HACK THE BURMESE JUNTA'S WEBSITE

To all hacktivists out there: please deface and run a dos on the State Peace and Development Council website.
WWW.MYANMAR.COM

Images from Burma

From Ko Hitke's blog
The monks and the people are still marching, despite the government's repression.

Update: A summary of the day's events from the Australian.

Arrests, tear gas and beatings in Yangon

According to witnesses, the police used tear gas and arrested 80 monks this afternoon in Yangon.

Update: BBC story.

Update II: The Irrawady has the latest, straight from Rangoon. And a great diary at the DailyKos.

[Picture by Aung Hla Tun, 09/26/07, Reuters]

The barefoot art of war

Beautiful article from Der Spiegel, via Salon.com

And from The Age
Burma sends soldiers to monastries

The picture is from this morning at the Shwedagon Pagoda, released by Burmese democracy activists.

And so it starts

After another round of gigantic demonstrations today, the hated SLORC has imposed a curfew, declared Yangon and Mandalay off-limits and deployed troops in the main cities.

Here's the story (Reuters India): Myanmar government imposes dusk to dawn curfew

Today Bush took a strong stance against the Burmese Generals at the UN. The hypocrisy of the Bush administration is boundless: based on their logic and their bullshit "freedom agenda," they should have sent an expeditionary force to Myanmar a long time ago. They obviously didn't. Because of their catastrophic Middle Eastern adventures, they have lost all the moral authority they could brought to bear on the Myanmar government's patrons (China mostly). So now we're left with principled declarations that are as lofty as they're toothless. Bush, the guy who authorized torture, renditions and surveillance over Americans (all crimes under American law), is now giving lessons on democracy and human rights to the Burmese military autocrats. The thugs that make up the State Peace and Development Council, who've been at it for much longer (it being torture, surveillance and oppression), are shaking in their jackboots. They also know Bush will do like them eventually, and like every other retiring dictator, and have himself amnestied.

A friend noticed that Burma was renamed Myanmar by the SLORC back in 1989. I have no position on the best and most appropriate nomenclature. In the actual Burmese language, the difference between Burma/Barma/Bama/Myanmar is barely audible. The SLORC did it as a public relations/propaganda stunt directed at the West. It was corporate rebranding of the worst kind. A little like cancer peddlers Philip Morris magically turning into altruistic, elevated and very latin high-brow Altria... The wire services use Myanmar, while the BBC has stuck with Burma. So I don't know what to do. And I know that in a political struggle of that sort, semantics are fundamental. So I'll think about it.

I can't help but find some irony and poetic justice in the fact that George Orwell started his career in Burma.

Respect

"You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can't sit on it too long."
Boris Yeltsin (of all people!)

For a few hours, fear and helplessness seem to have changed sides. But the situation is getting extremely tense. The SLORC must respond to the challenge, and quickly, or falter. However, these few days of protest are an unbearable chink in the junta's armor. The fiction that they and their goons enjoy any kind of support or authority is gone. They do not own fear any more. They are left with only violence.

Most likely, this will end in bloodshed.







Free Myanmar!

the latest news (from the BBC) : Burmese monks defy army warning

In support the people of Myanmar

Free Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
Free Myanmar


[Associated Press]

Urban wine

Beautiful story in today's Washington Post, about an exiled Iraqi Jew in New York, Mr. Latif Jiji, who makes his own wine from grapes growing all around his townhouse. It makes me want to do that, someday (and the weather in Los Angeles would be close to perfect).

Bordello

Amazing show tonight at Bordello on 1st Street. First, the amazingly funky Casxio - beautiful songs, beautiful band, superb riffs and deep, deep bass. David Byrne meets Daft Punk. And then, the incredibly charismatic Sam Sparro - the reincarnation of Iggy Pop as a funky beast. More later.

Young Marble Giants

They're so awesome. So minimal. And she's so completely charismatic. Respect.

Perseids

We went to Malibu to watch the Perseids last night. We planned a nice and refreshing picnic with sushi rolls, goat cheese, saucisson, red wine, melon. It was a wonderful evening on surfriders' beach. Didn't see many shooting stars though - but those we saw were spectacular.

LA earthquake

There was a little earthquake tonight - a 4.5 apparently - nothing to write home about. But we felt it around 1 am. We were in the kitchen, finishing up our glasses of Ridge ATP Sullivan Zinfandel 2005. Things kind of shook for a brief moment. No tremors, just a bang! and it was gone. Probably a plate releasing some energy - it turned out the quake centered around Northridge (lots of pent-up seismic energy there...). So it wasn't as big as the last earthquake I experienced, some time ago in Baños, down in Ecuador.

