From Clare.A.Lloyd at curtin.edu.au Fri Mar 2 06:36:18 2012 From: Clare.A.Lloyd at curtin.edu.au (Clare Lloyd) Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 05:36:18 +0000 Subject: ::fibreculture:: Call for papers - Mobile, Digital and Social Media stream at ANZCA 2012 Message-ID: Apologies for x-posting. Please feel free to circulate. Call for papers Mobile, Digital and Social Media at the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association conference Adelaide, Australia, 4-6 July 2012 All abstracts due by 16 March 2012. Full papers for the referred stream due by 16 March 2012. Non-referred papers due by 20 April 2012. The conference theme for this year focuses on 'change'. Change within the media and communications landscape. ICTs are constantly transforming, and as they do users must adapt. How are individuals and organisations adapting? How are these adjustments taking place? Where are they taking place? The mobile, digital and social media stream welcomes submissions that address the conference theme, and or contemporary issues in relation to mobile communications, mobile media, social media, and digital media. Please send abstracts and papers to the stream coordinators: Scott Rickard (srickard2012 at gmail.com) and Clare Lloyd (Clare.A.Lloyd at curtin.edu.au). Full papers are expected to be under 5000 words and follow APA style. The full conference call for papers is available at: http://www.anzca.net/conferences/2012-conference-call-for-papers.html Conference email: anzca2012 at unisa.edu.au Look forward to seeing you there, Clare and Scott Dr Clare Lloyd Lecturer | Department of Internet Studies School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts Curtin University Tel | +61 8 9266 3247 Fax | +61 8 9266 3152 Email | Clare.A.Lloyd at curtin.edu.au Web | http://netstudies.curtin.edu.au Publications | available here [Description: Description: email_logo.png] Curtin University is a trademark of Curtin University of Technology. CRICOS Provider Code 00301J (WA), 02637B (NSW) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 2097 bytes Desc: image001.png URL: From geert at desk.nl Sat Mar 10 16:36:35 2012 From: geert at desk.nl (Geert Lovink) Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 16:36:35 +0100 Subject: ::fibreculture:: 3 assistant professor positions in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam Message-ID: There are three vacant positions for assistant professor in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. Assistant Professor New Media and Digital Culture for 38 hours per week vacancy number W12-043 The ideal candidate would have familiarity with the study of digital media in the humanities, and have made acquaintance with such areas as digital humanities, information aesthetics and visualization, Internet studies, media arts, media history, media theory, social media and/or virtual ethnography. Internet skills are essential, as is up-to-date knowledge of Internet culture. Practical experience in working with Web-based applications (e.g., blogs and wikis) is desirable. The new media and digital culture team is part of the Media Studies department and concerns itself with research strategies for the critical study of Internet culture. The Assistant Professor is expected to teach on both the bachelor's and master's degree levels, in courses concerned with such topics as digital journalism, digital aesthetics, Internet research methods and techniques, media archaeology as well as the politics of code. Candidates also should have a new media research agenda. Tasks ? teaching and developing teaching activities both as part of and outside the Media and Culture programme; ? (co-)supervising Bachelor's and Master's theses; ? independently conducting research in the area mentioned, resulting in contributions to leading international publications; ? co-supervising PhD candidates; ? making a contribution to raising contract and indirect funding. Requirements ? relevant PhD degree; ? experience in research and excellent research skills, evidenced by publications in renowned international professional journals / book form; ? teaching experience at the university level and demonstrable didactic abilities and / or training, evidence by an educational portfolio; ? experience with digital and audio-visual equipment; affinity with ICT in academic education; ? team spirit and capable of functioning at all levels of more than one study programme; ? willingness to develop in a multidisciplinary capacity in order to be able to participate in multiple areas of the Faculty's curriculum; ? organisational experience and skills; ? thorough knowledge of Dutch and English; non-native Dutch speakers must achieve fluency in Dutch within two years. Further information Further information about this vacancy can be obtained from professor dr. P.P.R.W. Pisters, e-mail p.p.r.w.pisters at uva.nl. Appointment As a result of the Faculty policy pertaining to the flexibilisation of its workforce, this vacancy has been marked as a ?transfer position?. Transfer positions are only part-time. This means that when a staff member is employed in a transfer position, he/she will not be given a permanent contract and will be required to transfer to a new position within the UvA when the period of employment formally ends. If no alternative position is available at the University, termination of employment will follow. In such cases, the University will provide the necessary support. There are three vacant positions for the assistant professor New Media: ? For the 1,0 position, the initial appointment will be on a temporary basis for a period of two years. Subject to satisfactory performance, this will be followed by a permanent appointment. ? For two positions (0,8 and 0,7) appointment will be on a temporary basis for a period of no more than two years. There will be no permanent position for these two positions. You are asked to let us know in the application, if you are applying for only the permanent position, or also for the temporary positions. The gross monthly salary will range from ? 3,195 (scale 11) - ? 4,970 (scale 12), based on a full-time appointment (38 hours a week). Job application Applications should include a curriculum vitae and should be sent before 24 March 2012 to the Universiteit van Amsterdam, to the attention of the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Prof.dr. F.P.I.M. van Vree, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam. Please state the vacancy number in the upper left corner of the envelope, and make clear in your application which position(s) you are applying for (permanent or also temporary position).You may also submit your application by e-mail; solliciteren2012-fgw at uva.nl. In this case please state the vacancy number in the subject field. The selection process will include a trial lecture. From techdirt at techdirt.com Tue Mar 20 10:01:01 2012 From: techdirt at techdirt.com (Techdirt Daily) Date: 20 Mar 2012 09:01:01 -0000 Subject: ::fibreculture:: Julian Assange's Ultimate Publicity Stunt: Running For Australian Senate? Message-ID: <20120320023110.22850264@techdirt.com> Techdirt Daily Email for Tuesday, 20 March 2012 (Click here to visit the site) Julian Assange's Ultimate Publicity Stunt: Running For Australian Senate? (Politics) by Mike Masnick from the really,-now? dept on Monday, March 19th, 2012 @ 10:57PM Even for supporters of Wikileaks and what it tried to achieve, Julian Assange is a polarizing figure -- often accused of letting his ego get in the way of good judgment. So, to be honest, it comes as little surprise that he's announced plans to run for the Australian Senate, even while he's still stuck in the UK, awaiting a ruling on being extradited to Sweden (with some concerns about eventually being extradited to the US as well). Wikileaks also announced plans to have someone else run against current Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who Assange feels has not done enough to support him. While there have been some questions about the legality of such a run, enough Australian legal experts seem to agree that he can probab ly do it. Whether or not he can actually get very much support is another question altogether. However, from an outside observer's standpoint, it's going to make the next Australian elections a lot more interesting. Oh, and just for amusement's sake, one Australian publication mocked Wikileaks for misspelling Gilard's electorate, given its namesake's