IT Director for a non-profit in Washington, DC. Man About Internet.
These printers are supposed to be used from a network. If they were set up correctly, only people on their local area network would be able to use them. In these cases somebody messed up the configuration, allowing anybody online to access them. No Goatse or Tubgirl please ;)
From Techdirt:
Last week Thomas Friedman penned a silly column claiming that Internet-based activism doesn't "count" as real political engagement. "Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that — virtual," he says. As various people have pointed out, this is complete nonsense. I engaged in some campus activism in college in the late 1990s, and I have trouble even imagining how students coordinated their activities in the pre-email days. Blogs have proven an incredibly potent force for rooting out and publicizing injustice. And I'm sure the technologies that have evolved since I graduated are just as valuable to campus activists. Obviously, online activism by itself doesn't accomplish anything, but by the same token neither do telephone calls or newspaper columns. Rather, these are all tools that activists can use to coordinate their activities more efficiently. Many of the people who sign up for candidates' Facebook groups do go to the candidates' rallies or volunteer for their campaigns.
However, I think we shouldn't be too hard on Friedman. After all, it's pretty common for older people to complain about young people and their new-fangled ways of doing things. There are journalism professors who believe that you have to publish on paper to "count" as a serious journalist. There were lots of people who looked down their noses at Internet dating when it began, and some people still sneer at efforts to improve the online matchmaking process. And of course, there are books arguing that volunteer-driven content like Wikipedia is destroying our culture by undermining traditional ways of organizing information. Most of these arguments are silly, obviously, but it's not that hard to understand where they're coming from. If you've spent decades thinking about an activity in a particular way (if, say, you've been a print journalist for 30 years) you're going to have deeply-ingrained assumptions about how that activity is supposed to be done. And so when people start doing it a different way, it's inevitably going to seem incomprehensible and weird. So while I think Friedman's wrong, I don't think Friedman's being particularly obtuse. He's just fallen prey to garden-variety old fogeyism.
So my Venus genius, h, informed me of this a blog posting that summed up the implications of the Karachi bombing:
The bombing of Benazir Bhutto's motorcade in Karachi signals a new level of integration of the politcal arena of Afghanistan and Pakistan. If, as now seems likely, the attack is traced back to the "Pakistani" Taliban of South Waziristan and al-Qaida, it will constitute a strike at the center of the Pakistani political process by groups based on the frontier who are part of both the transnational Afghan-Pakistani Taliban movement and the transnational global al-Qaida movement.The moment is reminiscent of events in Central Africa in 1996. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda ended with the defeat of the Hutu-power regime, whose remnants and constituents fled into Eastern Zaire. This regional crisis in a distant border region unexpectedly linked up with the national political process of Zaire when the advent of elections made the citizenship of ethnic Rwandans (Kinyarwanda speakers) an issue that the Rwandan regime used as a vehicle for launching the war that overthrew the Mobutu regime. A "humanitarian" crisis on the frontier sparked a regional civil war than ultimately involved much of the African continent. Will the crisis of leadership and political integration among Pashtuns have similar ramifying consequences?
Paddy Ashdown, former EU Special Representative in Bosnia-Herzogovina, warns of just such an outcome in an interview with Reuters"I think we are losing in Afghanistan now, we have lost I think and success is now unlikely," he told Reuters in an interview."I believe losing in Afghanistan is worse than losing in Iraq. It will mean that Pakistan will fall and it will have serious implications internally for the security of our own countries and will instigate a wider Shiite, Sunni regional war on a grand scale."
"Some people refer to the First and Second World Wars as European civil wars and I think a similar regional civil war could be initiated by this (failure) to match this magnitude," Ashdown added.
Ok. That shit scares me.
Those who tried to kill Benazir Bhutto clearly perceive that a democratic Pakistan is the greatest threat their movement has faced in the region. Public opinion polls indicate that the Islamist parties that have sheltered them in the Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan are set to be wiped off the electoral map in any fair vote. The takeover by the frontier provinces by coalitions that support the international effort in Afghanistan could lead to serious effort to integrate the tribal agencies where al-Qaida and the transnational Taliban have their bases.Paddy Ashdown correctly warns that this situation is more dangerous than Iraq. Is anyone listening?
