Friday, 22 April 2011

Publishers Force Domain Seizure of Public Domain Music Resource

IMSLP, the largest public domain music library on the Internet, has just suffered a damaging attack on the site’s infrastructure. In a wrongful action over a single 90 year-old classical piece by Rachmaninoff, the UK’s Music Publishers Association convinced registrar GoDaddy to seize IMSLP’s domain name, which took the site completely offline.
While most readers will be very familiar with the commercialized mainstream pop sounds of the last 10 to 20 years, spare a moment’s thought for the deep history of our modern music. Without the great composers of the last few hundred years – Mozart, Beethoven, Bach to name just three – our soundscape today might be very different.
A group of people who are completely immersed in this history and absolutely determined to preserve it, are the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) who slavishly index public domain scores.
“Started more than five years ago in 2006, IMSLP has grown to include more than 90,000 scores from more than 5,000 composers,” administrator Edward told TorrentFreak.
Indeed, IMSLP’s coverage is extensive, spanning just about every composer one can think of. But one piece from their archives has just caused them a huge amount of inconvenience.
IMSLP’s listing of Rachmaninoff’s Bells, which was created in 1920 by a Russian and is public domain both in Canada and the USA, was spotted thousands of miles away by the UK’s Music Publishers Association (MPA).
Feeling they had some authority over the piece, MPA issued a DMCA takedown notice, not to the IMSLP site, but to their domain registrar, GoDaddy.
“We understand that Godaddy are the sponsoring registrar for the website http://www.IMSLP.ORG which makes available unlicensed copyright protected sheet music notation which is an infringement of copyright. By assisting this website, Godaddy are liable to pay damages for secondary copyright infringement once notice of the infringement has been given,” said the MPA’s Jake Kirner in the DMCA notice.
Without a second look at the issue, elephant gun wielding GoDaddy complied, seizing control of IMPSL’s domain name and taking them completely offline. Needless to say IMPSL were furious noting that the MPA’s assertion – that Rachmaninoff’s The Bells is protected under copyright in the US – “is nothing less than a bald-faced lie.”
IMPSL then when on to publish the MPA’s DMCA takedown notice in full on their website, which solicited demands from the MPA to have it removed. IMPSL refused.
“Seriously, you can’t expect to take down a major website, with a bogus DMCA takedown notice, and then try and hide the evidence. Can you see that? It makes you look ridiculous,” they wrote.
Then, just a few hours ago and following a threat by IMSLP that they could sue, MPA suddenly withdrew their complaint from GoDaddy.
Despite describing the original complaint as “underhanded” and “bogus”, IMPSL still managed to be gentlemen about the issue, and offered a “sincere thanks” to the MPA for their retraction.
“While IMSLP encourages open discussion of copyright issues, we have zero tolerance for underhanded tactics. To MPA’s credit, they have voluntarily retracted their claim. IMSLP will also be working on technical measures to prevent any future attacks,” they added.
This is not the first time IMSLP have had legal woes.
“IMSLP previously encountered major legal turbulence in 2007, when Universal Edition, an Austrian music publisher, successfully forced a shut down of the site,” administrator Edward told TorrentFreak. “However, IMSLP was able to recover after 9 months of reorganization.”
enigmax @'TorrentFreak'

The Twins

Underworld - Bird 1 (Joe Bellingham Dub)

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Lord of the Drone: Pandit Pran Nath and the American Underground

