Peter Mandelson: Proof as if it were needed of low life in high places

The proliferation of fake goods onto the international market, is partly thanks to the ready availability of near-good-enough gadgets and gizmos on eBay and other user generated trading sites, which masquerade as genuine items from big brand manufacturers.

From Dyson vacuum cleaners to the Apple iPad, every must-have item has its cheeper to produce cousin in the lucrative counterfeit industry. Often produced by exactly the same workers from the factories who produce the legitimate goods, $100 Rolex watches which look and feel like the real thing, but with essentially worthless inner workings, sit right alongside iPods with cloned operating systems which brick as soon as they are connected to iTunes.

There is no doubting that this is a huge problem. But the problem with ACTA, according to the Stop ACTA website, is that “[the treaty and all] negociations are done secretely. Leaked documents show that one of the major goal of the treaty is to force signatory countries into implementing anti file-sharing policies under the form of three-strikes schemes and net filtering practices.”

The British government have been pushing for ‘a three strikes and you’re out’ policy towards internet users who are found to have infringed copyright for some time. But all proposals so far have attempted to compel Internet Service Providers to police their users, by adopting monitoring methods which would prove extremely difficult to regulate and are wide open to abuse. For this reason, ISPs are largely against such measures. But it’s only a matter of time before an agreement is reached, which isolates them from legal liability.

For example, before leaving office, Peter Mandelson, the former New Labour MP and advisor to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who also served as a European Commissioner, introduced the Digital Economy Act, which “establishes a system of law which aims to first increase the ease of tracking down and suing persistent infringers, and after a minimum of one year permit the introduction of “technical measures” to reduce the quality of, or potentially terminate, those infringers’ Internet connections.” Or in plain English, if you do anything which they deem illegal (and therefore immoral?), they’ll make sure you never use the internet ever again.

Oleg Deripaska's yacht, where Peter Mandelson was amazed to discover that file sharing is a bigger threat to the UK economy than the wholesale closer of its manufacturing industry

ACTA now seeks to unify the policies of individual member states, with similar laws to the Digital Economy Bill, under one internationally recognised law. Read the deliberative draft of the proposals here: http://www.laquadrature.net/files/201001_acta.pdf

Recent events in the United States, when the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) attempted to push through the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), and the massive on-line campaign which successfully delayed that heinous law from being passed, shows that when those of us who are directly and negatively impacted by bad legislation of this kind get together, we can prevent such laws from being passed; raising awareness in so doing, among our friends and family, who might not ordinarily pay attention to international politics, of the need to remain vigilant.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theory nut job to be concerned about the sinister and cynical power play which is being fought out between hugely well financed individuals and private corporations around the world. They’ve seen what is happening in the Middle East and how oppressed people, in the nations of the world who currently work for a fraction of the wages demanded in the West, are taking to the streets to say enough is enough.

It is now time to do the same to ACTA as we did to SOPA and PIPA. The last thing their plans, models and projections can predict, is what will happen when an informed and morally motivated public join together in one voice of opposition.

They don’t mind what we know, they mind when we act on what we know.

http://www.stopacta.info/helpstopacta

This isn’t about demanding the right to download stuff for free. This isn’t about being against everything our governments try to do, simply because they’re trying to do it. This is about saying NO MORE to private corporations writing our laws for us, with scant regard for due process and a rational informed debate.

No one wants to steal from musicians and filmmakers whose art and skill make possible the movies and music we love. But the current system of copyright and the laws which enforce it, by criminalising innocent users, while ignoring the organised criminals who infringe intellectual property on an industrial scale, extorts as much money from artists and content producers as it does the end user.

It is the copyright law which needs to change, not the way in which people who fall foul of it are prosecuted — particularly when the methods for pursuing casual offenders involve destroying our presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and handing over more and more of our rights to privacy than we already have.

http://www.stopacta.info/helpstopacta

MegaUpload was the 13th most popular website on the internet

Virginia prosecutors have charged the site’s founders with $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content. www.nytimes.com, torrentfreak.com, Google News

By “other content” perhaps they mean the terabytes of files professional filmmakers and musicians have uploaded, over the last 5 years, to perfectly legally use the website as it was intended to be used, to share files essential to the creative process, which can’t be attached to an email because of their size?

