I'm a Decepticon!

Look! I have a Decepticon named after me!… really! Believe!

You want bandwidth? A call to arms against the Telecos.

The Baby Bells have been making promises to get all of the US on higher bandwidth connections. They made these promises to the FCC. FCC said great, raise your prices for basic services so that you can build these new fiber networks and put a T3 in every house. So prices raised, telecos earn $48 Billion, with $8 Billion more coming in every year, customers get nothing. Something wrong with this picture? Read all about what I know so far in “How The Bells Stole America’s Digital Future”. Still trying to figure out the best way to fight this problem. One thing is to get the word out. Fan the flames of outrage. We need this to get to the level of making congress people afraid to ignore the issue. I know enought to see that it is a long trip between here and there, but I’m encouraged to see what happend in S. Korea and Kenya. Several big name blogs like BoingBoing have covered this already. It registered a little on DayPop, but not much. I don’t really understand why, seems like a great call to arms for bloggers. Big companies stealing our most precious, bandwidth (one SONET ring to rule them all?). And what we do? So far not much. This story is old by internet standards. The html page is dated Wed, 14 Mar 2001 23:35:35 GMT. The guy behind this as been calling attention to this for quite a while (5 years or more, here’s a post about that papers author from back in 1998 ), but I think it’s time for a new round of intrests. So what can this lone blogger do to get you the outside world to care? I’m going to attempt to research who this guy, Bruce Kushnick and the content matter of this paper and post it back here. The idea being news generates more intrest, more intrest generates more news. Other thoughts:

• Write a story for one of the two alternative papers here in Charlottesville (The Hook or C’ville). Tie in my tail of woe getting DSL.
• Is it bad to email people who have big name blogs who I think would be / should be intrested in the story? Maybe better to just make noise and try and get them to come over.

Where I Work

Someone on IRC was asking about where I work. I realized we have a perfectly good website that does a good job of explaining who or what we are. Shellbook Publishing Systems

Shellbook Publishing Systems’ core business purpose is the dissemination of life-crucial information to the indigenous people of the world, readable by those people in terms of their own language and culture.

The reason you may want to look at the site is that I’m close to getting them to making a CreativeCommons wizard in the program to allow the content developers pick a CC license to put stuff under. A lot of what we are dealing with is permission to make derivative works, and publishing permissions.

Corporate Skulls Are Very Thick

The RIAA finally says Illegal music sites ‘here to stay’. Wonder what this means for their stream of lawsuits? Also they’ve been effective at shutting down a lot of college students from using P2P apps, but the worrysome thing for me, a p2p developer, is they might go after us. Or rather individuals like myself.

Laura says

Laura didn’t know the URL to this site. She says, “I see you every day. Why would I want to read about you?” Is that abuse?