On this day, 6 December 1989, 14 women, most of whom were training in engineering fields, were murdered in a mass shooting at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. The 25 year old shooter specifically targeted women, claimed he was “fighting feminism,” and killed himself after shooting 28 people. The victims’ names were: Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, and Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz. The day is commemorated annually across Canada as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. https://ift.tt/2rm0nJn
THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY They look like the girls I went to school with.
On this day (December 6) in 1989, fourteen women were murdered at École Polytechnique de Montréal because of one man’s backward belief that women don’t belong in engineering.
Violence against women, of course is not limited to engineers. It is an epidemic. A disease that continues to afflict societies across the world. Unacceptable. Damning for all those who sit by and let the lesser signs of sexism go by without speaking up.
This is the 30th Anniversary of this Terrible Day
I chose to reblog this post in particular, because its author, cuttlerish, wisely chose not to name the vile murderer. I am of the opinion we shouldn’t reward such scumbag with fame.
The
.ORG top-level domain and all of the nonprofit organizations that
depend on it are at risk if a private equity firm is allowed to buy
control of it. EFF has joined with over 250 respected nonprofits to oppose
the sale of Public Interest Registry, the (currently) nonprofit entity
that operates the .ORG domain, to Ethos Capital. Internet pioneers
including Esther Dyson and Tim Berners-Lee have spoken out against this
secretive deal. And 12,000 Internet users and counting have added their voices to the opposition.
What’s the harm in this $1.135 billion deal? In short, it would
give Ethos Capital the power to censor the speech of nonprofit
organizations (NGOs) to advance commercial interests, and to extract
ever-growing monopoly rents from those same nonprofits. Ethos Capital
has a financial incentive to engage in censorship—and, of course, in
price increases. And the contracts that .ORG operates under don’t create
enough accountability or limits on Ethos’s conduct.
Registries like PIR manage the Internet’s top-level domains under policies set out by ICANN,
the governing body for the Internet’s domain name system. Registries
have the power to suspend domain names, or even transfer them to other
Internet users, subject to their contracts with ICANN. When a domain
name is suspended, all of the Internet resources that use that name are
disrupted, including websites, email addresses, and apps. That power
lets registries exert influence over speech on the Internet in much the
same way that social networks, search engines, and other well-placed
intermediaries can do. And that power can be sold or bartered to other powerful groups, including repressive governments and corporate interests, giving them new powers of censorship.
Using the Internet’s chokepoints for censorship already happens far too often. For example:
The registry operators Donuts and Radix, who manage several
hundred top-level domains, have private agreements with the Motion
Picture Association of America to suspend domains based on accusations of copyright infringement from major movie studios, with no court order or right of appeal.
The search engine Bing, along with firewall maintainers and other intermediaries, has suppressed access to websites
offering truthful information about obtaining prescription medicines
from online pharmacies. They acted at the request of groups with close
ties to U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturers who seek to keep drug prices
high. The same groups have sought cooperation from domain registries and
their governing body, ICANN.
The governments of Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, among
others, regularly submit a flood of takedown requests to intermediaries,
presumably in the hope that those intermediaries won’t examine those
requests closely enough to reject the unjustified and illegal requests
buried within them.
Saudi Arabia has relied on intermediaries like Medium, Snapchat, and Netflix to censor journalism it deems critical of the country’s totalitarian government.
DNA, a trade association for the domain name industry, has proposed
a broad program of Internet speech regulation, to be enforced with
domain suspensions, also with no accountability or due process
guarantees for Internet users.
As the new operator of .ORG, Ethos Capital would have the
ability to engage in these and other forms of censorship. It could
enforce any limitations on nonprofits’ speech, including selective
enforcement of particular national laws. For intermediaries with power
over speech, such conduct can be lucrative, if it wins the favor of a
powerful industry like the U.S. movie studios or of the government of an
authoritarian country where the intermediary wishes to do business.
Since many NGOs are engaged in speech that seeks to hold governments and
industry to account, those powerful interests have every incentive to
buy the cooperation of a well-placed intermediary, including an
Ethos-owned PIR.
Not Enough Safeguards
The sale of PIR to Ethos Capital erodes the safeguards against this form of censorship.
First, the .ORG TLD has a unique meaning. A new
NGO website or project may be able to use a different top-level domain,
but none carries the same message. A domain name ending in .ORG is the
key signifier of non-commercial, public-minded organizations on the
Internet. Even the new top-level domains .NGO and .ONG (also run by
PIR), which would appear to be substitutes for .ORG, have seen little
use.
Established NGOs are in even more of a bind. The .ORG top-level
domain is 34 years old, and many of the world’s most important NGOs
have used .ORG names for decades. For established NGOs, changing domain
names is scarcely an option. Changing from .ORG to a .INFO or .US
domain, for example, means disrupting email communications, losing
search engine placement, and incurring massive expenses to change an
organization’s basic online identity. Established NGOs are effectively a
captive audience for the policies and prices set by PIR.
Second, the top-level domain for nonprofits should itself be
run by a nonprofit. Today, PIR is a subsidiary of the Internet Society
(ISOC), which also promotes Internet access worldwide and oversees the
Internet’s basic technical standards. ISOC is a longstanding part of the
community of Internet governance organizations. When ISOC created PIR
in 2002, it touted its nonprofit status and position in the community as
the reasons it should run .ORG. And those community ties help explain
why, when PIR proposed building its own copyright enforcement system in
2016, outcry from the community caused it to back down. If PIR is
operated for private profit, it will inevitably be less attentive to the
Internet governance community.
Third, ICANN, the organization that sets policy for the domain name system, has been busy removing
the legal guardrails that could protect nonprofit users of .ORG.
Earlier this year, ICANN removed caps on registration fees for .ORG
names, allowing PIR to raise prices at will on its captive customer base
of nonprofits. And ICANN also gave PIR explicit permission to create
new “protections for the rights of third parties”—often used as a
justification and legal cover for censorship—without community input or
accountability.
Without these safeguards, the sale of PIR to Ethos raises
unacceptable risks of censorship and financial exploitation for
nonprofits the world over. Yet Ethos and ISOC insist on completing the
sale as quickly as possible, without addressing the community’s
concerns. Their only response to the massive public outcry against the
deal has been vague, unenforceable promises of good behavior.
The sale needs to be halted, and a process begun to guarantee
the rights of nonprofit Internet users. You can help by signing the
petition:
Children in the Netherlands would place a carrot or some hay for Sinterklaas’ horse in their klompen, left by the fireplace or perhaps the windowsill tonight, hoping to find their shoe filled with sweets and small gifts left by Sinterklaas the on the morning of December 6th, St. Nicholas’ Day.
When I realized it was on fire, literally, the hardest part was leaving it in the oven to burn out. Except for a fire place, what better place to leave a fire?
“If you’re 40 or older, eating 2 ounces of black licorice a day for at least two weeks could land you in the hospital with an irregular heart rhythm or arrhythmia.“
