Month: November 2011
Google Now Censors The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, 4Shared and More
The changes were quietly processed and appear to be broader than previous additions. Google's blacklist prevents the names of sites appearing in their Instant and Autocomplete search services, while the pages themselves remain indexed.
Google users searching for terms like "torrent", "BitTorrent" and "RapidShare" will notice that no suggestions and search results appear before they type the full word. As a consequence, there's sharp decrease in Google searches for these terms. Initially only a handful of "piracy-related" terms were censored, but a recent update to the blacklist includes nearly all the top file-sharing websites. […]
There is currently no clear definition of what Google considers to be piracy-inducing, but Google claims that the blacklist helps to reduce online piracy. "While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online," Google spokesman Mistique Cano previously told TorrentFreak. […]
"It's a lot more subtle than the censorship attempts made possible by the pending PROTECT IP and SOPA bills, but it's still censorship and it starts small. Google is increasingly becoming a self-righteous Big Brother of the Web. So much for `Do no evil'," Fung told us.
A Pirate Bay insider also told TorrentFreak that Google doesn't live up up to its famous motto. ""It's just another step towards censoring their search engine altogether — without a legal basis. We're also wondering why this happens at almost the same time as they've released Google Music — a service where they sell music which in some cases might be found on The Pirate Bay," he added.
I want to burn with passion, not regret
After All This
by Richard Jackson
After all this love, after the birds rip like scissors
through the morning sky, after we leave, when the empty
bed appears like a collapsed galaxy, or the wake of
disturbed air behind a plane, after that, as the wind turns
to stone, as the leaves shriek, you are still breathing
inside my own breath. The lighthouse on the far point
still sweeps away the darkness with the brush of an arm.
The tides inside your heart still pull me towards you.
After all this, what are these words but mollusk shells
a child plays with? What could say more than the eloquence
of last night’s constellations? or the storm anchored by
its own flashes behind the far mountains? I remember
the way your body wavers under my touch like the northern
lights. After all this, I want the certainty of hidden roots
spreading in all directions from their tree. I want to hear
again the sky tangled in your voice. Some nights I can
hear the footsteps of the stars. How can these words
ever reveal the secret that waits in their sleeping light?
The words that walk through my mind say only what has
already passed. Beyond, the swallows are still knitting
the wind. After a while, the smokebush will turn to fire.
After a while, the thin moon will grow like a tear in a curtain.
Under it, a small boy kicks a ball against the wall of
a burned out house. He is too young to remember the war.
He hardly knows the emptiness that kindles around him.
He can speak the language of early birds outside our window.
Someday he will know this kind of love that changes
the color of the sky, and frees the earth from its moorings.
Sometimes I kiss your eyes to see beyond what I can imagine.
Sometimes I think I can speak the language of unborn stars.
I think the whole earth breathes with you. After all this,
these words are all I have to say what is impossible to think,
what shy dreams hide in the rafters of my heart, because
these words are only a form of touch, only tell you I have no life
that isn’t yours, and no death you couldn’t turn into a life.
shamanic fishing tackle
The buzzer at two:thirty in the morning, a brief sound, then a longer, more insistent beep, as grating to the ear as that alarm clock you meant to turn off, but didn’t. There is a wind storm outside, huge, tossing, beyond chilly. November brought snow once already. I decide to ignore the buzzer. It is likely, as it often is this time of night, for one of my more illicit neighbors. A junkie hitting the wrong button, someone drunk maybe, wanting to get in from the cold. I decide to leave it, but then it comes again, irritating. Deliberate. A voice calls from outside, but the weather tears it away. Defeated, I put on my permanently borrowed hoodie, draw up the zipper, and step out to the hallway in my stocking feet to go downstairs, too tired to puzzle out who it might be, too awake to simply let the stranger in.
It isn’t a stranger, but it is, in a way. Someone who used to be a friend, though not anymore. Hasn’t been for years. “Hey Jhayne!” He’s almost shouting through the glass, over the wind, weirdly cheerful. He must be freezing. “Do you recognize me?” He takes off his ball-cap and runs a hand through newly cut hair. “Hello, K-. Yes. It’s quite late. What’s up?” The last time I saw him it was difficult to get him out of the apartment. It was exceedingly uncomfortable. I had to involve a knife. He talks through the glass door, motioning for me to open it, but I shake my head no. That seems like it would be a stupid decision. He’s bigger than me, I’m tired, and he has a bicycle. As if to prove my point, he launches immediately into a well known scam, twenty dollars for gas for some guy he met down the street, sketchy details and a giant smile, as if it isn’t the middle of the night, as if the storm were instead a sunny, summer afternoon, as casual as butter. I gesture, dismissing the patter, “I’m going back to bed K-.” His grin becomes manic as he sees me begin to step away. He talks faster and faster. “But, do you have twenty dollars?” “No, I don’t. We barely have bus-fare. You still owe me rent. This isn’t a place for you to ask for help anymore.”
For a very brief moment he almost looks like he used to, before the drugs ate him up from the inside out, cracked the inside of his mind, and I raise my hand against the glass, like visiting a zoo exhibit, a glimpse into the past, and he puts his fingers against mine. Maybe one day he’ll be better, a father to his daughter, a friend again. But no, he doesn’t stop talking even as I try to say goodbye, too locked in his message, his bright, strange smile, his uncomfortable face. Finally I just walk away, his words, muffled by the glass, smearing into background noise as I slowly go back up the stairs and to my apartment, where I make very certain to lock the door.
Stunning.
Address Is Approximate, a Google Street View stop motion animation short made as a personal project by director Tom Jenkins, co-founder of The Theory.
via David Thompson.
The NY Public Library
A good Booke
is the pretious lifeblood of a
mafter spirit, imbalm’d and treafur’d
up on purpofe to a life beyond life.
I have a job interview there tomorrow
Mastering new things generally comes easily to me, yet contact lenses are presenting a strange new kind of learning curve. Despite several months of switching them back and forth with my glasses, (a task that abruptly went from herculean to simple when I learned how to peel them off the skin of my eye with a fingernail), I remain severely discomfited by the visual change, how everything warps, the way my brain readjusts its input parameters to redefine normal.
When I first tried them, the doctor put them in for me then told me not to stand up right away. I didn’t mind waiting at first, but eventually even the marvel of peripheral vision became boring in the broom closet back office, so I stood up and tried to step to the door, thinking I was ready. Wrong. As I crashed immediately to the ground, shattering every pretense of sophistication and grown-up-ed-ness, I could hear him shout from the other room, “I told you so!”.
very bruce sterling
Wave Glider Self Propelled Robots Have Begun a Historic Swim Across the Pacific:
“Yesterday, four Wave Gliders—self propelled robots, each about the size of a dolphin—left San Francisco for a 60,000 kilometer journey. Built by Liquid Robotics, the robots will travel together to Hawaii, then split into pairs, one pair heading to Japan, the other to Australia. Waves will power their propulsion systems and the sun will power the sensors that will be measuring things like water salinity, temperature, clarity, and oxygen content; collecting weather data, and gathering information on wave features and currents. It’s not going to be an easy journey—the little robots will face rough weather and have to dodge big ships. […]
The data from the fleet of robots is being streamed via the Iridium satellite network and made freely available—in an accessible form on Google Earth’s Ocean Showcase, and in a more complete form to researchers who register. Liquid Robotics is eager to see what the scientific community does with all the data—so eager, that it’s asking for project abstracts, and will give a prize to the top five proposals—six months use of a Wave Glider optimized to collect whatever information the winner needs.”
Occupy: Pregnant Seattle protester miscarries after being kicked, pepper sprayed
The news just went from ugly to horrific:
“When Fox arrived at the hospital, doctors told her that the baby had no heartbeat.
“They diagnosed that I was having a miscarriage. They said the damage was from the kick and that the pepper spray got to it [the fetus], too,” she said.
“I was worried about it [when I joined the protests], but I didn’t know it would be this bad. I didn’t know that a cop would murder a baby that’s not born yet… I am trying to get lawyers.”
The Scoville heat chart indicates that U.S. grade pepper spray is ten times more painful than the blistering hot habanero pepper, according to Scientific American. While law enforcement officials regulary claim that the spray is safe, researchers at the University of North Carolina and Duke University found that it could “produce adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects, including arrhythmias and sudden death.”
Here’s a photo of Jennifer being hustled to an ambulance after being sprayed. This is from the same event that pepper sprayed Dorli Rainey, the now iconic senior citizen.
EDIT: It is possible the miscarriage report has been fabricated, but this has yet to be verified.
a lot of cliches, but still awesomely impressive
ROSA from Jesús Orellana.
Via Wired, “Bunkered for months in his Barcelona basement, equipped only with computers and a vivid imagination, DIY filmmaker Jesús Orellana emerged after a year of solitary labor to deliver 2011’s most dazzling sci-fi short. […] The lush setting brings to mind Avatar’s Pandora, but instead of spending several million bucks on visual effects, 29-year-old comic book artist Orellana made the entire film for a grand total of $99.”