'Toward a Future We Want to Live In' - EFF Celebrates 32nd Birthday (eff.org) 25
"Today at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we're celebrating 32 years of fighting for technology users around the world," reads a new announcement posted at EFF.org:
If you were online back in the 90s, you might remember that it was pretty wild. We had bulletin boards, FTP, Gopher, and, a few years later, homespun websites. You could glimpse a future where anyone, anywhere in the world could access information, float new ideas, and reach each other across vast distances. It was exciting and the possibilities seemed endless.
But the founders of EFF also knew that a better future wasn't automatic. You don't organize a team of lawyers, technologists, and activists because you think technology will magically fix everything — you do it because you expect a fight.
Three decades later, thanks to those battles, the internet does much of what it promised: it connects and lifts up major grassroots movements for equity, civil liberties, and human rights and allows people to connect and organize to counteract the ugliness of the world.
But we haven't yet won that future we envisioned. Just as the web connects us, it also serves as a hunting ground for those who want to surveil and control our actions, those who wish to harass and spread hate, as well as others who seek to monetize our every move and thought. Information collected for one purpose is freely repurposed in ways that oppress us, rather than lift us up. The truth is that digital tools allow those with horrible ideas to connect with each other just as it does those with beautiful, healing ones.
EFF has always seen both the beauty and destructive potential of the internet, and we've always put our marker down on the side of justice, freedom, and innovation.
We work every day toward a future we want to live in, and we don't do it alone. Support from the public makes every one of EFF's activism campaigns, software projects, and court filings possible. Together, we anchor the movement for a better digital world, and ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.
In fact, I invite every digital freedom supporter to join EFF during our summer membership drive. Right now, you can be a member for as little as $20, get some special new gear, and ensure that tech users always have a formidable defender in EFF.
So how does the EFF team celebrate this auspicious anniversary? EFF does what it does best: stand up for users and innovators in the courts, in the halls of power, in the public conversation. We build privacy-protecting tools, teach skills to community members, share knowledge with allies, and preserve the best aspects of the wild web.
In other words, we use every tool in our deep arsenal to fight for a better and brighter digital future for all. Thank you for standing with EFF when it counts.
But the founders of EFF also knew that a better future wasn't automatic. You don't organize a team of lawyers, technologists, and activists because you think technology will magically fix everything — you do it because you expect a fight.
Three decades later, thanks to those battles, the internet does much of what it promised: it connects and lifts up major grassroots movements for equity, civil liberties, and human rights and allows people to connect and organize to counteract the ugliness of the world.
But we haven't yet won that future we envisioned. Just as the web connects us, it also serves as a hunting ground for those who want to surveil and control our actions, those who wish to harass and spread hate, as well as others who seek to monetize our every move and thought. Information collected for one purpose is freely repurposed in ways that oppress us, rather than lift us up. The truth is that digital tools allow those with horrible ideas to connect with each other just as it does those with beautiful, healing ones.
EFF has always seen both the beauty and destructive potential of the internet, and we've always put our marker down on the side of justice, freedom, and innovation.
We work every day toward a future we want to live in, and we don't do it alone. Support from the public makes every one of EFF's activism campaigns, software projects, and court filings possible. Together, we anchor the movement for a better digital world, and ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.
In fact, I invite every digital freedom supporter to join EFF during our summer membership drive. Right now, you can be a member for as little as $20, get some special new gear, and ensure that tech users always have a formidable defender in EFF.
So how does the EFF team celebrate this auspicious anniversary? EFF does what it does best: stand up for users and innovators in the courts, in the halls of power, in the public conversation. We build privacy-protecting tools, teach skills to community members, share knowledge with allies, and preserve the best aspects of the wild web.
In other words, we use every tool in our deep arsenal to fight for a better and brighter digital future for all. Thank you for standing with EFF when it counts.
EFF'ing great! (Score:3, Insightful)
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Three cheers for the EEF.
In the past I supported the EFF via Humble bundles until the EFF felt the need to join the bash Richard Stallman bandwagon. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/statement-re-election-richard-stallman-fsf-board [eff.org]
You might think an organization with a lot of lawyers would appreciate the belief that one is innocent until proven guilty, IE, convicted of a crime. My Humble charitable donations will go to the Free Software Foundation until they apologize.
hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Three decades later, thanks to those battles, the internet does much of what it promised: it connects and lifts up major grassroots movements for equity, civil liberties, and human rights and allows people to connect and organize to counteract the ugliness of the world.
How does it do "much of what it promised?" I mean, the internet did become a super-massive surveillance device that we are all happily feeding with every instant and detail of our lives, ready for the dictatorships-to-come to harvest, didn't it?
