Boing Boing » sweden

Mouldering city built of bread is a metaphor for Earth without humans

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 01:15:52 +0000

Swedish artist Johanna Mårtensson created this installation depicting a cityscape made of bread in 2009, and photographed it as it decayed, creating a series of pictures representing the destiny of all human folly come the day that we make ourselves extinct and vanish from the face of the Earth:

I was inspired by an article about how well the earth would do without us. Within 500 years all buildings would be half fallen or fallen, perfect homes for animals and plants. The forrest would soon grow in cities. After hand buildings as well as pollutions would be taken care of by bacterias and micro-organisms. An ufo that came here in a couple of of hundred thousand years would not see many signs of that a gang of primates ones thought that they where the lords of the planet.

Decor Photoinstallation by Johanna Mårtensson (via Crazy Abalone)

UK spooks' candid opinions of the Assange affair revealed

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:00:54 +0000

Julian Assange has presented a set of ~~freedom-of-information~~ data protection act liberated messages from GCHQ, the UK spy headquarters, concerning his own case. According to Assange, the messages reveal that UK spies believed that the Swedish rape inquiry against him was a "fit up" aimed at punishing him for his involvement in Wikileaks (many believe that the Swedish government would have aided in Assange's extradition to the USA, where there is a sealed Grand Jury indictment against him). He also revealed cables relating to the spies' candid opinion about his sheltering in the Ecuadorian embassy:

A message from September 2012, read out by Assange, apparently says: "They are trying to arrest him on suspicion of XYZ … It is definitely a fit-up… Their timings are too convenient right after Cablegate..."
...A second instant message conversation from August last year between two unknown people saw them call Assange a fool for thinking Sweden would drop its attempt to extradite him.
The conversation, as read out by Assange, goes: "He reckons he will stay in the Ecuadorian embassy for six to 12 months when the charges against him will be dropped, but that is not really how it works now is it? He's a fool… Yeah … A highly optimistic fool."

GCHQ acknowledges that the messages are real, but, "The disclosed material includes personal comments between some members of staff and do not reflect GCHQ's policies or views in any way."

Julian Assange reveals GCHQ messages discussing Swedish extradition [Giles Tremlett and Ben Quinn/Guardian]

Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde is a candidate for Pirate Party MEP in Finland

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:02:06 +0000

Peter "brokep" Sunde -- who co-founded The Pirate Bay and founded Flattr, a system for allowing fans to directly pay the artists they love -- is standing for the European Parliament in Finland on behalf of the Finnish Pirate Party. Sunde was raised in Sweden, but has Finnish roots, and is able to run there. His platform sounds like an admirable and sensible one, and my personal experience of him is that he's a good, thoughtful and honorable person. If I were in Finland, he'd have my vote:

“Non-commercial file sharing should of course become legal and protected, and must re-think copyright all together. Copyright is not the thing that makes ARTISTS money, it’s only for their brokers and distributors,” Sunde says.
“I’d rather see us sponsor culture by pushing more money to music education, and facilities for your people to create music. It would be much more sane for cultural advancement then extending copyrights.”
If elected Sunde hopes to be aggressive rather than defensive. This means not just responding to treats to Internet freedom, such as ACTA, but ensuring that this type of legislation doesn’t even make it onto the political agenda in the first place.
“I think there’s a huge possibility for us to impact the EU and I would like to be part of it,” Sunde says.
The Pirates are delighted to have the Pirate Bay founder on board. Harri Kivistö, chairman of the the Finnish Pirate Party, says that Sunde’s candidacy will raise the visibility of the party during the upcoming election. Perhaps more importantly, his values fit well within the Pirate Party movement.

Pirate Bay Co-Founder to Run For European Parliament [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]

(Image: Peter Sunde, Amphiteater, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from shareconference's photostream)

IKEA-style vibrator

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:53:46 +0000

LELO, a Swedish sex-toy company, has produced an IKEA-style, assemble-it-yourself vibrator called GӒSM (what else?) that comes with its own Allen key.

GӒSM is the world’s first truly eco-friendly vibe, made with100% recycled materials and powered by a revolutionary new rotation charging method pioneered by LELO. Meanwhile, GӒSM arrives in an 8-piece set that you assemble yourself, allowing you to take pride in piecing together your pleasure, and the money saved on production costs goes directly to you!

