It's so much easier to manufacture consensus when dissent is stifled, isn't it?

Hush, hush, bloggers carry.....

Censorware thinks blogs are unsavory. SurfControl, a censorware vendor, has roped off blogs from some of its customers' machines. That means that if your workplace, library or school relies on SurfControl to keep naughty pages away from its computers, you can't get at blogs, either.

Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the federal mandate requiring libraries to censor their terminals, companies like SurfControl control more than surfing: they control basic access to information.

Link

(via Dan Gillmor) [Boing Boing Blog]

10:39:36 PM    

National Geographic offers TOPO State Maps for Mac. Hikers, bikers or outdoor enthusiasts who have been looking for topographic maps for their Mac may want to check out National Geographic's TOPO! State Series, which is now Mac-compatible. [MacCentral]

Well, finally.

Some cool software, now available for us Mactypes.

10:29:33 PM     leave/read comments []

From our pals at Boing Boing:

Sexy Math. BoingBoing patron saint Bruce Sterling points our dirty minds to a website containing this suggestive series of images created entirely from mathematical algorithms. "If you find them offensive in any way," says the site's creator, "all I can say is that beauty (or obscenity) is in this case most certainly in the eye of the beholder." If high school algebra had been half this fun, perhaps I would have passed. Link [Boing Boing Blog]

10:24:09 PM    

In the Middle Class, More Are Deprived Of Health Insurance. The majority of the uninsured are employees of small businesses, civil servants, single working mothers and those working part time. By Stephanie Strom. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

The New Feudalists (let's call them "Republicans"), in some kind of Hayekian nightmare of unregulated Corporate Captialism Fascism, have put more and more of us on the road to serfdom. Only in this nightmare, the Party (Corporation?) is wrapping itself in the banner of free markets, not state control, when actually the Party is using the State to take power from the small businesses and the shopkeepers and give that power to the corporate oligarchs and the oligarghopolies. (Hey, I invented a word!)

Take health insurance, for example; as it becomes harder and harder for small businesses and independent contractors to secure health insurance, it makes large corporations more powerful.

Mr. Thornton is one of more than 43 million people in the United States who lack health insurance, and their numbers are rapidly increasing because of ever soaring cost and job losses. Many states, including Texas, are also cutting back on subsidies for health care, further increasing the number of people with no coverage.

The majority of the uninsured are neither poor by official standards nor unemployed. They are accountants like Mr. Thornton, employees of small businesses, civil servants, single working mothers and those working part time or on contract.

The "Texas Miracle" provides us with an example of where the New Feudalsim wants to take us:

The insurance crisis is especially visible in Texas, which has the highest proportion of uninsured in the country [~] almost one in every four residents. The state has a large population of immigrants; its labor market is dominated by low-wage service sector jobs, and it has a higher than average number of small businesses, which are less likely to provide health benefits because they pay higher insurance costs than large companies.

....

Ms. Pardo, a 29-year-old from Houston, said that having no insurance meant choosing between buying an inhaler for her 9-year-old asthmatic daughter or buying her a birthday present. The girl, Morgan, lost her state-subsidized insurance last month, and now her mother must pay $80 instead of $5 for the inhaler.

....

Lorenda Stevenson said her choice was between buying medicine to treat patches of peeling, flaking skin on her hands, arms and face and making sure her son could continue his after-school tennis program. "There's no way I will cut that out unless we don't have money for food," she said.

Mrs. Stevenson's husband, Bill, lost his management job at WorldCom two years ago, when an accounting scandal forced the company into bankruptcy. They managed to pay $900 a month for Cobra, the government policy that allows workers to continue their coverage after they lose their jobs, but when the cost rose to $1,200, they could no longer afford it.

And so it goes, over and over again.

As we roll down the road to serfdom, will we wake up and see the new face of fascism and feudalism or will we resign ourselves to being little more than cube slaves?

9:27:01 PM     leave/read comments []

Another watchdog of The New Feudalism:

Source: Oligopoly Watch; 11/15/03; 9:04:40 PM.

Strategic Alliances

Here's an excellent analysis by U. of Wisconsin Law School professor Peter C. Carstensen. It's an excerpt from a paper on "Market Concentration and Agriculture" that he delivered at a Department of Agriculture conference in 2000. While Carstensen's specific topic is agribusiness, but its ideas are applicable to all the oligopolies we cover. Here's one except that struck me. 

Non-merger collaborations among large firms allow them to coordinate their competition in order to create mutual power. The intended effect is to obtain a stronger market position. A few of these alliances might provide economically useful coordination if they create an efficiency-enhancing joint venture to produce or distribute new products. Such joint ventures also show that merger is not an essential element to effective entry into new lines of business. Other alliances, to the extent that we have any reliable information, are merely a mechanism to coordinate efforts among firms to limit their direct competition and ensure mutual strategies to build market power.

It should be a source of real concern that we know so little about the scope and content of these alliances. The parties, except as required by law, do not make public disclosure of their agreements or how they are implementing them. Given the high levels of concentration both within markets and industry sectors as well as the growing vertical integration in these industries, such disclosure is essential to proper evaluation of these relationships.

