in gravyland

Little Brother

I’m fully intrigued and excited about my raffle prize, so I’ve been having a bit of a look about to find out more about Cory’s new novel Little Brother.  Here’s Cory explaining a bit about the book from an interview with SCI-FI Weekly:

Doctorow: I just finished a YA novel called Little Brother, about hackers who declare war on the Department of Homeland Security. Every chapter has got a real-world how-to about why homeland security does not work, and how you can defeat it. And it talks about the math and computer science and information science behind the war on terrorism, the junk science behind the war on terrorism. But it’s also meant to be an instruction kit for teaching kids to be culture jammers and technology jammers. I’ve been calling it Encyclopedia Brown meets The Anarchist Cookbook. My editor at Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, called it Wikipedia Brown. So I just finished it, and finished the outline of book two. It’s a two book series. My agent is auctioning it off after Labor Day.

Sounds very cool, very useful, very interesting.

Powerful T-shirts from One Heart Home

Truth
Seek it, Speak it, Live it

Power to the Peaceful

Freedom through Peace

I’m fond of a good political T-shirt. I like to wear a message or two. It feels *hopeful* to walk around with a slogan on.

One Heart Home have a range of T-shirts these slogans (above) and more. I was given a “Power to the Peaceful” shirt for Christmas and I love it.

Go on, order one online…

PM’s office have spoof site ‘disappeared’

Sigh.

Richard Neville made a clever spoof of a John Howard speech, and posted it on a website called johnhowardpm.org. (PDF of the site here).
Then the Prime Minister’s office had the site ‘disappeared’ secretly. Neville was not informed. Melbourne IT just did it, then fessed up a couple of days later.

In the normal course of action, you’d normally expect the author of such a spoof to be asked to remove it. Didn’t happen that way here. A quiet word in the ear of Melbourne IT and it was taken down.

Secretly.
Gee they are pretty sensitive in the PM’s office, aren’t they? If you are strong and confident, you’d just laugh it off, you’d think. But no.

Poly the Pollie

The Podcast Network’s big guy Cameron Reilly has swung into action and launched Poly the Pollie — a plan to invite Australian politicians take a public lie detector tests about policy issues.

I’m thinking this is a great idea. And the first Pollie to be invited is our own Alexander Downer. See Cam’s invitation here and watch for updates on the progress of the project here.

I would so love to see this succeed.

Google China Censorship in Pictures

See these side by side results for google.com and google.cn when doing an image search for the term “tiananmen”. As in square. You can’t see censorship more graphically than that.

via Schneier on Security

Activist video games — managing McDonalds®

La Molleindustria, who are activist political videogame makers have this great McDonalds video game you can play online.

In the game, you have to grow the beef, slaughter it, hire staff, manage the restaurant, sell stuff, then grow more beef etc….

Suddenly your restaurant manager is screaming for more burgers. So go trash some more rainforest, farm some more beef. And on you go. In a moment I got a sense of the evils of consumption.

Highly recommended. Go play.

And for bonus points, they have a bunch of other subversive games.

Link

We shop till Visa says No More

Here we are in the week before Christmas. All through the land we line up in the shops with credit cards in our hands spending away on the right stuff. Or what we hope is the right stuff. Is this present the right thing? I find it quite a troubling time.

It is a time of joy and all that, but the cynicism seems to rising a bit more this year in me and the people I talk to. The consumption seems to be even more conspicuous and the prices higher and the expectations more daunting and the stress on the streets is palpable.

We did a project a few years ago in conjunction with Buy Nothing Day. It was called the Big Love Gift Guide, and we just popped it up on the web with some alternate gift suggestions that didn’t need you to spend money. This time of year, the Big Love Gift Guide gets lots of hits as folk look for gift alternatives. People’s alternate gift ideas added to the guestbook are quite touching and interesting. It is worth a look, especially when looking for a gift for those people who seem to have everything.

And I promise I won’t be in the shops at the last minute of Christmas eve like I was last year ;-)

Supreme Court halts remediation!

