Egypt in the 60's

The current state of play:

- MegaUpload - Closed.
- FileServe - Closing does not sell premium.
- FileJungle - Deleting files. Locked in the U.S..
- UploadStation - Locked in the U.S..
- FileSonic - the news is arbitrary (under FBI investigation).
- VideoBB - Closed! would disappear soon.
- Uploaded - Banned U.S. and the FBI went after the owners who are gone.
- FilePost - Deleting all material (so will leave executables, pdfs, txts)
- Videoz - closed and locked in the countries affiliated with the USA.
- 4shared - Deleting files with copyright and waits in line at the FBI.
- MediaFire - Called to testify in the next 90 days and it will open doors pro FBI
-Org torrent - could vanish with everything within 30 days "he is under criminal investigation"
- Network Share mIRC - awaiting the decision of the case to continue or terminate Torrente everything.
- Koshiki - operating 100% Japan will not join the SOUP / PIPA
- Shienko Box - 100% working china / korea will not join the SOUP / PIPA
- ShareX BR - group UOL / BOL / iG say they will join the SOUP / PIPA
Via

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Rick Falkvinge: the Swedish radical leading the fight over web freedoms

Rick Falkvinge, right, celebrates the election of Christian Engström, left, as an MEP in 2009 European parliament elections by hoisting a pirate flag over Stockholm. Photograph by Magnus Jönsson/PA

With his polished shoes, and formal three-piece pinstriped suit, Rick Falkvinge looks like the kind of man you might meet to discuss your tax affairs, or the finer points of your investment portfolio.
Not radical politics. Or illegal file-sharing. Or revolutionary e-currencies that may destroy the global banking system. Because, although sipping a soy latte in the Stockholm cafe that he calls his office, Falkvinge has the air of a successful corporate lawyer, he's actually the founder and chief ideologue of Europe's youngest, boldest, and fastest growing political movement: the Pirate party.
The Pirates are a political force that have come out of nowhere. Dreamed up by Falkvinge in 2006, they're an offshoot of the underground computer activist scene and champion digital transparency, freedom and access for all. In three years, they gained their first seat in the European parliament (they now have two) and became the largest party in Sweden for voters under 30. Since then they've gained political representation in Germany and swept large parts of Europe.
What they've done is to use technology in new ways to harness political power. Falkvinge describes how "we're online 24/7", how they operate in what he calls "the swarm" – nobody is in charge, and nobody can tell anybody else what to do – and how, essentially, they are the political embodiment of online activist culture.
The Pirates are geekdom gone mainstream and Falkvinge is the Julian Assange-style figurehead. A leading player in a fight for digital freedom that last week came to a dramatic head when the US Congress prepared to vote on the Stop Online Privacy Act (Sopa), and Wikipedia, supported by the likes of Google, led a 24-hour blackout of the internet.
The controversial legislation has, temporarily at least, been shelved, but Falkvinge is unequivocal about the gravity of the threat. The law would have given American courts the right to crack down on internet sites anywhere in the world and to monitor anybody's private communications. It is, he claims, nothing less than an attack on fundamental human rights.
"We're at an incredible crossroads right now. They're demanding the right to wiretap the entire population. It's unprecedented. This is a technology that can be used to give everybody a voice. But it can also be used to build a Big Brother society so dystopian that if someone had written a book about it in the 1950s, it would have been discarded as unrealistic."
The creeping attempts at legislation are down to the power of what he calls the "copyright monopoly", and although the US record industry and Hollywood studios view file-sharing sites as theft, and this week succeeded in having the founders of one site, Megaupload.com, charged with racketeering, Falkvinge is clear that it's no such thing.
"It's not theft. It's an infringement on a monopoly. If it was theft and it was property, we wouldn't need a copyright law, ordinary property laws would suffice." Nor does he have any truck with the argument that file-sharing hurts art and artists.
"It's just not true. Musicians earn 114% more since the advent of Napster. The average income per artist has risen 66%, with 28% more artists being able to make a living off their hobby. What is true is that there's an obsolete middle market of managers. And in a functioning market, they would just disappear."
But in any case, he says, it's not about the economy or creativity. "What it boils down to is a privileged elite who've had a monopoly on dictating the narrative. And suddenly they're losing it. We're at a point where this old corporate industry thinks that, in order to survive, it has to dismantle freedom of speech."
These are rights, he says, which the younger generation takes for granted and become incensed about when they are attacked.
"There's a complete disconnect between the way the younger generation understands technology and the way the older generation does. If you look at the record industry, particularly the British record industry, they don't call themselves the record industry but the 'music industry' or even just 'music'.
"So when the record industry is in a decline, they honestly think that music is in a decline, but it's not: 90% of music online isn't published through a label. There's more diversity than ever."
What isn't in any doubt is that the Pirates have appealed directly to young people. Falkvinge turned 40 yesterday and although he is of the first generation to have been brought up with computers – he got his first, a Commodore VIC-20 when he was eight – he's ancient for a Pirate party member.
"There are a few seniors, by which I mean people over 30, but the bulk is much, much younger. Honestly, if a member of a traditional party looked at our demographic, they wouldn't believe it. We are peaking at ages 18, 19."
And the issues which have made headlines this week, the attempts of lawmakers and the traditional, established industries to take on the new young upstarts of the digital age, are the ones which, he says, speak to the heart of this generation. "In the 1960s the buzzwords were peace and love. For this generation, it's openness and free speech. This generation has grown up being able to say anything to anybody. Letting ideas battle it out for themselves. And all of a sudden, corporations want to take that away. And 'offended' does not do their emotions justice."
Having taught himself how to code, Falkvinge set up his first software company aged 16, and calls himself "a first generation digital native". Although he's stepped down from day-to-day leadership of the Pirate party, and now operates as a self-styled "political evangelist", he certainly doesn't lack ambition. "Every 40 years, there's a new grassroots political movement," he says and traces a path between the rise of liberal parties in the 1890s, to the labour movement of the 1920s and 30s, the emergence of green politics in the 60s and the 70s, right up to the Pirate parties of today.
"Looking at the cycles of history, the time is right for a major new political wave. And the Pirate party is in 56 countries now. We had this smash success where we got into the European parliament in just three and a half years from founding. We became the largest party in that election for people under 30, just sweeping the floor with the most coveted demographic.
"The establishment didn't know what hit them."
In Germany last autumn, they gained major representation in the Berlin state parliament, and they're likely to achieve further success in Schleswig Holstein's elections in May.
"Where are we going?" Falkvinge asks rhetorically. "I think we are the next Greens."
That won't be seen as the hugest threat in Britain, I point out. But Britain is not Europe, and Falkvinge and the Pirates are ineffably European. There's more than a touch of Stieg Larsson to them. From the Scandi-cool roots, the computer hacking background of many of its members, and the underground nature of its support network, even up to its sexual politics. Falkvinge's Wikipedia entry describes him as "openly polyamorous".
What does that mean? "It means that I don't feel jealousy. I need to logically learn what it is. And I can be in love with several people at the same time and there's no conflict. And you know, in Sweden, this isn't a big issue."
Sexual libertarianism isn't an official Pirate policy, but "people in the Pirate party do tend to be more open to non-mainstream ideas. They are not as conformist as your average citizen."
The pinstripe suit is a bit of a cover, he admits. Look like a corporate lawyer. Act like a covert revolutionary. It's how to do politics, the pirate way.
Carole Cadwalladr  @'The Guardian'

