1/2/2003
Finnish parliament kills European Copyright Directive, the EU's version of the DMCA, which would have extended the reach of copyright laws in a most draconian fashion. The EUCD was mandated by the European parliament, which means that each EU member state is in theory obliged to pass it into law, no ifs or buts. (Isn't democracy a glorious thing?) So far, only Greece and Denmark have done so, and Finland has decided it's not having a bar of it. However, the battle isn't won yet; the EU is likely to apply economic pressure to force Finland to toe the line, and if not, there is the prospect of US trade sanctions. Though with any luck, this will hearten anti-EUCD efforts in other European states and the copyright absolutists will have an open revolt on their hands. (via Slashdot) ¶ [1 comment]
This looks interesting: DIBS, the Distributed Internet Backup System, a peer-to-peer system designed for data backup. Rather than sharing files, you share your surplus disk space for other users to store encrypted backups in; in return, they do the same for you. Which sounds promising, though I can see some potential problems with reliably getting things back. (How many redundant copies of data are backed up? What happens when peers disappear from the network?) Perhaps what this needs is some sort of "heartbeat contract" mechanism; where peers agree that if they don't communicate for a period (say, a week, or perhaps a month), the other peer has disappeared, and its disk space can be reclaimed for new backup partners. (via Slashdot) ¶ [comment]
America's last travelling freak show is about to close its doors. While there once were hundreds of sideshows in America, they are now an institution in decline, for various reasons. Retiring attractions are not being replaced as medical technology improves, television and tabloids have taken the place of freak shows in the public eye, and the institutions have also fallen victim of changing public morés (from the political incorrectness of staring at the differently challenged to the fact that you can see "tattooed ladies" and more walking down any street these days). Still, some of the "freaks" lament the passing of this institution, and scorn the desirability of being "normal":
"Thank God as a young boy I saw someone sticking a nail up their nose, or I would have a terrible life,'' said Apocalypse as he pulled a cigarette out of a metal Band-Aid tin. "You want to see a freak show? A guy sitting in a cubicle, staring into a computer all day, typing until he gets carpal tunnel syndrome, with a 'thank God it's Friday' coffee mug sitting on his desk. There's your freak show.''
Amen to that. (via bOING bOING) ¶ [comment]
31/1/2003
Another part of the Windows web browsing experience us Linux users miss out on: Malignant toolbar installs itself into Internet Exploiter, redirects home page/web searches to xupiter.com (owned by a shadowy Hungarian company, apparently) or the sites of businesses who paid them for placement (and who are, I would guess, unlikely to be highly ethical), and downloads pop-up gambling games behind your back. The toolbar resists attempts at uninstallation, and the programmers keep changing its code to keep one step ahead of anti-spyware tools.
Healan said some installations probably occurred when people clicked "OK" in a pop-up box without really knowing what they had agreed to, or when they meant to close the pop-up window.
Apparently SBS is airing a documentary on Wesley Willis tomorrow (Saturday) evening, at 10pm. I probably won't catch it as I'm DJing that night (and my TV reception is quite poor). (ta, Cos) ¶ [1 comment]
Horror train smash in NSW; 9 killed and many more injured as a peak-hour commuter train derailed between Sydney and Wollongong. And here we were thinking these sorts of things happened only in backward third-world countries like Egypt and England. ¶ [comment]
George W. Bush's Axis of Evil as extreme holiday destination.
North Korea was nowhere near as tough as I thought it would be, but Cuba was a real disappointment because it's so touristy.
Iraq should be popular as Egypt as a tourist destination; it's got the Garden of Eden, the first ever city, the Hanging Gardens, yet hardly anyone visits.
On the third day (in Iran) three guys burst in while we were talking to some students. They took us back to the hotel and turned our rooms over. When they found cameras, tapes and tourist visas, they decided that we were spies.
The amusing account of a journalist who listened to the entire 24-CD Throbbing Gristle box set in one sitting.
