On the 24th of December russia will face another series of mass protests demanding fair (re)elections. The organizers of this movement concerns, that there might be some repressions from the authorities, who would try to obstruct the access to independent sources of information.
The Pirate Party of Russia asks for help, to ensure with technical means the uninterruptible access to the main information website http://24dec.org/

What's needed?

• Mirroring Servers (that would mirror over ssh/rsync the static HTML content)

Many of you will know Minecraft. Various Pirate Parties have picked up Minecraft to use it as a tool of publicity, relaxation and teambuilding. Pirates around the world quickly jumped onto the train, and various Pirate Parties have been running MC servers for some time.

For you that don't know Minecraft, Minecraft is a sandbox retro game, where you have to mine resources, craft them into items, and use those items to build things. Various things have been built in Minecraft already, ranging from a Venator Star Destroyer in the PPNL Minecraft project, to a Stargate, and various other fantastic works of art. The biggest example is a person building a CPU in Minecraft, eventually causing him to get a job at a tech company.

As you may or may not be aware, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) are on their way to pass in the US. This would imply terrible consequences on free speech while imposing tyrannical conditions for web site providers like Diaspora servers or YouTube. The only reason for all this is clearly heavy lobbying of the copy monopolists that want people to pay for nothing: making copies that everyone can make at home.

Today, 20th of November, is election day in Spain. The new Prime Minister will be decided and probably the right-wing candidate Mariano Rajoy (PP) will win by a landslide, ousting the party in power since 2004 (PSOE). However, these elections are also important for the International Pirate movement, since they are the first general elections in Spain with Pirate candidates for both Congress and Senate.

And they're not only Pirates, but very exceptional candidates as well. For instance, the head for Barcelona's constituency is no other than Josep Jover. He is a famous lawyer in Spain for many reasons, but most notably because he managed to overturn in Brussels the Spanish digital tax: an arbitrary charge on all digital equipment, collected to be paid as a compensation to Spanish artists, as for their hypothetical losses due to what they call "piracy".

On November 9, 2011, President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev met with the Russian Internet community. The discussion included the entire Internet spectrum; bloggers, people involved in Internet projects, online media and movements, a number of celebrities and 3 Pirate Party representatives. Even though the President of Russia appears to be interested in gadgets, the change of copy law, Internet freedom, and Free Software implementation in schools and agencies, it was his first meeting with Internet activists to which the Pirate Party of Russia was invited.

Throughout the two hour meeting, the following Pirate topics were discussed:

More than seven months passed away since the last PPI General Assembly (GA) had taken place in Friedrichshafen, Germany. The time has come to arrange the 2012 GA, therefore, we call and kindly request for offers of hosting the next annual PPI GA. As all previous PPI conferences had been held within Europe, we strongly encourage especially the non-European Pirate Parties to send their offers. A list of requirements and more information on the conference can be found in wiki.