Thursday, 24 December 2009
Wednesday, 23 December 2009
My album(s) of the decade
So much great music in the past decade but I cannot choose between these two so both are #1!
Just the right amound of pop and noise!
Mousavi fired as head of Arts Institution
Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi has been fired as head of the Arts Institution.
The Council for Cultural Revolution, a high-ranking body chaired by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dismissed him on Tuesday night, state media said.
Mr Mousavi had run the institution, affiliated to the president's office, since its inception 11 years ago.
In recent days, hardliners have urged Iran's judiciary to put Mr Mousavi on trial for instigating unrest.
Mr Mousavi came second in the June election, and anger at the result saw mass protests in Tehran and other cities that led to thousands of arrests and some deaths.
Mr Mousavi has said the poll, that returned President Ahmadinejad to power, was fraudulent.
'Plainclothes men'
News of Mr Mousavi's sacking comes a day after his car was reportedly attacked as he travelled back to Tehran from the holy city of Qom, where he had joined tens of thousands for the funeral of a dissident cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri.
An earlier report suggested that the Arts Institution job was Mr Mousavi's only public post, but he also remains on the Expediency Council.This is seen a key body within the Iranian politics and at times a forum for reconciling legislation when debate in the legislature becomes deadlocked.
@'BBC'
@'BBC'
Iranian Cleric’s Office Reportedly Attacked
According to an Iranian opposition Web site, members of the Basij militia, which supports Iran’s government, attacked the office of a senior reformist cleric in Iran’s holy city of Qum on Tuesday, one day after a funeral for another dissident cleric there turned into an opposition protest.
Citing a report on the Web site Norooz News, Reuters and AFP said that militia members broke the windows of Grand Ayatollah Youssef Sanei’s office and beat up some of his associates.
Two days after June’s disputed presidential election, another opposition Web site, Peykeiran, reported that Ayatollah Sanei had issued a religious edict proclaiming that Mr. Ahmedinejad was “not the president” of Iran and that “it is forbidden to cooperate with his government.”
Following the death of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri this week, Ayatollah Sanei is the most senior cleric among Iran’s reformers. During Monday’s funeral for Ayatollah Montazeri, Reuters reported that some mourners carried photographs of Ayatollah Sanei, who was among the mourners.
The Norooz News report also said that the attackers posted photographs of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, in the reformist cleric’s office. According to Norooz, police officers stopped supporters of Ayatollah Sanei from defending the office...
Why Hollywood Security Is Better Than The Pentagon's
It sounds like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster: A group of insurgents hack into American military drones, using software they got off the Internet, according to The Wall Street Journal. But, for the benefit of that screenwriter likely pounding away right now to get his idea in first -- as well as for the general public -- what actually happened?
Essentially, three trends are coming together in war.
First is the growing use of unmanned systems, something I explore in my book "Wired for War." Just a few years ago, the U.S. military had no interest in unmanned systems. Indeed, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, we had only a handful of unmanned systems in the air and zero on the ground in the invasion force, none of them armed.
Today, we have more than 7,000 in the air, ranging from the 48-foot-long Predator to tiny ones that can fit in a backpack, and 12,000 on the ground, such as the Packbot and Talon systems that hunt down roadside bombs. Many of these systems are armed, giving new meaning to the term "killer app."
This 180-degree turn to robotics, however, often came in an ad-hoc manner. The back-end networks didn't perfectly fit with the wide variety of unmanned systems that were being plugged in.
Even more, the pressure was on to push the systems out as rapidly as possible, for very good reason. There was a war on, and these unmanned systems were proving to be far more useful to our troops than what the regular Pentagon acquisitions process had been providing.
One robotics company executive described how he couldn't even get his phone calls returned a few years ago. Now, he was told, "Make them as fast as you can."
Second, though, was a dash of arrogance. In not coming through the regular planning and purchasing system, many of the systems used proprietary software as well as commercial, off-the-shelf hardware. So many of the communications feeds going back and forth were poorly protected, and, in some cases, not even encrypted.
This was the case, for example, for some of the overhead surveillance video feeds that the unmanned systems were collecting and, in turn, beaming back both to command posts as well as to American patrols on the ground, who watch the feed off ROVER. (Akin to Dick Tracy's watch, this is a rugged video monitor a soldier can strap onto his or her arm or gear.)
