Thursday, 15 April 2010

The disgusting lies printed in The Sun
It says:
“The Truth.
Some fans picked pockets of victims
Some fans urinated on the brave cops
Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life.”

Julian Assange interviewed by Stephen Colbert

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Julian Assange

www.colbertnation.com

Library of Congress: We're archiving every tweet ever made

Get ready for fame, tweeters of the world: the Library of Congress is archiving for posterity every public tweet made since the service went live back in 2006. Every. Single. Tweet.
The LOC announced the news, appropriately enough, on Twitter. Twitter isn't just about being pretentious and notifying the world about the contents of your lunch (though it's about those things too).
Matt Raymond, one the Library's official bloggers, notes that "important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election, and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter."
But even those billions of other tweets and retweets, the ones about how you just got back from the worlds' most epic jog or how you're sick at home with the crocodile flu or how your crappy Internet connection just went down again and you can't take it any more—those matter too.
There's been a turn toward historicism in academic circles over the last few decades, a turn that emphasizes not just official histories and novels but the diaries of women who never wrote for publication, or the oral histories of soldiers from the Civil War, or the letters written by a sawmill owner. The idea is to better understand the context of a time and place, to understand the way that all kinds of people thought and lived, and to get away from an older scholarship that privileged the productions of (usually) elite males.
The LoC's Twitter archive will provide a similar service, offering a social history of hipsters, geeks, nerds, and whatever Ashton Kutcher is. As Twitter continues its march into the mainstream, the service really will offer a real-time, unvarnished look at what's on people's minds.
Digital technologies pose a problem for the Library and other archival institutions, though. By making data so easy to generate and then record, they push archives to think hard about their missions and adapt to new technical challenges. While archiving the entire Web and all its changes is simply impossible, the Library of Congress has collected a curated, limited subset of Web content "since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000." Today, it has 167TB of Web data.
Raymond sums up the Library's goal: "In other words, if you’re looking for a place where important historical and other information in digital form should be preserved for the long haul, we’re it!"
People seem to agree that this is big news; as Raymond noted when I contacted him for details, "I'm already getting flooded. This is already our biggest re-tweeted tweet ever!"
So if you don't want history to remember that burrito you had for dinner last night (and its aftermath), tweet carefully—now it's for posterity.

Nate Anderson @'ars technica'

Congress to archive every tweet ever posted publicly

Banksy in LA

Film premiere photos

HERE

The best of times...

Free Downloads!

Download the second single off the new album Li(f)e, "Best of Times" (MP3)

Download the first song off the new album Li(f)e, "Slow Man" (MP3)

HERE

HA!

AIannucci

RT printed out the "Yes Wi-gan" poster. Taking it to tonight's Wigan Athletic game & try to get it on TV somehow. \\ any more volunteers? half a minute ago via UberTwitter

Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive -- ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow. 28 minutes ago via web

Music shoes

We Can't Let the Pope Decide Who's a Criminal

Armando Iannucci's #twitterforce to put Tory Big Society into action

David Cameron invoked the spirit of JFK to ask 'what you can do for your country', the Thick Of It creator is starting a police force.

Yesterday, political journalists were having fun with the Tories' invitation to join their government, asking for diplomatic postings to Caribbean islands and suchlike. (No word yet on whether my formerly very private wish to be Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster will be granted.)

Today it is the turn of the comedians: Jeremy Hardy has taken out his own appendix and Armando Iannucci is taking up the Tories' offer to run local public services with an attempt to organise his own police force for Wigan – a #twitterforce.

We will keep you updated with any developments in Iannucci's bottom-up power-to-the-people crime-fighting initiative.

@'The Guardian'

Art Depot Moscow 2006 - Free Jazz Ethno Festival

Musicians:
Piotr Rachoń, Gendos, Elena Belyaeva, Mazzoll, Jon Dobie & Shoji Hano

Absolutely fugn superb!!!
Is there a recording of this?

Wednesday, 14 April 2010

WTF??? (How can people take the Daily Mail seriously?)

Cancer danger of that night-time trip to the toilet

BOLLOX!!!

First arrest!

scribblesvurt @AIannucci first Wigan arrest! http://tweetphoto.com/18390224 #twitterforce
half a minute ago from web

#twitterforce: Print out & wear proudly

Live from Wigan

#twitterforce One of our volunteers is in Wigan now, but I need to see an arrest. http://tweetphoto.com/18389111 less than 5 seconds ago via web

AIannucci

#twitterforce. I need someone to perform a citizen's arrest in Wigan, with photo proof. They can choose our slogan.

