It’s beem snowing in Leeds!

It’ll be front page news on BBQ when it causes traffic mayhem in Essex, no doubt.

via digg (The big DRM mistake)

After it arrived, I took out the first DVD and stuck it in my Linux box, expecting that I could start looking at the collected issues
[…]
It turned out that The New Yorker added DRM to their DjVu files, turning an open format into a closed, proprietary, encrypted format, and forcing consumers to install the special viewer software included on the first DVD. Of course, that software only works on Windows or Mac OS X, so Linux users are out of luck (and no, it doesn’t work under WINE … believe me, I tried).

via Spyblog (re Computer Misuse Act):

For the purposes of subsection (1)(b) above the requisite intent is an

intent to do the act in question and by so doing—

(a) to impair the operation of any computer,
(b) to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer, or
(c) to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data,

whether permanently or temporarily.

I’m sure that the DRM problems described in the first story fall into the emboldened sections of the legislation.

Does this mean UK government will be outlawing DRM? It’s a nice thought anyway.

An audio recording made on November 18, 1978, at the Peoples Temple compound in Jonestown, Guyana immediately preceding and during the mass suicide or murder of over 900 members of the cult.

Author: The Rev. Jim Jones, et al. (The Peoples Temple cult)
Date: 1978-11-18 00:00:00
Source: ? > cassette > CD-R > Sound Forge > FLAC Frontend > FLAC
Recorded by: Unknown; FLAC’ed by Olen Sluder (olenATacmDOTorg)
Keywords: Spoken Word; Historical

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

Notes

I acquired the source cassette tape c. 1979 from a high school friend whose father was an FBI agent.

The sound levels were increased as close as possible to clipping when I transferred to CD-R from cassette and then normalized to -18 dB average RMS power (loudness) in Sound Forge after extracting from CD-R

An interesting web site for further research is the Jonestown Institute (http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/), which contains transcripts as well as commentary on this and other recordings recovered by the FBI from Jonestown

Individual Files

Wow.

I came across this whilst checking up on the TCP stats at Archive.org, which are over 45,000 now.

Pay too much and you could raise the alarm

By BOB KERR
The Providence Journal
28-FEB-06

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Walter Soehnge is a retired Texas schoolteacher who traveled north with his wife, Deana, saw summer change to fall in Rhode Island and decided this was a place to stay for a while.

So the Soehnges live in Scituate now and Walter sometimes has breakfast at the Gentleman Farmer in Scituate Village, where he has passed the test and become a regular despite an accent that is definitely not local.

And it was there, at his usual table last week, that he told me that he was “madder than a panther with kerosene on his tail.”

He says things like that. Texas does leave its mark on a man.

What got him so upset might seem trivial to some people who have learned to accept small infringements on their freedom as just part of the way things are in this age of terror-fed paranoia. It’s that “everything changed after 9/11” thing.

But not Walter.

“We’re a product of the ’60s,” he said. “We believe government should be way away from us in that regard.”

He was referring to the recent decision by him and his wife to be responsible, to do the kind of thing that just about anyone would say makes good, solid financial sense.

They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.

And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges’ behavior was found questionable.

And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn’t call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn’t try to sneak a machine gun through customs.

They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.

After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn’t changed.

So Deana Soehnge called the credit-card company. Then Walter called.

“When you mess with my money, I want to know why,” he said.

They both learned the same astounding piece of information about the little things that can set the threat sensors to beeping and blinking.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn’t move until the threat alert is lifted.

Walter called television stations, the American Civil Liberties Union and me. And he went on the Internet to see what he could learn. He learned about changes in something called the Bank Privacy Act.

“The more I’m on, the scarier it gets,” he said. “It’s scary how easily someone in Homeland Security can get permission to spy.”

Eventually, his and his wife’s money was freed up. The Soehnges were apparently found not to be promoting global terrorism under the guise of paying a credit-card bill. They never did learn how a large credit card payment can pose a security threat.

But the experience has been a reminder that a small piece of privacy has been surrendered. Walter Soehnge, who says he holds solid, middle-of-the-road American beliefs, worries about rights being lost.

“If it can happen to me, it can happen to others,” he said. […]

http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=RAISEALARM-02-28-06 

So, NOW you see what has been happening while you were asleep.
The one comforting thing about this story is that this man went bezerk, and called everyone he could to ‘expose’ this ‘scandal’. Note how he describes himself and his generation. I fear that the youth of today would not raise even an eyebrow had this happened to them, shoulder shrugging eloi that they are.

That is the tragedy.

And of course, the decades long crusade to spread democracy and exert control over the middle east has all been for nothing. Now that the Iraqui resistance has engineered a civil war, the american press is actually saying out loud that us troops will have to pull out until the fighting dies down should it all get any worse. Had they never gone in there in the first place, and left ‘The Lion of the Desert’ in place, none of this would ever have happened.

