Ever since TPB announced that buyout deal with GGF, the populists who exclaimed "ra ra ra!" for the TPB owners at the infamous trial in Stockholm are now seething with either anger or dismissiveness for the "new" TPB. They're exclaiming "How could you do this to us, your loyal users?! Fuck you, I'm going to Demonoid!" because the prospect of TPB becoming a user-paid site (alot like Metafilter) rubs their offended ex-userbase as "going legit" or "kowtowing to the MAFIAA".

I rarely use TPB: I tend to use BT for downloading anime series and the occasional film, so I know that I'll find far more of what I want on isoHunt and AnimeSuki than on TPB, which seems to be much more used for software (for which, since using Ubuntu and mostly free-software, I've hardly lacked) and film/documentary distribution. So it hardly affects me that TPB will go legit and user-paid to any length, but I know that they have legitimate reasons (both financial and political) for doing such, and I find much of the fury that is being directed in its way from commenters on Digg and TorrentFreak to be self-righteous and misdirected.

But as a user-driven site, TPB, like Digg and YouTube, is finding itself in the crosshairs of many active Internet users who have an active disdain for anything that is corporately-driven or monetarily-supported, including web advertisements or making user accounts dependent upon monetary subscriptions. True, money is always a hurdle for any site to cross, and corporations tend to have an arguably-heightened sense of entitlement to monetary payments for many of the most minute perks and features that they distribute, but the behavior of corporations doesn't excuse the user from playing a role in the sustenance of a site for its services. That's why the Pirate Bay had banner and text ads on every page of the website.

The sites which display the content, or at least links to the content, need money to drive revenue for their survival as autonomous units; otherwise, they will fall to the wayside, no matter how popular they may be to their userbases.

The most disturbing mentality of TPB's proponents-turned-detractors ("I'm deleting you from my bookmarks. Good day, sir!"), however, shows when they comment on how TPB will be replaced by another new head of the BitTorrent hydra, followed by a "good riddance" to another old, expendable head. It's like they expect to be perpetually able to switch out hydra heads (i.e., trackers and search engines) every 6-12 months like shoes or toothbrushes, every time that a hydra head either gets taken to the judicial abattoir to be bled and culled or gets a bit "uppity" and starts to consider more sophisticated, machiavellian methods of financial sustenance.

So I ask myself....how do you reserve any respect for these fickle, thin-skinned "pirates" who can't even be counted on to dig into their own pockets to support their own captains and fix the severe damage to their own sinking ships BEFORE it comes to the captains forcing those pockets inside-out as a last-ditch effort? They're hilarious in their churlish textual expressions of "Fuck the RIAA!" e-rage and claims of support to the "cause", but they're truly impotent and unstable in the bladder and couldn't be counted upon to support any single one of the many public torrent sites.

So I don't think the Pirate Bay is in the wrong for going ahead with paid user subscriptions; actually, its been a long time coming for any major previously-non-corporate tracker of the TPB's size or popularity, and that people didn't see this coming as a feature is laughable. DRM on files may be a stretch, and may be signs of overreaching desperation to recoup legal costs (as DRM is seen as a "big no-no" for the free culture movement), but it's not surprising that TPB went this route after the trial.

And as it has been said in the media, this may be the symbolic end of the "Pirate" era of the free culture movement (and of this decade), but the contributions made by the unaffiliated trifecta of TPB, the Pirate Party and the Swedish Piratbyran will make part of a sociopolitical foundation for the pro-copyreform movement in the European Union, and will also open new questions for the Western copyreform and copyleft movements to answer.

Finally, I think that this decade has shown the advance of what I call the "wikileft", or the current movement towards making the production of media more open, publicly-persistent, collaborative and human-readable (as in the case of wikis for encyclopedic articles, or even in Mozilla's Bespin project for a web-based collaborative IDE). It is copyleftist by necessity (hence naturally allowing for P2P distribution), but it brings a greater focus upon the production of content, a focus which was never fully considered or exploited by the copyreform movement which cast its lot behind TPB and other distribution hubs. The wikileft, IMO, gives a far greater window of user involvement and responsibility than the copyleft or copyreformism ever did; users not only contribute their works to the wiki whiteboard, but take a role in the nurturing and development of the information contained on the whiteboard (including information posted by others) and ultimately "own" the responsibility and recognition for their own contributions.