I demand a recount LOL!

AIannucci

#twitterforce Well I liked 'Yes Wi-gan!' but yuou've voted for 'Things Are Going To Get Battered.' So we now have a constitutional crisis
2 minutes ago via web

The important vote

AIannucci >#twitterforce We need to vote on our slogan. Best 3 are 'Yes wi-gan!', 'Things Are Going To Get Battered' or 'A Fair Choice For Change.'

exilestreet

@AIannucci Can we do it? Yes Wigan!

Morning. If you've just joined us, 1000 of us chose to start our own police-force last night, and voted to police Wigan. #twitterforce

Thanx Martin/

"...just to say I love your blog , a little oasis of sanity on the interwebs!"

BNP play dress ups

It certainly seems the British National Party (BNP) will stoop to any level possible to portray some kind of image of being the caring party who are standing up for the rights of British people and British values. It now seems that Nick Griffin is to be flanked everywhere he goes by a man dressed in British Army uniform.

Nick Griffin Flanked By The BNP Soldier

But as ever with the BNP all is not as it would seem to be, the man dressed as a soldier is the BNP’s own Adam Walker who is also standing as an MP for the BNP in County Durham, so it would seem that Adam Walker doesn’t need to bother campaigning in County Durham as he is too busy pretending to be a British Soldier in Barking with Nick Griffin.

Adam Walker BNP Candidate for County Durham

Adam Walker is no stranger to the news himself having recently been sacked from his post as a teacher for posting racist comments on the internet during a lesson and is currently awaiting the outcome of a General Teaching Council which could strike Adam Walker off as a teacher, his brother Mark Walker also a BNP candidate was also sacked from his teaching position for a similar reason.

Asked if he was a real soldier, he admitted he wasn’t. “I’m wearing this uniform in solidarity with our boys in Afghanistan,” Walker said. Do we really need to see people pretending to be a soldier in order to show solidarity with our armed forces?.

Simply put this is a rather cheap stunt by the BNP to give the impression to the ordinary voters that the British Armed Forces actually support the BNP in any great numbers. The BNP also have ex-forces people standing as candidates for them, yet it seems even they didn’t want to be Nick Griffins soldier of the streets, at least they still show respect for the uniform.

Something for Adam Walker and the BNP to think about before he continues to strut around in a military uniform:

A quote from the Uniforms Act 1894, which is still very much in force:
3. Penalty for bringing contempt on uniform.
If any person not serving in Her Majesty’s Naval or Military Forces wears without Her Majesty’s permission the uniform of any of those forces, or any dress having the appearance or bearing any of the regimental or other distinctive marks of any such uniform, in such a manner or under such circumstances as to be likely to bring contempt upon that uniform, or employs any other person so to wear that uniform or dress, he shall be liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding [F3 level 3 on the standard scale], or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding one month.

@ Vote No To The BNP in 2010

Labour 1923 & 2010 VS Mao

Beneath the veneer of the Conservatives' people power

What these slick PR operators are really offering is deep cuts, lower taxes for the rich and sweeping Thatcherite privatisation

David Cameron's Conservatives are nothing if not accomplished PR professionals. And the Big Society theme running through today's manifesto launch is a brilliant presentational sleight of hand, which takes their political cross-dressing to new heights.

To hear Cameron and Hague carrying on this morning about people taking "collective" control of their own lives, the right to recall MPs, set up their own schools, elect police commissioners and create co-ops in the public sector, you could almost imagine the Tories had leap-frogged over Labour into Hugo Chavez land.

By any measure, it's a clever political branding exercise, which recognises the progressive political climate and gives a "people power" veneer to what — once you strip away the rhetoric and mood music — is in reality a classic Thatcherite anti-state programme for sweeping privatisation.

Who, after all, isn't frustrated by the corporate managerialism of public services and wouldn't be attracted by greater democratic involvement in how they're delivered (even if some balk, Oscar Wilde-style, at the committee meetings)? It's a seam Labour could have successfully mined for its own campaign if it had been a bit braver.

But look at the small print and the prospect of popular control turns out to be a mirage. Take "free" schools. It's not just that they'll be a marginal gimmick for better-off parents with sharp elbows to snaffle shrinking resources.

