Braydon Fuller has a deep knowledge of computers and uses his skills in all media on and offline. He has built websites for artist collectives in Los Angeles over the last four years. He's an activist for free software and free cultural works, after being introduced to the free software movement at a lecture here in Pasadena at Caltech on "Community vs Copyright" by Richard Stallman. His vision of an ideal computer operating system was already being made in theory and philosophy, and for the last twenty years. The most important element being user freedom and choice.
"I never walk someplace I don't know how to leave."
Proposed on Monday 13th, 2012 to the Los Angeles General Assembly.
Status of Proposal: An affinity group will be meeting tomorrow Tuesday February 14th, 2012 at 6:00 p.m. at the west steps of City Hall in Downtown LA to work further towards our goals.
What: Promote and encourage learning by giving credit to artists and authors in a way that does not prohibit the free distribution of works with computers and the Internet. Boycott any works that do not allow free distribution as any money spent toward this cause is a threat to the free and open Internet that is essential to participate in direct democracy.
Why: Copyright law should not be the grounds to censorship online that is harmful to the public benefit, and to initiate an Occupy LA direct action based upon the consented upon proposal and endorsement of Operation Black March on February 8th, 2012.
How: Initiate a boycott on copyrighted works that do not allow people to distribute them on computers and the Internet on March 1st from around 10:00 a.m. to 6 p.m. on the streets of Hollywood Blvd, meeting at Hollywood and Highland. We will also promote the world of works that allow for the free distribution by the people such as works that are in the Public Domain and new works that are licensed under the terms of free culture approved licenses such as those from Creative Commons that in majority ask for attribution. We will setup websites, fliers and signs to communicate with people with places to find these works online. We will refrain from using the social media websites Facebook, Twitter, etcetera since these websites are a poor example of how to deal with copyright because they don’t publish their own work and keep it held in private indefinetly that does not benefit the public. Instead we will entirely use free software to promote our message. Our signs can have domain names to these websites. We’ve already made one available at http://stophollywood.org, and we can work on many more in addition to working on improvements. We will meet at these steps at City Hall on Tuesdays at 7:30 until the March 1st action to coordinate our actions.
Q: How is this supporting artists, as stated from the title?
A: The action is to promote works that allow for the free distribution with computers and to avoid and boycott those that do not.
C: It doesn’t bring attention to the international treaty such as ACTA.
R: Bills such as SOPA, PIPA and treaties such as ACTA will keep returning until the real issue around copyright is resolved. We need to concern ourselves with the root of the conflict.
C:Concern about using the word “censorship”, and the it is being improperly used since works are still available after a website has been shutdown for violating copyright laws.
R: Censorship is what is happening because when a website is shutdown, there are many other works that are affected that are being censored, the website itself being the primary work. Some videos include copyrighted music, with original visual material. When these works are removed because of a “takedown” notice from the copyright owner, the visual material is often inseparable without changing the meaning of the work.
C:Artists should be compensated for their work.
R:This proposal is to support artists that allow for free distribution of their work and is encouraging compensating them for their work including paying them for their services, but not limited to monetary benefits.
B:If works are going to be promoted by Occupy LA, they should carry a message about the movement.
R:Sounds like a great idea.
B:Social Media is important and that Occupy LA wouldn’t be happening without Facebook and Twitter.
R:While this proposal asks for us to not use these services for this action, it is about going to Hollywood as an action, many people will likely help spread our message using networks such as Facebook, Twitter and many others so there is no way to prevent these networks from being used. Occupy received attention by camping in public space, that is primarily how the message was spread to the world through a diversity of media channels. I found out about Occupy LA because I walked by City Hall.
B:Does not fully understand what was being proposed, and doesn’t understand how Facebook is taking advantage of people.
R:They sell friendship to advertisers, and they do not release their own work to encourage learning and is not benefiting the public.
B:Should form an affinity group to work on this.
R:Sounds like a good idea.
*These notes do not represent the Los Angeles General Assembly in whole, or Occupy LA, I’ve elaborated some points, and am missing other points that I do not remember fully. These are my notes as the one making the proposal. Consider this post Public Domain.
So a bar down the street is charging $10 cover for entry during the Superbowl. The bar does not pay the cable provider for each person. Clearly this bar needs to be shut down for illegally rebroadcasting for commercial purposes to their own customers as copyright infringement; just like the 307 domain names siezed for unauthorized live streaming.
Wait, nobody cares about the Superbowl anyways, and why such bullshit is nessasary.
DRM stands for Digital Restrictions Management, and is the result of digital denial by a select few people controlling software. The Free Software Foundation has put together a resource to find media that fully embraces computing at “DRM-free resources guide”. The Stop Hollywood website, with links and information to movies, has been recently added to the guide!
Now is the best time ever, TO QUIT FACEBOOK, especially in light of their recent announcement of an IPO. They are not doing the work, you are! This is epic level deception. Free & open? I think not. They are NOT publishing their own work. Follow them and don’t publish anything, that is an absolute solution to “copyright infringement”. BOYCOTT FACEBOOK!
Download “AWE 0.3.5 Demo Video”
This video is a demonstration of the AWE plugin (version 0.3.5) for WordPress. The background music is from the Into Infinity project, a remix by Anthony Valedez
Related Posts:
Intro Video AWE 0.1.2
An Act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, Charts, And books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the passing of this act, the author and authors of any map, chart, book or books already printed within these United States, being a citizen or citizens thereof, or resident within the same, his or their executors, administrators or assigns, who halt or have not transferred to any other person the copyright of such map, chart, book or books, share or shares thereof; and any other person or persons, being a citizen or citizens of these United States, or residents therein, his or their executors, administrators or assigns, who halt or have purchased or legally acquired the copyright of any such map, chart, book or books, in order to print, reprint, publish or vend the same, shall have the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending such map, chart, book or books, for the term of fourteen years from the recording the title thereof in the clerk’s office, as is herein after directed: And that the author and authors of any map, chart, book or books already made and composed, and not printed or published, or that shall hereafter be made and composed, being a citizen or citizens of these United States, or resident therein, and his or their executors, administrators or assigns, shall have the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending such map, chart, book or books, for the like term of fourteen years from the time of recording the title thereof in the clerk’s office as aforesaid. And if, at the expiration of the said term, the author or authors, or any of them, be living, and a citizen or citizens of these United States, or resident therein, the same exclusive right shall be continued to him or them, his or their executors, administrators or assigns, for the further term of fourteen years; Provided, He or they shall cause the title thereof to be a second time recorded and published in the same manner as is herein after directed, and that within six months before the expiration of the first term of fourteen years aforesaid.
And be it further enacted, That if any other person or persons, from and after the recording the title of any map, chart, book or books, and publishing the same as aforesaid, and within the times limited and granted by this act, shall print, reprint, publish, or import, or cause to be printed, reprinted, published, or imported from any foreign Kingdom or State, any copy or copies of such map, chart, book or books, without the consent of the author or proprietor thereof, first had and obtained in writing, signed in the presence of two or more credible witnesses; or knowing the same to be so printed, reprinted, or imported, shall publish, sell, or expose to sale, or cause to be published, sold or exposed to sale, any copy of such map, chart, book or books, without such consent first had and obtained in writing as aforesaid, then such offender or offenders shall forfeit all and every sheet and sheets, being part of the same, or either of them, to the author or proprietor of such map, chart, book or books, who shall forthwith destroy the same: And every such offender and offenders shall also forfeit and pay the sum of fifty cents for every sheet which shall be found in his or their possession, either printed or printing, published, imported or exposed to sale, contrary to the true intent and meaning of this act, the one moiety thereof to the author or proprietor of such map, chart, book or books, who shall sue for the same, and the other moiety thereof to and for the use of the United States, to be recovered by action of debt in any court of record in the United States, wherein the same is cognizable. Provided always, That such action be commenced within one year after the cause of action shall arise, and not afterwards.
And be it further enacted, That no person shall be entitled to the benefit of this act, in cases where any map, chart, book or books, hath or have been already printed and published, unless he shall first deposit, and in all other cases, unless he shall before publication deposit a printed copy of the title of such map. chart, book or books, in the clerk’s office of the district court where the author or proprietor shall reside: And the clerk of such court is hereby directed and required to record the same forthwith, in a book to be kept by him for that purpose, in the words following, ( giving a copy thereof to the said author or proprietor, under the seal of the court, if he shall require the same).”District of to wit: Be it remembered, that on the day of in the year of the independence of the United States of America, A. B. of the said district, hath deposited in this office the title of a map, chart, book or books, ( as the case may be) the right whereof he claims as author or proprietor. ( as the case may be) in the words following to wit: [ here insert the title] in conformity to the act of the Congress of the United States, intituled ‘ An act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, chart, and book, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the time therein mentioned.’ C. D. clerk of the district of .” For which the said clerk shall be entitled to receive sixty cents from the said author or proprietor, and sixty cents for every copy under seal actually given to such author or proprietor as aforesaid. And such author or proprietor shall, within two months from the date thereof cause a copy of the said record to be published in one or more of the newpapers printed in the United States, for the space of four weeks.
And be it further enacted, That the author or proprietor of any such map, chart, book or books, shall, within six months after the publishing thereof, deliver, or cause to be delivered to the Secretary of State a copy of the same, to be preserved
And be it further enacted, That nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, Reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book or books, written, printed, or published by any person not a citizen of the United States, in foreign parts or places without the jurisdiction of the United States.
And be it further enacted, That any person or persons who shall print or publish and manuscript, without the consent and approbation of the author or proprietor thereof, first had and obtained as aforesaid, ( if such author or proprietor be a citizen of or resident in these United States) shall be liable to suffer and pay to the said author or proprietor all damages occasioned by such injury, to be recovered by a special action on the case founded upon this act, in any court having cognizance thereof.
And be it further enacted, That if any person or persons shall be sued or prosecuted for any matter, act or thing done under or by virtue of this act, he or they may plead the general issue, and give the special matter in evidence.
Approved, May 31, 1790
As you have probably heard, there are two pieces of legislation currently pending that we, and others like us, believe seriously threaten the internet. I wanted to take some time to delve into the text of both of these bills, and outline their potential consequences as I am able to understand them. As you can imagine, this is a complex issue, and as a result this is going to be a complex post. I highly encourage you to set some time aside to read this thoroughly. Grab some caffeine, we are going to be here for a while.
As a disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, I’m a sysadmin. The following is not legal advice, but rather an outline and personal interpretation of critical portions of the legislation. If you own or operate a site that may be affected by this legislation, I suggest having your legal counsel look at these bills. If you’re a brand new startup with little to no money for legal counsel, well, best of luck to you. The internet may no longer be a friendly place.
Note: In recent news, several legislators have suggested that they will be removing the DNS provisions from both SOPA and PROTECT IP. However, those provisions still exist in the bills today, and they are likely to still be debated. For these reasons, I’m going to include the DNS provisions in this discussion.
To: English Wikipedia Readers and Community
From: Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director
Date: January 16, 2012
Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate—that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.
This will be the first time the English Wikipedia has ever staged a public protest of this nature, and it’s a decision that wasn’t lightly made. Here’s how it’s been described by the three Wikipedia administrators who formally facilitated the community’s discussion. From the public statement, signed by User:NuclearWarfare, User:Risker and User:Billinghurst:
It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web.
Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a “blackout” of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.
On careful review of this discussion, the closing administrators note the broad-based support for action from Wikipedians around the world, not just from within the United States. The primary objection to a global blackout came from those who preferred that the blackout be limited to readers from the United States, with the rest of the world seeing a simple banner notice instead. We also noted that roughly 55% of those supporting a blackout preferred that it be a global one, with many pointing to concerns about similar legislation in other nations.
