Just this morning, I made some suggestions about the future of file-swapping networks. Now I come across this in the Houston Chronicle:
As the recording industry prepares hundreds of copyright lawsuits against online music swappers, the makers of file-sharing software are fortifying their programs to try to mask users’ identities.
Some of the upgrades reroute Internet connections through proxy servers that scrub away cybertracks. Others incorporate firewalls or encryption to thwart the sleuth firms that the recording industry employs.
I hate when this happens–I never know if I’m so smart that I’m right there with the cutting edge thinkers or so dumb that I’ve merely parroted the obvious.
Anyway, it’s clear that RIAA persecution of file traders will emerge as one of the primary forces driving the development and ultimately betterment of this technology. So suck on that, Hilary Rosen!
Well, not really “photoblogging”, because the image is so heavily processed it doesn’t look remotely photo-esque anymore, but “graphicblogging” doesn’t have much of a ring. Anyway, this is Piazza del Campo in Sienna, Italy. I’ve been writing a lot about public spaces (not today, but over the course of this blog’s span) and Piazza del Campo is one of the greatest. My partner and I sat on the ground in the Piazza for hours, eating bread and cheese and salami bought at a market in Firenze, with a liter and a half of wine open between us, watching children running, a wedding at the town hall (just behind me to the left as I took the picture), and, after the sun went down, eating gelati from a stand just off the Piazza. This is where Sienna happens, whether on the patios of the cafés or just plopped down on the ground.
Plus, I’m really proud of this image.
Well, almost 16 hours have passed since I stumbled out of bed and started blogging this morning. A late sponsor brought my total up to $40 in pledges for Doctors Without Borders, which is good–seems to be about average from a quick glance at the participants list. So far, I’ve managed pretty well–I’ve been stockpiling links for a few days so I’d have stuff to write about. Those links ran out about 2 hours ago, and I admit, I am starting to be at a loss for ideas. I still have a couple of longer posts I want to write, but I’ve been thinking those will wait until the wee hours. My stomach is feeling somewhat better; however, I hardly slept last night, so I’m a little worried about how tired I’m going to get.
The one thing I don’t understand is how people can manage two posts an hour. I suppose if I just blogged about day-to-day stuff–“I went to the bathroom and stopped to consider the way the towel draped, ever-so-softly, over the towel rod”, and the like–I might be able to shoot one off every 30 minutes, but that’s not my thing. As it stands, I think I’ve been averaging a post every 45 minutes, but they’re pretty long posts, as is my wont.
Have you ever considered the word “wont”? Wonder what it means?
Anyway, going into the final quarter, things look not exactly bright, but not exactly dim, either. I imagine I’ll be getting a little punchy, maybe a little snarky, as my brain functions decay. I am reminded, though, of something Camus said, about man functioning best when he’s only had 4 hours of sleep. Something to do with our lack of patience for self-deception and idiocy. We’ll see, I suppose.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the Castro-led Attack on Moncada Garrison. Having seen the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista come to power in a military coup the year before, Castro and 160 men attacked the garrison in Santiago de Cuba. 50 men were killed; Castro was imprisoned. During his trial, he gave the speech which, smuggled out from his prison cell, became History Will Absolve Me, one of the rallying points of the Cuban Revolution.
If there is in your hearts a vestige of love for your country, love for humanity, love for justice, listen carefully. I know that I will be silenced for many years; I know that the regime will try to suppress the truth by all possible means; I know that there will be a conspiracy to bury me in oblivion. But my voice will not be stifled – it will rise from my breast even when I feel most alone, and my heart will give it all the fire that callous cowards deny it.
Released in 1955 on amnesty, Castro would go on to lead the revolutionaries to victory in 1959, but July 26th and the Attack on Moncada Garrison are remembered as the founding day of Castro’s Cuba.
I have mixed feelings about Castro, as do many others. On the one hand, he has managed, with little help from outsiders, to establish effective education and medical programs for his nation’s people. Without the artificial privation forced on Cuba by the American sanctions, Cuba might have been a stunning example of socialist success. On the other hand, for whatever reasons, Castro’s accomplishments have been at the cost of often stunning oppression: of homosexuals, of dissidents, of anyone who dares to break with his orthodoxy, however slightly. Cuba’s human rights abuses are well-documented, and unfortunate. As I say, maybe things would be different without the constant threat of war with the US, without the sanctions, but we can’t know for sure–too many people on both sides have locked us into a struggle that, even now, seems likely to remain until Castro’s death.
For the good that’s come out of it, though, I raise a metaphorical glass to the revolutionaries of the Attack on Moncada Garrison, on this 50th anniversary of their defeat.
I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70 of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.
This is a little late, but its news to me.
In an out-of-character move last week, the House approved the formation of an Office of Global Internet Freedom and funded it to the tune of $16 million. Stranger still: the measure was introduced by a Republican, Chris Cox of California. Cox was also responsible for introducing last year’s Technology Consumer Bill of Rights, which asserted the rights of consumers to freely use digital media for personal uses. I wonder how Cox gets along with the rest of his party, as they ram internet filtering, digital rights management, and file-swapping penalties down our throats?