Or perhaps they are referring to the millions of images and video clips which photographers and journalists have uploaded, to legitimately use the web site as a place to securely send information to news bureaus around the world, in countries where exercising your freedom of speech is as dangerous as it’s becoming in the US?

Who can say? What we can be certain of, is this is just the beginning. Up next: Rapidshare, FileFreak, MediaFire, YouSendIt.. ..it’s all going to come crashing down. And when they’re done with them, they’ll go for YouTube and Vimeo, LiveLeak, GrooveShark and beyond — anywhere which the SOPA / PIPA legislation gives them the right to act with impunity. No oversight. No trial. Just censored and gone, quicker than you can say Winston Smith.

By the way, MegaUpload have (or had) a complaints procedure clearly marked on their front page, which anyone who believed the website was being used to share copyright content could use, to issue a DMCA take-down notice, which the website would then respond to by immediately removing the offending content.

But let’s not quibble about that. Let’s focus instead on the fact that, apart from the fact the complete contents of the WikiLeaks cables were also hosted on MegaUpload, and pages and pages of documentation proving the Bush administration knew months in advance of it breaking in the press that soldiers were abusing inmates of Iraqi prisons, MegaUpload was also used by a tiny minority of people to download music and artworks which you can’t go out and buy even if you wanted to. Yeah, that’s the REAL story here. God damned pirates!!

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Your government is in control. Go back to sleep. Here’s 37 channels of Top Gear reruns. You are free, to do as we tell you. Sieg Heil!!

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed-if all records told the same tale-then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'" - George Orwell, 1984

Hence, Wikipedia, Google, Reddit and a huge list of other popular content sites (see http://sopastrike.com/ for a full list) are still going ahead with their planned day of protest, by blanking their web pages for 12 to 24 hours, commencing Jan. 18th, 2012.

But what comes next is of far greater importance than what has already happened. Because the upheaval and headline grabbing actions of those sites taking part in this day of action, are exactly the response to SOPA and PIPA the authors of this heinous legislation had hoped for. Phase two of their plan cannot succeed without our collective fascination eventually turning into frustration with those who attempt to keep the ball rolling. It is a strategic distraction, deliberately engineered to appear to be something it isn’t, by the very people who drafted SOPA and PIPA to begin with.

Bait and switch
In the 1950′s, the American economist Milton Friedman, along with his contemporaries in the Chicago School of Economics, devised a strategy for turning uncertainty in the markets to the advantage of those with the muscle to invest in what everyone else was running away from. At first, this theoretical strategy was of only minor academic interest to other economists; a thought experiment which no-one believed could work in the real world, because it depended upon the sort of fear and uncertainty which can easily lead to uncontrollable panic.

Today this strategy, known as The Shock Doctrine, is used by governments all over the world. Its transition, from an interesting theory to government policy, was made possible by successive American administrations, from Nixon to Obama, increasing the power of both the financial services industry and multinational corporations, by simultaneously decreasing the oversight and regulatory powers of the government over those same institutions. It was copied by everyone from Pinochet and Thatcher, to Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Obama, as eagerly as it was by Yeltsin, Putin, Blair and Cameron.

By deliberately creating fear, anyone selling a calming solution to those fears, becomes the dominant player — even if their strategy ultimately involves making ever riskier moves. Analogous to John Nash’s Game Theory, to succeed, Friedman’s doctrine is predicated upon the notion that in times of uncertainty, populations are easier to corral behind shifts in policy, which appear to be in their long term interest, despite that in the short term their effects are harsh. The cheat, is that the fear is artificially created, so that the long term ambition of those who claim to have a fix for that which they designed, can never be achieved. The carrot merely has to constantly descend further and further down the stick.