In making this decision, Wikipedians will be criticized for seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position. That’s a real, legitimate issue. We want people to trust Wikipedia, not worry that it is trying to propagandize them.
But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently,
We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.
But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or, if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.
The decision to shut down the English Wikipedia wasn’t made by me; it was made by editors, through a consensus decision-making process. But I support it.
Like Kat and the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation Board, I have increasingly begun to think of Wikipedia’s public voice, and the goodwill people have for Wikipedia, as a resource that wants to be used for the benefit of the public. Readers trust Wikipedia because they know that despite its faults, Wikipedia’s heart is in the right place. It’s not aiming to monetize their eyeballs or make them believe some particular thing, or sell them a product. Wikipedia has no hidden agenda: it just wants to be helpful.
That’s less true of other sites. Most are commercially motivated: their purpose is to make money. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a desire to make the world a better place—many do!—but it does mean that their positions and actions need to be understood in the context of conflicting interests.
My hope is that when Wikipedia shuts down on January 18, people will understand that we’re doing it for our readers. We support everyone’s right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression. We think everyone should have access to educational material on a wide range of subjects, even if they can’t pay for it. We believe in a free and open Internet where information can be shared without impediment. We believe that new proposed laws like SOPA—and PIPA, and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States—don’t advance the interests of the general public. You can read a very good list of reasons to oppose SOPA and PIPA here, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Why is this a global action, rather than US-only? And why now, if some American legislators appear to be in tactical retreat on SOPA?
The reality is that we don’t think SOPA is going away, and PIPA is still quite active. Moreover, SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem. All around the world, we’re seeing the development of legislation intended to fight online piracy, and regulate the Internet in other ways, that hurt online freedoms. Our concern extends beyond SOPA and PIPA: they are just part of the problem. We want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone.
On January 18, we hope you’ll agree with us, and will do what you can to make your own voice heard.
Sue Gardner,
Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Via Reddit.com:
The freedom, innovation, and economic opportunity that the Internet enables is in jeopardy. Congress is considering legislation that will dramatically change your Internet experience and put an end to reddit and many other sites you use everyday. Internet experts, organizations, companies, entrepreneurs, legal experts, journalists, and individuals have repeatedly expressed how dangerous this bill is. If we do nothing, Congress will likely pass the Protect IP Act (in the Senate) or the Stop Online Piracy Act (in the House), and then the President will probably sign it into law. There are powerful forces trying to censor the Internet, and a few months ago many people thought this legislation would surely pass. However, there’s a new hope that we can defeat this dangerous legislation.
We’ve seen some amazing activism organized by redditors at /r/sopa and across the reddit community at large. You have made a difference in this fight; and as we near the next stage, and after much thought, talking with experts, and hearing the overwhelming voices from the reddit community, we have decided that we will be blacking out reddit on January 18th from 8am–8pm EST (1300–0100 UTC).
Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action. We will showcase the live video stream of the House hearing where Internet entrepreneurs and technical experts (including reddit co-founder Alexis “kn0thing” Ohanian) will be testifying. We will also spotlight community initiatives like meetups to visit Congressional offices, campaigns to contact companies supporting PIPA/SOPA, and other tactics.
We’re as addicted to reddit as the rest of you. Many of you stand with us against PIPA/SOPA, but we know support for a blackout isn’t unanimous. We’re not taking this action lightly. We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t believe this legislation and the forces behind it were a serious threat to reddit and the Internet as we know it. Blacking out reddit is a hard choice, but we feel focusing on a day of action is the best way we can amplify the voice of the community.
As we have seen yet again in the fight against PIPA/SOPA, the best ideas come from our community. We all have just over a week to figure out exactly what to do with our extra cycles on January 18th. Please join us in the discussion in the comments here and in /r/SOPA.
— the reddit team
Learn More
- Information on H.R.3261 – Stop Online Piracy Act at OpenCongress.org
- Information on S.968 PROTECT IP Act at OpenCongress.org
- /r/SOPA FAQ
- Problematic language in the bill pointed out by a redditor.
- Video examination of bill’s language.
Get Involved
- /r/sopa
- List of companies that have expressed support for SOPA or PIPA.
- List of tech companies, and their contact info, that have expressed support for SOPA or PIPA.
- List of companies that have expressed concern with SOPA and PIPA.
- Take Action Checklist at Stop American Censorship.
- Contact Your Representative with info and a widget to find them by EFF and Wired for Change.
- Directory of Representatives
- Senators of the 112th Congress
- Helpful info on making phone calls to your Senator or Representative.
- SOPAOpera.org keeps track of where your Congressmembers stand on PROTECT-IP and SOPA.
Imgur stands in solidarity with Reddit, Wikipedia, Google, The White House and countless other groups that oppose HR 3261 (SOPA) and United States Senate Bill S.968 (PIPA). SOPA is not dead; it has been shelved and won’t return “until a consensus is reached,” according to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA). The fight against Internet censorship continues as the Senate vote for PIPA is still scheduled for Sunday. It is important that our users understand the far-reaching and potentially disastrous repercussions that this legislation could have on the vibrancy and freedom of the Internet.
We will be altering our standard service by blacking out the Imgur gallery on January 18th from 8am-8pm EST and replacing it with a message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation threatens sites like Imgur with methods to take action. It is important to note that our paid account holders will still have access to the service.
Please join in the discussion and the protest of SOPA and PIPA by calling the Senate switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Tell the person who answers where you live to be connected to your senator.
Information on the Protect IP Act:
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/showTake action:
http://americancensorship.org/
http://sopastrike.com/
I’ve amended the previous statement for the shutdown pages to read:
We are interrupting normal web operations until 8 p.m. PST today, to broadcast a very important message.
Today several of our Internet comrades were scheduled to testify concerning the Stop Online Piracy Act. That hearing has been postponed, and SOPA will not be heading to the House floor without consensus. At the other congress, The PROTECT IP Act has been moved to proceed on January 24th, after it was also put on hold. A group of six co-sponsors of the PROTECT IP Act have asked for the vote to be cancelled.
The PROTECT IP Act (Senate) and SOPA (House) must be stopped, as well as any similar legislation that threatens free speech on the Internet.
Since linking to the Wikipedia articles for the PROTECT IP Act and SOPA will not be possible on Wednesday, I’ve made a mirror of them, removed internal wikilinks, and formatted for readability. You can download a copy of these pages: Wikipedia SOPA and PROTECT IP Act Pages (January 16th, 2012)
Many websites are planning a protest against Internet censorship this Wednesday the 18th of January, 2012, over the PROTECT IP Act (Senate) and SOPA (House). Here is a template for shutting down and redirecting all pages to one with contact information for our representatives and senators.
Put a .htaccess file at the base directory of your website that will redirect all pages to one html page. Here is an example:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/testify.html$
RewriteRule $ /testify.html [R=302,L]
</IfModule>
Make a testify.html file at the base directory of your website and put in it your message. Here is a base HTML template that already has information for California.
<html>
<head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
<style>
body{
background-color:red;
font-family:Arial,sans-serif;
font-size:16px;
margin:0 auto;
text-align:center;
padding:20px;
color:#fff;
border:25px solid yellow;
}
strong{color:yellow;}
a {color:yellow;}
#page {width:500px;margin:0 auto;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="page">
<h1>[LOGO/NAME]</h1>
<p>[ADDRESS] <br/>
[CITY], [STATE] [FULLZIPCODE]<br/>
(213) 622-0554<br/>
</p>
<p><strong>We are interrupting normal web operations from 8 a.m.
to 8 p.m. PST today, to broadcast a very important message.
</strong></p>
<p>Today several of our Internet comrads are
<a href="http://oversight.house.gov/index.php?
view=article&id=1553:issa-announces-oversight-hearing-
on-dns-a-search-engine-blocking">testifying</a> to keep the
Internet free. A worldwide protest is gathering. The PROTECT IP
Act and SOPA must be stopped, as well as any similar
legistlation that threatens free speech.</p>
<h2>Our District Representative</h2>
<h3>[REPRESENTATIVE]</h3>
<p>[DISTRICT]<br/>
[ADDRESS]<br/>
Los Angeles, CA [ZIPCODE]<br/>
Phone: [PHONE]<br/>
Fax: [FAX]<br/>
</p>
</p>
<h2>California State Senators</h2>
<h3>Barbara Boxer</h3>
<p>312 N. Spring St. Suite 1748<br/>
Los Angeles, CA 90012<br/>
Phone: (213) 894-5000<br/>
Fax: (202) 224-0357
</p>
<p>
<h3>Dianne Feinstein</h3>
11111 Santa Monica Blvd. Suite 915<br/>
Los Angeles, CA 90025<br/>
Phone: (310) 914-7300<br/>
Fax: (310) 914-7318<br/>
</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
You can find your local representative from the House representative identifier, you’ll need to get your five plus four digit zip code that can be found at the USPS zip code finder.
You’ll end up with something that looks like this, and every URL will go to it:
Update: There are also several PIPA/SOPA plugins being made available for WordPress to shutdown your site or to add a widget or banner.
Downloads & Attribution
Audacity was used in making this brain freeze mix throw down.
Attribution
Last year before the Doo Dah Parade in Pasadena, California we at Poo-Bah Records setup a live radio transmission to broadcast what is playing in store, and to start doing live shows. We had an iMac computer donated to us and we used this computer as the base station. Our original plan was to use the Beagle Board and to provide a simple interface a single button to turn on and off transmission — perhaps with even an “on-air” light. The iMac had little memory, we upgraded it, and I installed Debian PowerPC on it. From here it’s been an process of trying many different configurations of software with differing results.
The first successful configuration was using Darkice on the “base station” and Icecast on our webserver — WebFaction allows custom built apps to run. It was a simple setup that didn’t record, it merely connected and broadcast over the Net.
First configuration for Darkice
[general] duration = 0 # forever bufferSecs = 5 # seconds reconnect = yes [input] device = hw:0,0 sampleRate = 44100 # Hz bitsPerSample = 16 # bits per sample channel = 2 # channels [icecast2-0] format = mp3 bitrateMode = cbr bitrate = 92 quality = 0.3 channel = 2 #lowpass = 5000 server = 10.0.0.1 port = 8000 password = ******* mountPoint = listen name = Poo-Bah Radio description = Poo-Bah In-store Broadcast url = http://poobah.com/ genre = Hip-Hop / Various public = yes
Some time later we started to do live shows, The Tom Coston Show with Red Rosie, and we wanted to not only broadcast but to be able to record the show to put the shows up as podcasts. Darkice supported, in addition to connecting to Icecast, writing to disk.
I modified the configuration file to include this feature
[file-0] bitrateMode = cbr format = mp3 bitrate = 256 quality = 0.8 fileName = /tmp/poobah_radio_active.mp3
In addition to this a bash script that would move and rename the file based on a timestamp each time it was started and stopped. Initially we used a less precise timestamp, but because the radio could be stopped and started within the same minute or even within the same second we had the timestamp include nanoseconds so that overwriting a 3 hour recording would not be possible.
Bash script to start the radio and recording
#!/bin/bash killall -9 darkice TIMESTAMP=`date +%F-%a-%Hh%Mm%Ss%Nns` SESSIONSPATH=/home/poobah/Music/Radio_Archive mv /tmp/poobah_radio_active.mp3 $SESSIONSPATH/$TIMESTAMP.mp3
It seemed easy enough, however we discovered a problem with the setup after having a few shows lost because our internet connection was busy enough to cause a lag, and the buffer to skip. The skipping on the outgoing stream was also recorded to disk, so the podcast had the same interruptions as the live show. This was solved by increasing the configuration for the buffer for Darkice.
