NOT EVERYONE CAN SWIM

Posted on | October 8, 2009 | No Comments

Greenpeace Denmark is organizing a huge demonstration in Copenhagen on December 12, just before the final stage of the climate summit. More than 60,000 activists are expected to participate and further to the banners made by activists themselves, Greenpeace will manufacture 3,000 banners and signs to hand out to ensure that spinning news cameras broadcast the right message.
Right now, they are giving you and me the chance to decide what these banners should read – see here. Although the page is in Danish, most of the suggestions are in English.

My favorite so far is ‘NOT EVERYONE CAN SWIM’.

The criticism that Ralph Lauren doesn’t want you to see

Posted on | October 6, 2009 | No Comments

Oh joy, how I just love to sit and watch when big greedy corporations shoot themselves so immensely in the foot – in this case fashion mogul Ralph Lauren. The following blog piece is pasted from Boing Boing, by whom Ralph Lauren and their top-notch lawyers currently – and deservedly – are being keelhauled through the blogosphere:

Ralph Lauren advert

Last month, Xeni blogged about the photoshop disaster that is this Ralph Lauren advertisement, in which a model’s proportions appear to have been altered to give her an impossibly skinny body (“Dude, her head’s bigger than her pelvis”). Naturally, Xeni reproduced the ad in question. This is classic fair use: a reproduction “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting,” etc.

However, Ralph Lauren’s marketing arm and its law firm don’t see it that way. According to them, this is an “infringing image,” and they thoughtfully took the time to send a DMCA takedown notice to our awesome ISP, Canada’s Priority Colo. One of the things that makes Priority Colo so awesome is that they don’t automatically act on DMCA takedowns. Instead, they pass them on to us and we talk about whether they pass the giggle-test.

This one doesn’t.

So, instead of responding to their legal threat by suppressing our criticism of their marketing images, we’re gonna mock them. Hence this post.

As Wendy Seltzer from the Chilling Effects project said, “Sounds like a pretty solid fair use case to me. If criticism diminishes its effectiveness, that’s different from the market substitution copyright protects against. And I’ve rarely seen a thinner DMCA form-letter.”

So, to Ralph Lauren, GreenbergTraurig, and PRL Holdings, Inc: sue and be damned. Copyright law doesn’t give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings. You should know better. And every time you threaten to sue us over stuff like this, we will:

a) Reproduce the original criticism, making damned sure that all our readers get a good, long look at it, and;

b) Publish your spurious legal threat along with copious mockery, so that it becomes highly ranked in search engines where other people you threaten can find it and take heart; and

c) Offer nourishing soup and sandwiches to your models.

DMCA Infringement Notification

—

Also, I enjoy adding to the infringement by presenting the advert here.

Obama: Right city, wrong date

Posted on | October 5, 2009 | No Comments

Denmark was surely buzzing last week when the IOC delegates met to decide where the 2016 Olympic Games were to take place. Most of the fuzz of course came because of Obama’s short visit to boost the Chicago campaign, but the otherwise popular president’s visit also stirred heavy criticism; not so much for taking active part in the American OG-lobby, but rather because he is not likely to attend the pivotal climate summit in Copenhagen later in the year. One can only think that he and his administration seem to give higher priority to getting the economically lucrative games to take place on American soil, than on saving the climate of Mother Earth by attending the summit – that by many is seen as the last call to prevent unstoppable climate change.

Greenpeace Denmark as usual took things into their own capable hands and made sure the whole world could see the tremendously contradictory nature of Obama’s IOC-visit this week.

Greenpeace banner on St. Nicolai Church in Copenhagen.

Greenpeace banner on the parking house in Scandiagade in Copenhagen. The building was on Obama’s route from the airport.

I hope he proves us all wrong by setting Air Force One’s course towards Copenhagen in December.

Read Greenpeace Denmark’s blog-post here (in Danish).

Surveillance on a unimaginable scale

Posted on | October 1, 2009 | No Comments

As if London wasn’t already the most surveyed (or should that read ‘paranoid’?) city in the world, new heavily EU-funded surveillance development measures are under way in Britain that will exceed our wildest imagination.

So far, it has been reassuring for us laymen to know that even if CCTV-systems monitor and record our every move in London as well as all other larger cities across the globe, the amount of this footage being scrutinized by humans was minimal due to the simple fact that watching it requires time in a 1:1 scale – thus making it way too expensive to watch pretty much anything other than crime (and perhaps shopping habits). This may soon change, however, as artificially intelligent systems are being developed that can record and watch actions in real time and point out “threats and abnormal behaviour or violence“.
This is not only scary in terms of diminishing citizen privacy in general, but perhaps more significantly because humans will then be able to decide what the machine should consider suspicious. All of a sudden an immense power is assigned to public authority agencies as well as private corporations that can now monitor employees, customers and citizens on a whole new scale. Who is to restrict them from entering totally different alarm parameters into the machine? Number of times you pick up coffee at the office? Number of visits to the bathroom? (slacker?) Number of visits to political gatherings? Etc.

Read the story here and the following discussion at Slashdot.

How social media technologies are altering the media landscape

Posted on | September 30, 2009 | No Comments

That social media and user-participation is booming is a well-known fact. The same goes for the detoriation of the printed press industry. Still, this short movie puts numbers and facts to this development – it’s fascinating.

Greenpeace event time-lapse graffiti video

Posted on | September 26, 2009 | 1 Comment

Please allow yourself the time to watch this brilliantly made video that was produced by Greenpeace in Copenhagen to mark the premiere of The Age of Stupid movie.

