a on Wed, 15 Aug 2001 05:24:18 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Information cannot be free |
> i prefer scoring, recommendation and hypertext to censorship. yes, although i believe he did have a valid point on the amount of communication correlating to value of information, and how that relates to the way free networks operate. its great when you have a tool like google that really works well with free information - but if those tools dont exist then free information is often really useless. corresponding to this, i believe that censorship (such a harsh word, but i use it in its loosest sense) actually has value. you wouldn't expect an adobe user manual to have 600 pages of useless noise, for example. both forms are of great value, and both require the right methods of access. > "information wants to be free" may be bollocks, but i don't think it's an > accepted hacker mantra. but in the case of many classes of information, > it's of greater value if it is freely available. yeh, i think he was flawed in his relationship between information freedom and hacker culture. what lead me to thinking about this was the stuff i read about HAL before you went, and the stories I heard about it while you were out there. there was an article emploring attendees not to engage in illegal activities for fear of giving HAL (a _hackers_ convention) a bad reputation (ie, making a clear distinction between hacking and cracking, for example). but what i heard was that HAL was a breeding ground for trouble - warez servers, continuous cracking on the local net, etc. it would be good if you could honestly confirm or deny if this was the case. anyway, my worry is that the hacker community cannot actually separate itself from its sinister alter-ego. this makes the efforts of people like rms even harder because they strictly do not condone illegal activities. so you end up with this increasing mass of hacker types exploring 'freedom of information' with systems such as gnutella (which, let's face it, is used to distribute information illegally) and using their pseudo-political rhetoric to justify partaking in illegal activities normally associated with cracking (ie, "let's crack a proprietary encryption system!" - yes, it may be the right thing to do, but it's _still illegal_) i'm not making any accusations that this is the case - i'm just confused because often the hacker community sends out conflicting signals with regards to all these issues. i'd like to hear more opinions. how does an honest hacker reconcile the knowledge that others in her community are using her same political stance to justify illegal activities? the same question needs to be flipped and asked to those involved in closed-information systems, too. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net