similarities to Assange himself: Assange had an electoral learning process of his own which played out live on Twitter yesterday morning, with a first message from the Wikileaks feed announcing only that the organisation would be ?fielding a candidate to run against Julia Gillard in her home seat of Laylor (sic)?. Very shortly afterwards, a second tweet declared: ?We have discovered that it is possible for Julian Assange to run for the Australian Senate while detained. Julian has decided to run.? The spelling error in the initial tweet betrayed a curious ignorance of Australian history, given that the electorate in question is named after Peter Lalor, who led the famous Eureka Rebellion at the Ballarat goldfields in 1854. One would have thought that Lalor, a radical activist who saw his efforts crudely suppressed by the authorities before going on to a distinguished career as a parliamentarian, might have been better known to Assange ? if not to the extent that he would have spe lt his name correctly, then at least so far that he might have misspelled it in a phonetically correct manner (?Lawlor?). But I digress. I would be pretty surprised if this candidacy (or either candidacy if they really do raise two candidates) actually goes anywhere, but that won't make it any less entertaining to follow. 18 Comments No That Won't Backfire At All: Questionable Story About Obama's Daughter Disappears From The Web (Journalism) by Mike Masnick from the rampant-speculation dept on Monday, March 19th, 2012 @ 6:57PM Generally speaking, the press has something of an implicit agreement that they don't use underage Presidential offspring in politically tinged stories. For obvious reasons, it's considered to be a pretty cynical move. Of course, if they actually do something newsworthy, it might be a different story. This afternoon a bunch of stories started appearing, talking about how President Obama's daughter Malia was traveling in Oaxaca, Mexico as part of a trip with some classmates (and 25 secret service agents). This story was reported on by the AFP wire service, and some tied it to the fact that the State Department recently issued a travel advisory urging Americans to stay away from parts of Mexico. Not surprisingly, some picked up on this story to suggest some sort of... something. Double standard? Hypocrisy? Of course, the details suggest this really was not much of a story. I f you actually read the State Department warning, it makes it clear that there is no warning in place for Oaxaca -- so this trip doesn't appear to go against that warning. It seems likely, then, that the AFP decided to pull back the story once someone pointed that out, but the story is now rapidly disappearing from a variety of online publications (big and small), leading to questions and easy political points about how the story is being "scrubbed." Google News listed about 27 versions of the story when I looked, and later, following the links, I found almost every single one of them was flat out gone. In most cases, they were replaced with a 404 (including The Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Australian) or sometimes just redirecting people to a front page (Huffington Post and International Business Times). The only version I still found up was at TurkishPress.com, but it might not last very long. Now, I tend to think that using the President's underage kids for a political story is generally a low blow and not particularly nice, but if there is something newsworthy happening, it should be fair game. I also think that, from the sound of it, this story got blown out of proportion by those who didn't bother to actually read the details of the destination or the State Department's specific warning which notes no problem at that destination. But, having said all that, simply having the article disappear completely, rather than putting up a correction or an explanation of what happened, simply fuels both the conspiracy theories and the interest in the story. It's exactly the wrong way to go about dealing with the situation. There are a variety of possibilities here. The administration may have asked the press to pull the story, which would only generate more interest in the news. The AFP, upon realizing that it shouldn't have posted the story, may have issued a kill order/ retraction of sorts. Or perhaps there's some other reasoning. But there are good ways to handle these situations and ways that are guaranteed to backfire. Simply making the articles disappear is pretty much guaranteed to backfire and generate more interest in the story, even if it's a total non-story. Replacing the original story with a "hey, we thought this, but we got it wrong," would have been much more effective. 38 Comments DailyDirt: Pigs In Space... ((Mis)Uses of Technology) by Michael Ho from the urls-we-dig-up dept on Monday, March 19th, 2012 @ 5:00PM The space race has been over for quite some time now, and we're headed into unknown territory now -- without a singular mission for space exploration. There are a few manned missions still on-going, and there's also a lot of experimental spacecraft under development. Here are just a few space projects that use some interesting technologies. A Japanese construction company says it might be possible to build a space elevator by 2050 using carbon nanotubes to form a cable 96,000 kilometers long. There's no way to estimate the cost for this gigantic elevator to space, though, since the materials to actually build it can't be manufactured (yet?). [url] Ion propulsion systems have been under development for decades, and the Dawn spacecraft used an ion thruster to get a closer look at a big asteroid named Vesta. Ion thrusters can run for a long time, unlike chemical propulsion, and achieve velocities far greater than conventional rockets. [url] Masten Space Systems' Xombie suborbital rocket had a successful test flight, demonstrating vertical takeoff and landing maneuvers for NASA. This rocket uses a flight control system that could help land spacecraft on asteroids or other non-terrestrial bodies. [url] To discover more links on space exploration, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon universe. [url] By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too. Why Hollywood's Six Strike Plan Should Be Investigated For Antitrust Violations (Legal Issues) by Mike Masnick from the good-points dept on Monday, March 19th, 2012 @ 3:49PM With there being renewed interest in the questionable deal between the RIAA/MPAA and the US's largest ISPs to set up a "six strikes"graduated response plan to cause trouble for those accused (not convicted) of file sharing, some are beginning to realize that the whole plan deserves serious antitrust scrutiny. After all, you have the representatives of two major industries getting together in a room to collude on a plan that will make internet access more expensive for users. On top of that, since it's based on mere accusations (not convictions) -- and those accusations will come from a company with a terrible track record for accuracy -- you'll have to pay to challenge a strike and (most ridiculous of all) if you do challenge it, you are limited to just six defenses -- significantly less than are allowed under copyright law. That is, if the work is in the public domain, but published after 1923,you have no official defense under the plan. In other words, not only does the plan involve collusion a mong multiple big industries, but at the outset it assumes guilt before innocence, makes you pay to claim you're innocent, and won't even let you use basic defenses afforded to you under existing copyright law. All of that seems of questionable legality. It also makes the White House's direct involvement in brokering this plan look even worse. And, once again, it makes us wonder why the real stakeholders, internet users, weren't given a seat at the table. If they were, perhaps this would have been avoided. Of course, given the White House's involvement in brokering the deal, there doesn't seem much likelihood that the Attorney General will bother to scrutinize the agreement, since it would effectively be challenging his own boss. That said, the article linked above suggesting that an antitrust inquiry seems necessary is written by Sean Flaim, and is based on his even more thorough research paper detailing why this program needs to be reviewed for antitrust violations. Unfortunately, the chances of that actually happening are still pretty slim. 87 Comments