• Eben Moglen Is Reshaping Internet With a Freedom Box – NYTimes.com

  Fantastic article. Eben Moglen’s ideas tie in well with Lewis Hyde’s on common wealth and copyright copyduty. More power to them.
  QUOTE
  “We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now,” [Moglen] said. “What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring, but the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the Net and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been.”
  (…)
  In the first days of the personal computer era, many scoffed at the idea that free software could have an important place in the modern world. Today, it is the digital genome for millions of phones, printers, cameras, MP3 players, televisions, the Pentagon, the New York Stock Exchange and the computers that underpin Google’s empire.
  (…)
  Social networking has changed the balance of political power, he said, “but everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.”

  In January, investors were said to have put a value of about $50 billion on Facebook, the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg. If revolutions for freedom rest on the shoulders of Facebook, Mr. Moglen said, the revolutionaries will have to count on individuals who have huge stakes in keeping the powerful happy.

  “It is not hard, when everybody is just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg, to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse,” Mr. Moglen said.

  By contrast, with tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers, there would be no one place where a repressive government could find out who was publishing or reading “subversive” material.

  In response to Mr. Moglen’s call for help, a group of developers working in a free operating system called Debian have started to organize Freedom Box software. Four students from New York University who heard a talk by Mr. Moglen last year hav

  tags: eben_moglen internet freedom security democracy software

• Streetsblog San Francisco » Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change: Green Technology

  QUOTE
  We need to focus, ironically, on ends, not means. For example, in passive solar buildings, focusing on the end goal (thermal comfort) rather than the means (heating air) changed the design approach dramatically. It turns out that human comfort has more to do with surrounding surface temperatures than with air temperature in a building, so massive walls that absorb and store the sun’s gentle heat also provide a more comfortable environment without all the hot air. Or, if lighting is the goal, electricity and bulbs are just one potential means; a building that welcomes daylight is the simple, elegant solution—even better than a complex system of wind farms generating green electrons for efficient fixtures. Likewise, the goal of transportation is access, not movement or mobility per se; movement is a means, not the end. So, bringing destinations closer together is a simpler, more elegant solution than assembling a new fleet of electric cars and the acres of solar collectors needed to power them. Call it “passive urbanism.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: sustainability cities urbanism energy streetsblog peter_calthorpe climate_change

• 2011 Sustainable Cities and Responsible Investing | Corporate Knights

  Corporate Knights’s Issue 34 on Sustainable Cities (Canada).

  tags: cities sustainability canada corporate_knights

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted: 02|20|11 at 1:30 am. Filed under: links.

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