As part of our effort to share Austrian Economics with the world, we announced the first version of the Mises.org torrents in 2009, 2.0 in 2010, and 3.0 in 2011.  These torrents allow you to download the content on Mises.org for offline reading and sharing.

Version 4.0 is now available in a new user-friendly format. We have completely re-organized the files and focused on only including the books and media featured on the website. In addition to the books and media themselves, the torrent now includes links to purchase physical version of books and to the latest version of the file on Mises.org. Download them here: books (8.6) GB, media: (114 GB), and journals (4.3GB)

You will need a bittorrent client such as uTorrent if you don’t already have one to open these links.

HTTPS Everywhere is a web browser extension from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that encrypts your communications with many major websites. This makes it very difficult for third parties to track your online activity. Mises.org now has enhanced support for HTTPS Everywhere, so you can surf and shop on Mises.org using totally encrypted communications. (Read more about how this was done.)

Many of you have emailed the webmaster to ask about the software behind Mises.org. Mises.org runs a custom open-source content management system (CMS) based on Microsoft.Net. Anyone can follow the work, contribute code, or use it for their own site using the available documentation. If you are interested in contributing your technical skills, using the CMS for your own site or just learning more about how it works, read on.

The project started in 2004 when I created a new .Net-based site as the basis of future development. Mises.org has never had any full-time technical resources, so the website has always been cobbled together from bits and pieces of spare time and many different technologies. Over 15 years, we have accumulated much content, slowly transitioned to new technologies and usually done the bare minimum to keep everything running. According to ohloh, which calculates the cost of a software project based on the amount of source code, the value of the total time investment in Mises.org is over four million dollars. 16 people have made over 1500 separate contributions to the current site.

So what kind of functionality does the CMS provide? Let’s dive in:

All the management functionality can be accessed from the CMS admin home page, which links to the editors for different sections and integrates with third-party services:

It’s not necessary to use the manager home page, as logged-in admin users see an edit button which takes to the relevant admin page on every page on the site:

Clicking “Edit” takes you to the relevant content edit page:

Here is the user interface for editing a daily article:

Here is the complete page. Note the support for data templates, image upload (multiple sizes are automatically generated), and version history.

Here is the central page for the document/media manager. It’s one of the oldest sections and rather messy:

Here is the UI for editing documents such as books. Note the integration with our store and built-in file uploads:

The CMS knows to show different fields when you edit audio/visual content:

The “Page Content” editor is used for miscellaneous text sections and email on the site:

Here is the editor for the Mises Quotes:

The “Are you an Austrian?” quizzes:

The fellows database (there’s also one for staff):

The tagging system (it detects what Google keywords people used to get to pages and uses that results to suggest related information)

Media Categories:

The events calendar editor:

Registration forms:

Event registrations forms editor:

Periodical management UI (this is only a small fraction of it)

Ward Library:

Fundraising monitoring:

404 redirect mappings make sure that (in theory) the user is always redirected to the right page, even when the site design or technology changes.

Error logging:

Of course this is just the visible interface. Behind the scenes are automated services which organize and index files based on meta-data.

Editing supported file types:

Organization of books and media:

Finally, the user account management

As you can see, there’s a lot to the website – and this is only a fraction. If you’d like a more detailed look, you can grab a copy of the source code:

If you’re interested in learning more, join the MisesDev list.

You may have noticed the new literature pages that we launched last week. Do you like it?  How would you improve it? Please comment below.

Senator Al Franken is outraged that Carrier IQ is spying on smartphone users. He has accused the company of violating numerous federal wiretap statues and the lawsuits are already flying.

Skimming the media, one might presume that this villainous outfit sneaks onto people’s cell phones at night, monitors their every keystroke and text message and empties their bank accounts and announces their love affairs at the town square at the first opportunity.

The reality is a little more somber. The Carrier IQ software is installed on phones by cell phone carriers to report diagnostic information. While the potential scope of the software is troubling, it is only capable of recording the information that cell phone providers install on it. It seems to be that at worst, Carrier IQ can be blamed from providing the munitions – but it is the cell phone companies who pull the trigger.