Worried that if I just sit around my flat listening to Throbbing Gristle all day, I might start baying myself, I venture outside. This proves to be the biggest error of judgment I have made since embarking on the project in the first place. It's difficult to know exactly what would be the ideal activity to engage in while Throbbing Gristle provide the soundtrack. But I can reveal that shopping in central London is not among them. A journey by Tube is even more like a descent into some netherworld of the damned than usual. The heaving crowds of Oxford Street, nerve- jangling at the best of times, are rendered nightmarish.
(via Cos) ¶ [4 comments]
Well, it looks like I'll be doing another DJ set this weekend; this time, it'll be on Saturday evening, at the Season/Squipplepippy gig. (Btw, isn't "Squipplepippy" a cool name for a band?) Right; time to buy a Discman that works properly. ¶ [comment]
The World's Oldest Multinational Corporation: The local branch office of the Catholic Church has attracted criticism after officially supporting a visit by an American psychologist who claims that homosexuality is an illness and can be cured.
Meanwhile, it has recently emerged that, on the other side of the world, a religious organisation has been rounding up single mothers, sexual abuse victims and orphans as well as girls who were too dangerously pretty to be allowed out, stripping them of their identities, forbidding them to speak, and forcing them into slavery, making a tidy profit of their labour. Is this in Saudi Arabia? Nigeria? Or perhaps one of the excesses of the Taliban? No; it's the work of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and its "Magdalene Laundries", the last of which closed way back in 1996. ¶ [3 comments]
30/1/2003
Beware the badly-translated Asian Two Towers bootleg DVD captions; some are oddly streetwise, like "Bring your pussy face to my ass" and "You gonna pick it up or what?"; and some, like Eomer saying "too long i wanted my sister" are just disturbing. (via MeFi) ¶ [comment]
The Melbourne Electronic Music Festival Film Festival programme looks interesting. Perhaps too biased towards the dance-music side of things, but should be interesting nonetheless. ¶ [comment]
Won't someone think of the children? Under new laws unveiled in Britain to protect children from the paedophile menace, having sex in one's private garden will be a crime, punishable by up to six months. Sex in one's home is still legal, however, even with the blinds open. If you're in Britain, now may be your last chance to legally have a bonk in your backyard (though wouldn't it be too cold for that sort of thing?) ¶ [comment]
The latest craze in Germany is kartoffelkanone, or "potato bazookas" made from drainage pipes which launch potatoes using ignited hairspray. There have already been several injuries.
A spokesman for the police in Brandenburg said: Woodland on Sundays echoes to the thump-thump of these guns. It is a growing social problem that needs to be tackled.
Could this be the European equivalent of backyard wrestling? (via Slashdot) ¶ [3 comments]
European journalist Timothy Garton Ash's survey of anti-Europeanism in America; Europeans are seen as "EU-nuchs" or "cheese-eating surrender monkeys"; cowardly, amoral, godless, unprincipled, weak, effeminate, petulant, hypocritical, anti-Semitic, of poor personal hygiene and monumentally ungrateful for America constantly saving their asses: (via Graham)
A study should be written on the sexual imagery of these stereotypes. If anti-American Europeans see "the Americans" as bullying cowboys, anti-European Americans see "the Europeans" as limp-wristed pansies... The sexual imagery even creeps into a more sophisticated account of AmericanEuropean differences, in an already influential Policy Review article by Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace entitled "Power and Weakness."[3] "Americans are from Mars," writes Kagan approvingly, "and Europeans are from Venus"echoing that famous book about relations between men and women, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
Anti-Americanism and anti-Europeanism are at opposite ends of the political scale. European anti-Americanism is mainly to be found on the left, American anti-Europeanism on the right. The most outspoken American Euro-bashers are neoconservatives using the same sort of combative rhetoric they have habitually deployed against American liberals. In fact, as Jonah Goldberg himself acknowledged to me, "the Europeans" are also a stalking-horse for liberals. So, I asked him, was Bill Clinton a European? "Yes," said Goldberg, "or at least, Clinton thinks like a European."
