Sunday, 12 June 2011
Guy Rundle - From Cold war to Cyberwar: Power, the State and the Wikileaks Effect
The first of this years Wednesday Lectures hosted by Raimond Gaita at Melbourne University (8/06/11)
The Wednesday Lectures: Raimond Gaita presents 'Power and Consent'
6:30 pm Wednesday 15 June 2011.
The Wednesday Lectures: Secrecy, Power and Democracy - Panel Discussion
6:30 pm Wednesday 22 June 2011.
The Wednesday Lectures: Kevin Heller presents 'Can the U.S. Prosecute WikiLeaks for Espionage? Should It?'
6:30 pm Wednesday 29 June 2011.
Forthcoming:
The Wednesday Lectures: Raimond Gaita presents 'Power and Consent' 6:30 pm Wednesday 15 June 2011.
The Wednesday Lectures: Secrecy, Power and Democracy - Panel Discussion 6:30 pm Wednesday 22 June 2011.
The Wednesday Lectures: Kevin Heller presents 'Can the U.S. Prosecute WikiLeaks for Espionage? Should It?' 6:30 pm Wednesday 29 June 2011.
Rimbaud's Wise Music
He died of cancer in a Marseilles hospital in 1891, still young — having in effect compressed what for others would have been a long lifetime of artistic revolution and exotic adventure into just 37 years. A deepened and more detailed acquaintance with the legend does not disappoint: he is one of those exceptional meteoric individuals whose very eruption and subsequent accomplishments remain dazzling and difficult to explain away.
Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 in Charleville, in the northeast of France close to the Belgian border, to a sour-tempered, repressively pious mother and a mostly absent soldier father who disappeared for good when Rimbaud was 6. He excelled in school, reading voraciously and retentively and regularly carrying off most of his grade’s year-end academic prizes. Early poems were written not just in French but sometimes in Latin and Greek and included a 60-line ode, dedicated (and sent) to Napoleon III’s young son, and a fanciful rendering of a math assignment.
He had announced in a letter written when he was only 16 that he intended to create an entirely new kind of poetry, written in an entirely new language, through a “rational derangement of all the senses,” and when, not yet 17, he made his first successful escape to Paris, financed by the older poet Paul Verlaine, he came prepared to change the world, or at least literature. He was immediately a colorful figure: the filthy, lice-infested, intermittently bewitching young rebel with large hands and feet, whose mission required scandalizing the conventional-minded and defying moral codes not only through his verse but through his rude, self-destructive and anarchical behavior; the brilliantly skillful and versatile poet not only of the occasional sentimental subject (orphans receiving gifts on New Year’s Day) but also of lovely scatological verse; the child-faced young innovator whose literary development evolved from poem to poem at lightning speed.
In Paris, he became close friends and soon lovers — openly gay behavior being very much a part of his project of self-exploration and defiance of society — with Verlaine, whose own poetry Rimbaud had already admired from a distance, with its transgression of traditional formal constraints including, shockingly, bridging the caesura in the alexandrine line. (Although this line occurred in Verlaine’s third book, Rimbaud may well also have been familiar with the first, “Poèmes saturniens,” or “Poems Under Saturn,” which was published in 1866 and has recently appeared in a deftly rhymed and metered new translation by Karl Kirchwey that offers it for the first time in English as an integral volume.) Their stormy relationship, which extended into Belgium and England and lasted a surprising length of time, was richly productive literarily on both sides...
Continue reading
Lydia Davis @'NY Times'
US defence chief blasts Europe over Nato
Robert Gates delivers a speech on entitled Reflections on the status and future of the transatlantic alliance, warning that Nato risks 'military irrelevance' unless spending is increased by members other than the US. Photograph: Jason Reed/AFP/Getty Images
The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, has warned that a new post-cold war generation of leaders in America could abandon Nato and 60 years of security guarantees to Europe, exasperated by Europe's failures of political will and the gaps in defence funding needed to keep the alliance alive.In a blistering attack on Europe - which he accused of complacency over international security - Gates predicted a Nato consigned to "military irrelevance" in a "dim if not dismal" future unless allies stepped up to the plate.