But there are other troubling questions. The use of the carrier IQ software was never secret – while the details were usually glossed over, all carriers admit to collecting diagnostic information from their customers – they have to, in order to do their job. Why is a software and service vendor being blamed for providing services to carriers? No one is forcing people to use cell phones from a particular carrier or even to use a particular model with any carrier. At most, we can accuse carriers of not sufficiently disclosing the capability of their diagnostic tools. Is this really deserving of a Senatorial investigation?

I have a few thoughts on why this might be.

First, there are only a few carriers in the United States, who have much more control over devices and service contracts than most other countries. In Europe and Asia, for example, consumers pay full price for generic cell phones and pay relatively low fees for phone service. For example, in China (where I happen to live), one can buy an anonymous throw away phone number, a cheap cell phone and hundreds of minutes of talk time for about $30. By contrast, a typical Verizon or AT&T cell phone, comes with a two year contract and is heavily customized and locked down by the carrier. It is perhaps not surprising that people are who feel stuck with their carrier cry to the government for help.

Second, there is the widespread perception that telecommunications in the U.S. are closely monitored by a junta of corporations and government agencies, who spy on individuals secretly and with little or no constitutional protections. (This perception happens to be true.)

From these two facts, comes widespread suspicious of any activities which may by deemed as “spying” on users by corporations. Not of the government mind you, but corporations, as if AT&T makes billions in profits and customer goodwill from listening to your conversions.

Actually, the government does pay billions to corporations to spy on you, both for monitoring technologies and wiretap fees. So maybe the fears are not entirely unfounded. But surely people should recognize that without politicians to fund a huge government-industrial anti terrorist/IP pirate complex, and without highly-regulated government-granted monopolies of telecom services, spying on your customers would not be a huge profit center.

It gets worse. Senator Al Franken chairs the Senate’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law and is a co-sponsor of the COICA and PROTECT IP (SOPA) acts, which would create a censorship firewall around the USA in the name of protecting us from piracy and allow the government to seize any website without any due process whatsoever. He also voted twice to extend the Patriot Act – after many years of criticizing the Bush administration for the same. Furthermore, he is a leading champion of net neutrality – or ever stricter “fairness” rules for telecoms.

So, who is the greater threat to your privacy – the U.S. government or a small software company that provides diagnostics services for cell phones?

New torrent files are available for all of Mises.org (270 GB) and books only (8.6 GB). (The complete torrent includes the books.) For more information on Mises.org bittorrent dumps, see the original original announcement and the follow-up. Remember that if you downloaded a previous version, you can resume rather than start over. Also, you can choose to download any part of the torrent rather than all 270GB. (More on the Mises.org open-content movement.)

Please spread the word!

In the days when the Bell System had a monopoly on phone service, people used rotary phones asked an operator to connect them, and wireless calls were not even a gleam in Dick Tracy’s eye, the government began redistributing some of Bell’s profits to provide rural phone service to a nation of farmers. Nearly a century later, the government is still taxing telecoms – and then giving it right back to them (and more) in a complex system of taxes and subsidies in which telecoms route calls through rural areas in exchange for kickbacks from the FCC. The FCC seems have realized that the system is out of date and is “modernizing [the system] for the era of Steve Jobs and the internet future he imagined.”

It would be logical to assume that Steve Jobs would have advocated that the FCC end the taxes/subsidies, fire the bureaucrats, and stop stealing other people’s money. Right? Right?

From Wired: Defense Industry: Keep Paying Us or the Economy Dies

“If we are not allowed to steal money from companies that make things that people want and from the salaries of people who want to buy their products, then we will not be able to hire people to make things that no one wants to pay for.”

This argument relies on “studies” which use the broken window fallacy to obscure the essential aspect of government spending: the coercive redirection of resources from productive and voluntary production of values to unproductive and involuntary destruction of values.

If you are a programmer, database expert, web designer or artist, Mises.org could really use your help. Every day brings more traffic (1.4 million unique visitors per month) and more content to share with the world. There are hundreds of pending tasks for people with all sorts of technical skills. To get started, read this page then join the development list.

Dan Pallotta must be channelling Jeffrey Tucker because his HBR editorial “Steve Jobs, World’s Greatest Philanthropist” makes a very similar point. He does miss the next logical leap made by Jeff – what is true of Steve Jobs is true for all entrepreneurs. Still, it’s a brilliant and much-needed antidote to those who measure the value of a human live solely in terms of how much we sacrifice our values for others.

