Putin Outlaws Anonymity: Identity Verification For Online Services, VPN Bypass Advice a Crime
President Putin has signed off on legal amendments that threaten to destroy online anonymity, crush free speech, and stifle innovation. Starting this year, internet platforms must verify new users’ identities via state-approved systems, before granting access. VPN circumvention advice will constitute a crime, certain Gmail use will be banned, and non-state-approved hosting companies will be rendered illegal.
Since its invasion of Ukraine in February, Russian Members of Parliament and lawmakers have taken turns to see who can come up with the most aggressive anti-Western legislative proposals.
Suitably dressed-up in anti-American, anti-European rhetoric, plans to let everyone in Russia pirate Western content came early. While obvious to everyone else right from the beginning, the proposals were fundamentally flawed.
If Russians were allowed to gorge on free, high-quality foreign content, incentives to pay for Russian content would find themselves all but eliminated. Not only do local creators rely on that revenue for food and clothing, it also helps to prevent the collapse of Russia’s own entertainment sector.
Den konstante tanke om mulig død trods alle de mest velindformerede forholdsregler, ikke blot ved uheld, men også som følge af en andens enten uindformerethed, ligegyldige delagtighed, eller direkte overlagthed hvad angår at bringe mig i fare…
Det lyder som PTSD – som følge af at have været under angreb pga. mobning, pga. et destruktivt parforhold, pga. svær sygdom eller som følge af deltagelse i krig som passiv borger eller aktiv oprører og soldat i angreb og forsvar. Continue reading “den usynlige fjende”
Why care about the ebook reader, when the world can be changed from your living room?
Paul Otlet was a Belgian, *1868, died †1944, who perfected the Dewey Classification system as “the Universal Decimal Classification”, in his lifetime alone totalling 17 million index cards of human knowledge.
(The basic structure of the classification system, where every 10 parts are subdivided into ten and so forth, into eternity. It’s a actually an image of the capabilities of the human mind to distinguish between particles and thus make value out of everything.)
Seeing the complexity of human knowledge as an almost eternal subdivision of topics, he believed that accessibility to all knowledge for all contained it itself the road to peace for all of humankind. His own library, his “Mundaneum” reflected this vision.
(Part of the Mundaneum after years of neglect, as Paul Otlet was prevented access to it by small minded city officials, who cared little for his visions)
Most of his professional life he harbored the dream of a Universal City, a focus for “harmonious, pacifist and progressive civilization”, which he shared with an American sculptor, Hendrik Christian Andersen.
(Part of the enormous and beautiful sketch of the city of peace by Hendrik Christian Andersen)
When Andersen in the mid-30’s turned to the Italian dictator Mussolini for support to build the city, Otlet turned away in disgust, but soon found renewed support in the great architect Le Corbusier, who drew up plans and assisted him to until the very end.
Paul Otlet can be said to be among the chief architects behind the League of Nations (founded as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War), a unifying body of peace making among all nations, but even so his dreams of a permanent city of peace workers – politicians, intellectuals, scientist and artists working towards the abolition of war – was never recognized for real. And if it wasn’t enough that two world wars brought whole societies to their knees, and with them the real-world effects of his firm belief in pacifism; petty thinking in his own nation also destroyed his library and collections of art and science.
Even so his ideas of connecting all knowledge and making it accessible in images, audio and instant connections to anyone, anywhere, remained in the world. He described “the new book” as the combination of all existing singular medias.
His vision is basically the first 20th century version of the story of the difficult birth of the interconnectednes, which we today term “the Internet”.
”I repeat: My papers form a whole. Every part is related and together they compose one unique work, my archives ’Aeramundus Mundaneum’, a tool designed for world knowledge”. — Paul Otlet
A beautiful documentary, “The Man Who Wanted To Classify The World“, was created by Francoise Levie for release by Sofidoc Productions in 2002, following almost 1 year of opening and cataloguing the remains of his personal papers: 100 mice infested crates and boxes documenting every little thing in a life full of dreams, theory, planning, and action.
