Protecting speech on the global data networks attracts an increasing attention. The efforts and the corresponding abilities of governmental authorities, corporations and copyright enforcement agencies are countered by similar efforts and abilities of researchers and engineers to provide means for anonymous and uncensored communication, as Freenet, Free Haven and Publius. All three of them show a similar design. Content is split up and spread on several servers. When a file is requested, the pieces are reassembled. This design makes it difficult to censor content. All of these systems are not commercial products.
The most advanced system seems to be Publius. Because of being designed by researchers and engineers at the prestigious
For more information on Publius, see John Schwartz, Online and Unidentifiable? in: The Washington Post, June 30, 2000,
Freenet web site:
Free Haven web site:
Publius web site:
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Still, disinformation and propaganda are nothing magic. They can change things, but supposedly only if those things/meanings/opinions are not fixed completely.
It is never just a single idea that changes. Society is following the changes.
Thinking about disinformation brings us to the word truth, of course, and to the doubt that there is no definite truth. And truth can easily be manipulated to another truth. Just present some facts that seem to be logic and there you've got a new truth. And if the facts can supposedly be proved by empirical studies then the quality of the truth definitely rises.
That's what ideologies do all the time. And the media like to do the same thing - as a game with power or mere presentation of power?
But of course there also exist bits of disinformation which are more amusing than evil or dangerous:
- the theory of the celestro-centric world/"Hohlwelttheorie"
- the story of the German philosopher who invented an Italian philosopher, wrote books about him, even reprinted "his" texts, which had gone lost pretendedly 100 years ago - and finally lost his job and all his career when other scientists found out that everything had been made up.
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"Faced with this process of globalization, most governments appear to lack the tools required for facing up to the pressure from important media changes. The new global order is viewed as a daunting challenge, and it most often results in reactions of introversion, withdrawal and narrow assertions of national identity. At the same time, many developing countries seize the opportunity represented by globalization to assert themselves as serious players in the global communications market."
(UNESCO, World Communication Report)
The big hope of the South is that the Internet will close the education gap and economic gap, by making education easier to achieve. But in reality the gap is impossible to close, because the North is not keeping still, but developing itself further and further all the time; inventing new technologies that produce another gap each. The farmer's boy sitting in the dessert and using a cellular telephone and a computer at the same time is a sarcastic picture - nothing else.
Still, the so called developing countries regard modern communication technologies as a tremendous chance - and actually: which other choice is there left?
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1971 IBM's work on the Lucifer cipher and the work of the NSA lead to the U.S. Data Encryption Standard (=
1976
1977/78 the
1984 Congress passes Comprehensive Crime Control Act
- The Hacker Quarterly is founded
1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is passed in the USA
- Electronic Communications Privacy Act
1987 Chicago prosecutors found Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force
1988 U.S. Secret Service covertly videotapes a hacker convention
1989 NuPrometheus League distributes Apple Computer software
1990 -
- Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard publish their work on Quantum Cryptography
- Martin Luther King Day Crash strikes AT&T long-distance network nationwide
1991
- one of the first conferences for Computers, Freedom and Privacy takes place in San Francisco
- AT&T phone crash; New York City and various airports get affected
1993 the U.S. government announces to introduce the
1994
- the
1990s work on quantum computer and quantum cryptography
- work on biometrics for authentication (finger prints, the iris, smells, etc.)
