It’s about time to wrap up the week’s news regarding WikiLeaks and prepare for the next one, which will certainly also see a lot of action and further developments in all related areas. I can only hope that the developments will be positive, which is to say that I hope support for WikiLeaks and, more importantly, the concepts it stands for will grow significantly both on-line and off-line, but also that the movement will become more organized and focused, because our opponents certainly are and we won’t be able to properly fight against them if we pull in all directions at once.
I’m saying that because, despite some pretty good new strategy ideas, there is simply no focus anymore and trying to organize these efforts seems to become quite similar to trying to herd cats. And that’s a huge problem, because without focus and discipline their skills and enthusiasm are being completely wasted, no matter how useful they’d otherwise be. Not that anyone thought it’d be easy to organize such a group, if it can even be called a group, but good leaders know how to make the best use of the people they have available. We sure need a few of those to step up if we are to have a good chance at winning this…
Yet, even though the Avaaz petition, despite the very good start, is now gathering signatures far slower than expected and is certain to fail reaching the goal of one million by the end of the week by a large margin, we do have good news as well. What’s more, said good news are about off-line efforts, which are certainly much needed in our repertoire. There are plans for protests in several countries around the world and those that took place in Spain and, most notably, Australia already managed to gather a significant number of participants. This is very important not only for the issue at hand but also as a way to show the powers that be that we can still see what’s going on in the world at large, think with our own heads and fight for important causes no matter how much they try to beat us into submission with the economic crisis and scare us into inaction with the threat of terrorism.
It’s very important to start piling up the pressure at street level as well, so this will become a battle that the society at large is interested and involved in and not just an “infowar”. Not that the on-line component is any less important, far from it, but those in charge often react faster to one thousand people marching in the streets than to one million signing a petition, plus that many other people are more likely to notice such a protest than an on-line campaign, which means they could also decide to join. Or they could decide to fight for the other side, of course, but that’s always a risk you have to take.
If each such protest could manage to gather at least one thousand people, it would already be a victory, though of course even much smaller numbers can make a difference as well. If something like this would take place in all the countries where officials have expressed views against WikiLeaks and similar projects, as well as in front of as many embassies of such countries as possible everywhere else in the world, it would send an extremely powerful message. The United States, United Kingdom and Australia are of course of particular importance, but the pressure must be maintained at high levels everywhere. No matter where you are, follow what your elected representatives have to say about the issue, ask them if they don’t volunteer their opinion, and react accordingly.
What worries me is that I’m yet to see anything about protests actually taking place in the United States. I see that they’re planned, but I can’t readily find information about any that already took place. Does anyone know of any? How many people showed up? How did they behave? How did the authorities react? I don’t think I need to point out how important it is to send a particularly strong message there…
In other good news, some companies do have some backbone and choose to support WikiLeaks despite the pressure. And that list sould also include EasyDNS, which was at first wrongly accused of dropping WikiLeaks even though they never had anything to do with the site in the first place and then ended up actually providing services for them.
While certain authority figures keep stressing the dangers, this situation also outlines the benefits of helping WikiLeaks, as the people who approve of WikiLeaks will, as shown in the EasyDNS statement, fully appreciate this course of action and possibly show that appreciation by choosing that company’s services over those of its competitors. So if you know of any other companies that should be listed here alongside DataCell, EasyDNS, Flattr, OVH, XIPWIRE and, at least for the time being, possibly also Facebook and Twitter, show your support and at least promote them. Such gestures serve to simply make it good business to support such controversial projects despite the pressure coming from the authorities, and that can really go a long way.
Finally, it seems that some former members of the WikiLeaks team will launch a competing project called OpenLeaks. Normally I’d say that any such projects, like the new Balkan Leaks and perhaps also the older Cryptome, can only be a good thing, because they promote transparency and freedom of speech and information, fighting against those who want to control everything themselves. However, the fact that OpenLeaks will obviously refuse to take responsibility for their actions, instead choosing to hide behind the other companies or organizations chosen to publish the information they’ll receive, makes the concept questionable at best, and most likely detrimental.
While I’m at it, I need to mention that Cryptome seems to have recently turned itself into a conduit for opinions and information shining a bad light on WikiLeaks. As long as it’s accurate information, it should obviously be revealed, but the opinions are the part I have a problem with when it comes to such a service. Still, it certainly could be true and Assange and WikiLeaks may have some dirt to hide as well, but it wouldn’t make any difference. As I keep saying, this war is about way more than WikiLeaks and pretty much not at all about Assange himself, as you may have noticed that I didn’t even mention his name in this post until now. That means that we need to stop bickering and fight together for the common cause. If some bad apples need to be thrown out of the basket, they will be, no matter who they are, but that must never be allowed to jeopardize our real quest.
