RE: nettime Iranonymity
The deliberately generic-sounding URLs for the service are publicized over Radio Farda broadcasts and through bulk e-mails that Anonymizer sends to addresses in the country. The addresses are provided by human rights groups They're using spam for this? What a weird planet this is where a superpower buys email addressed from human right groups to spam citizens of a third world country. Douwe Osinga http://douweosinga.com # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Pastry (and mayonnaise) Attacks in Brazil, USA, Canada, and Russia
On August 28, an anti-FTAA activist pied American Embassador Peter Allgeier, co-president of the FTAA, during a press conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The activist, a member of Bakers Without Borders, released a note protesting the negotiations of the FTAA. The FTAA will concentrate wealth, increase poverty, and destroy labor, consumer and enviromental rights, said the note. The protest also focused attention on the disregard Brazil's government has shown for a September 2002 unofficial plebiscite in which over 10 million people voted No to the FTAA. Last month, President Inacio Lula da Silva said at a meeting with George Bush that negotiations will proceed and should finish by 2005. Brazilian social movements and NGOs protest the continuation of negotiations. The pieing comes just two weeks ahead of a WTO meeting in Cancun, which will be met with massive protest. Editor's note: check out the incredible pie action photos at: http://www.midiaindependente.org/pt/blue/2003/08/262167.shtml ~~ Former Presidential Candidate Gets 'Pied' At Event 3:16 p.m. PDT August 12, 2003 [AP] LOS ANGELES -- Ralph Nader got a pie in the face at an event Tuesday with one of the people running for California governor. The former Green Party presidential candidate was in San Francisco to endorse Peter Camejo, who's one of six declared Greens running in the recall election. At the end of a news conference, a man ran into the room, shoved a pie in Nader's face, and ran out. Nader threw some of the pie at the unidentified man as he took off -- but the police didn't catch him. Later, Camejo said he thought the Democrats were behind the pie throwing. The Green Party will announce on Thursday which candidate it will endorse. ~~ Monday morning, in the beautiful (yet corporate headquarter ridden) city of Calgary, Alberta's premier was busy flipping flapjacks and beef sausages (because he can't sell them to his friends in the USA anymore) when a team of dedicated pie-throwers delivered him the long awaited dessert that he deserved! July 9 2003 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE KLEIN STAMPIED BY THE BANANA-CREAM THREE Monday morning, in the beautiful (yet corporate headquarter ridden) city of Calgary, Alberta's premier was busy flipping flapjacks and beef sausages (because he can't sell them to his friends in the USA anymore) when a team of dedicated pie-throwers delivered him the long awaited dessert that he deserved: a succulent banana-cream pie, that Ralph Klein himself qualified as good tasting, unlike his politics (which leave a bad taste too often in many people's mouths). Obviously, the Banana-Cream three, who were from Calgary, did not include a married gay couple. Ralph would not permit that in his province, even though the rest of Canada's governments will stop harassing gay citizens and finally treat same-sex couples equally by letting them marry. They find it utterly funny that Mister Klein would try to give the pie-throwers lessons in democracy. They suggest he opens a dictionary, looks up the word plutocracy, and then tells them how much it costs to become Premier of a province like Alberta. Is it surprising to see Ralph Klein opposing the Kyoto Accord for the right of big corporations to pollute, the same corporations that finance his campaigns? Talk about democracy in action! He even threatened to separate from Canada for his friends' right to pollute. Even if you do separate, Mister Klein, your pollution will not stay over Alberta, and all the provinces are concerned. This pie will not fill the hole in the ozone layer, but it feels good to our environment, because, for once, the joke is not at our expense. Remember when King Ralph went in a homeless shelter on a winter night, completely drunk, to yell at the people there and throw money in their faces before leaving in a rage? Afterwards, he confessed he had an alcohol problem; the three were happy to hear it, because, for a while, they thought he had a problem with the poor The stampede breakfast marked the first time that Ralph Klein's face was red in public and it was not due to drinking. They hope the pie have finally cured him. Pie High! P.S. Now, Mister Klein does not only have the threat of separation in common with Quebec, both provinces have pied their Premier. There are only 8 more to go! ~~~ Dressing down for election chief text: Artyom Vernidoub Photo by I. Ponomaryov [1]http://www.gazeta.ru/2003/08/28/Dressingdown.shtml The campaign to clean up electioneering by Russia's top electoral official, Alexander Veshnyakov, has got off to a bad start. As he closed a five-day conference involving 27 political parties at the
nettime for those who attend n5m4: swap meet
