The World Wide Web consortium is considering a proposal to specify standards for HTML extensions to implement Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The proposal is supported by Netflix, Microsoft, Google and the BBC.

The copyright wars have eroded the internet's inherent resilience at a time when it is desperately needed. Today's internet is integrated into our lives in ways that have surpassed even the wildest prognostications of the 1980s – it's the default way of signing your kid up for after-school dance classes; for paying your gas bill; for posting videos of police violence;

Information warfare is the 21st Century equivalent of class warfare, with people like Aaron Swartz (threatened with decades of imprisonment, then bullied by prosecutors into taking his own life), Barrett Brown (imprisoned, awaiting trial and threatened with life imprisonment), Jeremy Hammond (same), Julian Assange (under investigation by Grand Jury) and Bradley Manning (facing life sentence in upcoming trial) as its most notable victims whom the US Government has decided to make an example of so as to deter others from following suit.

What these adults saw in Swartz was someone who could realize the messianic potential of the Internet, someone who could build the tools that would liberate information and keep it free from the corporations and bureaucrats who would wall it off. Underlying it all was the hacker belief that the world could be perfected if enough of us tapped society’s vast reserves of knowledge and put it to proper use. “With his intellect, we wanted to harness it for good instead of evil,” says Lisa Rein, a Lessig aide who worked closely with him. “I was worried that Microsoft would get ahold of him.”

November 2011 to January 2013 is the 200th anniversary of the Luddite uprisings: a great opportunity to celebrate their struggle and to redress the wrongs done to them and their name. But why would a group of Earth First! activists, concerned primarily with protecting wilderness, be interested in a 200-year-old uprising based on a labor dispute involving textile workers in England? The conventional answer is that Luddism is an anti-technology, primitivist philosophy and that it has a tendency towards direct action, but the truth about its significance is both different and deeper.

Kim Dotcom's Mega officially launches tomorrow, but we're already in. From the membership plans we showed you this morning, the service might look like it's just another online storage locker like Dropbox or Google Drive. But it's way more than that. Mega is a weapon aimed straight at copyright rights holders. It's maybe the most private, invincible file-sharing service of all time.

November 2011 to January 2013 is the 200th anniversary of the Luddite uprisings: a great opportunity to celebrate their struggle and to redress the wrongs done to them and their name. But why would a group of Earth First! activists, concerned primarily with protecting wilderness, be interested in a 200-year-old uprising based on a labor dispute involving textile workers in England? The conventional answer is that Luddism is an anti-technology, primitivist philosophy and that it has a tendency towards direct action, but the truth about its significance is both different and deeper.

As a devastating series of cyberattacks struck the heart of the national-security establishment, the Feds set out to destroy the legendary hacker and radical anarchist by any means necessary.

For several years we have provided servers and communication infrastructure for the left. We have done our best to keep the servers safe and have resisted requests for user data by the authorities, using various means.

In short: we try to offer a liberating form of communication within the capitalist internet.

Over the past two years around 90 people - some as young as 16 years old - have been arrested in the US, UK, and mainland Europe for online criminal activities relating to the hacktivist group Anonymous. The charges they face range from disabling commercial websites, stealing sensitive information such as credit card details, to attacking government security sites. In March 2012 one of the leaders of the spin-off group called Lulzsec was arrested and has subsequently become an informant for the FBI in exchange for leniency, which has led to more arrests.