it’s unix, not eunuchs

I attended the first Tibetan Freedom Festival in 1996 on the Polo Fields of Golden Gate Bridge Park.  I was training in Russian at the Defense Language Institute and we rented a van, caravaned up there, partied, slept in the van and then partied again on Sunday.  It was great.  Rage Against The Machine, The Fugees, Beastie Boys, Chilli Peppers and unfortunately Yoko Ono performed and spoke.  They had a massage and misting tent.  They gave away free earplugs to anyone who needed them and encouraged parents to please use them on their kids.

It really was an amazing experience.

Today, reading, in news.com, about how people used textmarks.com and twitter to make the protest against China’s Olympic Torch Run more effective reminded me of the festival.  I love these open sites and networks but I would really like to see someone put together a sort of activisit pac.  Kind of like MojoPac.  Well not exactly.  What I’d like to see is a package that activists can deploy quickly on a server.  So that they could set up something twitter like, and an apache install with wordpress stacked on it, and a small mail server, and forums.  Yes, I know a good geek can roll all this stuff in a few hours, but not the average activist. And oh yeah, also a small tor network of some sort.  And a wikipedia instance, prepopulated with knowledge of common protest techniques.  Anti-G8 activists run camps where they teach people how to react to crowd control techniques, but wouldn’t it be easier to watch a bunch of videos on it if you’re stuck in an oppressed society?

The idea of this is so that people cold dynamically set this stuff up.  Twitter is good in the US, but if you’re in another country, you’re not going to be able to get to twitter.  but maybe you could get to torchruntwitter.com.  Plus, if the state owns the mobile phone carrier, perhaps you can’t send pictures to someone else.  But you could run a small java app that could shoot pics over a stunnel to this server.  Then an app on the server could immediately start torrenting it out, or posting to newsgroups, or posting to free bogs.  Basically blast the info to the net.  Widecast it or something.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001765.php

Yup,

I finally found something to energize me. Good thing it’s a Monday morning. Maybe I can push it on through to the end of the week.

Apparently a few Dems are going to try and get some of our rights back. The DMCA sucks monkey butt. Why? Because it’s now illegal to do things I used to do all the time in high school. You can’t legally photocopy a book. I’m not talking about copying the whole thing, binding it and selling it. I’m saying that copying 5 pages of a book and then using it in class the next day? ILLEGAL.

Lending a CD or DVD to someone else? ILLEGAL.

Using your TiVo? Possibly illegal.

Buying generic toner cartridges? ILLEGAL.

So anyhow, here’s something you can do to try and take back some of our rights:

SUMMARY ON THIS INFO
http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1084134579.html

JUMP RIGHT TO THE ACTION ITEM
http://action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=2421