First comes the drone of the sci-fi supercharged tamburas, fluxing and oscillating, too high up in the mix for the bureaucrats and professors at All India Radio, way too high. It’s like the rush of a marsh on a midsummer night with a million crickets, or the howling wind stirring the power lines outside a cabin in backwoods Idaho, or the hushed roar of the stream in front of a hermit’s cave above Dehradun: see the blue-throated god lying there, recumbent and still, his eyes shut, the dangerous corpse of the Overlord waiting for the dancing feet of his bloody, love-mad consort.
This was the sound La Monte Young heard the first time he heard any music from India, Ali Akbar Khan’s 1955 LP Morning and Evening Ragas, in a Music City Records promo-spot on the radio in Los Angeles. Young drove over, bought the record, and brought it back to his grandmother’s house, where he locked himself in his room and listened as the musicians were introduced by violinist Yehudi Menuhin, along with their instruments — this is Mr. Ali Akbar Khan on sarod, this is Mr. Chatur Lal on tabla, and this is the third instrument, the tambura, played by Mr. Gor. The sound that follows this final introduction lasts only a few seconds on the recording, but it had a dramatic impact on the young composer, who heard in it the basis for a music built around sustained tones and a sublimated, slowed-down rhythmic pulse.
If minimalist music as we know it was in some sense an emanation from that first tambura on the radio, it seems safe to say that it was another tambura that midwifed the birth of its more intimate, disparate heirs. Pandit Pran Nath’s tambura was louder, higher, and harder; it hits you deep in the body with its synesthetic sine wave vibrations and cascading overtones. Hear the world poised at the brink of some radical unfolding, the macrocosm in a bare moment, the maximum minimum, the music of another set of spheres. You haven’t heard the tamburas sing this song before because Pandit Pran Nath was a lifelong student and devotee of these incredible machines’ unearthly sound, adding a special finish of his own fashioning to their resonant lower gourds and tuning them up for hours until they turned into the lightningblack curtains and magenta-midnight light for the Malkauns, a raga with a special place in his repertoire.
It isn’t just the quality of the drone that distinguishes Pandit Pran Nath’s performance of the Malkauns, recorded at midnight in a studio in Soho in 1976. What really stands out in this recording — identified by his former student Henry Flynt as one of the two or three most important ever made — is his voice, stony and austere, with a subterranean intensity. When he hits the tonic note — what in Indian music is called the shadaja — and then slides it slowly, microtonally, downward, you can feel it inside your chest, an impossible emotion somewhere between awe, erotic desire, and annihilation. Some ragas are light-footed maidens dancing through springtime, at play on swings in the flowered groves along the Yamuna riverbank; Pandit Pran Nath’s are cremation grounds, the blue-black color of smoke rising softly from the smoldering log of a sadhu’s fire, the moon on the mountainside.
A musicologist will tell you that a raga is a specific mode, a series of notes that serve as the basis for improvisation, but Pandit Pran Nath and his students would tell you something else, that a raga is a living soul the performer invokes like a celestial, numinous presence moving behind and between the notes, a cosmic teacher that the performer, if he is successful, embodies and transmits, dissolving the boundaries between singer, listener, and song. Each raga comes assigned to a certain time of day, but many artists ignore them in performance, regarding the designations as conventional and dispensable; Pandit Pran Nath only sang midnight songs at midnight. The Malkauns raga is one such, a druggy pentatonic nocturne that some superstitious musicians refuse to play on the grounds that it attracts demons; it works like a powerful narcotic, replacing clock time with another temporality altogether. Do not attempt to operate a motor vehicle under its influence. Put on the recording from 1976 and prepare to lie down on something soft: those four simple syllables Pran Nath sings — go vin da ram — are the name of God...

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Alexander Keefe @'Bidoun'

Pandit Pran Nath (1918-1996)
Ragas of Morning and Night
1.

Raga Todi
2.

Raga Darbari
(Right click/save as)
Ragas of Morning and Night
(Todi, Darbari) Gramavision 18-7018-7 (1986)

This is a rare recording from 1968 India of Pandit PranNath singing Rags Todi and Darbari.

Pran Nath's Ragas of Morning & Night has nothing to do with entertainment, everything to do with meditation and everything to do with New Age music, so much of which is profoundly influenced by traditional Indian music. As we listen, we are drawn in, captivated and eventually transported to psycho-spiritual clarity. Ragas is an intense album for serious listeners who regard listening as a process of inner development.

