Leave the wiki out of the wikileaks [Updated]

Yglesias says,

I have mixed feelings about a lot of different aspects of this, but there are two key points. One is that the leaker here (presumably Bradley Manning, but that’s not yet been proven in a court of law) has broken the law and needs to be punished. The other is that the ability to republish leaked secrets is integral to the operation of a free press. Creating a new standard of harassing not leakers, but the publishers of leaks, is a very dangerous precedent whose implications go far beyond whatever you may think of the particular circumstances.

I think this is actually pretty well understood. Nobody's proposed any new legislation. The Department of Justice hasn't unveiled any actual charges against Assange or Wikileaks. And while it's very unseemly to see a United States Senator throwing his weight around to get Amazon, Twitter, etc. to drop Wikileaks, at the same time he is not getting the same info pulled from the New York Times.

So everyone instead wants to make this a story about the person of Julian Assange, or the technology of the Internet. (Verbally) attacking Assange is fine, but mostly irrelevant.

And over on the technological side, it's amazing how few people get it. I understand that most of the people I listen to on NPR or whose words I read in the paper are over 50, and probably do not think about the internet as much as I do. But take Josh Marshall, a youngish guy whose whole enterprise is built on the web. He writes:

Let's say that the Wikileaks cables hadn't been State Department cables but rather the final tracks of Lady Gaga's next album or perhaps each episode of next season's Mad Men? How long do you think they would have stayed online?

Say what? There's no difference. That content would have stayed online forever, as the wikileaks will. To miss this important point is to completely misunderstand the current state of the internet.

Wikileaks is alive and well. You can go there, you can donate to them if you so choose, and the "poison pill" insurance file is sitting on many servers around the world, waiting for you to pull it down to your hard drive.

So Joe Leiberman gets to look like a national-security tough guy by bullying Amazon. And it's distressing that Amazon, Twitter, Paypal, etc. have caved. But, in strictly technological terms, it doesn't matter. 


"You can't stop the internet, bitches." -Monkey


Updated Monday @ 10:30. This from the Guardian

Attempts to railroad WikiLeaks off the net quickly failed. Removing its hosting servers has increased WikiLeaks' ability to stay online. More than 1,300 volunteer "mirror" sites, including the French newspaper Libération, have already surfaced to store the classified cables. Within days the WikiLeaks web content had spread across so many enclaves of the internet it was immune to attack by any single legal authority. In some respects, WikiLeaks has never been safer or as aggressively defended.

Sunday funnies

Indie Rock Pete says:

Link roundup: porn and piracy

Where in the past I would have done quick insta-posts on these items, lately I've taken to throwing them in my Evernote notebook, in the hopes that they will be resources for more substantial Bellman posts down the road. Now, I am thinking that's unlikely, so here they are all in a rush.

1. Evernote! I highly recommend this service. It is free, it has a Mac client, a Windows client, an iPhone client, and a web interface, so I have my notebook everywhere I happen to be. importing and organizing information is very easy. And if you need something to push you over the edge into trying it, notes with images are scanned and put through text-recognition routines so that you can search against their contents. Pretty slick! It highlights the portion of the text that it thinks features the word I searched for:


2. I think some of my friends might be criminals.

An Iowa man was convicted of possessing child pornography last week because some of the books in his vast collection of Japanese manga (comics) appeared to depict minors engaged in sexual acts
...
39-year-old Christopher Handley, an office worker, was brought up on charges of possessing child pornography in 2006 when customs officials seized a package for him. It contained several manga, some of which were "lolicon" that showed what officials said were children being sexually abused. There were also images of bestiality. Handley has a huge collection of manga, and only a few are lolicon. He also had absolutely no child pornography of any description in his house or on his computer.

Nevertheless, Handley entered a guilty plea. According to Threat Level, it was simply because his attorney had exhausted all other options:

"It's probably the only law I'm aware of, if a client shows me a book or magazine or movie, and asks me if this image is illegal, I can't tell them," says Eric Chase, Handley's attorney.

Ruh-roh. If this extends to literary descriptions, I better return my copy of Lolita to the public library!

3. Piracy is a moral imperative. Eskil Skeensburg is an interesting fellow. He's developing a game called "Love" by himself that might possibly revolutionize the way games are developed, and is quite likely to be a fun game. But I also like reading his blog, which is mostly about developing the game, but meanders around to topics like,

It is a duty not a right to break an unjust law.
...
The only way to find pirates is to monitor all peoples communication.

The only way to stop piracy is to deprive people of all communication.

