I’m on a catch up mission tonight so I’m just going to be throwing stuff up here and depending on links or the music/movies themselves to do most of the explaining.
I’m also updating my Video Index tonight. (So it won’t be worthless anymore.)
Thanks!
There’s a cool panel I’ll be going to this Sunday in Berkeley at the Hillside Club.
I don’t mean to make the event sound confrontational in my headline. The goal of this panel is to get everybody in one room so we can hear all of the different viewpoints on these issues. Hopefully we’ll be willing to listen to one another. It should be pretty interesting.
Members of the press: this would be a good chance for you to spend an hour or so of your time and learn everything you ever wanted to know about spam tech and collect a round of business cards from the participating parties for quotes in the future when this stuff hits the mainstream media over the next few months.
CAN WE STOP SPAM?
A Panel of Spammers, Anti-Spammers, and the Spam-Inflicted Duke It Out
Here’s the official description:
We’ll hear all sides – including your own – at a revolving panel, which
includes antispam developers Brightmail, Postini, Mail Frontier,
Cloudmark, and ActiveState (from Canada); Internet entrepreneur Gary
Kremen, founder of Match.com and sex.com, who argues that spam is
ineradicable; Paul Goldman, CEO of Markado, an “intelligent” etailer;
EFF Chair Brad Templeton; Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist; and PC
World’s Harry McCracken, whose team has just completed an exhaustive
round-up of anti-spam legislation.
What: Sylvia’s and Jeff’s CyberSalon
When: SUNDAY, June 15, 2003
Time: 5:30-8:00 p.m.
Where: Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Berkeley
Directions are at the bottom of the full invite.
See you there.
This clip is also from June 9th and provides a great recap of the fast talking going on by the Repubs all day Sunday on the various major news networks regarding their WMD lies. Stewart has edited in a little footage from one of Colin Powell’s WMD speeches, just so we can all refresh our memory about what was said.
I’m also about to post some footage of my own that I was able to dig up from the weeks before the Shrub War that should help to refresh our memories a bit 🙂
“The Republicans, for the first time in this Administration, are on the defensive. Their tactic can be best described as “flooding the zone.”
The Repubs Flood The Zone (Small – 7 MB)
The Repubs Flood The Zone (Hi-Res – 96 MB)
The Daily Show (the best news on television).
I’m hearing murmurings on my local TV news (KTVU) a week or two ago about how California might be headed for some kind of new energy crisis because of repairs being made on power plants.
You have got to be kidding me. Every year there’s a new and improved reason for a “crisis” to justify charging Californians even more for their power than the previous year.
Not only is there a “crisis” all of a sudden around summertime every year for a different reason, but every year we find out the year before’s reason was merely a new creative inaccuracy (as revealed later in some report before being swept under the carpet, again).
Here’s a CNN article from November 2002 that I just found in a pile of stuff I never got around to blogging before now that sums up how things were just starting to look back then.
Looks like they’re starting to pick up the offenders. How nice. Nice show for the people. Let’s see if it goes anywhere.
Here are some other articles I’ve posted earlier on this subject that remind us that the important part is to make sure that the State of California doesn’t pay these companies a penny more for these blatant overcharges.
Last I checked, the State Of California still owed the power companies a bundle for the overcharges.
More articles and docs on this in the days to come. Maybe this will be the year that Californians 1) don’t get shafted by the energy companies again and 2) see some of these crooks actually go to jail and 3) (new addition 6/13/03) “Get their money back” from the crooks who conspired to steal it from them by not having to pay one penny of the 7 Billion dollar tab.
I’m not holding my breath, but it sure will be interesting to see how this thing plays out.
Report: Evidence of price-gouging during California energy crisis
SACRAMENTO, California (AP) — A report by federal energy regulators details how two power companies may have conspired to drive up prices during California’s 2000-2001 energy crisis.
The previously undisclosed findings have angered officials who say regulators let the companies off with just a slap on the wrist.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report focuses on discussions between employees of Williams and AES Corporation about prolonging an outage at a power plant to take advantage of higher prices the state was paying at the height of the crisis.
The report says employees also cut deals to shut down a second power plant AES operated for Williams.
As a result of the two plants being closed for 15 days, Williams earned more than $10 million in energy sales from its other plants.
The FERC investigation ended in March 2001 when Williams agreed to refund the state $8 million. The companies did not admit any wrongdoing.
There’s an “emergency” protest going on tomorrow afternoon to protest the Shrub Administration’s deportation of over 13,000 muslim men who cooperated voluntarily with the INS Special Registration Program.
The news conference and rally afterwards is going on from 12pm (noon) – 1:30pm at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Building on 444 Washington Street (at Sansome) in San Francisco. Here’s a map of the location and a gif of that map, in case the mapquest link doesn’t work.
I’ll be there recording it so you’ll still be able to check it out if you can’t make it, but it’s very important to get as many people there as possible for this so please try to make it if you can.
See you there!