Pandit Pran Nath in UbuWeb Film

@'UbuWeb'

Syria's Twitter spambots

Syrian hashtag searches have been inundated with links to photographs and football statistics. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

As demonstrations rage on Arab streets, a different battle is happening on Twitter. In Morocco, Syria, Bahrain and Iran, pro-revolution users of the site have found themselves locked in a battle of the hashtags as Twitter accounts with a pro-government message are quickly created to counter the prevailing narrative.
Deemed a revolutionary tool in many of the region's uprisings, Twitter has been used to great acclaim for disseminating news and images, often from the ground. In Egypt, where Twitter users number in the tens of thousands, tweets using the hashtag #Jan25 from Tahrir Square helped paint a picture through weeks of demonstrations. Elsewhere across the region and beyond, observers and even journalists turn to Twitter to get a handle on what's happening in the streets.
Though often a tool for good, Twitter can be used by anyone for virtually any purpose. Journalist Nick Kristof incurred the wrath of the Twitter masses after covering stories of protesters in Bahrain being attacked by police forces. During Morocco's 20 February protests, pro-monarchy tweets targeted anyone using the #Feb20 hashtag. And back in 2009, reports abounded of Twitter being used to throw off supporters of Iran's green movement.
The latest news comes from Syria, where Twitter use remains low despite – until recently – a ban on certain other social networks, including Facebook. Nevertheless, Syria's dedicated Twitter users have taken to the microblogging site to post news, images and photos of the demonstrations taking place across the country. Using the hashtags #Syria, #Daraa and #Mar15, they've managed to bring attention to a movement – and ensuing crackdowns from security forces – that hasn't seen much global media attention.
Twitter users have to contend with competing interests as protests continue elsewhere in the region, but also with a cabal of pro-regime accounts, set up recently for the sole purpose of flooding the #Syria hashtag and overwhelming the pro-revolution narrative.
As the Syrian blogger Anas Qtiesh writes, "These accounts were believed to be manned by Syrian mokhabarat (intelligence) agents with poor command of both written Arabic and English, and an endless arsenal of bite and insults."
These accounts, run by individuals, harassed users but had little effect on the hashtag search. Another set of accounts, however, managed to inundate the #Syria tag. Using a Bahraini company, EGHNA, bots are sending messages – sometimes several a minute – using various Syria-related search terms.
Under the heading "Success stories", the EGNHA website says:

"LovelySyria is using EGHNA Media Server to promote interesting photography about Syria using their Twitter accounts. EGHNA Media Server helped LovelySyria get attention to the beauty of Syria, and build a community of people who love the country and admire its beauty. Some of their network members started translating photo descriptions and rebroadcasting them to give the Syrian beauty more exposure.

LovelySyria is using their own installation of EGHNA Ad Center to generate the Twitter messages, their current schedule is two messages every five minutes."

Other accounts, such as @SyriaBeauty, @DNNUpdates and @SyLeague, perform similar functions. Their messages are sometimes political, sometimes not, but all were created recently and all serve the purpose of diverting attention from the Syrian protests.
While often annoying to users, accounts set up to tweet links across a hashtag are not in violation of Twitter's terms of use. Twitter's help centre suggests blocking users to prevent seeing their content. But without third-party software, blocking doesn't remove a user from a search.
Nevertheless, although Twitter shies away from moderating content and removing users, the search functionality favours users with a complete username, profile and photograph, and users who automate their tweets can be removed from search.
After numerous complaints, that's exactly what has happened to the #Syria bots. Though they can still be viewed by their followers and those who input the URL directly, Syrian hashtag searches – vital to many hoping to gain firsthand news from the country – are no longer flooded with links to photographs and football stats.
Syrians still face numerous obstacles online – from the fear of security forces infiltrating their accounts, to the red lines placed on free speech – but this one small victory means that, in the battle for narrative at least, they've won.
Jillian C. York @'The Guardian'

WikiLeaks, the First Amendment, and the Press

Black Poppy, A Magazine for Heroin Addicts

Here's why Japan's earthquake was so strong

Ex-detainees claim AFP officer witnessed torture

Dionysus - burk

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CatherineDeveny Catherine Deveny

Jesus only had 12 followers. I have almost 12,000 #itsnotacompetitionbutIwon #GodIsBullshit

WSB stencil

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San Francisco
(Thanx Linda! XXX)

Libyan rebels pay a heavy price for resisting Gaddafi in Misrata

Is Big Pharma set to corner the American market on medical marijuana?

