Kultur, natur og modstand
En dansk mesterkok indvier de udenlandske seere i det danske cuisines mysterier og intime og velkendte forhold til dansk kultur.
En tiltrængt oplysningskampagne for de af vore medmennesker, der er så uheldige at være født uden for Danmarks grænser. Et must for enhver, der ønsker at forstå den finere danske madkultur.
“Mord” rimer ikke på “mor”. “Fjer” rimer ikke på “færd”. Så hvorfor skriver I, at de gør?
Hvis du er Windows-bruger og går ind på den store spilproducent Valves hjemmeside Steam, gør de dig ikke alene opmærksom på, at man nu kan downloade en beta-udgave af deres Steam-system, som gør det muligt at spille deres spil – de opfordrer dig til at skifte til Ubuntu for at prøve det, komplet med et link til download af Ubuntu 12.04 LTS!
Jeg mener personligt stadig, at det er et problem, at de bagvedliggende programmer (i modsætning til selve spillene) ikke er fri software, men i betragtning af, hvor stort et problem det har været med spil på Ubuntu og GNU/Linux i almindelighed, er det en meget velkommen udvikling, at så stor en spiller som Valve (producent af bl.a. CounterStrike) nu er på banen med deres Steam-platform. Selvom Steam (endnu?) ikke er fri software, vil dette skridt helt klart gør det lettere også for gamere at bruge fri software i det daglige.
Via Ubuntu Vibes.
Hvis du nogensinde har brugt et RSS-feed til at læse en blog på nettet, har du brugt Swartz’ arbejde.
Og hvis du bekymrer dig om din frihed i vor moderne tidsalder, bør du vide at Swartz måske begik selvmord under indtryk af retsvæsnets helt uproportionale forfølgelse af, hvad der i bund og grund var ment som et slag for friheden på nettet.
Og læs Cory Doctorows nekrolog over Swartz: RIP, Aaron Swartz.
Jeg har nu set de første seks afsnit af TV-serien “Game of Thrones”, og det har været en god investering af min tid. Faktisk er det den bedste TV-serie, jeg har set, siden jeg så de fire første sæsoner af LOST (jeg er ikke begejstret for dennes slutning), som den foreløbig ser ud til at overgå. Foreløbig ser det ud til at kunne blive den bedste af de “nye” amerikanske TV-serier, og det siger faktisk ikke så lidt, med præstationer som LOST og THE WIRE og BREAKING BAD at holde den op mod. Go see.
Det kan gå grueligt galt. Så blot, hvordan det gik my man Robert Browning:
In 1841, Browning published the long dramatic poem Pippa Passes, now best known for the lines “God’s in His heaven/ All’s right with the world.” Toward the end of it, he sets up a kind of Gothic scene, and writes:
Then, owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!The second of these lines created no stir at all, presumably because the middle class had truly forgotten the word “twat” (just as it had forgotten “quaint,” so that Marvell’s pun on the two meanings in “To His Coy Mistress” has fallen flat for six or eight generations now). A few scholars must have recognized the word, but any who did behaved like loyal subjects when the emperor wore his new clothes, and discreetly said nothing. No editor of Browning has ever expurgated the line, even when Rossetti was diligently cutting mere “womb” out of Whitman. The first response only came forty years later when the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, collecting examples of usage, like Johnson before them, and interested to find a contemporary use of “twat,” wrote to Browning to ask in what sense he was using it. Browning is said to have written back that he used it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns, comparable to the cowls for monks he put in the same line. The editors are then supposed to have asked if he recalled where he had learned the word. Browning replied that he knew exactly. He had read widely in seventeenth-century literature in his youth, and in a broadside poem called “Vanity of Vanities”, published in 1659, he had found these lines, referring to an ambitious cleric:
They talk’t of his having a Cardinall’s Hat;
They’d send him as soon an Old Nun’s Twat.
“Twat” blev altså i Brownings kilde ikke brugt om noget, en nonne kan tage på hovedet … sprogbloggen citerer Oxford English Dictionary, der som sin mest konkrete betydning har pudendum muliebre. Av.
Judson Jerome, i hans The Poet and the Poem, Writer’s Digests Books 1979, s. 351:
I have heard that, before Franco, there was an annual Catalan poetry contest, the prizes for which were awarded on the steps of the cathedral in Barcelona. The third prize was a silver rose. The second prize was a golden rose. The first prize was, of course, a real rose. The poet’s most difficult wrestling with his soul is learning never to be envious of the golden rose.
Pia Olsen Dyhr, vores venstreorienterede og p.t. meget lobby-bukkende handelsminister, skrev et indlæg i Information, hvor hun påstod at ACTA er “en sejr for Danmark“. Indlægget består mest af udenomssnak – Olsen Dyhr taler om “forfalskning” af tasker, sko og andre mærkevarer, mens hun slet ikke kommer ind på konsekvenserne for folks brug af Internettet.
Tech-journalisten Glyn Moody svarer hende og sætter et par ting på plads. Værd at læse, ikke mindst fordi det nok ikke er sidste gang, vi kommer til at høre den type argumenter:
The minister highlights problems with counterfeit goods. These undoubtedly exist, and are especially worrying for things like medicines or spare aircraft parts. But this does not address the real problem with ACTA: that it seeks to apply the same harsh legislation aimed at curbing dangerous counterfeit goods to the simplest digital copyright infringement.
