from www.blackouteurope.eu:

“Think about how you use the Internet! What would it mean to you if free access to the Internet was taken away?
These days, the Internet is about life and freedom. It’s about shopping, booking theatre tickets … holidays, learning, job-seeking, banking, and trade. It’s also about the fun things – dating, chatting, invitations, music, entertainment, joking and even a Second Life. It is a tool to express ourselves, to collaborate, innovate, share, stimulate new business ideas, reach new markets – thrive without middlemen..

Just think – what’s your web address? Unless people have that address in their “package” of regular websites – they won’t be able to find you. That means they can’t buy, or book, or register, or even view you online. Your business won’t be able to find niche suppliers of goods – and compare prices. If you get any money at all from advertising on your site, it will diminish. Yes, Amazon and a select few will be OK, they will be the included in the package. But your advertising on Google or any other website, will be increasingly worthless. Skype could be blocked. (As it is in Germany in the use from iPhone, already). Small businesses could literally disappear, especially specialist, niche or artisan businesses.

If we don’t do something now – we could lose free and open use of the internet.” (Blackout Europe, 2009)

For residents in the Spanish State you can e-mail your MPE here; xmailer.hacktivistas.net

Seems that citizen initiatives such as WiFi networks are becoming increasingly relevant in order to secure a second chance or a true alternative as they constitute huge linkages of computers and data and people in a Open philosophy. Hopefully enough, MPEs on May 6th will attend to the already 345.000 mails sent supporting the Open Letter to the European Parliament.

RAX!

Blog entry first published in http://guifi.net/en/node/20052

It seems that the same security arguments that lead to unjustified and threatening law proposals to civil rights since 9/11 is now used to approve more laws that, in the name of “our security” (not homeland security necessarily), will widen the already open door to our privacy.

As one can read;

“the Internet Safety Act applies not just to AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and so on–but also to the tens of millions of homes with Wi-Fi access points or wired routers that use the standard method of dynamically assigning temporary addresses. (That method is called Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, or DHCP.” meaning that; ”A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.”

Well, it is far from Catalonia but trends are trends and, while we did avoid (thanks to public demonstrations) the state of emergency and law enforcement one could expect after the 11-march attacks in Madrid, it is not clear if cities and ISP’s will mirror themselves in what is going on in the States. As usual, we would prefer to mirror ourselves with seattlewireless or NYwireless, but still, it is worth giving it a thought.

You can see the full news about this law proposal in http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10168114-38.html.

RAX! (recerca, amor i xarxa)

Yann Bona.

ok,ok… getting started. From now on, messing around with css stylesheet and php stuff. Hoping to start editing soon about citizen management of technology or, else, what I term in catalan; “Gestió Ciutadana de la Tecnologia”. Which is the topic of my Ph.D at the Department of Social Psychology in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).

So, if you are (very improbable though) reading my first attempt to test the editing tool of WP with this dull message, consider this blog as “under construction / replacement / disentanglement…” till further deletion of this draft post

THX!

PS: [I have finally decided to not erase the early shaping of this post]