The OGIF is intended to”develop and implement a comprehensive global strategy to combat state-sponsored and state-directed Internet jamming, and persecution of those who use the Internet”–such a pleasant ring to those of us even a little familiar with the terms of the DMCA. The bad news? It’s not for us. Its measures are directed at non-democratic, repressive states like Myanmar and China. As far as I can tell, its measures are not directed at corporate-sponsored or corporate-directed jamming, nor (of course) at the acts of the American state.
However, what works in China will work here, and I don’t see how the OGIF can control the tools it develops once they are “set free” to undermine the regimes of democracy-fearing governments everywhere.
Peter Suber is the man behind the Free Online Scholarship newsletter, now called the SPARC Open Access Newsletter and published by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. For years he’s been directing scholars to “open access”–publically available, no charge–scholarly sources, and working to develop more such sources. In this interview, Suber discusses his involvement with the Public Library of Science and the general idea of “open access” scholarship.
Basically, open access is to scientific research what free software is to programming. The difference is that a great deal of scientific research is publically-funded, whether through universities or through federal grants, and as such belongs to the public. Also, as Suber says:
There is an important difference, however: open access is compatible with ordinary copyright. We don’t need the public domain and we don’t need alternative licenses like GPL, although these would also work to support open access. Copyright even in its current unbalanced, reprehensible, post-DMCA form is compatible with open access. All we need is the consent of the copyright holder to waive some of the rights given by the statute, and to permit the unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, storing, printing, searching, linking, and crawling of their work.
Scholarly authors are inclined to give this consent because they write for impact and not for money. In this they are nearly unique among creators of intellectual property. So the fact that musicians and filmmakers don’t readily consent to open access is predictable and irrelevant. Scholarly authors don’t receive royalties from their articles and never have. They are paid by their employers, not by readers. This gives them the freedom to advance their careers by advancing knowledge, even if this pursuit leads them in directions that would be marketing disasters – -for example, contradicting mainstream ideas or cultivating a specialization that interests only a smattering of other researchers worldwide.
Essentially, Suber has, for the relatively limited world of scholarly writing, picked up the gauntlet thrown down by Richard Stallman and the Free Software movement, developing an approach well-suited to scientific research.
Virtual Bubblewrap
I’m not really sure anything else needs to be said.
It looks very as if I got a job at my local library. I won’t know for sure until Monday, but let me prematurely celebrate by finally posting links to some of the blogs by and about librarians I’ve been meaning to post for a while.
- First up is librarian.net, a general roundup of all things library-related, especially stuff about or from the American Library Association. The site is run by Jessamyn West, whose personal blog, abada abada 07/03, also bears looking into. Be sure to take a look at the technically legal signs for libraries to post regarding the impact of the PATRIOT Act on library-goers’ privacy rights.
- Libraryman is well-dressed for any occasion, and provides commentary on stories of misfortune and woe throughout the library kingdom.
- Librarian and Information Science News is the “slashdot” of the library world, offering breaking news and observations. Its coverage of information technology, privacy and First Amendment issues, and Iraq have been especially good.
- LibraryPlanet.com is another good site for technology and privacy issues, often stuff you wouldn’t normally think of as “library issues” because you’re too wrapped up in images of mousy old ladies with their hair tied back in a tight, tight bun. Apparently, you think she runs the server…
- The Shifted Librarian also covers technology issues, but specifically how those issues effect the circulation and retrieval of digital information.
- Both Male Librarian Centerfold and Liberry Blooze regale us with stories drawn straight from the librarian’s workaday life. I guarantee you’ll laugh more than once at the stupidity and sheer dense-headedness of library patrons very much like you and me.
Well, that’s my list. There’s a few other sites I visit now and again, but these are the most regularly updated and interesting ones I know of. Hopefully some library people will clue me in to some I might have missed.
I’ll be adding these to my blogroll, along with a whole bunch of other links I’ve never gotten around to adding, hopefully next week.
A long long time ago, I can stil remember when, I used to work at the Jewish Museum. At the time we were planning an incredible multi-media exhibition on the hisotry of Jews in the entertainment industry. From the first silent films to the latest Spielberg blockbuster, Jews have played a central role in American entertainment, ironically defining what “being American” meant at a time when most Jews were still learning English. Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting has finally, more than 3 years later, opened at the JM, and I would love to see it. Of course, I no longer live in NY, so the online material will have to suffice, at least until the exhibition travels.
The exhibition catalogue should be good too–I have copies of a lot of the drafts, and they were very promising.
In the spirit of labor schools and free universities comes AnarchistU, a Toronto-based free education collective starting classes this September. Open education was, once upon a time, a foundational activity of labor-oriented political movements. For instance, the Workmen’s Circle, a Jewish mutual aid society dating to the last decade of the 19th century, ran a circuit of travelling lecturers across the country, delivering talks on topics ranging from literature to physics to Darwin to Marx.
AnarchistU doesn’t have quite so wide a selection of topics (yet?) but the ones they do offer look interesting: experimental literature, the Russian Revolution (ostensibly the one in 1917), art and collaborative techniques, and more. I, alas, am not a resident of Toronto, but I hope to follow from afar how things develop at AnarchistU–hopefully,they will stand as a model for similar experiments in other cities.
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