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, 16 June, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
This post is being donated to Danny O’Brien, and his very cool ideas using Opera Unite. I add my name to this challenge. Come up with this and I’ll set up and run any needed server space and find the people to promote, disseminate and otherwise flog this in farsi.
The demo services that Opera offers are great, but they really are just demonstrations. It’s generating a lot of excitement and “wuh?” in equal measure on the discussions I’ve seen, which is something I recognise from my attempts to proselytize the edge to those already excited by the cloud.
It occurred to me (encouraged by Stef) that a great and timely Opera Unite application, just for the next few days, would be a web proxy for Iranians. Run it on your Opera service, post your machine’s Unite URL onto twitter with a tag #spartacus, and Iran would be drowning in potential proxies to use.
Posted on Tuesday, 5 May, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
And now one more for the ever growing list of reasons why government control of content is generally a bad idea: Ofcom, the Uk government’s censor, has killed an advert by Women’s Aid about domestic abuse because of its depiction of violence against women.
‘The Cut’, directed by award-winning director Joe Wright, was first aired early this month at which point it was planned to be released only in cinemas. The decision to take the advertisement, which features a £2-a-month donation request, onto television appears to have been made following the cinema and online release.
The Advertising Standards Authority reported that it has received two complaints about ‘The Cut’, but that the complaints came not from people who had seen the advert itself, but had read news stories about its content.
Apparently I can watch serial killers hack women up for entertainment on television, but if the matter is treated with any sort of seriousness, it’s deemed a threat to the public. Maybe they felt it was to biased in favor of abuse victims or something.
Posted on Sunday, 12 April, 2009 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
It’s a feather cap that many newspapers should be aiming for. The Telegraph reports that Goldman Sachs hired law firm heavies to close down a blogger’s site,”Facts about Goldman Sachs” at goldmansachs666.com.
This Hybrid car site also hates Sachs, and uses cardboard to say so
The site’s aim is to be “an open forum for facts and discussion about what part Goldman Sachs and their executives played in the current Global Economic Crisis.” Florida investment adviser Mike Morgan started the blog just a few months ago, but ran afoul of Goldman Sachs, who allege the criticism, “violates several of Goldman Sachs’ intellectual property rights” and also “implies a relationship” with the bank itself.
The site states in several places that it’s not affiliated with the bank, and really, common sense would hopefully prevail in a court of law that the investment bank wouldn’t be opening up a Google-owned push-button publishing operation to criticize itself. Most of the posts are a collection of items which can be around around the web and also cover other banks’ scams as well, leading one to wonder just what is so damaging on this blog that some corporate hack felt the need to sic Chadbourne & Parke on someone who is essentially an angry typer.
Could it be that Sachs doesn’t like the particular collection of reposts? Or is there actually something there specific that could bring down an investment giant?
Could it be the combination of publicly accessible tools that Mike Morgan is taking advantage of to build momentum against Sachs? Blogger is easy, public and instant publishing. He’s also using Go To Meeting Dot Com to hold a webinar and solicit information and volunteers on May 15.
It”s not the only anti-Sachs front. Goldman Suchs Blog is another offering from the chagrined side of investment banking bailouts.
From a quick perusal of both blogs, I’m at a loss at what’s so potentially damaging here, but if a person’s effectiveness can be measured by the reaction they generate in the enemy, Mr. Morgan is on to something.
Posted on Saturday, 4 October, 2008 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
Porn?
You know, I admit I’m a sucker for a censored work, or even an attempted-censored work. Film, movie, music whatever. It just makes me want to know so much more about what the message was when there’s someone trying to keep me from accessing it.
More so when the intimidating group comes from religious circles. It’s not likely I would have waded through Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses if there hadn’t been a fatwa issued. Tough for Salman, but I can just imagine the the publishing house’s marketing team clicking their heels over the noting that a religious nutter had done their work for them.
No, I suppose it’s not a cool admission. sort of like admitting you weren’t into some punk band back when they were with Sub-Pop Records.
So it’s interesting to me that an author of a book that is the subject of attempted censorship by religious zealots is herself turning on critics of her work, accusing them of stocking violence, just by criticizing her work.
Posted on Wednesday, 5 December, 2007 By yours truly | TOOLS:Talk or Share
I want to make a version of this tool that works for WordPress. See update below.
Well, at least a clone of it is, anyway. Drew3ooo is now the home of a BoingBoing mirror. Why? Because we on the d3 development team (which is me in the editorial sense) hate censorship. Also, we’d (still just me) like to learn more about the Distributed BoingBoing tool and mod it for a couple other projects that are either live or under development that might benefit, such as this, this, this or this.
BoingBoing is one of my favorite blogs, worth checking in on daily. But it has found itself on the wrong side of a few firewalls when it comes to corporate and government censorware. As a website developer who works with organisations that also run into the potential of these sorts of jams, this idea has some appeal. Installing this mirror took seconds. Far less time than it took to write about it. drew3000.net/dbb.php.
This is a very cool tool and a neat way of utilizing the true people power of the internet to beat censorship. Created by Mark Christian, it requires absolute URLs, which can be easily added into a WordPress theme and css file, but doesn’t really work with the WordPress system (that I know of), so I’m looking to somehow mod it, or find something that does that and plays nice with WordPress. Not that I really think my site is being blocked, or even paid attention to, but I’ve created some other WordPress installations and am working on others that could benefit. Anyone have any clues on mirroring WordPress in this manner for beating censorware, drop me a comment.
• • •
UPDATE: So it does work with WordPress, kind of. To see it in action, click here. You’ll notice if you click around enough that there are some problems with it working with WordPress. The footer doesn’t format well, comments, pingbacks, archives, searching and that sort of thing aren’t really working, but I think that better minds than mine could probably come up with a mod of this file that would work.
To get Mark’s Dristibuted BoingBoing, file, click here. To get my highly in-progress, semi-working version, Distributed drew3ooo, click here.
I’ll continue to tinker with this, but if you come up with a mod that works with WordPress, drop me a line and I’ll be your biggest fan.
“I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel – let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.” — Howard Zinn
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.
Well, at least a clone of it is, anyway. Drew3ooo is now the home of a 
“I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel – let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.”