Addition to the Darkice configuration to increase the buffer
[general] duration = 0 # forever bufferSecs = 40 #seconds reconnect = yes
However there is still the possibility that the Net connection could die, and thus the recording would also fail. We needed a way to separate the processes so that one could fail without effecting the other.
To achieve the separation of the processes we started to use Jackd; it lets us connect several programs to one audio source, in addition to being able to direct the audio output on one program to another. So we setup jack and had Darkice to connect to it instead of the audio device directly, and we turned file streaming off. Then we had arecord connect to jack through an alsa workaround and piped arecord to lame to stream to an mp3 archive on the disk.
Bash script to start the radio with Jack
#!/bin/bash
killall -9 darkice
killall -9 arecord
TIMESTAMP=`date +%F-%a-%Hh%Mm%Ss%Nns`
SESSIONSPATH=/home/poobah/Music/Radio_Archive
jackd -d alsa -r 44100 &
sleep 8
arecord -D jackplug -c 2 -f S16_LE -r 44100 -t wav |
lame --little-endian -q 5 - $SESSIONSPATH/$TIMESTAMP.mp3 &
/usr/local/bin/darkice -v 10 -c /home/poobah/poobahradio.cfg
2>&1 >> /var/log/darkice.log &
This seemed to work very well, however it failed to write more than 183MB of a 128k mp3 file. We lost more recordings because of this. Arecord doesn’t support Jackd natively and we used an .asoundrc configuration to enable support.
.asoundrc file to support Jack in alsa interfaces
pcm.jackplug {
type plug
slave { pcm "jack" }
}
pcm.jack {
type jack
playback_ports {
0 alsa_pcm:playback_1
1 alsa_pcm:playback_2
}
capture_ports {
0 alsa_pcm:capture_1
1 alsa_pcm:capture_2
}
}
So the search was on again for another program. I found one called Rotter that supported Jackd directly. Now we have Jackd, Darkice, Rotter and Icecast running to record and broadcast live shows that can work with or without a live internet connection, that can be as simple as having an on and off switch.
Here is the bash script to start the radio using Rotter instead of arecord
#!/bin/bash
killall -9 darkice
killall -9 rotter
killall -9 jackd
TIMESTAMP=`date +%F-%a-%Hh%Mm%Ss%Nns`
jackd -d alsa -r 44100 &
sleep 8
rotter -a -f flac -L heirarchy -N $TIMESTAMP
-d 336 /home/poobah/Music/Radio_Archive/
2>&1 >> /var/log/rotter.log &
/usr/local/bin/darkice -v 10 -c /home/poobah/poobahradio.cfg
2>&1 >> /var/log/darkice.log &
And to stop the radio
#!/bin/bash killall -9 darkice killall -9 rotter killall -9 jackd
Configuration file for Darkice
[general] duration = 0 # forever bufferSecs = 40 # seconds reconnect = yes [input] device = jack_auto sampleRate = 44100 # Hz bitsPerSample = 16 # bits per sample channel = 2 # channels [icecast2-0] format = mp3 bitrateMode = cbr bitrate = 92 quality = 0.3 channel = 2 #lowpass = 5000 server = 10.0.0.1 port = 8000 password = ***** mountPoint = listen name = Poo-Bah Radio description = Poo-Bah In-store Broadcast url = http://poobah.com/ genre = Hip-Hop / Various public = yes
On the WebFaction server we have Icecast running on a dedicated IP, we built Icecast from source as a custom application.
The Icecast configuration
<icecast>
<limits>
<clients>30</clients>
<sources>1</sources>
<threadpool>5</threadpool>
<queue-size>102400</queue-size>
<client-timeout>30</client-timeout>
<header-timeout>15</header-timeout>
<source-timeout>10</source-timeout>
<burst-on-connect>1</burst-on-connect>
<burst-size>65536</burst-size>
</limits>
<authentication>
<source-password>****</source-password>
<relay-password>****</relay-password>
<admin-user>****</admin-user>
<admin-password>****</admin-password>
</authentication>
<directory>
<yp-url-timeout>15</yp-url-timeout>
<yp-url>http://dir.xiph.org/cgi-bin/yp-cgi</yp-url>
</directory>
<hostname>localhost</hostname>
<listen-socket>
<port>35898</port>
</listen-socket>
<fileserve>1</fileserve>
<paths>
<basedir><base_path>/share/icecast</basedir>
<logdir><base_path>/var/log/icecast</logdir>
<webroot><base_path>/share/icecast/web</webroot>
<adminroot><base_path>/share/icecast/admin</adminroot>
<alias source="/" dest="/status.xsl"/>
</paths>
<logging>
<accesslog>access.log</accesslog>
<errorlog>error.log</errorlog>
<loglevel>3</loglevel>
<logsize>10000</logsize>
</logging>
<security>
<chroot>0</chroot>
</security>
</icecast>
Scripts to start, stop, and check Icecast on the web server
#!/bin/sh cd /home/poobah/webapps/poobahradio/ bin/icecast -c etc/icecast.xml -b
#!/bin/sh
SERVICE='bin/icecast'
if ps aux | grep 'poobah' | grep -v grep | grep $SERVICE > /dev/null
then
pid=`ps -eo pid,args | grep $SERVICE | grep -v grep | cut -c1-6`
kill -9 $pid
else
echo "$SERVICE isn't running!"
fi
#!/bin/sh
SERVICE='bin/icecast'
if ps aux | grep 'poobah' | grep -v grep | grep $SERVICE > /dev/null
then
echo "$SERVICE is up and running!" > /dev/null
else
cd /home/poobah/webapps/poobahradio/
bin/icecast -c etc/icecast.xml -b
echo "$SERVICE was down and has been restarted
automatically. It would be good to check it at this time!"
fi
Adding the following line added to our crontab on the web server
0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /home/poobah/webapps/poobahradio/check_daemon.sh
Update:
It’s telling that Tom offers shoppings malls as an example of a “public” place similar to Google+. In fact, almost all malls are entirely private settings, which is why they have the right to boot out people wearing offensive shirts. Just because lots of people are somewhere, that does not make it public.
Why we shouldn’t let Google (or anyone else) claim their private services are public spaces. / BoingBoing
Here is an screenshot of the next update to AWE for WordPress.
Much thanks to Fiorentino for feedback and finding bugs.
Download Video
Comedy Central / Stop Online Piracy Act – The Colbert Report
Let’s make this more exciting and start committing some crimes, some copyright infringement crimes. Right now, ICE can technically seize this domain. Comedy Central can likely sue me, contact my domain host, and issue them a DMCA take down notice. They can also send me an email and ask me to remove it, obviously they would need to prove they are actually the owners of the material. Under SOPA, I could face 4 years in jail, under the PROTECT IP Act, I could also face the same amount of jail time. Perhaps I would need to do it a few more times to get that kind of draconian punishment.
However, there is also a chance that this could be considered fair use. I’m making a parody of it, I’m also not making any money from this, I’m not taking away from the original, I’m only using a portion of the show, the subject matter is about our government, and I may in fact now be promoting the network and show — and it doesn’t cost Comedy Central anything. I just want to point out that despite the indifference displayed by Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central is against the idea of letting people copy videos based upon their actions on their website. It was not a simple task to make a copy of the above video, and included using: Jack Audio Connection Kit and Audacity to record the audio, XVidCap to record the video, and Pitivi to edit the two together. All of those programs are available for everyone to use for any purpose, to modify and study, to copy, and to distribute improved versions — you have those liberties.
This is my freedom of speech, this is what I want to say. Copyright is broken! When will you believe it? When will you listen?
I’m not against Comedy Central, I’m not against Stephen Colbert and the many people it takes to produce their show. I’m not a villain, a thief, or a pirate. I’m acting as their promotion, I am their friend. I live in Los Angeles! I’m not two steps away from working for them. Many films and television shows are filmed right here in my building, and also all around Downtown. People, I have friends that work in the industry. This type of activity is real social media, it isn’t the greedy mass produced Silicon Valley type.
Download: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/awe.zip
Plugin Page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/awe/
Send feedback at the contact page.
I have found a great tutorial on using Inkscape called, “Draw a first-aid kit in Inkscape”. It’s on a blog hosted at WordPress.com that is titled, “Design Tutorial”, where several people are blogging.
To install Inkscape on Ubuntu and other similar operating systems, run this command in the terminal:
apt-get install inkscape
Video synth software freedom in a portable box. Get more details at Milkmist.org!
Download Audio
View the full show: “A Christmas Carol” / CC-BY / Poobah Records
After trying several programs to modify the tags of an MP3 file; Kid3, id3v2, id3tool and Banshee, I’ve found the best program that also has ability to add images. Install the program in Ubuntu by using the Terminal command:
apt-get install easytag
Banshee has the same abilities, however it did not seem to write the changes to the mp3 files, but to its own database.
Q Light Control
Pro: Less expensive than buying the hardware controls.
Con: Setup is time consuming and difficult. It is niche use and it is not included in the Ubuntu software repository, and likely requires external installation or building from source.
The software is used to control lights such as these (Fig. 1), as sent from Logan. He has rebuilt old school DMX activated lights that have x,y mirror controls and twelve dichroic colors (super vibrant), and twelve patterns. They are connected via USB using an adapter (Fig. 2). Hopefully we will get to see some amazing photographs from these soon!
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
I am in support of democratic transparency…. I’ve recently sent eleven thank you letters to the eleven House representatives that have been against and critical of SOPA. This list of representatives includes:
Nancy Pelosi California's 8th District 235 Cannon HOB Washington, D.C. 20515 Darrell Issa California's 49th District 2347 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Anna G. Eshoo California's 14th District 205 Cannon Building Washington, D.C. 20515 Jared Polis Colorado's 2nd District 501 Cannon HOB Washington, DC 20515 Mike Doyle Pennsylvania's 14th District 401 Cannon House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 Mike Thompson California's First District 231 Cannon Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Zoe Lofgren California's 16th District 1401 Longworth House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 Ron Paul Texas's 14th District 203 Cannon House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Lloyd Doggett 25th District of Texas 201 Cannon House Office Bldg Independence and 1st St, SE Washington DC 20515 Mike Honda California's 15th District 1713 Longworth HOB Washington, DC 20515 George Miller California's 7th District 2205 Rayburn HOB Washington, DC 20515
These congress members deserve our respect for standing up for our civil liberties online. EFF is the source of the list, I’ve gathered the addresses from each of their websites. In my letters I have included a call for action, “A Revolution Online”. If they have the power to bring about laws to close the Internet, they also have the ability to open it up.
The real issue is on the definition of copyright, the history copyright, the connection between copyright and the tool used to copy, and why it doesn’t even need to exist for any digital work! Not this absurd distraction called SOPA.
Everyone stop using proprietary software — immediately. Right now, today is the day. Install a free software operating system, or have a friend, associate, assistant take care of your computing for you. Does that sound extreme?
Occupy I.C.E. ( Immigrations and Customs Enforcement )
March & Rally in L.A.
Thursday, Dec. 15th, 11AM
Gather @ Olvera Street, Main Plaza
Along with detaining immigrants and splitting families apart, which is the main focus of the march, ICE is also been responsible towards violation of First Amendment rights of free speech. They have seized hundreds of domain names and not just for within the United States, but the entire domain worldwide. Domains have been seized in error in the process. They claim it justice because of copyright infringement laws that were written when computers and the Internet did not exist.
cc-by-sa / bgf
WHEN
WHERE
Pershing Square
532 South Olive St,
Los Angeles, CA 90013
This action is in conjunction with Occupy Los Angeles. As of Dec 8th, the dropping of all charges against Bradley Manning and his immediate release is an official demand of Occupy Los Angeles.