What the architects of the SOPA and PIPA legislation are ultimately hoping, is that by the time they are forced to abandon their initial proposals, the shock felt in the technology sector at having come so close to seeing their entire business model effectively made illegal will be so great, that it forces them into agreeing changes, introduced in the name of compromise, which in-fact go much further than the original proposals ever hoped to achieve.

Follow the money
Between them, Apple, Google and Amazon represent the end of the old ways of doing things. Apple controls the lion’s share of the most profitable parts of the music business: the distribution platform, the playback media and marketing. Google owns the tracks which the advertising train of the online economy runs on. And Amazon recently announced a move to a publishing model, buoyed by the success of its Kindle eReader device, which puts the sort of control into the hands of authors and content owners, which the traditional print industry simply cannot afford to do.

Hollywood knows the days of its business model are also numbered. 3D and IMAX might have drawn people back to the multiplexes to see the latest blockbuster, but not every movie can have a $200 million budget, and not every movie buff enjoys thin plots, centred around CGI explosions and plastic tits. That’s why the MPAA is going after the low hanging fruit of BitTorrent, which impacts most significantly, not on its latest releases, but its legacy assets. The fact which they cannot seem to fathom, despite that it is common knowledge among every 12 year old from Phoenix, Arizona to Pelton Fell, County Durham, is it’s simply easier and cheaper to download a BitTorrent of ‘The Girl Whose Nipples Speak Norwegian‘, than it is to pay £9.99 to wait three days for an easily scratched DVD to be delivered in the post, or as is the case with “legitimate” digital downloads, has been so badly crippled to prevent it from playing on specific devices, that it simply doesn’t meet its intended purpose.

So instead of embracing the distribution model everyone is already using, Hollywood resorts to type; if you can’t beat ‘em, sue ‘em. Their case to both the congress and house of representatives, that websites hosted outside the United States pose a serious threat to the American economy, perfectly demonstrates this backwards, xenophobic, money grabbing mentality. It essentially accuses anyone who voices concern over their wide reaching proposals as being part of the problem. When, in reality, they are the solution to a problem the studios themselves created, when instead of learning lessons from Napster, they sought to tighten their grip on a system no-one under the age of 40 understands, much less uses.

Brace yourself for phase two
In the coming weeks and months, you’re going to hear a lot of crazy talk about Johnny Foreigner “stealing our jobs” and “draining our economy”, because if there is one type of Shock Doctrine the American electorate respond to better than any other, it’s that which appears to come from overseas. The weakness in this argument, is it’s complete unadulterated bullshit — and more and more true Americans are beginning to realise it every day.

There was a time, not so long ago, when we European types were verbally beaten to within an inch of our lives for daring to so much as mention to our American friends, on-line, that they were being deceived on an industrial scale. From the manipulative lies which led to the illegal invasion of Iraq, to the warning signs about Obama’s true position on Israel, discussion forums and UseNet chat groups would ring out to the sound of self-congratulatory chest beating, as yet another Englishman was sent packing to chants of “USA! USA!”, as yet another hastily assembled, received opinion, know-nothing-and-proud-of-it reply thread, became lauded as if it were the modern day equivalent for the war of independence.

Then came the occupy movement. Suddenly, Americans realised they weren’t alone in their disgust at the way a tiny minority of their countrymen portrayed them. From Portland to Pittsburgh, ordinary people with ordinary lives, began to see that, far from being in the minority with their yearning for journalism by journalists as opposed to celebrities, and music by musicians as opposed to DJs, and books written by writers, as opposed to critics, they were in the majority — and that together they could change things forever.

SOPA / PIPA is the opening salvo against that shared belief. They are coming for our freedom of information. And until we learn to stop reacting in the pre-programmed, knee-jerk way their doctrine is specifically designed to provoke us into, they’ll keep getting what they want and taking whatever they like.

Write to congress now!
http://sopastrike.com/strike/
Not In The US? Petition The State Department:
http://americancensorship.org/modal/state-dept-petition/index.html

Hello, this is Jim who emailed you earlier today following on from Alex Botten’s invitation for you to talk about this on our podcast.