If the wikileft can comprehensively outsource the production of prime, expert-level media to the lay public within the next decade, what would be the need for the statically-produced media that the copyreform movement fights for the right to non-commercially distribute under the protection of fair use? Who would care about the Encarta Encyclopedia client software being distributed on BitTorrent when one can point to any one of the nearly 3 million English Wikipedia articles created and edited by millions of users?

The copyleft, for its own sake, must morph into the wikileft to make user-generated, user-supported content more ubiquitous and prevalent throughout the Internet, thus squeezing out the demand for the proprietarily-licensed, statically-produced media which the TPB, isoHunt, LokiTorrent, OiNK and others past and present  fight for the right to distribute. The latter type must be dumped in the shortest order in order to render irrelevant the companies which claim intellectual monopolies over their distribution, and bring the nightmare of the MAFIAA to a blessed end.

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I don't know what I did, but I no longer have the ability to write in any text boxes in firefox because they have disappeared. For example, I could not write this entry in Firefox because the box has completely disappeared. I also lost the ability to use my up and down arrow keys and the PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN keys. I am using a beta version of the latest Firefox. Internet Explorer works fine. It's just Firefox. Anyone have any ideas what may have happened?

New version of popular web browser Mozilla Firefox 3.5 has been released yesterday, on the 30th of June. Probably you already heard about developers’ announce that new Firefox has such many innovations that they even decided to give number 3.5 to this release (before Firefox 3.5, Firefox 3.0.11 was released). It’s time to find out [...]

I wonder about how labor unions have increasingly come out in favor of mutualization of larger megacorporations, particularly in their favoring of worker cooperatives as a model for such mutualization.

I wonder about it because I'm a bit lost on whether worker co-ops are in philosophical conflict with consumer co-ops: both are mutualized institutions meant to at least provide a more transparent product and more democratic governance, but worker-owned co-ops are more limited in their demographic and democratic spread than consumer co-ops, and they are more bound by necessity to ensure job security for all worker-owners.

Job security, of course, is good: it not only fits within the labor unions' ultimate goal of protection of jobs and worker welfare (by mutual assurance, if need be), but it also guarantees that any owning member will have a means of generating income for both oneself and for the other members of the co-op, giving worker co-ops a philosophical and financial advantage over consumer co-ops, which are larger in membership but provide seemingly basic, threadbare benefits in comparison.

Of course, even if the worker co-ops assimilate into each other to create a megacooperative conglomerate, it may only make a fraction of consumers into worker-owners. Its not like the labor unions will be able to announce "Hey, everyone aged 18+ in the country is hired, so come clock in on Monday! We'll send everyone - including you - to a day job, get you educated, and get you settled into an apartment at the same time!" It would be nice to dole out job positions like nation-states dole out citizenship, but I doubt that worker cooperative federations or conglomerates will be able to ensure jobs and income for all adults in that way....at least, not with the way that worker cooperative federations are structured.

New DS is up on MozDev, and it's sitting in the sandbox at AMO waiting for approval. If you downloaded it from MozDev originally, then the extension updater thing should do its thing properly (I hope - it's been over a year since I last did all the update-signing thing so I might have done something wrong, but it seems to work for me). If it's unable to download (worked straight away for me, so maybe they updated how all that stuff works in the past year), then it's possibly still syncing to whatever mirror you were trying to download it from, so try again later.

Nothing new (aside from that annoying-as-hell LJ user bug, you know, the Ctrl+K one not giving expected results), but I will start working on it again, otherwise it'd be a total waste of spending half a day trying to get everything set up for development.

I thought it was just me, and some inane fluke of my XP/Firefox combination, but now I read it on my flist as well: the button for the LJ user tag in DS doesn't work. I have to code it by hand in the source window.

And as I am posting, I must say a button for the 'small' and the 'strike' tags would come in REALLY handy, as I use them a lot -- the other two most frequent reasons I change to source view.

Is there, perhaps, a new version of DS somewhere that has these, but isn't known to Mozilla yet and has to be installed by hand?

I have the latest version of Firefox and it seems like whenever I go from site to site, I see something in the lower left hand corner that says "transferring data from..." and it lists a whole bunch of weird things (website addresses?). I haven't tried it in IE yet. I was wondering if anyones know what it means, and if it's something only in Firefox. I am going to cross post this in a few communities, so if you see it more than once, I apologize.

Here are a few examples:

"transferring data from direct.shots.com"
"transferring data from ishouldvebeenanastronaut.com"