Once power in a market is concentrated in a handful of companies, they can settle into a pattern of being friendly competitors. This is often done through trade associations, which are nominally open to all participants in the market but are often cover for the backroom deals mad between companies. As long as detectable price fixing is not part of it, regulators are often happy to let it all slide.

But as we've seen, there's a whole host of things that companies can do under the guise of joint ventures or industry associations, beyond price-fixing. The RIAA (the recording industry trade association) has made itself notorious by legislating protection for its largest members, extending copyright laws, and setting up joint ventures between the Big Five recording companies, dictating standard terms to suppliers (artists) and distributors (retailers), and even (though they were caught) setting prices. And while the association claims too represent the whole industry, it clearly is owned by the Big Five. (In fact, a recent NPR story showed how a number of small recording firms were listed on the RIAA's Web site as members, when they had never joined and fought unsuccessfully to be de-listed.)

Of course, when there is a wide-ranging association of a number of individual companies, associations may well represent the interest of the whole profession or market, such as the American Medical Association or the Printing Industries of America. But in industries that are controlled by a small number of players, the association becomes a facilitator for the cooperation of those companies in ways that otherwise might provoke antitrust action.

[Oligopoly Watch]

9:26:03 PM    

Tube! Cool!

3D London Tube.

These 3D rendered London Tube maps are pretty mind-blowing.

Link

(via Blackbelt Jones)

[Boing Boing Blog]

4:54:18 PM    

Privacy-consciousness-raising stickers.

The Austrian cyber-activists Quintessenz put on the local Big Brother Award ceremony. To promote it, they distributed these stickers that look like hidden cameras, encouraging people to put them up in toilets and other places where privacy matters. The caption means "The Most Shameless Surveilleur."

116k PDF Link
[Boing Boing Blog]

4:52:56 PM    

Secret cameras revealed!. How to find hidden cameras:

Some methods to hide cameras solely rely on the way human perception works. A very simple way to "hide" a camera is to install it at a large distance from the space to be surveilled. This does not restrict the usefulness of the camera images in any way because tele lenses can be used to compensate for the distance. For this application there is no need for subminiature cameras, although these are even easier to hide. Standard surveillance cameras painted the right color are very hard to spot and usually have a CMount or CS-Mount 7 socket which is needed for attaching the necessary high quality tele lens.

260K PDF Link

(via Crypto-Gram) [Boing Boing Blog]

4:52:05 PM    

Yet another quiz!

How could I be anything but a character in an Oscar Wilde book?

In my not so humble opinion, you, of course, belong in the Picture of Dorian Gray, and do not try to deny it. You belong in the fashionable circles of Victorian London where exotic tastes, a double life, decadence, wit and a hypocritical belief in moral betterment make you a home. You belong where the witty apothegms of Lords, the silly moralities of matrons, the blinding high of opium, and the beauty of visual arts mingle to form one convoluted world.

Which Classic Novel do You Belong In?
brought to you by Quizilla

Props to JulieBeth for the link.

3:57:19 PM     leave/read comments []

Hungover CNET wakes up next to MP3.com. What do we have in the bed with us? [The Register]

Yes, it's another banner day for Corporate Cruelty, as C|Net tells thousands of musicians to fuck off and die as it prepares to ride the dead-end "gravy train" of DRM.

Musicians received this announcement on Friday.

"Your personal information, music, images, related content or other information will not be transferred to CNET Networks, Inc. or any other third party... Please note, however, that promptly following the removal of the MP3.com website, all content will be deleted from our servers and all previously submitted tapes, CD-ROMs and other media in our possession will be destroyed. We recommend that you make alternative content hosting arrangements as soon as practicable."

A verbose way of saying, "piss off"...

Now why would C|Man Mao do such a thing, destroying a massive archive that allowed artists to reach their fans directly? Is this some sort of C|ultural Rev.loution?

Not since the Great Leap Forward has there been such a destruction of the commons. Back then, for political reasons, millions of books were burned. Now, for very sensible commercial reasons that we must not question, millions of MP3s will be lost to the commons. You have precisely seventeen days to grab the good stuff (and, Steb Sly - we hope you have a backup)

Punters and musicians alike will have until December 2 to retrieve the goods. After that, the future isn't too difficult to predict.

CNET will follow Wal-Mart, Real Inc. and Apple Computer into the DRM business, infecting as many computers as they can with restrictive software controls that close what for a brief period has been an open computer platform. They all hope that this tentative business model, the terms of which are set by the entertainment "industry", will somehow turn them a profit. Or at least give the illusion of doing so, until a better idea comes along.

It should be noted that MP3.com's founder, Michael Robertson, is none too pleased with what's going to happen to his creation:

"It's a sad day because according to the public announcements, they are deleting all the music,'' Robertson said in an e-mail. "It's like a museum filled with digital antiquities burning to the ground.'' [San Francisco Chronicle]

Indeed it is, but Corporate Amerika doesn't give a shit about artists or listeners, aside from how much green can be extracted from their wallets. But we all knew that, didn't we?

1:14:58 PM     leave/read comments []