The American Independent has previously reported on the growing corporatization of the incipient medical marijuana industry at a time when medical marijuana dispensaries scrabble to hold on to their businesses in the face of a multi-pronged federal crackdown. But there are signs afoot that it just may become ever more corporate if a Big Pharma push to get the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to recognize a cannabis-derived drug is successful. Last week, British prescription drug manufacturer GW Pharmaceuticals announced a licensing agreement with drug giant Novartis, maker of Ritalin and Excedrin, to begin selling GW’s drug Sativex in markets across Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Middle East. The medication is already available in Britain, where it’s produced and marketed by Bayer, and in Canada and Spain. It’s on the market in those countries as a liquid that patients spray under the tongue and is prescribed primarily for sufferers of multiple sclerosis and cancer...

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Kyle Daly @'The Washington Independent'

Drug gangs help themselves to Central American military arsenals

Mexico wants to sue U.S. gun makers

Senator rips gun rights group for gun owners, Nazi victims analogy

Texas kinder shock as child's gun fires

10 Charts About Sex

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♪♫ Steve Martin And The Steep Canyon Rangers - Jubilation Day

Twitter Using Too Much Dirty Energy, Amongst Web’s Worst Offenders, Says Greenpeace

Canadians Can’t Post Election Info On Facebook

Miró

Joan Miró's works come to London in the first major retrospective here for nearly 50 years.
14.04.2011
Renowned as one of the greatest Surrealist painters, filling his paintings with luxuriant colour, Miró worked in a rich variety of styles. This is a rare opportunity to enjoy more than 150 paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints from moments across the six decades of his extraordinary career.
Miró at Tate Modern

Tim Hetherington: The fault lines of West Africa

J.G. Ballard - The South Bank Show (2008)

Melvyn Bragg hosts an in depth interview with the author, JG Ballard. Ranging from his earliest experiences living in China as a child and subsequent imprisonment by the invading Japanese army, through his early and wholly abortive career in medicine - though he says that that experience was totally beneficial to his writing career and that everyone should spend at least some time studing anatomy. Then on through his long career as a full time writer. Starting in 1962 when he gave up his then job as an assistant editor right up to the present day.
Subjects covered are the influence of Surrealist painting in the imagery of his work. How the sudden death of his wife affected his life, work and family. And the impact of his most controversial novel, Crash, which inspired one publisher's reader to write "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish" - which Ballard took as a huge compliment.
Other contributions in the show come from the likes of Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Martin Amis, all of whom are confirmed Ballard fans.

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Sebastian Junger Remembers Tim Hetherington