What’s important is how we use our time on this earth, not how conspicuously we give our money away. What’s important is the energy and courage we are willing to expend reversing entropy, battling cynicism, suffering and challenging mediocre minds, staring down those who would trample our dreams, taking a stand for magic, and advancing the potential of the human race.

On these scores, the world has no greater philanthropist than Steve Jobs. If ever a man contributed to humanity, here he is. And he has done it while battling cancer.

While the authorized tell-all biography of Steve Jobs is yet to be published, I don’t think anyone would argue that Steve Jobs is motivated by either money or the desire to “help” humanity as such. The product is an end in itself. It is not designed with the goal of making the biggest profit or giving the consumer exactly what he wants. Rather, his goal is to create something that fulfills his own values – and then leave it to the consumer to recognize the value proposition of his creation. That may not be a popular business philosophy, but it’s hard to argue with its success.

Combining Mises Daily, Literature, and Media authors:  http://mises.org/authors/

I often get emails asking “What design company do you guys use to manage this amazing website?”

While there are many great writers and speakers who contribute to the content on Mises.org, we have no full time developers or designers nor any big-time media agency behind our online presence.  There are just a few web developers and designers who volunteered their time to create the functionality of Mises.org.   You can follow their work here or join the development list to contribute yourself!

For those who prefer the old media interface, it is back at http://mises.org/media.aspx

Did you know that two significant events in spaceflight took place in 1969? The first was the first manned landing on the moon, on July 20, 1969. The second is a little less known. Buoyed by the success of the space program, President Nixon made the fateful decision to launch the Space Shuttle program in that same year.

The cost for the project was estimated to be about five billion dollars to deliver stuff to orbit at $118 per pound. The “space shuttle” was intended to fly much like a plane – cheap and easily serviced, with flights every few weeks and massive cargo capacity.

When the Shuttle was finally completed in 1981, the reality was a bit different. First, the shuttle was 20% too heavy, so it couldn’t actually deliver the military payloads it was designed to fly. That left the civilian market. Unfortunately, the actual cost was $27,000 per pound delivered to orbit. Finally, the overhaul after each flight actually took many months and cost $1.5 billion, making regular “shuttle” service impractical. Compounding the cost was the fact that the shuttle tends to explode with cargo and crew every decade or so, and thus costs years of idleness and a dozen billion or so in redesign costs. In other words, the program was a total failure before the shuttle ever got off the ground.

If a car maker tried to sell a car that cost 228 times what was promised, could fit only half the advertised passengers, and had to be refurbished after every drive, they might not do so well in the market, especially when a much cheaper alternative was available. The Soviet Soyuz launcher designed in 1965 costs under a tenth of the Shuttle and has now in fact replaced it.

When the government was faced with the same problem, it decided to “invent” a market for the shuttle instead. Thus came about thousands of useless space experiments and a useless $160 billion space station, which is scheduled to be demolished in 2016. In other cases, satellites which used to be launched by cheap expendable rockets were redirected to the shuttle, actually delaying the launch and ballooning the costs.

Finally, after 30 years of flying a 1970′s era design, the shuttle has flown its last. Imagine if other technologies had been likewise monopolized by the State. We’d still be driving rusty gas guzzlers with giant fins and after-burner tail lights, computing on enormous mainframes with punch cards, calling from home on rotary phones, and listening to music on LP’s. And forget about microwaves and calculators! (Of course, even these things were created by the market.)

The best hope for the next 30 year of spaceflight is that a private company such as SpaceX takes over. But with the government as their biggest customer, I wouldn’t plan a vacation to the moon just yet.

Craig Hockenberry writes at his blog how the coming of the Internet allowed developers to distribute their products online and take small software developers mainstream. Today, independent developers create many of the best-sellers for platforms such as Apple’s App Store.

But there is a dark cloud on the horizon:

But this expanded distribution is also putting our business at risk: there are people in this new market who claim a right to a part of our hard work. Either by patent or copyright infringement, developers are finding this new cost of litigation to be onerous.