The 'thriller' Filipino jail exercise

I don't know whether this is creepy or hilarious or both? And who the hell is filming this? A guard? The warden? The detail that kills is the cheap blue plastic hair clip in the "girlfriend's" hair...

the tour de france

Incredible piece by the best of all sports writers in France today - in Libération. The one and only Jean-Louis Le Touzet (I reproduce the article in extenso, just for my own sake - Libé won't sue me, I've been buying it since I was 14, and even in the US...)

C’est chose entendue que le cyclisme ne se comprend qu’à la lumière de la triche et du dopage et que le Tour, poinçonné par les scandales, se présente comme un vieux ticket de métro. Pourtant, les règles du jeu n’ont pas été modifiées : la duplicité et sa couronne de lauriers sont toujours les grands vainqueurs. Le Tour de France est fait pour donner des héros comme le pommier donne des pommes. Mais c’est un arbre qui donne des coureurs génétiquement modifiés depuis Indurain et l’apparition de l’EPO, cette molécule qui a transformé le sport en spectacle, car ce qui est excellent pour le vélo l’est tout autant pour le rugby ou le football.

Suiveur. La presse sportive n’est au fond pas si éloignée de la presse du cœur. Le lecteur toqué de sport est comme la femme de ménage qui a passé sa journée à frotter les cuivres : elle a besoin qu’on lui raconte des histoires d’amour adultérines sous le mail, à l’ombre des grands ormes. Le suiveur est comme Anatole France : il ne croit plus au ciel mais supporte mal qu’on touche à la liturgie de juillet. La France de juillet est une France en sandales romaines. Ainsi le pied respire mieux. Le Tour, qui s’observe à travers le vitrail d’une église romane, nous démontre chaque jour le délicieux Jean-Paul Olivier, notre Chateaubriand du cyclisme. C’est parce qu’il aime l’inouï dans le grandiose que le suiveur vagabonde à travers le pays avec sa machine à écrire. Le mensonge est moins intéressant que le démontage du mensonge.

Vinokourov s’est-il dopé avec le sang de Léon Tolstoï ? A l’UCI de nous le dire. Le suiveur lui-même a cherché la vérité pendant douze ans. Il a mis une fausse barbe pour enquêter, mais il a été vite démasqué avec sa cape de Fantômas, ses collants noirs et sa cagoule en feutre. Sous la chaleur de juillet, il a plus d’une fois failli perdre connaissance. Le Tour l’a plusieurs fois ranimé, ramené à la vie, et l’a supplié de ne plus recommencer à faire l’enfant. Le petit suiveur a écrit 13 200 fois le nom de Lance Armstrong, 8 797 fois le mot dopage, 243 fois le mot félicité et 54 fois Rasmussen. Il est bien avancé, car le Tour prône maintenant «la révolution».

Myrtilles. Mais que fait l’homme de juillet ? Il s’assied à l’ombre, dans un virage, et mange des chips. Dans une assiette en plastique. Il est sous l’influence du vin rosé et du fromage de tête. Il a le mollet nu. Il est heureux. Que fait la presse ? Elle vient lui parler de coureurs qui trichent à l’heure où il engouffre une tarte aux myrtilles. L’homme de juillet veut regarder les coureurs sur l’asphalte brûlant. Le suiveur restera toujours ce serviteur invisible du Tour, celui qui met la table, la débarrasse et ainsi de suite jusqu’à l’étape suivante. Mais tenter de corriger les dérives du Tour, c’est comme tenter de corriger une faute de grammaire sans en faire trois soi-même dans la même phrase. La machine à fabriquer du rêve fait une fumée bleue et le suiveur au fond de la salle de presse tousse affreusement. Le Tour nous dit que la probité est la base de tout ordre établi. Le Tour prend les Français pour des imbéciles. Le grand parti cycliste est éclaboussé par les scandales. Va-t-il passer ? Ça serait un crève-cœur pour le suiveur qui adore son Tour et ses gros mensonges.

L’empire du Tour ne survivra que s’il réduit le réel à de nouvelles lois, nous disent Messieurs Clerc et Prudhomme, les nouveaux marxistes-léninistes du Tour. Pour autant, on remet toujours le prix Jacques-Goddet au plus lyrique des suiveurs. Mais c’est le prix Feydeau qu’il faudrait remettre. Pour le moment, le Tour essaie de concilier le ciel et l’enfer. Le cyclisme est le dernier sport religieux, et c’est pour cela qu’on lui pardonne toutes ses offenses. Le Tour, cette nature copieuse qui récidive sans cesse et qui pourtant jamais ne lasse.