Either someone can own a message and stop others form saying it, or we have freedom of speech.

These are the stakes. Don't think it is about someone getting payed. The financial well being of me and all the artists I love is insignificant, compared to the basic rights of a human being. Supporting artists is one thing, stopping people form exercising their rights like freedom of speech or taking away peoples right to privacy is another.

I used to think that supporting artists was the right thing to do. Now I'm asking, do I longer want to financially support organizations who use my money to lobby governments and courts to take away my basic rights and freedoms? [Have they] made it morally wrong for me to pay, in their quest to force me to pay?

Yes.

Stephen King insults some of his readers, but he has a point.

via D. Fireball,

“The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys,” Stephen King wrote in an e-mail message. “And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.”

On the one hand, it's easy for Stephen King to say this. He might not miss a few hundred dollars here and there in revenue lost to book piracy.^*

But on the other hand, he's totally right. Be it music, movies, books, or recipes, there are some bootleggers who would otherwise never be exposed to that intellectual property, because they would never, ever, evereverever, pay full market value for it.

On the gripping hand, the real victims of piracy are second-hand stores and libraries, and both are institutions for which I have many positive feelings... which are rapidly turning into just "nostalgia." (Been nice knowing you, Dusty Bookshelf and Manhattan Public Library!)

---
^* Book piracy, brought to you by the letter RRRRRRRR!

Coincidentally, I also have a parrot and an eye patch

Why are mommy and daddy fighting?

As of this morning, I no longer get NBC programming on my cable box. And neither do a few hundred thousand other Austin customers of Time Warner Cable. Apparently, the corporation who owns the local affiliate is engaged in brinkmanship with Time Warner over their long term contract. It's sad, really.

Sad, because neither can win. Even if they reach an agreement, and KXAN extracts a few extra million dollars from the TWC, both business models are headed for the landfills of history. And these antics are pushing a bunch of us to Hulu, iTunes, or worse, the 'rents. Or even worse, farther away from television altogether, accelerating their demise.

But is it art?

The Overdub Tampering Committee grabs new albums as soon as they leak to the internet, adds some of their own music to them, and redistributes the music.

“If you illegally download music on the internet the chances that our work is in your collection is very, very likely! In fact, you might have a whole lot of us!”, they claim. In fact, ‘Polluting’ P2P networks with this music didn’t end the spread. TOTC have seen their works spread as far as radio stations.

This is exactly the kind of disaster that Beck has been warning about for years. Or maybe he thinks it's cool.

Personally speaking, it runs afoul of my strong desire to maintain control over and clarity within my music collection. Or maybe I think it's cool...?

Have You Been Punked By TOTC? at TorrentFreak

John from Cincinnati thread (episode 7)

Just watched episode 7, and I still have no idea what's going on. Some folks seem to think that it's all very Catholic, which it might very well be, although I would be disappointed if it were that reductive.

As for the symbol that John keeps drawing, we finally saw it drawn in a medium (concrete), and now we know it looks like this:

I have no idea what's going on, and I'm hoping it's not entering Twin Peaks territory, but it just might be. Random thoughts:

John Monad is a piss-poor Christ, if that's what he's supposed to be. Although he did seem unhappy about hanging with dad, which I guess I might be if I were Christ.

I'm sick of this camera chick. Three episodes now she's been whacked out of her mind on whatever John did to her, and so basically right now she's a non-character... a non-character we have to watch when we could be watching something more interesting.

Post your thoughts, if any, in the comments.

Good news from the internet

This album kicks ass:
If you liked The In Sound from Way Out, you will like this. I hope it comes out on vinyl. More good news:

Mike D said that "even though The Mix-Up is a "post-punk instrumental" album, the Beasties have no plans to ditch vocals for good. In fact, they are currently planning another version of the album that will feature collaborations with "a pretty wide array" of "mostly newer" vocalists.

Slow week at The Bellman

Mark promised us some Catholic humor, but I think he overdosed on Jesus last weekend, and is actually sick today. So, in the mean time, let me kill any momentum this blog had by asking.....

David Tennant: Is he a great Doctor, or the greatest Doctor?

Season 3 is halfway over in ol' England, and I've been 'renting it. At the end of Season 2, I woulda said that he's a "good Doctor," but now I've ratcheted my esteem all the way up to "the greatest Doctor." He's really got a bead on the character.


Also, his new chica is the cutest one in, let's say, 900 years of travel through time and space.

In other news, the new Sage Francis album is pretty good. I didn't know he was white, tho. Like da man says: