Thursday, 19 April 2012

Dear Deidre: what the hell do you know about web censorship?

Our communities in crisis

'Nobody comes to investigate why this is happening': Mowanjum community leader Gary Umbagai at the entrance to the town. Photo: Glenn Campbell
It came without warning, triggered by something as trivial as a teenage boy demanding that his brother hand over his mobile phone. It was the 16-year-old's birthday, and he was celebrating by drinking steadily all day, as he did most days. The tiff, really nothing more than a simple squabble between brothers, ended in the early hours of the next morning when the darkest of impulses overwhelmed the child.
An 8-year-old girl raised the alarm. She had sighted the boy's lifeless body hanging from a tree behind the church in the abandoned playground. After several hours police and emergency services arrived, conducted a brief investigation and had the body removed.
As the sun climbed into the sky, scores of children looked on in silence. Witnesses said the grieving and sobbing rolled through the tiny community of Mowanjum like a thick black cloud. In this one small place, just a 10 minute drive from the thriving mining hub of Derby in West Kimberley, there have been six deaths by suicide in six months.
Gary Umbagai, council chairman and mineworker, openly despairs about the rising death toll and community dysfunction. "There is something dreadfully wrong in our community, but what can we do?" Mowanjum and Derby he adds, have the highest youth suicide rates in Australia, possibly the world.
"There is a terrible crisis here, but nobody in authority except the police acts as if there is a crisis." The Age visited Mowanjum this month with the permission of the traditional owners and after being alerted to the community's desperate plight by health workers troubled by what they believe is chronic official indifference.
In January, a 20-year-old surrendered his life after his partner locked him out because he was drunk and violent. In March, a 44-year-old newly unemployed mineworker hanged himself. In yet another incident, a young girl vanished into the bush only to be found days later, also the victim of an apparent uncontrollable impulse after a relationship went wrong.
Umbagai says he has lost count of attempted suicides. A document obtained by The Age reveals that in a four-month period from July last year, 18 females and 22 males were admitted to the Derby hospital, for self-harm, attempted hanging, overdosing and suicidal thoughts. Most cases involved indigenous people and excessive alcohol consumption. The number of young Aboriginal people taking their own lives may be higher as some deaths, such as a recent road fatality, have been classified as accidental...

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Russell Skelton @'The Age'

Benjybars - Roots of Kode9 Mix

Download (WAV 639MB)
Kode9 - Sine of the Dub
Kode9 - Sub Kontinent
Kode9 - Spit
Kode9 - Swarm
Kode9 - Stalker
Kode9 - Dislokated
Kode9 - Fukkaz
Kode9 - Ping
Kode9 - Ghost Town
Kode9 - Curious
Deep Alpha - All Think (Kode9 Alphadub remix)
Kode9 - 9 Samurai
Burial - Distant Lights (Kode9 remix)
Massive Music - Find my Way (Kode9 remix)
The Bug - Skeng (Kode9 refix)
Kode9 - Den of Drumz
Kode9 - Stung
Dabrye feat Doom - Air (Kode9 remix)
James Yorkston - Woozy with Cider (Kode 9 remix)

Hyper-Deviation: Benji B VS Kode9

Former top MI6 officer attacks global war on drugs

A VERY interesting read

Crazy

Via

UPDATE:

This is NOT a direct quote from Kerouac but in fact an Apple ad inspired by him from 1997 and apparently - 'Using a Mac computer, if you open your applications and right click on the TextEdit application and select "Show Package Contents" Contents>Resources then open the file "Edit.icns" in the Preview application you will notice that this quote is used in the icon. It is part of the icon but isn't noticeable until the icon is blown up.'

Thanx to Stan for pointing this out.

However this is fugn bonkers...

‏ @AlexiMostrous

Sony release version of God Save The Queen to combat Universal's Sex Pistol re-release. Promoter asks "if you will please help Her Majesty".

???

Wikileaks, Assange & Defending Democracy (Live from Federation Square Melbourne)

Info

The online copyright war: the day the internet hit back at big media

A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that major media firms hate technology. They certainly fear it. Since Jack Valenti, the legendary film industry lobbyist, said in 1982 that the VCR was like the Boston Strangler, preparing to murder the innocents of Hollywood, they have viewed such advances as a Godzilla creature rising from the sea to threaten their existence.
In the past 30 years in the US, they have lobbied for 15 pieces of legislation aimed at tightening their grip on their content, as technology has moved ever faster to prise their fingers open.
In this seemingly never-ending battle, 18 January 2012 was a defining date, a day when the internet hit back. Mike Masnick, founder of TechDirt and one of Silicon Valley's most well-connected bloggers, remembers running through the corridors of the Senate in Washington, laptop open, desperately trying to find a Wi-Fi signal.
Around him was chaos. Amid a cacophony of phones, political interns were struggling to keep up with the calls and emails from angry people across the US and the world claiming Hollywood-backed legislation was about to break the internet and end its open culture forever. In an unprecedented day of action, Wikipedia and Reddit, a social news website, had gone offline in a protest organised by their communities of editors, and backed by thousands of other sites, large and small. Google had blacked out its logo in protest. Students around the world were bitching on Twitter that they couldn't get their homework done without Wikipedia. Even Kim Kardashian came out swinging.
One senator's office that Masnick visited calculated they had taken 3,000 calls. Within hours of the unprecedented assault, Sopa, the Stop Online Piracy Act, was dead and a sister act, Pipa, a neat acronym for the tortuously titled Protect IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) was sunk too. In Europe, the action buoyed up opponents of Acta, the US-backed international copyright treaty that has sparked protests across the continent. Countries including Bulgaria, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia have all refused to sign, arguing that Acta endangers freedom of speech and privacy, and the bill has stalled. But for how long? "The industry has this down cold," Masnick says. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Valenti's old stomping ground and one of the most powerful lobbying bodies in Washington, has emerged bruised from the battle, but few doubt it will rally.
There is widespread anger among leading media companies about the way the Sopa fight played out. The protest had many voices but there was no doubting whom the media executives blamed – Silicon Valley in general and Google in particular. President Barack Obama had "thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters", according to Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp empire includes the Fox studios. "Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them," Murdoch wrote on Twitter. "No wonder pouring millions into lobbying."
But trying to blame Google or even to cast this as a battle between Silicon Valley and Hollywood is to misrepresent a major shift in the media landscape, say those pushing for a more open internet...

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