I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's
too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that
10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say "Daddy, where were
you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?"
 - Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation
%
Like music and mathematical equations, computer language is just that,
language, and it communicates information either to a computer or to
those who can read it. ... For the purposes of First Amendment analysis,
this court finds that source code is speech. - Judge Marilyn Hall Patel
%
Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good.
Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you
fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed. - Paul Graham
%
Learning when to violate a process, when to step outside it or somehow
transform it in order to serve a higher value demands what is highest
in *us*. - Steve Talbott, NetFuture
%
To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere.
And you especially need a brain that's in the habit
of going where it's not supposed to. - Paul Graham
%
We are rarely taught any rules governing the breaking of once unbreakable
rules. We are supposed to intuit the exceptions from the circumstances.
Being able to intuit the rules of rule-breaking is widely regarded as a
mark of maturity. - Gary North, January 2004
%
The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but
because of those who look on and do nothing. - Albert Einstein
%
Unchecked police and military power undermine personal security,
and increase the risk of terrorism attacks. Unchecked terrorism only
increases the risk of terrorism attacks. Statistically, if both are
possible, I am more at risk from the first, and am likely to lose more.
 - Daniel Staal, August 2004
%
...freedom has a higher acquisition cost, but a lower maintenance cost
(TCO). It's the opposite for slavery: they offer it to you on a silver
plate (otherwise nobody would take it). - Carlo Strozzi, September 2004
%
Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug
dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers.  Seems like you can scare
the public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.
 - Bruce Schneier, January 2006
%
I've already written about the security risks of what I call "wholesale
surveillance." [...] The problems and insecurities that come from living
in a surveillance society more than outweigh any crimefighting (and
terrorist-fighting) advantages. - Bruce Schneier, January 2006
%
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to
govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would
be necessary. - James Madison
%
Christmas is an ancient Pagan/Babylonian mid-winter festival, which the
Christian religion tagged onto. The beliefs surrounding this period may
be bollocks, but in a free society we must have the freedom to follow
and celebrate bollocks or we cannot claim to be free, except to agree,
and that's no freedom at all. - David Icke, December 2005
%
Our society definitely needs a serious conversation about the fundamental
freedoms we are sacrificing in a misguided attempt to keep us safe from
terrorism. It feels both surreal and sickening to have to defend our
fundamental freedoms against those who want to stop people from sharing
music. How is it possible that we can contemplate so much damage to our
society simply to protect the business model of a handful of companies?
 - Bruce Schneier, December 2005
%
The police and the military have fundamentally different missions.
The police protect citizens. The military attacks the enemy. When
you start giving police powers to the military, citizens start
looking like the enemy. - Bruce Schneier, December 2005
%
First World War poster: Your Chums are Figthing. Why aren't You?
David Icke: Because I have a friggin' mind of my own...
 - David Icke, February 2006
%
Even in the most wildly optimistic projections, data mining isn't tenable
for uncovering future terrorist plots. We're not trading privacy for
security; we're giving up privacy and getting no security in return.
 - Bruce Schneier, February 2002
%
Fear is the prison, its absence is the key. What we need is the under-
standing and the will to change the reality that manifests as control
and suppression, and this can never be done while we are imprisoned by
fear. Freedom from fear is freedom itself. - David Icke, March 2006
%
But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own
strength, would have no reason to conspire. They needed only to rise up
and shake themselves, like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose, they
could blow the party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely, sooner or later,
it must occur to them to do it. And yet... - George Orwell, "1984"
%
[Cannabis] should be totally free to grow and use, but the DEA-mob-cabal
has made it into a black market item, and extracts huge untaxed profits
from it. That money buys more lobbyists and payoffs, to keep the game
going. Freedom and the average citizen suffer. - zentara, March 2006
%
The Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, said that "Fascism should more
properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and
corporate power". Under that definition, most of the world has been
under fascism for centuries. - David Icke, March 2006
%
The question now is no longer: is it possible, but: what do we want?
A privacy-friendly [collective rights] flatrate, or a highly invasive
infrastructure of control technology for private management? Freedom
or digital barbed wire? - Volker Grassmuck, May 2006
%
Hotmail allows you to blacklist certain e-mail addresses, so that mail
from them automatically goes into your spam trap. Have you ever tried
blocking all that incessant marketing e-mail from Microsoft? You can't.
