The Null Device

2001/10/16

The Reg has a roundup of WTC-related hoaxes. (via Richard)

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Food for thought: Is democracy a passing fad? It goes into how attempts to impose democracy in countries without the conditions for it have resulted in instability, with benign dictatorships being more beneficial, and how apathetic, corporate-ruled America (and the West) is evolving into something like Athenian oligarchy, democratic only in name. (via Plastic)

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P.S. I am not a crackpot. "I Hate Married People", the title of Helen Razer's latest venture, reminds me: I recently saw a number of flyers all around advertising the fact that it will soon be National Baby Day or something like that. I was not going to let this reproduction-centric cultural construct go unchallenged (to me, the assumption that life is about passing on one's genes is sort of like the Ten Commandments on a courthouse wall to one of America's embattled secularists), so I printed some labels reading "THANK YOU FOR NOT BREEDING", with the intention of putting them on the flyers. Alas, all the flyers seemed to be gone. Oh well.

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As a man in the US found out, now is not a good time to put an envelope of white powder on your boss's desk.

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The Election: Meanwhile, John Howard seems so confident of victory, he is already promising to cut taxes for multinational corporations (many of whom pay very little tax anyway, as their local sales offices don't make profits, because of how their overseas parents price the goods they sell and such, but I digress), and easing the crippling restrictions on foreign ownership, mergers and acquisitions.

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More Recording Racket perfidy: now they want the right to delete your MP3s with legal impunity; and to whit, their lobbyists have appended a rider to this effect to "anti-terrorist" legislation.

"It could lead to some really bad outcomes, like a program purposefully intended to delete MP3s that misfunctions and erases everything on a disk -- ooops," says Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Think a repo man smashing windows and knocking down doors to pull out the 27-inch color TV when you've missed a couple of payments."

So keeping MP3s of ripped CDs is now a form of terrorism against the US economy (through the copyright industry; and we all know that what's good for the megacorporations is good for everyone, don't we, kids?), but breaking into people's Windows machines through backdoors in "secure" players and deleting their MP3s is perfectly justified? Go figure.

Mind you, the RIAA's amendment has apparently not made it through and been dropped; though it's the thought that counts. And it's a pretty fucking scary thought too.

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