Friday, January 15, 2010

A Brief History of the Oink Trial Pt1

So the oink trial is over, and Alan won.

In a larger sense, many of us won. The Oink raid and trial was, at it's essence, a show-trial, every bit a spectacle trial (or 'spectrial') as last years Pirate Bay one – if not moreso. After all, the Swedish Police didn't do the raid accompanied by TV cameras – in fact they covered up cameras – but otherwise it was similar.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

I made Wikipedia!

Earlier this week, I had a slight surprise. Someone had actually created a wikipedia article about me. Great! Nice to think I was considered notable enough in the Pirate Party movement to get a page. It's a bit light on facts though, so I thought I'd add some here (since I couldn't add them to wikipedia, as that's a “conflict of Interest”

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Oink and the Technicolour Lie-coat

One of the core philosophies of reporting is that you only print what you're sure of. If you don't know, don't say. That way Libel lies.

Someone really should tell the Northern Echo (Update; see comments, it's written by the Press Association) that. Today, they ran a piece about the restarting of Alan Ellis' trial. Alan, if you didn't know, was associated with oink, the music bittorrent tracker. If you know about bittorrent, and the case in particular, it's a real head-slap moment. The majority of the piece appears to have been copied from the RIAA/BPI filings made to police, and 30 seconds research (even to past news stories covering this case) would prove the lie.

Let's look at some of the errors

Monday, January 4, 2010

Terrorism - How Not to Deal With It

Terrorism. An innocuous word to some, but it makes US government officials lose their collective minds. In an orgy of CYA (cover your ass) clusterf*cks, they manage to turn even the simplest blunders into terrorist activities.
Let's first reflect on the actual DANGERS of terrorism. As I wrote about a few months ago, there are more deaths, on average, EVERY MONTH on US roads, than in every terrorist attack targeting at least one US Citizen from 1994-2005 combined, and that over the same period, mother nature - in the form of tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, snow/ice and even plain old heat – killed twice as many over the same time period as the dreaded T-word. Fivethirtyeight.com also breaks down air-based terrorist incidents by miles travelled, time travelled, and number of passengers involved. Their results?