Bill Gates’ plan for fixing the world

Posted on | November 12, 2009 | No Comments

Last night in New York, Bill Gates presented his philanthropic plan on how to use a vast amount of his earned fortune to improve the world in a range of areas. Whether it will actually do any good in the large picture is hard to predict, but he surely deserves credit for trying.

Mashable writes: “It’s been more than a year since Bill Gates stepped down from day-to-day operations at Microsoft to focus on his philanthropic efforts through the Gates Foundation.

In that time, Gates has traveled the world (in the past week alone, he’s been in China, India, and today, New York), strategizing the best use of his enormous fortune and that of his foundation, which, also includes $31 billion of Warren Buffett’s money.

Tonight at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, Gates shared a progress report of sorts in an interview with Matthew Bishop of The Economist, which also included some broader questions from the audience.”

Read the entire article on Mashable.

Angry Mermaid Award launches

Posted on | November 9, 2009 | No Comments

ATTAC Denmark, Corporate Europe Observatory, Focus on the Global South, Friends of the Earth International and Spinwatch now launches the Angry Mermaid Award – an award which will be given to the company or organization that has worked the hardest to prevent and sabotage positive action to improve our climate. The winner will be decided by a poll and the announced in December during the Copenhagen climate convention.

From the website: “Crucial UN climate talks take place in Copenhagen this December. While people, organisations and social movements around the world are calling for strong action to prevent climate change and ensure climate justice, big business has been lobbying to block effective action to tackle the problem, while also seeking to benefit from it.

The Angry Mermaid Award has been set up to recognise the perverse role of corporate lobbyists, and highlight those business groups and companies that have made the greatest effort to sabotage the climate talks, and other climate measures, while promoting, often profitable, false solutions.”

Read more.

Vote here (starts Monday Nov 16, 2009)

Danish anti-piracy agency throw in the towel

Posted on | November 7, 2009 | 12 Comments

/// UPDATE NOV 8, 2009: This piece was Boing Boing’ed today, both on the site and in the newsletter. ///
/// See also ping-backs from siltala.net, gadgetsteria.com, theworldmatters.org, newsblog.twitwp.com, skivadlime.se, nezinau.lt and partidulpiratilor.ro ///

Just now it has been announced in the press by the official Danish Anti-Piracy agency, Antipiratgruppen, that they are throwing in the towel and will seize cease their operations completely; to find and convict music copyright offenders. In todays news, in an article on the website of national daily Politiken, the story reads:

(rought translation from Danish – read original piece here):

PIRATES ONLINE ARE GIVEN FREE HANDS

Published Nov 06 2009 23.00 (11pm) on politiken.dk
By Dorrit Saietz and Rune Eltard-Sørensen

It is illegal, but still you will not be punished.

In practice it proven almost impossible to prosecute the many Danes who infringe copyright online, when they download music, film, games and software for free.

This says Antipiratgruppen (Anti-Piracy Group), who in behalf of the movie- and music industry since 2002 has worked to stop illegal piracy and file sharing. And there they now throw in the towel and drop the cases against privates suspected of illegal file sharing.

“We have to, because it is has been announced by the state court, that it takes very strong and concrete evidence to have these people prosecuted. We have simply not been able to establish the necessary evidence,” says
»Det har vi været nødt til, fordi det er kommet frem i landsretten, at det kræver meget stærke og konkrete beviser at få dømt de her folk. Vi har simpelthen ikke kunnet løfte bevisbyrden«, siger paralegal Maria Fredenslund from Antipiratgruppen.

STATE COURT ACQUITS PEOPLE
An overview of Danish trials shows an extremely small possibility of getting sentenced – unless the the accused confesses. Four principal state court trials last year lead to three acquittals and only a single sentence for illegal file sharing. And this sentence only came into place because of a confession.

Per Overbeck is the lawyer of the accused and tells, that cases against two more of his clients these last six months has been dropped.
“Antipiratgruppen has recognized that they cannot get people sentences without either catching them in the act or threatening them to confess. In practice, that means that if there is no confession – then there is no case,” he says.

Illegal file sharing is immensely popular. In a recent survey from Aarhus University is shows that 70 per cent of youths between 15 and 25 years download illegal music from the Internet.

The music industry label association IFPI estimate that 95 per cent of all downloads happen without the consent of copyright owners and that this cost the music business billions in lost revenue every year.

REPORT: ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO PROSECUTE PRIVATES
A recent report from the Cultural Ministry support defence lawyer Per Overbeck and Antipiratgruppens estimate, that last years’ state court sentences makes it practically impossible to have private citizens sentenced for illegal file sharing:

“Out of the four cases we can establish, that the courts do not sentence owners of Internet connections simply because of technical identification of IP-adresses and technical recognition of files,” they say.

