Blog The Right Thing

Wikipedia  by  T.P

I don't know what the fuss is all about. Posting on Wikipedia is pretty simple as long as you don't want to write something about your cat. It's an encyclopedia guys, not a notebook.

The website is not very interactive and intuitive like blogger, but still, as long as you put some hyperlinks to relate to other wikipedia articles, you're fine.

It takes a while though to know if your article will be deleted or not, and I'm still waiting, so maybe I'm making a fool of myself. We'll see.

What's up big bloggers?

Three keys words to define e-learninng:

Easy, because every body knows or should know how to use a computer, or at least do basic tasks that you will have to perform in a future job.

Fast, because whatever you need, you can have in an instant on the Internet, you can find videos, audios, texts, images, they are just a click away from the class.

Efficient, because you can bring your work wherever you go and everything fits in only one flash drive.

The possibilities with e-learning are endless.

Socrate once said, « I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance », and that he said, is what makes him someone different, someone ready to discover things and understand them better than anyone else.

I do follow that principle on the Internet, because it is not humanly possible to know everything that goes on over there. Being aware of your ignorance allows you to overcome that difficulty very quickly. You can know focus on how to know things better, and that is an opportunity the Internet is offering you.

You do not know how this software works. No problem, just google the right question and you will get the right answer. It is not easy to find out what you need, it is actually somehow an art that takes many years to master. But when you do, you will be like a Jedi of the web, and no one will try to play you.

One amazing stuff I found out using the Internet is something pretty useful for any sport fan like me. I always was very disappointed to see that the French channel Canal+ was blurring its frequencies on TV, so that people who do not have the C+ decoder could not see the Champions League soccer championship for example. I wanted to follow the NBA, but I couldn’t. What about the PGA Master tour? What about boxing? What about the Super bowl?

Well, I couldn’t watch any of those.

One day, it was the semi-finale of the Champions league tournament and the Red devils of Manchester United were encountering the Blues from Chelsea. Two of the greatest teams of all time with some of the best players ever, like Drogba, Ronaldo, Rooney and plenty of others. And when I turned on my television I already knew that the image was bound to be encrypted, but still I wanted to see the game. I could have gone to a bar, but since I have a great TV at home and I had beer in my fridge, why would why?

So I went straight on the Internet and started looking, searching deep into the web to find a website where I could watch the game online. And after 30 minutes of disappointments, I found out this website:, called MyP2P.eu.

And if you go check it out, you’ll find out that it is pretty cool, and very easy to use.

There it was, a treasure of the Internet, hidden behind thousands of web pages, but still I found it. So now, I can watch what I want, whenever I want, and wherever it happens (even when it had already happened).

Let’s cut right to the chase, shall we?

How would you feel if someone steals your identity? How would you feel if one day you wake up, go to the door because the bell is ringing and there is a lawyer standing and an empty truck ready to seize your belongings?

What have you done?

Let’s rewind a little bit. Last week, you wanted to make a little surprise to your wife. You are hanging out in the stores, spent a couple of boring hours looking at clothes, perfumes, jewels but nothing strike your attention. Back home, you were listening to some music on deezer.com and while listening to your favourite artist you see that he is actually doing a concert in a week or so. You go right away on the proper website to buy some tickets, fill the application and pay with your credit card, supposedly protected by your bank. But instead of receiving the golden tickets of your dream, there he is, in his bright suit leading a bunch of movers just waiting for a sign to get your stuff out.

So what happened? What did you do?

Cyber-criminality happened. Some smart guy just created a fake webpage superimposed on the real one. So the second you finished up the application, the hacker saved the page with all your information on it and got at the same time all the numbers he needed to use your credit card. And maybe if you put the same password that you use for your other internet accounts, he may have snooped into your life.

From that moment, he had very little time to use that information against you, without you noticing it. He became you, used your money and your savings.

What can you do to be protected?

Transparency is a tricky notion. Anyone would think that the Internet make good and bad acts show up faster. It is true that we can have access to any events around the globe faster, because the technology made it possible.

But since we always hear about the bad acts first, it made me realize that, we only hear about those things because people are interested by it. Anything can be transparent on the Internet. But it only comes up to our attention, because the web community made one singular event popular. It is all about popularity. It is all about rating, about how many people looked at one particular video.

What is sad though is that, this mass effect of the Internet rarely happens when something good takes place. People want to see drama, they are more attracted to what is wrong in this world. But if the Internet has been so transparent over the past few years, it is because it caught the attention of the other media, which actually realize how powerful the Internet can be, and how many people it reaches. It's like a perfect circle, something happens, someone took a video of it and posted it on the Internet. People start looking at in, and when it has reached a certain number of views, the TV for example is going to talk about it and emphasizes the buzz around it, making more and more people want to watch it. Because who would want to be kept out of the loop? Human beings are curious, that is why the Internet has become so transparent.

What is completely different now from just a few years ago due to the new models of communication?

The right question would be, what is not different? Everywhere I look, everything is different because of the Internet. They all can be related to it in some way. The Internet has changed a great deal of things regarding communication. What has not changed though is who control that communication.

We still need at least two persons to communicate. Some people will argue that you can talk to your machine and ask him things. But, can it really understand complex questions and value an opinion as human beings can? That is an open question, and I can really say that I do have an answer for it. Still, maybe it does exist, but artificial intelligence is not part of our everyday life yet. I cannot converse with my computer, and on the Internet, even if you think you are alone, you never will be. The new models of communication have not replaced human beings yet.

Are we safe for long though? Scientists and engineers are making so much progress that A.I is becoming more real everyday. Will my next friend be my computer?

Or maybe that Robot? Who knows?

So many things have changed with the arrival of the Internet. Some were instantaneous, and other became real and popular after a few years, because people needed time to break their habits.

If I use both music and the Internet in the same sentence, what do you always think first?

This is a new era, an era where Pirates do not ride boats, do not steal strangers for money, but Pirates still, hidden behind the shadow of their IP address, surfing on the web, picking what they want, where they want and whenever they want it. They do not sail across the Caribbeans, the world wild web is their kingdom, a kingdom where boundaries, borders and frontiers are as blurry as a straight line in deep water.

The game has changed, but the rules remain the same. The pirates steal and try not to get caught. They conquer with no remorse, they live in danger looking over their shoulder every time they put foot on land. But when Pirates had guns and swords to defend themselves, peer-to-peer users can only count on the strength of their firewall.

Does that portrait seem fair to you?

Pirates are always portrayed as unscrupulous people, youngsters most of time, who do not have values, who seemed to lack even the simplest sense of morality.

But they only are portrayed like this by the previous generation. A generation which saw the Internet, and more importantly, peer-to-peer, as a threat. A threat because it changed and crushed the status-quo that prevailed for so many years.

Change, this is what many of us were born into. A world of technology growing faster that no one could ever imagine. A world that our fathers took part in creating. And just like our fathers took over the reality and the contemporaneity of their world, so did the pirates.

The Internet was created to collaborate, to exchange files, to literally link people together. Peer-to-peer is the exact expression of that definition. The simple right to share what you like, what you think people should have access to. The freedom to share the knowledge, the distraction, of what made you who you are.

That right is not free. You got to be equipped and pay for your connexion. But I already hear the defender of copyrights claiming that it is an unfair retribution for having the right to put online and share any type of file you got. And be sure that I feel the same way. But now that we have created this anomaly, that we have allowed people and somewhere encouraged them to do such a thing. Can we take it back in an instant.

Somewhere along the way we created an addiction, a cyber-addiction. The need to collect, to possess, to discover, to be aware of things. But at the same time we came to late to set boundaries, and when our society, our government punishes one person for having downloading ten songs, it feels like in some way we are ashamed to acknowledge it. Moreover, when I read that those cases must serve as an example for the rest of the population, it seems like the defendant became the victim.

I drew earlier a comparison between pirates and peer-to-peer users, and rest assure that this comparison is not futile nor a delusion of my literary past. This comparison has been used by peer-to-peer users themselves. One of the biggest bitTorrent tracker is called “The Pirate Bay”. This Swedish website, very popular among the peer-to-peer users' community, became even more famous when in May 2006, the Swedish police took down most of the servers. Engaged in an unprecedented lawsuit against the biggest Majors like EMI, Universal Music or Sony BMG Music entertainment, the founders were facing some serious time. Anyways, what came out of the juridical debacle that followed, is a movement: the “Pirate Party”. In only 3 years, the Pirate Party became the third largest party in Sweden. In the 2009 European Parliament elections, the party received 7,13% of the total Swedish votes, wining as a result one seat in the European Parliament.

The motto of the party is as follows: “We claim that today’s copyright system is unbalanced”. Needless to say, Pirates are fighting for their own beliefs with legal and democratic weapons. Shall we say that Pirates have climbed up a step in the evolution?

It appears to me that music became in someway a cause worse fighting for, assuming one more time the face of freedom.

The Internet totally changed the way we encountered music, the way we relate to it, the importance we put in it. Every morning I look around me and see people from 10 to 80 years old feeling the vibe through their headsets, and I can not stop thinking that music has reached such an enormous potential because of the Internet. Therefor preventing people from downloading music would be a gigantic hit down on the music industry.

So before thinking about how we could capture pirates, we should think about how we could make this work for everybody, make this industry viable for the producers and the consumers. I can feel a certain uneasiness in the air when talking about music and the Internet. But in this long debate, there is no easy way out, and the way it is going to end up, is totally up to you.

T.