The Inspirational Meanderings Of Gary Lachance

Just realized there's a "Stan" in Transnistria. Made my morning.

COMPUTER HELL.

"You can't wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act."

Shared link: Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations

"I believe in the principle declared at Nuremberg in 1945: "Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."

Shared link: Edward Snowden meets Amnesty and Human Rights Watch at Moscow airport – live coverage

It would appear that we're at a crossroads, my friends, wherein the internet could be either the key to our ultimate liberation, or the complete opposite.

For the past decade, I've been developing a bold new vision that could peacefully enable the former and it is nearly ready for release.

I hope you'll be inspired to participate and help me share it with the world. Whaddya say?

Shared link: US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet

In a presumably prophetic twist of fate, thirty years to the DAY, I have finally completed the rough draft of a Radical New Proposal that brings full-circle the foundational principles of the Free Software Movement; as first set forth by Richard Stallman on September 27th, 1983.

Gonna start sending it out for peer review tomorrow- PRIVATE MESSAGE ME if you'd like to review, my beautiful peers :)

Very stoked to shake the hand of fellow Decentralist and Founder of Open-Source Ecology Marcin Jakubowski! #OpenSynergy #Feast2013

I was photographing in Penn Station late last night when I heard screaming and loud music. A huge crowd of people came around the corner. Everyone was dressed in costumes and bright colors. One dude was dressed as a rabbit. Another had a giant, flashing, neon sword. Everyone was laughing, dancing, and singing, as very loud dance music blared from a portable sound system. "This is a new type of dance party!" someone shouted into a microphone, "Join us!" The participants fanned out through the station, encouraging onlookers to join them. "Don't just stand there!" said the man with the microphone, "This works better if everyone is dancing!" I approached two participants along the edge of the crowd. "What is this?" I asked. "We're not exactly sure," they answered. "We joined two hours ago, and still haven't quite figured it out." After a few more minutes of dancing in Penn Station, the dance party moved on, heading for another location...

Since being introduced to #Bitcoin back in the Summer of 2011, I've been an ardent believer and advocate. During the 2.5 years since, its value has exploded from $3 to $360.

No investment I'm aware of has begun to approach this meteoric rise in value and there are many reasons to believe that BTC will continue to appreciate exponentially.

Being a believer in all things #Decentralized, encouraging similarly-minded friends to invest in Bitcoin has been a longtime mission of mine, in hopes that doing so will grant them future financial freedom (and enable us to dedicate our energies to Cutting Loose and/or Decentralizing the world in funny new ways).

Anyhow, I've been sending round an email containing a ton of information on this esoteric new technology and if you are into #Decentralization / #OpenSource / #Futurism / #RiskingItAll, I would like to send it to you for consideration.

Message me with your email addy if interested please!

This new #Bitcoin video features some very clever tech-oriented businessmen explaining the staggering potential and possibilities of the crazy new phenomenon.

Key takeaways: -Think of it as "programmable money" .. what banks and Wall Street do can be done in code by Bitcoin, with no fees. Bitcoin makes banks and Wall Street obsolete. It can function as your own private, instantly transmittable, totally portable swiss bank account.

-Is it a "protocol", comparable to the TCP/IP protocol which is what the world wide web operates on (a standard that lets websites connect/be indexed/etc) ... this isn't just a "currency" or a "commodity", it's a new, math-based PROTOCOL that is going to revolutionize the world and shife the balance of wealth and power in ways unimaginable.

-If Bitcoin succeeds in replacing the global financial system, each bitcoin will be worth millions. The odds of this happen get better every day.

-This leads to the other unique property / revelation about Bitcoin. Unlike our standard money, which can only be divided to two decimal places, Bitcoin can be divided to an unlimited number of decimal places.. meaning that even if it does rise to $1,000,000 per coin, you could still easily transfer/spend tiny fractions of each coin without any issues.

Most people seem to not care about any of this stuff, or realize that #Decentralized currencies are going to re-shape our societies with greater effect than any other force in history. But mark my words, it is going to happen.

So! If you put any stock in anything I say, do a little research and snag yourself at least one bitcoin.. and shoot me a slice once you've retired on it ;)

#Coffee

Shared link: As Bitcoin hype settles down, real possibilities start to emerge

Knew I was waiting for something, and here it is.. the perfect day to release "Privacy Is The Enemy" :)

Shared link: Data Privacy Day - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world!

Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!

One year ago, the #Snowden revelations began, initiating a wave of calls for increased security and encryption across the internet, along with efforts to "rein-in" government surveillance; crystallizing today as the #ResetTheNet campaign.

Then as now, I believe that these efforts will not ultimately be sustainable or successful, that any expectation of privacy (in public or online) is at an end, and that the only rational, sustainable SOLUTION to this situation is a collective, voluntary transition to a new paradigm of Radical Transparency.

As severe vulnerabilities within #OpenSSL and #TrueCrypt demonstrate, even the most trusted privacy tools (which were recommended by Mr. Snowden himself) cannot be relied upon, and to operate online with the assumption that your activities can ever remain 100% private would be extremely unwise.

Further, regardless of all measures taken to improve your online privacy, with billions of audio-and-video-recording, location-tracking smartphones now blanketing the globe, the rise of near-perfect facial recognition technology, and omnipresent social networks, the lines dividing the offline world from the online are now blurred beyond recognition and unless you want to wear a mask all day, there's no dodging the reality that there can be no expectation of privacy in public ever again.

Every single corporate and government database out there is also eventually going to be breached and all information that has ever been digitized will someday be publicly available forever. All banking info. All medical info. All photos. All videos. All communications. Forever.

But although technology's advance is inexorable and the trend towards total public surveillance seems to be unstoppable, I've long believed that this can ultimately be spun to the advantage of everyone.. it's just going to take a radical shift in the way we operate.

With this in mind, I sat down last Fall for an entire month to research and compose an overarching vision that outlines how we could best spin this new technological reality to our advantage, ultimately resulting in a provocatively-titled, 30-page-long essay: "Privacy Is The Enemy".

If any of this stuff is of interest to you, I encourage you to check it out. It contains a good number of ideas that I haven't seen anywhere else and hundreds of links to fascinating new information concerning #Privacy, #Transparency, #Technology and the emergent paradigm that is #OpenSource / #Decentralization.

Make no mistake, the end of privacy isn't a concept I'm in love with and I couldn't care less about the private activities of others. I just find these topics extremely interesting and recognize that unless we get a large number of people on board with this "still-sounds-way-too-crazy/scary" concept and begin actively using these tools to create an Open society that empowers everyone, these same tools will inevitably be used to disempower everyone.

Technology is going to force us to choose between privacy and freedom. The sooner we come to terms with this, the better.