• English translation of Rickard Falkvinge’s speech at the demonstration held in Stockholm on June 3rd.
• A list of civil rights breaches in the police raid on The Pirate Bay’s webhost.

The fact that TPB was able to go back online within three days (now distributed across four countries, no less) demonstrates that no amount of underhanded feudal tactics by commercial interest groups will ever stop or even abate the free flow of culture and information. If TPB went down permanently, plenty of successors would quickly show up, just as when SuprNova, Sharereactor, Audiogalaxy and Napster went away. If they managed to destroy the usefulness of Bittorrent technology, a new and more advanced technology would replace it. Piracy has likely existed since before history, and it isn’t going away.

So what for the artists and creators? If you can’t beat them (and you can’t), join them. There are several interesting movements on this front recently, but it most certainly has not arrived yet. I read an article or blog post (though I can’t find where) that talked about how the providers have to make their product more attractive to people than a free copy. This is an undoubtedly difficult thing to do, but iTunes, although seriously flawed, has shown that it could be possible. The benefit of iTunes is range and availability: it’s all there ready to recieve as quickly as your connection allows. The two biggest downsides of iTunes are the price (why should I pay as much for an album-worth of impermanent compressed music as I pay for a practically uncompressed archiveable CD?) and the overbearing DRM (which is really just a bad idea all round).

So they’re partly there. Unfortunately, I don’t have the killer business model, and I don’t think it exists yet. But that is what the industry associations should be spending their billions on, not trying to preserve the status quo. Because if anything is inevitable, it is change. And the Internets are all about change.

As for the civil rights breaches, well, most of them are internal Swedish matters, and probably won’t have much effect outside that country (or at most the EU). All that is except for number one: the intervention of the MPAA and US Government. This is a situation that’s been building up for years, and one that was predicted a long time ago by many sci-fi authors. That corporations can have so much influence over governments is just frightening. My problem with the situation is that the primary goal of a corporation is to make profit. That’s all, plain and simple. Governments are supposed to serve and represent the people, and the primary goal of people is not to make profit, but to be happy, comfortable and secure. Government therefore cannot be achieving its purpose if it is controlled by corporations. Some would say this is a naïve view, but I don’t think it need be any more complex than that.

We certainly live in interesting times (not that any previous times weren’t interesting, because most of them were… like this or this or this or this).

P.S. Apologies for the numerous gratuitous clichés. I promise I shall avoid them henceforth.

P.P.S. If you don’t use Digg yet, you should start. You could even add me as a friend to see what items I digg, which, if not useful, is at least an interesting insight. If you don’t watch Diggnation either, you should start. Good times.

This will be interesting. Very interesting.

And William Shatner is 75? He’s doing pretty well for that age.

The main point of this post, however, is as a general invite to a screening of the short film I worked on as part of the course, named Toss. Anyone is welcome. Friday, 3rd February 7:30pm at Pugg Mahone’s, corner of Elgin and Drummond Streets, Carlton. There will also be screenings of two shorts made by the other groups in the course.

As a quick life update, I have been working full-time, nine-to-five (supposedly) for the past six months or so. I recently decided to move to four days a week, so that I could have more time for personal projects, but for the past five weeks I’ve been full-time again in order to finish a not-so-personal project. Yesterday was my first day off again, and it was rather enjoyable. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about work soon.

Curiously enough, I actually attended my five year high school reunion a couple of weeks ago. Believe it, ’cause it’s true. It was an… interesting event. Most of my closer friends didn’t show up, as expected, but it was good to catch up with a couple of people. Strange how people regress to old cliques and habits when surrounded by such ghosts of the past, long thought put to rest. The school has a lot of new buildings and equipment, including a huge recording studio (which would have been so very nice to have when I was there), but from what I hear, it’s not used very much. Music was always a strength of the school, but I don’t think it has quite the emphasis these days, unfortunately. Of course, I don’t really have reason to care anymore.

Speaking of music, I’ve finally started getting back into playing the Celtic/Folk stuff. I’m playing in a band along with my uncle and another friend, and we’ve also got a couple other people lined up to join us. I’ll be sure to post any gigs we have in case anyone is interested in seeing us, though such an event may not be soon.

You’ll probably recall my numerous posts on the MA engine that used to run this site. Well, in the past month I decided to retire that (since it was old and chunky and full of hacks) in favour of a shiny new system that is progressing well, especially since I have help on this one. There are also some other interesting projects starting up, which I may well elaborate upon at a later stage.

Well, I’ll leave it at that for now, and we’ll see what the future brings for the old island.

This complete waste of your time was brought to you by full-time work, World of Warcraft, and the letter Z.

A work update: well, the hardest thing about the past week was changing my sleep patterns from 4am-2:30pm to 11:30pm-7am. Work itself has not really begun yet… it’ll take me a while to get the system and setup. As I understand it, I’ll be focussing mainly on the CMS the company is developing. It’s already in an advanced stage, so I’m still trying to understand how it works, where it’s going, and what exactly I am supposed to do with it. I’m looking forward to the moment it all clicks.

The machine I was working on for most of the week died early Friday afternoon, and I was therefore able to get a new machine. A coworker and I went over to the local computer shop, and picked out a nice set of components that should be decent to use for development. It’s a pretty good setup, and came in under $1000 (not counting my dual monitors). I then got to do the really fun part: put it together. The process wasn’t anywhere near as difficult as with my own machine. No screwdriver mishaps, no incredibly difficult heatsink installation, no multiple fan speed controllers/monitors to route and connect. I now have the unenviable task of installing software on it to look forward to on Monday.

Speaking of routing, I really need to de-spaghettify and de-dustify my machine.

The install was uneventful and easy. I opted for the stage 3 install, since the machine is primarily just a web server accessed mostly by me, and not in need of high optimisation. Furthermore, I was in somewhat of a hurry, and the machine is not the fastest thing you’ve ever come across. It’s very nice that iiNet provide a Gentoo mirror so that I can get all the packages without counting against my download limits. I just followed the installation guide, which was straight forward and simple.

The most annoying problem was trying to emerge PHP 5, some of the features of which I do actually use. Try as I might, no amount of package.use-ing or package.unmask-ing would let me get the PHP 5 Apache2 module. In the end, I had to unmerge what had installed, and use the download from php.net. Undesirable, but at least it works. Anyway, everything else has installed perfectly through the Portage system, and I find it so very much easier and less painful than RPM or compiling ‘automanually’. For instance, the other day I found I needed a plain FTP client to upload some stuff. I just typed emerge -av ftp, upon which Portage told me exactly what would be installed (including dependencies) and with what compile options, then after confirmation, downloaded, compiled and installed FTP. Simple. Easy. Fun.

The Gentoo Wiki’s HOWTOs are very useful, but in many cases they don’t cover the particular configuration one is after. This is understandable, and the backup brain is always useful in such situations.

So in the end, I find that everything works noticeably faster, there is no longer any cruft build up, and stuff works that never worked before. The install wasn’t nearly as difficult as some say, though I’m not without some prior knowledge and experience.

Gentoo is good.

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In other news, on Wednesday evening I accepted a job offer from a small-but-expanding web development company. I’m pretty excited about it. I start on Monday morning, and I will post more about it all afterwards. I’ve definitely enjoyed my little holiday these past few months, but I’m at least looking forward to doing something out of the house.

Given that I will soon be outside doing things, you may find that I post a bit more often… but maybe not.