I really have to get myself a MacOS X box. The peer pressure of so many hackers moving over to fiddle with this platform is growing fiercer and stronger. And now I discover the ultimate in hacker cool – you can overclock the new iBooks in software. Change 600Mhz to 700Mhz with the click of an option button! 700 to 800Mhz! Either to 2GHz, thus busting your machine and your warranty! Oh, the illicit thrill of it!
I don’t know what comet flew over Europe, but something’s giving the cybberrights community there a new lease of life. At XCOM, we relaunched STAND to be more of a umbrella blog for all the different UK orgs (this the subject of my elliptical blog entry a fortnight ago). The same week, Caspar Bowden left FIPR, the main parliamentary lobbying group on tech issues – a real shame, but perhaps it’ll lead to a refreshing shake-up in that organisation. And now, some of the cooler activist orgs in Europe – including the Chaos Computer Club, rivacy International and Denmark’s Digital Rights) – have co-operated to form European Digital Rights, a pressure group working from Brussels.
The need for cooperation among European organizations is increasing as more regulation for the internet, privacy and interception is originating from the European Union. Especially since 11 September the pace in which civil rights threatening regulation has been passed demands unified action from civil rights defenders. Some examples of regulations and developments that have the attention of European Digital Rights are data retention requirements, telecommunications interception, the cyber-crime treaty, initiatives for rating and filtering of internet content, notice and takedown procedures of websites and fair use restrictions.
Woah. I’m still a little in shock over XCOM. If you can measure success by numbers, we did extraordinarily well – over 1000 people turned up. There were queues outside before eleven, and they had to stop people from coming in for a while in the afternoon.
I’ve been wanting to be a part of something like this ever since I dragged Lee Felsenstein for lunch years ago, and talked with him about putting together all the different tribes of geekdom. It was a little unsettling seeing it take off so close to my face, though.
At the end, Dave and I did one of our standard schticks we’ve done at previous NTK Live shows. It felt very different. Those older shows were pretty clearly meetings for fans of NTK – and this was something much much bigger. Who were these people banging on about an ASCII e-mail when there were giant BBC Microcomputer art-robot video installations machines ridden by WiFi-wielding teenagers dressed in clothes they’d made themselves out of origamid loyalty cards to talk to? Even Dave, who (with the excellent mute posse), pretty much single-handedly organised much of the show, seemed a bit dwarfed by the magnitude of what he’d done. It was all about five times bigger, and ten times weirder than I’d ever imagined it to be.
And of course the irony is that I was rushing around so much, I didn’t actually see much of it. If want to know what it was like, check out the coverage by Cory and Tom Coates and Neil McIntosh. There are some photos too!
So I’m late up writing the dumb jokes that I’ll use to cover up our usual poorly planned, dazzlingly executed (or vice versa) Happening, The Festival of Extreme Computing. As usual, Dave explains it all much better than I ever will, in this terrifying Guardian dump of his current mindstate:
It is forward-looking too, but focusing on innovative uses of existing technologies instead of just “buy another upgrade and your life will be better”. As Orwell put it, “he who controls the past, controls the future” – clearly a big fan of the Terminator films.
Sorry about the interruption in services. I’m currently recovering from one of those nasty bacteria-laden infection things that killed off all the martians in War of the Worlds, but has so far left me with merely an ongoing fever, an inability to concentrate for more than thirty seconds, and a strong tendency to begin every conversation with “Oooh, I’m very ill, you see”.
It was worth the wait though. Look! Picture of a really old TV licence!
We stumbled on this because Cory was chortling at the modern equivalent sitting on Manar’s desk we’re both staying at for XCOM. You need to pay a small annual tax to own a TV in the UK, a fact which most North Americans generally find terribly amusing. The tax goes to fund the BBC, which is free for all, has no advertising and charges no subscription.
Actually, this older forebear is not a licence for owning a TV, it’s a licence for building one. Which makes me think of my father, who built his neighbourhood their first television, and put it in an box that used to hold oranges. And built me my first computer when I was eight, and put it a cardboard box, with a hole cut out for the keyboard, and plugged it into a ready-made television, and lifted me up onto his shoulders and carried me into a new world.
The NSA is running “loose lips” ads in military magazines and as posters in military facilities. More pictures #1, #2, and #3 (shown), and #4.
This is the first time the NSA has ever commissioned an outside ad campaign, said NSA spokeswomen Marti Mercer. Like all aspects of budget for the ultra-secret NSA, the advertising campaign’s cost is classified.
– from Kepple
Very early attempts to analyse the structure of Simmish, the language of the Sims. Not very detailed, but I appreciate learning the canonical spelling of “Dis graw is fredeshay”.
A lot of birthdays coming up: Ditherati, NTK, and Netscape 4.0 are all five, osil8 is six, Zeldman was seven. And Mozilla, hopefully, will be either zero, or too many years old, depending on how you look at it.
Things that should have an RDF feed, number one.
Dorodango! The shiny ball of mud that kids (and cheating adults with electron microscopes) go crazy for!
