Wednesday, September 15, 2004

The latest buzz in TV programming - generosity. The latest batch of reality TV shows swap competition and greed for cooperation and charity. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories] 9:29:03 PM    comment []

Outfoxed interviews available under CC license via Bit Torrent. torrentocracy - blog Outfoxed Torrent (torrentocracy exclusive) In working with Lawrence Lessig, Robert Greenwald has agreed to release the interviews within Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism under a Creative Commons non-commercial license (press release). This means that among the rights now granted, interviews balancing out the fair journalism of Fox News can freely be used as anyone sees fit. To see the full movie, you can purchase the Outfoxed DVD or check it out in theaters. Torrentocracy (along with archive.org) has exclusive initial access to distribute these interviews in their digital form due to the work undertaken to promote a TV-connected, public domain, internet based media distribution network. The torrent file to start your Outfoxed download can be found at http://www.torrentocracy.com/files/torrents/outfoxed_interviews.torrent. For more information on how to use bit torrent peer-to-peer filesharing to download this, go here. If you were a Torrentocracy user, you could already be downloading Outfoxed to your television. Here's some serious substantial non-infringing use of P2P. I bought the DVD and watched Outfoxed. Definitely worth buying the DVD, but being able to download and use the interviews from the documentary is a great contribution to the commons. It will be interesting to see how people remix this stuff. [unmediated] 3:15:55 PM    comment []

A Computer With the IPod's Bloodlines. Apple's new iMac G5 desktop computer was clearly designed to send a message to the world's iPod fans: "If you think our music player is great, you should check out our computers." By By DAVID POGUE. [The New York Times > Technology] 3:15:23 PM    comment []

Who's taping whom?. The Christian Science Monitor looks into the right of "video activists". Widespread use of digital cameras at both large demonstrations and small antiwar rallies raises serious questions about intimidation, civil rights, and privacy. Should police be able to record peaceful demonstrators? Are activists using cameras to antagonize police? As the technology becomes more pervasive, its limits are being tested in courts and questioned by civil libertarians. Growing numbers of "video activists" say cameras protect their rights and help spread their messages. Filming a demonstration, they say, lessens the possibility of police abuse and, if abuse occurs, the tape becomes evidence. But police, too, are attempting to protect their rights. They use video in the event protests turn violent, to investigate crimes afterward, and to transmit images through wireless cameras to police command centers. They use it for training and, they say, to investigate groups that may have links to terrorist organizations. [...] The rise in video activism is only one way technology is altering social movements. Cheap and accessible, digital technology - like text messaging through mobile phones - has enabled activists worldwide to organize on the Internet. [unmediated] 3:08:57 PM    comment []

Too Much Fun At Bush-Cheney '04's Expense. Ok, not actually too much fun. Just the right amount of fun. They had a thing on the BC'04 web page that allowed you to enter a slogan of your choosing and have it show up on a Bush-Cheney '04 poster, which you could then print out in massive quantities. This, as it turned out, was really, really stupid. Let me give you an idea of why it was really, really stupid:    [Go to Andrew's blog if you want to see the poster.]  You can see a memorial here. Why a memorial? Because eventually, the Bushies realized how very, very stupid this was. Twice, actually, since they discontinued it a few months ago, but then got sucker-punched when they decided to bring it back again a couple days ago. Doofuses. Anyway - enjoy the exploitation. [Andrew Bayer is Dreaming of China] 6:39:09 AM    comment []

From One College President to Another (4 Letters). To the Editor:. [The New York Times > Opinion] Letters in reply to the column by John McCardell, Jr. (President Emeritus of Middlebury College) that I commented on Monday. They include a rejoinder from the current president of Middlebury and a letter making a point I should have included Monday: Tenure makes university governance more democratic. 6:34:40 AM    comment []

Don't Mess With Librarians. The timid media won't do it, so 'radical' librarians are standing up against the government to protect free speech and fight censorship. Commentary by Adam L. Penenberg. [Wired News] 6:28:04 AM    comment []

Controlling 'The Sims'. Mental breakdowns and warped childhoods add to the fun in "The Sims 2," creator Will Wright explains. [CNET News.com] 6:27:25 AM    comment []

Majority of Chinese cannot write without a computer. China Digital News reports on an interesting article from the Indian Economic Times. With the increased use of computers, an overwhelming majority of Chinese people are forgetting how to write without a keyboard, emphasising the need that the Chinese language needed more protection, an on-line survey has revealed. In a survey, conducted by the Beijing-based China Youth Daily and Chinese news portal Sina.com, 80 per cent of the 432 people surveyed checked "We urgently need to strengthen the protection of the Chinese language." Survey takers who think "it's unnecessary" and those who don't care each constitute just 10 per cent of the total. [Smart Mobs] 6:27:24 AM    comment []

German software pirate, and his father, get jail time. The noose appears to be tightening around one of Europe's largest software counterfeiting rings as a German court sentenced a second member of the network to prison on Monday, and handed a sentence to his father for helping run front operations. [InfoWorld: Top News] 6:23:24 AM    comment []

Developing nations CC licence. Creative Commons has launched yesterday a new standalone license, dubbed Developing Nations. This attribution-only license applies within developing nationsand can be used in a few ways: - it can be combined with something currently licensed under a more restrictive license, so that your photographs could be protected from commercial use in the United States, but if it also carried a Developing Nations license, those same photos could be used commerically in say, Brazil, - you might also be a musician or photographer that wants to maintain full copyright in North America and Western Europe, but welcome use by others in the countries of Southeast Asia. From Creative Commons Weblog. More information in their Press Release. [Smart Mobs] 6:22:17 AM    comment []

September 14, 2004. We've been quietly making some improvements to the beta discussion group software.  . . . And finally we got Summer Intern Ben's excellent Bayesian filtering code working... due to a couple of configuration problems it wasn't running right. The idea is to delete comment spam before anyone sees it. It's hard to tell if the filter works yet because it needs more training, but so far it's doing pretty well. If you think comment spam is not a big problem, you haven't moderated a discussion group lately... this is the number one priority for spammers these days, since email filters are starting to work pretty well and spamming a lot of discussion groups is perceived as a good way to trick Google into giving a site prominent placement. We admit to three strategies to prevent comment spam: Bayesian filtering which can be trained to remove comment spam instantly Not allowing new comments on old posts, so that comment spam can't be hidden in posts which nobody but Google visits any more Using a META tag to ask search engines not to follow URLs from discussion topics. Although this technique prevents comment spam from working it doesn't prevent it from happening because spammers don't seem to particularly care if a given spam works or not. By "we admit to" I imply that there are other things we do which we don't talk about too much because revealing them would make it that much easier for spammers to work around them, thus reducing the cost of spamming, thus making it more economically feasible. One side affect of the Bayesian filter is that if it finds a suspicious topic, rather than letting it through, it will flag it for a human moderator. The moderator can then allow it to be posted (which trains the filter) or leave it unshown. The effect of this is that rarely, new posts won't appear until a human approves them. This should happen less and less as the filter learns more. [Joel on Software] 6:22:01 AM    comment []