Study Confirms That Fox News Makes You Stupid – do they really need a formal study to confirm that?

No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it. – much as i agree with this, try convincing a cop who is intent on arresting you of that fact, or a court which is prosecuting you once you are arrested… 😐

Europe faces rising austerity protests in 2011 – this is just the beginning…

Author Slams eBook Piracy, Son Outs Her As a Music Pirate – copying is not theft.

Why do we let this creepy company spy on our emails? – another reason why, in spite of the fact that i use noscript, taco, adblock and tor, i still won’t use gmail. Warrant needed to snoop on your emails – now we have to wait and see if google data-mining your email for targeted advertising will disappear. my guess is that it won’t change anything.

Why Are the Feds Cultivating Their Own "Homegrown Terrorists"? – could it possibly be that they can’t find any foreign-grown ones? or that they’re so inept that they wouldn’t recognise a terrorist if one blew up in front of them? could it possibly be that they don’t understand why someone would hate the way things are, and have a tendency to cheer, or look the other way when terrorists are actually being born…? 😐 … no, it couldn’t be that… it’s probably because they’re too busy with things like this: Texas Airport Security Insults India After Wrongfully Demanding To Search UN Envoy’s Turban and Boy of 12 hauled out of class by police over David Cameron Facebook protest – this is exactly the sorts of things in which the DHS is interested, not actual terrorists at all… TSA’s Scanners Can Be Fooled With Pancakes – another reason why “security theatre” is exactly that, and doesn’t really have anything to do with detecting or deterring people who really want to do evil.

Internet was never free or open and never will be – i’ve worked with internet long enough to know that he’s largely correct. i have about as much freedom as is practically affordable these days, but if my host provider decided that i was doing something illegal, they would shut me down and there would be very little i could do about it, whether i actually was doing something illegal or not. my impression is that the only way for me to prevent that is to buy my own server and a backbone connection, which is prohibitively expensive at the moment… and even then, i still have to connect to an internet which, if they decide to do so, can block anyone from ever being able to see, or get to my server…

despite rumours that wikileaks.org is back up and running on a new nameserver in the US (unconfirmed, because it still comes up as unknown), Air Force blocks access to sites that covered WikiLeaks – they somehow think that if they tell enough people not to view this site that it will magically vanish… poor, deluded air force people… 😐

UK, not Sweden, behind efforts to keep Assange in jail – i wonder how long it will be until actual blame for holding assange in jail boils down to US interests in shutting him up… 😐

meanwhile, US Is Apparently Torturing Bradley Manning, Despite No Trial And No Conviction – apparently the US gummint is really pissed at him for turning over their dirty little secrets… like this: Australia feared Israeli strike on Iran could spark nuclear war

Justice Department sues BP, eight other companies over Gulf oil spill – this is a good thing, but it’s far too little, far too late, and will probably be forgotten, appealed or countersued eventually.