1996 France liberates its cryptography law: one now can use cryptography if registered
- OECD issues Cryptography Policy Guidelines; a paper calling for encryption exports-standards and unrestricted access to encryption products
1997 April European Commission issues Electronic Commerce Initiative, in favor of strong encryption
1997 June PGP 5.0 Freeware widely available for non-commercial use
1997 June 56-bit DES code cracked by a network of 14,000 computers
1997 August U.S. judge assesses encryption export regulations as violation of the First Amendment
1998 February foundation of Americans for Computer Privacy, a broad coalition in opposition to the U.S. cryptography policy
1998 March
1998 April NSA issues a report about the risks of key recovery systems
1998 July
1998 October Finnish government agrees to unrestricted export of strong encryption
1999 January RSA Data Security, establishes worldwide distribution of encryption product outside the USA
- National Institute of Standards and Technologies announces that 56-bit
- 56-bit DES code is cracked in 22 hours and 15 minutes
1999 May 27 United Kingdom speaks out against key recovery
1999 Sept: the USA announce to stop the restriction of cryptography-exports
2000 as the German government wants to elaborate a cryptography-law, different organizations start a campaign against that law
- computer hackers do no longer only visit websites and change little details there but cause breakdowns of entire systems, producing big economic losses
for further information about the history of cryptography see:
for information about hacker's history see:
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Regarding the dimension of their financial and human resources commercial media companies are at any rate much more powerful players than their independent counterparts. Still those reply with an extreme multiplicity and diversity. Today thousands of newsgroups, mailing-list and e-zines covering a wide range of issues from the environment to politics, social and human rights, culture, art and democracy are run by alternative groups.
Moreover independent content provider have started to use digital media for communication, information and co-ordination long before they were discovered by corporate interest. They regularly use the Internet and other networks to further public discourse and put up civic resistance. And in many cases are very successful with their work, as initiatives like widerst@ndMUND's (AT) co-ordination of the critics of the participation of the Freedom Party in the Austrian government via mailing-lists, an online-magazine and discussion forums, show.
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The Council for Mutual Economic Aid (COMECON) was set up in 1949 consisting of six East European countries: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the USSR, followed later by the German Democratic Republic (1950), Mongolia (1962), Cuba (1972), and Vietnam (1978). Its aim was, to develop the member countries' economies on a complementary basis for the purpose of achieving self-sufficiency. In 1991, Comecon was replaced by the Organization for International Economic Cooperation.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution, though short, lists a number of rights. Only a handful of words refer to freedoms of speech and the press, but those words are of incalculable significance. To understand the current subtleties and controversies surrounding this right, check out this First Amendment site. This detailed handbook of legal information, mostly intended for journalists, should be of interest to anyone who reads or writes. For example, the chapter Invasion of Privacy shows the limits of First Amendment rights, and the balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of the public - or, more crudely, the balance of Tabloid vs. Celebrity. Each section is carefully emended with relevant legal decisions.
http://www.rcfp.org/handbook/viewpage.cgi
According to Barbrook and Cameron there is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. In this paper they are calling this orthodoxy the Californian Ideology in honor of the state where it originated. By naturalizing and giving a technological proof to a political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless and - horror of horrors - unfashionable. - This paper argues for an interactive future.
http://www.wmin.ac.uk/media/HRC/ci/calif.html
Harold. D. Lasswell (* 1902) studied at the London School of Economics. He then became a professor of social sciences at different Universities, like the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Yale University. He also was a consultant for several governments. One of Lasswell's many famous works was Propaganda Technique in World War. In this he defines propaganda. He also discussed major objectives of propaganda, like to mobilize hatred against the enemy, to preserve the friendship of allies, to procure the co-operation of neutrals and to demoralize the enemy.
Polybius was one of the greatest historians of the ancient Greek. he lived from 200-118 BC. see:
A computer programming language is any of various languages for expressing a set of detailed instructions for a digital computer. Such a language consists of characters and rules for combining them into symbols and words.
Certain
The World Intellectual Property Organization is one of the specialized agencies of the United Nations (UN), which was designed to promote the worldwide protection of both industrial property (inventions, trademarks, and designs) and copyrighted materials (literary, musical, photographic, and other artistic works). It was established by a convention signed in Stockholm in 1967 and came into force in 1970. The aims of WIPO are threefold. Through international cooperation, WIPO promotes the protection of intellectual property. Secondly, the organization supervises administrative cooperation between the Paris, Berne, and other intellectual unions regarding agreements on trademarks, patents, and the protection of artistic and literary work and thirdly through its registration activities the WIPO provides direct services to applicants for, or owners of, industrial property rights.
Formerly (1955 - 1979) Sperry Rand Corporation, American corporation that merged with the Burroughs Corporation in 1986 to form Unisys Corporation, a large computer manufacturer.