Education/Knowledge
“Our name is Knowledge Liberation Front, and we’re your crisis!”
USB dead drop
Online file sharing too dangerous? Dead Drops is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. Anyone can access a Dead Drop and everyone may install a Dead Drop in their neighborhood/city. A Dead Drop must be public accessible. Read more or check the dead drop database
Classical music goes public domain
Science 3.0 meta-blog
Science 3.0 is a meta-blog that combines the hypothesis based inquiry of laboratory science with the methods of social science research to understand and improve the use of new human networks made possible by today’s digital connectivity. This website is a community where those interested in the advancement of research can share ideas, tools and build connections. With Science 3.0 it is easier to find net pearls like Maitri Erwin’s always entertaining ‘A Pirate Scientist’s Life For Me’ focusing on public access to science education and open publishing.
OpenOffice goes LibreOffice – not only free but independend from Oracle
The Document Foundation released the beta of LibreOffice, to speed up the rate of changes to the notoriously slow OpenOffice office suite software project under the lead of the software corporation Oracle. This suggestion received support from all the major open-source and Linux powers: Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu. Even Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced that they’d place LibreOffice in next spring’s update of Ubuntu. Only Oracle does not like the fork and insists of keeping the name OpenOffice for its own free office suit. Read more
Who gets on top of Google search results?
Czech Republic: Law against commons
A leaked draft of the new Czech Copyright Act was obtained by Pirate News at the beginning of August 2010, after the Ministry of Culture has initially declined the request of Czech Pirate Party to have access to the document three days after the draft was sent out for feedback to organizations affected by the proposal. The draft presents a storm of “improvements” which grant millions of euro from public sector budgets to collecting societies. Read more
Wikipedia Watch
The people behind google-critical Google search front end “Scroogle Scraper” also run Wikipedia-Watch. Stressing their weird humor they point out weaknesses and lapses of the wikipedia principle – and thereby maybe of the more general principle of commons based peer produktion.
Consequences of commodification
The Times newspaper’s website has lost two‑thirds of its audience following the implementation of a paywall, according to data published yesterday – a dramatic decline, but not as steep as many had forecast. Read more: Techdirt and Guardian
Untitled-en
Who owns Google’s revenues?
AdSense, the advertisement company behind Google, is comprised of several products. The most popular are AdSense for content, which allows publishers to generate revenue from ads placed alongside web content, and AdSense for search, which allows publishers to place a custom Google search engine on their site and generate revenue from ads shown next to search results. Since AdSense for content and AdSense for search offer publishers different services, the revenue shared with publishers differs for each of these products. Read more
Open Cola and Cube Cola
The principle of Open Source now set Cola free from monopolist capital. It was reconstructed via reverse ingeneering, published as Open Cola under the GPL and since then optimized by global community under the conditions of free cooperation. One of the approaches is Cube Cola: Besides working on the recipe a group of artists from the “Cube” in Bristol produces “information material” like a poster and a tea towel with the recipe, as well as a hand book and a set of tools necessary for the production of free cola. Finally it is distributed besides other goods via Feral Trade Courier. That is a live shipping database for a freight network running outside commercial systems. The database offers dedicated tracking of feral trade products in circulation, archives every shipment and generates freight documents on the fly.
Prokla available online
Prokla (Probleme des Klassenkampfes/problems of class struggle), one of the leading and long standing unorthodox Marxist journals in Germany, is now available from the internet. The older issues from 1971 to 2006 are even freely accessible. Of course Prokla as all left journals is dependent on subscriptions. Check out www.prokla.de
German Federal Archives donate 100.000 image files to Wikimedia Commons
Starting on Thursday Dec 4, 2008, Wikimedia Commons witnessed a massive upload of new images. It received nearly 100,000 files from a donation from the German Federal Archives. These images are mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archives. Read more