log

Robert Gibbs, US Pres­i­den­tial Press Secretary:

We should nev­er be afraid of one guy who plopped down $35 and bought a web address. … Let’s not be scared of one guy with a laptop. 

Julian Assange, in the Guardian Q&A:

The Cable Gate archive has been spread, along with sig­nif­i­cant mate­r­i­al from the US and oth­er coun­tries to over 100,000 peo­ple in encrypt­ed form. If some­thing hap­pens to us, the key parts will be released auto­mat­i­cal­ly. Fur­ther, the Cable Gate archives is in the hands of mul­ti­ple news organisations. […] 

The basic prob­lem with Gib­b’s assess­ment, along with Lieber­man’s, is that they don’t under­stand the tech­nol­o­gy or the infra­struc­ture involved in the Wik­ileaks effort. These are not dumb peo­ple eas­i­ly swat­ted with a sin­gle favour from a US host­ing ser­vice or polit­i­cal con­nec­tion at ICANN. Any gov­ern­ment brava­do in this sit­u­a­tion is at best pre­tence. And as for under­ly­ing mes­sage in Gib­b’s state­ment — that we have noth­ing to fear — who said we do in the first place?

Today I received an invite to join Domi­no’s new media ven­ture, the Ideas Lab, a place where you can sell your poten­tial­ly lucra­tive ideas for noth­ing but exten­sive media exploita­tion by a multi­na­tion­al piz­za brand for infin­i­ty time + 1. From their scary Terms and Conditions:

Except as express­ly pro­vid­ed oth­er­wise in the Pri­va­cy Pol­i­cy, you agree that by post­ing mes­sages, upload­ing files, inputting data, or engag­ing in any oth­er form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with or through the Web­site, you grant us a roy­al­ty-free, per­pet­u­al, non-exclu­sive, unre­strict­ed, world­wide license […] 

Whoa!

[…] to use, repro­duce, mod­i­fy, adapt, trans­late, enhance, trans­mit, dis­trib­ute, pub­licly per­form, dis­play, or sub­li­cense any such com­mu­ni­ca­tion (includ­ing your iden­ti­ty and infor­ma­tion about you) […] 

Whoa!

[…] in any medi­um (now in exis­tence or here­inafter devel­oped) and for any pur­pose, includ­ing com­mer­cial pur­pos­es, and to autho­rize oth­ers to do so.

Holy shit! All this so I can give free ideas to a multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tion and (pos­si­bly) win a $100 gift vouch­er! Count me in, guys!

(Yo, seri­ous­ly, don’t sign up for stuff like this.)