- Has Transparency Made Book Scouts More or Less Important? : “For small publishers, foreign rights deals are an important opportunity. But for big conglomerate publishers who sign up multi-million dollar titles, those foreign rights deals are often essential to covering those whopping big advances. What’s more, they are in competition with their fellow conglomerates to snap up the rights to as many potentially lucrative bestsellers as possible. To help them do this as quickly and as cheaply as possible, many big conglomerates rely on book scouts.”
- Anonymous — From the Lulz to Collective Action : “Taken as a whole, Anonymous resists straightforward definition as it is a name currently called into being to coordinate a range of disconnected actions, from trolling to political protests.1 Originally a name used to coordinate Internet pranks, in the winter of 2008 some wings of Anonymous also became political, focusing on protesting the abuses of the Church of Scientology. By September 2010 another distinct political arm emerged as Operation Payback and did so to protest the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and a few months later this arm shifted its energies to Wikileaks, as did much of the world’s attention. It was this manifestation of Anonymous that garnered substantial media coverage due the spectacular waves of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks they launched (against PayPal and Mastercard in support of Wikileaks). Despite this notoriety and despite the fact that Anonymous had already coordinated protests against the Church of Scientology, commentators struggled to describe its ethics, sociology, and history using traditional analytical categories.”
- Is Norway’s pension fund investing in surveillance tech? : “On February 10th, Dagens Næringsliv, a Norwegian newspaper, published a long investigation into Norway’s ties with companies that produce surveillance and censorship technology that is used in authoritarian states.”
- A Year After the Egyptian Revolution, 10% of Its Social Media Documentation Is Already Gone : “In April, OR Books published Tweets from Tahrir, a book of tweets sent from Ground Zero of the democratic revolution that played out in Egypt last year. The book, its promotions declare, “brings together a selection of key tweets in a compelling, fast-paced narrative, allowing the story of the uprising to be told directly by the people in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. History has never before been written in this fashion.”
- Have You Jailbroken Your Ford Lately? : “At a not-too-distant point in our future, this will be a serious question. Today Ford and Bug Labs announced that they are jointly supporting the first open source car software. Think of it as your car’s API. You’ll need to install a small $40 piece of hardware to interact with the car systems, and the effort, called OpenXC, is making this data available to both Android and Arduino platforms.”
Number station broadcast 3/12
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