Tag: media

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Ev.Bet is now netZoo

This blog launched one year ago, soon after its primary scribe began grad school and soon after the most disastrous (I hope) government in this lifetime made its most fatal — and still unforgiveable — mistake, it’s non-response to the Katrina disaster. Revisit the early days of EverythingBetween, now known as netZoo in the Sept. 2005 archives.

Back then I had a good time railing on Christopher Hitchens — who has become an adverb consistent with curmudgeonly in recent years — and now is a perfect anniversary opportunity to reprise.

Hitch flicked off the Real Time crowd last weekend on Bill Maher’s HBO show. Wish I were there. Bear with me, as I continue re-tweaking the site to consistently point in the right direction — netzoo.net is a URL I’ve used for various purposes since 1999, and its back full-force as I am retiring the Everything Between experiment. Welcome.

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Flickr Launches GeoTagging Feature

We knew this was imminent, as it had already been enabled by third party apps, but today Flickr went public with their official Yahoo! Maps geo-tagging mashup! What’s more, one of my fave Yahoo! props — Upcoming — will now be incorporated with Yahoo! Local and suddenly the whole world fits even more conveniently in my shirt pocket. Upcoming declares that their database has just been expanded by 3000%. woah! This is awesome news! For more tricks and tools on geotagging and mashing up your photos and more, i’d recommend OgleEarth’s links page.

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USA for Africa – Save Paul Salopek

The U.S. media’s attention to the still tender situation in south Lebanon, where UN troops are just now moving into place is waning considerably. Is it finally time to devote concentrated coverage to incomprehensible devastation elsewhere? A proposal to move 20,000 UN troops into Darfur ASAP, amid reports of a new offensive by the Sudanese government.

paul salopekMeantime, Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent Paul Salopek is on trial for espionage and related charges in southern Sudan. He is on assignment for National Geographic, and has yet to even PUBLISH a word from his trip, yet he is already in deep.

The Sudanese government has been hard on the media for years, primarily in allowing access to the Darfur crisis, where half a million people have died in a three-year campaign of government-sponsored genocide. But Salopek — winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting (see his award-winning articles from Africa in 2000 and his 1997 reporting on the Human Genome Project), — is not a spy and was not out of bounds for carrying a backup copy of his passport and a publicly available satellite map of Sudan. The Tribune has an article today highlighting Salopek’s accomplishments, sprinkled with high praise from his contacts and associates worldwide here.

Securing Salopek’s immediate release is of utmost urgency, writes Tim Rutten in the L.A. Times.

Salopek was arrested along with his driver and interpreter, both from Chad — which neighbors Sudan to the South. Chad is in the news as well these days and in no small way.

Chad is a big shot with its freshly tapped and abundant oil. Earlier today, they expelled two oil giants — Petronas and Chevron — from the country:

“From tomorrow, the representatives of Chevron and Petronas must leave Chad and close their offices… ChevronTexaco and Petronas must leave Chad because they have refused to pay their taxes,” Chad President Idriss Derby announced.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, is in Kenya encouraging reform and arriving a hometown hero (his father and grandfather are from there). There is plenty I intend to read regarding his trip including Blog coverage from the Sun Times and Tribune and this Time feature. The senator has also been closely tracking the Salopek case, according to this statement captured by the Trib:

“Press freedom is like tending a garden, it’s never done,” Obama said. “It continually has to be nurtured and cultivated and the citizenry has to value it. It’s one of those things that can slip away if we don’t tend to it.”

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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.”