Not Stupid – Greenpeace event time-lapse Graffiti video from Karuna Guzmán Møller on Vimeo.

Huge Yes Men shenanigans on Monday in New York

Posted on | September 20, 2009 | No Comments

The uncanny Yes Men are up to something big on Monday. Five days ago, they sent out an email to their mailing list with a message saying that “If you live in New York, please visit http://newyorkbigevent.com/ to sign up for some GIANT, extremely FUN, potentially WORLD-FIXING shenanigans on MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 21. (…) We can’t tell you much about what we’ll be doing, as the element of surprise here is crucial. But we can tell you that it’ll be huge and absurdly fun, and when a hundred world honchos meet the next morning to discuss climate change at the UN, you may have helped set the tone for progress.”

An additional mail-out followed this Friday: “Watch for that email SUNDAY afternoon, and a text message shortly (If you’re not in New York, but signed up to be part of our ‘digital fun squad,’ more instructions to come!)”.

Most recent communication was this tweet: “CALLING ALL TWEETERS: Be ready to re-tweet something scary, wacky, and cool on MONDAY!!!”

I’m ready.

UPDATE OCT 1, 2009:

I meant to post these way earlier, but haven’t been able to find the time. These are just selected reactions and coverage of the highly profiled and awesome ‘Survivaball’ Yes Men spectacle:

‘YES MEN HONCHO SPRUNG FROM CLINK‘ – Officiel Yes Men blog post (text).

‘THEY LOOK LIKE A BUNCH OF BEACH BALLS‘ – CNN-news coverage (video).

Will EasyJet care? Valued customer feedback

Posted on | September 11, 2009 | No Comments

Just wrote this email to the EasyJet airline company.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Christian Villum
Date: Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 10:35 AM
Subject: Feedback from a loyal customer
To: press.office@easyjet.com

Dear Easyjet,

as this was the only email address I could find on your extensive website, I hope that those receiving it in the press department will forward it to those handling customer feedback.
(By the way, are you not aware that present day web 2.0 business dynamics invite customer feedback as a value asset? If you do, why is it so hard to contact you by email/form/social media service/whatever?)

First of all, I want to praise your product. I sincerely appreciate your low prices and module-based fees in which I as a customer can tailor my travel needs (select and pay for check-in of luggage if needed etc.). Very useful and via a website that is swift and easy to maneuver using simply intuition. Consider me a loyal customer. So loyal as to actually contact you with the following message, rather than just get mad, leave your site and avoid using your service in the future.

I would like to express great dissatisfaction with the visa-fee of 70 DKK (I am Danish, hence the currency) that appears very late in the online ticket purchase transaction process. First of all, it is a very high fee for a trip between Copenhagen and Berlin (total price DKK 333), especially knowing that Visa-transactions are free in 20,000 other off- and online stores around the globe.
Secondly, it is ethically questionable and downright wrong to quote an “all-inclusive” price first and then add non-avoidable fees later (I noted that all credit cards cost a fee of DKK 70 except for Visa Electron and one other Visa-version that is anything but common). NOT COOL. It caused me to cancel my purchase, leave your website and write this email, while even being on a deadline and not having the time to do such a thing. I hope it will reach someone who cares.

Kind regards,
Christian Villum, Denmark
villum(at)autofunk.dk

PS: Look forward to finding a ‘Please leave us feedback’ option on your front page.

—

UPDATE (SEPT 11, 09:15pm): Less than 10 minutes after this blog post was tweeted, I received a direct message on Twitter. Seems like a template based reply, though. But still okay, I guess. I tweeted back: ‘Look forward to hear more’ – let’s see if their social media setup supports real web 2.0 customer relations.

UPDATE (SEPT 11, 10.00pm): Less than one hour after I sent the email to the press department, I received an email with a direct link for an online form through which messages to the customer department could be sent. Point to EasyJet for that. I have now sent the email again through the form – let’s see what happens.

UPDATE (SEPT 13, 09.55pm): Received a much more personal direct message on Twitter – wishing me a good time in Berlin. Definitely not a bot, I like that. But let’s see what happens to the Visa-fee. And let’s see if they’ll let me know.

—

UPDATE (SEPT 12, 02.30pm):

Less than one hour after I sent the email to the press department, I receive

—

UPDATE (OCT 14, 2009):

Just stumbled upon this article on Boing Boing – remembered my EasyJet grievance – and thought it should be included in this post:

Airlines that charge fees lost most more money than airlines that don’t

Freeform101.org HQ has moved #Berlin

Posted on | September 7, 2009 | No Comments

Just a quick note to advise that the editor of this blog has moved from Denmark to Berlin to stay for five months. Something that will probably project on the forthcoming entries.

Working with Ogg Theora

Posted on | August 20, 2009 | No Comments

The open standard, non-proprietary media format Ogg Therora (.ogg) is really catching on. Read this new article from the Free Software Foundation website.

Excerpt:
“Ogg Theora is becoming a big deal, and that’s exactly what he hoped for when we launched the PlayOgg campaign in May 2007. The free, patent-unencumbered video codec now works in over 24% of the world’s web browsers with no plugins required. The latest 1.1 release of the Theora encoder (obligatory weird codename: Thesnulda) is coming out any day now. And when it does, the huge improvements in quality and functionality made over the past year with support from Wikimedia and others will percolate out into the major GNU/linux distributions, arriving at the fingertips of those who build and maintain the world’s biggest video sites. Most of all, people are excited, releasing new tools that make the Theora easier to use, as well as jaw-dropping demos of what free formats and web standards can do.”