I wrote an article "1984 in the Making: Stealthy Invasion of Consumer Rights and Privacy by ICT Corporations"
and submitted it to a conference in Taiwan to be held Nov 11, 2007.
(They don't have an English page but I guess a suitable translation of the conference name could be
"Information Science and Society".)
I don't get a chance to talk but will have
a poster space to display my article,
or some picture related to it.
I spent an entire day to draw this picture using inkscape. I think it would be a pity if I show it only to the conference attendees. So here it is. I am grateful to find nice drawings from wikimedia, such as Butters, squirrel, and kiwi, to include in my drawing. My drawing never got good grades in the elementary school, and I had seldom drawn between then and 1996, when I started advocating FLOSS and the danger of proprietary file formats. By that time I was too old to learn good drawing. So please excuse the crude quality. I hope you enjoy the ideas in the drawing, especially the text in the Big Brother's underwear. You need to save the svg file and zoom in in inkscape in order to read it. But then you would give him a very good reason to shoot you using the DMCA gun. You have been warned. BTW, I feel a strong urge to draw a handcuff on the male genital instead of on the hand. because it really rings very well with Big Brother's command: "Thou Shalt not Reproduce without permission". But I don't have the guts to do so. :-) Any ideas or actual fixes to improve the drawing will be greatly appreciated. (Not the last one about reproduction please...I am serious.)
This picture is distributed under the creative-commons attribution share-alike license. If you find it useful, please feel free to improve on it (I would appreciate if you let me know) and/or show it to the poor souls who don't know that their computers report back to the Big Brother once every two weeks. It will take your voice, her voice, our voices together, to unlock the handcuffs that the Big Brother has placed on the consumers' hands.