From: Renee [EMAIL PROTECTED] CLAIM YOUR BLANKET WHILE SUPPLIES LAST: SWAP MEET For the Next 5 Minutes 4, De Geuzen is organizing a swap meet where tactical traditions, such as buttons, flyers, T-shirts, pie throwing, stencils and stickers can be displayed and generally talked about. For the event we are designing around 25 blankets that will operate as a tactical interface. Made to be viewed vertically as a banner, or horizontally as a surface, or from above as a shelter, our blankets are a kind of nomadic, carry-all, platform for attending participants. For the first days of the conference the blankets will circulate both inside and outside various venues of the Next 5 Minutes. Owners will quite literally unfold them and squat or occupy any space they see fit to air their wares and promote their cause. At a time and location to be announced, the blankets and their owners will converge in a single place for a turbo exchange of tactical traditions. Audiences/participants will be able to peruse a variety of goods on view or participate in a series of show and tell/how-to lessons held at the same location. The space will be a cross between a junk sale and a DIY center where computers converge with ironing boards and the dilettante is valued as the expert. In preparation for the Swap Meet we have set-up a weblog for people to get to know each other and exchange ideas, resources, and know-how in advance of the event. We will also use the site for documentation and hopefully continue the debate around tactical traditions long after the event is over. see: http://www.geuzen.org/swap/ If you want to register for a blanket and/or you would like to post on the blog please send your name and email address to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime blog blog failure
Well, nettimers, I wrote the following blog, but then I thought, you would probably be more interested in it than the average inhabitant of the blogsphere; so though it's own my new blog site ( http://blogs.salon.com/0002859/ ), why waste it? so here it is: Best, Michael Michael H. Goldhaber My very own Blog! Wow! Yesterday, at a party, I mentioned to a friend that I now have a blog, and she said Be careful! she then explained that as a therapist she hears her clients evidently being sucked into the Internet. I imagine this to be like one of those two-dimensional creatures in Edward Abbots Flatland disappearing as parts of them are sucked into the third dimension. (There another limb goes, into cyberspace). I reminded her that she was supposed to congratulate me on my blog, which, properly cued, she then did So here I am typing away for my legion of readers, though probably there aren't any. Still, like every other blogger I'm sure, I secretly imagine the entire planet eagerly sitting down to my latest addition with your morning coffee, tea, whiskey, water, alfalfa juice or whatever, far more interested in what I have to say than in your dull boring newspaper, or spouse or pet or child, or even your own blog, which you yourself could be writing between sips if you weren't so busy reading mine. When everyone on earth has finally seen the light and started a blog, then probably the average number of readers for each blog will approach the magic number zero (except for one's own re-readings, if any). But still, even if the hit counter shows you as you start your blog each day that no one has read your latest effort, it's difficult to feel, as you send your work out over the Internet to the blog server, that no one is ever going to read what you wrote. After all, one day, thr5ough some Google search or other, this blog might be discovered, and more and more people will link to it, so that even my past blogs will be read by many, preserved as they ought to be for eternity in cyberspace (the blogs, that is, not the people, but yet the people who blog will also be preserved to the extent they put themselves in their blogs) . Now one could just as well imagine writing things on scraps of paper and letting the wind carry them off, hoping someone somewhere will read them. Or perhaps one could tack the scraps up to telephone poles near crowded sidewalks. But the technology of the Internet offers a greater potential: we all know that some web sites do get millions of hits; why not this one? The result, writing a blog definitely presents the illusion that one has a substantial audience, say half the size of the largest potential audience, splitting the difference, that is, between what could be and what most likely is. Seems like a sound calculation, if you don't think about it too much. All this illustrates to me, vividly and firsthand, the phenomenon I call illusory attention. It occurs all over the place, in many forms in modern life. One of the purest cases is when you are watching someone speaking directly into the camera on television. She may seem to be speaking directly to you, even answering a question you have just silently put to her, but of course she is paying you as a person not the slightest real attention, since she doesn't know you exist. At the opposite, equally common extreme, perhaps, you are talking to your lover, right into her ear, perhaps, on some deeply intimate subject, while she is secretly thinking about renewing her car insurance, and you are none the wiser. To be sure, every human attempt at getting attention, whatever it may be, founders to some degree. No two people understand words in exactly the same way, or gestures or any other form of expression either, so we are never completely perfectly heard. Just as modern technology enables the illusory attention offered by a sympathetic-seeming talking head over TV, so the Internet, with its personal web sites, listservs, chat rooms, and now blogs , makes the illusion of one's outpourings reaching an audience seem far more real than tossing the scraps of paper (or just whispering) into the wind would lead to. And we do want attention. The knowledge that there is a huge audience out there apparently enhances the chances that someone who perfectly gets what I have to say -- yet without having thought of it yet yourself -- is reading this. You , perhaps. That prospect is so pleasing. Of course, though a close reader will see that I am very intimately revealing myself in the foregoing, this blog lacks the kind of personal revelation many blogs apparently have. (I really am not sure about this, since I have only ever read three or four blogs by anyone else. As with all of us, I suspect, writing my own blog seems so much more interesting, and in fact, carries for me a greater charge of illusory attention; which is another deeply personal admission, so there!). Freud spoke of the the train's carrying his child away
