The release of this text should not give the illusion of transparency by hiding the fact that the whole negotiation process was carried on out of public scrutiny. Moreover, ACTA could profoundly alter the Internet ecosystem by turning technical intermediaries into a copyright police of the Net.

Do you consider yourself to be fairly familiar with the Debian Linux distribution? I thought I was familiar with it enough to know its origin and history. There's one significant piece of the Debian puzzle that I didn't know about: Its Constitution.

Smári McCarthy is a thoughtful anarchist and practical chaos technician - with a deep interest in Free Software and democracy. Currently serving as project manager for the Icelandic Innovation Center, Smári works on digital fabrication and peer-to-peer education, while spending his spare time breaking the fundamental assumptions of how we organise society. I sat down for an interesting interview with Smári, in which he explained his projects and how they can contribute towards a more sustainable world.

"The Minister of Science and Technology proposes to include a set of Regulations in the Publicly Financed Research and Development Act, section 17, that will result in dire consequences for the research sector in South Africa in particular and all South Africans in general, by stifling local innovation and access to knowledge. These Regulations must be stopped!

"...Nearly 300 delegates, coming from 18 countries on 4 continents, shared on the place that sciences and technologies have on the “march of the world”, on their evolutions and on the necessity of the emergence, on an international scale, of a network-space, which could put in prospects the working of the scientific insti

The question of software patents without democracy and the FFII response

The signatories of this petition, representing a Community for Freedom of Choice and Market in the European Union, draw the attention of the Members of the European Parliament to the current situation where the institution’s ICT systems are locked into the products of one vendor, warns about the implications of this for participative democracy and for fair competition, and calls for action to promote Open Standards and Interoperability.