The Pirate Bay Claims It's Going To Host The Site Via Drones Flying Over International Waters ((Mis)Uses of Technology) by Mike Masnick from the the-pirate-ships-continue-to-go dept on Monday, March 19th, 2012 @ 2:46PM One of the more amazing things about the recent moves by the entertainment industry to put in place stricter laws around the globe to attack file sharing, is that they still don't realize how pointless this is compared to the only real solution, which is to offer more of what consumers actually want, rather than trying to force them into some old way of doing business. For every "victory" the industry declares, we see more and more evidence that the file sharing just moves further away from what the industry can control (and keeps growing). The Pirate Bay, of course, has always been one of the leaders in mocking the legacy entertainment industry as it continues to operate, despite years-long efforts to shut it down. And even as there are reports of new raids pending, the organization has shifted to magnet links, meaning that taking it down will be even more meaningless than in the past. Even so, the folks involved in TPB are still trying to go further. As highlighted on TorrentFreak, the latest plan from TPB is to see if it canserve the site from GPS-controlled drones flying over international waters: One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary. With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we're going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war. We're just starting so we haven't figured everything out yet. But we can't limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we're building, that's more than enough. Whether or not they can actually pull it off is a totally different question, but as we've been discussing recently, drone technology is getting cheaper, and the potential disruption of the Raspberry Pi should not be underestimated. While such things might not really be ready yet to do what TPB hopes to do, it's not difficult to project these trends out just a little ways to see that not only will it be possible in the not-too-distant future, but it would be a surprise if we didn't see setups that go way beyond what TPB is currently proposing before too long. 79 Comments From Lori Drew To Dharun Ravi, Punishing People Based On Others' Suicides Is A Mistake (Free Speech) by Mike Masnick from the giving-the-wrong-message dept on Monday, March 19th, 2012 @ 1:40PM A few years back, we covered the Lori Drew case, involving charges brought against a woman who stupidly set up a fake user account on MySpace to try to find out what was going on with a girl the woman's daughter had some issues with. The "fake account" was of a boy who the real 13-year-old girl became very friendly with. At some point, the "boy" turned on the girl, said some nasty things to her -- including "the world would be better off without" her -- and cut off communications. The girl committed suicide soon after. Lots and lots of people wanted Lori Drew brought up on charges for the girl's death. While we found Drew's actions to be incredibly immature and ridiculous, we were much more concerned with efforts to pin the suicide on her. Of course, the law wouldn't allow such a thing, so prosecutors trumped up some charges, involving a claim that she committed a felony by not following MySpace 's terms of service. She was found guilty of a misdemeanor (not felony) charge -- which was then dropped by the judge, who wasn't comfortable with the ruling. Of course, this did lead to a flurry of attempts to pass "cyberbullying" laws -- which try to make it a crime of some sort to be a jerk online. This is problematic for a variety of reasons, especially since it raises significant First Amendment issues, in part because "being a jerk" is extremely subjective. But the worst part is that much of what is considered to be "jerky" behavior is determined after the other party commits suicide. This is extremely problematic -- because whether or not your actions are seen as criminal depends almost entirely on how someone else reacts to them. If they shake off your actions, then you're fine. If they commit suicide, you get punished. Thus, the incentive then is actually for kids to seriously hurt themselves, if someone acts in a mean way towards them, as that increases the likelihood of the bully getting punished. That doesn't sound like a good incentive system. I'm thinking about all of this after hearing about the guilty verdict against Dharun Ravi -- the Rutgers student who surreptitiously filmed his roommate engaged in a sexual encounter with another male. That roommate, Tyler Clementi, later killed himself, once he found out about it being filmed. Like the Lori Drew case, much of the prosecution focused on the dead teenager -- and you can understand why. It's a horrible (and horrifying) story. But, again, the reaction is much more based on the end results, rather than the initial action. No doubt, what Ravi did was despicable, but is it really criminal? Law professor Paul Butler has an excellent opinion piece explaining why this is an overreaction. He notes that Ravi was clearly immature and did an obnoxio us thing in invading his roommate's privacy, but the desire to see him locked up (and apparently there's a good chance he'll be deported to India, despite not having lived there since he was 2 years old) is almost entirely because of Clementi's tragic death: Let's be honest. A lot of people want a pound of flesh from Ravi because they blame him for Clementi's death. Tyler's reaction was tragic, and it was idiosyncratic.... No judge in the country would have allowed a homicide prosecution, because, legally speaking, Ravi did not cause the death, nor was it reasonably foreseeable. Of the millions of people who are bullied or who suffer invasions of privacy, few kill themselves. [....] For his stupidity, Ravi should be shamed by his fellow students and kicked out of his dorm, but he should not be sent to prison for years and then banished from the United States. As Butler notes, the rush to the criminal justice system, and the focus on blaming Ravi, takes us away from a more reasonable place in thinking about how to deal with these things: The problem with broad laws like New Jersey's is that they come too close to punishing people for what they think. Bigotry, including homophobia, is morally condemnable, but in a free country, it should not be a punishable offense.... [....] Ravi did not invent homophobia, but he is being scapegoated for it. Bias against gay people is, sadly, embedded in American culture. Until last year people were being kicked out of the military because they were homosexuals. None of the four leading presidential candidates -- President Obama, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich -- thinks that gay people should be allowed to get married. A better way to honor the life of Clementi would be for everyone to get off their high horse about a 20-year-old kid and instead think about how we can promote civil rights in our own lives. Though a national conversation about civility and respect would have been better, as usual for social problems, we looked to the criminal justice system. The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any country in the world. We are an extraordinarily punitive people. Indeed, as tragic as Clementi's death is, it did inspire thousands of people to act in a positive manner against homophobia by launching the It Gets Better project -- a very powerful way that tons of people have gathered to try to pass along the message to bullied teens (mainly from the LGBT community) that things do, in fact, get better. That response is a way of trying to deal with the actual problems. Going after Ravi with these charges just seems like a punitive action based on what Clementi did after Ravi's clearly childish and obnoxious actions. It certainly can be difficult to separate out what Ravi did from what Clementi did later, but in a society based on law, that's what we're supposed to do. Being a jerk should get you shunned, but not put in prison. 