The problem of the relatively open video feeds has been known for a while. Indeed, back during our operations in the Balkans, it was discovered that just about anyone in Eastern Europe with a satellite dish could watch live overhead footage of U.S. Special Operations forces going out on raids of suspected war criminals. One joker commented that it was harder to tap into the Disney Channel.
But the Pentagon assumed that foes in the Middle East wouldn't be smart enough to figure this out, and underestimated how quickly the technology to tap in to the feeds would advance, becoming cheaper and widely available. The problems were not fixed, and more and more of these relatively open systems were deployed.
Unfortunately, we all know what happens when we "assume" our enemies are dumb (they make something out of "u" and "me."). Using a $26 software package called Skygrabber, originally designed to allow customers to download movies and songs off the Internet (none of them pirated, of course), insurgents were able to tap into the various U.S. military video feeds, The Wall Street Journal reported. U.S. forces became aware of it after they captured a Shiite militia member in Iraq, whose laptop had files of the pirated footage saved on it.
To be clear, these insurgents were not able to take over control of the drones. They really weren't even doing "hacking" by the true meaning of the term. It was more like someone snooping in on a police radio scanner listening to unencrypted transmissions.
Some people used to listen to these scanners for entertainment, but for criminals, it proved useful to know what the police know and where they might be headed, which is why the police now encrypt these scanners.
Here too, it seems more likely the insurgents weren't watching themselves on the pirated video for amusement, but rather because the video feeds let them know what the U.S. military was monitoring. If I see that the U.S. military is watching a house with a station wagon out front, and I am sitting in a house with a station wagon out front, then I might well suspect that they are on to me.
This leads to the third trend -- the shifting domains of warfare. War is not merely about bullets and bombs, it is also becoming about bits and bytes. This was a relatively old security opening that wasn't fixed because we assumed it couldn't be exploited by insurgents or groups in the Middle East. What are our assumptions then about sophisticated, large-scale efforts funded by certain state powers on the Eurasian landmass "that shalt not be named"?
More importantly, not everyone is merely going to want to snoop, merely to learn what we know. Instead, we are entering an era of "battles of persuasion." In these, the goal is not to blow up the enemy's soldiers and weapons, as in traditional warfare, but to jam or disrupt their controls, change critical information they rely on to operate properly or even "persuade" them to do things contrary to the goals.
To use a Hollywood example, if Goose told Maverick in "Top Gun" to "recode all American F-14s fighters as Mig-29s," Tom Cruise would have just laughed his maniacal cackle and ignored him. A robotic Cruise would simply follow the instruction to recode the software and now view IceMan as a legitimate target to shoot down.
The U.S. military has responded to the reports with a mix of public calm and private consternation. Officials have said they are fixing the problem, such as by working to encrypt the video downlinks, and that this is a tempest in a teapot.
The first problem, though, is the scale. There are literally thousands of unmanned systems in the air (as well as the current ROVER models that only receive the unencrypted video feed) that will need to be retooled for encryption. This will be expensive and arduous, and all while the war goes on. There are also worries that layering the encryption on top of the system software will slow down the communications and make them hard for multiple users to access at once.
More important, though, is the ad-hoc, back-end nature of the response. It is far different from having your entire system design of both hardware and software take into account how to protect information efficiently but effectively, throughout the communications and operations chain.
The result could be that our patched systems may end up still less protected than the movies or video games you download at home on your DVR or X-Box.
The best explanation of this comes from arstechnica:
"Operating system vendors have built entire 'protected path' setups to guard audio and video all the way through the device chain. TVs and monitors now routinely use HDCP copy protection to secure their links over HDMI cables.
"Game consoles are packed with encryption schemes to prevent copied games from playing. Microsoft even goes out of its way to add encryption when Windows Media Center records unencrypted over-the-air TV content. Even the humble DVD, with its long-since-breached CSS encryption, offers more in the way of encryption."
In sum, unfortunately for would-be scriptwriters, the overall danger of this incident is certainly not up to the level of a Hollywood blockbuster. But, moving forward, it is also a bit worrisome for the rest of us that Hollywood had put more efforts into protecting the "Terminator" movies from illegal download than our military had in protecting its robotic systems at war today.
