guerre contre la scientologie, le fog sur san francisco, obama, obama, obama, etc.
soufron
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Anonymous vs. Scientology protest in LA today
Sean Bonner writes on Blogging.la (where he and other contributors have been covering this story for weeks): Since I first posted about Anonymous Vs. Scientology I've been following it rather closely which you've probably noticed. When the Feb 10th call to action I knew things were getting interesting. Then Newsweek picked up the story and photos started trickling in from other protests around the world this morning. I've been following the coordination efforts and planning to attend the protest today to take photos and see how many people would actually show up. In fact when I posted asking how many people you all thought might be there the response seemed to imply that most people thought no one would really show up. As Mack posted this morning that was pretty far off, and from my count over 300 people were there.Link to full post with photos. Images: Sean Bonner. Below, a "Frosty Ice Co." truck presumed to be a Scientology mobile surveillance unit, with cameras inside, to document the protestors -- some of whom were masked, others not.
 • Email to a friend • Related • My City = My Body - Biological Interactions with and in the CityOne more from the work in progress exhibition at the Royal College of Art in London. Tuur Van Balen, student of Design Interactions turned his attention to drinking water. Water service companies add fluoride to the water to reduce tooth decay, in the UK, in the US and other countries. It has also been said that the army in some countries added bromide to drinking water in order to quell sexual arousal amongst male soldiers. Male fish in some area turn female because the oestrogen in birth-control pills ends up in the river.
My City = My Body is part of ongoing research into future biological interactions with the city and more precisely into how the increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will change the way we interact with each other and our environment. The first chapter of this exploration of new biological interactions is dedicated to Thames Water, London's largest 'drinking water and wastewater service company'. Making use of the work-in-progress-show at RCA, he offered tap water (kindly provided by Thames Water) and asked visitors to donate a urine sample along with their postcode. He added the samples and postcodes to a map of London which contains biological information. Because i liked his project a lot and wanted to make sure i wouldn't write anything too silly about it, i asked Tuur to give us more details about his research. I'm passing the microphone to him: The installation / intervention in the show is part of a bigger, ongoing project called My City = My Body. I'm interested in how cities are not as much made up by streets and buildings as they are made up by our behaviour and experiences. (The London of a design-student, cycling around from Shoreditch to South-Ken is totally different from the London of a banker in a black cab with his blackberry and a loft in Notting Hill) These experiences are heavily mediated by technology, just look at the way mobile communication networks totally reshaped our cities.
What I'm interested in, is how future technologies might influence our urban behaviour. We're on the verge of a new area, an area that relies on the understanding of our body and the understanding of our DNA. What does this mean for the cities of tomorrow? Will we have DNA-surveillance and discrimination? Bio-identities and communities? ... The biological map in the interim show was an 'intervention' using the show as a platform to get feedback on these ideas. By gathering urine samples, I want to make people think about how their biological waste contains information. Pissing in public might become like leaving your digital data up for grabs, spitting in the streets like leaving your computer unprotected on the internet. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to test the urine samples in the show. As England is the Mecca of Health&Safety, it was a struggle which took me up to Senior Management to even exhibit my project in this form ("Bio-hazard, sir!") Continuing this research, I'm trying to contact a laboratory to look at bacteria, how bacteria could be a possible way of transforming our biological waste into information (inspired by Drew Endy's BioBricks project) and what the consequences in our everyday lives could be... Thanks Tuur!
Images of the project courtesy of Tuur van Balen.      
 How A Video Game Is Changing Physical Therapy"Nintendo's Wii video game system, whose popularity already extends beyond the teen gaming set, is fast becoming a craze in rehab therapy for patients recovering from strokes, broken bones, surgery and even combat injuries."
Wired 02/10/08 Clinton campaign manager quitsThe knives inside the Clinton campaign were out for Patty Solis Doyle, and her enemies finally succeeded.
I liked Patty. It's rare to have high ranking Latinos anywhere in politics, and rarer still to see Latinas in positions of real power and influence. Reports have suggested she was too much of a micromanager, and discontent over her leadership has leaked into news reports ever since Clinton's Iowa defeat. Once Williams joined the campaign, this transition appeared to be inevitable. Williams was Clinton's chief of staff when she was First Lady. 
 Record Label Quits, Uploads Albums onto The Pirate BayDependent Records, an independent record label from Germany recently decided to shut its doors and upload all its albums onto The Pirate Bay. Interestingly, a year ago the the CEO of the label mentioned piracy as one of the main reasons why they decided to quit.