Now they are set to leave Iraq as it self destructs, and they have the audacity to try and provoke an attack against Iran, which is completely stable.
Wasted lives, wasted money, mass murder, the destruction of the American way of life, the discrediting of democracy, all for nothing…nothing. What an unmittigated disaster.

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/011733.html

Doesn’t say anything new, but at least people are paying attention.

Take a look at http://wink.com

Where you can look at people’s collections of related links; for example:

This is SandervanderHeide’s Search Guide. You can look at SandervanderHeide’s tags, check out the newest links, or add the favorite “Collections” to your private page. This is a great way to stay updated on the things you care about from people you trust.

If you look at this users page, you can see, for example, all of his links that are to do with the NSA’s domestic spying.

You will remember that Higher Though works (heh, will work) by users manually linking together URLs that are related to each other, so that you will be able to browse them as collections of semantically linked pages, or images or any other type of object that can be accessed with a URL.

Wink doesn’t do this however; it merely allows people to collect related links together in a static list. To make it more like HT, they would need to allow you to go to another related link from any link, instead of the links only available destination being straight to the article.

HT works better than tagging. For example, on this users page, he has a colection of URLS all tagged witht the word ‘citizen’. Now, this tag essentially sits between any two URLS as a semantic mediator. The word ‘citizen’ doesn’t in and of itself contain the meaning of the two links, so if I click on any of these tags in his list, in the Wink results, I get a wildly different set of links, all tagged with this same word.

Higher Thought eliminates the semantic ambiguity of tags, by directly linking two URLS; the urls themselvs are the tags. Since the URL has the meaning of its content ‘encoded’ into it, if the HT connection is made correctly, once you jump into the HT stream of linked tags, each one will relate to the next without ambiguity. The objects a URL represents have very subtle meanings; this is why you have to use multiple tags to pin down the category of a blog post or news article. By linking URLS together directly, you eliminate the need for multiple tags, and allow the meaning of the information to organize itself.

Think of HT as a way of implimenting ‘fractional tagging‘, in the same way that an imaginary object in fractal geometry has a demensionaltiy that is between two whole numbers, the beauty of HT lies in the subtle graduations of meaning that single, one dimensional words can’t convey very well.
Obviously, we can build a moderation system so that bad users links (noise) are pushed out of site. Once we have a critical mass of users, good users links will all connect to each other, and the broken bridges between clusters of HT links cause by bad uers will be eliminated.

It would become a self organizing, semantically correct cloud of all objects with urls, with entry points at each url, from which you will be able to surf from one node to another, viewing semantically linked collections and lines of related urls.

I made a buzzword….

‘fractional tagging‘
‘fractal tagging‘
‘fractagging‘
‘fraagging‘

The more I hear about the environmental situation regarding the ‘Thames Gateway’ redevelopment the more I wonder how the area is going to cope.

Even now we are hearing stories that this year there will be significant water shortages in SE England, never mind the additional demand of an extra million people and associated infrastructure. The lack of winter rainfall is undoubtedly a sign that a large amount of water is remaining in the sea (in addition to that being added by ice-cap melting) which can only worsen the situation of the areas being ‘planned’ on flood plains – we can at least rest assured that the insurance market will determine the value of such developments.

(Since I wrote that paragraph it has been reported that Kent Water will be allowed to compel residents to install water meters)

In addition to such concerns the utterly political excercise of producing a £60,000 house for ‘keyworkers’ is producing a number of lacklustre and shoddy designs for houses – the life expectancy of some of the cheaper ‘affordable homes’ is less than ten years (I am sure I read that a £30k home could be built but would have a 5 year lifespan), making the resale value negligible and not a sound investment by any means. If the government weren’t determined to tie developers to producing ownable homes rather than rented accommodation the quality of housing for key workers could be much improved.
Cheap, non-traditional housing types will have higher insurance premiums and probably more onerous mortgage requirements thus increasing the day to day costs for workers rather than reducing them. In addition to utility, transport and taxation costs rising above the rate of inflation.

Additionally the short term succouring of the demand for more key workers in the SE will just further increase demand down the line, it would be better to let individuals decide whether they can afford to live in the SE/London with expensive services or decamp north/westwards where the price of living is generally lower.

I could go on, and probably will in another post. (Can we have a Cassandra category?)

Technorati Tags: Thames, Gateway, water

My sister is emigrating to Australia in a few months… Can anyone recommend a video camera setup for keeping in touch? I’ve read mixed reviews of the iSight, and am not convinved by Apple peripherals in general. Mac this end, PC hers.

Merci beau.

Call for applications for the
MP- Scientist Pairing Scheme 2006

Are you a scientist with an interest in politics?  The Royal Society is currently inviting applications from scientists to take part in the 2006 round of its successful MP-Scientist pairing scheme.