Source: Informed Comment: Global Affairs
I previously wrote about this story from last week and it seems that the IFPI wants their domain back. Ars Technica has word on what has happened since the initial domain conquest (arrrr). Some excerpts below:
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has taken up a new battle against pirates, but this one is different than previous legal pursuits. The UK-based organization acts as the worldwide arm for the music recording industry, but as widely reported, it apparently forgot to renew its .com top-level domain in time before it got snatched up by one of its top targets, The Pirate Bay. While the IFPI still retains control of ifpi.org, ifpi.com now points to a Pirate Bay page that reads: "International Federation of Pirates Interests." The two sides are now preparing for a fight over the domain, and we talked to the parties involved.
The switch came about sometime last week, when Pirate Bay was given the domain by someone who had bought it after it expired some time ago, The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde told Ars. A quick look through Archive.org shows that the "real" IFPI has not been using the domain for some time—in March of this year, the domain was a parked page with a Google search box, and as recently as April, it was being used as a blog for the "free music community."An account of the events from IFPI spokesperson Laura Childs appears to confirm this. "IFPI's website www.ifpi.org continues to operate as normal. The web site www.ifpi.com was acquired by a cyber-squatter who appears to have passed it on to an associate of The Pirate Bay," she told Ars. "IFPI has already taken legal action to get the domain returned. We have filed a complaint at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) under the dispute resolution procedure. This procedure is designed for classic cyber-squatting cases such as this which involve the use of a URL in bad faith."
Indeed, the WIPO introduced new dispute resolution procedures in 2002 to account for cybersquatting. The procedure involves a review by WIPO-appointed, independent panelists in order to enforce ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. If the panel decides that the domain was acquired or used in bad faith, then it can order the domain to be transferred to the party that registered the complaint. (For curious readers, a number of past cases and related decisions can be found on WIPO's website.)
Given WIPO and ICANN's definition of "bad faith"—which says that the domain cannot be used to cause confusion with the "Complainant's mark"—there's a decent chance of The Pirate Bay eventually losing control of the domain. But if Pirate Bay can fight back and prove somehow that it has no commercial interests or intent to confuse visitors with the "real" IFPI site, it might have a chance at succeeding.
"We have not done anything illegal or even immoral," Sunde told Ars. "I can't see why we shouldn't be able to keep the domain name. We're not going to bash IFPI on it, we're going to host our own IFPI on it," he said.
Guillermo Habacuc Vargas had 2 children catch this dog. He paid the kids for this. He then chained the dog and used the dog as “art”. He told everyone not to feed this dog. The dog died in the gallery. He calls himself an artist.
If he is an artist I think we should chain him and let him die. Call it "art criticism".
So h has agreed to go to see They Might Be Giants with me at the 9:30 club in here in Washington D.C. on Nov. 23rd. This will make the 2nd time this year that I've seen TMBG, the first being at Starr Hill Music Hall in Charlottesville VA. I saw them last year with Ryan, Ken, & Neil at the Orange Peel in Asheville N.C.
Needless to say, I'm a huge fan. Ryan got me hooked on them some years ago and over time my appreciation for their music has grown and grown. I am in love with their new album, "The Else"which has so many good songs on it that I can't emphasize enough that you should go and buy it. What prompted me to blog about this was the fact that I bought those tickets yesterday & saw the following post over on Laughing Squid today:
“The Mesopotamians” is the latest animated music video by They Might Be Giants, from their album “The Else”. The video was directed by David Cowles and animated by Chris Timmons. Another great musical history lesson from TMBG.David Cowles has also designed a cool new t-shirt for “The Mesopotamians” to go along with the video.Here’s TMBG performing “The Mesopotamians” on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on October 13th.
(Via Laughing Squid.)
