BYTESFORALL [May 2007] Software 'piracy' ... poverty and copyrights... other updates from South Asia
BYTESFORALL * MAY 2007 * SUMMARY * * * SOFTWARE PIRACY IN INDIA DROPS BY ONE PERCENT: STUDY. And Patrice Riemens informs that a most interesting article in yesterday's Financial Times Digital Business supplement details the stunning costs, direct and indirect, that are associated with the 'management' of software licenses for business and other professional organisations. It's called "The hidden cost of being too cautious" and is by Alan Cane Published: May 30, 2007. Source Patrice Riemens [EMAIL PROTECTED] * * * GOOGLE OFFERS HELP to Mysore University (Karnataka) to digitize 8,00,000 books. The Mysore University library has around 100,000 manuscripts that are written both on paper as well as palm leaves. These would include India's first political treatise, the 'Arthashastra' written in the 4th century BC by Kautilya. The idea behind digitising for free is to get free links to these materials once the necessary patenting is complete. Google will also provide expertise, software, and manpower for the digitization work. Whereas, Mysore University is training some of its select Physics students to help in the digitization process. http://www.techshout.com/internet/2007/21/google-to-digitize-80-books-at-mysore-university-in-india/ http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/message/10340 * * * LET'S MAKE POVERTY A 'COPYRIGHT FREE ZONE'! Nalaka Gunawardene argues that we all know the power of moving images. Used strategically, moving images can move people to change lifestyles, attitudes and behaviour. Indeed, the right kind of information -- whether about microcredit, contraception, home gardening or immunisation -- can vastly improve the quality of life, and even save lives that are needlessly lost. Says Nalaka: "Broadcasters need to let go of development related TV content after initial broadcasts. They must also allow educational and civil society users greater access to vast visual archives, gathered from all over the world. In this context, I would like to repeat a proposal I first made last year, which I have since presented at the UN Headquarters and other forums. It's simple: Let us make poverty a 'copyrights free zone'." http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/message/10338 * * * TELECENTRE.ORG BLOG, some highlights: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/message/10336 * * * CHEAPER LAPTOPS FOR CHILDREN: A programme to provide millions of low-cost laptops to students in poor countries is set to start production in September even as commercial competitors prepare to offer even cheaper models. The idea from Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory, who proposed the project at the World Economic Forum in Davos two years ago, has moved closer to fruition. Negroponte sees the computers, to be sold in bulk to governments of certain countries, as a linchpin of education and development. The non-profit organization he formed -- One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) -- attracted support of leading businesses and institutions and will start production later this year, Michail Bletsas, chief connectivity officer at OLPC, said. The laptop is being made by the Chinese firm Quanta: the goal is for Quanta to manufacture 40,000 laptops a month beginning in September, then step up production to 400,000 per month by the end of the year. "OLPC would like to manufacture at least three million units in the first round of production," he said. But OLPC could not say which countries were planning to order the laptops, spokeswoman Jackie Lustig said. Volume shipments to developing nations were planned for later this year, she said. "OLPC is in talks with Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Nigeria, Thailand, Pakistan, Russia, Rwanda and many other countries -- but nothing definite just yet," she said. http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1099381 http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/message/10332 * * * * SOFTWARE, FROM A BANGLADESHI HACKER: "These are some of my hacks that you might find useful. I wrote them in my own time (weekends, after work and in my vacation), my employer has nothing to do with them. All the software are available with source for free. If you have any questions or suggestions please email me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you find the software useful, please let me know as well. Share and enjoy!" http://www.muquit.com/muquit/software/software.html * * * CELLPHONE CALL FROM EVEREST: British climber Rod Baber on Monday became the first man to use a cellphone for making a call from Mount Everest. He used the GSM technology. Earlier, satellite phones had been used to make calls from the Everest summit, but this is for the first time that a call has been made using the 3G technology. The call was made possible with the help of a cell tower installed by China Telecom in Rongbuk, about 12 miles from the mountain peak. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/message/10
Fragments on Machinic Intellectuals