Re: nettime [Fwd: Re: [ox-en] Felix Stalder: Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology]
Am Dienstag, 26. August 2003 um 17:07:02 Uhr (+0200) schrieb Felix Stalder: These limitations refer to the kind of problems that can be addressed through the current form of social organization developed in the Open Source Movement. The way Open Source Projects are organized reflects the specifics of problem -- developing software -- and thus they cannot serve as a model to address problem with very different characteristics. This does not mean that other problems, for example, the development of drugs, cannot be organized in an open way, but this 'open way' will have to look very different from the way Open Source Software projects are organized because the problem of creating drugs is very different from the problem of creating software. In other words, there is an intimate relationship between the characteristics of the problem and the social organization of its solution. A good example are Open Content licenses. They have departed significantly from Free Software/Open Source licenses wherever they allow to restrict modification and commercial distribution of a work. Therefore, the two major Open Content licenses, the GNU Free Documentation License (used by, among others, the Wikipedia) and the Open Publication License, are non-free or non-Open Source. As a consequence, the Debian project recently considered moving software documentation released under the GNU GDL into its non-free section. - The same is true, btw., for the 12 licenses Creative Commons http://www.creativecommons.org offers of which only 4 qualify as Free or Open Source according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Open Source Definition. If Open Content needs other legal regulations than Free Software, then obviously because of the different social issues of writing, for example, books as opposed to writing software. (Which doesn't mean that these fields couldn't converge very soon - for example through the need for authors to write complex XML markup, use revision control and content management systems etc., so that the traditional distinction will get more and more blurred.) Nevertheless, this is a good opportunity to question the venerable copyright statement of Nettime: distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission. In order to turn Nettime into a truly public and free resource, I suggest to change this line into distributed via nettime; unless stated otherwise by the author, permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 -F -- http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/ http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3200C7BA, finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Fw: [spectre] Viennese BLOOD HONEY
i take advantage of this short message from steven kovats to bring to the list's attention an exhibition which, despite the opportunistic theme (and cheesy title) is a serious cultural overview of the visual culture in the area. indeed, this could be a good side trip for the Ars Electronica goers. calin - Original Message - From: stephen kovats [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: spectre [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2003 5:36 PM Subject: [spectre] Viennese BLOOD HONEY BLOOD HONEY Future's In The Balkans Curated by Harald Szeemann Exhibition period: 16.05. - 28.09.2003 At BLOOD HONEY - FUTURE¹S IN THE BALKANS The Essl Collection is presenting the work of 73 artists from Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Croatia, Greece, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Slovenia, Turkey and Serbia-Montenegro. One of the biggest and most comprehensive art exhibitions covering the greater Balkan area, this exhibition should give a good insight into the strong relationship that art has with the political and cultural context within this region ... a place that, as the title suggests, is still looking to find its own proper post-Jugoslav, proto-Eurobalkan identity. The exhibition runs until the end of September, so anyone stopping over in Vienna going to or coming from Ars Electronica may be enticed to stop by ... further info: www.sammlung-essl.at ammlung Essl Privatstiftung / The Essl Collection An der Donau-Au 1 3400 Klosterneuburg / Vienna Austria / Europe Tel: +43-2243-370 50 Fax: +43-2243-370 50 DW 22 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Opening hours: Tue - Sun: 10.00 - 19.00 Wed: 10.00 - 21.00 Mon: closed # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Iranonymity