Source: Free Bradley Manning
The Los Angeles General Assembly was consented to be held now at Monday, Wednesday, Friday & Saturday at 7:30pm at the steps of City Hall. After February 1st, 2012 it will be reconsidered to hold the General Assembly everyday. Keep in mind, there still will be people at the steps of City Hall everyday at 7:30pm, so that people who know about it already can just show up.
Please donate to CrossXBones who does live video streaming of the general assemblies. View the stream source, GA 12-13-2011 part 2
This week the House is holding a full committee for a vote on SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Senate has already had wide support for their version of the bill PROTECT IP Act, senator Wyden has placed a hold on it. These bills threaten free speech online as we know it, more than each of these individual websites threaten free speech by not supporting free software 100%. Websites that benefit from the “Safe Harbor” defined in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, leading to a wave of what many have called “user-generated” websites acting as a software as a service, will all face unreasonable legal liability. Users will be faced and held accountable for their copyright violations, no take-down notice, they’ll be facing jail, likely around 4 years. To make the troubles worse, the entire website domains will be threatened with being totally censored in the United States, if they support illegal copyright violation activity.
Occupy Wall Street has come out against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and the PROTECT IP Act, in their statement:
We, the 99%, call upon our elected representatives to oppose censorship, and reject the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act.
SOPA and the Protect IP Act would make it possible for the federal government and judges to censor content on the Internet. The government would be given the power to block access to websites and to put websites on a DNS blacklist. Potentially, anything from Facebook to your friend’s blog could be shut down for possible “copyright infringement.” If SOPA becomes law, posting a video with any kind of copyrighted material could be considered a felony.
Civil rights groups, leading technology companies, and hundreds of law professors and lawyers oppose SOPA and the Protect IP Act. They recognize that these bills threaten to break the internet’s infrastructure and stifle the rights of people to freely express themselves. We know multinational corporations have spent lots of money lobbying our representatives to pass this legislation – legislation that is clearly counter to the interests of the 99%.
Over the last decade, digital information networks have made it possible for people around the world to communicate with each other more freely than ever before. We have begun to truly realize our shared humanity. But, the technology that has helped make this possible is not yet under our control. So far, that infrastructure has been operated with an eye toward liberty and justice; but, now we find that our rights to privacy, assembly, and speech in cyberspace are under attack.
We, the New York City General Assembly of #OccupyWallStreet, recognize the critical importance of a free and open internet. The openness of the internet and our right to free speech is threatened by SOPA and Protect IP. They must be stopped.
Statement Against SOPA | NYC General Assembly
The New York City General Assembly website is built using BuddyPress and WordPress, and is in support of free software online. One of the many solutions available, that I will likely provide more information available soon, in addition to my own work on a networked media free software plugin for WordPress called AWE.
cc-by / braydon fuller
These photos are free of known copyright restrictions.
Earlier this week I’ve received in the mail the U.S. copyright registration for the painting of “Facebook Condensed Human Brains Soup”, inspired by the famous Warhol series, “Campbell’s Soup Cans”, that I first remember seeing in public high school on a light projector. Only until later did I realize the significance of the work. So while I can not study to see how Facebook works, be able to make a copy of it, or to make an improved version and make further copies; I can make a painting about it. This work can now officially be copied freely, modified, improved, and distributed by everyone. Why? Because it is possible, and has not been possible in any other time period.
It’s time to strike against social media, DMCA take-down notices… in overwhelming force! I simply can not stand back and wait for imperial laws to pass and threaten these websites from being blocked as they are already in other countries, action must be taken now. I am really grateful that many popular tools of the social web provide options available to license works under the terms of free licenses. When living in an imperialist state, we write licenses that grant back our freedoms. So while what may seem as enforcing control through a license, is actually the reverse. This is known as copyleft and is jamming the existing industrial machine of copyright law that is taking over our lives — the machine that is threatening our freedom of speech. The world is filled with an endless amount of copyrighted works that can threaten your own work from take-down notices, such as police brutality and other injustices. To be able to have this freedom, works need to be within existing copyright law and considered their own original works. To take back our culture, we can take existing works and change their meaning.
The goal is to occupy each proprietary social media website with entirely freely licensed works, until they are complete repositories of free works. They will have no option be to also follow suit with freely licensing the source code for each of these websites. Otherwise they are going to continue to hoard their source code in secret, you’re the leaders. If you agree all it takes to make this happen is to begin to participate, a consensus will be reached.
You can mark your videos under the terms an Attribution license only, it is the only offering of a free license that they allow. They have setup a Creative Commons on Youtube page that details how to apply the license, your account must be in good standing. It is the most liberal of the licenses and allows the work to be re-used in works that do not have the same license, they need only apply attribution. It is the license that works with how Youtube is designed with advertisements, and their stance in support of both free and non-free works, a reflection of the world of media in transition. It is up to you to decide the future of media on the internet. To see if a video is licensed under these terms expand the information below the video.
You can license your videos on Vimeo to be shared freely to various degrees incorporating aspects of Attribution, ShareAlike, Non-Commercial and NoDeriv. There is a brief description of what each means at the Vimeo FAQ for Creative Commons. The most used license is the Non-Commercial, however there is much contention with the applied meaning of the term warranting in-depth research into the understanding of people’s interpretation of its meaning. Most people are to read it to mean anything commercially motivated. The license defines the non-commercial as to use the work for “commercial advantage”. ShareAlike is the same principle as software licensing such an the hugely famous GNU General Public License that makes sure that the the freedoms you give to others care with the work in the redistribution and reuse. NoDeriv means that the work can not be modified, a collection of like works is not considered a modification, and is useful for works that are of a single opinion and should not be altered or transformed. Using an attribution license is the best option to go because this will yield the best exposure, and what Vimeo and Youtube have been famous in exposure and cultural popularity. To see if a video is licensed in such a way, look at the bottom right of the video page. You can search videos by these licenses.
The photography platform is a huge supporter of Creative Commons licensing, and the largest repository of such licensed photography on the internet today. They have made a page, Flicker: Creative Commons, that you can find images available as free culture. To see if a photo is licensed in such a way view the bottom right of a photo page, if you’re logged in you can change these to various licensed. All of the Creative Commons licenses are available to be used at the Flickr photography platform.
Anything posted on Twitter does not have copyright law apply, you can not copyright such insignificant amount of text, anything posted is free of copyright laws. The same would go with short status updates on any other network, and why major media can just read off Facebook pages willy nilly. By at large these networks terms of service allow their use of your copyright works to the network so that they are not in violation. Google+ and Facebook terms of service grant them the permission to display all posted works, the copyright remains as yours. There is nothing to prevent you from putting licensing text for descriptions of videos, music and others in these networks.
Also ambivalent towards copyright law, they support regular and free licensing. They are supporters of free licensing and have facilities to search music that is licensed as such. When possible always license your work under these terms so that the works are not directly tied to this service, as it is very easy to block a single website, but it’s impossible to block twenty different sites, especially if you can not easily track where the file has gone. If you want your work to continue to be around, license it freely so that it can leave SoundCloud.
Another big supporter of free culture licensing, and support all variants of the licenses. Their service however is itself a proprietary one, and is easily targeted and blocked.
Tumblr does not support as far as I have found anything about being able to mark posts with a free license. You can however paste a license into the description of your blog by first choosing a license.
©2011, Braydon Fuller. This work is licensed under an Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Update 1: OLA March, Rally & Press Conference Against the National Defense Authorization Act Sunday December, 4th 2011 – http://occupylosangeles.org/?q=node/2604
Update 2: There wasn’t a march, and no planned press conference. There was a group of people to discuss the topic among supporters.
Yesterday, December 3rd, 2011, the Los Angeles General Assembly at the steps of City Hall came to a consensus on “Defending American Citizens against a Military State” ( http://losangelesga.net/2011/12/defending-american-citizens-against-a-military-state/ ), but tabling “How: Section 3″ for later proposal due to contention with the wording. It’s been consented to carry out the two prior actions. There is an emergency march today, Sunday, at noon around the streets of City Hall. We march against the outrageous $662 billion dollar defense budget, and we march against making America a battlefield and its citizens military targets. After the march, we pollinate the streets of Downtown, creating a massive local awareness with our community, discussing the issues with as many people as possible, and then reconvening at City Hall at 5pm.
To read the full details of the bill that has passed Senate, view it at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:S.1867:
Key Points:
“(1) United States Citizens. — The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.”
“(a) IN GENERAL. — Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107–40) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war.”
To read the full details of the bill that has passed Senate, view it at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:S.1867:
This post is free of known copyright restrictions.
The cue sheet and martini image (download) by Poobah Records is available to be copied under the terms of an Attribution license.
I found this great video at the New York General Assembly website, which is running WordPress with BuddyPress, and how I ended up discovering it.
I’ve spent the last ten hours at Solidarity park, for Occupy Los Angeles, in Downtown. Many people came prior to 12:01am, including every media station, trucks lined the streets. The park was filled with people to each end, and had a chance to meet with several people who I knew from outside the protest. At around 3:00 a.m. the initial crowd had settled, and many people took to the streets, after midnight.
There are more than two dozen people who made a circle in the middle of the park that are willing to be arrested to be peacefully civil disobedient, and to stand for justice against the economic tricks that are being played on the U.S. government. Their passion and dedication is admirable.
The park officially opens to the public at 5:00 a.m. and being in the park at this time is not participating in civil disobedience, and there is no reason for anyone to be arrested in the park at this time. However that does not mean that this will be upheld, since they have been said that the park is closed as of 12:01am this Monday. The police have previously refrained from enforcing park hours. Citizens have the right to peacefully assemble, it is the responsibility for the police to keep the assembly peaceful, they are peace officers.
At 4:45 a.m. police outfitted with face guards and batons surrounded the south end of the park on 1st street, suddenly. Many people bolted back from the streets. Their message to us was that they want to keep the streets clear for traffic.
At around 5:30 a.m. I left the park and walked around the perimeter. I started towards the north side and headed west two blocks. Both of these roads were closed, with people directing traffic. I walked then back south and found lines of police cars parked in the road. Some blocked off, and in other areas would take up an entire lane and leave one lane open. I headed back east, and found more police cars in the road in a single line. One man I walked by that I greeted, told me he thought it looked beautiful.
“Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.”
— David Hume’s Essays, Moral and Political
This post is written by Braydon Fuller and is available to be copied under the terms of an Attribution-NoDerivs license.
Occupy Los Angeles early tomorrow morning, 12:01am, is facing eviction based on warnings from mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa, and this next week will be a defining moment for the movement.
Media is one of the propaganda tools of the wealthy minority use to influence politics in a democratic state, not touching on the influence over congress. The Citizens United decision that removed the censorship of political broadcasting that are funded by corporation or unions, granting corporations the freedom of speech over politics, like people, is a core of this issue being protested.
Los Angeles is the leading city of media for not only the United States but for the world, there is a great number of artists and public figures here in this city. It’s great to see many of them showing solidarity with the movement, such as; Shepard Fairey, Tom Morello, Bill Maher, Jesse Jackson, Jeff Ross and many others.
Shepard Fairey at Occupy Los Angeles, photo by Mikey Wally available under the terms of an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license. More photos.
Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine at Occupy Los Angeles, photo by Mikey Wally available under the terms of an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license. More photos.
Download Video
Bill Maher at Occupy Los Angeles interview with Clark Davis by OccupyLAMedia available under the terms of an Attribution license.
This post, though only a few words, and is mostly a collection of other works, is available under the terms of an Attribution license by Braydon Fuller unless otherwise noted.
