ryan.freebern.org

Recently I was thinking about the whole copyright/software patents/DRM/DMCA kerfuffle, and it struck me that it’s a very interesting story with a lot of neat characters, and it would make a great documentary along the lines of “This Film is Not Yet Rated”. I discussed it with friends, all of whom agreed that it could make a great film. There could be interviews with Jon Johansen (of DeCSS fame), Bruce Schneier, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Steve Jobs, Page and Brin, maybe even an anonymous informant from within the RIAA or MPAA.

Today, I watched a video of Cory Doctorow giving a talk about these topics (his favorites) at Google. You can watch on YouTube if you’re interested. It’s an hour long including the Q&A session at the end, but Doctorow is a compelling speaker and it’s a great talk if you care about information freedom and the future of technology. The reason I bring it up, though, is that thirty minutes into his talk (at 30:45, actually), he offhandedly mentions that he’s “doing some consulting on a movie” that Kirby Dick, the creator of “This Film is Not Yet Rated,” is doing.

So I think that, given Doctorow’s involvement, maybe Dick is actually in the process of making that copyright/software patents/DRM documentary that I dreamed up. You heard it here first!

Remember that moronic court decision I posted about in May? (A judge had ruled that a Wiccan couple couldn’t expose their son to “non-mainstream” religious beliefs.) Well, I predicted it’d be overturned in a week… and it’s been overturned, three months later! I was close.

Anyway, hooray for the Indiana Court of Appeals for protecting the religion part of the First Amendment. Now hopefully these people can get back to peaceably practicing their chosen religion without an idiot judge meddling in their affairs.

Allow me to further extend my admiration and congratulations to Spain, who legalized gay marriage today.

Canada, you have my sincerest admiration and respect. Congratulations to you for making same-sex marriage legal. If only those of us in other so-called enlightened nations would follow suit.

How long until this moronic court decision gets overturned? I give it a week at most. I wouldn’t be surprised if the judge caves under public pressure and retracts it before then, though.

How do idiots like this with obvious disregard for the U.S. Constitution manage to become judges? Where along the way do they decide to just ignore some bits of the law?

Via Warren Ellis:

A test of the controversial US missile defence system failed on Sunday – the second time this has happened in recent months.

[...]

The MDA revealed on 14 January 2005 that this was caused by the interceptor’s internal safety system preventing lift-off.

If only every weapon contained an internal safety system like that…

I’ve been hearing more and more about a new service, YouSendIt. It bills itself as a simple way to send people files that are too large for email to handle — up to 1GB. You enter an email address, upload a file, and the recipient is given a link (active for seven days) to download the file.

I don’t think I’ve actually heard of anyone using it for its intended purpose, however; everyone seems to be using it as a temporary host for mp3s that they want to share with friends. They upload the file, get the link themselves, and then post it on their weblog or IM it to everyone who wants it, and voilá, a new kind of filesharing.

When I first heard about people using the service this way, my immediate thought was that they must be crazy to just trust that the service provider won’t rat out copyright-infringers to the RIAA. Before making any judgments, though, I checked their website. Right on the top of the page is a link titled “your privacy is guaranteed.” That sounded promising.

Clicking the link and reading their actual privacy policy, however, tells another story:

IP addresses are logged [...]

We collect the e-mail addresses of YouSendIt Delivery recipients and senders [...]

We may disclose your information if necessary [...] Disclosure may be required by law or if we receive legal process.

They claim to guarantee your privacy, and then blatantly state that they log almost every bit of information that they receive and will gladly give it up if the RIAA comes knocking with a subpoena. This is crap. It almost smells like a filesharing sting operation. While many people I know are gladly going about sharing files with this service, I’m wary of doing so, and I urge anyone else with concern for their privacy to avoid it as well.

A mashup is a home-spun mix of two or more songs, usually the lyrics from one overlayed on the backing music from another. The artist uses an audio editing program, chops samples out of one or more songs, and blends those samples in some sort of pleasing fashion with samples from other songs. The result, if done well, can be both fun and intriguing, as you hear some familiar sounds in a totally new context. (For instance, the Kleptones’ “A Night at the Hip-Hopera” is quite possibly my favourite album released last year, and it’s entirely mashups.)

