Content about Technology

Friday, January 20, 2012 - 04:16

No doubt emboldened by the recent recognition of Kopism by The Sweedish Government and the outright wrongness of the US government's pursuit of the power to, at will, delete whole parts of the Internet, The Stewards of The Pirate Bay have made a press release where they courageously stand up, unashamedly declaring their principles. To me, this release sounds a turn of the tide in the near 16 year long battle to establish an indelible repository of the creations of humankind that operates independent of royalty, government, religion or regime.

The tech industry needs to wake up and realize that the pirate bay and kopism are the disowned and missing pieces of our collective's solution to the Big Data Problem. A distributed, indelible meshwork of seeds, trackers and parts of files scattered among billions of computers all around the world. A storage network using time and interest to achieve a infinite mirroring refraction of data, capable of predicting and exceeding our present needs, nearly indefinitely. We could have it if we could just shake ourselves free of the fantasy that some company will invent a for-profit cloud suitable to hold all the data humankind must it not forget.

Dammit 2012 is awesome.

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012. PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.

There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they’re all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it’s all based on being able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between each other, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them).

It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition.

We’ve proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.

</blockquote>

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we’ve stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this:

The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to therest of us obedient consumers.

The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that no one wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the American people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.

To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he’s complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world - because he’s jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you’d get a more honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can’t access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We’re sorry for that.

—THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

Posted via email from The Sid Gabriel Post

Thursday, January 19, 2012 - 10:38

Tahrir Tilt Shift

Over one billion dollars in US foreign aid is earmarked for Egypt
every year in the President's Discretionary Budget. ( See:
www.deathandtaxesposter.com ) As tax paying US Citizens, we paid for
the armor, the sticks and overtime hours of the "Egyptian Zucotti
Redux Extreme" spectacle that ended 2011. These are frames taken from
videos that reached the outside world via smart phones. The frames are
stylized using a process known as tilt-shifting. The depth of field
and aerial diffusion of light is simulated to mimic photographs taken
of scale-models of the original subjects.

Reaching for a "toy-soldier" metaphor, the effect is meant to
communicate the eerily detached sense of responsibility some feel
regarding the human cost our foreign aid may have carried. While aid
money outfitted the military/police force with shields and clubs and
armor, it also sped the proliferation of internet access through the
country and brought the social media within reach of the citizens of
Egypt. We are intertwined such that a direct causal relationship to
the violence we witnessed cannot be isolated, nor can a direct
relationship to the protests be easily drawn, but the feeling that we
are responsible in part for this lost revolution, can be felt in some
of us. I don't think anyone claims we are not related somehow to the
turn of events.

Those with the awareness and the consciousness required to see the
tragedy that the rampant, unchecked fear of others has wrought upon
the earth, over and over again, witness now that same fear of others,
driving its roots into a nation, before elections, before democracy,
the people's will to self-brutalize. To do whatever is necessary to
maintain power over others, pursuing the myth of security that lives
with the will for violence.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Posted via email from The Sid Gabriel Post

Friday, December 23, 2011 - 03:35

On "The Ascent of Money", A BBC Series on The History of Finance

I watched The Ascent of Money BBC series last night. It was well worth the 4 hours of my life that it took to take it all in.

The information prompted me to journey on an endless flow of related internet searches, and research. Last night I also had vivid dreams, a sign of reorganization in the associative networks of the brain. I'm not surprised because I was actually enthralled. To communicate the historical perspective of his book "The Ascent of Money" Niall Ferguson's miniseries takes up the mantle of James Burke's "BBC Connections" series. I was a huge fan of James Burke's uncanny ability to relate modern day entities, to seemingly unrelated events in history by illuminating the connections implied by history. "The Ascent of Money" delivers the history of money in clear connections between events, painting complete pictures of the historical relationships that shape the present day financial world. To do this, Niall Ferguson copied the Connections format exactly. All the way down to the conclusions that tag each section. While the series attempts to be impartial, I caught the author implying more than once, that we are without an alternative to this financial system. It also lacks coverage of the Fractional Reserve Lending Privilege that our government grants to the banks. I believe the author is genuinely trying to help, but lacks the imagination required to be impartial to the financial system. You have to be able to imagine all the other magnificent ways we could solve the problems that financial systems "solve" for us in order to see the current financial system for what it is.

While the series fails to show alternatives are possible, it does do a very good job of relating every war ever fought by any nation to the decisions made by powerful banking families. I am no peddler of hate, and do not have a problem with the choices made by those in power, from Medici all the way to Rothschild and Rockefeller etc, I have no issue with the few families that maintain control of the financial systems, I am concerned that the people of the world continually choose to enable and facilitate wealth systems that don't maintain harmony with nature or neighbor.

