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Microsoft: Just Say No!

The Passions

Meatheads, Slobs and Pencil Necked Geeks

Opera

Effective erasure of sensitive data on CD-RW discs

Many people like the idea that information wants to be free because it helps them see themselves as freedom fighters and upholders of great ideas rather than people who are too mean or poor to pay for their software. It is a good meme because it works well with the central ideology: “I am a good person”. It is similar to the idea that niggras like white folks making their decisions for them, six year old girls seduce their uncles and “if God didn't want them to be shorn why did he make them sheep”? Ideas that help make people feel good about themselves are good memes, they have a high survival chance. Many people want to copy information and distribute it for their own selfish reasons, the idea that information wants to be free is a way that they can justify their actions to themselves (to their selves, their selfplex) and to other people.

Information is easy to copy. Digital data is very easy to copy. It is in its nature to be inherently copyable. To extrapolate from that to come up with a general principle that information wants to be freely copied is quite absurd. Software is easily copied in exactly the same way children are easily raped and old people are easily robbed in the street. We don't take “she was asking for it” as a good excuse in these cases, likewise we should not make software piracy into a new virtue. Taking a video camera into a cinema or hacking a website is not liberating information, it is theft. People who do such things love to see themselves as romantic heroes but they are not. There is virtue in the free distribution and exchange of information, but no virtue in theft.

The way to fight the rising tide of payment on the internet is to resist it legally and to keep building the internet up in our image.

Here are some suggestions:

Choose your search engine with care.

Before you use a search engine try to add your URL to it. Look for a way to add a URL to the search engine's database. If you cannot find an option that lets you do it without paying a fee DO NOT USE THAT ENGINE, EVER. I recommend Google as being the best search engine on the web because it works very well and you can list a site without paying a fee.

Don't be afraid of the Big Names

Ironically many of the big names in the search engine business are the best ones to use, because they allow full listing of a site without charging a fee, while the little ones charge for a much less worthwhile service. MSN and AOL do not discriminate against the zero-budget sites, many of the smaller engines only list sites that pay. Many of the top search engines use The Open Directory Project which is a human edited catalogue of the web that allows any site to be added with no fee payable. This is how the internet should be, and those horrible corporate ogres agree.

The big companies in the internet world such as Microsoft/MSN, AOL and Netscape offer excellent packages to the individual while their rivals with higher street credibility have more intrusive advertising. Keep an open mind, do not assume automatically that everything that comes from a multinational corporation is evil and everything from a smaller company is good. There are quite a few hoopy froods around the boardrooms of the top internet companies.

Keep your options open.

Don't rely too much on any one company for internet services. Shop around. Use several. I use ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and AIM. I use Opera as my main browser plus Firefox and Internet Explorer as spares. I use ntl World for my internet access but I don't use their news server I use Google groups for newsgroup postings. Nobody can take my “business” for granted. If everybody shops around the services we have will stay excellent and they will stay largely free.

Do not be afraid to pay

If you demand everything for nothing then you will get what you pay for. There are some things that are worth paying for at times. Free webspace covered with pop-ups and banners is an abomination. If something can be financed by such advertising it can also be bought cheaply. It is far more honourable to pay for a service yourself than to expect somebody else to pay for it by putting up advertisements that people try to block out with other software. If you are working from webspace with advertisements you are not the webmaster, you are the webslave, your function is to provide hits for their advertisements.

I paid for my browser, Opera (until it was given away), and I have paid for Trillian a chat client that lets me chat to users on lots of different networks at the same time with no advertisements.

Use your voice

The internet is the greatest invention in the liberation of humanity since the invention of printing, possibly even more important, time will tell. We have an internet in which any individual can directly publish to a significant fraction of the world's population. This is mind boggling freedom. We must use it. It is your duty to posterity to grasp this opportunity and use it. Do not let the powerful take this freedom away from you or limit it. Use your freedom now, if you have not set up your own website do it now, this week. If you need help just ask.

Do not let the internet be taken over by commercialism, filth and misinformation. While you cannot fight such things easily you can dilute it with voluntary content and wholesome communication.

If you want to see high quality free content on the web do something about it. Provide some.

Get ORGanized.

Watch out for the .org top level domain, a non-geographic domain for voluntary and non-profit making organizations.

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited