this post originally appeared in Stir Magazine illustration by Daksheeta Pattni In 2002 I described United Diversity as “a member owned and stakeholder governed network of mutual advantage.” In truth, it was aspirational. At the time, the flexible off-the-shelf legal structures and open source tools needed to make such a network a reality simply didn’t exist. Now they do. Co-ops that combine best practices from the international co-operative movement with best practices from the open source … [Read more...]
The decentralisation of Pirate Bay filesharing
Following a suggestion by Rasmus Fleischer, a leading member of the Pirate Bureau, Torrentfreak concludes: “The Pirate Bay will dissolve, but in its place many “new TPBs” will return, just without the familiar domain name and pirate ship logo. This is very similar to a concept Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde had in mind for the new Pirate Bay. A decentralized setup through which the ‘torrent site’ controls only a tiny part of the ’sharing’ process. At the basis of this new scheme are two … [Read more...]
Hyperlocal file sharing: The Pirate Kiosk brings the Pirate Bay to the streets
Many sites and projects have rushed to the rescue ever since the Pirate Bay announced its intended sale back in June. Opentracker wants to take over the Pirate Bay's tracker duties, and Torrage wants to step in as an independent torrent file hoster, just to name two. And then there is the Pirate Kiosk - an exact copy of the Pirate Bay that's run out of an old newsstand and that can only be accessed via Wifi. pirate kiosk From kioskofpiracy.org: "(A) copy of the infamous Pirate Bay is … [Read more...]
Wikipedia + Flickr = Fotopedia
I am a huge fan of Wikipedia, one of the greatest achievements of sharing; I also enjoy wandering around Flickr, although its lack of over-arching organisation makes that hard to do. Maybe this is perfect solution: Fotopedia, "the first collaborative photo encyclopedia", which uses text from Wikipedia, but only to provide what amount to extended captions for the pix, which are generally very attractive.It's not the first to do this - VisWiki has been around for some time - but Fotopedia seems … [Read more...]
MakeHuman Makes Open Source More Human
One of the canards about open source is that it only produces hardcore hacker programs - dev tools, infrastructural stuff etc. - that have little to offer the general, non-technical, *normal* user. While that may have been true ten years ago, things have moved on. For example, here's MakeHuman, an amazing program that lets you create photorealistic 3D humanoid characters:MakeHuman is an open source (so it's completely free), innovative and professional software for the modelling of … [Read more...]
On Opening Up with PHP
PHP is one of the big success stories of open source, so it's great to read this interview with its creator, Rasmus Lerdorf. I was especially struck by these words of wisdom:in 1997, it basically came to the point where I was going to kill the project, because it was growing so fast and my mailbox was filling up with suggestions, complaints, patches, all these things. Up until then, I had been doing everything myself. Someone would make a suggestion, send me a patch and I'd rewrite the patch … [Read more...]
Open Everything
Today, an Open Everything event will take place at the Paraflows Festival in Vienna, Austria. Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation is the main speaker. Franz Nahrada and Ralf Schlatterbeck will follow up with the hardware side of open production, with Factor e Farm and Open Source Ecology as a case in point. We prepared a short video - which Ralf will present - on creating a post-scarcity village on the scale of 30 acres. The essence of such a village is open technology and knowhow. This video … [Read more...]
Soil Pulverizer Annihilates Soil Handling Limits
We are glad to report that the LifeTrac-mounted, open source soil pulverizer has annihilated soil-handling limits from our compressed earth brick (CEB) pressing ability. Initial testing achieved 5 ton per hour soil throughput, while The Liberator CEB press requires about 1.5 tons of soil per hour. We have shown the pulverizer rotor development in a previous post. See the build and testing of the machine after the addition of the bucket and lift cylinder: Soil Pulverizer Prototype 1 Complete … [Read more...]
How p2p Works: An Introduction
When we started talking to people about the project, we’d often find that some didn’t get how p2p works. Not that you have to understand it to use it, but if you do want to, we produced a couple of simple animations that explain how p2p works. (First, we mean p2p as in peer-to-peer software and not p2p as a philosophy, though there are obvious parallels!.) Streaming What is p2p? It’s a method of distributing data. Where it works well is when you need to distribute large amounts of data, for … [Read more...]
We need a p2p architecture for money too!
How to best transcend the current economic mess? Put Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, Tim O’Reilly, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Nathan Myhrvold, and Danny Hillis in a room somewhere and don’t let them out until they have framed a new, massively-distributed financial system, founded on sound, open, peer-to-peer principles, from the start. And don’t call it a bank. Launch a new financial medium that is as open, scale-free, universally accessible, self-improving, and non-proprietary as the … [Read more...]