By Cory Doctorow at 5:59 am Saturday, May 19
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The Swedish news show Uppdrag Granskning has posted an hour-long investigative journalism piece establishing the link between the giant Swedish telcoms company Teliasonera and oppressive regimes around the world. Teliasonera sold and supported network equipment that was used to spy on dissidents, journalists, political reformers, union leaders, and the general public in Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Kazakhstan. Here's EFF's writeup of the piece:
The investigative report, titled “Black Boxes,” in reference to the black boxes Teliasonera allowed police and security services to install in their operation centers--which granted them the unrestricted capability to monitor all communications—including Internet traffic, phone calls, location data from cell phones, and text messages—in real-time. This has caused concern among Swedish citizens and Teliasonera shareholders, who had previously been assuaged by assurances from the telecommunications company that they follow the law in the countries in which they are operating. After a meeting with Peter Norman, Sweden’s Minister of Financial Markets, the chairman of Teliasonera’s board of directors issued a statement, announcing that they had launched “an action programme for handling issues related to protection of privacy and freedom of expression in non-democratic countries, in a better and more transparent way.”
Teliasonera’s declaration of good intentions may be too little too late after the damning evidence of abuse compiled by Uppdrag Granskning. Documents obtained by their investigators showed an Azerbaijani had his phone tapped after he published a piece about being beaten at the hands of government security agents while covering a story. The report also found that black-box surveillance was used in Belarus to track down, arrest, and prosecute protesters who attended an anti-government protest rally following the 2010 Belarusian presidential election. One Azerbaijani citizen says he was interrogated solely due to the fact that he voted for the Armenian representative in the 2009 Eurovision song contest.
Swedish Telcom Giant Teliasonera Caught Helping Authoritarian Regimes Spy on Their Citizens
By Cory Doctorow at 3:50 pm Monday, May 7
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The first-ever wedding sanctioned by the Church of Kopimism (an officially Swedish church that reifies copying and characterizes file-sharing as a sacred act) was convened last weekend. It was a beautiful and awfully funny and joyous occasion, judging from the video. Here's Torrentfreak's Ernesto with more:
It was only a matter of time before the first Kopimist couple would become married, and last weekend this joyful union took place at the Share conference in Belgrade.
On stage, a Romanian woman and an Italian man were joined in a holy Kopimist act. Both promised to share the rest of their lives together and to uphold the highest sharing standards.
The Church was delighted to bring the news and commented: “We are very happy today. Love is all about sharing. A married couple share everything with each other.”
Like any other matrimony, a Kopimism marriage is bound by rules. The Church of Kopimism allows the couple to share their love with others, as long as those others don’t steal it. Most importantly, however, they have to copy and remix themselves.
“Hopefully, they will copy and remix some DNA-cells and create a new human being. That is the spirit of Kopimism. Feel the love and share that information. Copy all of its holiness.”
Or to put it in the words of another famous religion: “Be fruitful and multiply, teem on the earth and multiply in it.”
File-Sharing Church Weds First Couple
Peter Sunde, the notorious and entrepreneurial "brokep" who co-founded the Pirate Bay,
writes in Wired about his view on the entertainment industry's corruption and the cluelessness of the lawmakers who side with them: "Evidently, Warner Brothers felt that the investigation was taking too long. The studio contacted the police officer in charge of the investigation (one person that worked mostly by himself) and before I had even been questioned by him, he interviewed for a job with Warner Brothers."
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 9:48 am Thursday, Jan 5
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Sweden has given official religious status to Church of Kopimism, a faith and philosophy based on file-sharing. The faith's foundational document, ""POwr, broccoli and Kopimi," is available as a .torrent file indexed on The Pirate Bay (natch). It exhorts followers to undertake 100 tasks to attain #g_d (a hashtagged, all-lower-case version of the observant Jewish tradition of writing God as "G_d").
001. Obtain the Internet.
002. Start using IRC.
003. Group and birth a site.
004. Experiment with research chemicals.
005. Design a three-step program.
006. Take a powerful stance for something positive and essential.
007. Regulate nothing.
008. Say that you have to move in two weeks, but stay for seven months. Come back a year later and do it all over again.
009. ROTFLOL.
010. Relax, you’re already halfway there.
011. Just kidding.
012. Don’t think outside the box.
Build a box.
013. Support support.
014. Organize and go to parties and fairs.
015. Start 30–40 blogs about the same things.
016. Drain the private sector of coders, graphic artists and literati.
017. Create a prize that is awarded.
018. Express yourself often in the media, vaguely.
019. Spread all rumors.
020. Seek out and try carding, and travel by expensive trains. Don’t order sushi.
021. Start a radio station.
022. Everything you use, you can copy and give an arbitrary name, whether it’s a news portal, search engine or public service.
023. Buy a bus.
024. Install a MegaHAL.
025. Make sure that you are really good friends with people who can use Photoshop, HTML, databases, and the like.
As faith strictures go, these ones are actually pretty good. On the other hand, I'm not much of a believer in Gods, G_d or #g_d, so perhaps this isn't for me.
File-sharing religion goes legit in Sweden
By Cory Doctorow at 7:41 am Saturday, Dec 17
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The Swedish tourism agency has convinced the government to turn over management of the official national Swedish Twitter account to everyday Swedes, on a rotating basis, to show the world what a swell place full of swell people Sweden is. I want brokep to run the account for a week.