In the description on the torrent download page Herwig writes: “I closed down my record label Dependent Records for good. But since I want my music to be heard by the people out there, everything I have ever published is now available on The Pirate Bay,” stressing that it’s a legal torrent, approved by the label. Over the past few months, more and more artists have decided to make their music available for free on BitTorrent sites. However, this move from Dependent Records seems to be a bit odd, especially when you read why the label decided to close its doors. Little over a year ago, Stefan Herwig wrote: “We are not closing our doors because of the existence of pirate websites, but because there are simply too many people who enjoy our bands and their songs who do not wish to pay for them.” Herwig and his team got frustrated when they saw their albums appearing on P2P networks. They don’t seem to buy the argument that indie artists actually profit from these new technologies, as Herwig writes: “A popular claim often seen on Internet fora maintains that the P2P culture weakens the majors and bolsters the independent labels. This is, we can assure you, 100% bullshit. Even if there are listeners who download first and buy later, they are clearly in the dwindling minority.” We understand Herwig’s frustration, but 100% bullshit is not completely accurate. Several studies have shown that most artists, especially those who are not mainstream, profit from filesharing. The dwindling minority Herwig is talking about probably exists because of filesharing, and may have never discovered Dependent Records’ artists if their albums weren’t available there. Music consumption has changed significantly the last decade. People consume more music simply because it is available, illegal or not. The challenge for the the recording industry is to find ways to monetize this demand, for example by all-you-can-eat plans for a fixed price. The bottom line is, piracy has shown that music is more popular than ever, and no artist will ever argue that this is a bad thing. Update: We received a response from Dependent Records’ Lothar, who wrote us: “We never decided anything like that. The offer is completely illegal.The Person who create an account with the nickname Stefan_Herwig has absolutely nothing to do with our label owner of the same name.” Obviously the uploader did have access to the entire catalog of the label, interesting… This is an article from: TorrentFreak Record Label Quits, Uploads Albums onto The Pirate Bay     
Time Lapse Video of San Francisco Fog
Hi-Def San Francisco has a beautiful time lapse video of east to west fog flowing through San Francisco on February 8th. Thanks to John Pettitt for the tip! Related Posts  The Futility of Fighting Media “Pirates”—How MediaDefender Got Hacked
For a blow-by-blow, on how the teenage hacker compromised MediaDefender’s own defenses and why he felt compelled to disseminate its secrets on the Web, read Dan Roth’s story “The Pirates Can’t Be Stopped” in Portfolio. (In case you have not seen it, the story has been out for a few weeks). The hack ended up increasing MediaDefender’s costs by 28 percent, including nearly $1 million in legal fees and “service credits” it had to offer to unhappy media customers. Here’s an excerpt from the story, which shows how exposed the company became to the righteous teenager (who refers to the company as Monkey Defenders):
The story also has some good details on how MediaDefender went after the Pirate Bay. It’s a cautionary tale for media companies everywhere. Treat file-sharers like pirates, try to clamp down on them, and they’ll always find new ways to fight back. There are too many of them. They are smarter than the media companies and the industry’s digital lapdogs. Treat them like consumers, and they’ll respond better. (Photo via Casey West). Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0    
 Word-Of-Mouth Web Promotions Boost Record Sales. Go Figure.
New York University’s Stern Business School’s Professor Vasant Dhar and Elaine Chang, a former student, have released the results of a study that proves online word-of-mouth can be used as a good predictor of a music albums sales numbers. They did not have any way to measure if the online chatter actually influenced more sales, but as a prediction of sales numbers, it turned out to be an excellent gauge. Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica said yesterday that the researchers couldn’t afford the record sales reports from Nielsen SoundScan, so they instead turned to the best indicator of all sales they could find online: Amazon sales ranks. Then to follow the online chatter, they monitored what was being said on blogs, and also how many friends the band(s) had on MySpace. They did this for 108 albums at the beginning of 2007, and followed a mixture of independent releases as well as those from the big four record labels. The results aren’t terribly surprising, but they did find that the more friends an artist’s MySpace account had, the higher the album sales. As for blog posts, if an independent release got at least 40 blog posts from everyday people (not marketing blogs), they saw sales at three times the normal. For the big four labels, 40 blog posts would show a five-fold sales increase, but to get to a six-fold increase, it took 250 or more blog posts. While all of this somewhat fascinating, it’s kinda got the smell of a “Well…DUH!” moment. Of course online mentions are going to correlate to higher sales. The Web is a natural facilitator of word-of-mouth. While it is still interesting to see actual proof of the viral marketing concept, I think the world already knew it worked this way. The more a product is in front of a consumer, the higher the sales. Of course, as we already said, there is no indicator if these numbers show that new buyers were influenced, but as a sign of how sales will do on an album, this study’s finding doesn’t come as much of a shock. 
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Nonetheless, a few days ago Dependent records’ CEO Stefan Herwig decided 