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Leonard Cohen and Old Ideas

In a recent public conversation with fellow rock bard Jarvis Cocker about the new recording Old Ideas, Leonard Cohen answered the younger man's suggestion that his songs are "penitential hymns" (a phrase Cohen himself employs in his new song "Come Healing") with jocular humility. "I'm not sure what that means, to be honest," Cohen reportedly replied. He continued, "Who's to blame in this catastrophe? I never figured that out."
The catastrophe he mentions is life itself — a description Cohen probably picked up from a fictional character he admires, Zorba the Greek, who embraced the "full catastrophe" of a well-connected, joyfully physical existence. The Buddhist teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn has also borrowed it for a book title, which is relevant, since Cohen's writing is famously philosophical, connecting his Jewish heritage to years of Zen meditation and an enduring existentialist bent.
But this spiritual master is a sensualist, too: His artistry is grounded in the careful examination of how the body and the soul interact. Old Ideas, his 12th studio album, was recorded after a triumphant world tour that had Cohen performing three-hour shows night after night — no mean feat for a man in his late 70s. It throbs with that life, its verses rife with zingers and painful confessions, and its music sounds more richly varied than anything Cohen has done in years.
Its depth comes in the tenderness and refined passion Cohen brings to his thorough descriptions of being human — a state in which pain and failure dance with transcendence and bliss, as he growls in harmony with his angelic backup singers in the beautiful "Come Healing," "The heart beneath is teaching to the broken heart above."
Old Ideas provides plenty of new lines like that, worthy of a Quotable Cohen anthology. (My favorite right now is from the folksy waltz "Crazy to Love You": "Crazy has places to hide in that are deeper than any goodbye.") But what makes this album special is its sound, which steps back from the synthesizer-heavy arrangements dominant on Cohen's other late-period work and explores a range of styles, from countrypolitan twang to gypsy jazz to Dylanesque blues.
Bobby Zimmerman, in fact, is a clear reference point throughout Old Ideas. At times, it seems like a response to Time Out of Mind, the 1997 release that marked the beginning of Dylan's epic lion-in-winter phase. (That he was only 57 when he made it shows how long a pop star's old age can last.) Like that album, Old Ideas contemplates mortality in the bitter light of failed romance; it fearlessly broaches emotional extremes while still dropping the wisdom of an elder who should know better. "The Darkness," with its funky undertow, and "Banjo," an easy talking blues, are especially Dylanesque, with Cohen adding tartness to his own gravelly growl and his band getting into a loose Americana groove.
In the end, of course, Leonard Cohen remains his own man, with a unique sound that brings the temple to the cabaret and a sensibility balancing humor and profundity on the crystal stem of a glass filled with red wine of an ideal vintage. In "Going Home," whose words were recently featured in The New Yorker by poetry editor Paul Muldoon, Cohen's inner spirit pokes fun at his pop-star self: "He's a lazy bastard living in a suit," the enlightened voice says. But you know what? That suit still fits, and the cut is perfection.
Ann Powers @'npr'

Leonard Cohen – Old Ideas (2012 - Albumstream)

Tracklist:
1. Going Home
2. Amen
3. Show Me The Place
4. Darkness
5. Anyhow
6. Crazy To Love You
7. Come Healing
8. Banjo
9. Lullaby
10. Different Sides
STREAM

Rapidshare says:

Dear RapidShare fans,
You posted some comments on our wall today regarding the shutdown of Megaupload. There is no reason to be concerned. We distinguish ourselves from services like Megaupload in many major issues and we aren’t threatened in any way. One of the main differences between RapidShare and Megaupload is that we never wanted to escape from the legal access of any administration. RapidShare AG was founded in Switzerland, was always based at the address cited in the imprint and was always managed with an authentic name without any anonymous intermediary companies. The drastic measures against Megaupload were obviously seen as necessary by the FBI because the situation was different there.
We wish you a great time with RapidShare!

:)

LoveIsFreedom69 Liam 
@rupertmurdoch - Dear Murdoch. You are fucking old and going to die soon. Dont tell us kids what to think and feel anymore. Thanks