Category: internet

where I discuss new technologies, “web 2.0,” and everything cool

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‘The Hawk of Lebanon’

I finally tracked down the song that I can’t get out of my head. Firkat il-Shamal’s “The Hawk of Lebanon” is catchy as hell, in spite of its lyrics (the translated verse begins: I hail thee, hawk of Lebanon / I welcome thee, Hassan Nasrallah / Here are your men, Hezbollah / Victory, victory with the help of God).

I originally referenced it last week, after hearing it on The World (click here to listen to Aaron Schachter’s piece).

Firkat il-Shamal (Band of the North) consists of The El Haija brothers from Jenin and until this summer was known primarily as a top band on the Palestinian wedding circuit. That is, until they penned the hottest song of the summer in Gaza, and the West Bank. Israeli police are confiscating copies of the song on grounds that it is inflammatory, According to the AP. (The article, published yesterday and written by Sarah El Deeb, carries the bizarro title, “Boy band sings praises of Nasrallah.”)

The World’s Web site has an excellent feature on the song and the El Haija brothers, complete with a translationn of the lyrics and photos. (click here).

Even as the war has let up militarily, it appears that Israeli soldiers continue attacking Palestinians with Nasrallah screen savers on their mobile phones, according to this article by the Palestinian News Network’s Ali Samoudi. Interesting.

One-sided songs of war are nothing new, however, the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East contain many examples, including this, of how technology and the Internet is revolutionizing the way war is fought by states and publics. (See my presentation “The Internet is the Machine Gun of the 21st Century” and Jade Miller’s “Hezbollah, Israel, and the U.S.: A Conflict with Far-Reaching Implications.”

I am posting an MP3 of “The Hawk of Lebanon” for educational purposes and with no intent of making a political/cultural statement of any kind. (thx to BBC/PRI/WGBH)

Firkat il-Shamal -- The Hawk of Lebanon [ 10:04 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
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Protect Your Identity with Stephen Colbert

Colbert, who recently authored a guide to being expert at everything for Wired, backed himself up this week with “Protecting Your Online Identity.”

Cuz you never know who’s watching your Internetron:

WATCH: Part 1 | Part 2

Commenting on Bruce Schneier’s blog, Israel Torres summarizes:

1. Always type with your non-dominant hand – so it’s not typed in your handwriting.
2. Pick the right password – close your eyes and slap the keyboard at random.
3. Get hundreds of credit cards – never use the same one twice.
4. Defrag your hard drive once in a while – overheard a nerd say it somewhere at best buy.
5. For every real search on a search engine do a fake search – make it seem it’s not you doing the search.
6. An infected computer is a vulnerable computer – make sure you wash your computer once a month.

Now go ahead and take the Colbert Green Screen Challenge (or at least watch some of the wacky submissions).

More on Colbert cross-platform multimedia integration in this post at 3i.

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Just Say No… to Downloading

From Boing Boing:

The RIAA has just released a back-to-school propaganda video called “Campus Downloads” that is full of lies, half-truths, omissions, and intimidation aimed at convincing students to stay away from file-sharing.

This is so utterly reminiscent of the Just Say No campaign of the 80’s and the pre-Bush-era policy of educating the youth on the importance of safe sex. I just began taking a grad school course on DRM and copyright in the Internet age, etc, taught by Cory Doctorow, who opened the class by screening the aforementioned video, interspersed with his own p.o.v., the facts and a brief introduction into the saga of DRM and emerging copyright implications and developments in technology and the internet.

A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal of all places pointed out the utter ridulousness of these so-called “legal” file-sharing systems to which access is purchased by Universities, and of course then factored into students’ tuition fees.

Assuming you haven’t already seen this scare-piece — produced by the RIAA’s own campus outreach propaganda wing, stylishly named CampusDownloading — at freshman orientation, it is provided below in the spirit of helping the blood-money-hungry RIAA (though they did drop their suit against a dead man) in illegally disseminating their BS.

And just in case they come for you, Grant Robertson recently published “A Layperson’s Guide to Filesharing Lawsuits.”

Podcast Video [ 7:58 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download