This is what a criminal looks like

As support for The Pirate Bay people on trial, a site was created where you can upload your photo and declare that you are a "criminal" because you share movies, music and other files.

So far more than 1000 people have uploaded photos of themselves!

Pirate Bay trial about to start

The people behind the operation of the infamous torrent site The Pirate Bay stand trial starting today in Stockholm. Hans Fredrik Neij, Per Svartholm Warg, Peter Kolmisoppi, Carl Lundström face charges for copyright infringement. That is pretty big news. The Pirate Bay has been much more than a place for someone to find pirated software and movies. The four operators run the site by provoking just about everybody in the software and movie industry. The run many anti-DRM campaigns and were promoting freedom of speech and freedom of file transfer on the internet. Pirate Bay started the Spectrial Campaign (Spectacle + Trial) to promote their case.

This is a very fussy trial as the Swedish law is not very clear as to these things. Pirate Bay does not host copyrighted material so the prosecution will have hard time convincing the court they they are breaking any law. De fence is going to stress about other legitimate services that have links to copyrighted material. Any search engine out there is potentially a guilty of copyright infringement by that right as they provide links to copyrighted material.

In slashdot forums there was a particularly great comment about that situation:

Google provides links to infringed copyrighted content. So does Pirate Bay.
Google makes money from advertising. So does Pirate Bay.

OOoooohhhh! But Pirate Bay's advertising is PORN!!

Oh, well. That settles it, then. We find the defendant guil-cup of the charge of accessory to copyright infringement.

The lawyers are turning the trial into a spectacle trying to get as many people as they can interested about the trial in order to get their voice heard. This actually a very good idea since if the trial had no publicity it would probably end up being a "get these people locked up" trial behind closed doors. National Swedish television has announced that they are going to stream live from the courtroom. For anybody that does not speak Swedish their is even going to be a twitter translated broadcast.

UPDATE

50% of the charges have been dropped so far. Major win for defence in the 2nd day of the trial.

Check out the photos from the press conference and the supporters outside the court.

Online Music Tax in the UK

Dumb-asses in the UK government are thinking about enforcing a new tax, the online music tax. Basically this will be a tax of 20 BP (approximately 21 euros or 28 dollars) for every broadband connection in the country. This tax would be used to cover the losses of big music and production companies from illegal internet downloads.WTF?

This does not make sense. The tax payers will start paying for the failures of the much-hated record labels? It is not enought that UK tax-payers pay 100 pounds per year to the BBC as a licence to watch TV, now they will have to pay an additional 20 pounds to the labels. Think about how much money these companies would be gaining for nothing? Why should we give them such a present? What sick mind thought of that? I think they will start to justify all sorts of stuff just to play along with the big companies, saying its all because of the economic crissis....I am getting angry again....calm down..calm down..

OLPC in trouble. Capitalism is an ugly system.

Nicholas Negroponde announced that the organization is laying off half of the staff due to economic difficulties. Basically what that means is that the OLPC laptop is not selling as much as it was expected and the organization did not take as many preorders as projected (or that some preorders where canceled due to some shady events....).

When OLPC was first announced everybody was talking about it and everybody wanted one. It had a open hardware/software approach that many people liked and the idea behind it was "free education for underprivileged kids of developing countries". Who could object to that? Some companies that discovered a new market maybe?

Capitalism is an ugly system. As soon as word got out, many big companies starting producing their own cheap netbooks and offering countries their solution to compete with the open architecture of OLPC. There were even stories that got out about bribing third world country officials for canceling OLPC orders and choose another solution of a certain company.

You think these kids would benefit from windows?

Lets hope though that this drawback will not be the end of OLPC as is. Negroponde is taking a shift to non free software approach. I wonder why? What there is to gain from installing a non free,closed operating system like windows on the OLPC? The kids certainly do not object to Linux. What about governments? Ahhhh, there you go. But why governments of developing countries object to free software? Think about it...

Die Welle, Review

I have been meaning to watch this movie for a couple of weeks now and eventually I watched it last night. Prior to the screening I had read a lot about it and I was prepared to watch a German film of the magnitude of “The Experiment” or the “Life of Others”. I will start by saying that the film did not deliver what I expected but it did not fail all together.

