[E.O.M.S.]

Ledgends???

...As Steve Albini has just posted!

"Iain fell ill after a trip to Florida to visit his family and had to be hospitalized, where his condition worsened and he died Thursday morning. Although he had Pancreatic and Liver cancer, his death was ultimately caused by a pulmonary embolism as a complication of the cancer.

I went to Black Box, the beautiful studio he built in the French countryside in January, and while he was sick, he was in good spirits and essentially the same guy we've always known. From the conversation I had with Dave Odlum, who works and lives at Black Box, the doctors said every indication was that Iain's passing was peaceful.

There will be a funeral service on Friday, February 19.

Iain was a dear friend and mentor, and I consider him responsible for a good many of the best things that have ever happened to me. As is the case when someone important dies, I find it hard to imagine the world without him. Black Box survives as a testament and monument to Iain's imagination and perseverance. It's in the running for the best place on earth to make a record.

Requiescat in pace Iain."

@'Electrical Audio'

Pic courtey of

'The Power of Independent Trucking'

(Lots of music there too...)

Who the Hell Are Die Antwoord?

Olympic Luger from Republic of Georgia Dies After Crash During Training Run

A luge athlete from the Republic of Georgia, Nodar
Kumaritashvili, was killed in a crash in training on the
Olympic track at the Whistler Sliding Center on Friday, an
official at the track confirmed. Kumaritashvili lost control
of his sled near the end of his run, when he was moving at 88
miles an hour, and was propelled over the track wall into a
steel pole. Training was immediately suspended on the track,
which many competitors have said may be too fast and too
dangerous.

FACT SHEET – CONROY’S GREAT FIREWALL OF AUSTRALIA

What is the 'Clean Feed'?

The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and will not make anyone safer.
The filter will do almost nothing to prevent the people who are willfully making, trading, and accessing child sexual abuse material. This type of material is not distributed in the open and we need to fund police to continue to infiltrate and prosecute the groups of people responsible for creating and distributing such material.
The filter will not prevent children from accessing inappropriate material. The proposed category of censored sites will not be wide enough to provide assurances to parents. Parents will be much better served by installing one of the many voluntary filters that are currently available and ensuring that their children are adequately supervised and aware of risks they may face online.
The list of material to be banned includes much more than child sexual abuse material. The category of material that has been 'refused classification' includes websites about euthanasia, controversial movies such as 'Ken Park' and 'Baise-moi', and many games that are designed for people over 16 years of age.
Despite being almost universally condemned by the public, ISPs, State Governments, Media and censorship experts, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is determined to force this filter into your home.

An activist group that temporarily blocked access to key Australian government websites plans to continue its cyber attacks, the BBC has learned.

The group, known as Anonymous, was protesting against the Australian government's proposals to apply filters to the internet in the country.

A man claiming to be a representative of the group said that around 500 people were involved in the attack.

The method they are using is known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).

DDoS is illegal in many countries including the United Kingdom. There is no indication that the attack was carried out from within Britain. DDoS attacks typically call on machines in many different nations, making them hard to trace.

The sites were intermittently blocked on 10 and 11 February. The action has been condemned by various bodies including the Systems Administrators Guild of Australia (SAGE-AU) and Electronic Frontiers Australia.

"All it takes is a few people to basically send junk traffic to their websites which is causing them to be offline," the man, calling himself Coldblood, told BBC News.

"The people who are currently attacking (the government websites) are planning to keep doing it. It will probably keep happening until either they get bored or it gets sorted out."

The sites are currently back online but the domains of individual politicians, including that of Stephen Conroy (minister for broadband, communications and the digital economy), were among those targeted.

Web filters

Anonymous is protesting against Australia's plan to apply a country-wide filter to block certain content in 2011.

In trials already carried out the technology behind the filter has proved to be 100% effective in preventing access to designated sites.

The banned sites would be selected by an independent classifications body guided by public complaints, Senator Conroy has said.

He said the aim of the filter is to make the internet a safer place for Australian children.

Speaking to the BBC, Coldblood said that the activists did not support the creation of illegal content but that banning it would not tackle the issue.

"If something is illegal which is done on the internet the government should try and prosecute them," he said.

"If they ban it it will just appear somewhere again. What they really need to do is go after the people who are making this content."

The group consists of "a few thousand people" based all over the world Coldblood said.

They staged cyber attacks on Iran following the election protests and have publicly protested against the Scientology movement.

This was sparked after the Church of Scientology requested the removal of a clip from YouTube featuring Hollywood actor Tom Cruise.

"One of our main missions is against censorship on the internet," said Coldblood.

The group had not had any direct contact with the Australian government, he added.

SAGE-AU said the attack was "the wrong way to express disagreement with the proposed law."

