Thursday, 28 July 2011
The Daily Show segment that caused the UK ban
It's against the law to show clips from Parliament in a comedy setting in the UK. The same rule applies here in Australia too...
'Topiary' arrested
Officers from the Metropolitan Police Service’s Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) arrested a 19-year-old man in an intelligence-led operation today.
The announcement was made on the Metropolitan Police Website, and the arrest has been made as part of an “ongoing international investigation into the criminal activity of the so-called “hacktivist” groups Anonymous and LulzSec”. The statement also confirms that they believe the man they have is “Topiary”.
The suspect was arrested at a residential address in the Shetland Islands, off the north east coast of Scotland, and he is being transported to a police station in central London. His address is currently being searched.
Police are also searching another address in Lincolnshire, and a 17-year-old male is being interviewed under caution in connection with the inquiry, though he has not been arrested.
It’s thought that ‘Topiary’ is second-in-command at LulzSec, and the ‘public’ face of the hacktivist group. Topiary was notable for his eloquent writing, and it may surprise some to learn that the man suspected of being Topiary is still a teenager.
Topiary is thought to manage the main LulzSec Twitter account, which was last updated 5 hours ago, though he likely had a hand in most of the group’s announcements. He’s also thought to be well-known among hackers with links to more senior Anonymous members.
Up until now, very little has been known about his identity, though he has been referred to as ‘Daniel’ in some leaked transcripts in the past. And it seems that Topiary had wiped his Twitter feed too, leaving a single, solitary message, perhaps in anticipation of the net closing in on him:
We’ve written extensively about both LulzSec and Anonymous in recent months. LulzSec announced in June that it was to cease activities after 50 days, but the group was soon back in the fold. And just last week, we reported on LulzSec and Anonymous’ joint statement, which was directed at the FBI.
And today’s arrest has happened on the same day LulzSec and Anonymous issued another joint statement calling on people to boycott PayPal. “PayPal’s willingness to fold to legislation should be proof enough that they don’t deserve the customers they get. They do not deserve your business, and they do not deserve your respect.”
Its statement continued:
“In recent weeks, we’ve found ourselves outraged at the FBI’s willingness to arrest and threaten those who are involved in ethical, modern cyber operations. Law enforcement continues to push its ridiculous rules upon us – Anonymous “suspects” may face a fine of up to 500,000 USD with the addition of 15 years’ jail time, all for taking part in a historical activist movement. Many of the already-apprehended Anons are being charged with taking part in DDoS attacks against corrupt and greedy organizations, such as PayPal.”The LulzSec and Anonymous hacktivist groups seem to be spread far and wide. Last week we reported that the FBI had raided three people’s homes in New York, thought to be members of Anonymous. Shortly after, it was revealed that a 16-year old leading member of LulzSec, known as TFlow, had been taken into custody in London.
And at the time of writing, the Lulzsecurity website has been taken offline too: http://lulzsecurity.com/.
We’re sure there will be further statements from both LulzSec and Anonymous in due course, but it seems that the net is certainly closing in, and it will be interesting to see where the hacktivists go from here.
Paul Sawers @'TNW'
LulzSec hacking suspect 'Topiary' arrested
'Nevermind' – Deluxe Edition Tracklist
CD One
Original Album
'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
'In Bloom'
'Come As You Are’
'Breed'
'Lithium'
'Polly'
'Territorial Pissings'
'Drain You'
'Lounge Act'
'Stay Away'
'On A Plain'
'Something In The Way'
The B-Sides
'Even In His Youth'
'Aneurysm'
'Curmudgeon'
'D-7' live At The BBC
'Been A Son' live
'School' live
'Drain You' live
'Sliver' live
'Polly' live
CD Two
The Smart Studio Sessions
'In Bloom' previously unreleased
'Immodium' (Breed) previously unreleased
'Lithium' previously unreleased
'Polly Previously' unreleased mix
'Pay To Play'
'Here She Comes Now'
'Dive' previously unreleased
'Sappy' previously unreleased
The Boombox Rehearsals
'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
'Verse Chorus Verse' previously unreleased
'Territorial Pissings' previously unreleased
'Lounge Act' previously unreleased
'Come As You Are'
'Old Age' previously unreleased
'Something In The Way' previously unreleased
'On A Plain' previously unreleased
BBC Sessions
'Drain You' previously unreleased
'Something In The Way' previously unreleased
CD Three
The Devonshire Mixes
'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
'In Bloom'
'Come As You Are'
'Breed'
'Lithium'
'Territorial Pissings'
'Drain You'
'Lounge Act'
'Stay Away'
'On A Plain'
'Something In The Way'
CD Four
Live At The Paramount Theatre
'Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam'
'Aneurysm'