The story is about a left-wing high school teacher that tries to teach his students about the nature of fascism and show them that a dictatorship is still possible. Long story short, he organizes them into a group with Nazi characteristics and the students start to act like a fascist group. The experiment gets out of his hands and and the film climaxes into a rather interesting but expected finale.

The first part of the film is better than the second focusing on group dynamics and has some political depth (not a lot though). Second half, on the other hand, focuses more onto the characters and gets kinda boring. It misses to hold interest as it moves on to showing individual relationships between students which are interesting but miss the point of the film which works better with group dynamics.

The theme of the film was very promising and the movie could have been so much better. A friend who watched the film with me last night suggested that it was over simplified and I agree with him on that. It is either the producers had a lot of ideas but failed to deliver them, or the intentionally simplified the movie to be digested easier by a mainstream audience. At any rate you will enjoy the movie and will provide you and your friends with some food for thought and conversation.

The value of Internet in the world of tomorrow.

Due the nature of my job I am in front of a computer screen at least half of my day. At home I continue to be in front of a screen for recreational reasons many days of the week. Internet is my primary source for news, communication and entertainment. During the past days I was pleasantly surprised by rediscovering the true value of information and the power of communication through the Internet.

Last week started in Greece, what can only be described as, a revolt with riots spreading to the whole country minutes after the murder of a 15 year old boy from a special unit policeman in Athens. The shooting was only the tip of the iceberg against an unfair system, against police brutality against a dead end, many young people see in front of them, caused by unemployment, an economic crisis where billions are given to banks instead of those in need and an incompetent conservative government.

After many days of riots and a public outcry against the government with much playtime on the news, talk shows etc, suddenly the TV and radio stopped most of the broadcasting of riot related news, stopped the related talk shows and generally toned down the whole thing. Television continued playing their garbage shows, trash news and lame TV series. After a day I read in the newspaper that the state-run Television and Radio Comity prohibited the TV channels to broadcast riot videos and instructed them to tone down the news on the riots. A failing government had censored the news so that the public will loose interest in revolting against the government feeling the thing is blowing off.

These days the Internet plays a very significant role. Many people, including myself, are informed about the news by other means. These means include Internet news groups, independent news sites, and collaborative groups that report on whats happening on their city or country such as Indymedia (which spans over many countries). Many people where mobilized using the Internet. Many movements set up a blog to inform other people about their intentions and declarations. People rally other groups of like minded people through Facebook. An amazing thing happened. I was using Internet in my everyday life as a power user, but I never actually saw its potential work. I did now. It gives people voice and enables other people to hear what they have to say. It is a tool for a truly democratic society where people do not need a state or any other organization to self-organize, to mobilize, to get informed or to get heard. This is the power of Internet. That is why governments around the world have started experimenting with ways of censoring the Internet. Some countries have even prevented poeple from using certain services such as youtube. We have to prevent that from happening. They have taken away television and radio which have long before sold out. Now, they will try to take away our most powerful tool today. We should not let that happen.

Google-Bomb Greek Police

On the evening of Saturday 6th of December in Athens-Greece a special unit policeman shot, for no reason, a 15 year kid, Alexis Grigoropoulos. Alexis died instantly. People from all over Greece and in other countries are on the streets for 5 days now demonstrating against those that steal their dreams, against an unfair economic and social system, against police brutality. Rage is everywhere. The murderous pigs always get away with their crimes. Lets not let that happen this time. Protest to your governments and Greek embassies, send letters to newspapers in your country. Let other people know about this.

Farewell Alexi

Support Greek people in their fight. Google bomb Greek police

On your blogs and sites place a link to the Greek Police web site with anchor text "pigs murderers". If enough links exist, when someone searches for "pigs murderers" on Google, the greek police website will come up.

Copy and paste the following line to your blog or site and forums:

<a href="http://www.astynomia.gr">pigs murderers</a>

it will appear like this:

pigs murderers

Tell your friends that have a blog. Post it on your blogs and sites. Tell your friends. Post it on facebook. Post it on forums

Copy and paste this post directly if you like. Make sure the line of the html link code appears correctly on your post so other people can copy and paste it from you. If you have a problem to use the line to a blog post replace the <> of the link code with &lt; and &gt; respectively