Sunday, 29 January 2012

Liverpool 2 VS 1 Manchester Utd

What would life be without the usual Ferguson whingeing?

Ex-ruler charged with genocide in Guatemala

http://www.euronews.net/ Guatemala's former military dictator will face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in connection with the deaths of indigenous people killed under his rule.
A judge in the south American country has decided Efrain Rios Montt should be held accountable for brutality that occured while he was dicatator.

Topiary

Shetland teenager Jake Davis accused of hacking into websites under the pseudonym ‘Topiary’ has had his trial delayed until 11 May.
Davis was due to enter a plea at Southwark Crown Court in London along with fellow accused hacker 19 year old Ryan Cleary, but the trial was pushed back due to a continuing investigation into the “possible complicity of others”, with the case being described a “significant and complex international investigation”.
Mr Davis was arrested by police in July 2011 at his address in Hoofields, Lerwick, before being flown to London where he spent five days in the cells. He was eventually bailed to his mother Jenny Davis’ home in Spalding, Lincolnshire.
Police identified him as ‘hacktivist’ Topiary, who had been a spokesman for widespread hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec.
He faces five charges, including conspiracy to carry out a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), in which their website would have been flooded with traffic to make it crash.
As part of his bail conditions, Mr Davis is not allowed access to the internet or a mobile phone. These same conditions have carried forward with the new plea date.
Via

Just business: how Russian technology provides the eyes and ears for the world’s Big Brothers

Richard Dawkins’s Jury Delusion

Bahrain deports Australian over Facebook posts

An Australian English instructor went to Bahrain to teach at the state-run Polytechnic University. Unfortunately, he was forced to leave the country for posts he made on Facebook. Australian English instructor Tony Mitchell recently moved to Bahrain where he was offered a job at the state-run Polytechnic University. He described himself as a witness of the various horrifying events in the struggling country (see The Atlantic’s four-part series). Mitchell was eventually fired, evicted, and forced to flee because of posts he made on Facebook.
Bahrain’s government has been extremely thorough when trying to suppress any form of uprising. It has reached the point where the country is getting rid of anyone it can, just in case. At the university, investigations began in May 2011. Bahraini teachers were being identified from photographs taken at demonstrations showing they had attended the protests: Facebook was used to display them and pro-government supporters were asked to identify the circled faces so that they could be traced and detained.
One of the non-teaching staff was arrested and severely beaten, but was able to resume work. Students were also victimized: some were arrested while others were simply expelled. The rest tried attending class by passing through various check points as they commuted from their villages, which were being raided by police who regularly arrested suspects and damaged property.
A few were called to the administration building at the Polytechnic and taken to the nearby military building where they were all put in a room. They stayed in there all night and were interrogated the next morning. Some were handcuffed, hooded, and taken away on a bus, never to be seen again. Mitchell believed he was safe since the comments he had made on Facebook were not critical of the ruling family or the government. He said his posts simply tried to correct false or misleading information. On the other hand, he was unsure if he could continue working at the university if it was run by a government that resorted to unlawful arrests, torture, as well as identification from social networks.
Mitchell eventually received a text message asking him to visit John Scott, the Director of Human Resources, in the CEO’s office. The Ministry of Education knew all about Mitchell, and the comments he had made on Facebook. A number of his Facebook “friends” had kept copies of his posts, and they were presented to him, although he insists none of them could seriously be used to show that he was critical of the government.
Since classes finished in four weeks, Scott allowed Mitchell to continue teaching until June 30. He agreed to not making further comments on Facebook, as he did not want the university or anyone from management to get into trouble for his actions. Here’s how Mitchell felt about being fired: I had been sacked from my job, not because of my teaching ability or for any normal disciplinary reason, but because I had taken videos and made comments on Facebook. I now had to think of my future after June30, look for a new job somewhere and tell my wife that we had to leave our beautiful apartment and the life we enjoyed together in Bahrain.
On the other hand, I felt a huge sense of relief that I had been freed from having to work for the Bahraini government and that I would no longer have any association with them whatsoever.
Despite his promise, Mitchell couldn’t resist monitoring Facebook to keep track of the students that were being expelled. Some comments criticized Scott for the expulsions and for going back on his word that the Polytechnic would remain neutral. Mitchell knew Scott’s hands were tied by the Ministry so he posted the following comment: “I will tell you more about this after June 30th.”
Mitchell’s Facebook “friends” immediately informed the Minister of Education and the next morning, on June 14, he was called to the human resources director’s office and asked to leave immediately. The university had previously booked flights to Thailand for Mitchell and his wife. They were for July 1, but the university was willing to exchange the tickets. Mitchell asked if he could stay through the end of June as planned, but was quickly told he should seriously consider leaving the country as soon as possible. Mitchell and his wife flew out of Bahrain on June 23.
Via