"The impact of DOS attacks is frequently felt less by government agencies than by system administrators, many of them SAGE-AU members, who are responsible for managing websites and servers," continues a statement on its website.

YouTube in Australia

Senator Conroy has also contacted Google requesting that the company begins to filter YouTube content in the country.

Google says that while it complies with the laws of the individual countries in which it has a presence, it would only investigate and consider removing content after receiving a "valid legal request" about something already posted on the site.

"We first check that the request meets both the letter and spirit of the law, and we will seek to narrow it if the request is overly broad," said a spokesperson.

"YouTube is a platform for free expression. We have clear policies about what is allowed and not allowed on the site."

@'BBC'

One of the founders of the Pirate Bay is kicking off a venture that aims to help websites generate cash.

Called Flattr, the micropayments system revolves around members paying a fixed monthly fee.

At the end of each month that cash will be divided among participating sites a Flattr member wants to reward.

Members might want to reward a band that made a track they liked, the author of a story they enjoyed or a site that gave useful advice.

Participating sites will sport a Flattr button in the same way that many have clickable icons that let visitors send information to friends or refer something they find interesting to sites such as Digg and Redditt.

"The money you pay each month will be spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month," said Mr Sunde.

"We want to encourage people to share money as well as content," Mr Sunde told the BBC. "It's a test to see if this might be a working method for real micropayments."

The minimum Flattr wants people to pay each month is 2 euros (£1.73) but members can pay more if they want to.

"That way you have control over your monthly spending on content, and you can rather help many people than just a few," he said.

Many micropayment systems had not proved popular, he said, because they were too cumbersome to use regularly.

Mr Sunde said he hoped it proved popular among the vast number of niche sites run by passionate amateurs that have a small, dedicated audience but which struggle to cover their operating costs.

Initially, Flattr plans to take a 10% cut of any cash paid as an administration fee. But, said Mr Sunde, it hopes to push that percentage lower as people sign up.

"We're not really in this for becoming rich," he said. "We're doing it to change things and making people get money they never got before."

"I know that people are nice enough," he said. "People love things and they want to pay."

Flattr is currently in a closed trial but hopes to be ready to launch by the end of March 2010. It is seeking partners looking to generate some cash from their content.

Mr Sunde said the idea for Flattr came to him about five years ago but could not pursue it because of "other things that took massive amounts of time".

"I wanted to find an one-click way to pay for content," he said. "I wanted it to be based on the idea that different people have different financial situations," he told the BBC. "So doing it in a flat rate manner was the only way."

The "other things" included The Pirate Bay website that pointed people towards copyrighted content such as music tracks and videos. Mr Sunde and three other administrators of the site were pursued in Sweden's courts by film and video game makers.

In April 2009, the four were found guilty of aiding copyright theft and were sentenced to one year in prison and fined 2.7m euros (£2.35m). Final appeals from both sides of the case are due to be heard in early 2010.

@'BBC'

The Triffids were a 1980s Australian folk-pop band whose frontman, David McComb, died in 1999. On April 5, Domino will release Come Ride With Me... Wide Open Road: The Best of the Triffids, a career-spanning eight-disc box set, and a single-disc best-of called Wide Open Road: The Best of the Triffids. Also, the surviving members of the band will reunite and team up with some guests to pay McComb tribute at a few European shows in April.

BBC Persian Television is one of the channels being jammed by Iran

Three major international broadcasters have strongly condemned Iran for its "deliberate electronic interference" in their broadcasts.

The BBC, Deutsche Welle and Voice of America said the jamming began on Thursday as Iran marked the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.
They said Iran was broadcasting freely around the world while denying its own people programmes coming from outside.
Earlier, the US accused Iran of using a "near-total information blockade".
A state department spokesman said there were strong indications that the telephone network had been taken down, SMS messages blocked, and internet communication "throttled".
"Iran has attempted a near total information blockade," PJ Crowley said.

We will not stop broadcasting accurate and impartial news and current affairs into Iran

Joint statement by the BBC, Deutsche Welle and Voice of America

In pictures: Iran revolution rallies

Iran claims uranium 20% milestone

John Leyne on cyber wars

"It is clear that the Iranian government fears its own people."
White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs meanwhile said that the web giant, Google, and other internet service providers had been "unplugged" in Iran.
Reporters Without Borders says the blocking of Google's Gmail e-mail system takes the drive to control cyber-space to a new stage.
But the organisation claims that most Iranian internet users know how to sidestep censorship and access blocked websites.
Correspondents say a number of governments - notably China and Burma, as well as Iran - make strenuous efforts to block modern internet communications among their opponents.
'Accurate and impartial'
The BBC, Deutsche Welle and Voice of America said the Iranian authorities' jamming was affecting services on the Hotbird satellite, which covers audiences across Europe and the Middle East.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Tehran rally on 11
February 2010