'Drain You'
'School'
'Floyd The Barber'
'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
'About A Girl'
'Polly'
'Breed'
'Sliver'
'Love Buzz'
'Lithium'
'Been A Son'
'Negative Creep'
'On A Plain'
'Blew'
'Rape Me'
'Territorial Pissings'
'Endless, Nameless'
DVD
Live At The Paramount Theatre
'Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam'
'Aneurysm'
'Drain You'
'School'
'Floyd The Barber'
'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
'About A Girl'
'Polly'
'Breed'
'Sliver'
'Love Buzz'
'Lithium'
'Been A Son'
'Negative Creep'
'On A Plain'
'Blew'
'Rape Me'
'Territorial Pissings'
'Endless, Nameless'
Music Videos
'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
'Come As You Are Music'
'Lithium'
'In Bloom'
Original Album
'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
'In Bloom'
'Come As You Are’
'Breed'
'Lithium'
'Polly'
'Territorial Pissings'
'Drain You'
'Lounge Act'
'Stay Away'
'On A Plain'
'Something In The Way'
The B-Sides
'Even In His Youth'
'Aneurysm'
'Curmudgeon'
'D-7' live At The BBC
'Been A Son' live
'School' live
'Drain You' live
'Sliver' live
'Polly' live
CD Two
The Smart Studio Sessions
'In Bloom' previously unreleased
'Immodium' (Breed) previously unreleased
'Lithium' previously unreleased
'Polly Previously' unreleased mix
'Pay To Play'
'Here She Comes Now'
'Dive' previously unreleased
'Sappy' previously unreleased
The Boombox Rehearsals
'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
'Verse Chorus Verse' previously unreleased
'Territorial Pissings' previously unreleased
'Lounge Act' previously unreleased
'Come As You Are'
'Old Age' previously unreleased
'Something In The Way' previously unreleased
'On A Plain' previously unreleased
BBC Sessions
'Drain You' previously unreleased
'Something In The Way' previously unreleased
CD Three
The Devonshire Mixes
'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
'In Bloom'
'Come As You Are'
'Breed'
'Lithium'
'Territorial Pissings'
'Drain You'
'Lounge Act'
'Stay Away'
'On A Plain'
'Something In The Way'
CD Four
Live At The Paramount Theatre
'Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam'
'Aneurysm'
'Drain You'
'School'
'Floyd The Barber'
'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
'About A Girl'
'Polly'
'Breed'
'Sliver'
'Love Buzz'
'Lithium'
'Been A Son'
'Negative Creep'
'On A Plain'
'Blew'
'Rape Me'
'Territorial Pissings'
'Endless, Nameless'
DVD
Live At The Paramount Theatre
'Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam'
'Aneurysm'
'Drain You'
'School'
'Floyd The Barber'
'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
'About A Girl'
'Polly'
'Breed'
'Sliver'
'Love Buzz'
'Lithium'
'Been A Son'
'Negative Creep'
'On A Plain'
'Blew'
'Rape Me'
'Territorial Pissings'
'Endless, Nameless'
Music Videos
'Smells Like Teen Spirit'
'Come As You Are Music'
'Lithium'
'In Bloom'
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
NY Mummy Smugglers Reveal Vast Antiquities Black Market
Amazingly, however, mummy smuggling not only still happens today, it was once so common that enough mummies were available to be ground up and sold as powder, archaeologists reveal.
"Mummy powder was something you could buy in pharmacies up to 1920, because people thought it was a type of medication," said Egyptologist Regine Schulz, curator of ancient art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Today's black market for mummy and other antiquities is in the billions of dollars, though exact numbers aren't known. Besides not having a clear bead on the breadth of trafficking in Egyptian artifacts, scientists and officials say it's often difficult to protect the precious artifacts as the Egyptian desert is so vast...
Continue reading
Charles Q. Choi @'Live Science'
'The Beach Beneath the Streets': A Pleasant Meander Through the Situationist Labyrinth
The SI is said to have played a leading role in the general strikes in France in May 1968, inspired the fashion, music, and lifestyles of ‘70s punk subculture, and set the agenda for postmodern media interventions such as culture jamming, sampling, and other forms of hacktivism. McKenzie Wark‘s new book The Beach Beneath the Streets: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, takes its title from one of most the famous SI phrases from May 1968: “Sous les paves, la plage!” (“Under the pavement, the beach!)
Given his profile as a prominent contemporary media theorist, it should come as no surprise that Wark has been heavily influenced by Situationism. Indeed, his celebrated book A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard, 2004) took obvious cues from SI frontman Guy Debord‘s magnum opus, The Society of Spectacle, both in terms of its sublimely aphoristic form and its cryptic theoretical content. His next book Gamer Theory (Harvard, 2007) was in essence a requiem for the unrestrained spirit of play animating the notion of derive, now corralled within the multilevel structures of computer video games, set by the boundaries of what Wark terms their ruling “allegorithms” (a mashup of the words allegory + algorithm, meant to convey the way in which imaginative possibility has been short-circuited by the digital code embedded in predetermined game narratives).
