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Election 2006 (and beyond): Digital Copyright Canada
From: command_-at-_interlog.com (Gary Morton)
Date: 9 Aug 2000 07:37:27 -0400
Gnutella Replaces Godzilla in Corporate Media - Aug.9.2000 The Globe and Mail is supposed to be Canada's respectable national newspaper. Yet recent reading experiences of mine seem to be proving that theory wrong. Yesterday I checked its tech section and found a couple of disturbing articles. The section itself is standard corporate media, promoting the web as a commercial vehicle only. Unless you are hawking a new gadget or business web site or are a CEO making 600 million a year, you are not likely to appear in it. Of course I am used to that. But it is harder to get used to the crazy political views the Globe is pushing. In an article about the music industry dispute via Napster, their featured columnist tells us that Napster is just a pretender in its role as an enemy of the capitalist free market. The real villain is a file-sharing program called Gnutella - a larger part of that threat being the hundreds of open source programmers who work on it. Recently at friend's I was forced to watch a new version of Godzilla. Now, after reading the Globe, I know that Gnutella is the real world enemy. According to the article it is the greatest threat to the free market system and our way of life since Soviet Socialism. Gnutella programmers are especially frightening because they are not working for money but due to the mad idea that information should be free. So is Gnutella really going to destroy the world? Well let me tell you that the answer is no. I would say that the mega-corporations ruling the earth of 2000 are the greatest threat to the free market that ever existed - they are the real Godzillas. It wouldn't be the end at all if what they call our way of life went down like the Titanic. Under the current system, the best that is to be expected of 99.9 percent of us is that we consume the products of global corporations and fawn over the celebrity class of superstars that push those products. As they enrich themselves we remain on the shores of serfdom living in the happy delusion they have provided us. If Gnutella really does sink that big superstar Titanic, we won't be on board. We'll be off somewhere on that shore where they abandoned us years ago. You'll be there and I'll be there. And if champagne still exists in that end-time world, I plan on toasting the big ship's demise. Not because I enjoy destruction, but because I enjoy the idea of the mindless masses regaining the earth that has been taken from them. The next article in the Globe that disturbed me was one called a Personal View - Don't hire DefCon hackers by Victor Keong, a cyber security expert. Keong warns us about shabby hackers that don't obey dress codes and pose a general threat to the corporate earth. Keong opens saying, "From all over the world, they make the annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas. They have names such as Mudge, Null and Dark Tangent. Tattooed, pierced, tie-dyed and ready to brag, they wear motorcycle boots, leather and even kilts in the hot July desert sun." The upshot of this article is job discrimination. Keong calls on employers not to hire such people. And if anything makes Keong's sort of crap journalism worse, it is that people like him have been having great success in recent years. Not in getting hackers fired but in getting service providers and net companies to fire scads of employees that dress in an alternative fashion. So the Globe will have you out of a job, but there's no need to worry. Just check their section on poverty and you'll see why. Nearly all of this year they've been featuring a piece online by John Stackhouse, who went onto to the streets posing as panhandler. Stackhouse has discovered that these homeless sorts are really all rich, loaded down with bags of panhander's gold. An El Dorado he calls it. And you'll be rich, too. After the Globe convinces your boss to fire you. You'll just have to spend it fast 'cause Gnutella is gonna stomp on the world. This article posted in the http://citizensontheweb.com computer section. If you want to write a Letter to the Editor of Globe Tech regarding the article above - go to http://www.globetechnology.com/site/letter.html --------
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