As expected, the war has started and it won’t end anytime soon, especially since protests are not just on-line anymore. Or it won’t end unless, of course, the other side will surrender, allowing WikiLeaks to continue as planned, including once again allowing donations through PayPal, MasterCard and Visa, and also, even more importantly, truly strive for a far more open society, where information will no longer be controlled by a few, but freely available to all. Which we all know they’ll never do unless forced, and perhaps not even then. So we get mad, put whatever skills we have to use, fight to the best of our abilities, and force them!
But let’s take a step back for a moment and see what happened in the first part of this war, which started with the attacks against www.wikileaks.org. Then Amazon ended its partnership with WikiLeaks and EveryDNS removed www.wikileaks.org, citing the attacks aimed against the site that were affecting its entire infrastructure. WikiLeaks reacted by telling people to go directly to the site’s IP address and then, helped by Pirate Parties everywhere, started a massive campaign meant to create a large number of site mirrors, so the site will never be taken off-line again. Currently, there are 1368 mirrors listed, even though the site itself is now nearly impossible to take down.
Next came the financial front. PayPal and PostFinance blocked their accounts and then MasterCard and Visa refused to accept payments made to WikiLeaks anymore. In response, DataCell, who is the WikiLeaks payment processor, announced that they will sue MasterCard and Visa, while donations for WikiLeaks are now accepted by another firm, namely Flattr. Recently, PayPal has announced that they will release the remaining funds in the WikiLeaks account, though they will not accept any other donations made for the site.
Otherwise, Julian Assange has been arrested on rape charges, after turning himself in as soon as the proper warrant arrived from the Swedish authorities and being denied bail. The charges are obviously quite weak, in fact only being possible thanks to the very drastic Swedish sex laws, and they were originally dismissed by the Swedish courts some months ago, so the fact that they have been brought back into focus just as this scandal started is extremely dubious to say the least. But, once again, Julian Assange may be the founder and leader of WikiLeaks, but he is not WikiLeaks and this is not about him. He certainly needs to be defended from those who wish him harm because of WikiLeaks and look for other topics to bring up because they have nothing to charge him with, but “the show must go on” even while he’s in jail or, if it comes to that, even if he’ll be assassinated. But I doubt they’d go that far, because that’d turn him into a martyr and make even more people rise up against them.
As for the attacks against the sites of the companies that acted against WikiLeaks, they seem to be winding down, those who organize them saying that they are switching focus to what can they do to actually support WikiLeaks. At the same time, Avaaz has finally acted and started a petition in support of WikiLeaks, which they hope will gather at least one million signatures by the end of the week, which doesn’t seem hard at all when you consider that WikiLeaks’ Facebook page has over one million fans already.
In some other news, I’ll start with the good and say that Bradley Manning, who is currently accused of leaking the data released by WikiLeaks, may be declared a hero. At the same time, Amazon tries to make money off WikiLeaks, despite, as I said before, ending their partnership with them as soon as this scandal started. As for this paragraph’s bad news, those come from Pakistan, where the media has taken advantage of the WikiLeaks scandal to publish fake cables that support the nationalist agenda. Then again, as we all know, “the first casualty of war is always the truth”.
This is only the beginning, but it is where we are today. What next? Well, it partly depends on what “they” do next, because we will need to react in time and in force to any new developments. But we also need to be active by ourselves, not just when we have something to react to, and this movement has certainly gathered enough supporters and gained enough momentum to achieve amazing results. We do not lack ideas, but they must be selected carefully, though also swiftly. We cannot waste all of this potential, which means that we can’t wait, but we also can’t act rashly and make mistakes that will come back to haunt us, forcing us to spend precious time and resources to fix the damage caused.
This is a big fight, an important fight. It is a battle for freedom of speech. It is a battle for freedom of information. It is a battle for the right to know what our elected officials are really using their powers for and to make our opinion heard. It is, as I said before, ultimately a battle for control, because “he who controls information controls the world”. It is a dangerous war to fight and will certainly become even more so. It will also very likely be a long war, with many difficult battles. But we cannot back down, no matter what. The outcome of this war will have extremely important consequences, likely deciding the direction of the world, at least from certain points of view, at least for the next few years. We must make sure that we will emerge as victors!
All I can say in the end is this: Stick to what you know you can do, but make full use of whatever skills and resources you have and do your part! Do not expect to win every battle, because we certainly will not, but fight every step of the way, never giving in and never giving up! If we all work together and refuse to be frightened into inaction, we will prevail!