Steve Barker's 'On The Wire' (BBC Radio Lancashire 21/01/12) Download/Listen

Save On The Wire 
If you missed last weeks show, you can download here and play at your leisure!:
Jennifer Preston 
Who is a "real" journalist? Why does decide who gets credentials? suggests nymedia "stop using them"

Retaliation Fears Spur Anonymity in Internet Case

Image

How Do You Start a Fire With Ice?

♪♫ ScHoolboy Q - NigHtmare On Figg St.

(Thanx Dray!)

For Son#2 :)

Via

Google and Bing accused of directing users to illegal copies of music


NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly Urged to Resign After Police Conceal Role in Anti-Muslim Documentary

♪♫ Nick Cave, Charlie Haden and Toots Thielemans - Hey Joe

Mega Aftermath: Upheaval In Pirate Warez Land

Under Obama, the Freedom of Information Act is Still in Shackles

Three years ago this past weekend, on his first full day in office, President Barack Obama issued his now infamous memo on transparency and open government, which was supposed to fulfill his campaign promise to lead the “most transparent administration in history.” Instead,  his administration has been just as secretive—if not more so—than his predecessors, and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has become the prime example of his administration’s lack of progress.
In 2009, Obama made FOIA reform the centerpiece of his open government agenda. “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government,” he said, while laying out principles he wished to see his agencies adopt in the proceeding months. In March of 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder issued what the Justice Department called “comprehensive new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guidelines.” Holder ordered that all executive branch departments and agencies were to apply “a presumption of openness” in response to FOIA requests.
In 2010, EFF’s senior counsel David Sobel testified to Congress, calling on the Obama to lead by example if they wish to change the FOIA process.
Unfortunately, secrecy won out in the Obama administration almost immediately. In the early months of his presidency, a court ruled that the administration would have to turn over photos related to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in response to a FOIA request. Knowing they’d likely lose the appeal, Obama supported a new law that could keep information secret even when FOIA would otherwise require disclosure. The bill’s only intention was to create a way to shield photographs of detainee abuse from public disclosure.
President Obama also refused at first to release White House visitor records, a practice for which his predecessor, George W. Bush, was pilloried. The Obama Administration appealed a court’s ruling that the visitor logs were subject to FOIA.  In September 2009, Obama reversed course and agreed to release voluntarily White House visitor records going forward. But in 2011, the Administration was still fighting in court to keep the logs before Obama’s reversal a secret.
The Associated Press looked at the administration’s commitment to transparency in 2010 and concluded Obama was using FOIA exemptions to withhold information from requesters more than Bush did in his final year, despite receiving fewer overall requests. And one of the most frequently used exemptions was one Obama explicitly told the agencies not to use: the “deliberative process” exemption, which allows the government to withhold documents dealing with its decision making process. In Obama’s first year in office, the use of the exemption skyrocketed from 47,395 times in 2008 to 70,779 times in 2009.
Worse, more than a year after Obama and Holder’s memos, a National Security Archive study found “less than one-third of the 90 federal agencies that process such FOIA requests have made significant changes in their procedures.” Even FOIA requests on transparency were held up:
The AP is still waiting–after nearly three months–for records it requested about the White House's "Open Government Directive," rules it issued in December directing every agency to take immediate, specific steps to open their operations up to the public.
Yet around the same time, when President Obama was asked a question at a townhall about why his administration wasn’t more transparent, he responded by saying it was the most transparent in the modern era. What was his first reason? The administration's release of White House visitor records—the same records they went to court to fight to keep secret. The President also bragged: “We’ve revamped the classification system so it’s not used to hide things that might be embarrassing to us.” Which, of course, is not true either. As EFF has pointed out, government secrecy and overclassification has reach absurd levels under Obama.
More damage was done to FOIA in the Dodd-Frank bill. A little-noticed provision of the recently passed financial-reform legislation stated that the SEC “no longer has to comply with virtually all requests for information releases from the public, including those filed under the Freedom of Information Act.” Other media organizations have lodged public complaints about FOIA procedure at the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and even agencies dealing with health and scientific issues like the EPA and NASA.
EFF has experienced many of these problems first hand. When we sued the FBI after it was revealed they were systematically abusing their National Security Letter authority, the bureau redacted the vast majority of the thousands of pages requested. In another case, it was clear the FBI was redacting arbitrarily information when it wasn’t appropriate. The DHS singled out EFF, along with other activist groups and media representatives such as the ACLU, EPIC, Human Rights Watch, and AP, for an extra layer of review on its FOIA requests. EFF sued just to find out the names of the members of Obama’s Intelligence Oversight Board.
But by March 2011, only 49 of the 90 federal agencies had followed any “specific tasks mandated by the White House to improve their FOIA performance.” The National Security Archive found in July that federal backlogs of FOIA requests are growing. A Study released in December of this year by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org found the administration was withholding information using nine of the most common exemptions 33% more than George Bush’s last full year in office.
But perhaps the worst violation of Obama’s open government principles was the deplorable attempt by the Justice Department to change the DOJ’s own FOIA regulations. Under the proposed rule, instead of refusing to confirm or deny a document is in the Department’s possession, the agency could "respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist." The Los Angeles Times called it an “outrageous proposal” that “provides a license for the government to lie to its own people and makes a mockery of FOIA.” After near universal outcry, including pressure from Congress, the Justice Department scaled back its rules. But as the Sunlight Foundation said, the Justice Department’s revised FOIA rules were still “worse than reported” and allow reviewers to dismiss requests for a host of trivial reasons. Obama’s Justice Department seemed intent on killing the very law it championed at the start of his administration.
The Freedom of Information Act has been hailed by open government advocates as “one of the most significant laws ever passed by the U.S. Congress,” yet its passage and survival has been fought by Presidents for more than forty years. The bill, as a significant check on executive power and secrecy, was originally opposed by Lyndon Johnson, yet was signed into law in 1966. When Congress strengthened the act after the Watergate scandal, President Ford vetoed it on the advice of his then-chief of staff Dick Cheney. Thankfully, Congress overrode his veto. Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese was so opposed to FOIA, despite its being law for more than 20 years, he wrote a memo telling the Justice Department to disregard essentially requests it disliked.
President Obama promised to change all that. Unfortunately, it’s clear many of his pledges have been broken or ignored, turning his declaration that he would lead the “most transparent administration ever” into a punch line rather than a re-election slogan.
Trevor Timm @'EFF'