Tim Hetherington (left) and Sebastian Junger in Afghanistan in 2008

Tim, man, what can I say? For the first few hours the stories were confused enough that I could imagine maybe none of them were true, but they finally settled into one brief, brutal narrative: while covering rebel forces in the city of Misrata, Libya, you got hit by a piece of shrapnel and bled to death on the way to the clinic. You couldn’t have known this, but your fellow photographer Chris Hondros would die later that evening. I’m picturing you wounded in the back of a pickup truck with your three wounded colleagues. There are young men with bandannas on their heads and guns in their hands and everyone is screaming and the driver is jamming his overloaded vehicle through the destroyed streets of that city, trying to get you all to the clinic in time.
He didn’t. I’ve never even heard of Misrata before, but for your whole life it was there on a map for you to find and ponder and finally go to. All of us in the profession—the war profession, for lack of a better name—know about that town. It’s there waiting for all of us. But you went to yours, and it claimed you. You went in by boat because the city was besieged by forces loyal to Muammar Qaddafi (another name you probably never gave much thought to during your life) and you must have known this was a bad one. Boat trips are usually such nice affairs, but not this one. How strange to be out on the water off a beautiful coastline with the salt smell and the wind in your face—except this time, you’re headed toward a place of violence and killing and destruction. You must have known that the unthinkable had to be considered. You must have known you might not ever get back on that boat alive.
You and I were always talking about risk because she was the beautiful woman we were both in love with, right? The one who made us feel the most special, the most alive? We were always trying to have one more dance with her without paying the price. All those quiet, huddled conversations we had in Afghanistan: Where to walk on the patrols, what to do if the outpost gets overrun, what kind of body armor to wear. You were so smart about it, too—so smart about it that I would actually tease you about being scared. Of course you were scared—you were terrified. We both were. We were terrified and we were in love, and in the end, you were the one she chose.
I’m in the truck with you. I’m imagining those last minutes. You’re on your back watching the tops of the buildings jolt by and the blue Mediterranean sky beyond them. I almost drowned once, and when I finally got back to the beach I was all alone and I just lay there watching the clouds go by. I’d never really thought about clouds before, but there they were, all for me, just glorious. Maybe you saw those clouds, too, but you weren’t out of it yet, and you probably knew it. I know what you were thinking: What a silly way to die. What a silly, selfish, ridiculous mistake to have made.
Don’t think that, brother. You had a very specific vision for your work and for your life, and that vision included your death. It didn’t have to, but that’s how it turned out. I’m so sorry, Tim. The conversation we could have had about this crazy stunt of yours! Christ, I would have yelled at you, but you know that. Getting mad was how we kept each other safe, how we kept the other from doing something stupid.
Your vision, though. Let’s talk about that. It’s what you wanted to communicate to the world about this story—about every story. Maybe Misrata wasn’t worth dying for—surely that thought must have crossed your mind in those last moments—but what about all the Misratas of the world? What about Liberia and Darfur and Sri Lanka and all those terrible, ugly stories that you brought such humanity to? That you helped bring the world’s attention to?
After the war in Liberia you rented a house in the capital, and lived there for years. Years. Who does that? No one I know except you, my dear friend. That’s part of Misrata, too. That’s also part of what you died for: the decision to live a life that was thrown open to all the beauty and misery and ugliness and joy in the world. Before this last trip you told me that you wanted to make a film about the relationship between young men and violence. You had this idea that young men in combat act in ways that emulate images they’ve seen—movies, photographs—of other men in other wars, other battles. You had this idea of a feedback loop between the world of images and the world of men that continually reinforced and altered itself as one war inevitably replaced another in the long tragic grind of human affairs.
That was a fine idea, Tim—one of your very best. It was an idea that our world very much needs to understand. I don’t know if it was worth dying for—what is?—but it was certainly an idea worth devoting one’s life to. Which is what you did. What a vision you had, my friend. What a goddamned terrible, beautiful vision of things.
@'Vanity Fair'

Diary

(Tim Hetherington's last film)

Curtis Mayfield - Live PA, Modernes, Bremen, DE - Radio Bremen 1990-03-23

1. [01:55 4:20] Curtis Mayfield - "Super Fly" (1972)
2. [06:15 4:41] Curtis Mayfield - "It's Alright" (1980)
3. [10:56 4:08] Curtis Mayfield - "Gypsy Woman" (1971)
4. [15:04 6:35] Curtis Mayfield - "Freddie's Dead (Theme From Super Fly)" (1972)
5. [21:39 8:06] Curtis Mayfield - "Pusherman" (1972)
6. [29:45 5:26] Curtis Mayfield - "We Gotta Have Peace" (1985)
7. [35:11 2:56] Curtis Mayfield - "People Get Ready" (1965)
8. [38:07 5:18] Curtis Mayfield - "Give Me Your Love (Love Song)" (1972)
9. [44:08 5:22] Curtis Mayfield - "When Seasons Change" (1975)

Curtis Mayfield - Guitar, Vocals
Frank "Buzz" Amato - Keyboards
Randy Brown - Bass
Lee Goodness - Drums
Louis Stefanell - Percussion

Beastie Boys - Make Some Noise (Video - UPDATE)

Already deleted @ vimeo after a few hours, here's a new embed.

As DJ PIGG wrote in the comments:

"Damn, do they not want to promote the song?"

Thursday, 21 April 2011

PJ Harvey @ Coachella 2011

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Explosions in the Sky - Take Care, Take Care, Take Care (2011 - Albumstream)

. Last Known Surroundings
2. Human Qualities
3. Trembling Hands
4. Be Comfortable, Creature
5. Postcard From 1952
6. Let Me Back In