45 Comments Summit Entertainment Claims To Own The Date November 20, 2009; Issues Takedown On Art Created On That Day(Trademark) by Mike Masnick from the hello-ip-fraud dept on Monday, March 19th, 2012 @ 12:38PM Summit Entertainment, the movie studio behind the Twilight films, is no stranger to ridiculous-to-insane overreaches of intellectual property law. In fact, the studio seems to make a habit out of it. The company has sued Zazzle because some of its users made fan art inspired by Twilight. It's shut down a Twilight fanzine. It's said that only it can make a documentary about the real town where the fictionalTwilight story is based. It's sued to stop a fashion designer from factually stating that a character in one of the movies wore its jacket. Itshut down a silly 8-bit YouTube game. It issued a takedown on a song that was written years before the Twilight movies. It went after Bath & Bodyworks for daring to to sell a body lotion called Twilight Woods, which had nothing to do with the movies. It aggressively sued a fanand pressed criminal charges< /a> for tweeting some behind the scenes photos of a Twilight movie. It also sued the guy who registered twilight.com back in 1994. This is a company that thinks that the world revolves around its trademarks, and it appears to have little concern for what the law actually says. Its latest move is particularly asinine. The company came across the following lovely image created by artist Kelly Howlett and posted to Zazzle, and issued a takedown. If you're thinking that image has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Twilight, or any other Summit property, you're entirely correct. But it turns out that Summit Entertainment has decided it owns the date 11-20-09 (that's Kelly's Facebook explanation of what happened, found via Bleeding Cool), which was the date the sketch was created, and what it was tagged with. It also happens to be the date that theTwilight movie New Moon was released. Summit has no legitimate claim here. At all. And yet it took the artwork down anyway, because that's the kind of IP abusers they are. Zazzle eventually came to its senses and restored the image, and Howlett is offering it on Society 6 as well. If Summit Entertainment had anyone with a soul working for them, they'd buy a few hundred prints to apologize. Either way, the company has such a long and consistent history of abusing intellectual property law, isn't there a point at which we just say that the company no longer deserves any such power? If you regularly abuse monopoly privileges, shouldn't they be taken away? 54 Comments :-( Samsung, Research In Motion Sued For Making It Easy To Use Emoticons (Patents) by Mike Masnick from the thus,-infringing-a-patent dept on Monday, March 19th, 2012 @ 11:39AM All the way back in 2001, we wrote about how the brilliant satirists at Despair Inc. successfully trademarked :-( and announced that they planned to sue 7 million internet users for violating the trademark. The actual announcement was pretty funny -- even though not everyone got the joke. In 2006, we also had a story that mentioned a whole bunch of patents and patent applications related to emoticons. It appears that one of those is now being used in a lawsuit against Samsung and RIM for having the gall to create a button that makes it easy to pick an emoticon without typing it in. The patent in question (US Patent 7,167,731) really is for having a button that lets you pick emoticons. How this is possibly patentable is beyond me. But, for some reason, examiner Lee Nguyen thought it was somehow non-obvious. The patent was originally assigned to Wildseed, a mobile accessories firm that AOL bought in 2005. The patent itself then went to Varia Mobil, who moved it to Varia Holdings to Varia and back to Varia Holdings. It's Varia Holdings bringing the lawsu it. Varia appears to just be a trolling operation (of course). It's fairly stunning that anyone considered this a valid patent at any point. That it's now being used as the basis for a lawsuit should (once again) raise significant questions about the USPTO's approval process for patents. Read More | 42 Comments A Terrifying Look Into The NSA's Ability To Capture And Analyze Pretty Much Every Communication (Privacy) by Mike Masnick from the be-afraid dept on Monday, March 19th, 2012 @ 10:33AM You may recall that we've written a few times about the "turf war" between the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department's NSA over who gets to run the "cybersecurity" efforts for the country. The NSA has been particularly insistent that all cybersecurity efforts should go through it, and an amazing, detailed and positively frightening article from James Bamford at Wired Magazine, which is ostensibly about the NSA's massive new spy center in Bluffdale, Utah, but is really a rather detailed (and well-sourced) account of just how much spying the NSA is doing on pretty much all communications. The article breaks some news in not just confirming the details of the infamous warrantless wiretapping that st arted under President Bush and has continued unabated under President Obama, but also explains how the program is more advanced and more expansive than previously thought. Basically, the NSA now collects everything, whether or not the law allows it -- and it's building massively powerful computers to break any encryption that is used on that communication. In regards to the question of "cybersecurity," one reason why the NSA wants official control over cybersecurity is that's the curtain it tries to hide behind to explain its massive spying operations: A short time later, [NSA deputy director Chris] Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency?s associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had simply dubbed ?the spy center.? Hoping for some details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard? ?Absolutely not,? he said with a self-conscious half laugh. ?Nor do I want them sp ying on me.? For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: ?It?s a state- of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation?s cybersecurity.? While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it?s collected, and what is done with the material are far more important issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice cover?it?s easy to explain, and who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the center as ?a great tribute to Utah,? then added, ?I can?t tell you a lot about what they?re going to be doing, because it?s highly classified.? And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official ground-breaking for the nation?s largest and most expensive cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who?d originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was Glenn A. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country?s human and electronic spies. The entire article is worth reading, as it details the extent of the NSA's spying, as well as their near total lack of concern for what the law says it's allowed to do. A former NSA official who left the agency soon after all this started notes that the organization "violated the Constitution setting it up," and that "they didn't care. They were going to do it anyway and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way." This same officials notes multiple ways that the NSA could have set up programs that only focused on specific "targets" or those close to the targets, to stay within the framework of the law. He even suggested these to people at the NSA and elsewhere in the federal government and was completely brushed off. The temptation to collect everything is apparently just too powerful. As the article notes, even if such an effort may be useful in getting information on those who wish to do us harm, the threat of it being massively abused is incredibly high: But there is, of course, reason for anyone to be distressed about the practice. Once the door is open for the government to spy on US citizens, there are often great temptations to abuse that power for political purposes, as when Richard Nixon eavesdropped on his political enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA to spy on antiwar protesters. Those and other abuses prompted Congress to enact prohibitions in the mid-1970s against domestic spying. But it appears that things have gone very much in the other direction now, with the NSA having much more ability to spy on people today than in the past. And even the idea of strong encryption may only be a temporary way of keeping the NSA from knowing everything you've communicated. Bamford details the NSA's classified effort to build superfast supercomputers that can help in breaking even the strongest encryption being used today. It's not quite there yet, from the sound of things, but it also appears they're