Be The Media

NYC Grassroots Media Conference - March 2 - Hunter College

"For the past four years, we’ve explored the political dimensions of media and how it shapes our lives. In developing relationships between community and media organizations, the NYC Grassroots Media Coalition is working to re-imagine issues of access to, control of, and power over our media system. That means defining our struggle as a struggle for Media Justice.

Join us at the 2008 NYC Grassroots Media Conference as we seek to define our understanding of and relationship to Media Justice as a community, and explore how we can not only envision an ideal world, but make this vision a reality."

For more information about the conference, click here.

Indymedia's hardware is returned, but many questions remain

From Independent Media Center:

"On Wednesday, October 13th, Indymedia's seized hardware was mysteriously returned in the same way it disappeared — without any information provided as to who took it or why, and on whose orders.

Numerous organizations have already expressed their solidarity with Indymedia. "I would say that this is an indication of the successfulness of the Indymedia network," says Peter Phillips, Ph.D., director of Project Censored. "Freedom of information is a radical idea when applied in a fair manner, and radical ideas will always be suppressed by the transnational corporate elites whenever possible."

Italy and Switzerland requested Indymedia's server seizure

From Indymedia.org:

"Indymedia has learned that the request to seize Indymedia servers hosted by a US company in the UK originated from government agencies in Italy and Switzerland. More than 20 Indymedia sites, several internet radio streams and other projects were hosted on the servers. They were taken offline on October 7th after an order was issued to Rackspace, Inc., one of Indymedia's web hosting providers.
The reasons for the court order or who actually holds the servers now are still unknown to Indymedia."

FBI seizes global Indymedia servers

From Urbana Chanpaign Indymedia Center:

"FBI took the hard drives of Global IMC servers in the USA and the UK. It appears that a court order was issued to Rackspace (Indymedia's service provider with offices in the US and in London) to physically remove the hard drives from Global Indymedia servers (backup servers are now in place). Rackspace was given no time to defend against the order before it was acted upon and turned over the hard drives, both in the US and the UK. The servers hosted numerous local IMCs and the reason for the seizure is not known.

The FBI's latest anti-free-press actions began at the beginning of October when they visited Indymedia's ISP demanding the removal of identifying information from photographs of undercover police officers that was posted on the Nantes Indymedia website. When asked what the US government was doing requesting the removal of information from a French-run website that contained information about Swiss police actions, the FBI stated that this was a "courtesy" to the Swiss government. The FBI agents stated that no laws had been broken, and no crimes had been committed. However, because no identifying information was posted on the website in question, it was unclear what actions the FBI was requesting. "

The article in question is/was posted here:

http://nantes.indymedia.org/article.php3?id_article=3910

GROUPER: Friends-only file sharing

From Nick Wingfield in the Wall Street Journal:

"Programs like Kazaa and eDonkey let users share music and movies on their computers with anyone on the Internet. Now comes the next step: friends-only file sharing.

In a development that could raise hackles in the entertainment industry, a company founded by two online-music pioneers has developed software that lets people share music, movies, photos and other digital data on their computers with small groups of users, limited to no more than 30 people. The company, Grouper Networks Inc., is part of a growing number of mainstream businesses seeking to commercialize file sharing, a technology commonly associated with rampant swapping of pirated music and movies and one that often became toxic to investors after all-out legal assaults by recording companies and movie studios."