For example, Article 9 of ACTA states: “In determining the amount of damages for infringement of intellectual property rights, a Party’s judicial authorities shall have the authority to consider, inter alia, any legitimate measure of value the right holder submits, which may include lost profits, the value of the infringed goods or services measured by the market price, or the suggested retail price.”
For physical counterfeits, that might make sense, but it doesn’t for digital copies. What is the lost profit from sharing one file? One Euro – the cost of the copy – or the millions that the copyright industries claim has been lost as a result of the multiple copies around the Net?
Not only that, but Section 4 on Criminal Enforcement uses a definition of “piracy on a commercial scale” that includes “indirect economic or commercial advantage.” Obviously, everyone that shares digital files without paying derives indirect economic advantage; and because there is no *minimum* level of infringement specified in ACTA, that means that sharing a single MP3 could in principle lead to criminal charges and imprisonment.
Moreover, another clause stipulates that signatories “shall ensure that criminal liability for aiding and abetting is available under its law.” Even linking to a site that holds unauthorised copies of copyright materials is clearly aiding someone download them, and therefore in principle, because of the very broad definitions employed by ACTA, anyone on Facebook or Twitter who points to a video clip that has not been authorised, and which has some advertising around it (thus making it “commercial”) could be subject to criminal charges and imprisonment.
These are just some of the examples of the way in which the inclusion of digital infringement alongside counterfeits has led to a situation where ordinary users of the Internet may find themselves threatened with criminal proceedings and imprisonment.
Other major issues include the fact that ACTA requires authorities to “order an online service provider to disclose expeditiously to a right holder information sufficient to identify a subscriber whose account was allegedly used for infringement.” That is, guilty upon accusation, and no right to privacy.
Since ACTA has been drawn up and agreed behind closed doors, there is now no way to amend these problematic passages. In order to protect European citizens from the disproportionate punishments that ACTA provides for, to preserve their privacy and the assumption of innocence before being proved guilty, the only solution is for the European Parliament to reject ACTA when it is presented for ratification, and for new treaties to be drawn up that deal with counterfeits and digital infringement separately.
Og mens den danske regering og andre har travlt med at stikke blår i øjnene på os alle sammen, er der forhandlinger i gang om TPP, en opfølger til ACTA, der ganske enkelt vil udstede retningslinjer for, hvordan en computer overhovedet må virke, hvis den skal kunne afspille musik. Der er virkelig og for alvor grund til at være på vagt og stoppe ACTA nu!
Cory Doctorow har en lang artikel på Boing Boing, hvor han forklarer hvorfor DRM aldrig vil virke, og hvorfor kampen for at gennemtvinge kopibeskyttelse og afbryde adgangen til The Pirate Bay og diverse andre “uønskede” hjemmesider kun kan lykkes, hvis man forbyder folk at have computere.
Doctorow sammenligner denne type lovgivning med den situation, der ville opstå, hvis man med henvisning til et stigende antal bankrøverier ville forbyde biler at have hjul. Det er et vigtigt argument. Artiklen er værd at læse i sin helhed, men nedenstående citat fanger en central politisk pointe:
The important tests of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose are first whether it will work, and second whether or not it will, in the course of doing its work, have effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress, Parliament, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it’s unlikely I’d succeed. If I turned up, pointed out that bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles, and asked, “Can’t we do something about this?”, the answer would be “No”. This is because we don’t know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications, but useless to bad guys. We can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we’d be foolish to risk changing them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies—even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies—no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.
However, if I were to show up in that same body to say that I had absolute proof that hands-free phones were making cars dangerous, and I requested a law prohibiting hands-free phones in cars, the regulator might say “Yeah, I’d take your point, we’d do that.”
We might disagree about whether or not this is a good idea, or whether or not my evidence made sense, but very few of us would say that once you take the hands-free phones out of the car, they stop being cars.
We understand that cars remain cars even if we remove features from them. Cars are special-purpose, at least in comparison to wheels, and all that the addition of a hands-free phone does is add one more feature to an already-specialized technology. There’s a heuristic for this: special-purpose technologies are complex, and you can remove features from them without doing fundamental, disfiguring violence to their underlying utility.
This rule of thumb serves regulators well, by and large, but it is rendered null and void by the general-purpose computer and the general-purpose network—the PC and the Internet. If you think of computer software as a feature, a computer with spreadsheets running on it has a spreadsheet feature, and one that’s running World of Warcraft has an MMORPG feature. The heuristic would lead you to think that a computer unable to run spreadsheets or games would be no more of an attack on computing than a ban on car-phones would be an attack on cars.
And, if you think of protocols and websites as features of the network, then saying “fix the Internet so that it doesn’t run BitTorrent”, or “fix the Internet so that thepiratebay.org no longer resolves,” sounds a lot like “change the sound of busy signals,” or “take that pizzeria on the corner off the phone network,” and not like an attack on the fundamental principles of internetworking.
The rule of thumb works for cars, for houses, and for every other substantial area of technological regulation. Not realizing that it fails for the Internet does not make you evil, and it does not make you an ignoramus. It just makes you part of that vast majority of the world, for whom ideas like Turing completeness and end-to-end are meaningless.