Saturday, 28 January 2012

Wanting to see less copyright infringement doesn't necessarily mean being irrationally opposed to downloading - the music business has come a long way since Metallica sued Napster

Map of 10,000 Tweets Shows New York City at Work

Liberté, égalité, fraternité

Via

HA!

Via

ASIO tight-lipped on refugees in limbo

ASIO is refusing to explain why it ruled four male refugees, who could be detained in Darwin for the rest of their lives, are a threat to security.
The Darwin Asylum Seeker Support Network says three Tamil Sri Lankans and a Burmese Rohingyan cannot understand why ASIO says the men are a threat to Australia's security.
They have been recognised as refugees by the Immigration Department but could spend the rest of their lives in detention because of the negative assessments.
Darwin Asylum Seeker volunteers who visit the men say they are traumatised because they do not know why they failed the tests, and cannot challenge the ASIO assessments.
ASIO will not comment on the individuals for security reasons.
The spy agency says it is the competent authority to make assessments in relation to Australia's security, and says any questions regarding the detention of asylum seekers are a matter for the Immigration Department.
A spokesman says less than one per cent of the more than 7,000 security assessments of irregular maritime arrivals undertaken by ASIO in the past two years have been given an adverse security assessment.
@'ABC'
Bullshit!!!

WTF???

Hüsker Dü: Where Were They Then? (1999)


BONUS:
Live At Camden Palace 1985

Sad to say that until fairly recently I would have said that one of the bands that I wished that I had caught live was this mob and then I found a live tape that I made of them in Amsterdam around this time!!! *ahem*

Brion Gysin shoots Bill Burroughs (Paris, October 1959)

William S. Burroughs standing in front of the Beat Hotel, 9 rue Git le Coeur
Portrait of William S. Burroughs on rue de Seine
William s. Burroughs walking with Maurice Girodias on rue Git-Le-Coeur
MORE

BONUS: REpost 

(Thanx SJX/Dave!) 
For Frank Rynne!
Wankers!!!