"If current trends in the decline of European defence capabilities are not halted and reversed, future US political leaders - those for whom the cold war was not the formative experience that it was for me - may not consider the return on America's investment in Nato worth the cost," Gates, a former CIA chief, warned.
Three weeks before standing down as Pentagon head and retiring from decades at the heart of the US security establishment, Gates used a 20-minute valedictory speech in Brussels to read the riot act to a stunned elite audience of European officers, diplomats, and officials.
Nato had degenerated into a "two-tiered" alliance of those willing to wage war and those only interested in "talking" and peacekeeping, he fumed in his bluntest warning to the Europeans in nearly five years as the Pentagon head.
Washington's waning commitment to European security could spell the death of the alliance, he said. The speech was laced with exasperation with and contempt for European defence spending cuts, inefficiencies, and botched planning.
The Libya mission was a case in point, Gates said, pointing out that the Anglo-French-led campaign was running out of munitions just weeks into operations against an insubstantial foe. The US had again had to come to the rescue of the Europeans in a campaign on Europe's shores and deemed to be of vital interest to the Europeans, he complained.
"The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country. Yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the US, once more, to make up the difference."
In March, all 28 Nato members had voted for the Libya mission, he said. "Less than half have participated, and fewer than a third have been willing to participate in the strike mission … Many of those allies sitting on the sidelines do so not because they do not want to participate, but simply because they can't. The military capabilities simply aren't there."
The air campaign had been designed to mount 300 sorties daily but was struggling to deliver 150, Gates added.
Away from the specifics of the current operations in Libya and Afghanistan, Gates charged Europe's leaders with lacking the political will to sustain Nato, complained bitterly about unending defence budget cuts, but conceded that the reduction in spending was probably irreversible.
The US share of Nato military spending had soared to 75%, much more than during the cold war heyday when Washington maintained hundreds of thousands of US troops across Europe, he said. The US public would not stand for this much longer.
Congress would rebel against spending "increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defence budgets", he said.
Noting he was 20 years older than Barack Obama, Gates said his peers' "emotional and historical attachment" to Nato was "ageing out".
"In the past, I've worried openly about Nato turning into a two-tiered alliance, between members who specialise in 'soft' humanitarian, development, peacekeeping, and talking tasks, and those conducting the 'hard' combat missions ... This is no longer a hypothetical worry. We are there today. And it is unacceptable."
Ian Traynor @'The Guardian'
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Little Feat Live at The Rainbow Theatre London (August 2, 1977)
Walking All Night
Fat Man In The Bathtub
Red Streamliner
Oh Atlanta
All That You Dream
Mercenary Territory
On Your Way Down
Skin It Back
Old Folks Boogie
Rock & Roll Doctor
Cold Cold Cold >
Dixie Chicken >
Tripe Face Boogie (fades out)
Download
BitTorrent.com and Archive.org Blacklisted as Pirate Sites by Major Advertiser
GroupM, one of the world’s leading advertising companies, has compiled a blacklist of more than 2,000 URLs in an attempt to prevent its clients’ ads from appearing on pirate websites. The blacklist includes many of the usual suspects such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, but it also features many perfectly legitimate websites including Archive.org and BitTorrent Inc’s site.
GroupM is a leading player in the advertising world, spending several billion dollars buying ads on websites each year. The company represents many top brands worldwide and has more than 17,000 employees and 400 offices.
In keeping with a company of its stature, GroupM is very diligent when it comes to the placement of their clients’ ads. To ensure ‘legit’ advertising placements, this week GroupM introduced a blacklist designed to prevent its clients’ ads from appearing on websites that distribute illegally obtained content.
“We’re serious about combating piracy and protecting our clients’ intellectual property as forcefully as we possibly can,” said GroupM North America CEO Rob Norman in the press release.
“Pirate sites are known to ‘domain hop,’ so we need to keep on top of the latest list of identified offenders as best as we possibly can in order to enforce this new policy to its fullest effect,” Norman added.