advancing faster than most people predicted. The whole article is worth a read, but it's a frightening reminder of the amount of power the federal government has today and its ability to abuse it. 84 Comments Indian Court Orders 104 Sites Censored Based On The Say So Of The Indian Music Industry (Free Speech) by Mike Masnick from the censorship-by-any-other-name dept on Monday, March 19th, 2012 @ 9:32AM Torrentfreak notes the interesting timing on this one. Just as MPAA boss Chris Dodd was in India talking up the importance of stricter copyright laws (like SOPA), an Indian court ordered a SOPA-like block of 104 sites that were declared as "dedicated to infringement" by the Indian Music Industry (IMI). What's interesting is that as you look down the list of blocked sites, they include many that appear to focus on movies, not music -- so it's not clear why IMI gets to decide what's infringing and what's not. Reading some of the details, it's pretty clear that the sites in question were not given a chance to present their side in court. In fact, it appears that even the IMI bosses admit that they haven't yet proved that all of those sites are infringing: Taking the sites to court is not humanly feasible: when we went after one site, we got the impression that the owner was in the US, based out of the Bahamas, and it was very difficult to get him to respond. Our person has to pose as an advertiser before the owner came on an email, and we eventually found that it was a young kid in Rajkot, and the entire process took six months. Going after 104 sites ? can you imagine the effort, the time and the money spent in chasing this? The better route is to establish comprehensively that each ofthese 104 sites is pirating content, and we?re doing that ? as a body and not a company ? and it?s easier to interact with the ISP now. In other words, shoot first, deal with the fallout of incorrect censorship later. Not surprisingly, the head of the IFPI (the international RIAA) cheered on this result: ?This decision is a victory for the rule of law online and a blow to those illegal businesses that want to build revenues by violating the rights of others,? said IFPI CEO Frances Moore in a statement. But in a clear signal that for the music and movie industries even the toughest of anti-piracy measures are never enough, Moore says that current developments are a good start. ?The court ruled that blocking is a proportionate and effective way to tackle website piracy,? Moore noted, adding that the Indian government should now ?build on this progress? by advancing further legislation to tackle digital piracy. The situation here seems extreme and disproportionate. Not only have the serious problems with DNS and IP blocking been described concerning internet security, but it's pretty clear that efforts like this don't work. There are already reports of sites from the list reappearing under different domain names, and all the court order is doing is spreading the game of whac-a-mole. Amusingly, the same Indian music exec who made the claim above about how it's impossible to actually track down these sites, later (in the same interview) admits he doesn't want to shut down these sites, because they have a "passion for music" and he'd like to work out deals with them. Of course, getting a court order to block access to their existing sites is a funny way to say "hey, I'd like to work with you." 57 Comments Judge Chooses Pi Day To Reject Lawsuit Over Attempt To Copyright Pi As A Song (Copyright) by Mike Masnick from the can't-copyright-facts dept on Monday, March 19th, 2012 @ 8:25AM Last year, we wrote about a dispute between two guys who had both recorded songs based on the number pi. A guy named Lars Erickson had recorded The Pi Symphony back in 1992 and registered a copyright on the output. It was based on assigning notes to the numbers 0 to 9, then playing them according to the sequence of pi. On March 14th, 2011 -- also known as Pi Day, since the 3/14 date matches the 3.14 beginning of pi -- musician Michael Blake came up with a similar idea. According to NPR's report on the song: He decided the song would be in C, then assigned each note a number: C=1, D=2 and so on up through 9. Using those assignments, he played the sequence of pi: 3.14159 through 31 decimal places. He assigned numbers to chords, too, but could only play the chords every other note and still make it sound vaguely musical. Finally, he used pi as the basis for the tempo ? it's 157 beats per minute, which is half of 314. He played this part on several instruments, as you can see in the video above, and layered them to make a song. The result isn't exactly catchy, but it's certainly melodic. Apparently Erickson got upset about this -- though he admits he was mainly upset that his own comments on the YouTube video of Blake's song were deleted. So he filed a lawsuit claiming copyright infringement. Blake successfully had the lawsuit transferred from Nebraska to Portland, Oregon, and has now succeeded in having the case dismissed, with the ruling itself issued on March 14 -- Pi Day once again. The ruling is embedded below, and it's a worthwhile read, highlighting the limitations of copyright. It actually goes into a fairly detailed description of the separation between ideas and expression, as well as questions about "substantial similarity." The conclusion: The primary similarity between Pi Symphony and "What Pi Sounds Like" is the musical pattern formed by transposing the digits of pi to a set of musical notes. That pattern is not protected by Mr. Erickson?s copyright for Pi Symphony. Pi is a non-copyrightable fact, and the transcription of pi to music is a non-copyrightable idea. The resulting pattern of notes is an expression that merges with the non- copyrightable idea of putting pi to music: assigning digits to musical notes and playing those notes in the sequence of pi is an idea that can only be expressed in a finite number of ways. This does not mean that Mr. Erickson?s copyright is invalid, only that Mr. Erickson may not use his copyright to stop others from employing this particular pattern of musical notes. What may be protected by copyright is the combination of that pattern with other musical elements: the choice of scale, rhythm, harmony, and embellishments or variation, for example.... Pi Symphony and "What Pi Sounds Like" employ different rhythms, different phrasing, different harmonies, and different tempos. The court does not agree with Mr. Erickson that the melodies of Pi Symphony and "What Pi Sounds Like" are sufficiently similar in their cadence or tempo to raise a question of substantial similarity. If there are additional similarities that relate to protectable elements of Mr. Erickson?s musical work, those similarities are minor and scattered throughout the work. For one work to be substantially similar to another, more than incidental and occasional similarities are required.... Thus, after the similarities based on unprotected elements of Pi Symphony are set aside, very few--if any--similarities remain. Mr. Erickson?s copyright is therefore ?thin? and protects his work only from virtually identical copying... The court also dismisses Erickson's claim of "unfair competition," noting that what appeared to be straight up jealousy is no reason for a legal claim: Copyright protects against the copying of original elements of an author?s work. It does not protect the copyright holder's goodwill, market status, or artistic success. It does not even protect the author's hard work in being the first to create a compilation of information otherwise available in the public domain. See Feist, 499 U.S. at 359-360 (rejecting the ?sweat of the brow? theory of copyright protection). These limitations derive from the constitutional basis of copyright, which is ?To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.? U.S. Const. art. 1, sec. 8, cl. 8. Copyright is thus intended to protect the original work of authors without granting monopolies over facts or ideas that would hinder further progress.... Given statutory law, the Constitution, and Supreme Court precedent, Mr. Erickson cannot use his copyright to stop Mr. Blake from employing the same idea?the transcription of the digits of pi to musical notes. Nice to see the court lay out the reasoning so clearly. It's unclear if the court recognized the symbolic nature of issuing the ruling on Pi Day, but either way, it was a nice move. Read More | 31 Comments Senators Tell The Obama