democracy

Lessig: Don't fall into the four-year trap

NEW YORK--Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University law professor and co-founder of the new Change Congress project, gave the audience at the Personal Democracy Forum conference a brief history lesson on Tuesday morning. His message: government corruption is nothing new.

On a massive display screen, he loaded up a portrait of legendary New England statesman and eventual Secretary of State Daniel Webster, whose professional conflicts of interest would have been enough to make even the most lukewarm of political bloggers cringe.

"Bribery wasn't even a crime in our Congress until 1853. The 19th century was a cesspool of this kind … Read more

Industry giants lobby to kill pro-consumer data-breach legislation

In a direct slap in the face to consumers, tech industry giants including Microsoft, AT&T, and Verizon are frantically engaged in an effort to kill pro-consumer provisions in a data breach notification bill currently being considered by the Indiana State Senate.

The bill would require that the state attorney general act as a single point of contact for data breaches. Any company that suffered a breach impacting one or more Indiana consumers would be required to notify the AG's office. The bill would also make Indiana the only state in the country to to require the attorney … Read more

Facebook's Zuckerberg apologizes, allows users to turn off Beacon

Today on the Facebook Blog, Mark Zuckerberg apologizes for the mistakes Facebook made in rolling out Beacon, and announces that the company is "releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely."

This is a clear victory for consumer backlash and protests. MoveOn.org spokesman Adam Green responds to today's development:

"Sites like Facebook are revolutionizing how we communicate with each other and organize around issues together in a 21st century democracy. The big question is: Will corporate advertisers get to write the rules of the Internet or will these new social networks protect our basic … Read more

Miro inches closer to full release

Miro Public Preview 3 has been unleashed for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It seems like this is the version of the freeware Internet TV channel player and aggregator that we've all been waiting for. Crashes seem to be a problem mostly of the past. The smart player, able to download content on the fly as well as play nearly any video on your machine makes Miro's appeal hard to resist.

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Take a look in the Miro

The revamp of Democracy Player is here, newly rechristened Miro, now at version 0.9.8.1 and available for Mac, Windows, and several flavors of Linux. If you're expecting massive changes from the 0.9.6 version, you're going to be a bit disappointed unless new logos designed by the same guy who did the Firefox logo raise your heart rate.

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Prof says global warming is dangerous to your freedom

Nobody's going to like this one. Liberals will feel attacked. Libertarians will nod glumly. Conservatives will feel they're being blamed for something that hasn't happened. And those who intend to ignore climate change will continue to accuse others of a conspiracy.

Peter Wells, a researcher in Cardiff, England, has published an article warning that climate change could lead to a global, militaristic totalitarian state. Here's where you can find the article, but it will cost money to see it all. So, a brief summary: Climate change will create severe challenges to numerous nations. It may prove … Read more

Democracy Player: First Look

Democracy Player, set to be renamed Miro with its next release, is an open-source video player that not only works for almost every type of video file out there, it also arranges vidcasts into "channels" to help keep them all organized. The channel guide creates automatic downloads of your favorite Web shows, from Ask a Ninja to National Geographic Wild.

Take a quick tour of Democracy Player with this First Look video.

Why A Democracy Depends on a Free Press

I recently started reading Al Gore's latest book The Assault on Reason, and have found his analysis on the role of today's media elites to be particularly insightful. Gore writes: If the forum is not fully open, then those who control access become gatekeepers. If they charge money in return for access, then those with more money have a greater ability to participate. Good ideas in the minds of men and women who cannot afford the price of admission to the public forum are then no longer available for consideration. When their opinions are blocked, the meritocracy of ideas that has always been the beating heart of democratic theory begins to suffer damage. The conversation of democracy then comes untethered from the rule of reason and can be manipulated.While perusing this passage, I was reminded of a short educational film made in the 1940s which outlines the continuum between democracy and despotism.

The full video can be found here.… Read more

An equal-opportunity player for Web 2.0

There's the temptation to start talking about the Democracy Player with a Lord of the Rings-esque, "One Player to Rule Them All" joke, but that wouldn't be very democratic, would it?

The latest version of the open-source Democracy Player contains some serious upgrades that make it worth a second look, if you haven't liked it in the past. The most important improvement is that the publisher, the Participatory Culture Foundation, seems to have worked through most of program's early stability issues. After tooling around with the player for hours on Windows Vista, it neither crushed my system's memory usage nor crashed. Memory usage and stability have been major issues for the plucky little player, and I suspect they will continue to be. But at least it wasn't gathering piles of RAM like a YouTube-obsessed squirrel fearing the approaching winter.… Read more