Occasionally I read Peter Sunde/brokep’s blog. Some of you may recognize the name; I’ve linked to and mentioned him here before. He is one of The Pirate Bay’s admins and was found guilty in trial of assisting copyright infringement, although the case is up in appeals now. Some of you may also look up to him.

In any case, I’ve found him to post pretty interesting things on his blog in general—at least when it’s not in Swedish and I can actually read it, and I just came across an interesting post he wrote a few months ago, titled “Facebook owns us.” Often we have heard of Facebook’s privacy problems and of things like people not getting the job they wanted because of Facebook. But perhaps the real danger lies in its social monopoly and its controlling effect on Facebook users’ social lives.

To better understand this, I would definitely recommend reading it, but I’ll provide the gist of it for you lazy tl;drers.

A very large number of people use Facebook. Not everyone uses Facebook, but for example, most of you reading this and almost everyone in my generation and the generations around me use Facebook to some degree. In this way, for those of us whose networks of friends stay connected through Facebook, Facebook monopolizes our social connections online and even affects us offline.

Thus, people have become connected through Facebook so much, relying on it for inviting people to offline events and so on because of its huge convenience. One of brokep’s friends wasn’t happy with Facebook for deleting his fan-made music videos on Facebook and did something that got his account completely deleted. He stopped showing up to events. People only realized later that he was never invited to some of them because he just disappeared on Facebook, and people simply rely on Facebook to invite people to events these days. At Facebook’s whim, it can deny people from being social. It can wipe out their only direct social connection with a multitude of people.

This is scary. But how do we break from the chain, a “vendor lock-in” (or “social lock-in”) of sorts, as one commenter mentioned? Open decentralized alternatives to the mega-network of Facebook seem unrealistic because the advantage of Facebook is that everyone exists on it (and that information is uniformly presented).

Here’s to hoping for the next great advance in social networking that will save us all.

A week ago, I finally finished Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. Everybody should read it. In the meantime, everybody should read these passages I’ve excerpted—bold emphasis mine—courtesy of the book’s Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

From pages 249-250:

Technology, tied to law, now promises almost perfect control over content and its distribution. And it is this perfect control that threatens to undermine the potential for innovation that the Internet promises.

To resist this threat, we need specific changes to reestablish a balance between control and creativity. Our aim should be a system of sufficient control to give artists enough incentive to produce, while leaving free as much as we can for others to build upon and create.

In setting this balance, there are a few ideas to keep in mind. First, we live in a world with “free” content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We refer to plots in movies to tell jokes without the permission of the director. We read books to our children borrowed from a library without any payment for performance rights to the original copyright holder. The fact that content at any particular time is free tells us nothing about whether using that content is “theft.” Similarly, an argument for increasing control by content owners needs more than “they didn’t pay for this use” to back it up.

Second, and related, the reason perfect control is not our aim is that creation is always the building upon something else. There is no art that doesn’t reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the earlier appropriator. Monopoly controls have been the exception in free society; they have been the rule in closed societies.

Finally, while control is needed, and perfectly justifiable, our bias should be clear up front: Monopolies are not justified by theory; they should be permitted only when justified by facts. If there is no solid basis for extending a certain monopoly protection, then we should not extend that protection… Before the monopoly should be permitted, there should be reason to believe it will do some good—for society, and not just for monopoly holders.

And from page 265:

The law is the instrument through which a technological revolution is undone. And since we barely understand how the technologists built this revolution, we don’t even see when the lawyers take it away. As activist and technologist John Gilmore has put it, in a line that captures the puzzle of this book: “[W]e have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity. . . . I think,” Gilmore continues, “we should embrace the era of plenty, and work out how to mutually live in it.”

Finally, this last paragraph of the book is compelling:

We move through this moment of an architecture of innovation to, once again, embrace an architecture of control—without noticing, without resistance, without so much as a question. Those threatened by this technology of freedom have learned how to turn the technology off. The switch is now being thrown. We are doing nothing about it.

Time to begin Free Culture.

There seems to be a lack of information out there on IRC clients for Mac OS X. On Windows, my choice is pretty clear; I use mIRC with NoNameScript, and for running an fserve bot, the script of choice is SysReset.

So, briefly, what’s usable (and totally free!) on a Mac these days?

Colloquy

Colloquy was the IRC client I started using when I first got my MacBook. Importantly, it makes every attempt to conform to the Mac Human Interface Guidelines. It seems decent, but to an mIRC user like me the interface can actually end up slightly frustrating. A possibly more major problem I had was that it would randomly run up the CPU usage really high once in a while, causing the CPU fan to turn on. I’d then have to close the program and start it up again. I’m not sure if it’s been fixed by now, but I’m sure they’ve made some progress overall since then, at least. In any case, Colloquy has a few problems, but it’s certainly usable; I just don’t prefer it.

X-Chat Aqua

Until yesterday, for about a year, I used X-Chat Aqua. In terms of configurability, X-Chat Aqua is pretty good. It has rather extensive options, just as an mIRC user (or an X-Chat user…) would expect to have, and, similarly, the interface is okay but definitely could be better. It’s not out of Alpha yet (and development seems to have stalled a bit) but still seems stable enough.

However, there are some problems with it common to other ports from Windows/Linux (e.g. MS Office); assigning a Space to it in Spaces preferences does nothing. But I would still say that, overall, X-Chat Aqua really isn’t bad. (X-Chat Aqua may be comparable to an older and shareware—but still maintained—Mac IRC client called Snak. I also tried it and don’t think Snak is really worth the bother since X-Chat Aqua does pretty much a similar job.)

LimeChat

I’m glad I found LimeChat the other day. Relatively new and under development, it has some of the mIRC familiarity just as in X-Chat Aqua but with an arguably better interface and easier setup. It’s functional, yet certainly lightweight, and it doesn’t look bad, as far as IRC clients go, at all. I’ve yet to run into any real problems with it, except I almost just kept using X-Chat Aqua until I found the LimeChat keyboard shortcuts to switch between channels easily (cmd + up/down). They definitely should have shown how to do that in the program itself instead of just on the website/documentation.

Anyway, I’d really currently recommend LimeChat for any OS X IRC user. If I find any problems, I’ll update this, and if anyone has further comments, please do make them!