Meet GӒSM, LELO’s Cleanest, Greenest Vibe (via The Mary Sue)

Eyeball mouth

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 16:24:14 +0000

This amazing eye-teeth makeup job comes from Swedish makeup artist PsychoSandra, who has an awful lot of equally astonishing samples on her site: "Haha I thought it was a long time since I did something with my lips. Wanted to do something weird, yes, I can say that it is weird. But pretty, it's not, but I had fun anyway. That's what counts, or?!;)"

Well it was fun anyway (via JWZ)

Pirate Bay documentary TPB:AFK ready for download

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 19:25:30 +0000

At long last TPB:AFK, the Kickstarter-funded documentary about the persecution of The Pirate Bay is finished and online, and ready for you to download:

Peter Sunde, one of the three founders followed in the documentary, previously told TorrentFreak that he has mixed feelings about the final TPB AFK cut but that “it tells an important story.”
TPB-AFK highlights a lot of the negative events the three founders went through, ending with the final guilty verdict early last year. Needless to say these events had quite an impact on their lives.
“It’s still a fucked up story and the film makes me think about the past years of my life quite a lot,” Sunde says.
The Pirate Bay founder added that he might have chosen other material to include and that many of the good parts have been left out.
“It’s Simon’s decision what to include and it’s his view of our story. I like that he’s independent from us and that he’s promised to release lots of extra material for some of the things that I might have wanted to have included,” Sunde said.

TPB AFK: Watch and Download The Pirate Bay Documentary NOW [TorrentFreak/Ernesto]

Download via BitTorrent [The Pirate Bay]

Early Pirate Bay server now in a museum

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 20:05:28 +0000

The Computer Museum in Linköping, Sweden has a "50 Years of File-Sharing" exhibition on that includes a machine characterized as the first Pirate Bay server, though there's some nuance to that description:

A Pirate Bay insider informed TorrentFreak that the contents of the computer case in question were initially hosted in the blue box pictured here. In the same photo are also the three other servers that were operational at the time, a laptop, tower case and the red server box.

So, in just a few years, the hardware moved from an old blue box to a prominent place at the Computer Museum.

‘First’ Pirate Bay Server on Permanent Display in Computer Museum

Working record made from ice

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 23:21:24 +0000

Swedish band The Shout Out Louds released a limited edition of 10 promos for their new album that consisted of latex molds that you filled with distilled water, froze, and played on a turntable:

“We talked to professors at different universities telling us it would never work out, so we had to develop the technique ourselves,” he says. After receiving a negative imprint of the song’s master cut, they started experimenting; the office became a kind of amateur chemistry lab, and the team spent hours testing different types of liquid, various drying techniques, and multiple kinds of molds.
“One of the biggest challenges was that the bubbles made the ice cloudy and messed up the tiny tracks, which made the needle jump.” Further trial and error revealed that using distilled water did the trick, giving the final product a nice clarity and even surface. Another insight? Time is not, in fact, on your side when working with a frozen substance; functionality and sound quality diminish immediately once the melting starts. A silicone cast allowed for quick and easy record removal, essential to ensuring it could be used straight out of the freezer.

It's a bit lo-fi, and the quality degrades quickly with meltage. But hey, record made of ice.

A Record Made Of Ice That Actually Plays (via IO9)

Peter "Brokep" Sunde, railroaded into Swedish prison by Big Content

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 16:17:15 +0000

Peter "Brokep" Sunde was convicted in Sweden's notorious Pirate Bay trial, and now faces prison time and a multimillion-euro fine. As his imprisonment looms, he describes, in detail, the bizarre circumstances of his conviction, which started with an illegal raid ordered by the US trade representative, continued with an investigation led by a prosecutor who'd already accepted a job with Warner Brothers as a copyright enforcer and was just working through his notice period as he pursued Peter; and then a trial that included a judge and multiple jurors who were literally getting paychecks from the large copyright industry associations. Peter was convicted on the thinnest of circumstantial evidence of having configured a load-balancer in a data-centre used by The Pirate Bay (this load-balancer was not plugged in at the time of the raid, and there's no evidence it was ever plugged in).

On the basis of this corrupt, ugly, kangaroo court, the Swedish justice system is ready to put him in jail for an "economic debt to some of the world’s richest corporations," offshore bullies who have perverted the course of justice in Sweden.

