The Bangus Ultimatum

Go to iBlog 2 , the Philippines’ 2nd Blogging Summit. Attendance is FREE. Register now to save your seat!

iBlog 2 will be held on April 18 2006, at the UP College of Law. Hope to see you all there!

A couple of wonderful offers from the cool office I work for, the Internet and Society Program:

* First, we’re opening up the planning process to iBlog2. We’re giving the blogging community a whole lot of control over the content and structure of the next Philippine blogging summit.

* We’re also willing to give bandwidth and storage space to podcasts on law and legal issues. We’re also giving technical assistance for those who haven’t tried podcasting.

Interested? Drop me a line through (emersonDOTbanezATupDOTeduDOTph)

That seems to be the overriding motif for the day so far. Thanks to The J-Spot I get a heads-up that the latest version of my favorite Linux distro is out. I take a peek at the University’s Open Source Portal and discover that the UP Computer Center has a copy ready for burning. I pick up a couple of cdr’s at lunch and head to the center to have my own copy of Ubuntu 5.10 aka “Breezy Badger”.

After upgrading my linux partition, I go ahead with installing Firefox 1.5 (go get it) and Open Office 2.0. I’m proud to report that 95% of my workflow runs on free and open source software

Where do I want to go today? To Open Source, you criminal monopolist bastards.

I guess we bloggers are allowed to celebrate our little victories. Even when they do get reversed. Sort of.

So they google-bombed Arroyo. Someday, when a friggin’ psycho looks for “sinungaling”, the Office of the President’s website will appear. Maybe we’ll have a regime change. Maybe we’ll get rid of Presidentialism forevermore and none of this will really matter. But hey, we google-bombed Arroyo, man! Whoop-tee-doo!

Somehow, this doesn’t feel as right as changing the google zeitgeist for “pinay”. Overall, that’s a positive effort/karma ratio. (Perhaps because all we wanted to change was mere perception. Perhaps because none of it involved grave violations of the Constitution.) Sorry, Young Radicals, but that just doesn’t work for me.

It reminds me of what Dr. Joshua Ellis had to say about our increasingly bifurcated civilization:

Meanwhile, most of the people with any genuine opportunity or ability to effect global change are too busy patting each other on the back at conventions and blue-skying goofy social networking tools that are essentially useless to 95% of the world’s population, who live within fifteen feet of everyone they’ve ever known and have no need to track their fuck buddies with GPS systems. (This, by the way, includes most Americans, quite honestly.)

…

The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.

I believe that blogging can play a role in real social change. To do that, however, we have to be brave enough to step outside our candy-colored, plasticine pods, and realize what is truly at stake out there.

A panel of judges in Florida orders the release of breathalyzer source code to DUI defendants:

“It seems to us that one should not have privileges and freedom jeopardised by the results of a mystical machine that is immune from discovery, that inhales breath samples and that produces a report specifying a degree of intoxication,” a February 2004 court ruling stated…

If CMI keeps refusing to subject the application to an independent audit, it is unlikely that a judge can force it to do so. This would render the results of the test inadmissible in court.”

UPDATE: Breathalyzers aren’t the only machines of legal consequence that have embedded code. Think about the processors and the programming behind computing your tax (the BIR claims it used datamining to sniff out tax evaders), the tabulation of votes (at least at the central level), and the determination of DNA matches.

Without access to the source code, they are for all intents and purposes “mystical machines” – and making conviction contingent on such “black boxes” may raise due-process concerns.

I’ll chalk this one up as another reason for government-led adoption of open source (or shared source, or at least open standards). “Certainly, the courts can require the disclosure of even proprietary sourcecode through the discovery process, why go through the extreme of modifying ourt entire tech procurement policy?” Buy why wait for the courts to review code post-facto (after the damage has been done, and expensive litigation started?) Are we not entitled, as taxpayers, to have an objective assurance that the code that our government purchases, the code that could send us to jail (or to death) are working the wayt they’re supposed to?

(reposted from the iBlog site)

Of course, if you lash out on bloggers, you can’t expect us to take it sitting down. Some great reactions online:

* From Doc Searls:

I’d like to ask Dan — and others who damn all bloggers for the sins of the few — how they’d like to read a report that calls supermarket tabloids “the newspapers” or hate sheets “the magazines.” Because that’s what happened to bloggers in this piece.

* Kurt Opsahl from the EFF has this great parody:

Printing presses are the prized platform of a public lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Ben Franklin and John Hancock.

Take the tea tax. Revenue was coming, providing much needed funding to help with his Majesty’s benevolent aims in the colonies.

Then the pamphleteers attacked. A supposed crusading journalist launched a broadsheet long on invective and wobbly on facts, posting articles with his printing press calling your King “deceitful,”"unethical,”"incredibly stupid” and “a pathological liar” who had misled the colonists.

Starting today I hope to post more regularly to the iBlog blog. Think of it as a buildup to generate buzz and inspire themes for iBlog Summit 2. I’m going to cover, well, blogging (Pinoys blogging in particular) as well as other intarwebby things and the inevitable overlap with social and legal issues. Here’s my first go at it, perfect for Halloween:

(Got this from boingboing) It’s something I’ve been waiting for: mainstream media at its most sensational, with its audience share threatened and its corporate sponsors reeling, lashes back at blogs. It turns out now that we are part of ” an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective”. Ouch.

A sidebar to the article then discusses how one can “fight back”. This includes:

BUILD A BLOG SWARM. Reach out to key bloggers and get them on your side. Lavish them with attention. Or cash.Earlier this year Marqui, a tiny Portland, Ore. software shop, began paying 21 bloggers $800 per month to post items about Marqui, while requiring them to disclose the payments. Marqui’s listings soared on Google from 2,000 to 250,000 results. Never mind that one blogger took the money and bashed a Marqui marketing strategy anyway.

BASH BACK. If you get attacked, dig up dirt on your assailant and feed it to sympathetic bloggers. Discredit him.

ATTACK THE HOST. Find some copyrighted text that a blogger has lifted from your Web site and threaten to sue his Internet service provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That may prompt the ISP to shut him down. Or threaten to drag the host into a defamation suit against the blogger. The host isn’t liable but may skip the hassle and cut off the blogger’s access anyway. Also:Subpoena the host company, demanding the blogger’s name or Internet address.

SUE THE BLOGGER. If all else fails, you can sue your attacker for defamation, at the risk of getting mocked. You will have to chase him for years to collect damages. Settle for a court order forcing him to take down his material.

Now, the article is obviously trollbait, but it shows that we’re not all safe in our own little worlds. Outside the walls, people are sulking and plotting deep into the night. And it’s not like mainstream media and Big Money are the only ones looking for payback. Governments and administrations are out for blood (sometimes, more literally than figuratively). It reminds me of Dean Jorge Bocobo’s fears that something as apparently harmless as TouchGraph could be used on a blog “clampdown”. As blogging spreads and grows in influence, expect more flashpoints of conflict, maybe even full-scale Blog Wars.