Administration To Reveal Its Secret Interpretation Of The Patriot Act (Privacy) by Mike Masnick from the and-again-and-again dept on Monday, March 19th, 2012 @ 7:06AM Over the last year or so, we've been covering Senator Ron Wyden's efforts to get Obama administration officials to come public with theirsecret interpretation of the Patriot Act. Wyden, of course, cannot say how they're interpreting the Patriot Act, though there have been clues, suggesting an extremely broad interpretation, that effectively allows them to spy on Americans, in direct contrast to the way most people (including many in Congress) believe the law allows. In the past, intelligence officials have basically said that they will not reveal how they interpret the Patriot Act because they don't want to, and doing so might reveal some of the details of how they spy on people. Of course, keeping certain details secret concerning specific operations to monitor threats is reasonable. But a secret interpretation of the law that appears to go against what the law says directly? That's not acceptable. If the government can just make up how it interprets laws, and then keep those interpretations secret, we no longer have representative democracy at all. We have a sham government. Given all of this, the NY Times and the ACLU sued the government for failing to reveal its interpretation of the law under a Freedom of Information Act. The administration is now seeking to get the two lawsuits dismissed... leading Senators Wyden and Udall to send a rather direct and forceful letter to Attorney General Holder questioning this move. I'll include a bunch of snippets below, but one key bit in this letter, which I believe is new, is the acknowledgement that further information that Wyden and Udall have come across suggest that the secret surveillance operation that makes use of this secret interpretation of the law is not even effective: We would also note that in recent months we have grown increasingly skeptical about the actual value of the "intelligence collection operation" discussed in the Justice Department's recent court filing regarding the pending lawsuits. This has come as a surprise to us, as we were initially inclined to take the executive branch's assertions about the importance of this "operation" at face value. We will provide more detail about this skepticism in classified correspondence. That's a pretty pointed claim, and certainly makes clear another reason why the administration is fighting so hard against revealing the secret interpretation. They know that once people find out just how widely they're tracking people under this bogus interpretation of the law, that not only will people be upset about it, but that the administration won't even be able to prove that such efforts did anything to prevent terrorism in the country. On to some other key parts of the letter: It is a matter of public record that section 215, which is a public statute, has been the subject of secret legal interpretations. The existences of these interpretations, which are contained in classified opinions issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (or "FISA Court") has been acknowledged on multiple occasions by the Justice Department and other executive branch officials. We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans thinkthe law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn't know what its government thinks the law says. That seems like quite an understatement. It really makes you wonder what country we live in today. I'm fine with the government keeping certain things secret -- but one thing that it should never keep secret is the law itself. That's not a democracy any more at all, a point made in the letter as well: In a democratic society -- in which the government derives its power from the consent of the people -- citizens rightly expect that their government will not arbitrarily keep information from them. Americans expect their government to operate within the boundaries of publicly- understood law, and as voters they have a need and a right to now how the law is being interpreted, so that they can ratify or reject decisions made on their behalf. To put it another way, Americans know that their government will sometimes conduct secret operations, but they don't think that government officials should be writing secret laws. Later, the letter notes that the administration certainly has been willing to reveal this secret interpretation to some members of Congress (such as the two of them), but it appears that even many members of Congress have no idea how the administration is interpreting the law: While the executive branch has worked hard to keep the government's official interpretation of the Patriot Act secret from the American public it has, to its credit, provided this information in documents submitted to Congress. However, these documents are so highly classified that most members of Congress do not have any staff who are cleared to read them. As a result, we can say with confidence that most of our colleagues in the House and senate are unfamiliar with these documents, and that many of them would be surprised and angry to learn how the Patriot Act has been interpreted in secret. Wyden and Udall are equally troubled by the insistence by the administration that it needs to keep its interpretation of these laws secret to prevent adversaries from understanding what's being done. They point out that this is "chilling logic" as it could mean that the government could basically create all sorts of secret intelligence laws: The crux of the Justice Department's argument for keeping the official interpretation of the law secret is that this secrecy prevents US adversaries from understanding exactly what intelligence agencies are allowed to do. We can see how it might be tempting to latch on to this chilling logic, but we would note that it would then follow that all of America's surveillance laws should be secret, because that would make it even harder to guess how the United States government collects information. For example, when Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance ct in 1978 it would have been useful to keep that law secret from the KGB, so that Soviet agents would not know how the FBI was allowed to track them. But American laws should not be made public only when government officials find it convenient. They should be public all the time, and every American should be able to find out what their government thinks those laws mean. There's a lot more in the full letter, but it's difficult not to be furious about the sense of entitlement the administration has over this. Keeping details of investigations secret is perfectly reasonable. But keeping a secret interpretation of the law secret -- and one that lets them do much greater surveillance than what the law appears to state in plain language, is a significant problem for those who believe in a working democracy and representative government. Read More | 88 Comments Procedural Error By Law Enforcement Means Restraining Order On Kim Dotcom 'Null And Void' (Failures) by Mike Masnick from the oops dept on Monday, March 19th, 2012 @ 5:34AM We've already seen that the claims made by law enforcement in the indictment against Megaupload has raised significant legal questions, as they seemed to assume all sorts of things not necessarily factually- based. Part of that overreach resulted in a New Zealand judge granting Kim Dotcom bail despite US authorities insisting that the court keep him locked up. Now things are getting even worse, as a court has declared the restraining order issued in the case as "null and void" and having "no legal effect" after law enforcement admitted to making a significant series of procedural errors. The end result may mean that everything seized from Dotcom -- including his money, cars and other goods... may need to be returned. The police apparently realized this and tried to apply for the proper restraining order after the fact, explaining to the judge that they had made five specific errors in the initial application. The judge is now figuring out what to do and whether or not this means that the government needs to return Dotcom's property. Of course, there's a good chance that the judge will allow the government to continue to hold the property and admit merely that "mistakes were made" and that they've now been corrected. However, given how many mistakes we've already seen in this case -- and the apparent