Indeed, companies that maintain a blacklist have to be on top of it, and compile the list with the utmost care. The last thing they want is to miss a potential pirate site, or indeed the opposite – include websites that don’t offer or link to unauthorized downloads at all.
GroupM was kind enough to share the full list of 2279 domains with TorrentFreak, so we could see for ourselves how accurate their list is. As we suspected, there’s still a lot of work to do for the advertising giant.
Among the ‘pirate’ websites that are currently listed we find the non-profit digital library Archive.org, which isn’t particularly known for offloading warez. Also listed is the website of BitTorrent Inc., the San Francisco based company which only offers its own software for download.
Neither of the above sites carry advertising at the moment, which limits the effects of the blacklist, but they are undoubtedly unhappy being branded as pirates.
“BitTorrent is simply a technology company that enables people to efficiently move large files over the Internet. We don’t distribute unauthorized content, though we do work with many independent artists to help distribute their works,” BitTorrent Inc’s Senior Director of Marketing Allison Wagda told TorrentFreak.
Aside from Archive.org and BitTorrent.com there are various other websites in the list which don’t offer or even link to copyrighted material. The file-sharing clients Frostwire, Emule, BitTornado, SoulSeek and Acquisition for example, the IRC client mIRC and the ‘legal’ torrent search engines Mininova, Publicdomaintorrents and YouTorrent.com.
Other websites that are not directly linked to piracy are the Russian Facebook Vkontakte, the video portal Suprnova.org and the Linux distro site Tuxdistro.com.
And then there are many file-hosting services such as RapidShare, YouSendit and the late Drop.io that are in the grey area to say the least. All are banned from serving ads. Those who take a good look at the list will see many websites that are not necessarily linked to copyright infringement, but are included nonetheless.
GroupM’s failed effort to compile a completely accurate anti-piracy blacklist once again shows the problem with these types of censorship; the collateral damage. Although one can certainly make a case for blocking many of the listed sites, it also puts several obviously non-infringing sites in the same corner.
Although there are problems, rather than hide behind a veil of secrecy, GroupM has been bold enough to allow their list into the open, a level of transparency rarely seen in these instances. GroupM was asked to comment on our findings, and we will add their response to the article when it comes in.
The Blacklist
Ernesto @'Torrent Freak'
Very interesting! As a point of reference in the two and a half years of doing this blog (all 13,800 posts,) I have only received a handful of DMCA takedown notices and most have been for links to legal downloads at the archive...
GroupM is a leading player in the advertising world, spending several billion dollars buying ads on websites each year. The company represents many top brands worldwide and has more than 17,000 employees and 400 offices.In keeping with a company of its stature, GroupM is very diligent when it comes to the placement of their clients’ ads. To ensure ‘legit’ advertising placements, this week GroupM introduced a blacklist designed to prevent its clients’ ads from appearing on websites that distribute illegally obtained content.
“We’re serious about combating piracy and protecting our clients’ intellectual property as forcefully as we possibly can,” said GroupM North America CEO Rob Norman in the press release.
“Pirate sites are known to ‘domain hop,’ so we need to keep on top of the latest list of identified offenders as best as we possibly can in order to enforce this new policy to its fullest effect,” Norman added.
Indeed, companies that maintain a blacklist have to be on top of it, and compile the list with the utmost care. The last thing they want is to miss a potential pirate site, or indeed the opposite – include websites that don’t offer or link to unauthorized downloads at all.
GroupM was kind enough to share the full list of 2279 domains with TorrentFreak, so we could see for ourselves how accurate their list is. As we suspected, there’s still a lot of work to do for the advertising giant.
Among the ‘pirate’ websites that are currently listed we find the non-profit digital library Archive.org, which isn’t particularly known for offloading warez. Also listed is the website of BitTorrent Inc., the San Francisco based company which only offers its own software for download.
Neither of the above sites carry advertising at the moment, which limits the effects of the blacklist, but they are undoubtedly unhappy being branded as pirates.
