One year ago today
Brutal crackdown on Turkish protests: People are gassed here non stop, in all central Istanbul areas. Tens of thousands of people are out in the streets.
Five years ago today
EFF kills another stupid internet patent: EFF's patent-busting project has put another notch in its belt: today they killed a truly outrageous patent on the use of subdomains for navigation and content management, as with jwz.livejournal.com. — Read the rest
One year ago today
Protester kicking away teargas cannister: Uncredited photo of a woman in at the Turkish anti-government/pro-democracy protests kicking away a tear-gas cannister.
Five years ago today
What shall we do with a carpet sample? A contest to see who could come up with the coolest uses for carpet samples, and the winners came up with some jim-dandy ideas. — Read the rest
One year ago today
Turkish Spring: Taksim Gezi Park protests in Istanbul: Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul is alive with protest at this moment. The action began on May 28, when environmentalists protested plans to remove the park and replace it with a mall, and were met with a brutal police crackdown. — Read the rest
Here's a quick overview of the technologies used (so well) by the #OccupyGezi protesters in Turkey. There's no question that the right tools helped organizers mobilize non-activists in huge numbers, despite the threat of police violence. But the question that remains to be seen is how much signals intelligence the police intercepted from the protesters, and whether they'll use that to track down and attack protesters after the fact.
From the Occupy Gezi Pics tumblr: "A young girl in a Burger King restaurant on Sunday, after she managed to escape the tear gas outside.
The caption reads: 'Spring will come again. I promise you.'"
A young girl in a Burger King restaurant on Sunday
I've been attending the Gezi Park protests since arriving in Turkey
on June 6.
Thousands of people have camped at the park in Taksim
Square, traditionally a gathering place for all kinds of meetings
and protests, to prevent Prime Minister Erdoğan from razing the
park to remove the place of assembly and erase some of the last
green space in Istanbul to turn it into an Ottoman barracks
shopping mall.
— Read the rest
Zeynep Tufekci, a Turkish-American Princeton/UNC sociologist who studies social movements and the Internet is presently in Istanbul's Gezi Park at the protests. She follows up on her earlier piece on the "social media style of protest" with a long and thoughtful look at what the protesters on the ground in Gezi Park are doing and why they're doing it:
After talking to the park protesters for days here is a very quick compilation of the main complaints and reasons people say brought them to the park:
1- Protesters say that they are worried about Erdogan's growing authoritarian style of governance.
— Read the rest
In case you've forgotten it amidst the Prism and Greek broadcaster shut-down stories, here's a reminder that the police are still engaged in a brutal crackdown on protesters across Turkey, courtesy of the Occupy Gezi Pics Tumblr:
"Taksim rainbow, Tuesday evening." — Read the rest
Three photos picked from the OccupyGeziPics Tumblr, chosen for their vivid incongruities, and also to remind us all that Turkey still fights for the right to protest:
Another photo of the woman in red surfaces.
— Read the rest
Rene from the German site Nerdcore sez, "A friend of mine who is staying in Istanbul right now contacted me this morning and I had the opportunity to interview a girl who is occupying Gezi Park in Turkey right now. The situation calmed down, but she told me that actually the whole city of Istanbul is up on their feet roaming the streets." — Read the rest
Mathilda sez, "In this photo by Twitter user @joeman24, a gas-mask wearing Dervish dances in front of protesters in Turkey."
A gas-mask wearing Whirling Dervish shows support for protesters in #Turkey
Two photos from the OccupyGeziPics Tumblr show the "people's bulldozer" in action — apparently a mechanical digger commandeered off a building site by protesters in Besiktas (one of my Twitter followers reports a rumor that it was a youth gang, and not portesters, though of course, youth gangs may be protesting too), and used to attack police barricades.
Mathilda writes,
Throughout the weekend, protests have erupted in Turkey in response to the brutal pacification of a peaceful sit-in in Istanbul. Over 1,700 people have been arested and there are multiple unconfirmed reports of people dying. The Prime Minister is blaming the entire protest on the social menace known as Twitter, which seems to be the only way for protesters to communicate (hashtag #occupygezi), as Turkish media networks seem to keep mum on the whole affair, and cell phone providers are pressured by the government to block communications.
— Read the rest
(Estimated 40,000 people cross the Bosphorous Bridge to join the protests/OccupyGeziPics)
Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul is alive with protest at this moment. The action began on May 28, when environmentalists protested plans to remove the park and replace it with a mall, and were met with a brutal police crackdown. — Read the rest
HP wants you to print things through its cloud service, wherein you pay a subscription fee for ink and your usage is routed through its servers. To encourage you to do this, it covers the USB port on one model with a sticker with a No Smoking-style "No USB" logo on it–lest you simply plug in your printer and start printing things with it before you've endured the hard sell via network setup. — Read the rest
Andrew Wodzianski is a DC-area artist whose work often riffs off of nerdy pop cultural touchstones and ephemera. His pieces make references to comic books, 8-bit video games, monster movies, and tabletop gaming.
To celebrate the 35th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, September 28, 1987, he created pieces of meme-styled art that draw inspiration from the Star Trek coloring books and ship blueprints of his youth. — Read the rest
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (previously) was dealt a stinging rebuke in March, when voters in Istanbul overthrew his AK Party, which had run the city for 25 years; Erdogan had previously said "whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey." — Read the rest
ISPs in the UK are required to censor a wide swathe of content: what began as a strictly limited, opt-in ban on depictions of the sexual abuse of children has been steadily expanded to a mandatory ban on "extreme" pornography, "terrorist content," copyright and trademark infringement, and then there's the on-again/off-again ban on all porn sites unless they keep a record of the identity of each user and the porn they request. — Read the rest
The millions of Hong Kong people participating in the #612strike uprising are justifiably worried about state retaliation, given the violent crackdowns on earlier uprisings like the Umbrella Revolution and Occupy Central; they're also justifiably worried that they will be punished after the fact.
A new report from the Institute For the Future on "state-sponsored trolling" documents the rise and rise of government-backed troll armies who terrorize journalists and opposition figures with seemingly endless waves of individuals who bombard their targets with vile vitriol, from racial slurs to rape threats.
