neonascent

NEWS.com.au has a story on the premium Australian’s pay for products.

Having come over from Europe, I am certainly acutely aware of differences. For example the australian Internet and Telecommunications products and services are all hugely inflated compared to EU.

Having lived in England though I am also aware of the media mentality of scandiliingly pointing out what is cheaper on the other side of the channel, but ignoring what is cheaper at home.

Middlesbrough is a small town in the North East of England. In what seems like a tribute to George Orwell, the council have just installed CCTV cameras fitted with speakers. As the enthusiastic press manager tells us, it will greatly help create a safer Middlesbrough:

“For example, if an operative now sees someone dropping litter, they can tell them to pick it up”

The press release continues, detailing how it will drastically reduce instances of Thoughtcrime.

Récemment j’ai lu quelque philosophie en francais et je pense que je devais essayer d’écrire en francais. Peut-etre ceci m’aidera a me rappeler. Nous verrons.

C’est vraiment une belle langue. Je suis tres triste que je l’ai oublié. Tant pis!

Princeton university has conducted tests on US electronic voting machines that were used in the last two elections (Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine), and found them to be (extremely) vulnerable to viruses and vote maniplulation software.

This should be absolutely no surprise what-so-ever. These machines are effectively PCs, and show less security precaution than the average Internet café computer. They are set to boot from flash memory, and presumably were not provided with malware/virus checking tools at the toll this would take on voter trust. (ie accepting the possibility of viruses is opening a can of worms).

In the Princeton demonstration video the demonstrator is careful to emphasise the criminality of the virus loader, and also the fact that what we are watching is a simulated election, but I think this is a pointed comment. I get the impression they are understating the importance of this research for interlectual impact - the audience realises themselves how easy it would be to apply this to a real election.

A collaboration with Maja Baska (and her fisheye Lomo) to produce a kitchy peace project. It’s fun, but deals with issues of Western Culture and idealism, shopping therapy, etc.

I am having a mockup ring-bound (continuation of circular motif) booklet printed. I need to try and source cheap printing as this Kinkos print is costing nearly $20!

Check out the Flickr set for fun pictures.

In a BBC News article covering Bush’s 9/11 remembrance ceremony I spotted reference to “his so-called war on terror”. I find it darkly amusing that it has taken official reports of zero link between Sadam and Al Qaeda, civil war in Iraq, continued fighting in Afganistan, etc. to change the BBCs line from “The War on Terror” to “[bush’s] so-called war on terror”.

Vogue Italia has a great TSA themed photo shoot viewable via Flash.

The emotional landscape of the shoot presents a really nice picture of TSA “security” and terrorist hysteria versus a vunerable/abused public. Of course there is also the femme fetale interpretation, which I think is a less significant reading for most pics.

The BBC NEWS reports on the findings of a Senate’s Intelligence Committee report: Saddam ‘had no link to al-Qaeda’.

This sort of report, reasoned and researched finding that oppose previous claims, is inevitable and unfortunately inconsequential. It doesn’t seem to have any affect, and you knew it would come out eventually. Some would say this is a case of hindsight 20/20, but when calling for a war based on supposedly concrete intelligence information that turns out to be wrong, you can’t just go “Oops”.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s metamedia program Mediawatch is a fantastic check on the flagorant inaccuracies, bias, and scaremongering in Australian media. “Jihad Jack”, the first Australian convicted under the recently introduced Anti-Terror laws (which included anti-sedition censorship), has recently been released after a confession he made in Pakistan was found to have been made under threat of tourure. Mediawatch examines the new sources reactions to this, as well as implications of News is the age of Terror, Fear, and protection of Democracy by self-destruction. It refers exlicitly to Australian news sources and their positions, but these will be familiar enough in your own country’s media to find interesting.

The article is a transcript of video available on the Mediawatch site, but unfortunately it cannot be linked to directly.