This is the development blog of www.clair.ro talking about web technology and sometimes sparkling about the current web trends.
Also the foundations of our approach to work and life is presented in Philosomatics.
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“Neil Harbisson introduces himself as the first cyborg ever legally recognized by any Government (2004). He was born colour-blind; so he can only see in black and white (Achromatopsia disorder).
An electronic device implanted in his neck allows him to translate colours into sounds. The camera that hangs from his forehead 24/7 was accepted as part of his British passport photo. By that very fact, the camera became congenital and not prosthetic to his body anymore. Thanks to it, light frequencies are captured and translated into sound frequencies by the chip, which in turn sends them to his brain. He literally listens to colours with his electronic eye.
A standard eye perceives light, tone and saturation. Harbisson’s organic eyes perceive light, but tone is converted into sound, and saturation into volume through his third eye.”
deconcrete/////, via Warren Ellis
One hundred Brooklyn community members and Occupiers peacefully disrupt foreclosure auction.
…approximately one hundred people peacefully and powerfully disrupted a foreclosure auction by bursting into song. At 3pm the foreclosure auctioneer attempted to start bidding on homes that had been foreclosed upon. When the bidding started, the courtroom burst into song:
“Mr. Auctioneer
All the people here
Are asking you to stop all the sales right now
We’re going to survive, but we don’t know how” […]Today’s action is part of a growing national movement committed to stopping foreclosures and keeping all Americans in their homes. Last month over 50 actions were carried out across the country, including foreclosure disruptions, eviction defense actions, and home reoccupations. Occupy Wall Street participants and other occupations across the country have been highly involved in these actions.
“We bailed out the big banks, and then they went on to foreclose on millions of families. That’s just heartless,” said Michael Premo, an organizer with Organizing for Occupation and Occupy Wall Street. “We’re committed to keeping homes occupied by people who need homes.”
Helge Peters: One Nation Under Tesco.
Reading this excellent, and quite exhaustive, analysis of the British zustände I came across this wonderful observation:
In August, in the Pembury Estate in Hackney, one person climbed the lamppost to disconnect the CCTV cameras. After clambering up, he found himself without the…
Napstering other industries / institutions in the past was about redistribution of profit and eliminating middlemen. Things got cheaper, brokers went bankrupt, huge corporations lost extra revenues, lean and agile startups flourished. The same will happen to capital and all its institutions. And it is already happening with Simple.com, Y Combinator, Kickstarter, bootstrapping. But one thing stays unchanged. Look at Apple’s shareholder structure and you’ll find the Rothchilds, Morgans, Vanderbilts and co. These dynasties have a couple of hundred years advantage to us. They are smarter, more connected and they have the cash. Do they will ever napstered? When and by whom? Is there a need to napster them? Is capital a stronger lifeform, ecosystem, evolutionary dimension than biological and mental / spiritual lifeforms? Do mones perform better than memes and genes? I think napstering is a normalisation process only. It destroys what’s weak and obsolete, incumbent. The reconstruction after napstering will need some new paradigms … unknown yet. This is not a trillion dollar question but one defining history for the next couple of centuries.
Yet surely having something wrapped right around your mind is different from having your mind wrapped tightly around something. What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own.How the Internet Gets Inside Us : The New Yorker (via wiredvanity)
The Pirate Bay - Evolution: New Category, via Dan W (via new-aesthetic)Today most data is born digitally. It’s not about the transition from analog to digital anymore. We don’t talk about how to rip anything without losing quality since we make perfect 1 to 1 digital copies of things. Music, movies, books, all come from the digital sphere. But we’re physical people and we need objects to touch sometimes as well!
We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.
The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one.
Beware Hollywood you are done
7 Charged as F.B.I. Closes a Top File-Sharing Site - NYTimes.com (via new-aesthetic)In what authorities have called one of the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have seized the Web site Megaupload and charged seven people connected with it with running an international enterprise based on Internet piracy.
Megaupload, one of the most popular so-called locker services on the Internet, allowed users to transfer large files like movies and music anonymously. Media companies have long accused it of abetting copyright infringement on a vast scale. In a grand jury indictment, Megaupload is accused of causing $500 million in damages to copyright owners and of making $175 million by selling ads and premium subscriptions.
The arrests were greeted almost immediately with digital Molotov cocktails. The hacker collective that calls itself Anonymous attacked the Web sites of the United States Justice Department and several major entertainment companies and trade groups in retaliation for the seizure of Megaupload.
The case against Megaupload comes at a charged time, a day after broad online protests against a pair of antipiracy bills in Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, in the House of Representatives, and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, or PIPA, in the Senate. The bills would give United States authorities expanded powers to crack down on foreign sites suspected of piracy. But technology companies and civil liberties groups say that the powers are too broadly defined and could effectively result in censorship.
Four of the seven people, including the site’s founder, Kim Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz), were arrested Friday in New Zealand; the three others remain at large. Each of the seven people — who the indictment said were members of a criminal group it called Mega Conspiracy — is charged with five counts of copyright infringement and conspiracy. The charges could result in more than 20 years in prison.
As part of the crackdown, about 20 search warrants were executed in the United States and in eight other countries, including New Zealand. About $50 million in assets were also seized, as well as a number of servers and 18 domain names that formed Megaupload’s network of file-sharing sites.
The police arrived at Dotcom Mansion in Auckland on Friday morning in two helicopters. Mr. Dotcom, a 37-year-old with dual Finnish and German citizenship, retreated into a safe room, and the police had to cut their way in. He was eventually arrested with a firearm close by that the police said appeared to be a shortened shotgun.
“It was definitely not as simple as knocking at the front door,” said Grant Wormald, a detective inspector.
When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole………and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
–Nikola Tesla, 1926
