Category Archives: Friends

Backlogged Bad Puns Over Dinner

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During our celebratory Creative Commons dinner a few weeks back, Cory and Aaron were arguing about the randomness of numbers that come after the first billion numbers after the decimal in pi (3.14nextbillionnumbershere…then what dammit?) (Specifically, they were arguing about whether the distribution of digits in a non-repeating number is also Gaussian — the answer is no, because of distributions such as 1001110011001010 — Aaron won 🙂

At one point, Matthew Haughey commented: “Oh my god, they’re arguing over pi over dessert.”

Salon won’t fix a glaring error in one of its premium features

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Marc Perkel was interviewed by Jennifer Liberto and asked if he knew about Media Whores Online, to which he explained he didn’t. She then proceeded to print an article saying the project got started with some funding from him — and now Salon won’t amend it or pull the piece.

Here is the exact language in question:

As best can be determined, Media Whores Online originated in Tulsa, Okla., in 1996 when a self-proclaimed “ADD Catholic with an IQ of 64” began an irreverent left-leaning e-mail listserv called RL-LNW, short for “Rush Limba — Lying Nazi Whore.” Shy yet passionate, its low-profile editor, Terry Coppage, took on right-wing agendas with cutting and often crude humor. He received some financial help from Marc Perkel, an eccentric computer programmer who ran against incumbent John Ashcroft in the 2000 Missouri Republican Senate primary, garnering 10 percent of the vote with almost no campaigning. Soon Coppage began publishing his commentaries on a Web site called Bartcop, and adopted the moniker “Bart.”

Since the HTML version of the article in question cannot be accessed by the public at large, I’ve also created a plain text version for everyone’s convenience.

Here’s the actual Letter To Salon from Marc Perkel, but he also explained some of the details to me in an email:

I talked to her as she researched the article. She came across as if she were doing a pro-media whores article and asked questions relating to how sites like mediawhoresonline.com were a reaction to the failures of traditional news media.

In our discussion she asked who was behind the site and I made it clear that I had no idea – which is true. We talked about Bartcop.com – a site that I am behind and founded – with a guy in Tulsa OK in 1996 and I talked about why I was doing that.

I do think Bartcop did coin the term “Media Whore” so there was enough of a connection for this writer to deliberately confuse the facts. I think that mediawhoresonline was a bartcop inspired publication as are many sites on the web.

As best I can tell – this all started with people on CNN crossfire started arguing about who is behind MWO and made it out to be some sort of mystery or secret. This reporter who wrote the Salon piece did it from the perspective of smearing the left and to out the secret author of MWO. Having failed to get the facts as to who MWO is – she decided to out me and Terry as MWO.

Bartcop has dedicated an issue to her with links to many other sites that reacted to Salon’s story and Salon’s refusal to pull the story after Salon realized it was a false piece.

A Touching Moment At the Inappropriate Technologies Conference

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Sounds like last week’s MUTE/N2K Festival of Inappropriate Technology was a real blast!

Luckily, I was able to relive some of the magic first-hand, as Cory Doctorow sang along with a lovely MIDI rendition of “Warez Dood” (sung to the tune of “Hey Jude”) and explained to me, with a tear in his eye, how the crowd had all stood up and sang together at the end.

The Buck Stops With Craig Newmark: “Hollywood, Enough Is Enough”

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Check out:
http://www.craigslist.org/craig.vs.hollywood.html.

Craig Newmark, a ReplayTV user (aided by the EFF) is suing Turner Broadcasting (among
others) and seeking a declarative judgement asserting his right to space- and
time-shift TV programming — and to skip commercials while doing it — using
a PVR.

Right on dude! You big sweetie! Stand up for our right to watch shows later and go to the bathroom during commercials! (Has it really come to this?)

Craig vs Hollywood
Thursday, June 6, 2002

Hey, folks, you know that craigslist has a strong commitment to political
issues that affect the online community, like privacy and free speech. We
figure we should focus on what we know something about, and otherwise, provide
you a platform for whatever you want to discuss.

The major Hollywood companies could be embracing new technologies, serving
their customers better and making more money, for themselves, and for artists. A lot of people in Hollywood know this.

However, a lot of folks in entertainment seem to be panicking, taking bad
advice and trying to get anti-consumer laws passed, to restrict personal
freedoms, like what you do when you buy something like a CD or DVD, or record
a TV program.

To help everyone out, Craig is suing Hollywood, with the help of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a major pioneer in the fight for
online rights.

To oversimplify, the Hollywood lawyers are telling us that when we view TV,
skipping commercials is a copyright violation… and it gets worse from there.

Craig and others are telling them that this ain’t okay.

Craig is not representing craigslist in this regard, but we figure you should
know about this.

(For that matter, he can even help people figure out good ways to prevent
actual piracy, which could help out artists and the named companies.)

The idea is that Hollywood and also the tech industry are really
well-represented, but no one stands up for ordinary citizens and consumers.
(No one really stands up for the artists, and the industry is encouraging
piracy by its current actions, but that’s another fight.)

Hey, whenever you can, please help us out: support our legal challenge in
whatever way you can, stay informed, and tell people in your company and even
Congress that you’re concerned about this. I’d appreciate it if you were to
join EFF or any group concerned with your online rights.

More info is available on the EFF site here.

thanks!