We got word from the Supreme Court today. Good news! Very good news.

They have allowed the community’s case to go to trial, have ordered a halt to any remediation works until the case has been heard, and have denied the developers application to make the community front up with thousands of dollars in costs before the case goes ahead.

All three things we were asking for. This is wonderful news. This is a great step forward for the rights of a community to be consulted about potential health risks from local development.

There will be some coverage on Perth TV news tonight and I’ll post links as news stories become available.

Whoohoo!

(This means we won’t have to leave our house yet; and possibly not at all)

Mass-Debate

Beavis, Butthead, stop sniggering, boys!

Last night was a laugh. We had a fund-raising ahem mass-debate for the Save South Beach campaign between two local streets, Hickory Street and Walker Street. The $5 entry is helping pay for the ongoing supreme court action which I’ll talk about more later.

The topic? “That Hickory St men are bigger than Walker Street men”. Three men from each street debated the topic in a civilised and stylish way — without too many more than the required number of dick jokes to satisfy a crowd out for a good laugh. I was first speaker for Hickory Street, and I had a great time telling tall tales. My fellow speakers put in a great effort and by the end of the night, the result was a draw.

A bit of a slow day today. A few glasses of wine were consumed last night.

So, the Save South Beach campaign moves to the Supreme Court tomorrow morning were our legal folk can hopefully argue that we (the community) should be allowed to have some say in the remediation plans of the ANI Site. I’m going along to watch the argument. There won’t be anything decided tomorrow, thought. It will take a few more weeks to get a judgement.

May we have good luck tomorrow.

Actors can’t share :-(

The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) just don’t get it. A world first remixable film project has ground to a halt because the creative commons license is deemed “inappropriate” by the MEAA.

The full sad story from apc.au ict rights monitor:

SYDNEY — Film company, MOD Films, employing Creative Commons licensing, was refused any dispensation from the Australian Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) to contract local actors to an interactive re-mixable sci-fi film called Sanctuary. The decision on Wednesday brings to a halt an AU$100,000 short film shoot scheduled this month by preventing actors from being contracted under the MEAA award, despite letters of support from all the principal actors.

The MEAA Board decided that it could grant none of the dispensations sought by MOD Films, on the grounds that these would be “inappropriate”. The production had asked for dispensations and support for its world-first plans to employ professional actors in a film with only “Some Rights Reserved” by the production company. The company intends to permit non-commercial use and re-voicing of the film by the audience. The MEAA also rejected the option of any further negotiations with MOD Films.

Link | MOD Films Press Release

South Beach Remediation plan out for public comment

There’s a bit more news on the South Beach Remediation that fills out the story a bit.

Firstly, the Environmental Management Plan, once a big secret we weren’t allowed to read, has now been released for public comment. I had a look. It sounds a little better than my worst fears. They are not going to sieve all the dirt any more to pull out larger particles — instead they are going to rake out the large particles with a rake attached to a bulldozer. This at least means they aren’t going to pour all the dust through the air into the sieve, which is a part improvement.

But I don’t know. The monitoring program seems a bit thin on the ground and I think sampling they have done to find out what is in the ground has not been done at a high enough density.

Thankfully, Fremantle council has decided to step in and conduct an independent assessment of the remediation plan. The results of that will be interesting.

Toxic Dust Cloud, or Take A Holiday?

I’ll take the holiday thanks.

We live in South Fremantle, just a couple of streets back from South Beach. We live in a dead-end street. It is quiet. We can easily walk to the beach. Paradise? Yes, almost. As usual, in every perfect world there is something evil creeping underground waiting to strike :-(

There’s a old factory at the end of the street. It borders onto South Beach. That old factory is build on the site of a lead smelter that closed in the 1920s. Developers are now about to pull down the factory and prepare the land for construction of a whole lot of houses. Problem: the ground is unstable. The developer plans to dig out 5m of soil and filter it, taking out the big bits, and put it back, then add 0.5m of new topsoil.

