ZNet provides forum facilities for online discussion and chatting on various topics ranging from culture and ecology to international relations and economics. ZNet also publishes daily commentaries and maintains a Web-zine, which addresses current news and events as well as many other topics, trying to be provocative, informative and inspiring to its readers.
Strategies and Policies
Daily Commentaries: Znet's commentaries address current news and events, cultural happenings, and organizing efforts, providing context, critique, vision, and analysis, but also references to or reviews of broader ideas, new books, activism, the Internet, and other topics that strike the diverse participating authors as worthy of attention.
Forum System: Znet provides a private (and soon also a public) forum system. The fora are among others concerned with topics such as: activism, cultural, community/race/religion/ethnicity, ecology, economics/class, gender/kinship/sexuality, government/polity, international relations, ParEcon, vision/strategy and popular culture. Each forum has a set of threaded discussions, also the fora hosted by commentary writers like Chomsky, Ehrenreich, Cagan, Peters and Wise.
ZNet Daily WebZine: ZNet Daily WebZine offers commentaries in web format.
Z Education Online (planned): The Z Education Online site will provide instructionals and courses of diverse types as well as other university-like, education-aimed features.
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"Freedom of anonymous speech is an essential component of free speech."
Ian Goldberg/David Wagner,
Someone wants to hide one's identity, to remain anonymous, if s/he fears to be holding accountable for something, say, a publication, that is considered to be prohibited. Anonymous publishing has a long tradition in European history. Writers of erotic literature or pamphlets, e. g., preferred to use pseudonyms or publish anonymously. During the Enlightenment books as d'Alembert's and Diderot's famous Encyclopaedia were printed and distributed secretly. Today
The original design of the Net, as far as it is preserved, offers a relatively high degree of privacy, because due to the client-server model all what is known about you is a report of the machine from which information was, respectively is requested. But this design of the Net interferes with the wish of corporations to know you, even to know more about you than you want them to know. What is euphemistically called customer relationship management systems means the collection, compilation and analysis of personal information about you by others.
In 1997 America Online member Timothy McVeigh, a Navy employee, made his homosexuality publicly known in a short autobiographical sketch. Another Navy employee reading this sketch informed the Navy. America Online revealed McVeigh's identity to the Navy, who discharged McVeigh. As the consequence of a court ruling on that case, Timothy McVeigh was allowed to return to the Navy. Sometimes anonymity really matters.
On the Net you still have several possibilities to remain anonymous. You may visit web sites via an
In Germany, in 1515, printers had to swear not to print or distribute any publication bypassing the councilmen. Today repressive regimes, such as
Anonymity might be used for abuses, that is true, but "the burden of proof rests with those who would seek to limit it. (Rob Kling, Ya-ching Lee, Al Teich, Mark S. Frankel, Assessing Anonymous Communication on the Internet: Policy Deliberations, in: The Information Society, 1999).
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Established in 1998 and privately held, Europe Online created and operates the world's largest broadband "Internet via the Sky" network. The Europe Online "Internet via the Sky" service is available to subscribers in English, French, German, Dutch and Danish with more languages to come.
http://www.europeonline.com
User tracking is a generic term that covers all the techniques of monitoring the movements of a user on a web site. User tracking has become an essential component in online commerce, where no personal contact to customers is established, leaving companies with the predicament of not knowing who they are talking to. Some companies, such as
Whenever user tracking is performed without the explicit agreement of the user, or without laying open which data are collected and what is done with them, considerable