The scary part is that these infringements can happen with any part of our products or websites: things that you’d never imagine being a violation of someone else’s intellectual property. It feels like coding in a mine field.

My fear is that It’s only a matter of time before developers find the risks and expenses prohibitive and retreat to the safety of a larger organization. We’ll be going back to square one.

A similar scenario is playing out in numerous industries, from books to music & movies to fashion.  Entrepreneurs in many industries are battling corporations and moochers who are trying to use the intellectual property regime to either strangle or leech from those trying to push civilization forward.

Periodically, people ask me how they can help Mises.org. I don’t mean financially, or academically, but how to improve the Mises.org website.

Actually, we could use a lot of help from people with the right skills. While it may seem that Mises.org is run by some giant shadowy corporate conglomerate on a huge budget, it turns out that most corporations actually are not fans of capitalism. So rather than a huge government-size organization, Mises.org is run by a small team of contractors and volunteers who barely have time to fight spam bots and spam blogs and help people reset their passwords. With our full-time jobs and all the distractions entailed in keeping the website going, it’s difficult to find time to create great features for the website for the million visitors who view over 2.7 million pages every month.

Why help Mises.org?

• Mises.org makes a difference for millions of people.  Every 24 hours people view 500,000 pages (and download 230GB) on Mises.org (see screenshot) and change their fundamental ideas about man, economy, and the State.
• Mises.org thinks long term.  Whereas politicians only care only about the next election,  lobbyists care about a few narrow issues, and (most) companies about the next few quarters,  Mises.org is building the groundwork for the next 50 years.  Our content is open, free, distributed globally and designed to influence academia and public debate on a fundamental level from unique, radical, and fundamental perspectives.

Here are some skills we could really use:

• Creative: Creative art and web designers who can create amazing new interfaces
• Tech Support: Technically competent tech-support kind of people
• Coders: .Net/C# programmers
• A/V media: Audio/visual media experts
• SysAdmins: System administrators for Windows and Linux
• Project Managers: “feature owners, ” cheerleaders, and organizers for the development effort
• Testers: People to test new features and track down bugs

Most people regard amateur radio is a very niche hobby performed in basements on equipment that hasn’t changed much during the last 100 years. But this wasn’t always the case. As Ars Technica reports, during the early 20th century, wireless radio was the latest in high tech and popular songs and plays were written about radio boys who provided critical communications links.

But it was not to last. Shortly after the Titanic disaster, many major newspapers accused “outside unrecognized stations” of spreading misinformation about the disaster. A few months later, The Radio Act of 1912 was passed, which for the first time imposed severe restrictions on non-commercrial operators. In 1927, the licensing requirements were extended to commercial operators as well. It later came out that the Senate Commerce Committee had the new law prepared well in advance and used the Titanic incident to gather public support for its passing. Of course, through all the regulations, the State was granted best frequencies and exempted from the licensing burden.

So was the Radio Act of 1912 motivated by a concern for public safety, a desire by corporate media to squeeze out amateur competitors, a government power grab over an emerging medium, or a legitimate technical problem? We’ll never know for sure, but it is interesting that from the earliest days of radio to FDR’s thought police, to today’s “wardrobe malfunctions,” regulations of the airwaves has been as much to do with controlling information as technical challenges.

Over the last few years, the Austrian school has emerged as a global phenomena, with Mises Institutes cropping up all over the world.

Now you might think that China would be the last place to find a group of free-marketers, but in fact not only does the webmaster of Mises.org live in Shanghai, but there is a lively and rapidly growing group of expats and locals who share many similar ideas and interests. If you’d like to join us, email us or apply to the Google Group.

Linkedin.com is the worlds largest professional networking website with over 90 million users worldwide, is also home to an active and lively Ludwig von Mises Institute Group.  First started in November 2007, the group’s membership began to swell as greater interest in sound economics reflected the economic calamity of our time.  The LvMI Group is now 1700 members strong and growing daily, with a membership that includes people from many different walks of life:  economists, politicians, financiers, students, and more.  It is a growing community allowing professionals all over the world to network and interact with like-minded Misesians.

Join today!

(Members with @mises.org and @mises.com email address are automatically approved.)

Mises e-books now feature a “Google Preview” button so you can see the book in your browser – no PDF or EPUB reader needed!