The big problem there is the filtering. My understanding is that they are going to pick up the dirt and filter it with something. They are going to do it in the open, with prevailing winds blowing the dust into my house, garden and all our lungs.

Best practice for the developer would be to build something to contain the dust over the whole site but they aren’t going to do that.

Most likely we’ll have to move away from our home for a few months to escape exposure from the dust. To turn that big downer into something positive, we are thinking about a 3 month work break/sabbatical/exploration in Europe and Asia, maybe Vietnam, Japan, Italy, UK … plus a few more. We will see.

There’s a bunch of community action going on which we are supporting, including a Supreme Court action against the government to get the approval for the remediation plan set aside, and a really result by Adele Carles who ran against the sitting ALP member in the state election. At this stage of counting she has over 6% of the vote.

More on the whole issue at savesouthbeach.com.

Blog shy (two week short form blog entry)

Golly, another 2 week gap between entries. It intrigues me why I get stuck sometimes and blog entries don’t come easily.

So, here’s two weeks worth of blogs in one:

New Years happened. Doesn’t that seem like a century ago. A big party, lot of fun, people, lots of talking. From a week or two weeks later it seemed a bit empty somehow. Perhaps I was looking for something a bit more soulful, a bit more of a ritual. I’m glad to be in the new year. 2004 sucked a lot in many ways.

I had a great time down south after new years, catching up with good friends and having a holiday for a couple of days. Everybody was in a holiday mood.

Look, every time I go fishing I catch absolutely nothing. This has been going on for a while. What god have I offended? Or is it really true, as Kimmy claims, that I don’t really want to catch a fish anyway?

Bill Gates said silly things, calling us free culture creative commons folk communists. Now we are creative commies. Thanks for the meme, Bill. I’ve got a T-shirt on order.

I’ve got lots of new innovation going on in my work life. A couple of interesting new highly secret projects that might be really big one day :-) haha. We’ll see.

Apple are beating up on mac websites that publish rumours of upcoming products. The EFF jumps in to help the websites. Silly Apple.

Then Apple releases new products at Macworld. Gizmodo shows off a couple of cool fake Apple ads that are funny. Despite Apple’s litigious behaviour which deep in my creative commie heart I should punish them for, I immediately order an iPod shuffle.

Movie: The Corporation

Libby and I made one of those rare trips into Perth last night to see the documentary The Corporation at Cinema Paradiso.

Fantastic film. Deep and wide with ideas and concepts. Here are a few that struck me:

1. Corporations exist as ‘persons’ under the law. They tend to behave with all the symptoms of a psychotic person, even if most of the individuals in the Corporation are be reasonable, moral, caring people.

2. Some Corporations view illegal behaviour and resulting fines as a cost of doing business and therefore make a habit of breaking the law and paying the fines because it is cheaper than behaving legally.

3. Corporations have got really good at getting themselves out of their expensive impacts on others and the world. These ignored impacts are called externalities. The more stuff that corporations can make somebody else’s problem, the more profit they can make.

4. It is possible for a Corporation to be ‘put to death’ or have its charter removed by government. It rarely, if ever, happens.

There is lots more there. It is sobering and ironic and funny in places. Well worth a look. See William’s review for more.

We stopped in at the Greek Taverna for a bite afterwards. It was crap. Don’t bother.

Not Happy, John!

Margo Kingston, one of my favourite journalists, has a book coming out on June 21 called “Not Happy, John - Defending our democracy”.

There’s a website for the book, where more details will be added as the launch approaches.

I’m looking forward to reading this one.

(thanks crikey.com.au)

Erosion of human rights

Amnesty International has released it’s 2004 report reflecting on human rights worldwide in 2003:

Huge challenges confronted the international human rights movement in 2003. The UN faced a crisis of legitimacy and credibility because of the US-led war on Iraq and the organization’s inability to hold states to account for gross human rights violations. International human rights standards continued to be flouted in the name of the “war on terror”, resulting in thousands of women and men suffering unlawful detention, unfair trial and torture – often solely because of their ethnic or religious background. Around the world, more than a billion people’s lives were ruined by extreme poverty and social injustice while governments continued to spend freely on arms.