Paul Otlet threw nothing away. Even a torn up letter was saved in a separate envelope. But out of the boxes grew a full life, where almost no endeavour went awry:
He had found his voice and conviction in pacifism – springing from the innate need to classify and put in order everything, which mankind discovered, developed and thought – and this certainty carried him through out the whole of his life. Not a Ghandi, not a Martin Luther King working among his people, but an intellectual working from a dream so large that one would almost call it a pipe dream, if not for his total conviction: That peace among all nations was possible, if only there was a common focus on peace for all to see and believe in.
(The League of Nations, which Paul Otlet soon found to be squabbling hens)
Paul Otlet died in the winter of 1944, 8 months before the world war II was declared over.
His decimal classification system, the UDC, is still in use today. His major work on classification, ‘The Book of Books”, is still being read.
I believe his description of the organization of information is the second most important factor in any human’s awakening to consciousness, the other being the creative survival combo of curiosity and synthesis.
Choosing between data – that’s the whole point. If we don’t know when to let go of information, that counting for the species as a whole as well as the individual alone, we will succumb to undigested information. That is a given. The question I am asking myself, though, is this:
Are we giving our synthesis of information away to the search engines, and therefore now as a species becoming stressed from symbiosis with an information system, which doesn’t always work to our advantage, but presents itself as if it is always the best it can be?
What we need to understand is that today, in the 21st century, we are all being sold a cheaper version of the New Book: the eBook reader is not the revalation of the new age. The computer is STILL the revalation – we’ve just gotten bored and want a new toy.
With our New Book we can change the world for the better. If we care.
En lille film, der aldrig ville kunne yde sit store underliggende emne retfærdighed, og lykkeligvis heller ikke forsøger på det. En lille flig af rædslerne, mennesker påføres, får vi. Et lillebitte hjørne for beskueren muligvis at fatte bare en anelse af, hvordan det er at have overlevet tortur.
Synopsis: Josef bliver svært forbrændt på en olieboreplatform og er tvunget til at blive der, indtil forsikringsspørgsmålet falder på plads. Hanna, der er blevet tvunget på ferie af sin arbejdsplads, fordi kolleger og fagforening klager over hendes punktlighed, lader sig hyre til at være sygeplejerske for ham. Han kan ikke se som følge af ulykken. Hun kan ikke udtrykke sine følelser. I tiden på boreplatformen nærmer de sig hinanden.
Måske de fleste ville opleve, at filmen skal få os til at tænke, at der er håb for enhver, som er kommet til skade i livet. Men jeg oplever den som en 120 minutters pakke, der kun sigter på at give Hanna en platform, hvorfra hun kan fortælle sin historie fra krigen.
Denne historie har samme effekt på mig som de eminente fortællere fra snart hedengangne DR: Ved blot at lytte, danner vi vore egne billeder. Inde i vore hoveder ser vi fortællingen udspille sig uden samtidig at føle skyld over ikke at kunne gøre noget ved grusomhederne. Som det ofte er tilfældet med TV, hvor vi må lukke af for det hele, fordi billedsiden får os til at føle det ske lige uden for vore vinduer, for så først med TV’et slukket at kunne sortere og finde os selv (hvis vi når det, inden vi har set en fiktionsfilm med 10 mord på 70 minutter).
Hannas fortælling bliver “vores egen” fortælling, vore egne billeder, vore egne grænser, og ved at være givet tilladelsen gennem den orale overlevering til at fylde os selv ind i det skete i vores egen hastighed og med vores egne evner for medfølelse, forbliver vi stærke i vores egen hverdag og virkelighed. Som er det eneste sted fred kan udspringe fra.
Dét alene gør tiden vel brugt. Om så disse billeder går tabt i strømmen af nye forestillinger, vil de for evigt have været vore egne. Det er det eneste, vi kan reagere på. Med omfanget af vores personlige evne til at gøre verden virkelig for os selv.
Since its invasion of Ukraine in February, Russian Members of Parliament and lawmakers have taken turns to see who can come up with the most aggressive anti-Western legislative proposals.