This is an extremely long argument which makes some interesting points, but for fear of being overly simplistic, I have to ask what it has to do with proving the existence of a specific God from a specific religion.

It is perfectly true to say, for example, that the high entropy state of the universe infers that, at some point in the past, every-thing was highly ordered. Indeed the coming into being of the first fundamental particles which later coalesced into dust and gas, galaxies, planets and eventually DNA and RNA, remains one of the great unanswered questions in all of science.

Postulating a designer, or an instigating force of some kind, at this point, is a perfectly valid position to take. But that does not mean you are free to immediately suppose that the nature and character of that instigating force is a specific god of a specific religion. In fact, if anything, it undermines the idea of us having any understanding whatsoever of the nature and character of that designer — least of all that such things are explored with any degree of accuracy, in the musings of an ancient, tribal people who authored the allegedly holy documents at the foundation of monotheism.

I am constantly amazed as to the lengths religious people will go to, to understand the scientific position on a range of topics, only to abandon what they have learned completely, when the evidence begins to point to something far more interesting than the God from their religion of choice. It really is classic God of the gaps stuff to insist, on one hand, that “The foundation of cohesive logic appears to have been undermined by quantum physics.” and on the other insist that this somehow constitutes proof of the existence of the deity to which you happen to have a predisposition towards believing in.

You undo your own argument in this way, because it highlights your greater commitment to theistic chewing gum, than the nouvelle cuisine of evidence against all forms of inductive assumption.

For instance, what possible justification can there be to say that simply because one understands Pauli’s exclusion principle, rumours of a desert dwelling preacher immediately become true? How, in other words, do you get from a position where you accept the scientific evidence of, say, cosmological evolution, but refuse to see that the very deductive process which gave us that knowledge to begin with, also tells us there is something far more profound happening, than we can hope to understand in one lifetime.

If you’re offended by having what you actually believe read back to you, consider the offence we take at being told the only way to be a moral person is to believe in such things without question.

I also understand that you believe the ability of the atheist to behave morally, despite their non-belief in Yahweh, constitutes proof that — even in their denial of his existence — they prove His ability to exert influence upon even the hardest of hearts. But you misrepresent us in this way so as to cover over the fact you haven’t even begun to approach a proof of your basic truth-claim — and it stands out like a sore thumb.

Further, it assumes we are hardened to the astounding beauty of the universe and the precision by which we measure it, when in reality we are the ones who advocate such a view. In simply pointing out that you make the perfect argument against the existence of the designer you postulate as being Yahweh, every time you acknowledge the even greater profundity of what we can empirically ascertain about reality, in your view, we immediately sacrifice ourselves to “random chance” or “a universe without meaning” — when nothing could be further from the truth.

Moreover, you have talked yourself into this position, on a perfectly wrong understanding of what Quantum Mechanics actually is and what it actually tells us. Quote, “If quantum mechanics seems to dismantle a cohesive logical explanation of the universe, it is likely that there is a non-materialist explanation.”

Quantum Mechanics does not dismantle cohesive logic, it solidifies it. Your misunderstanding of what Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle actually is, doesn’t constitute a reason for other people to be similarly confused.

More to the point, even if it did undermine what we know about the physical world, by your own logic it would necessarily follow that a “non-materialist explanation” of what we observe, would be — by definition — one which you cannot measure, quantify or describe — thereby even further undermining your belief that Yahweh embodies a “non-materialist explanation”; since the validity of the truth claim that He reveals Himself to us as a physical presence, cannot be considered an objectively valid experience, since our description of that experience is by definition borne of our material understanding.

Q.E.D., metaphysical truth claims are meaningless for precisely the same reason any conclusion drawn from its own proposition is viciously circular.

So on points 1 and 2, you have undone your own argument. Which is amusing, but not in a “let’s all point and laugh at the fundamentalist” petty kind of “typical atheist on the internet” sort of way. But in an almost amusing “he’s just explained how small his God is without realising it” kind of extremely sad sort of a way. I genuinely pity your loss of perspective, in this regard.

