Cyberstrike Follow-Up
By El Snatcher
Editor
The BBC is running
an article
today, reminiscent of a Pigdog article posted over the weekend,
about the UK Cyberstrike against metered local calling, and Bob
Glickstein's call for a general strike of computer professionals
in the 33 countries that signed the Wassenaar agreement, an
international treaty that imposes new restrictions on
cryptographic software technology. The article also mentions
several other similar online "strikes" throughout
Europe, and a protest to free two imprisoned Chinese scientists.
The trend is clear: crazy online boycotts. And once again,
Pigdog Journal scoops.
(We also have no idea why this story hasn't crawled onto Slashdot yet. We sent this
information along to them earlier this weekend... I guess they're
more interested in the latest
Star Trek drivel.)
According to the BBC, the cyberstrike was a complete bust:
"The 'cyberstrike' on Sunday in protest at local call charges
in the UK appeared to have little impact on Net traffic. Most
users appeared to be ignoring the boycott call...."
The cyberstrike site has vanished, and the "Cyberstrike
Team" members have fled like raccoons from a dumpster, covering their
tracks with broken links. The
Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications (CUT), a more mainstream
organization protesting metered local calling in the UK, has
completely dropped its support of the cyberstrike, sighting that the
cyberstrike organizers have been ignoring email, and the cyberstrike
site is 404.
"....we support such an event in principle, and admire anyone
who actually stands up and does something, but are not happy with
the way the event has been run," said Alastair Scott,
Moderator of CUT, in
a recent posting on the uk.telecom USENET group.
CUT's official
position statement about the cyberstrike is on its web site.
There's no news yet on the outcome of Glickstein's call for a global
strike of computer professionals. As of this writing (12-15-1998
03:34) Glickstein's page promoting the strike is still up.
http://www.zanshin.com/~bobg/wassenaar-strike.html
Over the weekend Pigdog Journal asked several computer
professionals whether they intended to strike, and they all said
no.
|