John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, posted this call to arms on his Twitter page: “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.” And indeed we are. Or at least we should be, because the fight is not specifically over WikiLeaks, but over who controls information, who controls what we know and, ultimately, who controls our lives. As such, the outcome of this war will affect all of us, whether we realize it now or not.
You might have noticed that I used an IP address to link to WikiLeaks, as suggested in one of their Twitter posts, since the domain names can, have been and will be blocked as this continues. Interestingly, going to that “official” IP address currently redirects you to another, which may or may not be their way of saying that not even blocking their IP will stop them. Either way, a list of mirrors is also available, though there are terribly few real ones on it.
Yet, as I said, WikiLeaks is just the battlefield and the scandal just the catalyst. It doesn’t even matter what was in those leaked documents. What matters is that those who wish to know everything about us hide all they can about themselves. And that is wrong. The only things that should be kept secret by authorities are the details of attack and defense plans when they are directly and openly involved in a war and those of plans to stop real and immediate threats to the citizens they are supposed to protect. Everything else should be done openly, so this is something that had to happen sooner or later, and indeed it happened way too late for far too many, but at least it finally did happen and we can finally see the reaction of the powers that be to having some of their dirt pulled out from under the rug, which serves as one more, albeit unnecessary, reminder of what they’re made of. So all that remains is to see what our reaction to their reaction will be. All that remains is to see what we are made of.
Let me also quickly go over the topic of Julian Assange himself and say that my opinion of him as a person, if I have one at all, is quite neutral. In fact, even without the rape charges, which under the circumstances seem highly unlikely to be founded in any way, I may say that there is something that bothers me about him, though I can’t quite put my finger on it, especially since I never cared to find out much of anything about him in the first place. But, despite many currently hailing him as a hero, all of that is irrelevant because this fight is neither for him nor about him.
This fight is for and about freedom. This fight is for and about the world, because “he who controls information controls the world“. Ultimately, this fight is for and about every single one of us. They can’t win a war against all of us, but we will obviously lose it if we refuse to fight. So will we give it our best and fight to gain control of our lives and of our world or will we bury our heads in the sand and get exactly what we deserve for such a course of action? Will we learn from the world’s failure to make any use of the chance offered by Georgia, which may well result in a new Cold War, or will we repeat the mistakes of just these leaders we should now be fighting?
In the end, I’ll leave you with some quotes from the outstanding Babylon 5:
“Nobody takes power. They’re given power by the rest of us, because we are stupid or afraid or both.”
“How many people actually belong to the Nazi Party, the Communist Party, the Jihad Party? A very small number, but there are always plenty of other people who are happy to do the work for them and others afraid enough to let it happen.”
“Governments deal in matters of convenience, not conscience. If they fall behind, it is up to the rest of us to make up the difference. If we don’t, who will?”
“When you stumble a lot, you… You start looking at your feet. We have to make people lift their eyes back to the horizon and see the line of ancestors behind us saying ‘Make my life have meaning.’ And to our inheritors before us saying ‘Create the world we will live in.’ I mean, we’re not just holding jobs and having dinner. We are in the process of building the future.”
“I’d rather do something and make a mistake than be frightened into doing nothing. That’s the problem back home. Folks have been conned into thinking they can’t change the world, have to accept what is. I’ll tell you something my friends: The world is changing every day, the only question is who’s doing it.”
“You can refuse to surrender; you can refuse to be broken. You just have to say ‘no I won’t’ one more time than they can say ‘yes you will’.”
And, of course, this.
We do not answer to kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers, governments, parliaments or any other political, military or religious leaders. We answer to our own consciences. Let us act, so we will not live to regret not doing so. We answer to our loved ones. Let us act, so they will not suffer as a result of our failure to do so. We answer to those who will come after us. Let us act, so they will not blame us for the world they’ll live in.
We are many. We are skilled, albeit in different ways. We are smart, albeit in different ways. We are strong, albeit in different ways. And, make no mistake, as long as we’ll fight, as long as we won’t let them frighten us into inaction, we will win!
Yesterday I grinned like an idiot for a little while after somehow managing to write the first piece of code that actually acted as a Windows program. It used message boxes instead of proper windows to display the text, but at least it no longer did it in a simple Command Prompt window. It was still in D, as I got back to fooling around with that a little a few days ago.
