Posted on Monday, 30 November, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
As the UK starts (late) looking at the legality of its latest colonial practices in Iraq — and to a lesser extent Afghanistan — while the U.S. is sort of like a kid with his fingers in his ears chanting “la, la, la, la,” pretending like it’s now doing nothing wrong with an Obama in the White House instead of a Bush, Europe may have been feeling a little left out of the culture war. It shouldn’t.
Overtly xenophobic posters featuring graphic design with Gestapo influences were used to successfully lobby against one of the world’s more impressive forms of architectural expression last week: the minaret. Maybe the Swiss government was trying to appeal to Geert Wilders, the nearby Dutch politico whose wet dream seems to be to see star-and-crescent armbands on every Muslim’s coat sleeve.
Now, as an atheist, all your faith-based pointy sky thingies have roughly the same spiritual connotation to me. Nevertheless, one cannot help being in awe when visiting either the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca or the Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris, and if it weren’t for these structures, I don’t think I’d have a use for religion at all. But if I could actually live inside one of these buildings around the clock, I could see how they might inspire belief in a divine what-have-you of some sort.
So it’s interesting that on the one hand, there was a debate about “free expression” in Switzerland over whether some hate posters should be taken down or not (some cities said yes, while others said no), but a law banning the minaret isn’t considered censorship in the same vein. Because as long as you have a building code that allows for tall sky thingies with religious connotations to exist, you’re censoring people if you tell them what their own sky thingy has to stand for. As long as this rule is on or near the books in Switzerland, it cannot claim to be either a place of free speech or real democracy, and that should cause some problems in the EU neighborhood. And if it doesn’t, that will signal which direction Europe is again headed.
Posted on Tuesday, 25 August, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
Posted by Jim Killock at the Open Rights Group:
According to the Guardian and reports this morning, Government officials today have announced that they intend to put in place a strong clamp down on illicit file sharing to ‘support’ record and film industries they wrongly believe are threatened.
This is the wrong moment to go in this direction. Online music revenues are going up, illicit filesharing is going down.
Instead of letting the market solve the problems, the government seems intent on heavy-handed intervention, that could include disconnection and other account restrictions. This would be in direct contravention of their own goal of universal broadband access, as well as a curtailment of people’s freedom of expression.
Yet again, we see knee-jerk reactions and policy swerves, this time in direct contravention of the government’s own consultation guidelines. Those guidelines are there for a reason: to make sure government policy is balanced and considered. We will be making a formal complaint.
The result of these proposals is likely to be protest, challenges and public arguments in the run-up to the General election. Popular movements in France, Sweden and elsewhere have kick-started over similar measures.
That will do nobody any good, neither politicians nor rights-holding industries, as copyright’s reputation suffers further damage.
Copyright is under threat: from heavy handed business lobbying and simplistic enforcement proposals.
BoingBoing: Glyn sez, “People accused of breaking copyright over the internet will have their internet connections cut off under tough new laws to be proposed by the UK government today. The decision is noteworthy since it was ruled out by the government’s own Digital Britain report in June as going too far. The Open Rights Group believes the government is breaking its own consultation guidelines by bring in the proposals in the way they have and asks people to write to their MPs.”
Time for some WikiWarriers to add more Wikidpedia pages to their watch lists.
Electronic Intifada reports on Camera, A pro-Israel (depending on how you define that) lobby and media pressure organization that’s “orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.”
SNIP: “A series of emails by members and associates of the pro-Israel group CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), provided to The Electronic Intifada (EI), indicate the group is engaged in what one activist termed a “war” on Wikipedia.”
The article offers some interesting insight into neww about recent lobby efforts to propagandize comment areas of newspaper websites and popular blogs. Apparently the World’s best used encyclopedia is also in the crosshairs.
Quote:
“A veteran Wikipedia editor, known as “Zeq,” who according to the emails is colluding with CAMERA, also provided advice to CAMERA volunteers on how they could disguise their agenda. In a 20 March email often in misspelled English, Zeq writes, “You don’t want to be precived [sic] as a ‘CAMERA’ defender’ on wikipedia [sic] that is for sure.” One strategy to avoid that is to “edit articles at random, make friends not enemies — we will need them later on. This is a marathon not a sprint.”
Zeq also identifies, in a 25 March email, another Wikipedia editor, “Jayjg,” whom he views as an effective and independent pro-Israel advocate. Zeq instructs CAMERA operatives to work with and learn from Jayjg, but not to reveal the existence of their group even to him fearing “it would place him in a bind” since “[h]e is very loyal to the wikipedia [sic] system” and might object to CAMERA’s underhanded tactics.”
Posted on Wednesday, 24 June, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
I recently contacted the administrators of parliamentlive.tv to see about getting access to about five minutes of footage from a House of Commons session I wanted to include in a video project.
Being that this was a public proceeding, lacking any sort of national security concerns and having to do with the common good, I thought this should be a fairly simple process. After all, the footage is openly available on a government website. It’s already been filmed, edited and posted. Getting the raw file should be no big deal. As it turns out, however, UK Parliament keeps about as tight a control on its content as the BBC does an episode of Doctor Who.
The response I got back cautioned me that “The situation relating to the use of Proceedings of Parliament on website is very complex.” And while I could freely link to any recording on the Parliament website I wanted to, should I actually choose to host and play a clip anywhere else or combine it with a video project, “this would be possible subject to a number of conditions.”
Posted on Saturday, 13 June, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
It’s been a while now since Rabbi David Forman published his May 25th critique of The Rachel Corrie Foundation as a guest op-ed on the Jerusalem Post website. Someone somewhere coined the phrase “publishing at the speed of thought” with regards to the ease of disseminating words and ideas online. I think they meant it as a good thing. While I’m an eager promoter of all things online and tech, I have often kept in mind a bit of advice I read elsewhere about blogging, which suggests giving an idea a week or so to process before publishing it all over World Wide Tarnation.
As the UK starts (late) looking at the legality of its latest colonial practices in Iraq — and to a lesser extent Afghanistan — while the U.S. is sort of like a kid with his fingers in his ears chanting “la, la, la, la,” pretending like it’s now doing nothing wrong with an Obama in the White House instead of a Bush, Europe may have been feeling a little left out of the culture war. It shouldn’t.
“Code is poetry.”