![[In the wake of the raid of the Occupy Wall Street at Liberty Square, 32,000 people rally in New York.]](http://braydon.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ows2.gif "OWS")
This image is Public Domain.
©2011 Dr. Veggie. Available under the terms of an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license. Download to Print.
View full testimony as PDF from Katherine Oyama, Policy Counsel, Google
The source of this and other testimonies can be found at the Judiciary House website for the Hearing on: H.R. 3261, the “Stop Online Piracy Act”
The Occupy Wall Street movement and campers at Zuccotti Park have been raided and tents and camps destroyed by the NYPD. There have been a few live videos from location made, one that remained streaming for over 19 hours by Tim Pool under the handle The Other 99. Using a galaxy mobile phone streaming over 4G with extra battery packs, and a lot of dedication and resilience.
This type of media coverage is what is needed. Unfiltered, unedited, raw and live coverage leaving the opportunity for everyone to take from it and make up their own mind. This is so important, and why I can identify with the movement. The bias is towards extending the first person experience. To be able to feel as if you are someplace without being able to be there.
Some people came out to the park because of the stream, and others were not at the park when it was raided and spent the day at work before being free to return, were very grateful of the live media coverage. Others following were able to give support with even more extra batteries and food. There were continually over 10,000 live viewers watching, and and able to interact and send messages.
My only grief in the matter is that the stream could be more independently done through using 100% free software, though would be incredibly difficult to support that kind of number of live viewers without a dedicated host setup to support this sort of thing, such as was used UStream. However the video itself is still viewed using the Flash plug-in, although I could be wrong and may also the stream in other accessible forms. While this may be currently the best way to reach people currently, it is also less about what happens after that fact, and being able to re-use the footage. The fact that we’ve seen it was the most important part, and most appreciated. We need more of this. Thank you.
OWS have reoccupied the park after a day of court decisions. A temporary restraining order was immediately placed on the City of New York, NYPD and others, followed by another court ruling to move the retraining order to permanent, however the court ruled against it and tents and structures are no longer allowed at Zoccotti Park.
Update: I realized that I didn’t mention any free software that is available for audio and video streaming. I’ve been using Darkice and Icecast to do live audio streaming and can recommend them, currently being used at Poobah.com. Unfortunately I do not have experience with live video streaming to have any recommendations. There is opportunity here for new media organizations.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
We do more reading than we do writing, a blogging platform should be designed around this use-case.
You can get it at the AWE – WordPress Plugins page. Subscribe to the mailing list at http://www.freelists.org/list/awe, and donate to support the project. Donations over $20 will also receive a free t-shirt.
Download / Your web browser does not support the HTML 5 video element.
Boulder, Colorado passed by a 3-to-1 margin an amendment that says corporations are not people and money is not speech and 6 Senators introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Have corporations overplayed their hand – is the backlash now underway?
©2011 The Big Picture RT. Licensed under the terms of an Attribution license.
©2011 Braydon Fuller. Licensed for use under an Attribution license. Download Hi-rez
Open letter to Congress:
I am a constituent and I urge you to reject the Internet Blacklist Bills (PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House). I am deeply concerned by the danger these bills pose to Internet security, free speech online, and innovation. The Internet Blacklist Legislation is dangerous and short-sighted, and I urge you to join Senator Wyden and other members of Congress in opposing it.
I am a web developer and artist, you can view my website at http://braydon.com I have been doing design and development for the web since the 1990s, like many in my generation, we were the first to experience the Internet in our public schools. That’s the first time I saw the Internet and was so excited, living in a small town, to have access to a world of information outside my own geographic boundaries. This is why the Internet is so important.
I have had a lot of conflict with proprietary software. I’ve paid for my fair share of proprietary software, only to be handcuffed by their licensing terms when I became so involved it, the software, that I wanted to be able to make my own improved version. At the age of sixteen I was an approved Adobe Photoshop Expert for version 5.0. Better is often a subjective term, and proprietary software supports 80% of use-cases, but I am a part of the 20% that has unique needs after spending more that ten years using a computer as foundation for my work. Now, realized the light, and looking outside the cave, I use 100% free software, free as in liberty and not as in price. Software is unlike many other works because it has source code. Developers can either also make available that source code, or to choose to keep it hidden forever. Because information and sharing information is important to business, software is as important as the streets and highways of our country, and shouldn’t be owned and proprietary but should be a part of the public. This is why I support using software that uses licenses such as the GNU General Public License, the BSD, and MIT.
The U.S. government currently doesn’t support this cause, while it is very much related with the responsibilities of a government and should be of its concern. I am asking for more involvement in many existing free software projects by the U.S. government in relation to safeguarding our civil liberties that will help encourage innovation on the Internet.
I oppose the H.R.3261 Stop Online Piracy Act.
Dear friend,
I just emailed Congress to urge them to oppose the Internet Blacklist Legislation, known as the PROTECT-IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. This legislation seeks to give the executive branch power to conduct slash-and-burn campaigns against websites that allegedly host – or even link to – content that infringes on intellectual property rights. That would “disappear” whole domain names, fundamentally undermining Internet security, and/or choke off their financial support. The Internet Blacklist Legislation puts more sites than ever at risk, effectively upending the DMCA safe harbors that have been crucial to the growth of Internet innovation and creativity.
Sadly, these short-sighted and dangerous bills won’t do much to stop online infringement – but they will jeopardize our ability to speak and read online with the kind of freedom we cherish in the offline world. Deep-pocketed Hollywood lobbyists are aggressively pushing to control and censor the open Internet, willing to sacrifice free speech and our Internet culture in hopes of controlling how people view their movies and products.
We need to stop this bill before it goes any further. Will you contact your representatives in Congress and urge them to oppose the Internet Blacklist Legislation? Visit: https://eff.org/r.C8A
Everyone who is currently licensing their work under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike license and the many different Creative Commons licenses, thank you. You already get it. However constantly needing to provide licenses with our work is tiresome, especially considering regular copyright applies without any additional information.
The authenticity of information online is based upon its location and its URL, among other more secure techniques as keys and signatures. This should become a more important issue.
I oppose the H.R.3261 Stop Online Piracy Act. You can read it in full at The Library of Congress. Stop the entertainment industry supported initiative to hijack currently trusted Domain Name Service servers at the level of U.S. controlled Internet Server Providers.
Update: This site can now be viewed with an encrypted connection, visit: https://braydon.com/ You’ll need to confirm the certificate since I’m self-signed and haven’t put down the $250 a year to get one from a certificate authority. This is useful to verify that my domain name and the pages being sent to your browser are indeed coming from my server and not from another server. Domain Name System (DNS) servers can be hijacked and deliver different pages (or be entirely blocked) while still appearing to be on the same domain. This can be done at an ISP, a router, or your computer.
“Digital Denial” by Braydon Fuller
MPAA supported legislation previously known as “PROTECT IP” has been updated. Ars Technica has recently published an article titled, “House Takes Senates Bad Internet Censorship Bill and Makes it Worse”, and Tech Dirt reports, “Protect IP renamed E-PARASITES Act would create the Great Firewall of America”.
In an argument in support of the legislation that would require ISPs to censor specific websites under the pretext that they are in violation of copyright infringement:
The motion picture and television industry is responsible for over 30,000 jobs in Colorado, 17,000 jobs in Maryland and 22,000 jobs in Arizona. Foreign rogue websites pose a threat to each one of these jobs by profiting from the sale of stolen content and draining our economy of billions of dollars annually. The PROTECT IP Act will help to deter, prevent and root out websites that harm thousands of honest workers. MPAA Blog – Protect IP Support Strengthens
Our economy is in recession, signs of this have been the real-estate and bank drama that has been the prime source for the Occupy protests happening across the U.S. and in other parts of the world. However, I have not to see the direct examples of it from my lens of the immediate surrounding. There even seems to be a worker shortage or lack of vitality in agriculture. In my own work, I’m turning down many job opportunities. Some because I’m busy, and others because of user ethics. I refuse to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement that includes software in its terms to not be disclosed. This is because software is different than any other work because it has source code that can be completely hidden from users — forever. Imagine if your government did not tell you the rules of our system and arrested us because we broke the rules. It would be an injustice. This is what is going on with the software industry that most of what Americans recognize as software development companies. If your business is dependent upon software, how are the rules of a computing system any less important than the rules of a government? Information is vital to business.
This is the reason I am starting the post-software movement that says, “It is better to use no software than to use proprietary software.” It is an art movement and an Internet campaign to draw attention away from software while not looking away. What would the world be like if the people who currently were using proprietary systems were to suddenly not have access to a personal computer running proprietary software. The only way, from a web development point of view, to develop a site that would reach the most number of people would be to develop for Android. It is likely the most popular and accessible free software system, even though it does also include proprietary portions, though the web browser source code is available and able for people to modify and redistribute. Google is smart in their recent purchase of Motorola, because they realize they need to get more into hardware. They are also a smart company because they use their free software releases, Chrome and Android, as advertisement to their bread and butter. I refuse to work for Google, or to entertain the possibility, because those services are based on proprietary Google-only software, in support of the Google-nation. Apply the same principle to real physical hardware products, and you have an elegant solution that is not in violation of user ethics. Computers are here to be help us, not to control us.
So MPAA you’re right to think about peoples jobs of honest workers, however are the 2 million American jobs that are supported by the film and television industry, as you quote, more important than 1.5 billion Internet users freedom of speech? Certainly we can produce films without the MPAA and to do so independently in support of millions of American small and large businesses.
Would the proposed bill even have a significant affect to end copyright infringement when DNS lookups can be delegated to the web browser or to user controlled routers, such as a plugin for Firefox. It’s time we bite the bullet, computers are hugely important because sharing is fundamental to society. I support the Occupy protest movement to keep overt private interests, such as this, out of our government, we are the 99 percent.
©2011, Braydon Fuller. This post is available for use under an Attribution-NoDerivs license.
Another key figure in computing, John McCarthy, has died this month. People I knew little about, yet their contributions have significantly advanced the state-of-art of computing, and has become a part my computing life. I’m most drawn towards a story John McCarthy wrote in 2004 about a crack-head single mother, her baby, and a personal robot. It explores logic conflicts that lead the robot to do something unexpected, and consequently received a lot of attention from the world. The story is called, “The Robot and the Baby”.
The story features Lisp like pseudo logic that details the logic the robot went through. I’m only familiar with Lisp from managing my Emacs configuration file, enough to realize the reference. Emacs is the only program that I know of that uses Lisp, and I use it every day to edit Python, JavaScript, PHP, HTML, CSS, and sometimes to just write English.
Unix was an operating system developed by AT&T during a period in time when there were laws against the telecommunications company from selling an operating system. This was still during the time when universities were the caretakers of computer technology, and the idea of a personal computer had yet to happen. The laws changed and allowed the operating system to become proprietary. Hackers that experienced the environment of freely sharing source code, rebelled against this and started Unix like operating systems. One of the projects is GNU, short for “GNU is not Unix”, giving tribute to it’s influence. There are now many different free distributions of this operating system, such as; Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Debian and Gentoo each with different philosophies for the needs of different people and communities. Now the hacker culture is live and strong across the world with many events organized to get involved.
“UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity.” – Dennis Ritchie
It’s our great loss, and the ideas and contributions Dennis Ritchie has made towards computing will be remembered forever.
The world mourns:
Download 3500×3500 / This is a modification to “Anchors” by Braydon Fuller
While you are sleeping, I am busy working…. Today, I am beginning a journey. I will be posting a new original work each day at The Post-Software Movement. Each will be available for you to download and print, sell, and pretty much do anything you want with. Yes! Finally!
