Copyright laws prevents release of historic jazz recordings In the 1930s an audio engineer named William Savory (above) made a lot of high-quality recordings of live jazz performances of Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Lester Young, Bunny Berigan, Coleman Hawkins and others. The National Jazz Museum in Harlem acquired the collection after Savory died. Steven Seidenberg of the ABA Journal reports that "jazz experts were stunned," by the recordings. "The extent and quality of the Savory collection was beyond anything they had imagined." Unfortunately, we will probably never get to hear the recordings, thanks to current copyright laws. Among the treasures: Coleman Hawkins, the first great tenor saxophonist in jazz, playing multiple ad-lib choruses on the classic "Body and Soul." A Trove of Historic Jazz Recordings has Found a Home in Harlem, But You Can't Hear Them
Is the cryptocurrency Bitcoin a good idea Wikipedia is giving away its old servers Wikimedia, the foundation that oversees Wikipedia and related projects, is upgrading a lot of its servers, and cycling out some of the old hardware. But rather than selling it or throwing it away, they're donating it to other, worthy projects -- maybe even yours. Most systems (but possibly not all) have the following specifications: * Dual CPU 2.5 GHz * From 3GB to 24GB of RAM, depending on role. * Most have 80 GB or larger HDD (some have two hard drives, some drives are 160GB or possibly even 250GB) If you are interested, please provide the following information in your email to us: * Registered non-profit name and information. * Your contact information, including email address, phone number, and relationship with requesting non-profit. * Information on the non-profit, their charter, mission and goals. * Shipping address information for a FedEx Ground delivery (i.e., the shipment destination)* * How the servers will be used. (We like to know and share with folks!)
BitCoins: Four Objections In response to my recent blog post about BitCoins, several commenters offered responses to my objections. Today I will address these considerations as well as others I came across during my research. Objection: My refutation was circular or my refutation was just an assertion that BitCoins are worthless. This isn’t the case. I suspect many people interested in BitCoins may have some training in computer science, so I’ll use an analogy from that field to briefly restate my argument. I am not asserting that BitCoins are “worth nothing.” Objection: Some people do accept BitCoins, so they can’t be a poor currency. There are several possible explanations for this. Objection: Subjective value theory means that value only exists in the minds of people, therefore there is no reason BitCoins couldn’t be as valuable as gold or any other commodity. This objection misses the point of my argument. We have already mentioned that paper money never spontaneously emerged on the free market.
Recording industry lobbyist appointed head of copyright for European Commission Maria Martin-Prat, who took a leave from her job at the European Commission to work as Deputy General Counsel and Director of Legal Policy and Regulatory Affairs for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI -- thee international version of the RIAA, CRIA and BPI, though they're all basically the same companies), has returned to the EC to run its copyright unit. While Martin-Prat was enjoying her holiday as a lobbyist for the industry she now regulates, she took a number of extremist copyright positions, including lobbying against the private copying exemption (part of European Fair Dealing), and arguing that it should be illegal to break the DRM on the media you buy, even if you don't violate copyright in doing so. Christian Engström, Pirate MEP, writes, "Welcome to the European Union, where the big business lobby organizations are calling most of the shots at the Commission, and where citizens are just seen as a nuisance to be ignored.
Golden Cyberfetters Over the past few months a number of people have asked what I think of Bitcoin, an attempt to create a sort of private cybercurrency. Now Alexander Kowalski at Bloomberg News directs me to this Jim Surowiecki article on Bitcoin, which is very interesting. My first reaction to Bitcoin was to say, what’s new? We have lots of ways of making payments electronically; in fact, a lot of the conventional monetary system is already virtual, relying on digital accounting rather than green pieces of paper. But it turns out that there is a difference: Bitcoin, rather than fixing the value of the virtual currency in terms of those green pieces of paper, fixes the total quantity of cybercurrency instead, and lets its dollar value float. So how’s it going? But does that make the experiment a success? And because of that, there has been an incentive to hoard the virtual currency rather than spending it.