(Meanwhile, Tony Blair is seen as a honorary American, or at least as a member of the US State Department, and trying to tow Britain across the Atlantic, as it were. Already the renowned New Labour spin doctors who created "Cool Brittannia" are working with the Whitehouse to sell "Brand USA" to a skeptical (and Europeanised) British public. The modest proposal of a few years back that Britain leave the EU and join the United States is looking somewhat less absurd.) ¶ [comment]
The Kraftwerk gig was excellent. I showed up and made my way to the balcony, finding a spot with a good view of the stage, as David Thrussell was playing all sorts of weird tunes. Then the DJ stopped, and things were quiet for some minutes, except for the crowd yelling and stamping.
Then the Metro was filled with the sound of an old-fashioned speech synthesizer uttering bits of German, and the curtain rose, revealing four middle-aged men standing behind consoles (and looking not unlike characters from some Star Trek-like TV show).
They played Computerworld and the projection screen glowed cathode-ray green (older readers may remember this colour); they also did Pocket Calculator, with an animation of a calculator, their (quite topical) anti-nuclear protest song Radioactivity, a version of Neon Lights with a verse in German, and their one song about a pretty girl, The Model.
While they stayed at their workstations, playing keyboards and operating their laptops, visuals were projected on the screen behind them, ranging from the sorts of retrofuturistic computer graphics (lots of wireframes; remember when those were cool and shading was too expensive?) to old stock footage of the Tour de France, train and road travel across Europe and the like.
Their songs varied quite a bit from the recordings; the version of The Robots started with them transposing the main riff into different notes, and went on into some improvisation with new (yet quite fitting) synth lines.
(Oh yes, the consoles they were using looked pretty nifty, consisting of a keyboard of some sort, a foot pedal and a laptop. I wonder whether the keyboard part is an off-the-shelf instrument of some sort, or a box containing various controllers and such, and indeed whether the keyboard is not just a controller for software on the laptop, Kraftwerk being famed for their fondness for Cubase VST.)
29/1/2003
Gulf War 2: The Game, a semi-interactive animated projection of the likely events of the war. ¶ [1 comment]
28/1/2003
Right-wing radio commentator Rush Limbaugh denounces anti-war demonstrators as "Communists" and "anti-American"; radical leftists call for a boycott of his advertisers, demonstrating their commitment to pluralism and diversity of opinion. These are probably the same people who tout Cuba as a model democracy. (via FmH) ¶ [13 comments]
If you're in the US and you've ever used a peer-to-peer network and swapped copyrighted files, chances are pretty good you're guilty of a federal felony. It doesn't matter if you've forsworn Napster, uninstalled Kazaa and now are eagerly padding the record industry's bottom line by snapping up $15.99 CDs by the cartload. Be warned--you're what prosecutors like to think of as an unindicted federal felon.
The law even grants copyright holders the right to hand a "victim impact statement" to the judge at your trial, meaning you can expect an appearance from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) or the Business Software Alliance (BSA), depending on what kind of files were on your hard drive. You'll no longer have that hard drive, of course, because it'll have been seized by the FBI, and you'll be in jail.
The NET Act works in two ways: In general, violations are punishable by one year in prison, if the total value of the files exceeds $1,000; or, if the value tops $2,500, not more than five years in prison. Also, if someone logs on to a file-trading network and shares even one MP3 file without permission in "expectation" that others will do the same, full criminal penalties kick in automatically.
No peer-to-peer users have been prosecuted yet, but there is a lot of pressure from the RIAA on the Department of Justice now to begin such prosecutions. Which means some poor bastard is about to get crucified. (via FmH) ¶ [1 comment]
During the Spanish civil war, anarchists inspired by surrealist and abstract art developed torture cells based on non-figurative art and the psychological properties of shapes and colours:
Beds were placed at a 20 degree angle, making them near-impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6ft by 3ft cells was scattered with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent prisoners from walking backwards and forwards, according to the account of Laurencic's trial. The only option left to prisoners was staring at the walls, which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines and spirals which utilised tricks of colour, perspective and scale to cause mental confusion and distress. Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving.
