murdoch owns a service that encourages illegal sexual encounters... well, we live in a litigious society, and Billionaire Tyrants make appealing targets.

(Found via: Atrios)

Microsoft is participating in Chineese internet censorship. Not really surprising. A number of large American companies are complicit in helping Red China turn the internet into a state-run media.

So it's worth noting that there's nothing magical and free about TCP/IP networking (the tech that powers the net). If we let it happen, governments and corporations will ruin what we've potentially got going here.

The more I think about it, the more I want to get an organization together to take a stand on these kinds of issues: internet freedom, outsourcing, open-sourcing, etc.