Re:hmm [It's the EFF's fault!] (Score:3)
Interesting comment, would have been a good FP, but I gotta complain about the vacuous Subject.
Still, what happened to the EFF over the years isn't as bad as where the ACLU landed. Splat. Face plant.
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>Still, what happened to the EFF over the years isn't as bad as where the ACLU landed. Splat. Face plant.
For a long time the EFF and the FSF were the two major organizations that I felt actually were acting in my best interest to represent me, and so I've supported them both over the years.
However, the EFF recently has done some troubling things, such as throwing Stallman under the bus for unwarranted reasons, and last year they fired their own (co-)founder, John Gilmore. For the first time in over a dec
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Which reminds me of the ancient CSB idea where you could focus your donations specifically on projects that you think would solve (or at least help address) some specific problem...
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The fun thing about the frontier analogy is, except for no one having been there earlier, that the new territory of the web actually has been grabbed and is now owned by corporations which have made it the big pile of manure (J. Weizenbaum) that it is.
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Implicit in idea of the frontier is that of being the first somewhere, and being first, one does a land grab.
That has nothing to do with the word frontier. A frontier is a borderland. It has nothing to do with "being first" or a "land grab."
Besides bears and woolly mammothes, certain other people, once called Indians, were there first, but decided either to leave it alone or, at least, just use it as their occasional hunting, foraging or ceremonial grounds, not to establish fences and homesteads, protected by horses and hell fire (guns).
What? Indians had settled pretty much everywhere in the Americans before Columbus. Their settlements had risen and fallen in many areas due to climate change (west), over hunting and insufficient agricultural techology (probably Cahokia and others), massive warfare, etc. but there were people everywhere.
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>I'm sorry to be the wet blanket here. But the first thing the EFF needs to do to celebrate its anniversary is to change its name. Frontier is the quintessential American concept, the idea that one's in some sort of no-man's-land or Wild West. Implicit in idea of the frontier is that of being the first somewhere, and being first, one does a land grab.
That's not true. Frontier is determined by boundaries, specifically the edges of boundaries. Hence, we can talk about "The Frontier of Medicine" or the "Ele
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There's absolutely nothing problematic about the word frontier, and I find it annoying when people try to problemitize literally everything they can think of.
No problem here, except the word "wild" was used twice in the summary and the EFF'ing announcement as well. Wild as in "pretty wild" and "wild web". Now that's practically a reference to the Wild West, don'cha think? And by the way I was thinking of the woolly mammoths not the children.
Well (Score:2)
The academic world from which EFF sprang has become the chief opponent of what they stand for.
Freedom includes the freedom to say things that people don't like. And we can't have that anymore, can we?
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Twitter is bakery and conservatives are a gay wedding cake. The courts have ruled this is legal.
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Is this definition of hate speech OK? (Score:2)
To shortcut debate rooted in disagreement over a definition, let's get this out of the way first:
"Hate speech" in this case refers to publicly encouraging behavior biased against a marginalized group, particularly one defined by ethnicity, gender, or disability, correct?
Archie and Company (Score:4, Funny)
We had bulletin boards, FTP, Gopher
Also we had an Internet search engine called Archie, which was then upgraded with an improved version called Veronica. This was going to be replaced with an even more improved search system called Jughead - though why someone thought that "Jughead" was an improved "Veronica" is a mystery. Clearly the improved "Veronica" should have been called "Betty". To those who think Veronica is superior to Betty it should be pointed out that the two characters were actually drawn identically except for clothing and hair style, something that legions of comic readers never caught on to.
But then the web and AltaVista came in and made it all obsolete.
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Also we had an Internet search engine called Archie, which was then upgraded with an improved version called Veronica.
Veronica was trans? Wow, I never picked up on that at all! But, admittedly I was a rather naive teenager...
(In any case I always preferred Betty over Veronica. And I really didn't grok why either of them went for Archie in the first place)
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One thing you may not know is the the Archie comic family were the very last books to be published under the Comics Code Authority (CCA) was formed in 1954.
Then in Veronica #202, published in September 2010, the gay character Kevin Keller was introduced, which was forbidden by the CCA and Archie stopped using its "services", causing the CCA to disband, Keller quickly became one of the most popular characters in the lineup.
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Or perhaps I should have said "openly gay".
You can have your own suspicions about the other regulars,
We have to dare to reach the best future... (Score:3)
"Toward a Future We Want to Live In"
https://eosprojects.com/fairne... [eosprojects.com]
Why should we settle for less ?
We have to dare to reach the best future we could live in.