GWEI – We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on our website GWEI.org. With this money we automatically buy Google shares via our swiss e-banking account. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself – but in the end we’ll own it!

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RAY’S is een laser geluid installatie waar het publiek en performers onderdeel van uitmaken en direct invloed uitoefenen op de audio-compositie door het doorbreken van een laser regen. Bekijk trailer en stills
Presentatie: dinsdag 21 en woensdag 22 junie 2005, van 20.00h. – 23.00h. in 11_Club_ Restaurant.
Toegang: gratis

Deze installatie is de implementatie van een idee dat we hadden voor ons sensor theater – dat helaas een zachte dood is gestorven omdat we geen goedkope mogelijkheid hadden om analoge signalen te vertalen naar usb. Het project was wel een leuke filosofische exercitie in de subjectiviteit van de waarneming
Laatst kwam ik echter een handleiding voor een create USB interface tegen. Ook is steim bezig met het ontwikkelen van een draadloze analoog-naar-usb interface. Dus wie weet, misschien wordt het project binnenkort weer nieuw leven ingeblazen

John Palfry:

We at the OpenNet Initiative released our study on Iran today. Of the states that we have studied, Iran has one of the world’s most sophisticated Internet censorship regimes. Iran has demonstrated its commitment to extensive Internet filtering through the targeting of weblogs, particularly those written in Farsi, the local language. The state blocks political, religious, and cultural statements on a range of topics from being written and seen online.

Update: /. has an article up about this

Wow, this is turning out to be one crazy week. Lets just take it one item at a time

Canada has introduced a DMCA-like copyright law.

The Blizzard v. BnetD battle before 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis continues (mp3 of argument). This is a very important case, because it will determine to what extent reverse engineering is legal under the DMCA. BnetD (See background) is a GPL’ed software package that provides a complete emulation of battle.net, a proprietary set of servers for games produced by Blizzard Entertainment. The EFF is helping the developers to fight to keep this right of R.engineering. Groklaw reports on how it went:

The gist of his [Blizzard's representative] presentation was “Piracy, Piracy, Piracy”. Through the emphasis in his voice, and the timing of his words, he wanted this court to understand that this was all about stealing. This was about the Defendant/Appellants taking something that did not belong to them. The overall sense of it was that he was trying to scare the judges and paint the Defendants/Appellants as being in the same group as the hackers and scam artists taking over people’s machines with viruses and worms. He pointedly observed that Defendants/Appellants had used fifty icons from the Plaintiff/Respondents server application to make their own product.

The Broadcast Flag (see Cory’s speach on the BF), which we all thought was dead after the EFF whupped them in the courts, is back! Via deeplinks:

Rumor is afoot that Hollywood is taking another crack at the Broadcast Flag on Capitol Hill, this time by sneaking a Flag provision into an appropriations bill before the Senate.

If what we hear is true, the provision will be introduced before a subcommittee tomorrow and before the full appropriations committee on Thursday. That gives us 48 hours to stop it.

This has been posted just about everywhere, so hopefully those crazy americans will be able to tell their Senators to stop this. Once this goes through in America, you can be sure it will go through in Europe (see cory’s talk).

Finally, opponents of European software patents have experienced a major setback. The FFII has a good report:

The Legal Affairs Committee today voted on amendments to the Rocard report on the software patents directive and approved a number of amendments. A few of these have a little symbolic value, such as definition of “technology” as “applied natural science” and, in some instances, renaming of “computer-implemented invention” to “computer-aided invention”. However, the result overall leaves the key loopholes of the Council’s text wide open, and in some cases even widened further. The directive will now be voted on by the full Parliament, in two weeks’ time.

See also this article by Richard Stallman in the guardian on why he thinks software patents are absurd. Scrivener’s Error has an interesting (and harsh) critique of Stallman’s essay (Time is of the Essence).

See also, Lessig on remix culture. At the end there’s a dialogue between Lessig and Cory Doctorow.

In Nederland: Brein eist klantgegevens internetaanbieders:

Auteursrechtorganisatie Brein heeft donderdag in een kort geding voor de rechtbank in Utrecht van vijf internetaanbieders de gegevens geeïst van 41 klanten die veel illegale muziekbestanden aanbieden op internet. Namens de Nederlandse platenmaatschappijen probeert de stichting bij de illegale muziekverspreiders een schadevergoeding te halen.

Uiteindelijk gaat het dus maar om 41 klanten. Ik denk dat het waarschijnlijk wel om zeer ernstige gevallen zal gaan. De vraag natuurlijk is of Brein het potentiele success van dit kort geding op zal volgen met een schadeclaim tegen duizenden gebruikers.

De Eerste Kamer heeft op 28 juni een publiek toegankelijk overleg met minister Donner over de voorgestelde bewaarplicht van verkeersgegevens. Voor meer info zie Bits of Freedom.

Een aardig stukje via nettime.nl:

Struikelblokken op de informatiesnelweg
Door Kees Stad/ A.F.R.I.K.A.

Betogingen en bezettingsacties van bedrijven op internet, alsmede het platleggen van websites en het succes van Wiki- en Indymedia. Volgens het schrijverscollectief A.F.R.I.K.A. zijn internetprojecten pas succesvol indien de mogelijkheden van een zo groot mogelijke openbaarheid en participatie ten volle worden benut.
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De petitie verzoekt de Tweede Kamer om de volledige informatie-uitwisseling in de publieke sector op open standaarden te baseren. Ook moet de software die met overheidsgeld ontwikkeld wordt op termijn volledig onder open source licenties vrij ter beschikking gesteld worden.
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Against European software patents? Add your face to this mosaic. Shortly before the decision in the European Parliament they will print this picture on a huge banner and show it in front of the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Created an events page on the twiki. Feel free to add anything. The link can also be found permanently on the right hand side in the static portion of this site.

• – If you ever need a wordpress plugin check out wp-plugins.net and wp-plugins.org!
• – soople.com – google but with all options easily accessible! Send this one to your grandma.
• – customize google – CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (e.g. links to the same search in yahoo, technorati, …) and removing unwanted information (like ads, sites you don’t like (e.g. experts-exchange.com)). All features are optional and easily configured from the options menu.
• – How to create firefox extensions – it is so simple!
• – mozilla javascript reference – useful while scripting
• – yahoo news rss search – now this is cool: just paste some keywords behind a url and add it to your feed reader. You’ll get new articles for your interest as a continually updated rss feed!
• – the European blogosphere – a wiki which intends to collect all European blogs. Pretty extensive already.
• – del.icio.us casting the net wider – how to search media files through del.icio.us
• – gataga.com – social bookmarks search and exploration engine
• – bunny suicides – so funny!
• – art of science gallery – yep, (even?) science can be beautiful.

This is an amazing story:

As head boy at a legendary choir school, Lawrence Lessig was repeatedly molested by the charismatic choir director, part of a horrific pattern of child abuse there. Now, as one of America’s most famous lawyers, he’s put his own past on trial to make sure such a thing never happens again.

Lessig has also just written a story about his experiences at the World Social Forum in Brazil. Topics include Free culture, and Brazil’s interesting stance in the copyright debate. Earlier seen here and here.