First is the growing use of unmanned systems, something I explore in my book "Wired for War." Just a few years ago, the U.S. military had no interest in unmanned systems. Indeed, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, we had only a handful of unmanned systems in the air and zero on the ground in the invasion force, none of them armed.
Today, we have more than 7,000 in the air, ranging from the 48-foot-long Predator to tiny ones that can fit in a backpack, and 12,000 on the ground, such as the Packbot and Talon systems that hunt down roadside bombs. Many of these systems are armed, giving new meaning to the term "killer app."
This 180-degree turn to robotics, however, often came in an ad-hoc manner. The back-end networks didn't perfectly fit with the wide variety of unmanned systems that were being plugged in.
Even more, the pressure was on to push the systems out as rapidly as possible, for very good reason. There was a war on, and these unmanned systems were proving to be far more useful to our troops than what the regular Pentagon acquisitions process had been providing.
One robotics company executive described how he couldn't even get his phone calls returned a few years ago. Now, he was told, "Make them as fast as you can."
Second, though, was a dash of arrogance. In not coming through the regular planning and purchasing system, many of the systems used proprietary software as well as commercial, off-the-shelf hardware. So many of the communications feeds going back and forth were poorly protected, and, in some cases, not even encrypted.
This was the case, for example, for some of the overhead surveillance video feeds that the unmanned systems were collecting and, in turn, beaming back both to command posts as well as to American patrols on the ground, who watch the feed off ROVER. (Akin to Dick Tracy's watch, this is a rugged video monitor a soldier can strap onto his or her arm or gear.)
The problem of the relatively open video feeds has been known for a while. Indeed, back during our operations in the Balkans, it was discovered that just about anyone in Eastern Europe with a satellite dish could watch live overhead footage of U.S. Special Operations forces going out on raids of suspected war criminals. One joker commented that it was harder to tap into the Disney Channel.
But the Pentagon assumed that foes in the Middle East wouldn't be smart enough to figure this out, and underestimated how quickly the technology to tap in to the feeds would advance, becoming cheaper and widely available. The problems were not fixed, and more and more of these relatively open systems were deployed.
Unfortunately, we all know what happens when we "assume" our enemies are dumb (they make something out of "u" and "me."). Using a $26 software package called Skygrabber, originally designed to allow customers to download movies and songs off the Internet (none of them pirated, of course), insurgents were able to tap into the various U.S. military video feeds, The Wall Street Journal reported. U.S. forces became aware of it after they captured a Shiite militia member in Iraq, whose laptop had files of the pirated footage saved on it.
To be clear, these insurgents were not able to take over control of the drones. They really weren't even doing "hacking" by the true meaning of the term. It was more like someone snooping in on a police radio scanner listening to unencrypted transmissions.
Some people used to listen to these scanners for entertainment, but for criminals, it proved useful to know what the police know and where they might be headed, which is why the police now encrypt these scanners.
Here too, it seems more likely the insurgents weren't watching themselves on the pirated video for amusement, but rather because the video feeds let them know what the U.S. military was monitoring. If I see that the U.S. military is watching a house with a station wagon out front, and I am sitting in a house with a station wagon out front, then I might well suspect that they are on to me.
This leads to the third trend -- the shifting domains of warfare. War is not merely about bullets and bombs, it is also becoming about bits and bytes. This was a relatively old security opening that wasn't fixed because we assumed it couldn't be exploited by insurgents or groups in the Middle East. What are our assumptions then about sophisticated, large-scale efforts funded by certain state powers on the Eurasian landmass "that shalt not be named"?
More importantly, not everyone is merely going to want to snoop, merely to learn what we know. Instead, we are entering an era of "battles of persuasion." In these, the goal is not to blow up the enemy's soldiers and weapons, as in traditional warfare, but to jam or disrupt their controls, change critical information they rely on to operate properly or even "persuade" them to do things contrary to the goals.
To use a Hollywood example, if Goose told Maverick in "Top Gun" to "recode all American F-14s fighters as Mig-29s," Tom Cruise would have just laughed his maniacal cackle and ignored him. A robotic Cruise would simply follow the instruction to recode the software and now view IceMan as a legitimate target to shoot down.
The U.S. military has responded to the reports with a mix of public calm and private consternation. Officials have said they are fixing the problem, such as by working to encrypt the video downlinks, and that this is a tempest in a teapot.
