According to the BBC, a teenager has been arrested for the crime of possession of “The Anarchist’s Cookbook”, and having attempted to obtain some of the chemicals required to make some of it’s recipes. While the unlicensed manufacture and use of explosives has probably been illegal for a very long time, the criminalization of possession of this book seems paradoxical:
For starters, the book is still on sale on Amazon.co.uk and has been sold legally in the UK for more than 30 years. It can be downloaded for free. (If you clicked on that link then you just came into posession of this allegedly terrorist book - please make an appropriate confession at your local police station).
I’m not a fan of this book: It’s more suited to somebody wishing to commit suicide than instigate a bloody Jihad. If you really want to blow things up you would be much better off consulting the US Army’s improvised munitions handbook. This excellent and well-researched book provides all the relevant formulations and ingredients for a wide range of high-explosives, plus handy safety tips to ensure that your ‘package’ gets ‘delivered’ to the right revolutionary or diplomat.
The Anarchist’s Cookbook is amateur stuff by comparison.
Jennifer Pariser (who is Sony BMG’s chief litigator) thinks she has found the perfect scape-goat for the continued decline of the recording industy - and funnily enough it’s the same scape-goat that music execs have always blamed ever since the days of “Home taping is killing music“:
“It’s my personal belief that Sony BMG is half the size now as it was in 2000, … thanks to piracy… when people steal, when they take music without compensation, we are harmed.”
An alternative explanation is that her company has declined because Sony BMG’s business model is no-longer relevant. We might also point out that since 2000 the record companies have invested all their limited intelligence in devising technology such as DRM or CDs with root-kits that take-over your computer, technologies which serve no purpose other than causing annoyance to people who might otherwise become Sony BMG customers.
Rather than develop new methods to engage and entertain music fans the record companies have been led by bunker-mentality lawyers like Ms Pariser who have guaranteed that companies like Sony BMG will have no role in the future of music distribution.
Why buy an official product from Sony BMG when the exact same recording can be bought from iomoio.com for a fraction of the price and without any of the annoying encumbrances. The market has found a price for music, and it’s about ten times less than what Sony BMG want to charge us. History shows that one cannot ignore the market for long before having to face the inevitable financial consequences:
As one commentator on Digg said: “I can’t wait for those idiots to go bankrupt“.
Justin McKeating’s article on the Usmanov censorship affair is a good read, because he highlights a simple fact apparently unknown to the sort of lawyers who specialize in making critical voices “Cease and Desist”. Freedom of speech is the one issue that unites just about every one of the world’s bloggers - and this incident has done a superb job of highlighting the inanity of British Libel laws, specifically the fact that any attempt to use them to silence internet speech will almost instantly result in the opposite of the desired effect.
This is yet another example of the well documented “Barbra Streisand Effect“, however with a novel twist that our quaint Libel laws and recent legal precedent from the Demon Internet case have made our British hosting companies even more risk-adverse than usual. While we can certainly blame Mr. Usmanov for his ill-considered heavy-handed litigation, we should also share the blame with cowardly Fasthosts who pulled the plug on reciept fo Usmanov’s complaints without even the most basic verification.
The worlds most famous skeptical investigator is famous for debunking celebrity charlatans like the nonsense-talking, spoon-bending mystic Uri Geller. I’m glad to say that he also has time to educate the world about entirely materialistic forms of flim-flam: this week he has turned his attention to the high-end hifi industry, specifically their tendancy to sell outrageously priced “interconnects” and speaker cables to gullible “audiophiles”.
Having served my time in community radio, I can be sure that there is no audible difference between an interconnect costing 50p and one which costs £50. There is a practical difference, which is that you have £49.50 less to spend on more important studio devices.
No recording studios engineer make use of high-end cables - they use whatever they find in the studio-spares bin which is mainly cheap, disposable cables. Good recording studios are full of expensive equipment, but these are things like mixing-desks and recording devices. The interconnects between these devices will usually be twisted-pair copper or cheap fibre-optic.
The entire CD mastering process introduces so much distortion into the recording that even if the quality of interconnects and speaker-cable made a difference it would be utterly insignificant compared to the amount of ‘noise’ that is intrinsically part of any recording.
For these reasons, I expect that James Randi’s challenge will remain un-accepted for the foreseeable future.
These new ads from Nokia are a not to subtle dig at their new Rival’s tendency to lock up their own products to the point of uselessness. Naturally Nokia are resorting to the old-standard of guerrilla-media, the fly-post:
I guess this is an attempt to make-known on the streets what has long been known amongst geeks and apple-fans, that Apple have seriously failed on what should have been the product-launch of the year.
There’s a fact behind this ad: At the moment Nokia have the most open mobile platform with the best support for open-source languages and freely-available development tools. If you know your stuff anybody can develop for Nokia, and make a living at the same time as you make the platform more desirable.
Apple, by contrast has done what they can to keep development tools out of User’s hands. History tells us that adoption of standards and technology does not favour control-freaks.