The surrealistic cells were used to torture Francoist Fascists, as well as (of course) members of rival leftist factions and splinter groups. (via Charlie's Diary)
(If they built something like that these days, mind you, they could probably pass it off as the latest clubbing sensation and charge admission for it.) ¶ [2 comments]
A Californian reader of the subversive/paranoiac news site Unknown News recently noticed that his expensive broadband connection was unusually slow; he did a traceroute to another Californian site, and found that his traffic was routed through a US Government machine in Virginia. More experiments revealed that this was the case for all of his traffic.
The questions this raises are: (a) would there be an innocent explanation not involving surveillance (such as network balkanisation and/or everything going through a central interchange; isn't MAE East in Virginia, for example?), (b) if it is a surveillance operation, how plausible is it that the author's subversive and potentially un-American reading habits contributed to the rerouting? If he has a fixed IP address, they could filter packets by it, of course; if not, it may be the result of a Middle Eastern-looking flight student, or a Green Party activist, using his ISP? ¶ [1 comment]
Britain is considering withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights; Blair must have been hanging around with George "Treaties? We don't need no steenkin' treaties" Bush for too long.
(To give them credit, they intend to re-sign the bits of the treaty they don't object to (i.e., all but the clause about freedom from torture or degrading treatment) almost immediately.) (via Leviathan) ¶ [comment]
27/1/2003
The scandal of the Bloggies, the supposed Academy Awards of the weblog community; it turns out that in the nomination process, corruption and favouritism are rife, with judges voting as a bloc, voting for people they know and like rather than objectively judging weblogs, and predictably the A-List(tm) storming home every time. It appears that the Bloggies selection process is dominated by a small clique of "in" bloggers who use this to increase their and their friends' Whuffie. (via The Fix)
(And I was wondering why there wasn't one right-wing populist jingoblog among the nominations, despite the dominance of such blogs in the public eye (and if you're reading this, you're by definition not the public eye; sorry).)
And then there are the Anti-Bloggies, which are the Razzies to the Bloggies' Oscars (or the Ig Nobels to the Bloggies' Nobels, or something like that), but still tend to focus on Well-Known Blogging Personalities and the memes that pass between them.
(Tangent: one of the downsides of a reputation economy is that it tends to be riddled with cliques, with insiders getting bonus Whuffie just for whom they know, and things soon starting to resemble the sociology of a high school canteen or a goth club, where your status depends more on petty politics than on your individual qualities. Discuss.) ¶ [4 comments]
26/1/2003
The Pentagon's battle plan for Iraq will involve hitting it with 300-400 cruise missiles each day, in order to demoralise the population. This is more than the total number of cruise missiles launched in the first gulf war's entirety. All areas will be targeted; which makes official statements about attempting to "minimise civilian casualties" rather hard to believe. (See also: "we had to destroy the village to save it")
Kudos to the first person to explain satisfactory why this is not terrorism. (via Stumblings) ¶ [27 comments]
The Null Device has finally jumped on the desktop icon bandwagon; only some years after the standard came out of the bowels of Redmond. That's what happens when it's too hot to sleep or do anything productive.
¶ [comment]
Yesterday was apparently the second hottest day on record in Melbourne (something like 44 degrees, which is about 15 more than reasonable). One of those days when you realise that weather is an integral part of the human condition, and not just some trivial fact. It's being too bloody hot is every bit as real and significant as awareness of one's mortality, longing for spiritual transcendence, love, or any other yardstick one may define "being human" by. Which makes one wonder why it's only times when it's too bloody hot (or too bloody cold or too rainy or something) that people notice this fact, and usually write off weather as an inconsequential truism.
