links

Someone accidentally posted this link in an IRC channel and since I was curious I checked it out. It's a pretty nice and functional map of freedom in the world, mapping countries in three categories: not free, partly free and free.

From a quick survey of the map it looks like the half of the world, and counting such highly populated places like China, even more than half live without essential freedoms, which is quite sad.

Yet, if we push the boundaries in terms of defining true freedom for an individual I think even more countries would be in the "partly free" category, but that's another discussion.

An excellent article about how digital technology allowed whole industries to evolve around providing their content and services for zero cost to the user. The sidebar features are also quite potentially useful.

I would also like to point out to a critique as well as an excellent comment to one of the posts the critique post linked which was aptly titled: "Incredible stupidity relating to online free".

I recommend reading all of the above. I am singling out that comment because it seems like an important distinction to make between free and no-cost. It quite reminds of the distinction we make between "free as in freedom" software and "zero cost" software.

I recommend viewing this talk (you can do it directly if you have flash, or install miro and add a TED channel to it which is a better option ). It talks about things like Prisoners Dilemma and how people are increasingly escaping it by cooperating, by turning distrust into assurance.

What impresses me the most, however, is the notion that we've just begun exploring cooperation and "technologies of cooperation". I like this notion because I occasionally feel like it's already done, blogs are everywhere, there is a saturation of forums, everyone can have a web site or a social network etc. - how can we do anything new here?

Bruce Schneier explains security and privacy are the same. Very insightful.

Bruce Schneier explains the economics of lock-in.