Build Date: Mon Mar 30 19:30:13 2026 UTC
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
-- Benjamin Franklin
Cyberstrike Follow-Up
By El Snatcher
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. |
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