Most recently, Wark lectured on the Situationists at Columbia University, the documentation of which has been issued by Princeton Architectural Press under the title 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International. The Beach Beneath the Streets expands on that last text, including whole sections that have been incorporated nearly verbatim...
Continue reading
Vince Carducci @'PopMatters'
Pearl Jam Twenty Trailer
Pearl Jam Twenty chronicles the years leading up to the band's formation, the chaos that ensued soon-after their rise to megastardom, their step back from center stage, and the creation of a trusted circle that would surround them—giving way to a work culture that would sustain them. Told in big themes and bold colors with blistering sound, the film is carved from over 1,200 hours of rarely-seen and never-before seen footage spanning the band's career. Pearl Jam Twenty is the definitive portrait of Pearl Jam: part concert film, part intimate insider-hang, part testimonial to the power of music and uncompromising artists.
Lori Nix
In our 79th episode we visit the Brooklyn studio of Lori Nix who photographs epic scenes of destruction and grandeur, natural wonders and glittering metropolises, magnificent architecture and heroic landscapes that all have one thing in common—they're all fake. Lori gives us a tour behind the artifice, showing us how she meticulously crafts the miniature sets using found objects and model-making materials.
This Photographer Achieves Surreal Pictures without Photoshop
This Photographer Achieves Surreal Pictures without Photoshop
The Mp3 Experiment Eight
For our latest mission, over 3,500 people downloaded an MP3 file and pressed play simultaneously. The event began at sunset in two starting points by the Hudson River. The masses converged on Nelson Rockefeller Park as twilight ended and participated in a series of synchronized activities involving flashlights, camera flashes, glow sticks, and masks.
Created by Charlie Todd & Tyler Walker
http://improveverywhere.com
Created by Charlie Todd & Tyler Walker
http://improveverywhere.com
DJ Spooky - 'Sonification of Ice Assets' (Download)
Ice-crystal sonification created in collaboration with Robert AlexanderNASA JPFP Fellow
HERE
Saul Bass Meets Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
(Click to enlarge)
Many of today's artists and designers have and will always be inspired by the one and only Saul Bass, an American graphic designer and filmmaker who was best known for designing innovative title sequences and posters for movies like North by Northwest, Vertigo, and Psycho.Nathan Boyd is one of Bass' admirers. "Saul Bass just blows my mind!," he tells us. "His style is so simple yet so complex! It really captures the feeling of the time those movies were made but, at the same time, works really well today. How is that possible?!"
Boyd, who you may remember as the one behind that clever Disney x Star mashup series, has been creating Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles posters in Saul Bass' trademark style. Why did he choose to illustrate these famous turtles?
"TMNT practically was my childhood," Boyd says. "There is so much nostalgia connected with TMNT for me. I'm a Star Wars fan, first and foremost, but the Ninja Turtles was something that I shared with my brothers growing up. We not only enjoyed the cartoon, but also the comics, the action figures (no matter how ridiculous) and quoting the first movie almost line for line. It's impossible, for me, to think of TMNT without thinking about all the good times I had with my brothers."
Boyd has plans to create one poster for each of the turtles and possibly one more for Shredder. "Still thinking about that one," he says. Love how they bring you right back to your childhood.
Alice @'My Modern Met'
Nathan H. Boyd's website
Stereogum Presents… STROKED: A Tribute To Is This It
Is This It was recorded in NYC at Transporterraum with Gordon Raphael. When it was finally released in the States in the Fall of 2001, a decade after Nevermind, it helped not only put contemporary New York City in the forefront of music lovers’ minds, it offered an easy reference for people to dig backwards into the Big Apple’s rock ‘n’ roll past. For certain younger fans, it was maybe the first time they carefully considered Television (the late ’70s), the Velvet Underground (mid ’60s to early ’70s), and other lesser known garage and rock and whatever bands that inhabited a dirtier, grubbier Manhattan. The title’s pure Richard Hell. The original sexy album cover a minimalist echo of New York Dolls (via Roxy Music). It’s no coincidence that 2001 NYC — eventually, especially Brooklyn — ended up being known for its post-punk revival. (See, for instance, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, Black Dice, Vice Records’ No New York nodding collection Yes New York, etc.) Is This It was a history lesson, but one with enough new ideas to also offer a roadmap.