carelessness with which so much of it happened -- it leads you to wonder how many other "errors" or shortcuts law enforcement in both New Zealand and the US took in bringing this case forward. It's no secret that Dotcom's larger-than-life persona has been an easy target in the attacks on Megaupload, but it's beginning to appear that law enforcement assumed that just because the guy is an obnoxious show- off with a criminal past that it didn't need to actually follow all the rules in bringing a case against him this time. That's not how the judicial system is supposed to work. 82 Comments FAA Admits That It's Going To Rethink Whether You Can Use Kindles & Tablets On Takeoff & Landing ((Mis)Uses of Technology) by Mike Masnick from the about-time dept on Monday, March 19th, 2012 @ 3:33AM It's been pretty clear for quite some time that there's no real safety reason why electronics are barred during takeoff and landing on airplanes. Furthermore, there's no legitimate technological reason for not allowing mobile phones on planes either -- that one's more just about keeping other passengers from going into a rage at having to hear others' half-conversations. However, it seems that more and more people are getting annoyed that they can't use their snazzy new ebooks or tablet computers (not just iPads, mind you) on airplane take-off and landings. Nick Bilton, over at the NY Times, asked the FAA what was up with that, and they admitted that they're taking "a fresh look" at those devices and whether or n ot they should be allowed to be used at those times. Of course, as he notes, this might just lead to a bunch of bureaucratic red tape -- including every possible device having to go through significant testing: Abby Lunardini, vice president of corporate communications at Virgin America, explained that the current guidelines require that an airline must test each version of a single device before it can be approved by the F.A.A. For example, if the airline wanted to get approval for the iPad, it would have to test the first iPad, iPad 2 and the new iPad, each on a separate flight, with no passengers on the plane. It would have to do the same for every version of the Kindle. It would have to do it for every different model of plane in its fleet. And American, JetBlue, United, Air Wisconsin, etc., would have to do the same thing. (No wonder the F.A.A. is keeping smartphones off the table since there are easily several hundred different models on the market.) Ms. Lunardini added that Virgin America would like to perform these tests, but the current guidelines make it ?prohibitively expensive, especially for an airline with a relatively small fleet that is always in the air on commercial flights like ours.? But, hopefully, a better, more efficient process can be found, and people will actually be able to use these devices on airplanes that aren't just over 10,000 feet... 60 Comments Visit Techdirt. The following information is a reminder of your current mailing list subscription: You are subscribed to the following list: Techdirt Daily using the following email: geert at desk.nl You may automatically unsubscribe from this list at any time by visiting the following URL: http://listserv.techdirt.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/u/techdirt/geert at desk.nl If the above URL is inoperable, make sure that you have copied the entire address. Some mail readers will wrap a long URL and thus break this automatic unsubscribe mechanism. You may also change your subscription by visiting this list's main screen: http://listserv.techdirt.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/list/techdirt If you're still having trouble, please contact us by using this form: http://www.techdirt.com/sendfeedback.php -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From BBarnet at groupwise.swin.edu.au Wed Mar 21 06:33:51 2012 From: BBarnet at groupwise.swin.edu.au (Belinda Barnet) Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:33:51 +1100 Subject: ::fibreculture:: Mark Amerika's new art work: Museum of Glitch Aesthetics Message-ID: <4F6A02EF020000E200086DAD@groupwise.swin.edu.au> Hi all, Here's a link to the trailer for Mark Amerika's new "Museum of Glitch Aesthetics" http://Glitchmuseum.com/ Cheers, bb From geert at xs4all.nl Sun Mar 25 19:44:21 2012 From: geert at xs4all.nl (Geert Lovink) Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2012 19:44:21 +0200 Subject: ::fibreculture:: Call for Papers and Creative Works CODE - A Media, Games & Art Conference 21-23 November 2012 at Swinbourne References: <4F6F7249020000E3000219C6@groupwise.swin.edu.au> Message-ID: <1CE3B14C-FF39-4908-B3D5-EE48745F5D25@xs4all.nl> Call for Papers and Creative Works CODE - A Media, Games & Art Conference 21-23 November 2012 Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne, Australia KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Jussi Parikka ? Reader, Winchester School of Art Christian McCrea ? Program Director for Games, RMIT University Anna Munster ? Associate Professor at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW DESCRIPTION Code is the invisible force at the heart of contemporary media and games, routinely obscured by the gadget fetish of breathless tech marketing and scholarly focus on more visible social and technical interfaces. With the recent material turn in media studies and the refinement of new approaches including software studies and platform politics, which emphasise interrogating the formal characteristics and underlying technical architecture of contemporary media, the time has come to bring code out into the open. Code can be defined in two distinct but related ways: as an underlying technological process, a set of rules and instructions governing, for instance, the permutations of all those 0s and 1s obscured behind user interfaces, but also as a cultural framework navigated and understood socially and performatively, as is the case with legal, social and behavioural codes. As an operative principle, code?s significance thus extends far deeper than its current digital manifestation. For this conference, we invite submissions of papers and creative works that consider the role of code as a simultaneously material and semiotic force that operates across the wider cultural, social and political field, with particular emphasis on media, games and art. The conference theme is also an opportunity to reflect on how, as academics and creative practitioners, we often participate in but can also challenge the disciplinary and institutional codes that can arbitrarily separate these domains. CODE will be a transdisciplinary event that brings media studies, media arts and games studies into dialogue through individual papers, combined panels, master classes and an included exhibition. THEMES We welcome submissions related to any aspect of code in all its diversity. Possible considerations might include, but are not limited to: - Code and the in/visible: what are the technical, ideological and academic aspects that work to obscure codes? And what might be the strategies for making codes visible again? Topics: ?screen essentialism? (Kirschenbaum 2008); race and/as technology (Chun 2009); glitch and error; programming activism; DIY coding; game exploits. - Code and/as ideology: as something that both carries and obscures meaning, what is code?s relationship to ideology? Topics: Black-boxing; the fetish of visualisation (Chun 2011); ?there is no software? (Kittler 2005); code as social frame; encoding/decoding. - Coding the disciplines: media and games studies. How do these closely related disciplinary formations account for their existence? What epistemological and methodological insights might they share or contribute to one another, perhaps through emergent fields like software studies and platform politics? Or should they remain distinct? - The deeper history of code: as a principle of information exchange, code?s centrality in media and communications technologies goes beyond the digital. What is the role of code in the deeper history of media, and what are the media archaeological resonances or links between ?old? and ?new? forms of code? Can their emergence often be traced back to the military-industrial complex? Topics: Prehistory of code; Morse code and semaphore; encryption and cryptography; cybernetics and early computing; pre- and non-digital games. - Code and the public/private: What are the historical, legislative, technological and cultural setprivacy?, in which