From the recently released book Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization, edited by Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber with Erika Biddle (http:// www.constituentimagination.net) Fragments on Machinic Intellectuals Jack Bratich There is a common complaint leveled at intellectuals today, lobbed from both Left and Right, which says intellectuals are holed up in the ivory tower. They are accused of being either elitist or reformist liberals, out-of-touch Marxists or armchair activists. In each case intellectuals are assumed to be isolated from everyday life. Over recent decades this charge has been thrown by the Left against that all-purpose brand: theory. Charges of obscurantism, jargonism, and armchair strategizing were leveled at "posties" (postmodernists, poststructuralists, postcolonialists), yet this specter of irrelevance obscures a larger trend taking place in the U.S. academy: the growing corporatization of the university.[i] According to Maribel Casas-Cortes and Sebastian Cobarrubias, in this volume, the ivory tower itself has a mythic functionerasing the university's immersion in historical processes. The increasing dependence of universities on corporate and federal funding has created a set of interlocking institutions that, if anything, makes intellectual work extremely relevant to and integrated with pragmatic interests. Put simply, we are in an era of embedded intellectuals. [ii] What can we make of this new condition? I address this question by evaluating recent tendencies in the academy, especially in the field of communications studies. Using the theoretical lens of autonomist Marxism, I examine intellectual labor, or the working of the general intellect, as a means to think through these conditions and offer some conceptual devices for understanding new potentials for radical subjectivity. Given the prominence accorded by autonomists to communication, media and information technologies in the new landscape of labor, I will highlight the academic disciplines where these processes are being studied and developed. Given the significance of communications both as growing academic field and infrastructure for the General Intellect (GI), as well as my own immersion in it, I concentrate on that circuit. Embedded Intellectuals Let's begin with a recent public face of the embedded figure: the now almost forgotten practice of embedded journalism. Brainchild of Victoria Clarke, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, embedded journalism involves integrating reporters into the very machinery of the military (living with troops, going out with them on missions, wearing military gear) during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While a few journalists wrung their hands in disapproval, mainstream media welcomed this innovation in wartime reporting. This new propaganda involved the state merging with private sector consultants (the Rendon group, Burston- Marstellar, the Bell Pottinger group) and professional journalism to form a nexus that Guy Debord once called "networks of influence, persuasion and control."[iii] As a mix of publicity and secrecy, this form of journalism recalls another, older definition of embedded. It has a very specific meaning in subliminal psychology research. Embedded refers to the hidden symbols, voices, or messages buried in a text. The word "SEX" in the Ritz cracker or the skull in the ice cubes of a Smirnoff print ad were embedded, according to Wilson Bryan Key (author of those 1970s mass market paperbacks on subliminal seduction in advertising). Even today, if you take a Neuro-Linguistic Programming course or order a subliminal message CD you too can learn to drop embedded commands into your speech patterns. But this Tony Robbins spectacle of war journalism originally got it backwards: rather than have the signifier disappear into the background (à la the hidden penis in the Camel cigarette pack), the embedded journalists took center stage, making their military handlers vanish and exert hidden influence. Only now, as the very practice of embedded journalism has become normalized, do we see it disappearing as object of scrutiny. Another definition of embedded comes from electrical engineering and computer architecture, where embedded systems refer to special-purpose microprocessors that reside in other devices (like wristwatches, antilock brakes, microwaves and cell phones). These are the applications that are producing smart appliances, e.g., refrigerators that will tell you when your milk is spoiled or when you are running low on beer. Combining these notions of embedded we can think of journalism as being embedded into an integrated circuit, where it becomes a component of a strategic assemblage of vision mac
Re: The Society of the Unspectacular
On Sunday, 10. June 2007 19:42, Morlock Elloi wrote: > If "empowerment" of the public by cheap self-publishing has demonstrated > anything, it is that a vast majority has nothing to say, lacks any > detectable talent and mimicks TV in publishing the void of own life (but > unlike TV they derive no income from commercials.) If media are made by, and for, one's own community (which might be very small) then talent and excitement are measured very differently. The material on youtube etc is "boring", mainly, I guess, because it was not made for you. Most of us produce lots of stuff that is boring to all but a hand full of people. But to them, it's great. It's the stuff that used to be called private, but is now online because it's the easiest way to get to the intended audience of 5 (or 500, or 5000). > So I wouldn't say that the classical notion of "public" has changed in > the sense that it got fragmented around "new media". It's "new media" > giving content-free personal smalltalk the ability to be globally > visible (not that anyone looks at it in practice, but they could, in > theory.) The technical possibility that "everyone" can watch it is pointing into the totally wrong direction. It's doesn't mean that everyone should watch it, it only means that the size of the audience is not determined on the level of the technical protocol but can scale freely up or down. This does, in some from, lead to a fragmentation of the public, not the least because the "public" in modern democracies was constituted through the narrow bandwidth of mass media. Though I'm not sure if this is the reason, as Eric suspects, for the very manifest trend of governments withdrawing from public discourse. Yet, for whatever reason, there seems to be a inverse relationship between the degree of privacy of ordinary people and the secrecy of governments. Felix --- http://felix.openflows.com - out now: *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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]
War profiteers in art (Biennale di Venezia, 2007)
Came back from Venice WAR PROFITEERS IN ART: PENSA CON SENSI -- SENTE CON LA MENTE" (Biennale di Venezia, 2007) first come those that sell bullets, then journalists, then grave-diggers and buildings mafia, finally there is the art-world and the movie production, some make money - the other careers Ana Peraica How is it possible that one of two this year's biggest events, Biennale di Venezia shows images of wars under an unclear concept of "pensa con sensi -- sente con la mente," being in the same year a Bosnian city in which European largest massacre after the WW2 is fighting for its pride and not even mentioning it? Is Den Haag's coldness for the suffering of Srebrenica and the whole selection of the Biennale indicating the same symptom? War tourism accompanied with role-playing of victims and general moral irresponsibility, spectacle of indolence * Caught between thoughts of Susan Sontag, analyzing images of war in the peace societies, its perverse enjoying of distant deaths that actually make them feel more secure and Baudrillard who has turned even Sontag's pacifism into the critique of pathetic standpoint in the text on Sarajevo, as actually Sontag went to write there, I am thinking again on the role of the war reporter that has emancipated indicating a cultural need for the distant trauma in public, and adrenaline addiction of reporting, but also a rare profit-making of the war .Moreover, the indolence grows, as it shows the algorithm of media and cruelty noted once by Billwet / Adilkno: more ethereal the medium: more violent and frequent the image of the dead. So, we see plenty of photos and videos of graveyards, corpses but names of artists are coming more important than victims represented. ART WAR PROFITEURS To be honest, I could not see more than Arsenale show. To sum up the Arsenale -- war, death, victims, among which of course - plenty of 11 September planes, models, toys, dead children and rarely some of conflicts caused by the West. A colleague, Ivana Bago with whom I was cruising the show has commented; we should have worn t-shirts with Srebrenica's appeal. The show had made me sick, not only as I've seen too many images of war myself, but as actually I am sick of war tourism, especially when someone is making a career on it. It indeed reminded me of plenty of conferences on war topics in which speakers were "caught in war" for a day, having all kinds of bullet-protection jackets and who had only made troubles to local police that had to cover them up instead of taking care for children, old people and women in danger that would not be able to escape, as these "reporters" Also, they would not be able to earn anything for a day being in the war, as photo-reporters, journalists and others. Even here, rarely some artist was reporting the original experience in the sense war being a disaster to one's life, mostly origins of artists were countries that had not seen the war since the WW2. But, exposing war images at Biennale is surely making them more important than all the memories of people that had suffered for years at same places. It is not a matter why did they went to report on the war, the matter if they were adrenaline freaks, but what the selection entitled "think with your feelings, feel with your mind" wanted to forward to its public? Some more of adrenaline to the asleep Biennale public or the indolence that is the actual international politics showing again with the Srebernica's case? Or it is yet another case of making a profit out of war. As if not presented in such a context, most of these artworks would actually be so immoral. NO MOVIE PRODUCTION FOR SREBRENICA So, why does then the Biennale show wants to get the picture of war -- most of which finished? And why does it not mention the only consequence of the European wars in which a victim did not gain the place as all other European victims? What is the difference between all presented cases and Srebrenica? Amazingly enough this years largest fight for the recognition of the pride of the victim has staid behind. Actually in the art-world that is really not a problem as, except of the work by ejla Kameric', there were rarely some other ones. Srebrenica does not find the media representation that has been given to the Holocaust throughout the XX century or during couple of years to 11th September. Its victims seem to be totally irrelevant. And in this review it is not the matter of the pure curiosity but the support that has to be given in the world in which Nazi war crimes or terrorism of extreme Muslims are not forgotten (yet) -- but are forwarded to whole nations and religions, while the case of the contemporary Western crime is not even risen to question. And that is the crime of indolence and war profit. KILLER INSTINCTS The only work that has actually given a critique was by Dan Perjovschi with graffiti at the entrance of Arsenale commenting