Don’t take that wrong — I admire your mental acrobatics, but only because it speaks to the level of sophistication the scientific evidence has forced you into adopting, simply to continue believing in belief for belief’s sake.

I’m going to deliberately skip large sections of your argument on the afterlife and the hallucinations of Ernest Hemingway, in the hope you will accept our invitation to debate this on the podcast, and finish instead on your final statement, “IV. Materialism has failed to provide support for answers to foundational questions while theism has provided such support.”

Please describe an action of good which could not be performed by an atheist and only performed by a theist. Do not insult your reader’s intelligence by saying “prayer”. And consider, by analogy, the shattered body of a child, sent into a crowded subway packed with timed explosives, and ask yourself if her parents are religious, or secular humanist.

Google Maps

I will listen to what the Pastor has to say and you will report back (in the comments) on what you learned from the below videos and links.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from either cheating and not watching all the clips from start to finish, or indeed just watching them now and still go to church as well. But that defeats the object. You have to watch the clips on Sunday, instead of going to church as usual.

Let me know if you plan on going ahead with this, so I can make arrangements with the church ahead of time, to film parts of the service. You’ve got the easy job. All you have to do is sit on your arse and learn something interesting about how we think the universe really works. I have to get my suit dry cleaned and bite my tongue when the collection plate gets passed around.

Here are the videos I would like you to watch. If you want to take part in the experiment, please don’t watch them yet. Instead leave a comment below stating the date of the next Sunday service you won’t be attending and I’ll arrange to go to church on that date in your stead.

This first one explains the smallest unit of measurement currently available to physicists, the Planck length. It’s important to pay attention to some of the stuff they refer to in passing towards the end of this clip, because it comes up again in the following video.

This next clip is rather long and some of you are going to instantly dislike it, because it was given at an atheist convention and it’s introduced by Richard Dawkins. Pay no heed to that and listen, instead, to what the nice man is saying about ‘A Universe from Nothing’. The often repeated phrase, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist” finds it origins in certain aspects of the Big Bang theory, which propose that fluctuations in the Quantum Field probably caused our universe to come into existence. Lawrence Krauss explains what cosmologists mean by ‘nothing’ in this context.

If atoms are mostly made up of empty space, why don’t we fall through the floor? Sounds like a ridiculous question, does’t it? Things interact with other things because they are solid. But what do we mean by solid? The Pauli exclusion principle explains that no two electrons in the universe can occupy the same energy levels. But since we put energy into something every time we interact with it, every electron in the universe must therefore adjust itself, somehow, to occupy a slightly different energy level. We are therefore, literally, connected to everything else in the universe. The fact that we can prove this is true, not only explains why there is incredible beauty in physics, but to my mind makes it somewhat more believable than talking snakes and magic wine.

Finally another clip from Sixty Symbols, only this time on the Higgs Boson and understanding the difference between photons (fluctuations in the electromagnetic field) and the field itself.

Now, what’s the point of this? Well, it’s a little experiment. See, I think I know what any Christian willing to take part in this little challenge is going to say, no matter what they might learn from the above videos, and I think I know what they’re going to say about my attending a church service too.

So as not to influence the outcome (every experiment needs a control) I’ve taken a date stamped screen shot of a text document and email, written before publishing this blog entry, with some suggestions as to what the possible replies to this challenge might be. This will be published after the results are in.

So as to rule out any tampering or editing, I’ve sent a copy of the text document containing my predictions to Richard Morgan, a Christian friend of mine from the Fundamentally Flawed Podcast, who will vouchsafe that I did indeed write out my predictions, before clicking “Send” on this article and, therefore, before reading any comments posted below.

How to take part:

If you’re a Christian and you want to send an atheist to church, leave a comment below stating the date of the next Sunday service you won’t be attending so as to instead watch the above video clips and write a review of them in the comments below. When I get back from the church service I will post a full account of the experience and publish my predictions on what you might say in response.

