Hackers In Space

A rock band once entitled one of their albums "Italians From Outer Space" in a bit of a joke .... so when I saw in the news last August that hackers wanted to set up their own satellite system, I laughed, thinking it a joke.

Italians From Outer Space

But the laugh is on me, because in a sign of the times that we now live in, that's exactly what they are proposing to do. The news from the hackers at the 'Chaos Communication Congress' in Berlin is that they are proposing put a 'Hackerspace Global Grid' of satellites into orbit, and tracking stations on the ground to take the Internet beyond the reach of censors. They even have plans in the long term, to help put an amateur astronaut on the moon!

The reason why they consider that this is necessary is because they believe that governments such as China and the USA, are increasingly trying to censor or own the world wide web ... acts such as the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) in the United States, they consider to be threats to online freedom. If passed, the act would allow for some sites to be blocked on copyright grounds, and of course China is implicated in numerous state hacking and censorship activities, such as the infamous "Great Firewall of China".

One of the future battlegrounds of the human race could be 'freedom of thought' versus 'censorship or control '.... I know which side I will be on.