The New Freedom

Monday, February 26th, 2007...3:49 pm

Not dead!: A few things

I told myself I wasn’t going to update until I had a completed project up. Sorry to disappoint, but I’m writing this empty handed. I’ve simply been too busy with school to bring you anything decent. There are a few half finished projects in the pipeline, but they’re all going to take a fairly significant chunk of time before I’m happy enough with them to publish. They’ll come soon enough though.

On the freedom front, I found something that made me incredibly proud to live in Boston: there is a new Open Source Political Party running for Boston’s City Council. I’m in favor of basically everything they stand for, Wiki-style law writing, free video of all public meetings, copyright and patent reform, and politicians with blogs and open communication channels. The only thing I’m not so sure about is the idea of “digg-style” lawmaking. Geek chair The reason being is that digg’s top stories always fucking suck. This is a direct result of people being idiots. Right now, the top stories on digg are “25 Reasons to Smoke Marijuana”, “Hot Chick Dressed as Stripper!”, and my personal favorite, “Seven Geeky Chairs You (Probably) Haven’t Seen Before”. Jesus tittyfucking Christ, is there any type of countdown list that can’t make it to the top of digg? (I was going to make fun of the 3000+dugg beer launching fridge, but it’s actually pretty awesome.) I definately don’t want the same ree-rahs who digg geeky chairs and “Things that Make You Say Holy Shit! WOAHAWESOME!” in charge of deciding which laws need to be enacted.

That being said, OpenCongress.org launched this morning. The site aims to “bring together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill.” Awesome. It’s absolutely dripping in obnoxious Web2.0iness, but that’s a good thing. It’s powered by GovTrack.us, which has existed for some time, but adds new features which make it much easier to see what is going on in congress, what the media is covering, and, most interestingly, what people are looking at online. Not surprisingly, those things don’t currently seem to align (look at the right hand column of OpenCongress’ main page). Maybe this project will bring about a change in that, and the government/media will start to focus on what people are actually concerned about.
Chuck D
More bullshit from the Creative Commons folks this morning: Version 3 of the CC licenses were released today, bring about more complications and eroding away at our fair-use rights. As I wrote about before, I disagree with Creative Commons because of the option of having “No Derivative Works”, which I feel is a bullshit hindrance to the creative process, and is a problem which I’ve actually encountered while creating a video. With Version 3, they’ve actually taken this a step further by introducing the Music Sharing License, which specifically includes a clause that “You may not sample or remix this music. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this music (this includes synching the music to a moving image).” Oh, mayn’t I? Fuck you, that’s acceptable fair use as far as I’m concerned, and I’m sure Public Enemy’s Chuck D would agree.

I love fucked up videos (which is basically the point of dashitlist), so I was I was absolutely delighted to find this insane remix of an old anti-drug PSA: