Obama and FCC Give Full Remote Control of Your TV Hardware to Corporations

U.S. President Barack Obama and his Federal Communications Commission have given media corporations the legal power to remotely disable functions and outputs in your television, DVD players, and content receivers. This decision means that when you buy equipment it will have a shut-off and control mechanism built into it allowing Warner Brothers or Disney to flip a switch that will turn off various parts of your equipment so that you cannot do certain things with what you are watching. A lot of equipment currently sitting in American households already has this circuitry built in and now it can be activated by the entertainment companies.  The Obama administration is going after more than television equipment though.  It’s putting this control stuff into computers and operating systems.

This is a new form of fascism.  Corporate fascism.  When the government allows total control of what the population is allowed to do with its own media equipment and content you have in place all the machinery of totalitarian control of expression, both artistic and journalistic.

Smash your TV and throw it over the fence onto the White House lawn.  Better yet, open Obama’s mouth up wide and shove your TV down his throat.  I’ve had just about enough of this corporate-owned jerk in the White House who is more concerned about finding his cigarettes than saving the Gulf of Mexico from an outrageous act of ‘accidental’ terrorism by British Petroleum.  Obama should have a swim in the new Gulf.  The man who vowed to stop all the secret torture and military clown tribunals and needless wars has inflicted more grotesque harm in these areas than his monkey-brained predecessor.  Obama’s teeth drip baby blood.  He’s a human predator drone.  And now he’s disabling our televisions sets.

No media company is going to shut off part of my television, I can tell you that now.  I don’t give a damn what President O says.  He’s done in 2012.  It doesn’t matter who runs against this nitwit in 2012.  I’m voting for them.  I’m too angry to give a crap anymore.  Let’s give Hillary a shot.

See, you don’t need a tea party to be angry about a guy who steals for Wall Street.  You can do it all by yourself.

Amazon Shows Us Why DRM Must Go

1984Last week, Amazon.com unwittingly dealt an enormous body blow to the concept of Digital Rights Management (DRM) by remotely deleting legally purchased copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from all Kindle ebook devices.  The excellent TeleRead site devoted to all things e-book and e-reader has a very well-considered post about the dangers of DRM and how we must protect ourselves against a world where customers don’t really end up owning digital copies of things they buy online.

When Amazon can connect to your Kindle device and blow away the book you bought, it means that you never really owned it at all.  You’re a renter.  Get used to it.  Almost any online service you can think of that sells you a book or a piece of music can come into your device and zap your stuff.  They consider it their right to do so.  We need laws that make our digital purchases our very own property and forbid anyone from modifying or deleting them for any reason.

The TeleRead article draws the connection between the ability of a company like Amazon to zap books and government censorship.  Since the technology can zap books, it will zap books because governments will consider it an effective means of censorship.