Radical media, politics and culture.

Blogs

Men fight and lose the battle, and the thig they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and then it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

William Morris

The next baby steps on the copyleft project

1. Establishment of a portal.

2. Design a license or appropriate one from the EFF, GNU etc. Open Audio License: Design Science LicenseEFF Open Audio LicenseFree Art LicenseFree Music Public LicenseOpen Content LicenseOpen Music LicenseOpen Publication LicensePublic Library of Science Open Access LicenseGNU Free Documentation License

3. Sustained examination of the mode of functioning of existing collective rights organisations and analysis of their relationship with artists.

4. See if the existing scheduling software for radio requires any adaptation for tv style application.

Overpeer Poisoning P2P on Behalf of Labels, RIAA

A stealth-mode company called OVERPEER has been flooding the p2p networks with fake Eminem files in an attempt to stop the trading of "unauthorized" mp3s. If you've encountered the "loop" files, in which a section of the chorus or hook is repeated over and over, you've been tricked by OVERPEER.

OVERPEER are doing this with the full knowlege and consent of Interscope and Universal Music, in fact they are under contract to Universal and other major record labels, and will be doing a LOT MORE of this type of "interdiction" in the near future.

OVERPEER are an interesting firm, their CEO used to be a VP at ASCAP, the big American performing-rights organization, so he's majorly connected to the top levels of the U.S. music business. His father has been on the ASCAP board of directors for decades. Strangely, the company was actually started and funded by a Korean conglomerate called SK Industries.

SK Industries are the second-largest corporation in Korea, a firm with many energy and IT infrastructure holdings. In fact they were partners with Enron! They have tons of money, and they're not going to quit, give up, or go away.

OVERPEER's mission is to kill p2p by poisoning the networks with fake, bogus files. They hope to discourage users away from Gnutella, KaZaA and other free networks, and drive everyone to the industry-approved Pressplay and MusicNet services. For more on OVERPEER, visit

http://www.sk.com/news/newsletter/current/essay.asp

If you don't agree with OVERPEER's mission to destroy p2p,

let them know! Their headquarters are at:

110 E. 55th Street, 14th Fl. New York, NY 10022 TEL: 212-906-8143 FAX: 212-906-8149

TELL THESE GREEDY FUCKERS THAT YOU DO NOT APPROVE! P2P SHOULD BE FREE!

http://www.nd.edu/~remarx/rm/pdf/rmsi_one.pdf Jason Read. The Antagonistic Ground of Constitutive Power: An Essay on the thought of Antonio Negri

Zerox

Adam Ant

lock up your brain because I'm here again I'm never bored to steal your chords ooh-ooh Zerox Machine ooh-ooh Zerox Machine

give me a line or a middle eight I've got the best so I want the rest ooh-ooh Zerox Machine ooh-ooh Zerox Machine

lets get together before its too late collect up the ideas, duplicate filling up the forms, send them off tonight and you'll be the owner of the copyright of the copyright, of the copyright

time of the essence get your ears to the ground however else can the hits be found?

I may look happy, healthy and clean a dark brown c voice and suit pristine but behind the smile there is a Zerox Machine

I'm a Zerox Machine

In the aftermath of Genoa I became a video-internet mole. Indymedia Italia made available documentaries in various states of completion so as to intervene in the national polemic and the international reflection on the confrontation of that week. Ensconced in my then New York home, I also mined archives of all the major television networks for their footage. As the sounds of helicopters, the stench of tear gas and the memory of people's screams as their mouths and eyes burned stayed with me, it would be fair to say that reconstructing the events of that time became something of an obsession.

Over the last year much of my work has enatiled an analysis of the means used by media conglomerates to maintain their technical advantages and market domination in a digital realm which was once heralded as the bearer of a new age of communicative democracy, Genoa provided the catalyst not only to study this in detail but also triggered consideration of how some of their strategies might be overcome.

The high level of interest in those events meant that there were significant numbers of people attempting to download such files simultaneously, resulting in excruciatingly slow download speeds from the Indymedia FTP servers. With some perseverance however I did manage to download the files, but it occurred to me that being in poissession of a cable modem over a fairly decent network (RoadRunner new York), I occupied a relatively priveliged position in the food chain of downloaders. Corporate content from the likes of CNN was far faster to access and indeed this parallel streched across a panorama comparing independent and commercial media sources. It should be obvious that this difference in performance influenced the selection of sources used by computer users during that period. Who knows on how many occasions an indymedia download was initiated and then cancelled as the time of download completion expanded towards the horizon. Those undeterred by the inconvenience may have been swayed by cost considerations, particularly users accessing data over dial-up lines where they are charged for either use or telephone calls or both.

As a delinquent sharer of MP3 files in recent times I was already familiar with many of the file-sharing systems available and the various innovations which have helped extend their reach into the dial-up user population, and so I wondered if anyone was employing such networks for the purpose of distributing radical documentary and film. Cursory searchesd on the two principal networks Gnutella (BearShare, Limewire etc.) and FastTrack (Kazaa and, at that time, Morpheus) yielded a total of szero results on Genoa and one for Indymedia - the item in question was in fact a recording of Richard Stallman singing his Free Software anthem! I went to bed feeling perplexed and somewhat dismayed.

Shortly afterwards I stumbled across EDonkey2000, which is an independent network. The interesting thing about this system is that it is primarily designed and used for large audio-visual files. The Donkey breaks large files up into smaller segments, increasingly the likelihood of successful transfer through reliance upon modularity. The program also contains features (which have now become standard) that allow a user to download from multiple locations simultaneously, and allows others to initiate transfer from you prior to the completion of your own download. The sum of this is to maximise bandwidth speed in a manner impossible when conducting a transfer with one node alone.

Files within the Edonkey system are not identified by name but rather through a unique hash generated from the file itself. In the first instance the consequence is to make searches fore desired content more difficult. The advantage however is that provided one is able to identify the source of hach as a trusted party, the integrity of the file is guaranteed. The importance of this cannot be overemphasised, particularly as we move into the next stage of the copyright wars, where strategies such as the insertion of spoof or corrupted files by media conglomerates eager to dissuade filesharers appear certain to be used with greater cunning and regularity. Likewise such hach functions provide protection against malicious users seeking to circulate viruses or trojans.

Sharereactor.com (Full of horrible pop-ups I'm afraid)is an independently operated party which functions as an accessory to Edonkey, playing the role of a portal where groups or individuals inserting files into the network can convey the news to the other donkey riders. The site operators review the file to ensure that it's not bogus, verify the availability of the file on a threshold number of nodes, and then publish news of the release in a php based blog which is also searchable. The review of the release also contains the actual hash key itself, allowing users either to save it and commence a search later or alternatively - should they have edonlkey installed and open - to launch the search directly from Sharereactor.

Given the fact that critical thinkers, actors and usrersd are already heavily invested in network cooperation across mailing lists, blogs etc, it strikes me that it would be easy to enlist volunteers to dedicate a portion of their computer's memory and bandwidth to providing a system for the distribution of video files across the net in this way, and that a portal analogous to sharereactor specialising in politically radical or socially interesting content could be established and comaintained by users of sites such as tao.ca, slash.autonomedia.org, infoshop.org and indymedia.org.

.......not far from the mountain resort where the dribbling fools 'in charge' of politics and economy in the G8 were holding their pow-wow, Jamie and I drank vodka into the night considering the dilemma of the commons and collective intelligence. Are these partners in the new engine of capital, can it be created and resisted, and what about co-optation?

Karl Marx "Fragment on Machines" (from the Grundrisse)

"The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individuals' insignificant doings as a mighty organism" (Marx Grundrisse, 693)

"What we call mass intellectuality is living labor in its function as the determining articulation of the "general intellect". Mass intellectuality–as an ensemble, as a social body– is the repository of the indivisible knowledges of living subjects and of their linguistic cooperation… an important part of knowledge cannot be deposited in machines, but rather it must come into being as the direct interaction of the labor force…. The expression designates, rather, a quality and a distinctive sign of the whole social labor force in the post-Fordist era"(Paolo Virno "Notes on the General Intellect" in Marxism Beyond Marxism ).

A new object of fascination, fugitive and furious. Pirate broadband delivery.

Plans are in the offing.

Read the following article on the history of pirate TV by a researcher from the International Institute of Social History and be inspired by the past. Given the contemporary technological capacities, surely anything is possible?

The scope of my confusion in the land of san and sayoonara is difficult to convey. The follies of my father's birthday and the hysteria of international soccer brought us here, so I've decided to have a wee mooch as I'm wont to do.

Here is an article I found about actions against electronic surveillance legislation promoted by the government.

Hopefully inspection of the woodwork will turn up some latter day zengakure‚Ž

and some publications....

`Anarchism' zine (1st issue out now) http://www.sanpal.co.jp/aiic/cont/amaga/order/a_order.html

`Kuro / La Nigreco' (Black Disposition) beb version. Same name zine keep to issue. http://www.ne.jp/asahi/anarchy/saluton/index.htm

Library of RRU: Roudousha Rentai Undo (Worker's Solidarity Movement). Website from anarcho-syndicalist. This organization is constantly publicating for understanding of anarchism. http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/~rruaitjtko/library.html

Broadband is miserably scarce on the craggy rock in the Atlantic from where I was sprund. In contrast to New York where ploymorphous plenty is the order of the day. Thus the circumstances for a terrible conjunction: high-speed up-down/load and then withdrawal. So the hunt for alternatives to the infrastructure of the cable moguls and telphone monopolists began.

Initially my interest centered on 802.11b wireless/airport networks, which are a commonplace in New York. Problem is that they require a line of sight connection between the remote user and the location where the broadband connection is to be found. Then my pal filled me in on the real deal baby. Nokia Rooftop Mesh Networking, and the grail was found.

Read the following article by Kevin Werbach to understand the excited clamour of my mind.

'The street finds its own use for things.' (And places)

Being a curious little budgie, I decided to attend a meeting of Avana.net on digital self-defence in the Forte Prensetino. A little explanation may give you a flavour of the Forte: a nionettenth century Napoleonioc fort, abandoned after the first world war, surrounded by a moat(!) and composed of three towers joint by passages, two large parade grounds and absolutely impregnable walls. Occupied for ten years now, the Forte is the home of innumerable agitational projects, one of which is the seat of the Roman hacklab.

There is something delicious about discussing advanced methods of self-fence in an old stone fortress; I'm such a sucker for juxtaposition.

For the inquisitive here is a nice page introducing witings on telematic antagonism in Italy

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - blogs