By Cory Doctorow at 11:22 am Saturday, Aug 28
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Jonah sez, "I've written an essay that compares the planned RNC actions, technologies and protests next week to the Wende in Bruce Sterling's short story 'Deep Eddy' and the Wende period of the falling of the berlin wall. It's also a piece that speculates whether the actions and technologies employed in the streets will produce any results. Just thought you and your readers might be interested."
And so the stage has been set. Hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions will be arriving in a city full of citizens already hostile to the political party that has chosen to hold it’s National Convention in their city for reasons of emotional manipulation. The police and city officials have set up a number of strenuous and overly aggressive methods of control.
That this event will be anything less than similar to Sterling’s description of the Wende is doubtful. At the very least a very large number of protestors will participate in one of the most varied, vocal and interesting political protests in American history. At the most extreme, the massive disturbance will awaken a number of American citizens to what the Bush administration is really up to and set off a sequence of events that will alter our political landscape.
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Thanks, Jonah!)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:20 am Saturday, Aug 28
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Bea Arthur forgot to take her pocketknife out of her purse last week at Logan airport and when the TSA found it, she ran around screaming, "The terrorists! The terrorists put a knife in my purse! We're all doomed!" She was being funny -- it's what she does. She's the funniest of all the Golden Girls, that's for sure.
The TSA didn't take it well.
Kur5hin has an appreciation of Ms Arthur and her sense of humor today:
It should be obvious to us that an 81-year old woman committed a crime by making a snide remark when hassled for carrying a pocket knife? I'm just glad that she had the guts to call the security guards out for their ridiculous behavior, even if most Americans think she's crazy for making a joke.
As such, I present a simple proposition: Bea Arthur for President!
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By Cory Doctorow at 11:17 am Saturday, Aug 28
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Great collage of old UK "Piracy is Theft" anti-software-piracy ads.
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via Waxy)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:15 am Saturday, Aug 28
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Michael filed a Freedom of Information Act request the the Justice Department to get it to release a movie called "The Public's Right to Know." The Department released part of the video, but redacted sections of it, claiming that since the video had been produced by a private contractor who hadn't assigned copyright to the feds, they didn't have the right to release it to him. How convenient. There's a
reason that the feds aren't allowed to copyright the stuff they make with our tax dollars: it's stupid and dirty and irresponsible as hell to circumvent that duty to make the public's bought-and-paid material available to the public by failing to negotiate the rights when contracting out to the private sector.
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Thanks, Michael!)
By Xeni Jardin at 7:38 am Saturday, Aug 28
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Following up on
this post about Enzo Baldoni, the Italian journalist and blogger who was executed in Iraq this week, BoingBoing reader Alessandro Burato says: "Hi. There's an important update on Baldoni's death -- his testament, posted by italian journalist Pino Scaccia."
27.08.04 - Enzo's Testament
"[At my funeral] I want people to smile -- did you notice? Funerals always end up with someone smiling: it's natural, it's Life taking over Death. And let people smoke freely anything they like; I'd also be pleased if new love stories would come out, and I'd even consider some aloof sex as an offer to Life rather than an offense to Death.
At about eight-nine o'clock, with little or no cerimonials, bring my coffin silently to the crematory, while the party and the music should last until late night.
About my ashes... throw them into the sea, I'd say. Or do as you want, who fucking cares."
Link to original version in Italian.
By David Pescovitz at 7:24 am Saturday, Aug 28
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Seminal UK avant-folk group the Incredible String Band is preparing to tour the US for the first time in three decades. The group melds sitars, guitars, banjos, and ouds with bluegrass, Celtic melodies, and classic 1960s psychedelia. Founding members Mike Heron are leading the band stateside. From publicist
Howard Wuelfing's email list:
Many of the artists that comprise the current wave of “experimental folk” consider the Incredible String Band as a crucial inspiration and influence. Devendra Banhart says (in typically Banhartian fashion) “Happy Birthday! not noodlemisters but Epic lizard man songs traversing the new universe holding sarods, our old hopes tightly, fiddles, chimes, udes, bagpipes, baby boars, banjos, mead, invisible ropes and on and on OH in this sweetcheese pond lies a perfect reflection of trueTRUE love! Happy Birthday Old Baby!"
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By Cory Doctorow at 5:29 am Saturday, Aug 28
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Wendy Grossman has written a good overview of the Broadcast Treaty proceedings at WIPO for Wired News -- this is a treaty that EFF is fighting, which would allow broadcasters to control what you and others do with their broadcasts regardless of whether those broadcasts contain public-domain or uncopyrightable material:
Cory Doctorow, the London-based European Affairs Coordinator for the EFF, highlights two additional sources of worry. First, the US, represented in Geneva by the Patent Office, is demanding that the treaty include webcasting. If that proposal should pass, broadcast rights could apply to anything downloaded from any Web site, making it impossible to be sure whether even open-source software wasn't covered.
Second, Doctorow said, one proposal in the draft treaty requires that receivers, defined as any device that can decrypt broadcasts, must incorporate technology to protect those broadcasts. As currently drafted, he believes that would include general-purpose computers.
That clause in the draft treaty echoes recent US legislation that introduced the "broadcast flag," a technical control that must be implemented by July 1, 2005 for all devices for sales in the US that receive television signals.
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By Cory Doctorow at 5:27 am Saturday, Aug 28
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The good people at Designed by Monkeys are selling this spiffy Michael Moore/Che Guevara mashup t-shirt for fifteen bucks cheap.
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via A Copyfighter's Musings)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:22 am Saturday, Aug 28
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A Techdirt writer sent a note to Al Fasoldt, a "journalist" with the Syracuse Post-Standard who wrote an editorial telling his readers that Wikipedia couldn't be trusted and should be avoided ("Wikipedia is a do-it-yourself encyclopedia, without any credentials").
Fasoldt responded with an increasingly patronizing and hysterical series of messages in which he described Wikipedia as "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous," insulting the Techdirt writer and storming off in a huff.
My main problem was that he seemed to write off Wikipedia based solely on how it was created and maintained, and not at all on the actual content. Along with my post, I sent an email to the writer, Al Fasoldt, giving him some additional information about Wikipedia, and wondering why, after telling us how you can't trust any random info online, he trusted the email from a random librarian claiming Wikipedia was somehow untrustworthy. The ongoing discussion with Mr. Fasoldt has been quite a lesson in watching how a journalist (a) continues to make unsubstantiated allegations (b) seems to prefer insulting me and putting words in my mouth to actually responding to my points or questions and (c) sticks steadfastly to his belief that only "experts" can be trusted with information -- and, in his case, only experts that he chooses. Yet, somehow, we're supposed to find him more trustworthy than a self-correcting community. Figuring he might appreciate the views of others in his profession (you know, "experts"), I sent him links to Dan Gillmor's article on Wikipedia and Steve Yelvington's recent realization of the power of Wikipedia. However, rather than actually look at that information, Mr. Fasoldt accused me of wanting "students to trust a source that's not trustworthy." After some back and forth of this nature, where Mr. Fasoldt responded to my request that he do a little more research by saying: "I'm glad you're not the publisher of a newspaper" (apparently, his publisher lets him do no research at all) and then telling me that anyone who wrote for Wikipedia obviously knew nothing (his phrase was: "100 times zero is still zero"), I suggested an experiment. I pointed to the Wikipedia page on Syracuse, NY where he apparently lives, and suggested he change something on the page, to make it provably, factually incorrect -- and see how long it lasted. Rather than take me up on the experiment, or suggest an alternative, he complained simply that the whole idea of Wikipedia was "outrageous," "repugnant" and finally (in another email) "dangerous," and therefore he refused to take part in my experiment.
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via EvHead)