As the population of docile, compliant citizens of the western nations increased, the scale of violence and cultural separation between rich and poor increased in step. The correlation is so close that a metaphor of a man and woman locked into a passionate argentine tango describes the relationship between the 1% and 99% quite accurately. The people just keep coming back to dance, and the nature of the dance is inescapable: it does take two to tango. The people just kept coming back for more. For centuries.

After grokking The Ascent of Money and comparing notes with the counterculture, I am convinced that we have only three issues driving the global finance problem:

1. The "Securitization" of Entitlements. Be they deeds, patents or copyrights, rolling them up into "Funds", "Record Labels" and "Patent Portfolios" and selling shares literally kills the commons. So we need to make every entitlement non-transferrable (period). Artists own their own music, Inventors own their own inventions and yes, Banks own their own loans. There is no other way for humankind to rediscover it self as the amazing talented builder of this wild and diverse world. Problem

2. The Fractional Reserve Lending System grants banks the right to invent money. That's just too much to "entitle" any node in any network of relationships. It kills the "fit node" relationships discovered by Albert Laszlo Barabassi in 2002. The repeating waveform oscillation of boom/bust is based solely upon the inflation generated by the Fractional reserve system and the idea that the Bank is foreclosing on real property because you cant pay the interest on money they invented is enough to make soccer moms go "tent city" on wall street.

3. Meaningfully Representative Government. Today, the lobby groups are the government. No way to deny it. Every bill in the Senate and House. Not one from the people. All from for-profit corporations that, by design, must maximize returns any way they can. The solution is to expand The Senate by 512 seats and the house by 1024. Allocated by population. With 1536 more people required to "win over" somehow, the Washington lobby is simply a priced out market. It becomes more difficult to go to war and more people and communities would be represented. Easing the feeling that the 99% have no say in what happens on the planet.

I don't like war. Competition outside of a context of cooperation is savage. If you read between the lines of intrigue presented in "The Ascent of Money" you can see the trends underlying and know that The World Bank will be coming to take Iran's billions of dollars worth of gold that they removed from the bank earlier this year. If you know the history of injustice. If you understand that Iran has been brutalized internally and internationally by us, if you can see how wrong it is for us to starve their children in their own countries because of our fear of them, then you will be able to see the trap laid by nature. The true life force, which maintains all competition for survival in a context of cooperation and all consumption in a context of creation. If we go to war with Iran, because The Bank wants their Gold. We will lose.

The planet will be run by people who choose to take on the responsibility of maintaining humankind in the context of cooperation and creativity that is responsible for all of it's accomplishments. This is written in the hunger of humankind. We want to be freely connecting points, creating the patterns we invent in the diversity of potentiality extant here. There is no purpose for any entity with the discretion to restrict this, to do so now. No purpose but fear, and fear has only lead the US into the dark. If we are to derive just power to rule, we cannot commit atrocity for oil or gold. We must courageously choose to view every person on this planet as one with us, including those we perceive as mortal enemies, we must look past the fear and be an agent in support of the greater context of cooperation that sustains all life in the universe.

Gosh, this year is intense. Anyhoo. Enjoy the 4 hours of insightful financial history, amazingly free of conspiracy theory vibrations.

Posted via email from The Sid Gabriel Post

Friday, December 23, 2011 - 05:06

The History of All Earth Ever, as A Drop of Water on The Sun (abstract)

This is a sketch of everything. It has been proposed by many scientists that the shape of the planet is not a sphere or spheroid. That it is actually toroidal, as the magnetic field field that the world generates (or according to some generates the world) it a toroid shape. All processes or cycles on the planet exist in a flow that follows a toroid shape. Here is a sketch of just the planet:

Of course this is just the magnetic field. Science currently calls this the magnetosphere. Science skipped the work of introducing active toroidal models to a field dominated by static spherical models, and simply called the earth's toroid shaped magnetic field a "magneto" "sphere" and killed all statement accuracy on the subject for the era.

I made a quick single pole sketch of the Earth and the field.

There were a couple pictures that came from Voyager last month that had tiny little magnetic fields.

Nasa was intent on calling them "magnetic bubbles" furthering the misconception of magnetic fields as spheres and implying they are subject to surface tension.That charachterization made me wonder how in the hell NASA invented an ion drive if they dont even know how to accurately represent a magnetic field. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbJiY1wATQ I decided that science pr was probably to blame and moved on to the data:

After revisioning the heliosheath in my mind I realized that the Sun was a vector field of toroid waveform oscillation. The artifacts at the edge of the heliosheath are not from our sun, but rather, they are the interstellar ether, collected at the bowshock, pushed into toroidal form, by a giant toroidal waveform oscillation that they are riding around the galaxy. A glimpse of the field between energy and what we percieve of as matter.

I began to consider it without time as a constant and visualized everything that ever existed and ever would exist existing simutlaneously. As a vector field of toroidal field oscillations, no moment would ever be the same as any other moment as they are all in what we percieve as motion. Oscillating at different frequencies, without the concept of a moving event horizon that we call "time" they are simply occupying their particular location in spacetime.

From that perspective I examined the concept of "big bang" and dropped it entirely as it was not possible for nothing to be. <-that's proper english. It is not possible for any waveform oscillation to have no relative earlier waveform. Just as one block stacks up on another and no block is at the bottom sitting on nothing, so the existence of the universe in spacetime follows the same pattern. With every oscillation of the field a descendant of the oscillation of the field. I decided to visualize the sun again and when I saw it, it was beautiful, all of human history, our tiny little moment, on this beautiful mass of water and earth stretching out around the sun. It looked so whole. Like a single one drop of water on the sun, a swirling shape in spacetime.

The piece titled "The History of All Earth Ever, As A Drop of Water on The Sun" I admit is a pale representation of what I see in my imagination when I conceptualize the Earth's relationship with the Sun, but it is as accurate as we know today. In time I will hopefully be able to prove that it is the most beautiful and accurate perspective for depicting our home in the universe. Much more capable of peace and understanding than portraying our home in a bunch of mysteriously connected sphere bubles floating in the blackness of nothing after a mysterious bang.

Posted via email from The Sid Gabriel Post

Sunday, December 11, 2011 - 11:15

FTC Deals FaceBook The Largest "Hump On The Wrist" In Silicon Valley History

Faceboook and the FTC came to a settlement on privacy concerns that were brought to light last year when brave independent bloggers relentlessly assailed the Social Network's shifting and unclear privacy policy.

The worst of the incidents involved Facebook users in foreign nations. When their Facebook "wall" became visible to their community at large, they discovered members of their community that liked to engage in homosexual activity, they discovered people questioning Islam, and a whole bunch of young people talking about the pre-marital sex they just had. The community leaders in these countries took it upon themselves to publicly ostracize, banish, and in more than one case, murder the "outed" "friends of friends" who were unclear that although FaceBook worked one way one day that did not mean that it would not change it's nature on a dime. For many in the developing world FaceBook is their first contact with the technologically advanced western cultures like America.

The total list of unkept promises as reported by the FTC are neatly summed up in this article at the Guardian UK:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/nov/29/facebook-ftc-privacy-se...

"The FTC said Facebook made eight specific promises that it did not keep.

In December 2009, Facebook changed its website so certain information that users may have designated as private – such as their friends list – was made public. They did so without warning or approval in advance.

Facebook said that company's apps would have access only to the information that they needed to operate. In fact, the apps could access nearly all of users' personal data – data the apps didn't need, said the FTC.

Facebook told users they could restrict sharing of data to limited audiences – for example with Friends Only. In fact, selecting Friends Only did not prevent their information from being shared with third-party applications their friends used.

Facebook had a Verified Apps programme, and claimed it certified the security of participating apps. It didn't.

Facebook promised users that it would not share their personal information with advertisers. It did.

Facebook claimed that when users deactivated or deleted their accounts, their photos and videos would be inaccessible. But Facebook allowed access to the content, even after users had deactivated or deleted their accounts.

Facebook claimed that it complied with the US–EU Safe Harbour Framework that governs data transfer between the US and the European Union. It didn't."

The FTC saw it fit to allow Facebook to simply do what Google and Twitter have already volunteered to do: Come in for third party privacy audits every 2 years for the next 20. 10 dates with a clipboard.

So the message the FTC wants to send is: if you create a social connection service where you lie to everyone on the planet, inspire people to kill and get killed, break up relationships, start new ones, have falling outs in their families, socially awkward disclosures with the public, expose the secrets of families and networks of friends to oppressive governments all over the world, all in the blind pursuit of maximum page views for ad revenue and maximum yeild of information for "other" revenue, you better watch out because free press bloggers will stay up nights and weekends writing and trumpeting that you should be brought to justice, the media will pick up the story and force you to answer for your crimes in your own press releases, making them so visible that the FTC will launch an investigation and when it discovers that you did indeed lie to everyone on the fricking planet, you did indeed sell all of your users data to marketers and other interested organizations after specifically promising not to, when the FTC finds out about that then you're going to have 10 lame as audits over the next 20 years just like everyone else in your industry volunteered to do. and since there was no punitive element of the settlement it can be assumed that if the "Privacy Audits" that happen every two years show that Facebook is continuing to sell information that it acquires by promising not to sell it, then more toothless FTC BJ's are in your future Mr Zuckerberg. I hope they make you as sick with disgust as you have made the few of us who can see the creepy way you roll.

AUDIT THE FED

@tttv

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