ALBUMSTREAM

Real Madrid player Sergio Ramos drops Spanish cup under a bus

Folk Music Pirate Brings Back a Piece of History

Leaving in a Huff

Heroin.com: Selling Junk Online

Illustration: Curt Merlo

In 2008, New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget G. Brennan began leading a team of undercover investigators targeting the drug dealers who used Craigslist to advertise their wares.
She sounded confident.
"It's like shooting fish in a barrel," she told the Daily News. That year, a Citigroup vice president, Mark Rayner, was caught moving ecstasy and cocaine from his Midtown offices using Craigslist. "We see lots of professionals, people with good jobs, doing it," Brennan said.
Three years later, drug dealing on the classified-ads website is still blatant and ubiquitous.
Sellers thinly camouflage their activity by posting ads for "420 T-shirts" or "tickets to the 420 show," using the numerical calling card for marijuana, or referring to "Tina," "T," and "parTy" for crystal meth. "Snow" or "skiing" is a cocaine reference. "Relief" calls up a healthy section of pills: Xanax, Ambien, Ativan, Klonopin, morphine.
Ironically, no search term is more productive at bringing up drug ads than "law enforcement," standard words for a buyer or seller who insists he's not with the NYPD.
Only a man named "Kai," however, appears to sell heroin openly on New York's Craigslist pages. And he's not very subtle at all.
"Want to 'nod out'? Ride the 'H' train," reads one subject line. The body of that advertisement offered "H, d@pe, diesel" for purchase "anywhere in Manhattan public or private." Sometimes he throws in the term "Papaver Somniferum L.," the Latin name of the plant that opium and poppy come from. For good measure, Kai insists in his ads that he's not law enforcement "and you shouldn't be either."
"We continue to conduct investigations into narcotics-related activity on Craigslist," Brennan tells the Voice. "Clearly, Craigslist and social-networking sites provide new opportunities for drug traffickers. It's something we're aware of and continue to investigate." Craigslist itself, however, did not respond to Voice requests for comment.
On a recent evening, Kai—who asked the Voice to use that name as an alias—finishes up a rack of ribs and a slice of cheesecake at a barbecue restaurant in Harlem. It's only 7, but it's been three hours since he last shot up. "I want to use right now," he says, looking nervous. "I'm thinking of how, I'm thinking of how." He takes out a cell phone and double-checks the Craigslist ad he had put up the day before, hoping someone will answer it soon. He sells drugs, he says, to support his own addiction, a fact that gets more obvious every minute since his last fix.
Despite the city's crackdown, Kai says he has gone untouched by law enforcement for the seven years he's been dealing on Craigslist. In his ads, he lays out strict e-mailing rules for his clients: include only a name and cell phone number. If a potential buyer follows the rules to the letter, he sets up a meeting in a public place—but he arrives without drugs. He says he can tell in a few seconds if a potential customer is legit, but makes each buyer lift up their shirt to show him that they're not wearing a wire, and lift up each pant leg to show him that they're not carrying a gun. Small talk builds to questions about drug use and then to specifics like quantity and price. Kai says he doesn't negotiate...

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David Shapiro & Joe Coscarelli @'The Village Voice'

Chris Hondros: All Alone In The World
His last photos

Hetherington Family Releases Statement on Tim’s Death

The following statement was released to Vanity Fair from the family of contributing photographer Tim Hetherington:

It is with great sadness we learned that our son and brother, photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington, was killed today in Misrata, Libya by a rocket-propelled grenade. Tim will be remembered for his amazing images and his Academy Award–nominated documentary “Restrepo,” which he co-produced with his friend Sebastian Junger. Tim was in Libya to continue his ongoing multimedia project to highlight humanitarian issues during time of war and conflict. He will be forever missed.

Taraf de Haïdouks & Kocani Orkestar - Band Of Gypsies 2 (2011 - Albumstream)

I Am A Gigolo
Pe Drumul Odesei
Mandrulita Mea
Talk To Me, Duso
Turceasca A Lu Kalo
Jarretelle
Où Cours-tu, Nostalgie? Après Toi Mon Amour
Dikhél Khelél
À Couteaux Tirés, Atika
100 Millions
Gypsy Sahara

Taraf de Haïdouks and Kocani Orkestar are undoubtedly two of the most famous and emblematic Balkan Gypsy bands. Started in 1991 in the small Romanian village of Clejani, the “band of honourable brigands” (that’s the literal translation of “Taraf de Haïdouks”) is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year by launching an ambitious project: a kind of Balkan big band, in which the 13 Taraf musicians and singers are joined by the 13 members of Macedonia’s Koçani Orkestar, one of the top brass bands around. The big band has recorded a new album, and will be touring from the spring 2011 on.