The problem with mashups is that record companies really don’t like people chopping up copyrighted songs and redistributing them. They complain a lot and try to sue people for it. However, the mashing-up isn’t what they have a problem with; it’s the distributino of said mashed-up music. So why not get rid of that distribution? Why not invent a way for people to let other people listen to clever mashups without having to actually send them any copyrighted music?

Say there’s an audio editing program which, along with actually editing the audio, keeps track of all the steps you take to do the editing and can save those steps — essentially, a set of instructions describing how to duplicate the edits you’ve made — as a small, easily redistributable file. Imagine: you open songs X and Y in the editor, and remove the vocals from song Y, then chop a few small sections out of song X and lay them on top of the instrumentals from song Y, and produce a mashup, song XY. Meanwhile, the editing program not only saves song XY to disk, it also saves a file describing every operation the program performed on either of the songs, called XY’.

You then send XY’, a file that contains no copyrighted music whatsoever, to a friend. Your friend has his own copies of songs X and Y on CD, and his own copy of the editing program. He opens songs X and Y in the editing program, and loads XY’, and voilá: song XY (your mashup) is available to him, and — here’s the important part — no illegal exchange of copyrighted data has taken place.

Essentially, it’s an optimized macro-recorder for an audio editing program. Someone on the Audacity team get on this, okay?

The chemical Dioxin has been in the news fairly recently with the poisoning of Ukranian presidential candidate (now president) Viktor Yushchenko. What is dioxin? It’s one of the most toxic chemicals known to science, a potent carcinogen, and a poison that has been linked to severe reproductive and developmental effects.

Why, then, do small amounts of dioxins occur in bleached cotton tampons, which are placed in one of the most sensitive, absorbent, and reproduction-related areas of a women’s body?

The FDA claims that it’s not a problem. They say the levels in most tampons are well below dangerous. However, dioxin accumulates in the body over time, so even these tiny levels can eventually be harmful — especially when you consider that the average American woman uses over 11,000 feminine hygiene products in her lifetime.

Additionally, as Heather Guidone says in her study entitled Endometriosis & Dioxin: a Toxic Link?:

Currently, the FDA requires tampon and related menstruation product manufacturers to monitor dioxin levels in their products; however, the results are not available to the public and the dioxin tests relied upon by the FDA are done by the manufacturers themselves. That’s a little bit like having the fox guard the hen house!

So the FDA, trusting giant manufacturing companies to put consumer safety over profit margins, tells us that bleached cotton menstrual products are safe.

What’s a concerned woman to do? Well, in the course of researching a rumour regarding asbestos in tampons (which proved to be false), Snopes’ esteemed Barbara Mikkelson reached the conclusion that the best bet is to buy unbleached organic cotton tampons, which are just as effective as any other tampon while being much safer. And Guidone suggests that you write to your state-level political representatives and urge them to support legislation mandating independent testing of feminine hygiene products to determine and warn consumers about the dangers of dioxin.

Here’s why it’s important for you, and everyone you know who cares about the future of our country and the world, to vote. Voter registration deadlines are very soon; make sure everyone you know who wants to vote can.

“I don’t care either way who wins. I am going to vote in the fall; I’m going to do what I do with every election: bring a coin to flip.”

“While it may be true that ‘every vote counts’, I choose not to vote because I have never been well enough informed (by choice) on either candidate’s issues or causes in any election. Also, when the person elected totally fucks up I can say, ‘Well, I didn’t vote for them.’”

“Personally I have to vote for Bush, otherwise my mom won’t pay for my apartment. Vote for the party, not the man, and all…”

(All quotes found on random blogs. Sorry, no attribution.)

My sister attended the RNC protests in New York City at the start of the month, and, thankfully, didn’t get arrested. However, at least 1,500 others were arrested, and many of them held in inhumane conditions at facilities like Pier 57, also known as “Little Guantanamo.”

Via Tuttle SVC, I have come across this letter on ZNet from the mother of one person detained at Pier 57. She claims to have inquired as to the leaseholder of Pier 57 at the time and found out that it was the Republican Party itself.

Reuters has the story that one of the 30 Guantanamo detainees reviewed so far (out of 585 currently held) has been found to be innocent. My first post here said that I hoped that wouldn’t happen, just so that holding these people for the last two years without any judicial review would be justified. Oops.