Joost test drive

Today I received an email invite to download JOOST. The name sounds weird, it has a kind of Amsterdam feel to it. It's one of those silly, meaningless words like SKYPE, for instance. It also comes straight from the same crew that built Kazaa (another silly name) and yes, Skype. Apparently the ghost in the machine is the same - an incredibly complex peer-to-peer, load-balancing, bandwidth-throttling core application developed by Janus Friis and Niklas Zenstromm. It's a very good idea, and just like Skype, if done right it has the potential to profoundly rearrange your daily routine.
The app itself is not even beta. It's like, alpha. The version I downloaded (for MacOSX) was 0.1.xx or something. So it basically quits if you jerk it around too much. I run it on a mac mini with a core duo @ 1.6 GHz and 1 Gb of RAM. Basically, a middle-of-the road set-up.

So what of Joost? It runs ok. Image quality is fine, but TV-resolution, so a little blurry at times. I understand they also serve HDTV programming, but I haven't really tried it because accessing channels is a fairly involved process. There are so many of them, and most of them are useless. I understand that as they reach public release, they will sign on big, major content providers. For now, the prospect of watching Paramount's Clockstoppers in low-res - as we say in French, bof.

This capture shows the basic interface - sort of mac-ified. It looks good, the branding's great.

The content is organized by channels - nothing really special here. But you pick a show to watch, so it's like a big video-on-demand site. It's like the big magical jukebox in the heavens (except that it is not: it's more like the big tuner that only picks up the shitty off-brand knock-off satellite - I mean, no offense but Porto Rican soccer? do they seriously expect a serious soccer fan be interested in that?). I think they are still in demo mode. I'm sure once they're up and running for real, they'll offer to charge us $30 for one evening of Premier League...

The channel navigation is easy and intuitive. There ain't much to navigate though. Big media conglomerates have signed on though - Viacom in particular, hence all the international versions of MTV are available. Yayyyy. And Comedy Central (sans Daily Show, so what is it good for?). It is showing promise though.

I started to watch an old Starsky and Hutch episode. It was sort of bumpy (but I'm on a building-wide wireless connection, so that's to be expected). I also checked out a random CNN documentary on Norway.

There's no CNN live feed. No live feed for that matter - it's more like a big TiVo - except that it's not stuff you chose to record. In the end. that' the main problem. Sure there's all this (legal) content I can stream onto my computer and it looks like TV and... and... well, not much. To me this is kind of a deal breaker. Great idea, but frankly, if I'm gonna watch TV on my computer, I'd rather use my little Miglia HDTV USB connector. With the appropriate software, I can actually use it like a TiVo.

In a way it feels that Joost comes too late. You can't really watch it casually (like TV) - at least not yet. But then again, if you'd like to do that, why not use a USB tv tuner? it's pretty cheap, and will save you a lot of hassles. Now if you want to use Joost as a VOD type of site, they'll really need to beef up their offering before it's of any interest. But I wonder, how will Joost be any different from a trip to the video store, when you don't know what you want to rent? And contrary to the video store, if you get bored you can just click it away and go back to youTube. On top of that, if I want to watch a Pixar movie in HD on my computer, I think I'll buy it from iTunes, of even better, I'll get it from Blockbuster's and rip it (and no, I will not us a Torrent client with a TOR proxy).

I think that Joost misses the mark not so much technologically but philosophically. TV is both immediate and awful. You don't watch most of the stuff on TV. There is a reason for that. But at the same time, TV is a unique medium for its immediacy. Live TV is geared to captivate you - it's not the same as watching a movie or a show. It's something unique. If you can't have that on Joost, then frankly it is of little use, precisely because the rest of the stuff, that is, shows, documentaries, films, etc etc. is mostly uninteresting. It's like the difference between a live soccer match and a recorded one when you know the result. Not as exciting.

Individual consumers are increasingly becoming their own media micro-niches. And the internet empowers them to build their own from the ground up. The days of aimlessly scanning the channel lineup for something , anything are basically over... That is, content producers and advertisers cannot dictate what you will watch as easily. They have lost some of their grip on our eyeballs and minds.

Joost claims it can deliver the lost eyeballs to the big conglomerates. They will let you IM other people who are watching the same thing all over the world. I can see the bull session with the code monkeys and the marketing dorks. TV. Social networking. Yoohoo.

Joost is a great app. It is just too late. Nobody likes TV anymore. TV is so last century. The only time people watch TV is for the FIFA world cup (or other live sporting events), the elections and 9/11. Otherwise, people watch shows, discrete units of content across a range of instruments. And you can't take Joost on your video iPod. So what's the point?