Sunde is the co-founder of Flattr, a company whose sole mission is seeing to it that the money fans spend on art goes directly to artists, without any funny record label or movie studio accounting in the middle. He also co-founded IPREDator, an amazing VPN that I use every day to stop my logins and passwords from being harvested by crooks and bad guys. He's one of the good guys, and he's being martyred by Big Content, with the complicity of a corrupt Swedish establishment. It is a shame of global proportion. Poor Peter.

A few months prior, a Swedish prosecutor had arrived at the conclusion that this service could not be sentenced for any crime in Sweden. He sent a memo explaining this to his superiors. After a meeting between representatives from the Justice Department and Sven-Erik Alhem, the over-prosecutor at the time, the prosecutor in question reconsiders. A quick raid was required, with full force. So full a force, in fact, that when the raid is actually conducted, the police have no idea what to grab. They seize hundreds of computers, in several cities, but also loudspeakers, cables, and the like. They don’t know the size of the things they’re supposed to be looking for, and decide – during the raid in session – to rent trucks from local gas stations to ship off all the seized goods. In short, it is stressful, unplanned, and ill considered. So ill considered that the police even missed several locations where the target of the raid had ongoing activities.
Thomas Bodström promised to come clear with what had happened. And yet, over 700 mails between him and the United States regarding this matter were (and remain) classified as secrets of the State. We still haven’t seen them. In the aftermath of the political scandal that was uncovered, Swedish national records were set in charges filed with the Constitutional Committee (Konstitutionsutskottet), Parliamentary Ombudsman (JO) and Chancellor of Justice (Justitiekanslern). The newly-founded Swedish Pirate Party became one of Sweden’s largest in a matter of days. A few weeks later, an election was held. None of the young wanted to vote for the ruling Social Democrats any longer, knowing that the Social Democrats had sold out their interests to rich lobby organizations in the United States. The Social Democrats lost power, partly because of this scandal...
..,Tomas Norström is very interested in copyright cases. So interested, in fact, that he also happened to be a member in the Swedish Association for Copyright, and was a board member of the Swedish Association For Industrial Legal Protection, SFIR[3]. Two organizations that take a very clear stance on copyright issues. The associations are daughter associations of ALAI and AIPPI, two international organizations whose statutes state their goal to strengthen the interests of copyright holders. The chairpeople for these international organizations frequently make statements condemning all kinds of copyright violations, and work for harsher punishment for violations.
Tomas Norström didn’t consider himself to be biased. Besides, he neglected to disclose his engagements since he regarded them as without consequence to the case. There was plenty of opportunity for him to consider his bias before the trial, as I personally had checked the layman judges[4] and found that two of them were biased. When my lawyer officially communicated this, Norström published a press release where he said he had found one biased layman judge (without mentioning the complaint from us). He had found a composer who had been active in the record labels that were suing us. There was another layman judge who got the paycheck from these industries, who Norström did not consider biased.

Aftermath of The Pirate Bay Trial: Peter Sunde’s Plea – In His Own Words - Falkvinge on Infopolicy

Swedish telcoms giant Teliasonera complicit in mass surveillance in the world's worst dictatorships

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 19 May 2012 12:59:16 +0000

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

File-sharing church solemnizes first wedding

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 07 May 2012 22:50:20 +0000

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

brokep on the entertainment industry

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 06:26:33 +0000

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."

File-sharing becomes a recognized religion in Sweden

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:48:17 +0000

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

Everyday Swedes take over management of nation's Twitter account

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 15:41:20 +0000

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)

Transparent speaker

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 21:57:13 +0000

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)

Swedish Pirate Party MEP Amelia Andersdotter, on taking office at long last

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:06:30 +0000

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)

Pirate Party mysteriously barred from exhibiting at Sweden's Gamex

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:43:03 +0000

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).

Subway station decorated with pixelart inspired by 8-bit games

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:00:40 +0000

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)

8-Bit Artwork In Swedish Subway System [buzzfeed.com]

Movie-industry self-piracy proves that IP addresses aren't people, invalidates copyright enforcement schemes

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 21:08:10 +0000

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’

Dense, beautiful sculptures made from thrift scores

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 16:27:53 +0000

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)