The scheme helps build bridges between parliamentarians and scientists in theUK. MP and scientist pairs spend time together in the laboratory and the constituency followed by an opportunity for scientists to go behind the scenes at Westminster gaining first hand experience of how science policy is formed.

We are looking to recruit post-doctoral scientists either with a research fellowship or working at a Research Council institute and a proven interest in science communication and matters relating to science policy.

[…]

I would apply, only I have no interest in politics….

Do I?

Thanks to Josh Carr, longtime BLOGDIAL poster, you now have your name underneath the title of your post, and a list of ten ecent comments in the sidebar.

Josh took time off from his work to Skype and walk me throught putting in the pieces of PHP where they needed to go. Thanks again Josh!

Slashdot is dying, and this is another example of why.

I just posted ATs amazing link to the BBQ Newsblight admission that filesharing is not theft, a great link, no doubt about it.

I posted it on Digg; 1 hour, 36 minutes later, its on the front page, blasting BBQ with a Diggstorm of traffic. I submitted the same story to Slashdot:

It’s Official: “File sharing is not theft.”
Wed March 01, 04:24 PM Rejected

And there you have it.

Why should anyone bother to submit stories to Slashdot, when they are going to be rejected, no matter how hot they are? And now with Digg’s new and superb commenting system coming online soon, there will be no reason to visit slashdot ever again. All the teenage trolls will dissapear from view, you can get cool stories on the frontpage guaranteed – as long as they really are cool – and be guaranteed that no one else’s cool stories are being rejected and kept from your view.

UPDATE: here is a torrent of the Newsblight item.

Dear Irdial,

President George Bush has come to Congress – to the American people, really – to ask for another $65 billion for war in the Middle East. It’s the fourth time in three years the Administration has asked for extra, unplanned billions to be taken from other needs. What will he do with the money? We’re told this $65 billion (in addition to the $241 billion spent so far¹) will be used to “stay the course.”

Problem is, no one – not Mr. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney nor Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – seems to know what “the course” is. All citizens are offered is more of the same policies – the same policies which have led Iraq to the brink of civil war and bogged our troops in a hopeless quagmire.

Enough is enough!

Let’s tell Congress that it’s time to use their Constitutional auth […]

Blah blah blah, whine whine whine…

If you don’t want this, DONT PAY FOR IT YOU IDIOTS.

Would you losers keep going to Wendy’s if they consistently forgot to put the burger in your bun every time you made an order?

Of course you wouldn’t, and this is no different. Stop shopping at McWarMachine!

File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4758636.stm

[…]

http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3407088

Watch this.

The 1972 installment “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” then picked up the action in the year 1991. Since the events of the prior film, much has changed on Earth. A space-borne plague has killed all cats and dogs on the planet, while also stimulating mental development of the lower primates. At first, humans use primates to replace their lost pets, but eventually they find them useful for menial labor, which ultimately creates a slave class. Zira’s baby, now 18 and named Caesar (played again by McDowall) initiates a rebellion after seeing the cruel and inhumane treatment of his primate brethren at the hands of their human masters. The rise of the “Planet of the Apes” had begun, using images that spoke to the racial intolerance and violence that plagued modern-day American society. […]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4761024.stm 

???!!!

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 (Xinhuanet) — The U.S. government has agreed to pay 300,000 U.S. dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by an Egyptian swept up in the New York area after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The Egyptian was among dozens of Muslim men that were swept up in the New York area after the attacks, held for months in a federal detention center in the city, and deported after being cleared of links to terrorism, the report said.

The settlement, filed in federal court late Monday, is the first the government has made in a number of lawsuits charging that non citizens were abused and their constitutional rights violated in detentions after the terror attacks.

The settlement, which removes one of two plaintiffs from a casein which a federal judge ruled last year that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller and other top government officials must answer questions under oath, requires approval by a federal judge in Brooklyn.

Lawyers for the government filed an appeal to that ruling last Friday. They said in the agreement that the official were not admitting any liability or fault, and in court papers, they said that the Sept. 11 attacks created “special factors,” including the need to deter future terrorism, that outweighed the plaintiff’s right to sue.

Lawyers representing the Egyptian and another plaintiff, a Pakistani, who is still pursuing the lawsuit, said the outcome was significant.

“This is a substantial settlement and shows for the first time that the government can be held accountable for the abuses that have occurred in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and in prisons right here in the United States,” one of the lawyers was quoted as saying.

The lawsuit accuses Ashcroft, Mueller of personally conspiring to violate the rights of Muslim immigrant detainees on the basis of their race, religion and national origin, and names a score of other defendants, including Bureau of Prison officials and guards at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. […]

 http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-02/28/content_4240628.htm