SOPA, PIPA, ACTA...

(Thanx Ivan!)

22 EU Countries Ratify ACTA, Key Parliament Member Calls it a ‘Charade’

Read Twitter's 'Confidential' Memo To Advertisers On New Enhanced Profile Pages For Brands

Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film


A short film about letterpress and one of the few remaining movable-type printing workshops in the UK, situated at Plymouth University, featuring Paul Collier. plymouth.ac.uk
A film by Danny Cooke dannycooke.co.uk
Soundtrack by Tony Higgins tonyhiggins.org
(Available to download here: goo.gl/exGL1)
Via

ACTA ‘Is More Dangerous Than SOPA’

Is there anything we need on the moon?

♪♫ Mark Stewart VS Primal Scream - Autonomia

Mark Stewart vs Primal Scream
'Autonomia' will be released through Future Noise Music on February 20th, a dense agit-protest superfunk monster with sirens and Bobby Gillespie's frenetic 'keeping the dream alive' call-and-response chant with Mark Stewart who explains the story behind the song - "I'd written this song about Carlo Giuliani, who was killed at the G8 demonstrations in Genoa. At that point, it was a protest ... afterwards I started getting on with Bobby and I asked Adrian [Sherwood] about doing it. It's important that people hear about the story, it's the message and the atmosphere as much as anything.'
Directed by Douglas Hart (founding member and bassist of The Jesus and Mary Chain) with Dominic Lee & Chiara Meattelli, the video exhibits a raw, riotous & feverish vivacity infused with the artists' trademark punk rock ethos to convey the song's deep political message.
"Starting out as a teenager in the late 70s with the Pop Group and thru the 80's with the Maffia up to his new solo record, Mark Stewart has led the attack on conformist reality. Mark is a constant inspiration and a true Thief of Fire. A poet of paranoia and a great laugh. What a guy." - Primal Scream

How Iran Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being Bombed?

♪♫ Errors - Pleasure Palaces

The future of books, today

HA!

Friday, 27 January 2012

HACKERS 
OUT OF 
CONTROL

It wasn’t meant to end like this...

HERE
Via

ph0n0n - Transorbital


(Thanx trnsnd!)

Who is benefitting from the Mega shutdown? And were Mega's D2F plans behind the major label's attack?

Via

This Mortal Coil - The Inspirations

Info
(Thanx Stan!)

Lego man in space: one (very) small step

                   

Canadian teenagers send Lego man into space

Newt - this one's for you XXX

Twitter Commits Social Suicide

NME Magazine 
Barack Obama causes sales of Al Green's 'Let's Stay Together' to go up by 490%

What the Adelsons will want for their money


Scary movie: Commander in chief Gingrich

Newtopia?

Newt 'Lightyear' Gingrich promises moon base by 2020

(Thanx Robin!)

♪♫ Ari Up & the New Crew - True Warrior (2001)

Ari Up & the New Crew, featuring Dunia Best of Brave New Girl, performing live at the Wetlands Preserve NYC on Sep 9 2001
(Thanx Joly!)

Black & White & Through To Black Again - A Joy Division Mixtape: Permutated by Mattress Grave


1) Novelty – Joy Division.
2) Digital – Joy Division.
3) Komakino – Joy Division.
4) Ice Age – Joy Division.
5) Failures – Joy Division.
6) Shadowplay (RCA Demo) – Joy Division.
7) Atrocity Exhibition – Joy Division.
8) Transmission (Genetic Records Session) – Joy Division.
9) The Kill – Joy Division.
10) Day Of The Lords – Jy Division.
11) Interzone (Live at The Factory) – Joy Division.
12) Exercise One – Joy Division.
13) Colony – Joy Division.
14) Something Must Break – Joy Division.
15) From Safety To Where? – Joy Division.
16) The Sound Of Music – Joy Division.
17) Glass – Joy Division.
18) She’s Lost Control (Live at Lyceum Ballroom, London) – Joy Division.
19) Auto-Suggestion – Joy Division
20) I Remember Nothing (Live At Winter Gardens, Bournemouth) – Joy Division.
21) Candidate – Joy Division.
22) Incubation – Joy Division.
23) The Drawback (RCA Demo) – Joy Division.
24) Means To An End – Joy Division.
25) No Love Lost – Joy Division.
(Thanx SJX!)

Drugs, murder and books in Soho

(Thanx Stewart!)