Sweet Liberty, You're Giving Me Diabetes

Over and over again corporations have been trying to control the Internet and make it their product and governments have been trying to make it their terrain. Meanwhile many, the masses, think it's fine, nothing wrong with any of this. People like shiny new products and the government is just trying to protect it's people (just like in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, China, etc etc).. . ..

Since the UK riots, the UK prime minister, David Cameron, would like to have a red button that can shut down "social media" in case. In case his subjects throw a fit or something. A red button that can shut down Twitter, Facebook, Blackberry Messenger and probably everything I guess because.. I mean.. wait, maybe he doesn't know about the other websites and services that exist, let's not tell him.

Not so long after that, like a few days ago, during an attempted protest in San Francisco, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) cut off access to the mobile phone network. So, no protest, no problems. No problems at all.

Of course Anonymous played around with the BART's website and exposed how securely they store their user's data. However, penetrating websites and exposing data, flaws, etc is just not going to be enough, BART probably does not care, they will reset their passwords, apologise to their clients and move on. As for the incident, they gave a nice explanation for their actions.

Maybe I'm just getting too paranoid, I mean, communications are private and nobody reads your emails, chat sessions and SMSes right ? Of course not, but still, police arrest a man for organising a water fight via Blackberry Messenger! A water fight !? And how did they know ... .

Maybe because Blackberry has agreed to help the police and has probably opened their doors wide open so the government can investigate on the riots. And on anything else they seem to stumble on. Like water fights ?! I still can't believe this.

Many have been comparing the looting and riots to the Arab Spring, obviously that is stupid as the UK's citizens have so much freedom compared to any Arab Spring affected country. That being said, as they are fighting and gaining freedom, others are getting very close to losing it.

Maybe we will all soon be dreaming of escaping to North Korea.