Thailand blocking WikiLeaks

File photo shows Thais using an internet cafe in Bangkok. Thai authorities have used their emergency powers to block domestic access to the WikiLeaks whistleblower website on security grounds, a government official said Wednesday.

 Thai authorities have used their emergency powers to block domestic access to the WikiLeaks whistleblower website on security grounds, a government official said Wednesday.

The order came from the government unit set up to oversee the response to political unrest that rocked the nation's capital earlier this year, a spokeswoman for the Information and Communication Technology Ministry said.

"Access to this website has been temporarily suspended under the 2005 emergency decree," she said.

Thailand has removed tens of thousands of web pages from the Internet in recent years, mainly for insulting the monarchy, a serious crime punishable by up to 15 years in jail.

A special cyber crime agency has also been set up to stamp out online criticism of the royal family.

Emergency rule, enshrined in Thai law since 2005, was imposed across many parts of Thailand during two months of anti-government protests in Bangkok from mid-March that left 91 people dead, ending with a bloody army crackdown.

Authorities have used the decree, which remains in place in seven out of Thailand's 76 provinces including Bangkok, to arrest hundreds of suspects and silence anti-government media.

Wikileaks has been the focus of international attention in recent weeks after it released thousands of military documents on the conflict in Afghanistan.

These included claims of meetings between Pakistani spies and the Taliban and that civilian deaths caused by international forces were covered up.

They also included the names of some Afghan informants -- prompting US military claims that the leaks endangered lives.

@'Bangkok Post'

James Blackshaw

James Blackshaw’s on a mighty roll. He’s released a number of fine albums, but grab 2007’s The Cloud of Unknowing (especially), 2008’s piano-threaded Litany Of Echoes, and last year’s piano-and-string (and etc.) augmented The Glass Bead Game to hear the London guitar virtuoso/multi-instrumentalist at his best. Upping the ante, Blackshaw’s forthcoming eighth studio album All Is Falling, his second for Michael Gira’s Young God, is a swirling 45-minute song cycle that includes his first use of electric 12-string along with a heady mix of glockenspiel, piano, percussion, violin, counting voices, flute, alto saxophone, cello, etc. It’s his most orchestral work to date. It’s also best enjoyed in one full sitting, but things come to a head in “Part 7,” so you might as well dip your toe in during a climax (there are many). This is a 7-minute edit of the full 12-minute section.

James Blackshaw – All Is Falling (Part 7 Edit)
(Right click/save as)

Even if his press photos haven’t been updated, the label’s explanation of the shift from acoustic to electric, Dylan fans:The seeds of this project were sown in the past few years while James was serving as guest guitarist with a friend’s group on tour. This was the first time he’d played electric guitar in nearly a decade. Blackshaw got unexpected pleasure and inspiration from the sheer volume involved, the way the different old valve amps he’d rent for each show would perform, and having to be more pro-active in his fretting; he noted that while a 12-string acoustic guitar “sings” or “plays itself,” that an electric guitar needs a lot more coaxing. James became curious as to how a 12-string electric guitar might sound in his own work and bought an Italia Rimini and a little Fender Superchamp. The slimmer neck and the lighter string tension allowing him to play faster and to reach finger positions he’d previously found awkward. At the same time, James acquired a home-recording set up which allowed him to experiment with the arrangements for other instruments, and this became integral to how he wrote the piece with guitar taking a smaller role in the overall picture as a result.  Both factors had a huge impact on the new music he was composing as well as the influence of post-No Wave maximalist guitar composers Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. 

All Is Falling is out 8/24 via Young God. Speaking of uncompromising songwriters, the label’s also releasing the new James Jackson Toth/Wooden Wand album Death Seat in October. Gira produced it.

Brandon @'Stereogum'

Aswad - Dub Fire

   

Thanx to Holy Warbles!