 - Bruce Schneier, May 2006
%
Adware, software-as-a-service and Google Desktop search are all examples
of some other company trying to own your computer. And Trusted Computing
will only make the problem worse. - Bruce Schneier, May 2006
%
Just because computers were a liberating force in the past doesn't mean
they will be in the future. There is enormous political and economic
power behind the idea that you shouldn't truly own your computer or your
software, despite having paid for it. - Bruce Schneier, May 2006
%
It is particularly galling to realize that if I bought a new Mac, I would
be subsidizing the development of an operating system that contains code
whose sole purpose is to lock me into a specific hardware platform.
 - Mark Pilgrim, June 2006
%
I'm creating things now that I want to be able to read, hear, watch,
search, and filter 50 years from now. Despite all their emphasis on con-
tent creators, Apple has made it clear that they do not share this goal.
Openness is not a cargo cult. Some get it, some don't. Apple doesn't.
 - Mark Pilgrim, June 2006
%
In Mac OS X 10.4, Apple deliberately changed Mail.app to use their prop-
rietary .emlx data format [...]. Now I'm forced to migrate all my mail
yet again from yet another proprietary format, and the best documentation
I've found so far is on LiveJournal. Jesus H. Christ, somebody deserves
to be fired for that. - Mark Pilgrim, June 2006
%
Will I Switch [from Mac to Ubuntu Linux]? Yes. [...] Alternatively,
Apple could open-source a few of their apps so we could all fix the
pain points, and they could start having an actual conversation with
the world. Nothing less is acceptable. - Tim Bray, June 2006
%
Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy."
The real choice is liberty versus control. [...] Liberty requires security
without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance
is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion
privacy even when we have nothing to hide. - Bruce Schneier, June 2006
%
Note that the Justice Department invoked two of the Four Horsemen of
the Internet Apocalypse: child pornographers and terrorists. If they
can figure out how to work kidnappers and drug dealers in, they can
probably do anything they want. - Bruce Schneier, June 2006
%
Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that
for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be
observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create
a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
%
Legally or otherwise, domestically or from overseas, flawless copies can
and will be obtained. And the modern European pirates who retrieve and
share our cultural gold - gold that the owners had forsaken - are not
scoundrels who defy the law but heroes who advance its ultimate aim.
 - Peter Guttman, July 2006
%
The learned helplessness that has us to believe we're incapable of knowing
how to treat our bodies properly without the advice of some 'professional'
or 'expert' who's being pumped with gifts, biased 'research' and free
samples by Big Pharma, sickens me. - Dave Pollard, May 2006
%
Any guess on how long it will take the FairUse4WM people to update their
software? And then how long before Microsoft to patch once again? Certainly
much less time than it will take Microsoft and the recording industry to
realize they're playing a losing game, and that trying to make digital
files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.
 - Bruce Schneier, September 2006
%
We need to hug authority into surrender. [...] The edifice of power is
only the illusion of power once we realise that the power lies with us.
 - David Icke, November 2006
%
Without legal privacy protections, the world becomes one giant airport
security area, where the slightest joke - or comment made years before -
lands you in hot water. The world becomes one giant market-research study,
where we are all life-long subjects. The world becomes a police state,
where we all are assumed to be [...] terrorists in the eyes of the
government. - Bruce Schneier, November 2006
%
Crypto is like an ATM that only lets you get money after you authenticate
yourself with your card and PIN. DRM is like some kind of nefarious goon
hired by the bank to follow you around after you get your money out,
controlling how you spend it. - Cory Doctorow, December 2006
%
The [Microsoft] Vista Content Protection specification could very well
constitute the longest suicide note in history.
 - Peter Gutmann, December 2006
%
[Vista] is evil, but it's evil in a stupid way. How could anyone who
is even a tiny little bit interested in getting good performance for
a reasonable price ever consider buying a system like that? It's as
if McDonald's would announce that the new and improved Big Mac comes
with shards of broken glass inside. - Lars Luthman, January 2007
%
L'informazione italiana è di regime, dei partiti. Tra Mediaset e Rai non
c'è differenza. E tra i vari giornali sovvenzionati dallo Stato anche.
Liberalizziamo le frequenze televisive e eliminiamo l'editoria assistita.