Here is a screen shot of the email to Richard, containing my predictions on your responses, which was sent BEFORE this article was published. Good luck!

Note that the timestamp in the top right corner is before the publication time of this article.

I am publishing this article at: 22:55 and 20 seconds on the 8th of Jan 2012

The email to Richard was sent at:

Simply put, SOPA and Protect IP are a kill switch for any content on the internet which might be uncomfortable for politicians or the private corporations who own them. It is being billed as legislation which would end, or seriously impact upon the illegal distribution of music and movies, via Peer to Peer networks. But in reality, it allows any private corporation to remove anything they want removed from the internet with total impunity.

This is not some conspiracy theory, mustered up by stoned teenagers. Nor is it a leftwing or rightwing, liberal or conservative “thing”. It is something which is happening now and it really does affect everyone, including you. Yes you, who thinks you’re OK, because once in a while you pay for something on iTunes or Netflix. It’s not about the actual media you consume, it’s about the way in which that media is distributed.

The appearance given to this legislation; that it is going through a “consultation process”, is a total facade, which wouldn’t you know it, the corporations who would benefit from it the most aren’t reporting on their news networks. In reality, the changes to the law and to the United States constitution itself, which it affects, have already begun to be enforced.

Most of the people in the House of Representatives who will officially pass this into law have no idea what it is and are being used as nothing more than a glorified rubber stamp. While this has become a familiar story by now, in common with many other such moves by corporate America to usurp the government by the people for the people to suite their own ends, this once again has massive repercussions for those of us living outside of the US, as well as those trapped within its borders.

Alicia Keys: A pirate

Megaupload’s primary purpose is to solve a perennial problem when working with large documents, such as .aiff and .wav uncompressed audio files. It allows large attachments to be sent from one user to another without using email. Most email services only allow 20 or 30 megabytes of attachments to any one message, and the average .aiff of a 4 minute music track is about 1 gigabyte. For technical reasons, to do with the transfer protocols which are used to route email across the internet, this tends to make sending large attachments unreliable and slow.

Megaupload gets around this problem and is, therefore, ideal for musicians who want to send many high resolution takes of their performances, perhaps from their home studio, to any one of the artists who are collaborating on the track with them, all around the world.

On December 9th, 2011, “The Mega Song” was removed from YouTube following a take-down request from Universal Music Group (UMG), despite that they did not own the copyright on any of the material used in the music video. Universal claimed that this was “pursuant to the UMG-YouTube agreement,” which gives UMG “the right to block or remove user-posted videos through YouTube’s Content Management System based on a number of contractually specified criteria.” But YouTube denied that any such agreement with UMG was in place and subsequently reinstated the video.

UMG and other media giants, clearly want to paint services like Megaupload in the role of the bad guy, just because a handful of their users post copyrighted content to their website. But Megaupload actively remove media from their servers which breaches copyright all the time. Plus, it’s not possible to search for filenames posted to Megaupload, so it’s not as if they’re offering a catalogue of media, and screaming free-for-all.

All Megaupload provides, is an A to B file transfer service. So because UMG and other media giants are incapable of competing with them, they simply seek to change the law so that they are the ones who decide how their rivals operate.

Megaupload offers a service people want to use. It’s convenient and it’s free. If and when Megaupload decided to monetize their services, it would pose a real threat to the existing distribution model which the media giants are clinging onto for dear life; an erosion of their grip on music and movies which started way back when Apple iTunes first began to offer a legit alternative to Napster.

The failure of the media giants to catch up, yet again, poses the real possibility that, this time, in an attempt to crush their opposition, they might break the entire internet.

Now, to anyone who followed the Shawn Karon debacle the Megaupload / YouTube story isn’t really news. YouTube’s take-down request procedure has long been open to abuse, because it presumes that the claimant is telling the truth about owning a particular video clip, which someone else is using without permission, before asking the claimant to present any proof of their ownership.