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a rally Iran was now a "nuclear state"

These include BBC Persian Television, the Voice of America Television Channel in Persian and Radio Farda; and Deutsche Welle's Television and Radio services. BBC World News - the English-language channel - was also jammed.
"We condemn any jamming of these channels. It contravenes international agreements and is interfering with the free and open flow of international transmissions that are protected by international treaties," the broadcasters said in a joint statement.
"The Iranian authorities are using the same satellite services to broadcast freely around the world including broadcasts in English and Arabic; at the same time they are denying their own people programmes coming from the same satellites from the rest of the world," they added.

Footage said to show a policeman beating a protester

On Thursday, a day-long security clampdown in the Iranian capital Tehran succeeded in preventing large-scale opposition protests as the nation commemorated the Islamic Revolution.
The opposition turnout was dwarfed by huge crowds at the state-run celebrations in the centre of Tehran.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed the rally, saying Iran was now a "nuclear state" and had produced its first stock of 20% enriched uranium.
But the White House said the assertion was based more on politics than science.

@'BBC'

"Gun" (excerpt)

"Blue Collar" (excerpt)

With much buzz surrounding Gil Scott-Heron's new album, here's a half hour bootleg featuring four kicking tracks from a 1986 live show at the Glastonbury Festival, originally broadcast on the BBC. Here we capture GSH somewhere in the middle of his 12 year hiatus between "Moving Target" and "Spirits", but he's in fine voice and spirit.

Keyboardist Kim Jordan switches between synth and piano, and she contributes some particularly fine piano solos - she was a member of Gil's touring band for 12 years, also appearing on the live "Minister of Information" album and "Spirits", both in 1994.

Also appearing on those albums was the Turrentine-ish saxophonist Ron Holloway, who also played on "Moving Target" from which both "Blue Collar" and "Washington DC" appear live here. He went on to record some albums for Milestone in the 90s, including 1998's "Groove Update" which features GSH on new versions of "Three Miles Down" and "We Almost Lost Detroit". That album also featured drummer Rodney Youngs from here.

Joe Phillips' guitar adds a blues sensibility to the proceedings, occasionally rocking things out a little too much for me, but holding back (or held back) enough to not ruin things. Bassist Robbie Gordon played with GSH from 1978 until 1994. He released a solo album called "Still Growing" in 1996, which included an unusual straight-ahead acid jazz version of Gil's classic song "B-Movie".

Best anecdote about this gig comes from the blog Look on the Nice Side, and I quote :

"I once had a pee on a fence next to him at Glastonbury festival, right after he’d just come off stage. And when I asked him if he didn’t have a hospitality area backstage and his own posh toilets, he shrugged and sad, “Yeah man, but I like to pee with the people”.

TRACKS

01 'Gun'

02 'Washington DC'

03 'Blue Collar'

04 'Johannesburg'

MUSICIANS

Gil Scott-Heron - vocals, keyboards

Kim Jordan - keyboards

Joe Phillips - guitar

Robbie Gordon - bass

Ron Holloway - saxaphone

Rodney Youngs - drums

Larry MacDonald maybe on percussion....

Download links (WAV & mp3)

@'Never Enough Rhodes'

(Thanx Simon666)

My tuppence worth - is that it is SO good to see Gil Scott-Heron back on top of things (musically and I hope personally!)

I will never forget seeing him at Womadelaide in 1993 (I think) when his lateness coming on stage was really pissing off the mostly ignorant crowd, causing Andy Glitre (as the MC) to ask for calm saying that this is "Gil Scott-Heron, that we are talking about!" and as we all know the man is truly an original!

PS:

From a comment by Jamie just left over at 'Never Enough Rhodes':

"I was at this gig as a young, wide-eyed first-time Glastonbury festival-goer. I was 16 years old, I'd just left school two days previously and had just had the best weekend of my life up to that point. What this tape omits is that 'Johannesburg' was aborted initially due to the lack of crowd response. Gil had asked the crowd to sing along with the chorus and he'd explained, patiently, that if we didn't sing up he wasn't going to do it. Cue the first 'What's the word?' bit and a fairly lacklustre response from the crowd. Gil cut the band and gently mocked our poor singing. I remember him saying something along the lines of 'OK, I know you were probably too busy pulling on a joint and missed it but this time you've gotta sing up'. The next chant of 'JOHANNESBURG!' you can hear on the recording...."

Mehdi Saharkhiz (“onlymehdi”) talks with Diane Sawyer of ABC News about his use of YouTube to circulate information and images of post-election events in Iran: