Obscene Litigation

Via ZDNet: Porn Filesharing Lawsuits Crest 30K Defendants

Last Monday saw numbers skyrocket in porn’s war against piracy and torrent sites when four porn companies filed suits in California to target 9,055 alleged file sharers. That was a week after director Axel Braun filed in West Virginia to sue 7,098 alleged pirates for one film, Batman XXX: A Porn Parody.

This is not to be confused with the seven West Virginia suits filed in late September, suing 5,469. That was just before three porn companies came together to file against 1,100 alleged torrent pirates in Chicago. None of these were filed in conjunction with Hustler/Larry Flynt Production’s now-total of four lawsuits for This Ain’t Avatar XXX, with its own defendant total of 7164. ...

The porn industry is not being shy about using shame over its own product as a threat, and this is particularly troubling. While the defendants initially coming up as “John Does” in filing, companies like Hustler/LFP are working the “name and shame” angle and asked a U.S. District Judge to green light revealing the identities of Does from Internet providers. Another adult company preparing to expose the identities of defendants is Third World Media. Once they are identified, they are more likely to settle whether they are guilty or not because of the content. ...

And just how much can that mean to cash-strapped pornographers? According to Dallas attorney Evan Stone (no relation to adult performer Evan Stone), who is handling a number of bittorrent lawsuits including Hustler/LFP, “We usually ask people for $1,500 to settle out of court.

What We Used To Remix Before The Internet

Via.

LOL Jenkins

Net Neutrality

Virtual Sedition

Here's a link to an icky story about an online wingnut game called 2011: Obama Coup Fails. In the game players battle out a new American civil war after the overthrow of the Obama administration. The game comes complete with its own fake history leading up to the war:

Back in 2007, one brave newscaster was the first in what used to be called the 'mainstream media' to ring the alarm bell. That man was Lou Dobbs of CNN. Lou Dobbs was reported missing during the media purges of January and February 2011, when Mark Lloyd and the FCC, on Obama's orders, cracked down on all dissent in broadcasting. Glen Beck, another broadcast media personality who rang the alarm bell before the coup, was found dead of an 'aspirin overdose' in late 2010, after the devastating elections in November.

And its own "future news stories" from the war itself:

 Omg.

Facebook International Politics

Via. Excellent internet snark from the Maila Times:

Islamabad, Pakistan: A diplomatic scandal erupted online yesterday when the Foreign Office of Pakistan found out that China, Pakistan’s so called “BFF,” de-friended Pakistan on Facebook. Initially, Pakistan thought that it was just an error, but senior ISI officials, after logging into Facebook through another account, confirmed that China had indeed removed Pakistan as a friend on Facebook.

Reports indicate that China is upset at Pakistan because they have started to become jealous of Pakistan over recent wall posts written by US diplomats on Pakistan’s wall. There were also questionable and scandalous photographs of Pakistani diplomats and US officials flirting in a night of debauchery in a local Chinese restaurant, which may have offended China.

Tensions have recently been high with the “Friends of Pakistan” group, as several of them have started to put Pakistan on limited profile and have ignored reciprocal ‘poke’ requests by Pakistan. Saudi Arabia complained a few days ago that Pakistan just ‘likes’ everything that the USA posts. The Saudi Foreign Minister has characterized Pakistan’s Facebook antics as “whorish,” and thinks that Pakistan is too much of a stalker.

Happy Birthday Internet!

Via:

"I'd like to wish a happy birthday to the Internet! Today marks its 40th birthday! In fall 1969, computers sending data between two California universities set the stage for the Internet, which became a household word in the 1990s. On September 2nd 1969, in a lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, two computers passed test data through a 15-foot gray cable. Stanford Research Institute joined the fledgling ARPANET network a month later; UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah joined by years end, and the internet was born."

Porn and Activism

I plan to use Ethan Zuckerman's wonderful paper in class this semester.

"Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.

Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats."

"I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media – it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test – if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable."

The tension between the consumption and production of online content is shaping much of the current struggle over what the internet will become. I'm attracted to this simple litmus test of porn and activism as the twin signs of a progressive medium.

My guess is it will provoke some interesting class discussion.

YouTube on YouTube

Digital Humanities Manifesto

Via. Here is an excerpt from A Digital Humanities Manifesto, a jointly-authored document by participants in the UCLA Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities:

1 Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.

2 Like all media revolutions, the first wave of the digital revolution looked backwards as it moved forward. It replicated a world where print was primary and visuality was secondary, while vastly accelerating search and retrieval. Now it must look forwards into an immediate future in which the medium specific features of the digital become its core.

3 The first wave was quantitative, mobilizing the vertiginous search and retrieval powers of the database. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, even emotive. It immerses the digital toolkit within what represents the very core strength of the Humanities: complexity.

4 Interdisciplinarity/transdisciplinarity/multidisciplinarity are empty words unless they imply changes in language, practice, method, and output.

5 The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy.

As a practicing member of the academic bloggeratti, I was intrigued/entertained by thesis 11:

11 Among the highest aims of scholarship: entertainment; entertainment as scholarship: a scandal that is now no longer a scandal. To speak to an audience.

Read more.

Teaching, Learning and New Media

Via. A talk by Michael Wesch.



A companion lecture to this much shorter video:

Gandhi In Gitmo

Via. Here's a very interesting cyberactivist/art installation: Virtual Gitmo on Second Life, including a strange interaction with a second life reenactment of Gandhi's Salt March to Dandi. Amazing.

Feelings

Via Professor Zero, here's an intriguing blog-based digital art project: We Feel Fine.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

Read more.

Offshoring Data

Here is an article speculating on Google's plans to literally offshore its servers:

Google may take its battle for global domination to the high seas with the launch of its own “computer navy.”

The company is considering deploying the supercomputers necessary to operate its internet search engines on barges anchored up to seven miles (11km) offshore.

The “water-based data centres” would use wave energy to power and cool their computers, reducing Google’s costs. Their offshore status would also mean the company would no longer have to pay property taxes on its data centres.

This plan seems to be the result of a strange confluence of large-scale computing, environmental, and tax accountancy concerns. It seems a very strange solution to any of them.

It also may give a whole new meaning to "computer piracy."

Wordle

Listen to Tim

You can listen to Tim Robbins' address to the National Association of Broadcasters, expletives undeleted. Here's how it begins:

I'd like to start with an apology to Rush and Sean and Bill and Savage and Laura whatshername. A few years ago they told America that because I had different opinions on the wisdom of going to war that I was a traitor ... I was a naive dupe of left-wing appeasement. And how right they were.

If I had known then what I know now, if I had seen the festive and appreciative faces on the streets of Baghdad today, if I had known then what a robust economy we would be in, the unity of our people, the wildfire of democracy that has spread across the Mid-East, I would never have said those traitorous, unfounded and irresponsible things.

I stand chastened in the face of the wisdom of the talk-radio geniuses, and I apologize for standing in the way of freedom.

But the really good stuff comes when he skewers the broadcast industry itself:

In the 80s and 90s, the FCC under pressure from the Reagan and Clinton administrations changed the rules limiting the number of radio and television stations a business entity could own, paving the way for large entertainment corporations to buy up local stations and put them under the umbrella of the larger corporations. Again the community benefited. Because of these conglomerates innovative approach, listeners no longer had to be subjected to perplexing controversial subjects, or confused varied opinion, or alternative rock.

Virtual Whiteboard

By way of academhack, here's a new web-based virtual whiteboard called Twiddla.

Twiddla is a virtual whiteboard. I have been waiting for this to be done right, as it is an extremely useful tool, and not everyone has Mac OS 10.5 which allows easy screen sharing. Twiddla is extremely easy, as they say “no plugins, no downloads, or firewall vodoo.” (Firewall Vodoo? Haven’t heard that before, but think I will now use it regularly as a catch-all phrase.)

Give it a try. I can almost see myself using this in class with the digital projector. I've never really bonded to the smartboard interface that enables all the drawing tools. And using Twiddla would just be pulling up another web page. It allows you to have multiple users, or an entire class, collaborate using it. Very cool.

Signs of Life

I find this news very encouraging:

Boston University students have won what one lawyer hailed as a "David and Goliath" victory after challenging one of the recording industry's most aggressive tactics: lawsuits targeting people who illegally download music.

US District Judge Nancy Gertner ruled this week that the university cannot turn over the names of students to several major record companies that sued for the information until she can do a more in-depth review. The ruling, for the moment, quashes the companies' efforts to hold the students liable for copyright infringement, which could have resulted in thousands of dollars in fines. Lawyers who supported the students said the decision would make it harder for record companies to win some 20,000 similar cases they have brought nationwide.

"This is definitely a step in the right direction," said Raymond Sayeg, a Boston lawyer who represented one of the four BU students who challenged the record companies. "The court has recognized the right of privacy of the students."

I have been appalled at how eager most universities have been to rat out their students to the RIAA. A university should have been fighting this battle on behalf of their students, but I'm glad to see at least someone is fighting.

Lecturers for Obama!

Here's a 20 minute lecture from law professor and internet studies scholar Lawrence Lessig in support of Barack Obama. I like it very much, but I know I'm perhaps more tolerant of this format than most of the electorate.

Embedded Angelina

From Writer Response Theory. MyCyberTwin is one of the strangest chatbot sites I have seen yet. I'm speechless. I've embedded a version of Angelina Jolie for you to chat with, but for those masochists out there you can also talk to George.