Here’s the official scoop (courtesy of an email I received from Refuse and Resist:
Civil rights and community organizations will hold a
news conference and demonstration outside the Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) offices in San Francisco on Friday, June
13. Following reports that 13,000 of the Arab and Muslim men who
voluntarily registered with the INS as part of the government’s
controversial Special Registration Program (NSEERS) will face
deportation, the groups are calling on the INS to halt the expulsions
of men from a list of mainly Arab and Muslim nations. The groups say
that the proposed deportations constitute racial profiling and will
not aid the fight against terrorism.
Speakers will include:
-Jayashri Srikantiah, American Civil Liberties Union of Northern
California
-Samina Faheem, American Muslim Alliance / Pakistan American
Democratic Forum
-Matthew Van Saun, Amnesty International
-Ben Allen, Blue Triangle Network
-Medea Benjamin, Global Exchange
-Riva Enteen, National Lawyers Guild
-Rev. John Oda, Pine United Methodist Church
-Greg Marutani, SF Japanese American Citizens League
-Statement from Attorney Lynne Stewart
Speakers at the protest following the news conference include
representatives of ANSWER, Arab-American Anti-Discrimination
Committee, Global Exchange, Refuse & Resist, South Alameda Peace &
Justice Committee, Not in Our Name, and others.
Jon Stewart has put together a nice montage of Democrats asking the Shrub “where the heck are the WMDs?”
These clips are from the June 9, 2003 Daily Show.
Democrats Ask About WMDs (Small – 8 MB)
Democrats Ask About WMDs (Hi-Res – 102 MB)
The Daily Show (the best news on television).
I love the way the RIAA has already blamed a temp for the incident.
The temp, of course, was just following instructions. The RIAA was just using the same inaccurate methods it always uses to make its usual faulty assumptions about the presence of “pirated” MP3s.
This article includes the actual letters that the RIAA sent out.
Complaint From Recording Industry Almost Closes Down a Penn State Astronomy Server
By Scott Carlson for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
A case of mistaken identity by a temporary recording-industry employee looking for illegal file trading came close to shutting down an academic server at the astronomy department at Pennsylvania State University during final exams last week.
On Thursday, the Recording Industry Association of America sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint to Penn State’s network-security office saying that a server on the university’s main campus, at University Park, was offering a song by Usher, a popular R&B artist.
The network-security office responded by sending a polite yet adamant message to Matthew P. Soccio, the manager of the astronomy department’s server: Remove the song from the server or we will shut it down within 24 hours.
Mr. Soccio spent hours scouring the machine for Usher’s MP3 files and found a couple of an unlikely offenders: One was a directory of files owned by Peter D. Usher, a professor emeritus of astronomy. The other was an MP3 of a goofy a cappella song about a satellite that detects gamma-ray bursts.
Mr. Soccio brought the non-results back to the network-security office and begged not to be shut down. “They were kind enough to leave us up,” he says, adding that the server is used to transfer academic work. “It’s the middle of finals week, so that would have killed us.”
Penn State’s network-security officials did not respond to calls from The Chronicle.
The recording-industry association, which regularly scours the Internet for evidence that copyrighted songs are being shared illegally, acknowledges that there was indeed a mix-up. In an e-mail statement, the association’s officials said that temporary employees usually verify each complaint before it is sent out, and that an employee had made a mistake in this case. The recording industry is reviewing all of the complaints verified by that employee. The association apologized for the blunder.
Mr. Soccio, however, is still a bit irked. He spent the weekend reading up on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and compared the recording-industry’s complaint letter with the letter of the law. “I have a problem with that complaint on a couple of different levels,” he says. “The DMCA is pretty clear about needing complainants to specify the files in question and the copyright in question, and that complaint does neither of those. That letter just points to the top level of my server and says I should look for ‘artists like Usher.’ I don’t know what that means.” Until Thursday, Mr. Soccio had never heard of the R&B star.
The experience has turned Mr. Soccio into an activist. He plans to send letters to Congressional representatives, and is circulating the texts in his department, seeking signatures from professors and other employees. The letters will ask Congress to strengthen fair-use laws and protections for institutions under the DMCA, he says.
Larry explains why he feels we need to reframe the problem of DRM because a lot of really smart people have been working on it “forever” to no avail. He talks about the three kinds of copyright holders out there: those who want “none” “some” or “all” of their rights protected and the different ways in which Creative Commons addresses the needs of the “somes” and “nones” that have been virtually ignored up until now.
He also talks a bit about the Eldred case.
Lawrence Lessig – Part 1 of 2 (Small – 16 MB)
Lawrence Lessig – Part 2 of 2 (Small – 15 MB)
Lawrence Lessig – Complete (Small – 31 MB)
No Hi-res at this time – Coming soon…
Audio – Lawrence Lessig – Complete (MP3 – 20 MB)
Here’s a transcript.
This work is dedicated to the
Public Domain. (Take it and run, baby!)
Just a little snippet for fun’s sake for a reader by special request.
This one’s for Joshua!
The Shrub is off to the middle east…
Daily Show Texodus Clip (Small – 4 MB)
Daily Show Texodus Clip (Hi-Res – 42 MB)
The Daily Show (the best news on television).
Here is a list of the serial lying from the Bush Regime about Iraq, including links to a cross section of all the news sources.
It’s nowhere near a complete list, and you probably already knew about most of these lies, but its a great list to send any annoying dittohead who buys into this fake war.
Best,
Kelley Kramer