YouTube’s hands are somewhat tied, because as the law currently stands, if indeed the claimant did own the rights to the content they have requested be removed and YouTube continued to allow it to be hosted on their site nonetheless, Google, YouTube’s owners, would become liable for any losses incurred as a result of their failure to comply with the take-down request.

But instead of fixing the existing laws, so YouTube and other similar services have their position clarified, the music and movie industry are instead to force draconian legislation through which would effectively allow them to flip the switch on anything they deem unsuitable, without having to ask nicely or explain why — and, theoretically, it wouldn’t just be the offending video clip which was removed, it would be the entire YouTube website. Read that last line again, until it sinks in just how dangerous this legislation really is.

How the internet works:
When you type a website name into the address box, or open a bookmark or click a link, your web browser asks your Internet Service Provider to send data to your computer which relates to that website’s name. Website names are technically knowns as Domains and the computers at your Internet Service Provider which negotiate this transaction on your behalf, are called Domain Name Servers. If you turn off the Domain Name Server that tells your web browser what to draw in the screen, when you visit a website, you effectively censor that website’s content.

This is the method used by the Chinese government to silence people who want to learn about the massacre at Tiananmen Square, for example. Google, for a while, went along with this Chinese government request, on the Chinese language version of their search results, but later refused to comply and consequently had to shut-up operations in the world’s fastest growing economy.

Such moral leadership in the technology sector isn’t as rare as your inner cynic might at first fear. Most of the websites which are, today, household names, just 5 years ago were the startups of young entrepreneurs who dared to imagine that they could change the world though ethical business practices which don’t just pay lip service to human rights and free speech, but actively protect and encourage other businesses who do the same.

It may well be a trite and perhaps even a little hammy or naive utopian vision, destined to be crushed under the wheels of reality, but in the belief that a better world might emerge from the co-ordinated efforts of internet users around the world, many companies have publicly opposed SOPA and Protect IP and lobbied to have it blocked.

Unfortunately there has also been a fair smattering of companies who have endorsed it; most notably Microsoft and GoDaddy — the latter being a Domain Name Registrar who, wouldn’t you know it, under the terms of the proposal they helped draft, would be exempt from having their domain names blocked. Indeed, thanks to GoDaddy.com’s endorsement of SOPA and Protect IP, a number of high profile websites, including Wikipedia, have switched to other DNS providers in public protest.

The upshot:
The worry, is that this legislation might be a genuine attempt to stop online piracy, whose unintended effects, would be to silence people who are critical of a particularly powerful lobby – like the oil and gas industry, or financial services for example.

We have to ask, what if the Megaupload video, instead of being a harmless musical promotion of a website, was footage of protestors being beaten with clubs, by private security contractors, outside an oil refinery which leaks toxins into the atmosphere, because it operates in a territory where politicians have been bought off and the workers and locals are too poor to be allowed a voice?

What if Universal Music Group, in the belief that they are entitled to protect their content with such vigour, that they inadvertently make it possible for someone running for President of the United States, to literally disconnect anyone who uses the internet to blog about their taking kickbacks from big tobacco?

Simply put, this is the kill switch large corporations and the corrupt politicians they own have been waiting for, since the internet was first introduced. We must fight it.

Mozilla, makers of the Firefox web browser and the foundation which has spearheaded a number of game changing open source initiatives in the past, has an excellent page of information on how US citizens can contact their political representatives and explain to them why it is important they actually read the legislation they’re being told to vote on, by their corporate sponsors.

https://donate.mozilla.org/page/s/SOPA?source=sopa_page

Please do all you can to spread the word about this. Here is a huge list of links, with which to inform yourself and other people about the ramifications of SOPA:

http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/search?q=sopa&sort=top&restrict_sr=on

Please share them on Facebook, twitter and other social media websites, so that together we can stop these ridiculous and dangerous laws from passing.

Christopher Hitchens: 1949 - 2011

Please give generously to cancer research UK, at this page set up in Christopher’s memory.

Over the coming weeks, you’re going to hear a lot of crazy talk about Christopher “being in a better place” and, I have no doubt, an attempt from rightwing talk-show pundits to suggest a deathbed recantation of his atheism.

