Around the world, computer hackers are being portrayed as the newest brand of terrorists.  This is a story of a hacker named Kevin Mitnick, imprisoned without bail for nearly five years.  Freedom Downtime tries to uncover the reasons why the authorities are so scared of Mitnick as well as define what exactly he did.

Surprisingly, no real evidence is ever presented by the authorities to back up the sensationalist claims in mass media.  But when a Hollywood studio decides to make a movie about Mitnick’s life through the eyes of one of his accusers, hackers turn to activism to get their message out.

The Money Programme’s Fiona Bruce gains exclusive access to Bill Gates as he prepares to step down from full-time involvement with Microsoft, the company he helped found. Gates’s company has changed the world, but he’s a controversial figure, with his ruthless business leadership contributing to Microsoft being sued by the US government.

In the first in this four-part series, we chart the extraordinary rise of blogs, Wikipedia and YouTube, and trace an ongoing clash between the freedom the technology offers us, and our innate human desire to control and profit.

Exploring how the web affects politics and the struggle for power in both democractic and authoritarian states, and also how the internet has inspired freedom of speech via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Telling the inside story of the gold rush years of the dotcom bubble, and revealing how retailers such as Amazon learned great lessons.

This episode also charts how, out of the ashes, Google forged the business model that has come to dominate today’s web, offering a plethora of highly attractive, overtly free web services – including search, maps and video – that are in fact funded through a sophisticated and highly lucrative advertising system which trades on what we users look for.

Are we empowered, connected and enlightened with the world’s knowledge at our fingertips? Or distracted and addicted with shorter attention spans? Are our skittering brains bombarded and stupified by the ‘yuck and wow’ of the web? Is the web really changing us – the way we think, the way we behave, the way relate to each other? And is it for better or for worse?

Australian documentary from 2002 exploring the prominent hacker community, centered in Melbourne, Australia in the late 80s to early 1990. The storyline centres around the Australian teenagers going by the pseudonyms “Electron” and “Phoenix”, who were members of an elite computer hacking group called The Realm, and hacked into some of the most secure computer networks in the world, including those of the US Naval Research Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a government lab charged with the security of the US nuclear stockpile, and NASA.

The Codebreakers was aired on BBC World TV during May 2006. It investigates how poor countries are using FOSS applications for development, and includes stories and interviews from around the world.

Invention is rarely the isolated product of a lone scientist or engineer. Instead, every significant technology in the modern world is the product of a long history of numerous people and events. One of our most modern inventions, the Internet, is itself the result of decades of work and innovation by thousands of people who may have never dreamed of the possibility or potential of a global network.

One interesting and influential ancestor in the history of the Internet is radar. Hundreds of the best scientists and engineers in Britain and the U.S. worked during World War Two to develop radar systems to help them to defeat the Axis powers. Electronics technology was pushed to new heights to make the signals stronger, and early computing machines were developed to process the complex radar messages.

In the 1980’s, personal computers became a common fixture in homes and offices. Supplying business with computers and software grew into one of the biggest industries in less than a decade. Soon, networking became a profitable business for engineers previously restricted to networking mainframes.

Some of the engineers trained on the ARPAnet went out on their own to found some of the fastest growing high-tech companies in history. Bob Metcalfe, one of the pioneers of ARPAnet, developed a better way of networking personal computers together and founded 3Com.

The rise of the personal computer by Apple and IBM introduced the rest of the world to computing. At first, computers were the tools of technically inclined nerds, but new applications drew other people to the keyboard. With an affordable modem, people could connect with other computer enthusiasts and commercial online services. People were using the computer as Bush and Licklider had prophesized, as a medium to interact with other people.

A venerable institution of international collaboration was the setting for the major development in the history of the Internet. It began when Tim Berners-Lee, a computer programmer at CERN in Switzerland, got to play on a new NeXT workstation. The object-oriented operating system was an inspiration for a problem he was working on – how to distribute information across a diverse network of different computers and operating systems. He started working on a protocol very similar the “docuverse” described by Ted Nelson, but reduced it down to a minimal, working model.

The Machine That Changed the World is the longest, most comprehensive documentary about the history of computing ever produced, but since its release in 1992, it’s become virtually extinct. Out of print and never released online, the only remaining copies are VHS tapes floating around school libraries or in the homes of fans who dubbed the original shows when they aired.

Jointly produced by WGBH Boston and the BBC, it originally aired in the UK as The Dream Machine before its U.S. premiere in January 1992. Its broadcast was accompanied by a book co-written by the documentary’s producer Jon Palfreman.