A Wakup-Up Call - tune in to freenode radio monday

[minddog]

Tune in to www.wopn.org Freenode Radio Station on monday for the official on 
air reading of Isky's Speech.  A big discussion with the oggjays of Freenode 
too!  Good music, some laughs, and some Free Software yackin ;)

Heres the speech in a rough form:
and a clip of the recording: 
http://www.cuadan.net/~jorwn/pag/pag-freenode-clip1.ogg

< quote from http://www.cuadan.net/~jorwyn/pag/freenode-transcript.txt >
First, I'd like to say a huge thank you to freenode, and open source
software, for making this broadcast possible. I'd also like to say thanks to
everyone I know who is listening, and a very special thanks to all of you I
don't know for tuning in today. 

I'm sure we are all at least somewhat familiar with the topic today, which
is Palladium and the TCPA. For those of you who don't know the specifics,
here is a brief run-down: 
TCPA stands for 'Trusted Computing Platform Alliance.' They see a problem, 
and Palladium is their solution. Palladium is a system that combines hardware 
and software to control computers and media platers to make them more secure. 
They hope to prevent virii and worms, reduce spam, and eliminate piracy of 
software and other media. 

These are admirable goals, ones we as a society should work for. But
many of us believe that their approach to a solution is wrong. Permit me to 
throw out an analogy here. 
As adults, we know that kitchen knives can be very dangerous when used
improperly. Do we hide all knives from our children for their entire lives?
No. We teach them to use knives safely. The same can be applied to computers
and the internet. With and honest effort at education, I truly believe we
can reduce insecurity without having to "v-chip" our computers, cameras, car
stereos, and televisions. Technology is meant to help, not to hinder. 

If the TCPA and the government have their way, they will violate the very
principles our country is founded upon:
Freedom of speech, freedom of choice, even our personal privacy. 
To compound this, the company the government is  asking us to trust to make 
decisions for us is one they have even sued for antitrust issues. The
company who makes the most softwre with vulnerabilities, Microsoft. 

This is not some Orwellian nightmare. This is reality, here and now, and
happening to us. If we do not stand up and stop it, we will be giving away
some very precious rights, because we either believed that it would not
affect us, or that we could do nothing ... until it was too late. 

Palladium will allow someone else to decide what we may or may not do on our
own computers. It does this by watching everything we do, but sitting in
our computers, some bizarre cross between a spy and an overly strict nanny. 
What's next, thought police?
The novel '1984' was not meant to be a model to be followed, but a warning
to the world. 

And for those of you still thinking, "This isn't about me." remember, you
are trusting a private company, backed by the government, to control what
you can and cannot do. 
And just one last note, just a "small" thing to consider...
What if there's a bug? How are you going to patch it when it can decide
whether you can or not?

(What if it breaks, and you need to put something in to fix it? How can you
do that when it can decide whether you can put something in or not?)

-- 
--minddog( Adam Ballai )

"I try to take it one day at a time, but several of them attack me at once."
-mistyflip