Networked Society

Ukrainian authorities have shut down a popular file-sharing website saying it violates copyright laws, officials said Wednesday.

Interior Ministry Spokesman Volodymyr Polishchuk said that Ex.ua was closed Tuesday after complaints from Microsoft, Adobe and other companies. The ministry said it has confiscated 200 servers that were used to support the website and law enforcement agents were questioning 16 of its employees.

The Recording Industry Association of America has named Ex.ua among the world's worst Internet piracy sites.

Shortly after Ex.ua went down Tuesday, the Interior Ministry's own website became inoperable. Polishchuk said this was likely a work of hackers.

We are the owners of our own health, not the corporate-medical-industrial complex. We must reclaim our rights to privacy, our fundamental right to make choices without being hounded by medical big brother, and our personal medical autonomy.

Despite overwhelming patient satisfaction and clinical evidence in support of alternative therapies such as acupuncture, Ayurveda, homeopathy, Chinese medicine, herbal medicine, chiropractic, nutrition, and energy healing, to name just a few, organized medicine tends to dismiss these options as unproven, pseudoscientific practices. Furthermore, mainstream medicine has been known to muster up the audacity to accuse alternative practitioners of attempting to rip off the public -- as if conventional medicine could never be accused of the same. And the irony is that the whole rotten enterprise hides behind the authority of "science" whenever the madness of its methods are questioned. Never mind that one medical study commonly contradicts another, and that medical research is riddled with conflict of interest, cover-ups, and the manipulation of data to conform to desired outcomes.

The medical establishment rewards conformity, enslaves doctor and patient alike by restricting choice and mandating certain practices, and uses supposedly private patient information to threaten job loss, school expulsion, and discontinuation of medical services if patients do not act in accordance with medicine's arbitrary and capricious rules. Relentless fear-based propaganda is designed to convince us that we will die if we don't take cholesterol drugs, be forever unhappy if we don't take antidepressants, fall down and break our bones without drugs to prevent osteoporosis, and lose our manhood if we don't use erectile dysfunction pills.

Turtle is a free and open source anonymous peer-to-peer network project facilitating free speech and sharing information by combining encryption with peer-to-peer (P2P) technology. Like no other anonymous P2P software, it allows users to share files and otherwise communicate without fear of legal sanctions or censorship.

Turtle has one drawback for us common mortals: So far, it only runs on a computer that has Linux installed as the operating system.

The basic idea behind Turtle is to build a P2P overlay on top of pre-existing trust relationships among Turtle users. Each user acts as node in the overlay by running a copy of the Turtle client software. Unlike existing P2P networks, Turtle does not allow arbitrary nodes to connect and exchange information. Instead, each user establishes secure and authenticated channels with a limited number of other nodes/friends controlled by people he or she trusts (friends).

Town Hall in Sedgwick Maine Here's a Way to Eliminate the Regulators and Lawyers, and Build Community At the Same Time: Organize and Declare Food...

Citing America’s Declaration of Independence and the Maine Constitution, the ordinance proposed that “Sedgwick citizens possess the right to produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing.” These would include raw milk and other dairy products and locally slaughtered meats, among other items.

This isn’t just a declaration of preference. The proposed warrant added, “It shall be unlawful for any law or regulation adopted by the state or federal government to interfere with the rights recognized by this Ordinance.” In other words, no state licensing requirements prohibiting certain farms from selling dairy products or producing their own chickens for sale to other citizens in the town.

Corporations are not people...

"I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one."

The person who created that sign in Zuccotti Park put her or his anonymous finger on the heartbeat of the Occupy movement.

Many wonder what Occupy stands for and why Occupy has not made specific demands – as though it's not enough that, in Occupy's brief existence, its participants have emblazoned the difference between the 1% and the 99% upon the consciousness of America. As my longtime colleague Ginger Varney said, "They've changed the conversation."

A team of salvage divers has discovered an unexplained object resting at the bottom of the Baltic Sea near Sweden.

"This thing turned up. My first reaction was to tell the guys that we have a UFO here on the bottom," said Peter Lindberg, the leader of the amateur treasure hunters.

Sonar readings show that the mysterious object is about 60 meters across, or, about the size of a jumbo jet. And it's not alone. Nearby on the sea floor is another, smaller object with a similar shape. Even more fascinating, both objects have "drag marks" behind them on the sea floor, stretching back more than 400 feet.

Finding a good match is always a tough row to hoe, whether it's for a romantic mate or a roommate. Some creative thinkers in New York City borrowed a strategy from the former and applied it to the latter. Et voila! Speedroommating.

Conventional video streaming—through, say, YouTube or Netflix—eats up network resources because each user is pulling in their own individual feed. The live peer-to-peer streaming protocol created by BitTorrent founder and chief scientist Bram Cohen, instead works much like BitTorrent itself does. Everybody that requests a certain video stream shares the feed between themselves, rather than just leeching the content. This reportedly reduces lag drastically, network load and increases video quality for those watching. And, just like when torrenting, the more people that sign on to a stream, the better it looks for everybody.

Thanks to Franco Iacomella for the heads up!

"With regard to my attempts to make corrections to articles dealing with health issues, on two occasions I experienced particularly notable rejections. One was an inaccurate and pro-pharmaceutical industry article on the subject of naturopathy; the other article concerned a physician – Dr. Matthias Rath – who was characterized as ‘controversial’ and, regarding whom, ’questionable lawsuits’ were alluded to. In both of these articles, I noted that there was scarcely anything reported that was meaningful.

Not only were my attempts to make changes to these two articles unsuccessful, it was stated that my edits were blocked on the grounds that they amounted to ‘vandalism’. Prior to this, I had never heard the term ‘vandalism’ used in this context. On Wikipedia, however, it is clearly a term used to justify censorship."

How did our country get here?...

Not only your country (the USA) - it's happening everywhere. Practically a family can no longer survive without both parents holding down a job. This is a trend that's definitely going the wrong way, and we see the outcome of it in the "crisis" that grips the economy these days.

Time to re-think money. Time to re-think the whole economic set-up.

As it is, we're only working for the rich (and for their banks). 

"You see that’s not true. You injure other people today also using social media. You’ve informed on them. You’ve created more records about them. You’ve added to the problems not of yourself but of other people. If it were as simple as just you’re only hurting yourself I wouldn’t bother pointing it out to you. See, that’s the difference, okay? The reason that this all works is that even when you know you’re hurting other people, you’re too selfish to stop. And there are hundreds of millions of people like you. That’s why it works."

Wherever I go and ask people what is missing from their lives, the most common answer (if they are not impoverished or seriously ill) is "community." What happened to community, and why don't we have...

To forge community then, we must do more than simply get people together. While that is a start, soon we get tired of just talking, and we want to do something, to create something. It is a very tepid community indeed, when the only need being met is the need to air opinions and feel that we are right, that we get it, and isn't it too bad that other people don't ... hey, I know! Let's collect each others' email addresses and start a listserv!

Community is woven from gifts. Unlike today's market system, whose built-in scarcity compels competition in which more for me is less for you, in a gift economy the opposite holds. Because people in gift culture pass on their surplus rather than accumulating it, your good fortune is my good fortune: more for you is more for me. Wealth circulates, gravitating toward the greatest need. In a gift community, people know that their gifts will eventually come back to them, albeit often in a new form. Such a community might be called a "circle of the gift."