http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articles/0,3266,47705,00.html
====================
The Infoanarchist
Could this 23-year-old British programmer unravel the Web?
Ian Clarke boots up a computer in a house he shares with two flatmates
in a gritty London neighborhood, across the street from Brixton
Prison. With a few quick keystrokes, he downloads a free copy of
Britney Spears' new single, Oops!...I Did It Again. As Britney's
sugary lament fills his dorm-style bedroom, bouncing off the unmade
bed and the laundry bag on the door, Clarke insists he feels no pangs
of conscience. "Copyright is a crutch," he says. "It's inherent in
nature that information wants to be free."
[snip]
As for actual content, the pickings are still slim, but it's not hard
to see Freenet's vast potential. Clarke scrolls down an index looking
for items of interest and calls out what he finds. The Communist
Manifesto. The U.S. Constitution. A document purporting to be a
British Intelligence report on Libyan spying activities in Britain. A
lot of files have names suggesting they're pornographic; a few seem to
be child porn. There are files that appear to contain secret "OT"
documents of the Church of Scientology. If they're real, they
illustrate Freenet's power: the Scientologists have obtained court
orders in the past to yank such documents off the Net. Another file
purports to be secret coding from Microsoft, also a vigilant defender
of its copyrights. Clarke says he's never been contacted by Microsoft
or any of the other entities whose content has been posted, and he
doesn't expect to be. After all, he doesn't control what gets posted
on Freenet. "There's nothing I can do, and they probably know that,"
he says.
[snip]
====================
Sue, SP4(:), listed on the Scieno Sitter list 5 times!
"It will take a *long* time to find another enemy
with the combination of evil and incompetence
you see in Scientology."--Keith Henson
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BY ADAM COHEN/LONDON
--
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