But that didn’t last long, as I then tried to glance at the MSDN Windows programming tutorials and went straight from grinning like an idiot to feeling like one. I couldn’t understand the first thing about any of it, so gave up on all that right away. I thought that Windows programming was Windows programming, since you call on functions known by the operating system and not on those defined by the programming language you use, so if I could just find a proper reference to those functions I should be able to figure some things out, but the fact that pretty much any tutorial is written for C++ is far more of a problem than I thought it’d be. And D seems to have certain issues with Windows programming as well, the one I noticed right away being that it apparently doesn’t recognize the commands that require UTF-16, which are supposedly the proper ones to use ever since Windows 2000. If I look at the description of the issue on the official site, I can conclude that this is intentional, in an attempt to allow programmers to code applications that would work on older versions of Windows as well, but that makes an already awfully confusing thing even worse for me, since I don’t really know what all of that means.
But enough about that… Right now this is quite difficult to write anyway because I seem to be experiencing the exact same thing I have experienced all too many times back when I was little. I feel as if my heart will stop beating if I stand still. Or I felt like that, at least, since I seem to have managed to solve the immediate problem for the moment, after struggling with it for at least some 30 minutes. I’m not fully over it at the moment, I’m still very edgy and my arms and legs are frozen, but the need to get up and move around is under control and I no longer feel that something very bad is imminent, though something still feels out of place in my chest.
I just remembered that all that was required in order to snap me out of this when I was little was for someone to succeed in calming me down, to convince me that my heart is actually quite fine. At the time, that required dad taking me to a doctor, who’d listen to my heart, say that it is indeed obvious that I’m very frightened, but that otherwise it sounds as well as the heart of any person who’s in such a state can sound, then give me a mild over-the-counter sedative and sit and talk to me for some 30 minutes. This happened about once every two weeks or so, and sometimes I’d be pacing around the house for several hours without stopping before dad would come home and take me to a doctor.
Now, of course, I knew I had to sort it out myself, so started working on it as soon as I pushed the initial panic aside. (Interestingly, the first thing I thought of was “I’m going to die and I didn’t even post anything this week”.) I know that, likely due to living in constant fear for all those years when my parents still forced me to go to school, I have a certain arrhythmia for a very long time, which likely caused these issues back when I was a kid as well. Since it can sometimes even happen several times per day, I stopped having much of a reaction to feeling that something’s wrong for one moment a long time ago, though I will at least shift my position a little in response to the momentary adrenaline rush produced by my body in order to set things back in order. However, sometimes that moment can stretch on to several seconds, which makes for quite a major adrenaline rush and a good reason to be afraid.
I assumed that what happened was that one such moment caught me by surprise, just as I was starting to type this post, and that the adrenaline rush made me feel afraid, which in turn caused slight variations in my heart rate even after the initial issue was solved, which then caused even more adrenaline to be produced and so on. At first I tried to simply will myself to stand still and calm down, but that wouldn’t work for more than a few seconds, so I moved on to holding a hand on my chest to feel my heart beating and, while trying to think of other things or, failing that, to count slowly to 100, I made note of when my hand felt irregularities and compared that to when the rest of my body felt like my heart was going to stop, noticing that such moments rarely coincided. It still apparently took some time to actually convince myself of what I was noticing, but eventually in worked, so here I am now, sitting down and writing this for over 30 minutes.
Then again, I know the arrhythmia keeps getting worse, likely due to the mood I’m in ever since Andra left, so it may not just be something caused by irrational fears. But that’s not exactly what I should be thinking about right now, is it?
Back to the original topic of this post, I have to say that I’m starting to feel that D may not be the right programming language for what I have in mind. I mean, for example, if I see it said that the proper command for a message box is MessageBoxW, because a newer operating system will convert whatever it receives as MessageBoxA to UTF-16 anyway and therefore make the program run slower, but if I type that in D the compiler says the command is unrecognized and suggests only MessageBoxA, I can see a real problem when it comes to writing pretty much any Windows program at all. Sure, the older commands work as well, but why make your program run slower if you have no intention of making it compatible with old versions of Windows anyway?
But there are plenty of things I like about it as well, mainly the fact that it did take a fair number of things from scripting languages without being one itself. And I certainly have no intention of ever starting to learn C++, so that’s out of the question. But if anyone has any other suggestion of an active programming language that can be used to write proper Windows programs, go ahead and post a comment. Same if you can point me to a really good resource for learning proper Windows programming that could be used with D, without requiring or imparting any knowledge of C++.
Yesterday I finished reading The Shadows of God, and therefore also The Age of Unreason, and that made me wonder about a few things. One of them was obviously what would happen if someone would somehow actually change the pitch of the universe, or just that of Earth? It is, of course, pure fantasy to consider anything like this, but there are also some more practical questions hidden in there: What would need to change in order to save life on Earth, including our own, from us? What would need to change in order to make us incapable of wreaking the kind of destruction we currently are wreaking?
Just to be clear, for once I’m not talking about changing the nature of humans, but of changing natural laws, as presented in that series of books. A simple exercise of imagination: What would need to stop working, or at least require much more effort for much less gain? What would need to start working, or at least require far less effort for far more gain? What would need to work differently and how exactly would it need to work? Assuming humans would still exist and still have the same thoughts and desires they now do, what would need to happen to make us unable to act in ways that cause great harm to the life forms that exist on Earth, including ourselves?
Fossil fuels are the first thing to come to my mind… What if oil and the fuels based on it wouldn’t burn anymore, or at least release very little energy in the process? What if the same thing would happen to coal as well? It would obviously force us to find different ways to generate energy and get rid of a major source of pollution, but would the solutions we’d find be better or only different, but just as bad, if not worse? This scenario is different from an “end of oil” one because we can see that one coming and either way there are plenty of reserves to ensure the continued operation of certain services that are currently seen as requiring these fuels for at least a little while longer, but if oil, and possibly also coal, would simply stop being usable as fuels all of a sudden there would be no warning and any reserves would obviously be completely useless. What would happen then? What would we switch to? If you also consider that military vehicles and rockets require such fuels as well, how would this affect our long-term capacity to harm the world and ourselves?
Next comes plastic. What if it would decay quickly? What if it’d simply rot away like, for example, meat, making it unsuitable for pretty much any of the uses we currently put it to? If it’d decay in a reasonable amount of time, we’d get rid of one problem, but if it’d decay way too quickly we’d pretty much be forced to stop using it and switch to other materials. Would those materials be renewable, fully recyclable or both, or would they be even worse? Would we be able to obtain sufficient quantities of such materials without causing more destruction? Considering that the production of plastics is another important use of oil, how would this change the world and humanity’s ability and desire to destroy it?
And what about nuclear reactions? It would be a really good change if they would no longer cause the kind of damage they currently cause to living organisms, but since their functioning is based on decay I don’t see how could things be changed in such a way as to allow them to continue functioning but no longer cause such damage. So what if powerful nuclear reactions would somehow simply stop happening? All nuclear arsenals in the world would suddenly become harmless and useless, as would nuclear power stations and nuclear military vehicles, which seems like a really good thing in itself, but the real effects would depend on what we’d replace them with. If this change would extend beyond Earth, it would also mean the end of all RTG-powered space exploration, which is something else that needs to be considered. That this would severely diminish our capacity to harm the world and ourselves seems all too obvious, but what would the other long-term effects be?
All that was about what should stop working, but we’d also need certain things to start working, or at least work much better, and the first I can think of is cold fusion. This, of course, depends on how safe would it actually end up being if it’d become so efficient and end up being used pretty much everywhere. If it would really be safe and something’d change to make it relatively easy to achieve sufficient power from such reactions, a whole lot of problems would probably be solved, but wouldn’t others be created at the same time? Could it be safe if it’d generate such large amounts of energy or would it become all too similar to current nuclear power? What kind of destruction would it enable us to sow? Considering how most humans think, can any such source of power be a good thing in our hands or would it just change the rules a little, but not the game?
I could start asking the same questions about a number of other things, but I can all too easily see how we’d use any and all of them to cause even more harm. For example imagine affinities that would, under certain circumstances, draw different atoms to different places, easily separating compounds without the need for the current harmful and wasteful processes. Or perhaps energy no longer being so easily generated by heat, but somehow by the absence of heat. The first scenario has obvious benefits, the second perhaps less obvious ones, but they’re there even so. Yet the potential for harm and destruction, direct or indirect, is undeniable if either would end up in our hands, seeing as I said I’m not assuming any change in the thoughts and desires of humans. So is there anything that could start working, or at least work much better than it currently does, that would remain only a benefit even in our hands, without being turned into a weapon or an excuse for harm and destruction?
This is just an exercise of imagination, but what do you say? Do you think that any such change would save the world from us? Do you think that any such change would save us from ourselves? Is there anything harmful that, if lost, we certainly wouldn’t replace with something equally harmful, if not more so? Is there anything beneficial that we wouldn’t find a way to use to harm and destroy? Without actually changing humans in any way, and without destroying humanity, is there a way to fully prevent us from destroying life on Earth, including ourselves?
I can’t say that I can think of anything… But if you can, post a comment, no matter how crazy the idea is. After all, this is all just a little bit of fantasy. In reality, humans will, after all, be humans, and until that changes I don’t quite see how could any less advanced life form hope to survive us, or how could we hope to survive ourselves… Which only means that we need to change humans soon, by any means necessary. It is, after all, easier than changing the laws that govern the universe. Though sometimes it seems no less impossible…