ALBUMSTREAM

Apple iPhone secretly records owners' every move

Gerard Smith (TV On The Radio) RIP

HERE

EU decides against stricter net neutrality rules

The European commission has decided against introducing legislation to protect net neutrality, saying media scrutiny and giving consumers enough information about their internet service provider will be sufficient to protect an "open and neutral" internet.
Legislation to prevent telecoms companies from introducing a tiered internet, with some content arriving faster than others, has been ruled out.
In a long-awaited report on its approach to net neutrality, the EU executive on Tuesday said "traffic management", or the prioritising of some packets of information over others, "is necessary to ensure the smooth flow of internet traffic, particularly at times when networks become congested".
Internet service providers have long argued they should be left alone to co-ordinate the flow of data through their networks, a position the commission has decided to endorse.
"There is broad agreement that operators should be allowed to determine their own business models and commercial arrangements," the report continues.
Commissioner Neelie Kroes, head of the EU's Digital Agenda department, said she will continue to monitor the sector for instances of ISPs blocking or throttling access to certain services, especially voice-over-internet-protocol offerings such as Skype.
Brussels admits there have been some instances of unequal treatment of data by certain operators, including throttling of peer-to-peer filesharing or video-streaming in the UK and five other EU states, and blocking or charging extra for VOIP services in six other countries.
But these problems were usually fixed as a result of bad press or via action by regulators, the report concludes: "Many of these issues were solved voluntarily, often through intervention by the [national regulators] or pressure created by adverse media coverage."
However, the commission has asked BEREC, the European electronic communications regulatory group, to investigate the extent of the issue. If by the end of the year Brussels finds that there are persistent problems of blocking, the commission will take additional action.
"If I am not satisfied, I will not hesitate to come up with more stringent measures," said Kroes. These measures could include "guidance" or a law to prohibit blocking of services.
But a "horizontal" bill, akin to that introduced by Chile last year, which goes beyond the problem of blocking and prevents any kind of tiered internet at all, the commission believes is unnecessary.
Last June, Chile became the first jurisdiction in the world to pass net neutrality legislation, forcing ISPs to "ensure access to all types of content, services or applications available on the network and offer a service that does not distinguish content, applications or services".
According to EU digital agenda spokesman Jonathan Todd, this goes too far: "The EU telecoms market is already healthily competitive. If an online service provider is confronted with extra charges for their content, they'll just tell the ISP to take a hike. It's a false debate."
Digital rights advocates for their part accused Brussels of succumbing to lobbying from the telecoms industry, saying consumers are not as able to "vote with their feet" as the commission believes.
"This simplistic spin does not stand the test of reality. In practice, millions of users can only chose one operator to connect to the internet, either because of geographical or commercial constraints," said La Quadrature du Net, a France-based online civil liberties group.
"Ms Kroes is hiding behind false free-market arguments to do nothing at all," added Jérémie Zimmermann, a spokesman for the organisation. He said that infringements of net neutrality are not an abstraction but already common to most mobile internet provision.
"In most EU member states, mobile phone operators agree on engaging in the very same discrimination in their so-called 'mobile internet' offers. These operators simply do not offer access to the universal platform of communications we call 'the internet'."
Leigh Phillips @'The Guardian'

Life on the Rebel Side of the Crosshairs

The Space Merchants

J.G. Ballard in Vogue 1962

Avert thine eyes Spaceboy!

(Thanx HerrB!!!)

Talk Talk - Live at Montreux 1986

1. Talk talk 2. Dum dum girl 3. Call in the night boy 4. Tomorrow started 5. My foolish friend 6. Life's what you make it 7. Does Caroline know 8. It's you

9. Living in another world 10. Give it up 11. It's my life 12. I don't believe in you 13. Such a shame 14. Rene

1986 was the band’s only appearance at Montreux and caught them at the height of their success. With a set list packed with hit singles and lead singer / main songwriter Mark Hollis’ charismatic performance they delivered an outstanding concert that draws a great response from the packed Swiss crowd.
Line-up:
Mark Hollis – vocals
Paul Webb – bass
Lee Harris – drums
John Turnbull – guitar
Rupert Black – keyboards
Philip Reis – percussion
Leroy Williams – percussion.