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.

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…

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.

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.

via Schneier on Security

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

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 ;-)

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)