“No one owns the brand of Sweden more than its people. With this initiative we let them show their Sweden to the world,” says Thomas Brühl, the CEO of the country’s tourism agency VisitSweden.
Curators of Sweden is certainly an interesting idea; a variety of Swedes, including an editorial writer, a founder of an advertising agency with his own farm, a suburban writer, a priest, a teacher and a coffee-drinking trucker lesbian are all lined up to take over the account in coming weeks. The plan is that they will portray a diverse range of values, skills and ideas from across the country.
It's interesting in that this combines the best aspect of live theater with the Internet -- that is, the ever-present possibility that someone will do something absolutely insane in a highly public forum while acting in an official capacity.
Sweden lets citizens take over its official Twitter account. This is either genius or insanity.
(via Runnin' Scared)
By Cory Doctorow at 1:57 pm Tuesday, Dec 6
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Swedish design firm People People has prototyped a transparent speaker called "Speaker," which uses WiFi or a headphone jack to receive its signal.
Being big is good for sound quality, but not so good for shipping. Any other speaker will ship a lot of air around the globe before ending up in your living room. This speaker ships in a small, flat package that goes in through your mailbox. The glass sheets making up the box is being ordered through the glass repair shop closest to every single customer. In that way the speaker reduces shipping with up to 90%, and supports local handicraft in one go. A very economical and ecological solution.
The speaker is then assembled at home, IKEA style. This also means that the components that breaks first (the rubber ring and the speaker cone) can be easily replaced, keeping the product away from any landfill.
That sounds great!
(via Cribcandy)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:06 am Monday, Nov 21
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Amelia Andersdotter is the Swedish Pirate Party MEP who won her seat more than two years ago, but is only heading to the European Parliament now, due to eurocratic delays. TorrentFreak catches up with the 24-year-old, who will be the youngest MEP in the room when she finally takes her seat.
“European approaches to competition law need to be changed, at least a bit. Better sector adaptation, for instance. The lack of real control over vertical integration creates the situation where telcos (or media enterprises) own everything from the backbone cables to the music streaming service – that’s not good. One would at least expect some obligation to keep the different tiers apart,” Andersdotter says.
“Currently this type of bundling is, more worryingly, encouraged rather than regulated and it creates a very unfair balance between the infrastructure owners (in this case) and users. Competition law just now deals mostly with horizontal integration, which would be say, if one company owns all of the cable in northern Belgium (Telenet).”
Andersdotter points out that the telecommunications sector has some good sector specific laws already, the net neutrality law in the Netherlands being a prime example. The problem is, however, to get all member states to adopt these regulations.
Pirate To Join European Parliament As Youngest Member
(Image: Demonstration mot IPRED, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from cybriks's photostream)
Sweden's Pirate Party says it was avidly courted by the sales staff for Gamex, the largest games conference in the country. The party bought a booth and went to some expense arranging to have it decorated and staffed. At the last minute,
Gamex mysteriously banned the Pirate Party from exhibiting at the show, saying the conference was "a venue for political conflict and the party’s presence could cause problems" (despite the fact that other political organizations are exhibiting there).
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 12:00 pm Tuesday, Oct 18
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A Stockholm metro station has been redecorated with pixel-art inspired by classic games. They're lovely -- what a nice way to start your daily commute.
(via Neatorama)
By Cory Doctorow at 2:08 pm Thursday, Sep 22
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TorrentFreak has
excellent analysis of the revelation that a user in the Swedish Film Institute's IP block has been accused of illegally downloading movies in a report from one of the motion picture industry's copyright bounty-hunters. Rather than sniggering at the sight of the entertainment industry being hoist on its own petard, we should be noting this as even more evidence that IP addresses aren't people, and the entertainment industry's legal campaign to sue people all over the world by the hundreds of thousands on the strength of an IP address alone is an unfair and unsuitable remedy for its copyright problems. After all, if the
Swedish Film Institute can't figure out who is responsible for downloading movies from its Internet connection, how can a university, employer, or family?
Although SFI acknowledge that the IP address (or addresses) logged by DoubleTrace does indeed belong to them, they reveal that it’s hardly trivial to discover the real-life person behind it. Not only do all of SFI’s staff share that IP, but several tenants (such as film and TV producers) do too. And visitors to their library, and visitors to some of their cinemas, and diners in the restaurant, not to mention those using the open WiFi in the cafe and foyer areas.
As indicated by the way they have been proactive in this case by calling in the police, the SFI really seem to want to get to the bottom of the allegations. They say they have firewall logs that could show when and from where in their infrastructure the movies were being shared.
But – and little surprise here – DoubleTrace, the anti-piracy company behind the allegations, aren’t being forthcoming with their evidence.
“The week before the incident became public we carried out intensive work in which we asked the information technology company DoubleTrace AB and production company Strix to show us the data that they claim to have, to get a chance to see if the sharing actually took place here, and if so, from where,” the SFI explains. “Since we are being denied the material it means that we can not verify whether the information is correct.”
Movie Institute Feels Pain Of IP Address-Only Piracy ‘Evidence’
By Cory Doctorow at 9:27 am Wednesday, Aug 10
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Swedish sculptor Michael Johansson creates beautiful, dense sculptures made from charity shop and yard-sale finds, arranged by similarity in tetrisoids and other odd fittings. Check out the link for some enormous pieces made from carefully fitted furniture, as well.
Michael Johansson
(via Core 77)