The report also points out that if a copyright owner for instance wishes to stop file sharing in a network, it demands that they make contact with every single user of the Internet. And this, as it is diplomatically put, “requires a significant amount of resources, both economically and in regard to time consumption.”

The politicians in the Cultural Board of Folketinget (the Danish parliament) admit that it is “up hill”, as the party Venstre (moderate right wing party) cultural spokesman, Troels Christensen, put it.

“We cannot prosecute, we’ve seen many examples of that”, he says.

Cultural Minister Carina Christensen (Conservative party) was not available for comment, as she was out travelling.

Map of silenced blogging voices

Posted on | November 5, 2009 | No Comments

Check out this interactive map from Global Voices showing bloggers who have been silenced – that is threatened, arrested, or even worse – for speaking their minds online. Even in the US there was one — Elliot Madison, who was taken by the FBI for tweeting on how to evade arrest during the G20 protests in Pittsburgh in September. China has the most with 33 on record; Egypt is a close second with 29.

Go to Global Voice to see the map in its original setting – as well read the Boing Boing posting.

A people’s history of the internet: from Arpanet in 1969 to today

Posted on | November 4, 2009 | No Comments

Just found this timeline of Internet history, which is interesting not only for it’s historic value, but also because it is compiled partly from user contributions. The text reads:

To mark the 40th anniversary of the first stirrings of the internet we asked you to tell us your experiences of life online. Hundreds of you responded, and here we present an interactive documentary of your stories and videos, alongside our own research and interviews with key figures.

See the impressive interactive timeline here.

Brilliant infographics: The World of 100

Posted on | October 27, 2009 | No Comments

Just stumbled upon this piece at Brainpickings, which points to a brilliant infographics website named The World of 100 made by a guy named Toby Ng. It visualizes statistics of the world in percentages boiled down to what he visualizes ‘if the world were a village of a 100 people’.

See a couple of great picks below – and check out the entire piece here.

Yes Men pawn Chamber of Commerce over climate change legislation

Posted on | October 21, 2009 | No Comments

From the Boing Boing blog: The Yes Men strike again. Posing as members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, they held a press conference today to announce that the chamber would abandon its opposition to climate-change legislation now in Congress.

Watch the video:

And read the press release. I love these guys.

UPDATE (Oct 22, 2009): Chamber of Commerce try to ‘Ralph Lauren’ the Yes Men

From Boing Boing: “Rebecca from EFF sez, “The Yes Men prank — they put out a press release and held a spoof news conference on Monday, claiming that the Chamber of Commerce had reversed its position and would stop lobbying against a climate bill currently in the Senate — apparently hasn’t embarrassed the Chamber of Commerce enough yet. Attorneys for the group have issued a takedown demand for the website connected to the prank, claiming copyright infringement. The demand ignores the parodic nature of the stunt (parody enjoys First Amendment protection) and may just serve to put the Yes Men’s criticism in the news for one more day.”

Read it here.

Brilliantly conducted web activism sacks Rush Limbaugh

Posted on | October 17, 2009 | No Comments

The much discussed attempt by ultra-conservative radio kingpin Rush Limbaugh to buy the NFL-team St. Louis Rams crashed and burned a couple of days ago after massive criticism by the public – headed by a brilliant web activism strike initiated by Robert Greenwald and his crew at Brave New Films. Not only did they manage to collect more than 25,000 signatures against Limbaugh in less than 8 hours via their website and campaign Rush Is A Racist, they also crafted below embedded video overnight to launch the campaign. Amazing work and amazing to see the immense impact of activism once really channeled right.

The impact of the campaign and the sacking of Limbaugh by the St. Louis manager is given a great round-up in the Ed Show:

Check out all Brave New Films projects on their own website. I just threw them a few bucks to help their brilliant efforts in creating a more just America – you should too.

The compelling future of human-computer interaction

Posted on | October 16, 2009 | No Comments

Just stumbled upon this visionary video made by a guy named C. Miller, who has thought up a design for a user interface (UI) that fits, utilizes and embraces human anatomy much better than the ole’ mouse’n’cursor. Check it out and see if you get the same eagerness as me to skip 5-6 years into the future.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Read more about his idea on the 10GIU website.

Five simple steps to revitalize any city

Posted on | October 14, 2009 | No Comments

I went to the Netaudio festival here in Berlin last week and listened in on some talks made by a guy named Andrew Dubber. Very interesting indeed and so are his tweets. One of the recent ones links to an absolutely magnificent 5-step list that all city authorities should read and implement. So simple and so inspiring.

It’s so brilliant, that I’ve chosen to cut and paste it in its entirety below. You can also read it in it’s original context on Andrew’s blog.

CITIES – SOLVED