“Escape!” / 12″ x 12″ / collage, acrylic, matte board
©2011 by Braydon Fuller
This work is available under the terms of an Attribution-ShareAlike license.
Download 1200dpi ( Tiff, Zip Archive, 478MB )
The Post-Software Movement: It is better to use no software than to use proprietary software. Our solution is very simple — a complete and 100% rebellion. This is a return to the very basis of the time before computers at all, while still retaining the concepts and subject matter of software and related technology. We leave software and adapt and infinite array of creative possibles by using: canvas, gouache, books, posters, quilts, flyers, electronics, brushes, markers, desktops, paper, scissors, weaving, zines, costumes, scarves, paintings, people, chairs, rooms, film, pencils, cardboard, boxes, flour, sugar, pans, voice, pens, notebooks, grids, dumpsters, stencils, gravity, etching, sticky notes, stickers, badges, whiteboards, watercolor, history, graffiti, sculpture, time, captchas, and scale. In addition; acrylic, adhesive, airbrush, aquatint, bamboo, binder, blotting, bronze, carbon, charcoal, claybord, conté, copal, crayon, crêpe paper, dip pen, drafting, dye, eraser, engraving, fixative, foamcore, frisket, glass, glitter, gold, graphite, grease, hardstone, india ink, intaglio, khutu, lithography, manila paper, mannequin, metal leaf, mezzotint, movable type, oil paint, paperboard, pastel, patina, pietra dura, plastic, porcelain, screenprinting, silverpoint, sketchbook, spray paint, stamp, tempera, tortillon, tracing paper, varnish, washi, wasli, watercolor, wood, woodcut and wood stain.
©2011, Braydon Fuller. Licensed under an Attribution-ShareAlike license.
More at: The Post-Software Movement
“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
Recently sent out to the wp-hackers mailing list (archive of discussion):
Hello,
I have been working on a free software solution to social networking. Many projects are focused on starting from scratch, such as; Freedom Box, StatusNet, Diaspora, and Libre.fm. My approach is different because I am planning on building upon what is currently already at the heart of social media, WordPress, and just fixing one problem — those pesky share buttons everywhere. I have just completed PHASE 1 of the project, and would like to make this the first public release, which does not include all the required features.
In the same way that people will post links of WordPress posts to Social Media websites, the goal of this is to automatically cross-post to a community of websites for promotional purposes and is a distributed method for online marketing campaigns. This will not require a visitor to leave to visit the post, since it is copied verbatim, and does not require users to be either a member of a network or not a member. This will serve as two-way posting making it possible for a dialog between separate websites and community organization. I am terming it “networked media” to be distinguished from “social media”.
Websites are built in the millions for publishing articles, videos, music and linking these to Social Media websites for promotion. My goal is to build new networked media websites that bring together a community of individuals based upon topics of interest; opening the opportunity for verticals and topic based networked media websites as opposed to Social Media differentiated by differences of software.
That is the goal. This is the future of online marketing. Now, here is what I have made. I have started with a method to define new URLS and templates, and am currently working on the aggregation portion. Here are the links to the resources for the plugin:
WordPress Plugin Directory:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/awe/
SVN:
http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/awe/trunk/
Project Management ( Documentation / Tickets / Git ):
http://code.braydon.com/p/awe/
Here are the phases of the project I have been planning:
1. URLS/Templates:
* Editing URLS
* Managing Menus
* Editing Templates
* Feed reader for synchronization
2. JavaScript Templates:
* JavaScript URL routing
* JavaScript Templates
* NoScript accessibility
3. Admin Interface:
* Unified front-end/back-end interface
* JavaScript admin that is extensible
4. Complete WordPress Distribution:
* Packaging the plugin as a part of WordPress
* Clean API for our JavaScript applications
* OpenID for network to network authentication and privacy
5. AWE Plugins:
* Write extensions to the core of AWE to add new post types
including: video, sound, gallery, events and shop.
6. Web Service:
* Dedicated web host for users that don’t want to run it on their
own hardware.
* Sign-up and payment settings.
For those that I have previously contacted about URL routing, this is the plugin I was mentioning. I am now looking to work in collaboration because this project can not succeed without the support of a few people working in synchronization. So let’s get going!
Sincerely,
Braydon Fuller
http://braydon.com
Copyright © 2011, Braydon Fuller. Download (212MB)
Original artwork at 9 1/2″ by 18″, watercolor, woodblock and embossing on archival paper. $50
Copyright © 2011, Braydon Fuller. Download (86MB)
Original artwork at 9 and 3/4″ by 9 and 3/4″, watercolor, intaglio and embossing on archival paper. $50
Copyright © 2011, Braydon Fuller. Download (66MB)
8″ by 10″ watercolor on acid-free archival paper. $30USD
Copyright © 2011, Braydon Fuller. Download (71MB)
8″ by 10″ watercolor on acid-free archival paper. $30USD
Copyright © 2011, Braydon Fuller and joint authorship with Logan Muszynski. Download (34MB).
The above video should play in Chrome and Firefox, looping will work in Chrome but not in Firefox. Safari and Internet Explorer are not supported because they do not support either the WebM or Theora codecs and the distribution of H.264 video encoding software requires a purchased license due to software patents. There isn’t any sound with this video.
Software in making this video:
firefogg – video encoding for web
gimp-gap – stopmotion video export
Much thanks to Logan Muszynski who does many stop motion videos.
Copyright © 2011, Braydon Fuller. Download (96MB)
Artist and photographer Logan stopped by earlier to brainstorm a collaboration of traditional art skills with modern technology such as the Net. I made the above work as a starting point.
Go to Poo-Bah Records ( 2636 E. Colorado Blvd, Pasadena CA 91107 ), right across from Denny’s, and grab a hacker t-shirt, new vinyl records from artists such as Matthewdavid, Samiyam, Take and Ras G, used dvds, rare cassettes, limited edition posters from artists such as Ques and Teebs, live radio shows like the Tom Coston Show with Red Rosie, and don’t forget to grab the Rolls Royce of incense and chill out!
VAu 1-072-321 Copyright © 2011, Braydon Fuller. License
There are also available, only at Poo-Bah, customized shirts with hand lettering using Jacquard Textile Colors that I bought from Raw Materials in Downtown Los Angeles. The shirts are screenprinted by The Ultimate Shirt Company, and the shirts themselves are manufactured by American Apparel, thus forming the ultimate convergence of ethics, 100% sweatshop free, 100% made in LA, and campaigning for free culture awareness.
Permalink: http://braydon.com/2011/09/hacker-tees-now-at-poo-bah-records/
Copyright © 2011 Braydon Fuller
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies
of this blog post without royalty provided the copyright notice
and this permission notice are preserved.
Much thanks to CharlieX and KRS @ Null Space Labs for the introduction to soldering enough to put together one of their kits, the Cylon II, an 8bit micro-controlled LED display. In just a day, I had a working Cylon II together, from not knowing anything about soldering, hot-platting, flux, solder paste, and solder wicks. I was most amazed at the soldering process of the microchip, since the soldering points are so small, but the solder went to the right places due to bonding of like elements floating in heated flux.
The last time I remember soldering was when I was around ten, when I would spend my free time taking apart electronics to try to figure out how they worked. Most of the time they would be completely dissembled, and never returned back to their functioning state. I wasn’t as interested in putting them back together, because they were probably broken to begin with, and why my parents probably let me take them apart. I was most interested in understanding how they worked. I learned how an electric motor worked in elementary school, only to be taught the same thing later in middle school, and being extremely bored. Learning how a motor works by taking it apart, is way more interesting then having a teacher tell you how it works; they could be wrong, have some sort of alternative motive, or just be lying. All my math classes made up for the boredom though! I’ve forgotten most of the math I had taken, up to an introduction to Calculus. All I remember of Calculus is thinking, finally, math that is really useful since most of our world is made up of curves, and not straight lines.
The Cylon II, is a very simplified computer; it has a flash-able 8bit chip, 6×5 LEDS, optional speaker, and three inputs. I’m excited to learn to program it, and learning a bit of C along the way, and start doing more soldering on the [NSL] BBB Android ADK Arduino board!
Have fun at DEFCON!
I’ve been trying to decide on a license for my own creative tangible works that would best take advantage of technology in the digital millennium. I want to avoid restricting peoples rights that normal copyright law in the United States has been doing since the computer has found its way into many people’s homes. Much to my surprise, it’s not a simple decision.
In section 4.b. of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Unported 3.0:
You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.
It’s pretty clear cut that the works can not be sold in exchange for monetary compensation at all. However the phrasing of “commercial advantage” is open to interpretation, and doesn’t clearly define how this applies with direct examples of what constitutes as an advantage. In section 4.d. they clarify things further:
For the avoidance of doubt:
- Non-waivable Compulsory License Schemes. In those jurisdictions in which the right to collect royalties through any statutory or compulsory licensing scheme cannot be waived, the Licensor reserves the exclusive right to collect such royalties for any exercise by You of the rights granted under this License;
- Waivable Compulsory License Schemes. In those jurisdictions in which the right to collect royalties through any statutory or compulsory licensing scheme can be waived, the Licensor reserves the exclusive right to collect such royalties for any exercise by You of the rights granted under this License if Your exercise of such rights is for a purpose or use which is otherwise than noncommercial as permitted under Section 4(b) and otherwise waives the right to collect royalties through any statutory or compulsory licensing scheme; and,
- Voluntary License Schemes. The Licensor reserves the right to collect royalties, whether individually or, in the event that the Licensor is a member of a collecting society that administers voluntary licensing schemes, via that society, from any exercise by You of the rights granted under this License that is for a purpose or use which is otherwise than noncommercial as permitted under Section 4(c).
Which further details that royalty collection is reserved in any place that would otherwise be expected for copyright royalties to be collected. So it’s not that much different than one would expect of plain copyright laws, with the exception that copying for non-commercial purposes is allowed, which people are already doing anyway, regardless if it’s legal or not. This just makes it not illegal, making it possible for sharing of these works publically, greatly helping the advertising effect of the works in areas outside of defined safe harbors, such as many of the major websites on known to many United States citizens, especially among artists here in Los Angeles.
In doing more research into this subject I’ve found that others have gone ahead and provided specific examples, that are not defined in the license, however they make them anyways. Strangely, the JWPlayer web software, is licensed using the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, when there are licenses specifically for software available. Curiously, I found in their readme for the player:
The player is licensed under a Creative Commons License. It allows you to use, modify and redistribute the script, but only for non-commercial purposes.
Examples of commercial use include:
- websites with any advertisements;
- websites owned or operated by corporations;
- websites designed to promote other products, such as a band or artist;
- products (e.g. a CMS) that bundle LongTail products into its offering.
If any of the above conditions apply to you, then please purchase a license for the player. If you are still unsure whether you need to purchase a license, please contact us.
Which is taking the phrase commercial advantage to mean anything commercial, and ignoring the aspect of advantage. If all commercial entities have been given the same rights, then how would any one entity have an advantage over the other by using the work?
There has been so much concern over what exactly “Non-commercial” means, there has been a two-hundred and fifty page full report into how people interpret the meaning, archived at the Creative Commons wiki: Defining Noncommercial.
In it I found this towards the middle:
In the next years, possibly as soon as 2010, Creative Commons expects to formally launch a multi-year, international process for producing the next version (4.0) of the six main Creative Commons licenses. This process will include examination of whether the NC term should be usefully modified as a part of that effort, or if the better approach might be to adopt a “best practices” approach of articulating the commercial/noncommercial distinction for certain creator or user communities apart from the licenses themselves. Whichever the result, this study has highlighted that in order to meet the expectations of licensors using CC NC licenses it will be important to avoid any modification of the term, however manifested, that makes a use widely agreed to be commercial – or only agreed to be noncommercial with low consensus – explicitly noncommercial. (…)
It appears that the definition has been intentionally left unclear, because it’s not exactly easy to understand or detail specifics at this point. Coming from experience in free software, commercial use is integral to the growth of the software. The same should apply to other free cultural works.