public signifying systems are vehicles for highly personal messages? Topics: public, private and intimate spheres; epistolary networks; social media; reality programming; celebrity; geolocating identity, meaning and destination. - ?Code and other laws of media?: the continuities and discontinuities of different codes. Just as legal codes embedded in technical protocols like digital rights management may disastrously overextend copyright protections (Lessig 1999), how else do different codes meet, overlap, extend and come into conflict with one another? Topics: Copyright and intellectual property; distribution; technical, legal, social and behavioural codes. - Security codes: Though code often serves to secure and obscure authority, it remains vulnerable to hacking, raising the spectre of a whole new form of risk society operating at the level of code and through its breaches and accidents ? how does this play out across networked information, communication and entertainment environments? Topics: phone hacking; Wikileaks; Anonymous and software-based protest; gaming hacks and cracks; data theft. - Code and agency: Interactive media, games, art and cultural practice can all deal with the relationship between the interacting participant and the coded system. What aesthetics and politics are at work when the participant?s presumed agency and the coded constraints are in tension? Topics: aesthetics of code-based media; interface; participant experience; emergence/counter-play; proceduralism and performativity. - Bodies in code: how do information and code, not only interfaces and devices, reconfigure the social, political and corporeal body, and vice versa? How might we conceptualise the materiality and ontology of code in relation to phenomenologies of embodiment and new materialism? Topics: post-humanism (Hayles 1999); new and vital materialism (Bennett 2010); genetics and other codes for the body; disembodiment and immateriality. - Failures of code: Much of code?s power lies in its invisibility, a transparency that allows it to be embedded as the ?common sense? of everyday life, but what happens when code fails, socially culturally, politically or technologically, or is exploited? Topics: rules and disobedience; comedy; subversion; disruption; revolution. :: For further discussion, please view the conference website: http://code2012.wikidot.com CREATIVE WORKS Code operates, as if by stealth, beneath the materiality of networked media performances, software art, games, mobile apps, locative and social media. But code also presents artists, performers and creative practitioners with opportunities to construct innovative hybrid media forms that can extend our understanding of contemporary art practice. From video installations in the 1960s, through to sophisticated interactive media and augmented reality applications, artists have arguably been at the forefront of innovation, adopting the language of the computer to forge new creative frontiers. We invite contributions that examine the creative potential of code, including but not limited to, the implications of code for contemporary art/ists, code as art and/or performance, code as avant-garde, virus and anti-art. The CODE conference will include a thematic exhibition. We are seeking submissions of screen-based works, pervasive games, and locative media projects that respond to the conference themes. Projected and performance works will also be considered. SUBMISSIONS - Individual 20 minute paper presentations: 300 word abstract. - Panel submissions: panel submission should include three/four individual abstracts of 300 words, a panel title, and a 200 words rationale for the panel as a whole. - Artists should submit a 250 word outline of the proposed creative work including links to supporting documentation (10 stills or up to 3 minutes of video). All submissions are due 31 May 2012 and should be emailed to codeconference at groupwise.swin.edu.au PlA special journal issue or edited collection on the conference theme is planned. FURTHER INFORMATION - Conference website: http://code2012.wikidot.com (includes venue and registration information, venue, thematic discussion, reading list, etc.) - Contact: codeconference at groupwise.swin.edu.au From saba.bebawi at yahoo.com Tue Mar 27 10:43:48 2012 From: saba.bebawi at yahoo.com (Saba ElGhul-Bebawi) Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 01:43:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: ::fibreculture:: Arab Spring Symposium Message-ID: <1332837828.29448.YahooMailNeo@web113807.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Global Media Journal Australian Edition together with the Australian and New Zealand Communications Association present The Arab Spring: A Symposium on Social Media and the Politics of Reportage? **A reminder that the deadline for papers for "The Arab Spring: A Symposium on Social Media and the Politics of Reportage"?is COB April 1st, 2012** ? **Researchers utilising global examples which cover the different uses of social media and the interaction between ?traditional? and ?alternative? media practitioners during the protests are also encouraged to apply** The Arab Spring: A Symposium on Social Media and the Politics of Reportage"? Friday June 8, 2012? Advanced Technologies Centre, Swinburne University? Melbourne Australia? Special issues editors Diana Bossio and Saba Bebawi With special keynote addresses from Dr Adel Iskandar and Professor Alan Knight This symposium proposes to both theoretically and empirically consider the social, political and cultural ramifications of interactions between 'mainstream' and 'alternative' reportage practices and their meaning in a digital media age, seeking to derive conceptualisations of social media and the politics of reportage. ? Proposals for presentations are now invited to be submitted for inclusion in the one-day symposium program.? Interested participants should email a 200-word abstract for a 20-minute presentation during the seminar.? We are seeking abstracts from authors that present new analyses of the changes and tensions that have occurred in the relations between the different forms of reportage, especially with the rise in popularity of social media platforms in times of crisis. Specifically we are interested in papers that critically examine the supposed dichotomy between what is perceived as the authenticity, authority and credibility of traditional journalism and the efficiencies and audience-driven content of alternative media practice. ? Research that explores the following themes would be welcomed:? * The different uses of social media during the Arab Spring protests * The interaction between ?traditional? and ?alternative? media practitioners during the protests * Specific ethical issues in reportage that arose during the interaction between mainstream and alternative media practitioners during the protests * How has mainstream media practice positioned itself within a discourse that has suggested the Arab Spring protests as a ?social media revolution?? * How can the Arab Spring protests be used a point of reference or case study to discuss this interaction between ?traditional? and ?alternative? media platforms? * How has the political and policy landscape transformed nationally and internationally in the past decade?? Participants will be invited to submit a paper for publication in the Issue 3, 2012 of the Global Media Journal Australian Edition. Please email abstracts as word document attachments to Seminar organisers: Diana Bossio?dbossio at swin.edu.au?or Saba Bebawi?sbebawi at swin.edu.au???Abstract deadline:? COB April 1, 2012? About the Journal The Australian Edition is a member of the innovative and original?Global Media Journal: an online-only, open access, global resource for communication and media studies scholarship, with independent editions around the world. The Australian edition of Global Media Journal invites the submission of essays and research reports that focus on any aspects in the field of Communication, Media and Journalism. The Global Media Journal continues to expand worldwide, adding new editions, including African, Australian, and Persian editions. More information is available at:?http://www.commarts.uws.edu.au/gmjau Submission Guidelines:?http://www.commarts.uws.edu.au/gmjau/submissions.html Dr Saba ElGhul-Bebawi Lecturer Journalism Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne, Australia -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: