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The Crime Studio

Nick Cotter  //  Wired, tired, and tedious to know.

 
May 25 / 4:03am

It's Towel Day

It's Towel Day. Carry your towel with pride!

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Filed under  //  douglas adams   h2g2   towelday  

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May 5 / 1:56am

Facebook Disconnections

I've just been checking out Facebook Connections, as per a helpful EFF article. I thought I'd try removing the suggested pages. Here's what happens if you do:


Note, I didn't touch any of these settings here - I simply removed the suggested Pages (which were all incomprehensible autogenerated gibberish anyway - the reason I wanted to remove them in fact). But doing that removes things like my "Work and education".

Facebook sucks.
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Filed under  //  facebook   fail   privacy  

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Apr 23 / 2:05am

Standing on the edge of a cliff with your eyes closed

via getreallist.com

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Filed under  //  doomed   oil  

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Apr 22 / 4:13am

Air pollution up again after flights resume

Following up to my previous post on the drop in nitric oxide etc. during the European flight ban, it's jumped back up again now flights have restarted (above us at least, it seems there's more contrails than usual):


This is the same Yarner Wood location. The decline continues until the 21st April, when the sky breaks all over in contrails. Need more data!
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Filed under  //  ashtag   aviation   environment   pollution  

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Apr 21 / 3:20am

Government requests directed to Google and YouTube

Government requests directed to Google and YouTube

Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about users of our services and products. The map shows the number of requests that we received between July 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009, with certain limitations.

We know these numbers are imperfect and may not provide a complete picture of these government requests. For example, a single request may ask for the removal of more than one URL or for the disclosure of information for multiple users. See the FAQ for more information.

We’re new at this, and we’re still learning the best way to collect and present this information. We’ll continue to improve this tool and fine-tune the types of data we display.

via google.com

The UK is there with 59 removal requests for the last 6 months of 2009. But Germany has 188, and Brazil 291 at the top of the charts.

Brazil also leads the data requests, even more than the US. What's with Brazil?

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Filed under  //  censorship   google   visualisation  

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Apr 20 / 12:55am

Air pollution down?

Is air quality up as a result of Eyjafjallajökull-imposed flight bans? Here's a chart from the the UK National Air Quality Archive which may be showing just that:

I've deliberately chosen Yarner Wood, in the middle of the countryside. Charts for urban areas don't show this. Nitric oxide is a component of con trails.

Of course we need more than one specially chosen graph to form an opinion, but I'd be keen to see some research on this event, air-quality-wise.
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Filed under  //  ashtag   aviation   environment   pollution  

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Apr 15 / 5:03am

The Greens have some positive policies on copyright reform

EC1010 Our general presumption is to encourage the Green value of greater sharing and to make it more difficult to obtain patents and similar forms of protection than at present. Specific policies are below.

EC1011 On cultural products (literature, music, film, paintings etc), our general policy is to expand the area of cultural activity, that is ways that culture can be consumed, produced, and shared, reduce the role of the market and encourage smaller and more local cultural enterprise (see CMS200 onwards). Specifically we will

  1. introduce a Citizen’s Income (see EC730), which will allow many more people to participate in cultural creation;
  2. introduce generally shorter copyright terms, with a usual maximum of 14 years;
  3. legalise peer to peer copying where it is not done as a business;
  4. liberalise ‘fair use’ policies to operate outside the academic environment, and allow greater development from existing copyright material; and
  5. make it impossible to patent broad software and cultural ideas.
via policy.greenparty.org.uk

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Filed under  //  copyright   debill   green   politics  

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Apr 15 / 4:21am

BLDGBLOG: Cities Under Siege

via bldgblog.blogspot.com

An excellent review of Stephen Graham's "Cities Under Siege":

'Graham outlines a number of dystopian scenarios here, including one in which "swarms of tiny, armed drones, equipped with advanced sensors and communicating with each other, will thus be deployed to loiter permanently above the streets, deserts, and highways" of cities around the world, moving us toward a future where "militarized techniques of tracking and targeting must permanently colonize the city landscape and the spaces of everyday life." '

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Filed under  //  books   doomed   reviews   war  

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