MRI scanners inspire brainwave music

A trio of artists have taken the output of MRI brain scanners as the inspiration for a series of pieces that will be exhibited in Suffolk in September, 2010. Designer Matthias Gmachl, Warp Records composer Mira Calix and electronic musician Anna Meredith have created works for an exhibition called Brainwaves that mashes up science, visual art and sound.

Gmachl is part of design studio Loop.ph, and has created an interactive sculpture that responds visually to sound. He's honed in on the electrical noises made by the machine, and the piece considers how those sounds connect to noises within the brain itself.

Calix, on the other hand, examines the emotional experience of having your brain scanned. She has put together a piece with the help of Meredith and a string quartet which uses the sounds emitted by the scanner as a basis for music. Meredith has also composed a new work of her own which will be performed.

All three have been assisted by cognitive neuroscientist Prof. Vincent Walsh, who is the official Scientist in Residence at the Royal Academy of Music. He'll be mentoring the artists and offering a scientific perspective on the work, giving a talk before each concert starts on the background of the MRI.

Another source of inspiration will be scans of different classical musicians playing through different musical scores in their mind. These will be taken at UCL, and offer a visual resource for the artists, alongside the noise of the machine itself. 

Brainwaves will also include a series of talks between musicians and scientists on the topics of harmony, group, composition and frquencies.

If you'd like to attend, then you'll need to get yourself down to Aldeburgh's Hoffmann Building in Snape Maltings, Suffolk at 8pm on 18 September, 2010. Tickets cost £10 and are available from the venue's website.

Duncan Geere @'Wired'

The Secret Histories of Those @#$%ing Computer Symbols

♪♫ Johnny Warman - Screaming Jets

Never ever heard this song 'til a couple of minutes ago!

Thanx Stan!

The Insanity Of Music Licensing: In One Single Graphic

The history of music licensing is a messy one, but the short version is that every time some new technology or technological shift has come along in the past century, someone in the industry has freaked out that it was going to mean the end of the world for them, and demanded that "something" must be done. What was often done was to add another layer of licensing, sometimes compulsory, sometimes blanket licenses, sometimes something else. Basically, every time the market shifted, copyright law was effectively patched with changes more or less duct taped on to existing law. Over time, this has just gotten messier and messier -- especially as some of these rights "overlapped." Is an internet stream of a music file a performance or a broadcast? If someone bought the file, do they still need to pay for a performance right? And that's just a few of the very initial questions.

One company that has launched a music service recently passed around a graphic illustration of the insanity involved in licensing music for any sort of online music service:

What you see there is basically the result of a century or so of "bolting on" new licenses due to changes in the market, rather than any concerted effort to look at whether or not the underlying laws or licenses make sense. It's the result of massive regulatory capture, as industries unwilling to change just run to the gov't and demand to be compensated even as their old business models are going away. At what point do people say it's time to scrap this mess and start from scratch? 

@'techdirt'

Government Uses Social Networking Sites for More than Investigations

In the midst of recent controversies over Facebook’s privacy settings, it’s easy to forget how much personal information is available from other sources on the Internet. But the government remembers. EFF recently received a number of documents from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) highlighting the government’s ability to scour not only social networks, but record each and every corner of the Internet. These documents were released in the second of a series of government disclosures resulting from EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in which EFF, with the help of UC Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic, sought information on the procedures and guidelines employed by government agencies when conducting social network monitoring or investigations. As an example of the government’s substantial information collection capability, several documents [PDF] in the CIA’s disclosure discuss the CIA’s so-called Open Source Center, established in 2005, which has been collecting information from publicly accessible Internet sources such as blogs, chat rooms and social networking sites, in addition to monitoring radio and television programs. The Open Source Center’s website, opensource.gov, bills itself as the “US Government's premier provider of foreign open source intelligence.” It is accessible to almost 15,000 local, state, and federal government employees and offers products ranging from reports and analysis on publicly available information dating back to the mid-90s, video reports and internet clips, translations, and media mapping and hot spot analysis.

In the other document [PDF] included in this release, FBI emails reveal the FBI’s interest in the University of Arizona’s Dark Web Project, an attempt by computer scientists to “systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web.” Information in the document describes the Dark Web Project as especially effective in employing spiders to search Internet forums and find hidden web sites in the “corners of the Internet.” In addition to being able to search the Internet for content, the Dark Web Project is developing a tool called Writeprint that claims to help identify the creators of anonymous online content. The FBI emails reveal an interest in applying the Dark Web Project’s tools to the FBI’s own “operational analysis and exploitation of data, including web forums.”

As EFF and the Samuelson Clinic continue to seek information about law enforcement investigation techniques used on the Internet, we hope to learn more about how the government uses this information and especially how long it plans to keep it. In the meantime, however, it is clear that government investigators are collecting a wealth of information though the Internet in general and outside of the law enforcement context. It is also a good reminder that while social networks and other websites have privacy settings, the Internet does not. Stay tuned here for the next release.

Tim Wayne @'EFF'

Shamantis - J.Biebz (U Smile 800% slower)

   

Brilliant!!!
Update:
A hoax?

More Porn For The Blind

What computers have shown us about the mind

The Invisibles: Filmmakers give voice to brutalized migrants

The women and children are raped. They are kidnapped. Those who can not remember the names of their relatives in the United States with money, have the tips of their tongues cut off. Those who can not pay the kidnappers are tortured, chopped into pieces and their bodies burned in boiling pots of diesel oil. Some are still alive when they are thrown in.
The Mexican government knows this, but does nothing to stop it.
These are the “Invisibles.”
These are the stories of migrants traveling on foot from southern Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. They are traveling north through Mexico, risking their lives to help their families.
Their stories are told in “The Invisibles,” which premiered on the campus of the University of Arizona on Sunday afternoon.
With striking cinematography, and powerful stories, this is the reality of the death walk. The filmmakers execute the four short films in perfect style, weaving stories of struggle and tragedy, while revealing the face of humanity.
A 17-year-old tells of her family being robbed. Then she was raped. More than half of the women migrants are raped. A man in a hospital bed tells of being thrown from a train. Along the train route, kidnappers hide waiting to kidnap the migrants.
Why? As one young mother put it: There is no work at home and everything is expensive. When her children needed school supplies and she could not buy them, she made the decision to travel on foot from Central America, risking all for a job in the US.
Filmmaker Marc Silver answered questions about the film after Sunday afternoon’s screening. Silver described his early interest in resistance efforts, which led to the profound truth of the deaths of migrants in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Amnesty International learned of the project and is now sponsoring the effort to bring about education.
When asked if migrants were reluctant to tell their story, Silver said that they were glad to have an opportunity to tell their stories, to share the horror of the abuse they had suffered in Mexico.
The four-part “The Invisibles,” is co-directed by Silver and actor Gael Garcia Bernal, star of “The Motorcycle Diaries.” The four segments are part of a feature length film now being filmed which will include the story of migrants dying in the Sonoran Desert.

Silver said he was pleased with the cooperation he has received in southern Arizona. “No one wants to see more people die in the desert.”
When asked what could be done, Silver recommended helping Tucson-based humanitarian aid organizations, including No More Deaths, the Samaritans and those who put out water for migrants at Humane Borders.
But Silver said what is needed is systematic change, change that encompasses trade and economic changes.
The Spanish language four-part series, “The Invisibles,” with English subtitles, will be shown on Mexico television to bring awareness to the abuse and torture of migrants ongoing in Mexico.

Silver said telling these stories has been empowering to the migrants who suffer abuse. It is also empowering to those who hear their stories, stories of resilience and courage.
Silver said there are also acts of kindness by those who try and make a difference, like the volunteers in migrant shelters, who are also targeted with abuse for helping migrants.

Then, there are village women who throw bags of oranges or tortillas to those migrants riding on top of trains.

Brenda Norrell @'Censored News'

When Did We Become Mentally Modern?

SHINDIG #3