In a strange way, Is This It sounded like something entirely new and entirely familiar at the same time. That’s one secret to its appeal. That, and the simple head-nodding hooks on modern classics like “Last Nite,” “Someday,” and “Hard To Explain” are so immediate. It’s a clean, but scruffy collection. It’s honed and tight, but also just loose enough — loose mostly in the presentation. People watching MTV in ’01 won’t forget the first time they saw the way Julian Casablancas didn’t seem to give a shit in the “Last Nite” video. Or how the bands’ minds appeared elsewhere when they performed on Late Night Television. It’s a kind of charisma you can’t teach or practice, one that felt as natural as their messy hair.
The Strokes maybe never topped Is This It, but you can’t blame them for that. Part of the record’s appeal is also the youthfulness of it, something you can’t replicate even a year later. That said, they definitely found a way to bottle it on the album itself: If you listen to it now, 10 years later, it sounds as fresh (and vintage) as ever. Which is maybe why its sound continues to surface in 2011 among both shaggy rock groups, yeah, but also kids with keyboards in their bedrooms and folks wearing sunglasses behind their laptops.
Tracklist and download
HERE
Norway Attacks: How a Once Moderate Region Became a Haven for the Far Right
People react at the end of a memorial service at Oslo Cathedral on Sunday, July 24, 2011, in the aftermath of the Friday attacks on Norway's government headquarters and a youth retreat in Oslo Emilio Morenatti / AP
In 2005, Norway's populist, far-right Progress Party ran election-campaign posters that featured a dark-skinned man pointing a gun at the camera and the slogan "The perpetrator is of foreign origin." Today, these posters carry a terrible irony: Anders Behring Breivik — a tall, blond, blue-eyed farmer not of foreign origin — massacred dozens of Norwegian schoolchildren on Friday, July 22, in what seems to have been a deranged attempt to spark a revolution against the influx of foreigners he felt was diluting Norway's heritage.
It is dangerous to look for answers in the mind of a madman. It does not necessarily reveal anything useful about a nation if one of its citizens murders under the banner of a particular ideology. But if Breivik's psychopathy is unique, in Norway and other Nordic countries his political beliefs are surprisingly widespread. It may seem shocking, but Scandinavia — for years a model of tolerance and cooperation and the sponsor of dozens of worthy international conferences and treaties — has become the latest European haven for xenophobic populist thought.
Norway's Progress Party, of which Breivik is a former member, won more than one-fifth of the national vote in the latest parliamentary election, in 2009. Last year, the Swedish Democrats became the first far-right party to enter the Swedish parliament when it captured nearly 6% of the vote despite a furor that erupted when local candidate Marie-Louise Enderleit posted a comment on Facebook that migrants should be shot in the head, put in a bag and sent back to their home countries. Denmark's Folkparty, which recently ran an anti-immigrant campaign under the slogan "Give us Denmark back," secured 14% of the vote in a 2007 election and has since been an influential coalition partner in government. And the True Finns became the third largest party represented in the Finnish Parliament after winning 19% of the vote in elections in April.
"It is the end of an era," Anders Wildfeldt, lecturer in Nordic politics at the University of Aberdeen, says of the entrance of the far right into the Nordic political mainstream. Citing the success of xenophobic parties in other parts of Europe, Wildfeldt adds, "It's becoming increasingly inaccurate to discuss Scandinavian exceptionalism..."
Continue reading
Debut for A Clockwork Orange music
Songs written by author Anthony Burgess for a musical version of his novel A Clockwork Orange are to be performed in the UK for the first time.
Burgess adapted A Clockwork Orange for a stage musical in the 1980s after his book was turned into a controversial film by director Stanley Kubrick.The music will be performed next year in Manchester during a series of events to mark the novel's 50th anniversary.
The story follows a violent teenage gang leader in a lawless society.
The film caused an international outcry when it was released in 1971, leading Kubrick to withdraw it from cinemas.
'Ownership of the story' The musical was "a kind of revisioning of the story", according to Dr Andrew Biswell, director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester.
Burgess, who was born in Manchester, was a prolific composer as well as the author of 33 novels. He died aged 76 in 1993.
"The music is really important because it establishes a tone and a mood," Dr Biswell said. "It's pretty close to West Side Story - that's one of the obvious influences on it.
"There's this scene in prison, where one of the prisoners is kicked to death, which is very throwaway and jolly. That's completely different from the corresponding episode in the film, which is very gloomy and depressing.
"The reason why Burgess wanted to make his own stage adaptation, quite a long time after Kubrick made the film, was to assert his own ownership of the story."
In 1990, Burgess's script was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, but the production rejected his music in favour of new songs by Bono and The Edge of U2.
Burgess's songs will be performed by graduates of the Royal Northern College of Music at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.
A separate musical version of the story, featuring a new score and script, will be staged featuring black actors at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, from September.
The anniversary will also include an exhibition about the film, featuring props, photographs from deleted scenes, location photography and rejected artwork at the John Rylands Library in Manchester.
@'BBC'
(Thanx Stan!)
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