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Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Here we think again...

Till a little time ago I thought I had a clear vision about the War in Iraq and the America Presidential election.

But, of course, I am Italian, and besides having a trivial view of life I also have a poor view of politics and economy.

I always thought that, on the contrary of what humans usually react, when somebody hits you, something must be wrong and before hitting back, you'd better find out what that is.

Even Aesop was saying that in his story of the fight between sun and wind.

At the end the sun was the winner because it used its intelligence instead of its power.

But certainly that was many years ago, and at the end of the day: what the hell do poets think of understanding life and people?

Listen to the American President, he can give you the best lessons about it, how to begin a war, how to win it and how to go on fighting even when the war is finished.

In principle it is exactly what they did before.

But that is nothing compared to his personal view of politics and political strategic alliances.
Now it comes out that his competitor in the Presidential elections has secret agreements with nothing less than Al Quaeda. Who votes for him is certainly voting for terrorism.

And I always thought exactly the opposite!

I am definitely sure that from now on every patriotic American will know who will win the elections.

The bad part of it is that, after a little While, they will soon realize who lost them.

Patrizia from a World on IP
patrizia@worldonip.com

Sunday, September 26, 2004

Here we Blog again...

Here we Blog again...

The Americans are great because they went to the moon, but the Italians were greater because they didn't even think of going there.

And when they struggled if it was correct saying "The Eagle has landed" or "wouldn't it have been better to say has mooned...", the Italians were in no stress because a dish of "Spaghetti alla carbonara" and a dish of "Pizza" have more or less the same calories, and what decides is just your own personal taste.

What a trivial way of seeing life! Yes you are definitely right, we Italians are not able to think great.

That is probably why our economy is going so bad.

We never realized how important is to throw bombs somewhere.

It is true, they could eventually produce a slight damage (but being far away from home, who cares?).

But just think of all the good they produce.

They create new jobs, they give a boost to your economy, and more than everything, they produce further richness where least needed.

It is also true you could eventually create new jobs producing something else, but what about all the oil wasted just to transport them, the pollution of those cute small war planes, the huge amount of taxes the Americans have to pay just in order to fill gaps in the state balance?

Well, I must say we trivial Italians are far away from that.

Of course we also got a few who share the political view of the American President, for example our leader.

But sometimes he has to face a strong opposition by the ones who understand nothing about politics and nothing about economy.

For example: why the people who have 750 millions dollars in their bank account are free to talk about the poor and the people who do not even have a bank account are not allowed to talk about the rich?

The obvious and well accepted explanation is that they do not know the right words and the right way.

If you are an ignorant, you'd better shut up.
Once people had to "fill holes", now I wake up every morning and think "I have to fill my Blog".

What the hell will I write?

And most important: "Who the hell will read me?"

May be I should do a little bit of spamming and send a few catching phrases and stop in the right moment with the word Continue, so that when one clicks on it, he is directed to my blog.

This is the fate of the ones who write for the precious goal of being read.

There are some lucky people out there who write because somebody is paying them.

And they do not even have to care what they write.

They just have to say the few, right, blah, blah that the person who pays them wants them to write.

And those people are usually called Journalists or writers or even poets, even though we are more inclined to see a poet as a person who writes just what he feels, and when he feels the right feelings.

Well sometimes the world is very unfair, but what can we do?

We could also decide not to write anymore, but then, who would fill our Blogs?

How could we compete in stupidity?

How could we out-dumb each other?

Who in the end would be the best in talking a lot saying nothing?

Patrizia from a World on IP

patrizia@worldonip.com

Answering to a "Hackers' Manifesto"

"Ours is a world that ventures blindly into the new with its fingers crossed."

That reminds me something.
When Mussolini (at that time) came to pay a visit to Cuneo, the town where I was born (luckily many years after that), they coined a special medal.


On one side they wrote: " The Dux lead us" and on the other side " The Madonna protect us".

"All classes fear this relentless abstraction of the world, on which their fortunes yet depend. All classes but one: the hacker class."

You forget to mention the class of the people who live with a daily empty belly, but then, they have something else to care about, more important than the relentless abstraction of the world.

"We are the hackers of abstraction. We produce new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations, hacked out of raw data. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colorings, we are the abstracters of new worlds. Whether we come to represent ourselves as researchers or authors, artists or biologists, chemists or musicians, philosophers or programmers, each of these subjectivities is but a fragment of a class still becoming, bit by bit, aware of itself as such."

I like it, "hackers of abstraction" sounds much better than "file sharing or "Cyber piracy" or even worst, the old, plain usual way, the word used since centuries "plagiarism".
But at the end of the day, the Hackers of abstraction do nothing else than copying music or movies or whatever and sharing it with somebody else.

And that is the point.
If you want to fight, you first define what you have to fight against, then fire your weapons and deal with the consequences.
No use to hide yourself behind euphemisms, neologisms or whatever other rhetoric you can choose.
Say what you want to do and why and why you think it right and may be how you would change the actual situation and law and why.

Otherwise we go on talking and saying nothing.

"A hacker manifesto: Not the only manifesto, as it is in the nature of the hacker to differ from others, to differ even from oneself, over time. To hack is to differ."

