From the Freenation Foundation their mission is:
“To establish an ecologically sustainable society that provides the freedom to advance humanity through science, reason and cooperation.”

One report describes how two prominent British leftists tried to persuade Lennon to finance “a left-wing bookshop and reading room in London”, but Lennon gave them no money.

Another page states that there was “no certain proof” that Lennon had provided money “for subversive purposes.”

Wiener told the L.A. Times, “Today, we can see that the national security claims that the FBI has been making for 25 years were absurd from the beginning.”

Wiener had originally asked for the documents in 1981, a year after Lennon was killed.  The FBI originally provided some files showing how closely monitored he was from 1971-1972.  The rest were not given, for reasons of national security.  In addition, the Freedom of Information Act was declared to not apply.

Wiener sued the U.S. government and received some of the documents in 1997. In 2004, a judge ordered the FBI to hand over the remaining 10 pages.

“psiphon is a censorship circumvention solution that allows users to access blocked sites in countries where the Internet is censored. psiphon turns a regular home computer into a personal, encrypted server capable of retrieving and displaying web pages anywhere.”

“Activity on nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation’s Chinese Wikipedia site has skyrocketed since its release, which Internet users in China first started reporting on Nov. 10. Since then, the number of new users registering to contribute to the site has exceeded 1,200 a day, up from an average of 300 to 400 prior to the unblocking. The number of new articles posted daily has increased 75% from the week before, with the total now surpassing 100,000, according to the foundation.”

“National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.”

I’ve tried this before and it was great fun, just kiss your life goodbye as you try to write a novel in a month.

Wikipedia

Last week, Chinese-forums.com members discovered that the blocking of wikipedia has ended!

Hopefully Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft will learn that they don’t have to self-censor to get into China.

Search Engines Help Nonprofits Raise Funds, Get Publicity

“I found this article in techsoup and have started using the search engine at work daily. It’s such a great idea and I’m suprised it wasn’t around sooner!”

From the article:

“Two search engines offering such services are GoodSearch , which funnels 50 percent of its ad-generated revenue to various nonprofits each time one of their supporters types in a new search term, and Google, whose Grants program allows nonprofits to spread their messages to a wider audience by providing them with free advertisements that show up alongside Google search results.”

India has announced that they wanted to selectively censor some pages and that “Because of a technological error, the Internet providers went beyond what was expected of them which in turn resulted in the unfortunate blocking of all blogs.”

Well, today, the Indian Government has said that itwon’t ban bloggers. Free speech online can continue in India!