I believe that their should be restrictions upon the use based upon a separation of physical, tangible, and mechanical copying to that of distribution and digital distribution. Copyright laws came to being as a means to more efficiently copy and distribute works because of the limitations of physical production. Digital copying shouldn’t be limited by copyright laws, that is if the world was magically connected with free software. However that isn’t a reality so we should look at specific examples.
There are software vendors masquerading around as physical stores, through the use of proprietary technology and software. Such as the Android Marketplace, Apple App Store, the iTunes store, Bleep, Boomkat, Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify. Which all have commercialized digital distribution by either exchanging digital files for monetary value or by charging a subscription to access digital files. These should all be restricted to being able to copy and distribute the works. If copying is restricted on websites, newspapers, blogs, and social networks that are commercially supported by advertisements, then that is almost entirely to limit copying on the Internet, except on personal websites. Still left is the commercial use of displaying artwork in physical retail spaces, small business to corporate, in addition to use in television and Internet advertisements, not to mention billboards.
I would interpret “commercial advantage” to allow use among websites with advertisements and in retail spaces, in advertisements, since all commercial entities would have equal opportunities. This could even be extended to the web stores and subscription services, so long as the works were not directly exchanged for monetary value.
Without having specifics, it’s a difficult decision to use the Non-commercial aspect of the Creative Commons licenses. Commercial value could be one of the things that drives free culture forward into everyday commercial life that we are surrounded by and depend upon.
Permalink: http://braydon.com/2011/07/what-does-noncommercial-in-a-creative-commons-license-mean/
Copyright © 2011 Braydon Fuller
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies
of this entire work without royalty provided the
copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved.
Dear Internet,
When I was a teenager I traveled to Switzerland in January with family, and in my first visit, I imagined things to be drastically different. In many ways, they were very different, however, much to my surprise, American music was played everywhere over the swiss ski alps, in public areas. Making what would otherwise not feel like home, welcoming, as if only to say, we like “you”, we are “you”. Realizing my own ignorance, I was also disappointed, I couldn’t say that we have given others such equal respect.
I have a hard time viewing those who are making copies of works of art as enemies to the works, and those who put creativity and energy into producing them. Like a relay race, they are picking up the baton and running with it. They are on the same team. This is the greatest benefit to being able to freely copy works, like a relay race, the team is able to run further and faster, and to areas otherwise thought humanly impossible.
This is the reason the organizations such as the Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons have produced a proliferation of ideas and rules of copyright as wide as the seas, deserts, and mountains that separate mankind. And why “copyright infringement” isn’t simply as easily defined as “illegally duplicated or stolen”. The idea comes from viewing the non-tangible as tangible. A vinyl album, t-shirt, DVD package, poster are tangible mediums to distribute and proliferate an idea. The computer is not a replacement or competition to these, it is a free world, not bound by the laws of physics, to discover and share ideas, to what ultimately lead to something physical and tangible. The idea of software as “hardware” has been proliferated through the “desktop metaphor” distributed by Apple Computer and Microsoft, and all of these ideas originating in California, and the first recorded appearance from a small research lab in Palo Alto. Originating from a company with vested interest in turning digital documents into tangible items, Xerox. The biggest tragedy has been to take this idea to the extreme of making software even more rigid than hardware, and taking advantage of people who know next to nothing about them, for their own benefit, to sell computers. In fact we would be better off without these proprietary operating systems entirely; to use a computer, you’d largely benefit from knowing someone who understands how to control it. The computer is the hardware, it’s important to continue to see software as it is — free.
Copyright laws are impossible to enforce in a free digital space, and shouldn’t be a concern, because it’s not a threat to the production of tangible goods, to that the government is established at enforcing. The computer is an imaginary world, a place for minds to be free, and to connect us to each other at alarming efficiency.
The United States Senate Bills S.978 and S.968 are rendered meaningless through the adoption of licensing your works from the Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons. We don’t need senators and politicians who deeply understand computers and technology, because we have these organizations working for our rights, in connection with many governments across the world. We can exist in a separate “continent”, and wait for the U.S. to come aboard.
Respectfully,
Braydon
Permalink: http://braydon.com/2011/07/us-economic-turmoil-part2/
Copyright © 2011 Braydon Fuller
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies
of this entire work without royalty provided the
copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved.
Dear U.S. Citizens,
There has been a string of United States Senate bills that are a threat to our economy, and a violation to our First Amendment Rights, and they must be stopped in their tracks. I urge you to tell your U.S. Senators about your concerns.
The S.978 bill (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:s978:) is a gross oversight in giving even more rights to the individual ownership of copyright, and taking away rights of the people that make it possible for creative works to be produced. It is harmful to our shared commons of creativity. Works build upon ideas of others, and by limiting our options to do so, is against the advancement of the state of art. It’s only to motivate the division of private spaces, as being creative in a public space, a Public Performance, comes with the potential of a lawsuit and a felony conviction.
The S.968 bill (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:s968:) gives more freedom to the U.S. government for censorship. Anyone who will or currently owns a domain name is at risk, and through willful copyright infringement will become at risk to having their domain name seized that has its Domain Name Server (DNS) under control of the U.S. Government. Copyright infringement is wrong, and those that are infringing are in the wrong. However we don’t need the potential for mis-use and corruption and increasing hostility to law-abiding Citizens that place great importance to online economy.
These bills are a contributory cause to the death to much of our American culture of “freedom”, that has made our country famous across the world. They must be stopped in their tracks! It has been a downward spiral since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, allowing among other things for copyright laws to be “continuously renewed”, take a look at “THX 1138″ at http://cocatalog.loc.gov/. What would have gone into the Public Domain fifty to sixty years from now, won’t likely enter Public Domain until around 2108, for a movie that was published in 1971, forty years ago. The computer has lead the way to laws being enacted, making our laws increasingly more oppressive for those who don’t even have a computer. A sign that things truly have gone into turmoil.
We need the government to take a stance against the individual owners of existing copyrights to stop them from taking away the rights of Citizens and treating everyone as if they are already a criminal, just because Citizens are liberated with our own ability to copy creative works. We need the government to stand up for a commons of creativity. To bring back copyright law before the DMCA of 1998, so that creative works can not be endlessly renewed, such as “THX 1138″ has been since 1998. We need a new revision that states that copyright laws do not apply to electronically distributed and transmitted creative works, it only applies to the manufacture, copying, and distribution of “mechanicals” and physical works, to which copyright laws have been born out of the inherit limitations of “the laws of physics”. The computer has been our liberator from the oppression of treating ideas like objects, a.k.a. “Intellectual Property”. This kind of law will motivate the production of real physical works, and gives jobs to many that are struggling and unemployed, and truly embracing the nature of the computer.
Sincerely,
Braydon Fuller
Los Angeles, California
http://braydon.com
While at SCaLE 9x this last weekend I went to a talk on “Behind the Scenes of Google Code Project Hosting”. I had previously just discovered InDefero, a project that started out as using a similar user interface but is radically different.
What I’ve always found very untrustworthy about Google Code Project Hosting, is that it is a proprietary based web service hosting open source software. They have two feelings for the same thing. He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing. Their hosting may affect your on more on a subconscious level than many may realize. You think we’ll ever see Bigtable or GFS (Google Filesystem) on their own code hosting? Google Code is built on top of Google’s proprietary database and filesystem, so even if they decided to make the project free software, there wouldn’t be a point because nobody could run it since it depends on those technologies, they would have to free their whole base. Which would be nearly impossible to do considering there might not be a community there to support it, that takes time.
At the end of the talk, someone asked the question if they were planning on supporting other version control systems. Which brought us to the ticket list of their project hosting which features at the top of the list as most requested feature being support for Git. The speaker from Google said he wasn’t allowed to state if they intended to support it.
InDefero supports Git, is free software, has a hosted service, there is no vendor lock-in, and you pay for your service like any other web host, and it’s actively developed. I see no reason to use Google Project Hosting unless it is for Google specific projects like Chrome or Android. The world needs more companies like Google, but less ambivalent towards free software, less quantitative, more qualitative, and moving together via the cooperative superpower of free software.
Let’s put our feet down and start running? Yes!
-Braydon
There are over 2,000 images available for viewing on the website. The entire website compressed is 3.5Gigs
Design Direction: Product Etcetera
After three months of development the Phthalo.com (the electronic music label) website is live and streaming! Visit Phthalo.com
Features include:
I went up to Poo-Bah record shop earlier today to work on updates to the site! Here is what is new:
Visit PooBah.com
So over a year ago I jumped into a project doing some development to improve the usability of the Drupal CMS interface for Saeger Media Group, and after a long dramatic wait, the update has gone live! They had an existing Drupal site, and the interface required a lot of insider knowledge of how the system works to be able to edit it. So I wrote two modules to add two new node types, and each with their own custom editor interface!
Adding an Event
Adding/Editing the Landing Page Slideshow
The plugins were written to create the node types using the Drupal API rather than using the Drupal CMS interface as much as possible. I dislike the UI of Drupal as a CMS, now things could have improved I haven’t stayed completely up-to-date with Drupal, but there are realistic benefits in the way that WordPress has emphasized creating an admin interface that is separate from the site. Separating form handling makes themes easier to develop, so there is less of a barrier of entrance for designers to get their hands into the CSS/HTML to fine-tune the layout. WordPress also has a stabilized user interface so that technical support and documentation remains similar among many sites, also lowering the barrier of entrance and in-depth knowledge required to edit the website. While the idealistic side of be knows that in-place editing, integrating the admin interface with the front-end interface, is more efficient and gives opportunities for higher degrees of finesse because it’s quicker to switch between edit and view, the realistic side of me knows that being able to edit the site without intensive training is important, and without intensiveness development. WordPress cares about lowering the barrier of entrance, and so it is my preferred choice!
SaegerMediaGroup.com Landing Page
Multiple Post Types
Non-destructive Image Watermarking
Custom Font
Lightbox 2
Facebook Interfacing
Custom Post Type UI This plugin provides an easy to use interface to create and administer custom post types and taxonomies in WordPress. This plugin is created for WordPress 3.0. Author: WebDevStudios
Lightbox 2 Used to overlay images on the current page. It works by placing an image with a link to a larger image. Series of images turn will be navigable via the Lightbox via next and back buttons. The Lightbox features titles and captions for each image. Authors: Rupert Morris, Lokesh Dhakar, and Michael Tyson
Simple Facebook Connect A series of plugins that let you add any sort of Facebook Connect functionality you like to a WordPress blog. This lets you have an integrated site without a lot of coding, and still letting you customize it exactly the way you’d like. Author: Otto
Wordbook This plugin allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. Your Facebook ‘Wall’ will show your most recent blog posts. Author: Robert Tsai
Initially we were using the Custom Post Type UI to create the gallery post type, however a custom interface was needed to more easily handle image attachments for a post. We put together a plugin that adds a Gallery post type with it’s own post editor, and adjusted the theme files to work with it.