Craig

Check out the Boss Martians U.S. Tour

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Evan Foster of The Boss Martians plays guitar and bass on a bunch of my Vagrant Records sessions (including Shake All Over).

Evan and the rest of the Boss Martians are currently on a U.S. Tour. Check them out if you’re over on the East Cost this month and early June:

* MAY 23 (THUR) – Toledo, OH @ The Bottle Rocket w / Chopzilla
* MAY 24 (FRI) – Philadelphia, PA @ w/ TOILET BOYS @ The North Star Bar
* MAY 25 (SAT) – Providence, RI @ Jakes Bar & Grille
* MAY 27 (MON) – NY, NY @ Mercury Lounge w / The Irreversible Slacks / Candid Daydream
* MAY 28 (TUE) – Cambridge, MA @ Middle East (Upstairs) w/ Bottom / Men of Porn / Binge
* MAY 29 (WED) – Washington DC @ The Black Cat w / Ruff Bucket (ex-members of Black Market Baby)
* MAY 30 (THUR) – Charlotte, NC @ Fat City Deli w / The Cherry Valence
* MAY 31 (FRI) – Atlanta, GA @ Echo Lounge w / Quintron & The Subsonics
* JUNE 1 (SAT) – New Orleans, LA @ El Matador
* JUNE 3 (MON) – Houston, TX @ Rudyards British Pub
* JUNE 4 (TUE) – San Antonio, TX @ Tacoland w / Where the Action Is
* JUNE 5 (WED) – Austin, TX @ EMO’S w / The Sir Finks
* JUNE 6 (THUR) – Dallas, TX @ The Trees w / Bob Schneider
* JUNE 7 (FRI) – Oklahoma City, OK @ The Green Door

Cory Doctorow on the Web’s Carpetbaggers

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Cory Doctorow has written some wonderful words to end the year with for the O’Reilly Network.

See:
2002: The Carpetbaggers Go Home .

In case it’s escaped your notice, the economy is also circling the drain. Once-proud giants like Yahoo are shutting down weird little community-driven divisions like webrings.com. The traditional business press is full of gloating editorials from columnists who insist that they were never fooled for a second, they knew from Day One that the Internet was just hype and horseshit, a waffle-iron married to a fax machine, and here we are, the bubble burst, fortunes lost, hardy-har-har. (Even a stopped (analog) clock is right twice a day.)

Having spent billions trying to make 95-percent-reliable services function at 97 percent reliability, the Captains of Industry are off for greener pastures (cough biotech cough), leaving behind a horde of underemployed html jocks, perl obsessives, pixel-pushers, and pythoneers. What are these reborn slackers doing with their time in a down economy?

Exactly what they’ve done all along, only more so. The spare-time economy has yielded a bountiful harvest of weblogs, Photoshop tennis matches, homebrew Web services and dangerously Seattlean levels of garage-band activity.

Webloggers aren’t professional journalists; they don’t adhere to the code of ethics that CNN et al are nominally bound by, and they often can’t spell or string together a coherent sentence, let alone pen an inverted-pyramid story. Nevertheless, bloggers are collectively brilliant at ferreting out every little detail of a story, wearing its edges smooth with discussion, and spitting it out again. Further, bloggers are spread out across the Internet, mirroring, quoting, and linking back to one another, collectively forming a Distributed Provision of Service that is resistant to CNN-killing catastrophes like 9/11. Blogs are about 95 percent of the way to being full-fledged news-sources, and the difference between the bloggers of the world and CNN is a couple of percentiles and several billion dollars.

Even as cable modem companies are knocking hundreds of thousands of subscribers offline, untethered forced-leisure gangs are committing random acts of senseless wirelessness, armed with cheap-like-borscht 802.11b cards and antennae made from washers, hot glue, and Pringles cans.

CNET’s Eliot Van Buskirk wrote

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CNET’s Eliot Van Buskirk wrote a great piece about preserving our civil liberties during this time of War, and the implications of the letting the White House create an atmosphere of self-censorship: Remember what we’re trying to save
.

Even more frightening is the idea that the government could use its new, expanded role for subtler purposes than accusing someone of breaking a law. Consider the case of Bill Maher, who made a controversial comment on his Politically Incorrect show, which now faces cancellation. Ari Fleischer, spokesman for the White House, condemned Maher’s statement, then uttered this chilling remark: “There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.” Whether or not you agree with what Maher said, his right to free speech is one of the essential principles on which our country was founded. Fleischer’s threat that Americans always need to watch what they say and do addresses my fear: that security measures put into place to catch these terrorists could eventually be used to silence dissenting voices within our media and populace. To surrender the right to say what we think is to give up what we’re trying to defend in the first place.

Assuming for the moment that the civilized world is not about to come to an end, we must be careful not to grant our government too much power, because it will be nearly impossible to reclaim what we’ve given away after the current threat is dealt with. If the government installs its Carnivore surveillance machines in our ISPs now, it could be hard to get them removed once everything (hopefully) returns to normal. Given what happened 17 long days ago, it seems a bit strange to write about holding onto our freedom to exchange the odd MP3 over the Internet. There are so many more serious issues at hand. But with any luck, we will again start caring about the things that concerned us before that tragic morning changed everything. When that day comes, I want our civil liberties to be as strong as they are now. The combination of the Internet and computers could be the perfect tool for control and surveillance of our citizens. In our quest for justice and security, let’s try to hold on to some measure of our freedoms.