Keep on Hacking

By Crispin Sartwell

Within a few years, the internet as a scene of unfettered expression and reportage is likely to be over, to be the scene only of the expression and reportage of vicious, annoying mega-corporations.

Microsoft has, it seems, announced that its Internet Explorer web browser will no longer be offered as a stand-alone program, but will *always* come bundled in the Windows operating system. This is to pursue with even more useless arrogance the approach that brought on anti-trust suits in the first place. Meanwhile Netscape, Microsoft's biggest competitor in the browser market, is breathing its last.

The Linux open-source operating system - circulating freely around the net for years - is one of the few possibilities to maintain any freedom at the basic level of computing in the face of the horror that is Windows. Much to the irritation of almost everyone, the SCO Group has recently asserted ownership over the Linux code.

Justin Frankel, pioneer of software that allows people to share files easily, has resigned from AOL because they pulled a program he wrote called Waste, that allowed people to form small file-sharing communities.

All of these are attempts to restrict computing options, communication, flexibility, transparency, and expression.

Really the only possibility is to keep writing rebel code, keep hacking, keep fighting back.