I heard today from a former Norwegian exchange student living in Australia that the weather features quite heavily in Norwegian literature, presumably because they have so much of it. For example, one novel published recently over there deals with a prolonged period of intense rain, during which everybody retreated to their homes and got really deeply into various interests and solitary activities; or something much to that effect.
Meanwhile, in English, weather is usually seen as a cliché; i.e., "nice weather we having" being the standard content-free conversation starter; a linguistic no-op, to all intents and purposes. ¶ [1 comment]
An interesting WIRED article about E-Gold, an anonymous, gold-based online payment system which can be used to buy everything from EFF memberships to ammunition to cheap books and flag-burning kits (not to mention shares in pyramid schemes and online gambling). It has a related denomination called the E-Dinar, based on an Islamic gold standard defined in the Koran, and for all the anarcho-libertarian kudos it gets, it owes its existence to a radical Islamic sufi sect sworn to the cause of eliminating the evil of paper currency and destroying capitalism:
E-dinar's British COO, Yahya Cattanach, and his family share a communal condo with Castiņeira in the comfortable Jumeirah district of Dubai. The company's Spanish president, Umar Ibrahim Vadillo, is also the president of the Islamic Mint. And finally, uniting all three men - as well as e-dinar's Swiss CEO, Malaysian CFO, and German CTO - is one crucial biographical datum: All are high-placed members of the Murabitun movement, a modern, Western offshoot of Sufi Islam and possibly the only religious sect in history whose defining article of faith is a financial theory.
A global gold-backed Islamic currency may not be so far-fetched. Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohammad (best known for berating Australia for its racist commitment to pluralism and intolerance of "Asian values" and such, and denouncing currency trading as a Jewish plot to destroy the economies of Muslim nations) has proposed a global "Islamic trading block" based around the gold-backed "Islamic dinar", which would instantly make E-Gold the currency of a big chunk of the world.
Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League, the pressure group best known for releasing a list of "hate symbols" including the "peace" and "anarchy" symbols and the Wiccan five-pointed star, has warned that E-Gold is a terrorist tool; then again, aren't open 802.11 access points and MP3 sharing networks also a terrorist tool? Is anything not a terrorist tool these days? (via vigilant.tv) ¶ [3 comments]
25/1/2003
A useful list of smutty phrases in French (cut out and keep in wallet or purse): (via MeFi)
English: "I don't give a shit!"
French: Je m'en bats les couilles
Literal translation: "I slap my balls against it!"
Not all that far away from "I unclog my nose towards you, sons of a window dresser!" ¶ [5 comments]
24/1/2003
Also via The Fix, an online poll for the top 10 albums of all time. It appears to be mostly voted for by angsty teenagers, judging by the selection of alternative there is there, and the fact that The Cure are seriously overrepresented in the top 100. Anyway, of my votes, only 1 got in the top 100 (The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead), or indeed the top 1000 (though Lush's Split and New Order's Power, Corruption and Lies are just under the top 1000. (My #1 choice, The Field Mice's Where'd You Learn To Kiss That Way? is in the 1,690th place.) ¶ [4 comments]
Salon Premium (which cheapskates can access for the cost of viewing a 4-page Flash ad) has an interesting case of six worst-case scenarios for Bush-era America; from Handmaid's Tale-style erosion of reproductive rights and grinding poverty for the least well off to environmental catastrophes and, of course, catastrophic blowback over the Middle East over Iraq and Bush's backing of Ariel Sharon.
"By insuring the health of the fetus over that of the woman, the goal is to give the fetus a higher legal status than the woman," Feldt says. "Again, it's women as vessels."
Six weeks later, an Indonesian Muslim living in Chicago, a quiet, industrious father of five enraged by the Palestinian expulsion and by images of Iraqi children killed by U.S. bombs in Baghdad shown again and again on Al-Jazeera TV, drives a rented truck filled with 2,000 pounds of fertilizer into the busiest downtown intersection at lunch hour and detonates it. At least 534 people are killed when a seven-story building collapses on top of an audience attending an outdoor concert.
(via The Fix) ¶ [1 comment]