The default post_type in query_posts is ‘post’, so other post types will not be in the loop unless they are specified. Here is an example of what you could include at the top of your template to include all post types.
global $wp_query;
$p = array('post_type' => array('article', 'gallery','post','project'));
$q = array_merge($wp_query->query_vars, $p);
query_posts($q);
I’m sure everyone has run into this problem! You’re looking at a list in your file browser, or a maybe a list of tracks, the filenames or track numbers contain both numbers and characters, and the ordering is against logic: “1,11,2″ instead of “1,2,11″. Often times we will rename filenames to be have a preceding zero to fix the problem, “01, 02, 11″, however that isn’t compulsory! This error happens because the numbers are seen to the software as as “string” of characters and their numeric value is not considered when it is sorted. Here is a great resource with examples in many programming languages on how to sort the “strings” considering both the alpha and numeric values in the “strings”: The Alphanum Algorithm
Adding an audio player to a website can be a simple to complex task, there are many possibilities. For the Into Infinity project, intoinfinity.org, sponsored by Dublab and Creative Commons, we needed a player that would cleanly loop an 8 second audio sample, and be able to play multiple tracks simultaneously. For music.vtechphones.com we needed something that would be embeddable onto other websites and blogs. In the case with poobah.com, what we need is something simple, and the WordPress Audio Player fits the purpose. This isn’t a WordPress website, however the audio player can be used on any website, and they have a page detailing how to do that at: WordPress Audio Player – Standalone Version.
Remembering HTML tags and syntax can be debilitating especially if it’s not your expertise. For that reason visual HTML editors are important in the ease of use and efficiency for website admin interfaces, as most people who will be editing the information on the website are likely not experts at HTML, but experts on the subject matter of the website, and in any case the focus is on writing, and not HTML, so the more the HTML can get out of the way, the better it is of an interface. WordPress uses the TinyMCE text editor for their admin interface, however the editor can be used for any admin interface. Here is a tutorial on how to do that: Django: Add WYSIWYG Editor
So it seems cycling in Los Angeles is becoming more legit! 4th St. and Fountain Ave. now have shared bicycle arrows painted on portions of their asphalt surface. According to the the Los Angeles Police Department Officer, S. Koegel, the LAPD will be escorting the Los Angeles Critical Mass ride tonight for the second time. I asked if he rode with us on the last LACM, he was riding a motorcycle, and he said they are going to be escorting a ride tomorrow. I said it was probably LACM. This last month I’ve had absolutely horrible luck getting cited for infractions to the law riding my bicycle on the gritty, pothole ridden, bicycle unfriendly streets of Los Angeles! Some of the tickets I’ve been cited for this last month riding solo on my bicycle, “Failure to Stop at a Red Light”, and “Failure to Yield on a Left-hand Turn”. All around the Pico/Vermont and 7th St. areas. Why do I feel the impulse to “drive” my bike like it’s 3,000 pounds, 13ft long and 6ft wide? Have the glory days just ended or begun?
Meets at Western & Wilshire at the Metro Station
Gather 6:30 PM. Ride at 7:30 PM
Every Last Friday of the month.
Previous research has shown a relationship between use of social networking sites and feelings of social capital. However, most studies have relied on self-reports by college students. The goals of the current study are to (1) validate the common self-report scale using empirical data from Facebook, (2) test whether previous findings generalize to older and international populations, and (3) delve into the specific activities linked to feelings of social capital and loneliness. In particular, we investigate the role of directed interaction between pairs—such as wall posts, comments, and “likes”— and consumption of friends’ content, including status updates, photos, and friends’ conversations with other friends. We find that directed communication is associated with greater feelings of bonding social capital and lower loneliness, but has only a modest relationship with bridging social capital, which is primarily related to overall friend network size. Surprisingly, users who consume greater levels of content report reduced bridging and bonding social capital and increased loneliness. Implications for designs to support well-being are discuss
cameronmarlow.com
WordPress has it’s own URL management system, and when developing websites it’s convenient to be able to add new rules dynamically. I’ve used this for two websites, music.vtechphones.com and for a site I am building now. It’s also great to keep all modifications in one place, so upgrades are easier, and easier for another developer to pick up!
Create a new plugin, and you place your rules into it doing something similar to the PHP below:
add_filter('rewrite_rules_array','wp_insert_my_rewrite_rules');
add_filter('init','flush_rules');
// Remember to flush_rules() when adding rules
function flush_rules(){
global $wp_rewrite;
$wp_rewrite->flush_rules();
}
// Adding a new rule
function wp_insert_my_rewrite_rules($rules){
$newrules = array();
$newrules['(articles)$'] = 'index.php?post_type=article';
$newrules['(gallery)$'] = 'index.php?post_type=gallery';
$newrules['(projects)$'] = 'index.php?post_type=project';
$newrules['(blog)$'] = 'index.php?post_type=post';
return $newrules + $rules;
}
Life, past the tragedies we face along our way, is impossibly complex and beautiful! The ups, the downs! I’m constantly amazed. I am who I am because of who we are, and where we have been! I am still here! We are still here! It’s all connected. There is a time for everything!
Photo from Zen – Wikipedia
I’ve gone through and installed several themes into a testing install of BuddyPress and have selected a few that I think will work as good starting points for further development and a good way to learn more about BuddyPress and how to develop social networking sites with it.
TwentyTen BuddyPress (Download) This is a theme that extends the default WordPress 3.0 TwentyTen theme to support BuddyPress. A great place to start in enhancing a blog with social networking features. Author: Ron & Andrea
BuddyPress Columns (Download) A three-column fixed-width variation to the default BuddyPress theme. There are many smaller details that make this theme feel almost finished, but still a bit of room to work with. Author: modemlooper
Fishbook (Download) A clean monotone light-blue two-column flexible-width theme. It remains consistent with default theme’s functionality. Author: Michael Kuhlmann
Jukt Micronics (Download) A minimal light two-column fixed-width theme. This one is one of my favorites, it feels open, good use of highlighting colors, and feels direct and to the point. Author: Michael Kuhlmann
Sense and Sensibility (Download) A stripped down minimal two-column theme. It diverges by not showing the activity in the main menu, which is good to see some variation in navigation. The theme looks like an ideal starting point for a heavy customized theme as there really isn’t much styling added to it yet. It also includes the WordPress meta in the sidebar with a link to access the site admin. Author: Ron & Andrea
More Information at VideoPress.com
More information at BuddyPress.org
Can you look eye to eye with Death without fear? Can you sacrifice your own heart to protest the death of a sibling and become a living ghost? We all share the same fate. Some meet this fate earlier and unexpected and without any reason — life is chaotic. However, to surrender yourself is giving up on your own life. Fuck you Death!
R.I.P. Natasha Fuller (1979 – 2001)
skiing is mountain born and bred,
the child of cold adventure
and pure spirited snow
- Natasha
This is a selection of 21 WordPress plugins written by 23 people from around the world. They extend a blog with social, community, and networking features. Ranging from multi-user community sites, to plugins that deal with interactions between individual blogs, and interactions with existing social networks.
BuddyPress will let users register on your site and create a profile, post messages, make connections, create and interact in groups and more. There are several ways of extending BuddyPress with extensions.
BuddyPress Events Calendar The plugin will add an option to the user menu called Events. From this menu users can create events and invite friends to join. The plugin will add an Events option to the main menu system for the events directory view. Add the Events widget to list; upcoming, newest, active and popular events on your front page. Total Downloads: 12,961 Author: erwingerrits
BuddyPress Ajax-Chat This plugin will extend BuddyPress to have an Ajax Chat client that works with BuddyPress groups, as well as all WordPress users. Total Downloads: 12,860 Author: David Aubin
BuddyPress Like Adds a ‘Like’ button to activities in the stream, allowing users to ‘Like’ the item and see who else has done the same. Total Downloads: 5,523 Author: Alex Hempton-Smith
BuddyPress Maps A component to find and display location markers on a Google Map. Total Downloads: 3,269 Author: G.Breant
BuddyPress Friends Online (FOL) Plugin will display on your Friends page in a widget under the search field, currently online friends. Data is dynamically updated. Total Downloads: 1,525 Author: slaFFik
BuddyPress My Friends Widgets Includes two widgets to display a logged in user’s friends. The small size shows 40px by 40px avatars and the big size shows 82px by 82px avatars. Total Downloads: 1,215 Author: Sarah Gooding
BuddyPress Followers Add the ability for users to follow others and keep track of their site activity. This plugin works exactly the same way that the friends component of BuddyPress works, however the connection does not need to be accepted by the person being followed. Total Downloads: 1,117 Author: Andy Peatling
BuddyPress Private Messages for Friends Only By default any member on your BuddyPress site can send messages to anyone in your userbase. This plugin adds the ability to send messages to friends and site administrators. Total Downloads: 983 Author: r-a-y
BuddyPress Private Messages for Followers Only This plugin adds the ability for members to send messages to their followers. Total Downloads: 208 Author: r-a-y
Private WordPress With this plugin, you may close down your blog, restrict people who can view your blog, or even open feed readers’ access only. Total Downloads: 7,316 Author: Jiehan Zheng
Friendz If you run a site with WordPress, probably some users are authors, some are contributors, and most of them are only subscribers. With Friendz each user has his own profile, even if there are no public posts by that user. Total Downloads: 645 Author: Roger Stringer
Private Network Allows Administrators at different WordPress installations, for example alice.com and bob.com, to share their posts within categories, posts with selected tags or single posts and pages. Within categories and tags is possible to share only private or include public posts. Total Downloads: 298 Author: Andrea Belvedere
Outgoing Comments (Tracker) Display your recent outgoing comments on your dashboard menu to help you revisit your friends’ sites. The main purpose is to trackback your own comments so you can know what sites you have comments on (with BackType service). Total Downloads: 238 Author: Julian Widya Perdana
WPfriends Simple plugin to keep track of your friends posts, similar to the friends page of LiveJournal. Currently you can just add WordPress and LiveJournal feeds. Total Downloads: 148 Author: Sascha Bias Status: Development
Wordbook This plugin allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. Your Facebook ‘Boxes’ tab will show your most recent blog posts. Total Downloads: 111,625 Author: Robert Tsai
WP-FacebookConnect Adds Facebook functionality to WordPress using the Facebook Connect APIs. Features include; single sign-on with your Facebook account, publish comments to the news feed, comment avatars display Facebook profile photos. Total Downloads: 43,398 Author: Adam Hupp
Meet Your Commenters When someone comments on your blog and writes a comment with his/her URL, is leaving more information than you think. This plugin displays web pages and profiles of those users in the dashboard, so you can add them as friends if you are in the same social network. Total Downloads: 6,194 Author: Alberto Varela
FriendConnect Login Google Friend Connect (GFC) adds the ability to become members of your site community using their Google, Yahoo!, AIM or OpenID accounts. This lets them interact with other visitors by making friends, sharing media, posting comments, playing games, and more. More information on Google Friend Connect. Total Downloads: 3,269 Author: Shahin Musayev
Add Post To Facebook This plugin will add a link or an image below your posts, allowing your visitors to share your posts with their friends on FaceBook. While the plugin is activated a link will appear after the content of the post with the text ‘Share on Facebook’ or the Facebook icon or both. Clicking this link will bring the user to the Facebook site. If the user isn’t logged in they will be prompted to do so. Once logged into Facebook the post will be added to the Mini-Feed of the account. Total Downloads: 972 Author: Pedro Maia
Friend Connect Commenting Plugin Visitors can log-in with their FriendConnect ID and leave a comment with that same ID or override WordPress comments system and replace it with GFC comments. Also you can add GFC gadgets as sidebar widgets. Total Downloads: 546 Author: Mauro Gonzalez
Broadcast on the 30th of December of 2011 on the Tom Coston Show with Red Rosie (the Host-less edition), discussion of domain names and the boycott of Godaddy over their support of SOPA.
Update: Contact Congress, and stop the PROTECT IP Act, now!
Update: SOPA & PIPA have been pulled, for now.