Censorship Executive Jobs - JB1628725 | Dubai, UAE Job Description Intigral is a Media/Telecoms company that aggregates, develops, and promotes digital content to the consumers of regional telecom operators. That includes all digital content offered on IPTV, the mobile, and the web. Intigral is seeking Censorship Executives with the following responsibilities: Majority of this role is to ensure that programming is within the compliance guidelines. Skills Computer literate and MS office proficiency Excellent communication skills Must work well under pressure Exposure to market trends (Gulf/Saudi Arabia) Strong judgment regarding compliance Awareness to flag issues Consistency in maintaining routine tasks Fluency in English is a must, Arabic preferred Salary Range: Job Details Job Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates Company Industry: Telecommunications; Arts/Entertainment/and Media Company Type: Employer (Private Sector) Job Role: Quality Control Joining Date: Employment Status: Unspecified Employment Type: Monthly Salary Range: Gender:
Bitcoin Cyber Geeks Outraged at Paul Krugman - Business It's quite common for liberal economist Paul Krugman to ruffle the feathers of Republicans with his Keynsian-infused biweekly columns. But today, The New York Times columnist rattled a more obscure subset of society: the reclusive cyber geeks of the Bitcoin world, who are letting their outrage be known. For the uninitiated, Bitcoin is a digital currency that can be exchanged for goods and services at participating vendors (for practical purposes, there are very few well-known organizations that accept them outside of WikiLeaks). What does Krugman think of this novel currency, which has no transaction fees and doesn't rely on a central bank? After championing it as a "good investment" (its value has "soared" in comparison with the dollar), he dismisses the currency as a workable model for society: What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. Heresy! OMG!!!! I posted a comment.
Many US ISPs in epidemic of covert search-hijacking of their customers The Electronic Frontier Foundation worked with UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute to uncover a widespread program of search-hijacking by American ISPs. Many US ISPs run covert proxies that redirect certain lucrative search queries (made by customers who believe that they are searching Google or another search engine) to their preferred suppliers, pocketing an affiliate fee for delivering their customers. Participating ISPs, which include Cavalier, Cogent, Frontier, Fuse, DirecPC, RCN, and Wide Open West (Charter used to do this, but appear to have stopped), did not disclose the practice to their customers, who were meant to believe that they were getting the search results that their preferred search-engines had presented. EFF and ICSI uncovered the vendor that supplied the hijacking software, a company called Paxfire. Widespread Hijacking of Search Traffic in the United States
Wikileaks: Guardian journalist negligently published password to unredacted cables (Update: Guardian denies) Wikileaks, facing criticism after unredacted versions of diplomatic cables escaped into the wild, today accused a Guardian journalist of negligently publishing the password required to decrypt them. A Guardian journalist has negligently disclosed top secret WikiLeaks’ decryption passwords to hundreds of thousands of unredacted unpublished US diplomatic cables. Knowledge of the Guardian disclosure has spread privately over several months but reached critical mass last week. The unpublished WikiLeaks’ material includes over 100,000 classified unredacted cables that were being analyzed, in parts, by over 50 media and human rights organizations from around the world. For the past month WikiLeaks has been in the unenviable position of not being able to comment on what has happened, since to do so would be to draw attention to the decryption passwords in the Guardian book. Wikileaks also says it is in touch with the U.S. "Our book about WikiLeaks was published last February. Interesting!
Lawrence Lessig at Occupy Wall Street [Video Link] Here's Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig in Boston NYC: "If this movement can be identified as a fight against the corruption that our political system has become, then it has the potential to bridge left and right in a way that could become much more generative, much more important, because people on the left and people on the right look at the crony capitalism of this system and they look at the way in which money from Wall Street bought the regulatory infrastructure that led to the collapse of 2008. And even worse, after the collapse of 2008, the same money blocked any reform of this regulatory infrastructure. Both the left and the right can look at this and say 'there's something deeply wrong with this system.'" Open Culture: Lawrence Lessig Occupy Wall Street Could Bridge Left And Right