The first problem, though, is the scale. There are literally thousands of unmanned systems in the air (as well as the current ROVER models that only receive the unencrypted video feed) that will need to be retooled for encryption. This will be expensive and arduous, and all while the war goes on. There are also worries that layering the encryption on top of the system software will slow down the communications and make them hard for multiple users to access at once.
More important, though, is the ad-hoc, back-end nature of the response. It is far different from having your entire system design of both hardware and software take into account how to protect information efficiently but effectively, throughout the communications and operations chain.
The result could be that our patched systems may end up still less protected than the movies or video games you download at home on your DVR or X-Box.
The best explanation of this comes from arstechnica:
"Operating system vendors have built entire 'protected path' setups to guard audio and video all the way through the device chain. TVs and monitors now routinely use HDCP copy protection to secure their links over HDMI cables.
"Game consoles are packed with encryption schemes to prevent copied games from playing. Microsoft even goes out of its way to add encryption when Windows Media Center records unencrypted over-the-air TV content. Even the humble DVD, with its long-since-breached CSS encryption, offers more in the way of encryption."
In sum, unfortunately for would-be scriptwriters, the overall danger of this incident is certainly not up to the level of a Hollywood blockbuster. But, moving forward, it is also a bit worrisome for the rest of us that Hollywood had put more efforts into protecting the "Terminator" movies from illegal download than our military had in protecting its robotic systems at war today.
Art by Robert Gordon McHarg III
To celebrate the anniversary of Joe Strummer's death yesterday these signs were put up at Edgeware Road tube station in London the scene of many of his busking efforts.
GoTo Podcast 003: DubMyDub (December 2009)
Tracklist:
1. Revolutionary Dub Warriors – Irie Stepper (Adrian Sherwood Remix)
2. Jah Free – Casting Out
3. Full Frontal Dublotomy – Vulture Dub
4. Small Axe (aka The Ruts) – Target (Moat Mix; Unreleased Version)
5. Alpha & Omega – Big Up Dub
6. Iration Steppers – High Rise
7. Disciples – Prowling Lion
8. Alpha & Omega – Dub In The Ghetto
9. Iration Steppers – Scud Missile
10. Iration Steppas – International Footstep (Universal Mix)
11. Power Steppers – A Taste Of Bass
12. Michael Rose – No Burial (Manasseh Remix)
Tuesday, 22 December 2009
This is out there
If ever there was a record designed to test if yr stereo is working...
But this is good, one thing that FL are never is pompous!
But this is good, one thing that FL are never is pompous!
Sympathy for the devil worshipers
It's taken more than a full decade for the most widely demonized and vilified music scene in rock history -- the Norwegian black metal scene of the early to mid-'90s -- to get anything close to a fair treatment in a documentary film. In truth, the job isn't finished yet. As crafty and compelling as Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's "Until the Light Takes Us" is, it may go too far in its understandable desire to correct the bias and prejudice of mainstream journalism.
Black metal burst onto the international scene like an explosion of media catnip 16 or 17 years ago with a wave of church burnings in Norway and other Scandinavian countries that destroyed numerous historical landmarks, including the legendary Fantoft stave church, originally built in 1150. A few weeks after the fires started an articulate young musician named Varg Vikernes (aka Count Grishnackh, of the one-man band Burzum) discussed them with a reporter, suggesting that he knew who was responsible and elaborating a complicated litany of motives, from neo-paganism and anti-Christianity to Nordic nationalism and anti-Americanism.
Vikernes was immediately arrested and almost as quickly released; indeed, while he was later convicted of many other crimes, it remains unclear whether he started the Fantoft fire. Nonetheless, all his erudite self-taught ideology, much of it crazy but a lot of it surprisingly insightful, got almost instantly boiled down to one concept: Vikernes was a Satanist, and he and his fellow devil-worshipers were running amok in northern Europe.
This turned Oslo's tiny black metal scene -- three or four bands, a storefront and a basement record company -- into Pop Culture Public Enemy No. 1 and, of course, made millions of teenagers around the world yearn to sign up, without the slightest idea what they were signing up for. Copycat church attacks followed throughout the Northern Hemisphere, often accompanied with spray-painted pentacles and 666's and so forth, and whatever had once been distinctive about the Norwegian scene just became, in Vikernes' words, "a bunch of brain-dead heavy-metal guys."