Ci tassano per raccontarci balle. RESET! - Beppe Grillo, Febbraio 2007
%
La tecnologia viene applicata per forzare l'obbedienza a scelte altrui
senza che su questi processi via sia stata mai una scelta politica
democratica degna del nome. - Alberto Cammozzo, Ottobre 2006
Technology is applied in forcing obedience to someone else's choices,
without any kind of democratic political choice on these processes.
 - Alberto Cammozzo, October 2006
%
Considero la televisione il più potente strumento (dopo le armi) di
repressione di massa. Se la nostra tv smetterà di essere un luogo
autoreferenziale della politica (di governo e non), un'immensa rivendita
di merci varie, una fabbrica di brutti modelli e falsi bisogni, allora
sarò ben felice di tornare a frequentarla. - Teresa De Sio, Marzo 2006
%
Appellarsi al concetto della neutralità della tecnologia per "discolpare"
tecnologie come il Trusted Computing è una azione intellettualmente
disonesta. Il Trusted Computing implementa tutta la diffidenza, l'ansia
da controllo, il desiderio di potere e le cattive intenzioni dei manager
delle aziende che la promuovono. - Oceani Digitali, ottobre 2006
%
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit
the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within
that spectrum. - Noam Chomsky, quoted by David Icke, February 2007
%
If web applications liberated us from the domination of a single company
on the desktop, why would we be eager to be dominated by a different
company on the web? [...] I'm not eager to go from being beholden
to Microsoft to being beholden to Adobe. - Ted Leung, March 2007
%
Internet radio is a canary in the coal mine of the insane Net-hostile Re-
gulatorium that stretches from the cableco/telco duopoly to the copyright
oligarchs who are strangling what Professor Lessig calls Free Culture.
[...] It's killing the values and cultures that keep our people free.
 - Doc Searls, March 2007
%
Is it really irresponsible to refuse to work and consume and live in debt
in a culture that is destroying our world? [...] If our lives are movies
we script ourselves, who is producing and directing them?
 - Dave Pollack, April 2007
%
Courage, self-confidence, and trust in each other. If we had these things
we could live without money, and without wage slavery. Is it any wonder
that the politicians, big businesses, the elites of the rich and powerful,
work so hard to make us fearful, full of self-doubt, distrustful, and
"just like everybody else"? - Dave Pollack, August 2005
%
I've heard that directly from folks working on the relevant teams
over there. Microsoft cheerfully shows up at the standards meetings
to make damn sure they screw up the APIs for everyone else.
 - Steve Yegge, September 2006
%
Love is hate
War is peace
No is yes
And we're all free
 - Tracy Chapman, Why?, Tracy Chapman, 1988
%
Microsoft wants to lure developers to build applications for Longhorn,
and no surprise. To mangle three metaphors, if you drink that kool-aid,
you're either locked in the trunk like Dave Winer says or if you like
my metaphor-ware better, you're a sharecropper. Either way, it sucks.
Don't go there. - Tim Bray, July 2003
%
We already treat different drugs differently; alcohol is treated dif-
ferently from tobacco is treated differently from heroin. [...] As for
cannabis, just give up. [...] Legalize it, regulate it, collect the
tax dollars, and free up the cops to go after the real problem drugs.
 - Tim Bray, April 2003
%
Privacy is lost not in one great flood but rather through steady erosion.
Eventually, the Peeping Tom taps on your window and waves, and you
don't recoil in horror and embarrassment. You wave back.
 - Nicholas Carr, November 2007
%
To most people, if it means anything, "IP" refers to something known as
"intellectual property". This widespread recognition is rather curious,
because "intellectual property" does not exist. [...] Instead of speaking
of "intellectual property", which invokes that feel-good idea of property
and ownership, we should speak of "intellectual monopolies".
 - Glyn Moody, Settembre 2007
%
Speaking of intellectual monopolies gives the lie to the whole idea of
"piracy" - another term, like "intellectual property" that is employed
to trick people into drawing incorrect conclusions. For it is impossible
to steal an intellectual monopoly - by copying content or an invention,
for example: the worst you can do is infringe on it.
 - Glyn Moody, Settembre 2007
%
By refusing to employ the phrase "intellectual property" we can begin
to reframe the discussion in terms that more accurately reflect the
underlying facts: that copyright and patents are monopolies, and as
such should be reduced to an absolute minimum, not a form of property
that should be maximised. - Glyn Moody, Settembre 2007