Through joint ventures and corporate chain sponsorship, they are also clearly intended to be part of a much wider privatisation of education — for profit, as Michael Gove made clear over the weekend. That will mean less control of schools and the curriculum for most parents than they have now.

Something similar applies to public sector co-ops – not a proposal the Tories are making for the private sector, of course, where they would have a hugely positive impact. And when it comes to MPs' recall, it turns out to be restricted to cases of "proven wrongdoing", rather than when electors simply demand a new representative.

For the rest, there were no significant new pledges today, no clarity on the cuts Cameron and George Osborne have already made clear will be faster and deeper than Labour's. Instead, the phoney war on national insurance was at full tilt and the commitment to concentrate the biggest tax giveaways (through raising the inheritance tax threshold to £1m) on the richest families in the country unswerving.

As in 1979, the 2010 Conservative manifesto has left out the most far-reaching changes a Tory government is likely to make. From what we know so far, those look to be the deepest spending cuts since the 1930s, lower taxes on the wealthy and the mass privatisation of public services.

Seumas Milne @'The Guardian'

China earthquake kills hundreds in Qinghai

Tory social care policies will hit the poor hardest

Anti-rape condom ready for SA World Cup

A South African doctor wants to distribute 30,000 free anti-rape condoms for women ahead of the football World Cup. Dr Sonnet Ehlers first developed the special condom five years ago and says it is now ready for widespread use.
The Rape-aXe, as it is called, is a condom women can insert themselves. The interior has tiny spines which, in case of rape, attach to the man's penis.
Dr Ehlers emphasizes that they do not draw blood, since this would increase the danger of HIV infection. However, they do cause a great deal of pain if the man tries to remove the condom. The condom has to be removed in hospital, she says, which means the rapist can immediately be arrested.
Critics argue that the Rape-aXe could work as a provocation and the rapist is likely to become more violent when he realises he has been trapped.
The anti-rape condom is not yet available in the shops in South Africa and has not yet been tried out on test subjects.

@'Radio Netherlands'

US government finally admits most piracy estimates are bogus

We've all seen the studies trumpeting massive losses to the US economy from piracy. One famous figure, used literally for decades by rightsholders and the government, said that 750,000 jobs and up to $250 billion a year could be lost in the US economy thanks to IP infringement. A couple years ago, we thoroughly debunked that figure. For years, Business Software Alliance reports on software piracy assumed that each illicit copy was a lost sale. And the MPAA's own commissioned study on movie piracy turned out to overstate collegiate downloading by a factor of three.

Can we trust any of these claims about piracy?

The US doesn't think so. In a new report out yesterday, the government's own internal watchdog took a close look at "efforts to quantify the economic effects of counterfeit and pirated goods." After examining all the data and consulting with numerous experts inside and outside of government, the Government Accountability Office concluded (PDF) that it is "difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts."

More specific studies that focus only on single industries don't fare much better because "the illicit nature of counterfeiting and piracy makes estimating the economic impact of IP infringements extremely difficult." And when it comes time to choose a substitution rate (how much of the infringing activity should be counted as a lost sale), we're left only with "assumptions... which can have enormous impacts on the resulting estimates."

The GAO then went on to slam three particular reports often linked to the government. They're all commonly cited, they're all bogus, and at least one is still being used officially.

Three commonly cited estimates of U.S. industry losses due to counterfeiting have been sourced to U.S. agencies, but cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology.
First, a number of industry, media, and government publications have cited an FBI estimate that U.S. businesses lose $200-$250 billion to counterfeiting on an annual basis. This estimate was contained in a 2002 FBI press release, but FBI officials told us that it has no record of source data or methodology for generating the estimate and that it cannot be corroborated.
Second, a 2002 CBP press release contained an estimate that U.S. businesses and industries lose $200 billion a year in revenue and 750,000 jobs due to counterfeits of merchandise. However, a CBP official stated that these figures are of uncertain origin, have been discredited, and are no longer used by CBP. A March 2009 CBP internal memo was circulated to inform staff not to use the figures. However, another entity within DHS continues to use them.
Third, the Motor and Equipment Manufacturers Association reported an estimate that the U.S. automotive parts industry has lost $3 billion in sales due to counterfeit goods and attributed the figure to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The OECD has also referenced this estimate in its report on counterfeiting and piracy, citing the association report that is sourced to the FTC. However, when we contacted FTC officials to substantiate the estimate, they were unable to locate any record or source of this estimate within its reports or archives, and officials could not recall the agency ever developing or using this estimate. These estimates attributed to FBI, CBP, and FTC continue to be referenced by various industry and government sources as evidence of the significance of the counterfeiting and piracy problem to the U.S. economy.

The GAO then sets its sights on several private industry reports. The Business Software Alliance claimed a loss of $9 billion to piracy in 2008, but its study "uses assumptions that have raised concerns among experts we interviewed, including the assumption of a one-to-one rate of substitution and questions on how the results from the surveyed countries are extrapolated to non-surveyed countries."

Next up was the MPAA, which has already publicly taken its lumps for that flawed 2005 survey we mentioned above. But even when you set aside the mistaken initial conclusion about collegiate downloading, the study still shouldn't be used by lawmakers; it's a black box.

"It is difficult, based on the information provided in the study, to determine how the authors handled key assumptions such as substitution rates and extrapolation from the survey sample to the broader population," says the GAO.

More than they bargained for

Why is the government even looking into this issue? It's all due to the PRO-IP Act, which passed under President Bush and has led President Obama to appoint an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator within the White House. Part of the IPEC's duties include gathering data on piracy and counterfeiting, and current IPEC Victoria Espinel is now rounding up that data. The GAO report is part of this process, and it certainly doesn't make industry estimates look compelling.

This is ironic for a bill that was backed by the big rightsholders; even its acronym, the PRO-IP Act, shows what it was supposed to do. But, by hauling the black art of "piracy surveys" into the light, the PRO-IP Act is forcing rightsholders to tone down some of their more specific and alarmist rhetoric.

The RIAA, MPAA and others have already asked Espinel to make Internet piracy her principal focus in order to "push back the tide of copyright theft."

What about all that data Espinel asked for, including detailed methodologies? The content industries basically punted, pointing to three surveys done by a single guy, Stephen Siwek of the Institute for Policy Innovation. GAO looked specifically at Siwek's work, all of which seeks to model effects of piracy on the entire US economy.

The government concluded that "most of the experts we interviewed" were reluctant to embrace Siwek's methodology; his approach comes from the Commerce Department, but it simply wasn't designed to measure what's being measured here. For instance, these studies ignore the obvious points that pirating goods leaves consumers with more disposable income, which is likely spent elsewhere in the economy. Effects on the economy as a whole, then, are terribly speculative and seem more likely to be simply redistributive.

None of this is to say that piracy and counterfeiting aren't real problems. The GAO accepts that the problem is "sizeable," but it also points out just how much bad data is used to produce these studies. Actual dollar figures and job loss numbers should be handled with extreme care and a good bit of skepticism; the GAO also noted that numerous experts told it that "there were positive effects [from piracy on the economy] and they should be assessed as well."

This is a helpful, level-headed review from the GAO, one that (hopefully) brings some of the debates over digital infringement into saner territory.

Nate Anderson @'ars technica'

Steve Reid (January 29, 1944 – April 13, 2010) RIP

Drummer Steve Reid who had played with Miles Davis, Sun Ra, James Brown, Ornette Coleman, Fela Kuti and most recently alongside Four Tet's Kieren Hebden has died in New York. That was him on Martha & The Vandella's 'Dancing In The Street' too...

More @'LA Times'

Steve Reid & The Legendary Master Brotherhood
'Nova' & 'Rhythmatism' (1976)

@'Mangedisc'

So have eye...

鶏舎 = バックステージパス

The future of the net in Australia?

HERE

Jon Stewart - I salute you!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Open Carrier Discrimination

www.thedailyshow.com

Last night Jon Stewart's Daily Show featured a lengthy segment comparing open carry advocates to gay rights advocates.

Open carry advocates argue that the second amendment guarantees the right of individuals to openly carry a firearm in public. This would include, as the video demonstrates, having a firearm in the open as one goes to the bank, or Starbucks, or grocery stores. On the other hand gay rights advocates argue that the Constitution guarantees their right to marry, adopt, and protection against discriminatory practices. While the two groups likely do not have much overlap in their population they do share many traits as the video below demonstrates. These traits include:

(1) Both argue their rights are rooted in the U.S. Constitution though both would likely disagree with the other side's claim.

(2) Both face discrimination from others. Both groups claim that this discrimination comes from uneducated and hateful opposition groups.

(3) Both groups struggle with some who do not want to be "open" in the advocacy for their beliefs.

The humorous segment does a great job of demonstrating how two groups who probably dislike each other actually have a lot in common.

Ryan Witt @'examiner.com'