Maybe the mullahs can get puppet dissidents to complain that porn sites are blocked, thus showing the US is not really willing to grant adult status to Iranians. Then if the sites are unblocked in reponse , perhaps that will distract dissidents from dissenting. It seems to work here. Best, Michael Michael H. Goldhaber Bruce Sterling wrote: *One wonders what the strategic Iranian infowar response to this should be. Maybe Americanonymity. -- bruces http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/32567.html A pact between the U.S. government and the electronic privacy company Anonymizer, Inc. is making the Internet a safer place for controversial websites and subversive opinions -- if you're Iranian. This month Anonymizer began providing Iranians with free access to a Web proxy service designed to circumvent their government's online censorship efforts. In May, government ministers issued a blacklist of 15,000 forbidden immoral websites that ISPs in the country must block -- reportedly a mix of adult sites and political news and information outlets. An estimated two million Iranians have Internet access. Dissident sites, religious sites, the L.L. Bean catalog -- we point them to the Voice of America site, but they can go anywhere, says Ken Berman, program manager for Internet anticensorship at the IBB, They're free explore the Internet in an unfettered fashion. Mostly unfettered. Like the Iranian filters, the U.S. service blocks porn sites -- There's a limit to what taxpayers should pay for, says Berman. But the United States' hope is that a freer flow of online information will improve America's image in the Arab world. The service is similar to one Anonymizer provided to Chinese citizens under a previous government contract that ran-out ended earlier this year. -- / # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Saddam International Airport
Hi, Gulf War III was carefully choreographed in terms of recoding some essential spatial icons. In the piece that follows, I am focusing on the taking and renaming of the Saddam International Airport. The essay was published in springerin [http://www.springerin.at/en] in the Summer 2003 issue. I am looking forward to your commments. Best wishes, Krystian - www.etc-publications.com Saddam International Airport/Baghdad International Airport The airport as a symbol and elementary unit of the (neo)-imperial world order Krystian Woznicki When, on April 4 2003, the Saddam International Airport was renamed »Baghdad International Airport«, it was the first big mark made by the allied forces in the course of »Operation Iraqi Freedom«. This »symbolic war«[1] produced a symbol that, like the toppling of the monument in Baghdad only a few days later, was meant to stand above all for the »New World Order«[2]. And thus, not least, for the apparently inevitable triumph of the US empire. There were several reasons why the airport in Baghdad was particularly suitable for this symbolic function. An airport is already per se a colonial and - if you like - imperial type of space production. In an era when air traffic and aerial warfare are the most advanced »modi operandi« of globalisation, it is the perfect medium and interface of capitalist territorial expansion. When air travel was in its infancy, airports were often built in undeveloped, or even »uncivilised« places. This made them central points in world-wide networks that integrated even undeveloped areas of this globe into the menu of official flight schedules - a dream of world-wide connectivity that was, for a long time, synonymous with Pan American Airways. It was also this circumstance that made the company with the blue globe logo an object of hostility. The airline was forced to accept several terrorist attacks in the 1970s and 1980s, including an attack on the ground in Karachi, a gunfire attack on the first-class cabin area on the open runway in Rome, and a bomb explosion that occurred during take-off in San Francisco. Even the hijacking of the »Landshut« meant that it was not only the picture of a Lufthansa plane at Mogadishu International Airport that burnt its way deep into the collective memory[3], but also a message from the hijackers transmitted by aircraft radio, which provided a sort of caption to this picture and in 1977 was tantamount to a manifesto: »We are fighting against the imperialist organisations of the world.« All in all, these were terrorist infringements that established the airport as a symbolic zone of conflict. In other words, not as a space in itself, but as a kind of »social space«, as a projection surface for higher conflicts and interests that were mostly of a global nature. This »symbolic turn« had already begun to become apparent in 1966 in the case of Narita Airport. While the farmers from around the intended site, who had not agreed to the airport's construction, began a bitter fight for their land, the students that joined them had a much more abstract agenda. As an advisor to the president of the Narita Airport Authority (NAA) recently recalled in the »Taipei Times«, they saw the sometimes bloody protests against Narita as being, above all, a symbolic fight against the establishment.[4] What is more, they interpreted the airport as being a key geo-strategic location, against the background of the second - »American« - phase of the Vietnam war. And when pictures went around the world of a woman armed with pieces of bamboo fighting against the riot police, people again spoke of »Japan's Vietnam«.[5] When US units took the airport in Baghdad, it was thus not only the geographical, spatial dimension that was emphasised, although the airport was obviously of great military, strategic significance, having a runway that is over four kilometres long, enough for a Boeing 747, but also for the largest military transport aircraft: in other words, the time needed to bring in soldiers, weapons and goods could be reduced from several days to a few hours, which would be of great benefit not only for the further course of the war but also for a siege of the Iraqi capital. What was stressed, however, was that the airport was now a »gateway to the future of Iraq«[6]. One could also say, by modifying the popular description many airports give of themselves as a »Gateway to the World«, that Baghdad International Airport was now to act as the »World's Gateway to the Arab Region«. So here, the airport is not only the symbolic medium of conquest, but that of reconquest: of recolonialisation. No Man's Land? One year before the epoch of decolonialisation was officially concluded (1975), the story of the Nicosia International Airport starts to get interesting. A airport that, as Bruce Sterling also writes in his geo-political pop epos »Zeitgeist«, set on Cyprus in 1999, is situated on the strangest part of the island: in the »wilderness
nettime DNA and Computers
Below is an interesting article on DNA and computers... one day we may have little software working on our flue viruses. Eduardo Navas http://navasse.net http://netartreview.net -- http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/uniontrib/mon/news/news_1n1dna.html DNA forms building block for next breed of computer By Jonathan Sidener STAFF WRITER September 1, 2003 For years, researchers have taken advantage of the ever-increasing power of computers to crack the genetic code. But Scripps Research Institute chemist Ehud Keinan and a handful of scientists around the world are going in the opposite direction, using DNA ? the blueprint for cellular life ? to crunch numbers inside a new breed of computer. If the research is successful, children one day might operate a computer powered not by silicon chips, but by biochips that run software and store data using the same double-helix of DNA that determines whether our eyes are blue or peas are green. And it is conceivable that future generations may have microscopic DNA computers coursing through their veins, capable of diagnosing and perhaps treating a variety of ills at the molecular level. You can't compare and say a DNA computer is or isn't faster than this, Keinan said, gesturing toward a sleek, metallic Macintosh PowerBook in his Scripps office. It's a different type of computer. DNA computers don't have keyboards and monitors. The computing takes place on the laboratory bench as complex molecular-chemical reactions. The first calculations, nearly 10 years ago, took place inside beakers and test tubes. A new generation of DNA computing uses biochips, devices built using semiconductor manufacturing technology. A biochip has millions of pieces of DNA on its surface instead of the millions of electronic circuits on a computer chip. At the moment, DNA computers are laboratory curiosities. One computer can play a respectable game of tick-tack-toe. Another can solve chess riddles. The computations they handle would make the least powerful of today's computers yawn. But DNA computers show some intriguing qualities. DNA is extremely efficient, both in storing data and in its use of energy. One gram of DNA, which would take up about as much space as an ice cube, can hold as much information as 1 trillion compact discs. With today's computer chips, energy consumption and the heat produced as a byproduct can cause malfunctions. But the chemical reactions that make a DNA computer work require little energy. Most significantly, the biomolecular computers operate on different underlying principles. Electronic computers make their calculations by processing a series of zeroes and ones, or binary code, one character at a time in a rapid sequence, like a machine gun that fires a series of bullets from a single barrel in succession. Not so with DNA computers. Because millions of DNA snippets can fit into a drop of water, DNA computers can make many parallel calculations at once, more comparable to a shrapnel grenade that launches many projectiles at the same instant. To Keinan and other researchers, this parallel processing provides much of the allure of DNA computing, the idea that machines built with a fundamentally different computing engine will be able to tackle fundamentally different questions. A young science DNA computing was born in 1994 when University of Southern California researcher Leonard Adleman devised a way to solve a mathematical brain teaser using fragments of DNA. Several research teams around the globe have taken different approaches to this computing via biology, and it remains unclear which approach, if any, will emerge from the laboratory. Electronic computers read a language consisting of two characters, 0 and 1. DNA computers read a language of four characters, the four molecules that make up DNA, known by their initials A, T, G and C. Like its electronic brother, a DNA computer has software and hardware. The software is the DNA string. The hardware consists of enzymes that read the DNA strand and snip it at precise, known locations. After each enzyme snip, four unbonded molecules remain at the end of the DNA snippet. DNA does not like to have unbonded molecules, so a second enzyme repairs the strand according to a set of rules hard-wired into DNA's biology. DNA computers use the predictability of these repairs to perform their calculations. The enzymes make a series of snips. At the final snip, the four letters of the unbonded molecules provide the answer or output of the calculation. 'Language of biology' Keinan is part of a team from the Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, that built the first autonomous DNA computer. In addition to his work at Scripps, Keinan is the founder and head of the Institute of Catalysis Science and Technology at the Technion. Before the Technion's work, molecular computers had required human guidance through a series of chemical reactions. Keinan, an organic