I would agree if the Hacker was a dog, or a bird, or a fish.
But being the Hacker a human, he is condemned to be always a human after all. Oscar Wilde said "It is a humiliating confession, but behind each one of us there is one common thing that goes under the name of : Human Nature."


"and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. Hackers create these new worlds, yet we do not possess them.
That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who monopolies the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce -- it owns us."


I like that "It owns us" it sounds great. A pity it doesn't mean anything.
If I write an essay about something, I hardly can see how it can own me.
May be in certain cases it can haunt the creator, and that is how most of the so called "stupid audience" like to see a poet or a writer or a painter, as somebody who is haunted by his creations.
Rarely is this way.


"We must live with our compromises.(Some refuse to compromise.) "

Holy words!


"Hackers are not joiners. We're not often willing to submerge our singularity in any collective. What the times call for is a collective hack that realizes a class interest based on an alignment of differences rather than a coercive unity."

I have another opinion on what the times call.
May be they just call for a fair law about copyrights, a law that would allow who produces something of interest for the collectivity to be paid and the people to enjoy it without having to pay too much and for too long. As simple as that.

"The slogan of the hacker class is not the workers of the world united, but the workings of the world untied."

At least we agree on that....


Patrizia from a World on IP

http://www.worldonip.com


Friday, September 24, 2004

Un urlo al mondo

Se scrivere e' un dono, non scrivere talvolta puo' essere un dono ancora piu' grande, ma tacere puo' essere una grande sofferenza, almeno per quanto mi riguarda, e nel mio caso non per glorificare me stessa, ma per poter urlare al mondo che non condivido il modo in cui gira.

Non condivido la politica di chi lo dirige e soprattutto non condivido la stupidita' di chi e' solo capace a lamentarsi ma non fa assolutamente nulla per cambiare nulla.
Forse e' la rassegnazione della gente che piu' mi adira.
Io definisco me stess Mrs Complaining numero 1, ma finora non ho raggiunto grandi obiettivi.
Voler cambiare il mondo e' forse un obiettivo troppo grande per le mie forze, ma almeno ci provo.
In questo quadro quando nel 1995 ho avuto il primo approccio con l'Internet ne sono stata entusiasta, perche' ho capito subito la grande potenzialita' e il potere rivoluzionario di un tale mezzo.
Si, io paragono l'impatto di Internet alla Rivoluzione Francese.
In fondo l'eredita' della Rivoluzione francese non e' stata nei nuovi ideali che ha contribuito a diffondere.
Il grande cambiamento e' stato a livello sociale.
Al posto del re e di pochi nobili sono arrivati al potere I medio alto borghesi che hanno contribuito a creare un'economia in cui la ricchezza era piu' distribuita.
E questo e' esattamente quello che l'internet rendera' possible.
La morte di Dinosauri come le telecoms e la nascita di una classe di piccoli, intelligenti inprenditori.
Le infrastrutture della comunicazione non saranno piu' appannaggio di pochi, perche' il loro prezzo e' sceso a tal punto da rendere possible la frammentarizzazione in migliaia di "connectivity points".
Io arrivo persino al punto di parlare di "customers' owned infrastructures", ma questa al momento puo' sembrare fantascienza (ma avverra' prima che uno se lo aspetti, almeno in paesi come la Cina)
Io vedo l'Europa avviarsi verso non solo il declino economico ma anche verso il conseguente decline tecnologico.
E' il prezzo che pagano le nazioni in cui una unita' centrale agisce non a favore dei propri cittadini, a favore dell'economia, ma a favore di pochi gruppi monopolistici che detengono e vogliono continuare a detenere il mercato. In poche parole si sacrifica il progresso perche' questo e' contro l'interesse di pochi.
In America si spinge a consumare piu' petrolio, anche se e' risaputo che un giorno non molto lontano non ci saranno piu' riserve, e solo perche' ci sono grossi gruppi che hanno interesse a vendere sempre di piu'
In Cina si incentive a risparmiare il petrolio, perche l'economia dipende dalla sua disponibilita'.
Chi dei due lei pensa che avra' un futuro?
In Italia l'unica frequenza libera per il Wireless e' 26 GHz, quando tutte le nazioni piu' progredite hanno firmato un accordo che lasciava all'uso dei propri cittadini la frequenza libera di 2.4GHz.
( Anche l'Italia ha firmato, ma ora si schiera dietro l'asserzione"per uso privato", come se usare l'Internet fosse per uso pubblico!)
Questo significa che in Inghilterra ad esempio ci sono tantissimi piccolo ISP che hanno una certa indipendenza dal Monopolio grazie al fatto di possedere (molto poco costosi) sistemi Wireless.
In commercio per ora non c'e' nessun sistema Wireless che funzioni con la frequenza di 26 GHz.
Tutto questo io vorrei poterlo urlare, a voce cosi' alta da poter raggiungere le orecchie di quelli che si lamentano e non fanno nulla.
Gli Ignavi del 21mo secolo.

Patrizia da un World on IP

patrizia@worldonip.com
 
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