The Pirate Bay trial to begin in Sweden

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10164777-93.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0
File swappers are expected to be keeping their eyes on a court in Sweden this week as a landmark copyright-infringement trial gets under way. The four men behind the popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay go on trial Monday in Stockholm, accused of helping millions of Internet users illegally download protected movies, music, and computer games. The defendants–Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, and Carl Lundström–face up to two years in prison and a fine of 1.2 million kronor ($143,529) if convicted of being accessories and conspiracy to break Swedish copyright law. Two of the defendants insisted during a Webcast news conference in Stockholm Sunday that their site was legal and that the trial’s outcome would have no impact on the site’s ability to operate. “What are they going to do about it? They have already failed to take down the site once. Let them fail again,” Gottfrid Svartholm Warg said, according to highlights of the event printed by TorrentFreak. “It has its own life without us.”

The Establishment Fearmongers for its Internet 911/Pearl Harbor False Security Flag: Do We Need a New Internet?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/weekinreview/15markoff.html?_r=1
Two decades ago a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student brought the Internet to its knees with a simple software program that skipped from computer to computer at blinding speed, thoroughly clogging the then-tiny network in the space of a few hours. The program was intended to be a digital “Kilroy Was Here.” Just a bit of cybernetic fungus that would unobtrusively wander the net. However, a programming error turned it into a harbinger heralding the arrival of a darker cyberspace, more of a mirror for all of the chaos and conflict of the physical world than a utopian refuge from it. Since then things have gotten much, much worse. Bad enough that there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over. What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.
…”They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”-Benjamin Franklin

Action Alert! Stop Time Warner from Dropping the Daily Show and the Colbert Report

Attention Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks customers, starting tonight, you will lose your favorite Comedy Central shows on TV and online because of a dispute with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. You can stop this! Time Warner Cable customers call 1-800-762-3786 and Bright House Networks customers call 1-866-309-3279, AND DEMAND THEY KEEP YOUR CHANNEL! YOU MUST BE AT LEAST 18 YEARS OLD TO CALL.
…sadly enough, the Daily Show and Colbert Report (perhaps the highest forms of satire present in the corporate mainstream media) represent the most accurate source of news for a large proportion of young people (especially amongst the coveted market of college age males). While still satire, the Daily Show and Colbert Report are a source of information infinitely more accurate and balanced than most news broadcasts.
Here, Jon Stewart verbally disembowels Tucker Carlson and the entire mainstream media on Crossfire (many credit Stewart’s tirade of honesty on Crossfire as the event that terminated the show on CNN):

Steven Colbert skewers President Bush in front of his face:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-869183917758574879&ei=o95bSbObGaeKqQO-hIigCw&q=colbert+bush&hl=en