Even as I write, the trending topic on Twitter, #godIsNotGreat, has seen a mix of outrage and praise for the words of condolences posted by Rick Warren, who had the effrontery to call Hitchens a friend, in the same breath as saying, “he knows the truth now“.

This to be followed, no doubt, by many similar such utterances of passive aggressive threat theology, in the hours ahead, from those who claim to be doing so in praise of a god who is “all loving” — so loving, in fact, that while a man of Hitchen’s calibre is stricken with cancer aged just sixty-two, 2012 will see Pope Ratzinger entering his 84th year as fit as ever.

The many religious who Christopher upset (don’t ever call him Chris), over the years, took umbrage with him not so much for his uncanny ability to make the truth about pedophile enablers in the Vatican, thieving liars like Mother Teresa, and the anti-semite Billy Graham sound almost amusing, but with that humour also came a sheer brilliance for finding the exact turn of phrase needed, to succinctly explain the real dangers of believing in things which aren’t true.

There’s a tendency among we atheist types, to think of Hitchens as “one of us” and, in so much as he furnished us with a new-found courage to confront the liars for Jesus in our midst, that much is true. But he also reminded us of the great responsibility which comes with it. It’s all very well to point and laugh at the low hanging fruit; the opportunists who use religion to grease the wheels of their political ambitions. But Hitchens also reminded us how lucky some of us are to live in countries where saying as much out loud doesn’t get you into anywhere near as much hot water as it does in Iran — or, indeed, those States of the American union with ambitions to model their legal and educational systems on similar such theocracies.

Previous to Hitchens, works of religious polemic were dusty great tomes of academic in-speak, wrapped in theology and philosophy for the learned; books within books, for people with the time and money to study its history. Those who took the view that religion alongside politics is a topic best avoided in polite conversation, for fear of causing offence, after Hitchens, suddenly had a voice; a new vocabulary with which to raise objection, whenever “that guy” said something demonstrably false, in the belief that religious faith is a virtue best served with a side order of received opinion.

Now, he is gone. And we are left with a body of work which will, rather ironically, live forever.

I can’t claim to have read every single one of these, no doubt, fine works. But if the ones I have yet to read are anything like the ones I have read already, I can thoroughly recommend the following:

1984 Cyprus. Quartet. Revised editions as Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, 1989 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and 1997 (Verso).
1987 Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles. Chatto and Windus (UK)/Hill and Wang (US, 1988) / 1997 UK Verso edition as The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (with essays by Robert Browning and Graham Binns). Reissued and updated 2008 as The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification, Verso.
1988 Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports. Hill and Wang (US)/Chatto and Windus (UK).
1990 The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish. Chatto & Windus, 1990.
1990 Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Reissued 2004, with a new introduction, as Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-592-7)
1993 For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports. Verso, ISBN 0-86-091435-6
1995 The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Verso.
1999 No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. Verso. Reissued as No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family in 2000.
2000 Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere. Verso
2001 The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Verso.
2001 Letters to a Young Contrarian. Basic Books.
2002 Why Orwell Matters, Basic Books (US)/UK edition as Orwell’s Victory, Allen Lane/The Penguin Press.
2003 A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq. Plume Books. Originally released as Regime Change (Penguin).
2004 Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays. Thunder’s Mouth, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-580-3
2005 Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. Eminent Lives/Atlas Books/HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 0-06-059896-4
2006 Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography. Books That Shook the World/Atlantic Books, ISBN 1-84354-513-6
2007 God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books, ISBN 0446579807 / Published in the UK as God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion. Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-1-84354-586-6
2010 Hitch-22 Some Confessions and Contradictions: A Memoir . Hachette Book Group. ISBN 9780446540339 (published by Allen and Unwin in Australia in May 2010 with the shorter title: Hitch-22. A Memoir.) ISBN 978-1-74175-962-4
2011 Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens. Twelve. UK edition as Arguably: Selected Prose. Atlantic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens_bibliography

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