From the section on Australia, which makes interesting, if sobering, reading:

National security was invoked to justify the erosion of human rights safeguards in draft laws on “antiterrorism” measures and refugee rights. Domestic violence against Aboriginal women and children and indefinite detention of child asylum-seekers were prominent themes in the domestic human rights debate.

Punishing the 92% to catch the 8%

It turns out that over 92% of the people detained as illegal immigrants to Australia end up being accepted as genuine refugees.

So we lock up the 92% for years in some cases, in prison conditions, in order to catch out the 8% and provide some sort of deterrent to people coming here as fake refugees.

Surely, with our high level of civilisation, we can work out some better deterrent than this. Punishing the huge majority of genuine refugees that have already suffered an awful lot.

And some of the 92% are children.

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has just released their National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention Report - A Last Resort? To quote from the news release:

In its National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention Report- A Last Resort?, tabled in Federal Parliament today [May 13th], the Commission found Australia’s immigration detention policy has failed to protect the mental health of children, failed to provide adequate health care and education and failed to protect unaccompanied children and those with disabilities.

The two-year, comprehensive Inquiry also found that the mandatory detention system breached the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It failed, as required by the Convention, to make detention a measure of “last resort”, for the “shortest appropriate period of time” and subject to independent review.

The system failed to make the “best interests of the child” a primary consideration in detaining them and it failed to treat them with humanity and respect.

Furthermore, the Government’s failure to implement repeated recommendations by mental health professionals to remove children with their parents from detention amounted to “cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment”.

Cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Why is this happening in my country. Does this make you sad and angry, like it does me?

To do something about it, have a look at: A Just Australia or Amnesty International Australia.

They Rule

They Rule is an interactive Flash website that lets you graphically navigate the directors and links between the top corporations in the US, playing a kind of six-degrees with companies and company directors.

I think we need one of these for Australia. Would be interesting to see the concentration at the top of our biggest companies. And let’s map in political donations and ex-directorships as well. It might not be a pretty picture.

(via Boing Boing)

EFA Paper on Free Trade Agreement

Electronic Frontiers Australia has written a position paper on the Intellectual Property provisions of the proposed Free Trade Agreeement. I broadly agree with what they say.

Here’s a quote from the summary:

EFA is opposed to Australia signing or implementing the provisions of Chapter 17 of the FTA. In particular, EFA is concerned that:

• consideration of Chapter 17 should be approached from the perspective of promoting innovation and the public domain, rather than protecting existing business models and punishing infringers
• Chapter 17 expansions are likely to impede rather than promote free trade and innovation
• there is no justification for extending copyright protection to 70 years
• criminal law has only a limited role in intellectual property law and should not be expanded
• proposed circumvention device bans are overly strict and have more potential to be used as weapons against competition and innovation than for it
• proposed rights management information provisions would unduly extend the power position of copyright holders and impinge upon consumers’ rights to deal with legitimately purchased goods
• presumptions towards subsistence and ownership of copyright are unnecessary and weight proceedings too far in favour of those claiming rights as opposed to those defending them
• provisions relating to damages would result in unrealistic determinations and increase the power of copyright holders
• take-down notice provisions are unfairly weighted in favour of those making allegations
• ISPs should not be force to divulge personal information about customers except after judicial order
• FTA would commit to allowing any and all ‘technologies’ to be patented, regardless of whether a need for patentability is demonstrated

Petition against FTA Intellectual Property clauses

Some local linux and open source folk have started a petition against the Intellectual Property provision in the proposed Free Trade Agreement. We need to get a lot of signatures on this so we can get the senate to understand the problem.

The IP provisions of the FTA do everything to support the rights of enormous media companies, further extends the lifetime of copyright, and criminalises reverse engineering and circumvention devices. A circumvention device is something like a multi-region DVD player, so this will potentially criminalise watching legal DVDs purchased in Asia.

Please sign here.