But as Aites and Ewell's film reveals -- the two American filmmakers moved to Norway for several years to gain the trust of their subjects -- both the music and the ideology of black metal were always more interesting than that summary suggests. With its emphasis on coldness, darkness and hardness and its Nordic, often symphonic sense of space, the music of Vikernes' Burzum and such bands as Mayhem, Gorgoroth, Darkthrone and Satyricon is surprisingly varied and weird, and often doesn't sound much like rock at all.
Interweaving grainy home videos of early Oslo live shows and interviews with survivors of the scene (at least two of whom appear anonymously), Aites and Ewell depict a vibrant, adventurous and often ghoulishly self-destructive world, where conversations about the negative effects of Christianity, American-style democracy, NATO and commercial globalization sometimes blended into outright nihilism. Even before the church burnings began, Mayhem vocalist Pelle Ohlin (aka "Dead") lived up to his nickname by literally blowing his brains out with a shotgun. Before calling the police, one bandmate snapped a notorious photo of Ohlin's mutilated corpse, which later appeared on the cover of the Mayhem live album "Dawn of the Black Hearts." (Seriously, don't click that link unless you're sure you want to see it.)
If you believe the testimony of Vikernes, Darkthrone drummer Gylve Nagell (aka Fenriz) and Satyricon drummer Kjetil Haraldstad (aka Frost), no one in black metal ever wanted to get famous or reach a mass audience, let alone spark an international trend of kids in corpse paint and black overcoats. Against the changed landscape of multicultural 21st-century Europe, musicians like Fenriz and Frost -- who were never directly involved with Vikernes' quasi-terrorist campaign -- seem semi-reconciled to their fate as professional entertainers, scraping out a living deep into middle age from the stylized remnants of adolescent pain and anger.
Neither of those guys, likable and wounded characters that they are, has the star power or philosophical depth of Vikernes, whom the filmmakers interviewed extensively in the relatively posh surroundings of his Norwegian prison cell. (Vikernes was released last May, after "Until the Light Takes Us" was completed.) With a tidy little goatee and a short jailhouse haircut, he looks like an unusually gym-toned specimen of late-30s academic. Loquacious and funny, he discourses at length, and in excellent idiomatic English, on the many crimes of Christianity and American-style commercial capitalism, which he blames for uprooting indigenous religious cultures not just in the Nordic countries but all over the world. He makes the church fires sound almost innocuous, a slightly overzealous effort to make the public "wake up" to the evils of mainstream religion.
That's all fascinating as far as it goes, but to some degree Vikernes is playing his liberal American guests, coming off as a Robin Hood combination of anti-globalization activist, Situationist intellectual and neo-Norse acolyte of Odin and Thor. In fairness, Aites and Ewell pull back the curtain on Vikernes little by little, revealing first why he spent so long in prison (for a gruesome crime whose details he recounts without emotion) and then the precise nature of his objections to Christianity. Its repression of women and gay people? Um, not exactly. Its crushing of open dissent and heresy? Its toadying to despots of all stripes? No and no. But the fact that Christianity is a historical offshoot of Judaism -- now that's a problem.
Do Aites and Ewell owe the viewership a clearer explication of Vikernes' ties to white nationalist groups, his long record of troubling racial, sexual and religious rhetoric and his public flirtation with Nazi ideology? You won't learn this in the film, for instance, but Vikernes is viewed as the philosophical father of the musical-political subgenre called "National Socialist black metal," or NSBM. Or is it fairer to this disturbing and complicated figure to present him on his own terms, without recourse to prejudicial buzzwords? (For the record, Vikernes has not called himself a Nazi since the late '90s, preferring the invented term "Odalism," said to signify "paganism, traditional nationalism, racialism and environmentalism," along with an opposition to modern civilization in all its forms.)
I can see both sides of the argument, and I've long been interested in the "Ezra Pound problem," meaning the tendency of underground aesthetic rebels to become enmeshed in noxious political ideologies. Maybe it doesn't invalidate Vikernes' music in particular (his forthcoming post-prison album was originally to be called "The White God") or the entire anti-modernist, atavistic spirit of black metal to observe that it comes with some heavy and evil-smelling baggage. But I suspect it's worth, you know, actually noticing and talking about.
Varg Vikernes going around in circles trying to explain the name change of his upcoming album from 'The White God' to 'Belus'
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