Technorati Tags:Joost

Great moments in Kazakhstani sports history

Finally, another idiot has replaced Borat as the most famous Kazakhstani in the world: Alexander Vinokourov, who left the Tour de France in disgrace today. It must be noted that the guy was still pedaling like crazy through the Alps and the Pyrénées, after crushing both knees in a fall seven days ago or so. A little like that American dude who managed to finish the race with a broken clavicle, and thanked Bayer for his otherworldly performance... rriiiiighhht.


Borat Vinokourov

Technorati Tags:Borat, Vinokourov, Tour de France, cycling

LA County Coroner

One can search the unclaimed persons database at the LA County Coroner website. The search will return pictures - it seems like a good idea, but at the same time it is extremely disturbing.

Technorati Tags:death

The effulgence of the North

Last night I went to the grand unveiling of the Velaslavasay Panorama. The invitation came to me by way of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which is the inspiration behind Sara Velas' wonderful project.

Subject: THE EFFULGENCE OF THE NORTH
Grand Unveiling & Alpine Spectacular
July 21st, 2007, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.

An Evening of Alpine Spectacle and a 360-degrees Arctic Panorama.

At The Velaslavasay Panorama
1122 West 24th Street
Los Angeles, California 90007

At Hoover & 24th Streets, Three Blocks North of Adams Boulevard.

Tickets: $12 general admission
$10 Panorama members and students

Available at the door or online .

It is with great excitement and only a little trepidation that the Velaslavasay Panorama announces the Grand Unveiling of The Effulgence of the North, an Arctic panorama taking the visitor to frozen heights to bear witness to the mysterious phenomena of the Aurora Borealis.

This evening of Alpine Spectacle will feature the yodeling talents of Tony Hartenstein and the melodic alpenhorn tones of Loren Marsteller. Professor Erkki Huhtamo will present an illustrated lecture on the most successful moving panorama of all time -- Albert Smith's Ascent of Mont Blanc, which was performed at London's Egyptian Hall no less than two thousand times throughout the 1850s. Outside in the Gardens will be an Alpine Photo Studio, Bavarian refreshments, and Janie Geiser's work of live projections entitled Stolen Archives of the Vanished Ice-World.

From July 27th and thereafter, Effulgence of the North will be on view weekly -- Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 12 noon until 6pm at The Velaslavasay Panorama.

Besides the Panorama itself, the event was absolutely spectacular! There was some serious yodeling going on, and a few wonderful performances in the gigantic garden behind the theater. An acquaintance of painter and lady of the house Sara Velas, explained to us that she had indeed built the gazebo from scratch. You can see her gazebo, and other wonders here. The Union Theater, where Sara Velas relocated the Panorama, served as headquarters for the Tile Workers Union back in the 60s (hence the name). As a result, wonderful abstract mosaic decorates the exterior of the building.

The huge crowd was very Getty-UCLA-USC-Silver Lake, what Bourdieu would call the "cultural capital (+)." A lot of very eccentric characters. It was also refreshing to see kids hanging around the artists. Another quintessentially utopian LA moment.

We had a group picture taken at the Alpine Photo Studio, shared a pretzel and a boiled München weisswürst dipped in Heinz grain mustard (straight from Costco, as the people behind the makeshift bar assured us), admired Janie Geiser's silent movie stylings artfully projected on a suspended white sheet besides a luscious banana tree.

On the way there, as we were idly cruising for a parking spot around 25th Street, we passed by two police cars.They had their big spotlights on, trained on the officers conducting some kind of business on the doorstep of a Church. The street was completely quiet and empty, so we couldn't really figure out what the trouble was. Until we turned the corner. We saw a white sheet on the sidewalk, covering an amorphous outstretched bump, something underneath. We didn't quite realize it at first. And then it hit us. It was a dead body. Random. Anonymous. Dead.

[The church is located at 1177 W. 25th St., and according to the Google, it is the Ward AME Church - I will try to call tomorrow to figure out what happened]

Technorati Tags:Velaslavasay Panorama, Museum of Jurassic Technology

Porn and the developing world

Hilarious (via Yahoo News and /.):

ABUJA (Reuters) - Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organization have used them to explore pornographic sites on the Internet, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported Thursday.

NAN said its reporter had seen pornographic images stored on several of the children's laptops.

"Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials," NAN said.

A representative of the One Laptop Per Child aid group was quoted as saying that the computers, part of a pilot scheme, would now be fitted with filters.

The OLPC is actually a beautiful Linux-based machine, and I'd love to snag one for myself. Now, put a free computer with free internet access into the hands of kids, and yes, they will find porn. What do you expect? that they will surf the web for Shakespeare ebooks and math problems? C'mon...

Vegas underbelly - literally

This is a picture of the "art gallery" in Vegas flood control tunnels. Strange and intriguing stuff by CNET's Daniel Terdiman. I don't see how this article has anything to do with technology, but it sure is cool!