“BitTorrent is simply a technology company that enables people to efficiently move large files over the Internet. We don’t distribute unauthorized content, though we do work with many independent artists to help distribute their works,” BitTorrent Inc’s Senior Director of Marketing Allison Wagda told TorrentFreak.
Aside from Archive.org and BitTorrent.com there are various other websites in the list which don’t offer or even link to copyrighted material. The file-sharing clients Frostwire, Emule, BitTornado, SoulSeek and Acquisition for example, the IRC client mIRC and the ‘legal’ torrent search engines Mininova, Publicdomaintorrents and YouTorrent.com.
Other websites that are not directly linked to piracy are the Russian Facebook Vkontakte, the video portal Suprnova.org and the Linux distro site Tuxdistro.com.
And then there are many file-hosting services such as RapidShare, YouSendit and the late Drop.io that are in the grey area to say the least. All are banned from serving ads. Those who take a good look at the list will see many websites that are not necessarily linked to copyright infringement, but are included nonetheless.
GroupM’s failed effort to compile a completely accurate anti-piracy blacklist once again shows the problem with these types of censorship; the collateral damage. Although one can certainly make a case for blocking many of the listed sites, it also puts several obviously non-infringing sites in the same corner.
Although there are problems, rather than hide behind a veil of secrecy, GroupM has been bold enough to allow their list into the open, a level of transparency rarely seen in these instances. GroupM was asked to comment on our findings, and we will add their response to the article when it comes in.
The Blacklist
Ernesto @'Torrent Freak'
Very interesting! As a point of reference in the two and a half years of doing this blog (all 13,800 posts,) I have only received a handful of DMCA takedown notices and most have been for links to legal downloads at the archive...
Faust's Jean-Hervé Péron wearing his 'Exile' badge
(Click to enlarge)(Top) J-PH wearing his 'Exile' badge that I gave to him this afternoon at the chat put on at 3RRR.
(Bottom) Occasional 'Exile' photographer TimN with J-PH.
(Photos: Mona Street)
(BIG thank you for 'Rund ist schön ist rund...')
Ras Amerlock - Farther East (JTR EP04)
For over twenty years, Michael McCutcheon a.ka. Ras Amerlock has been refining his chosen profession of music. Whether performing with The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra as a classical solo violinist, or as a roots reggae dub entertainer, opening for acts such as Burning Spear; Ras lives to perform and give Jah the glory for all that is, in this life. Ras Amerlock's music is a reflection in sound of the Rastafarian way of life he as a Rasta in America embraces. His current releases are heavy "old school" style dubs aiming to reflect a variety of techniques within the realm of the dubstyle sound. Ras has performed throughout North America, Russia and Europe by the grace of Jah.
Prepare for a flashing hitchhiking trip through the sonar landscapes of dubby history with our NET-EP 04, where Ras Amerlock is about to give you an exclusive lift aboard his hidden space ship laboratory!
Feeling the ever-present aftermaths of such dub fundamentalists as Scientist, King Tubby or Lee Perry all the way through your journey you will wonder if the legendary Black Ark studio really dissolved into its own mythical ashes - or if it hasn't reintegrated back into a new orbit just now.
Ras Amerlock's crazy 3D-dubness experiments will take you far beyond the black hole of historical emulation. "Farther East" is rather an echo-driven time machine, jumping from a glorious past straight to an unknown future, conveying deep studies into bassline gravity, Zero-G-offbeat science and deadly snare-blasters underway. Leaving a long trail of green haze in its wake. Fasten your seatbelts and switch on your Sens-I-Mania life support systems!
(JAHTARI)
Farther East
Prayer 4 Dreadlion
Panic
Space Buccaneer Vs. The Slaughters
Dub Wise
End Game Dub
One From Tesla's Lab
Farther East (version)
DOWNLOAD WHOLE EP
GET SINGLE TRACKS
(41.3 MB) 33:22 min
http://www.myspace.com/rasamerlockstatemonrasta
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
