The War on Internet Freedom : Various TV Bits

So the information wars (that have been waging for at least the last 500 years) have moved up a gear recently… with recent events being Edward Snowden trapped in Ballardian Limbo in a Russian airport (or so we’re told) and our sleazy prime minister here in NZ, demonstrating a dismal ignorance about the web, and the law, and basic morality, “talking” to Arch Criminal Kim Dot Com… with KDC fighting on behalf on the New Zealand people, and The Coward and Liar, John Key snearingly, arrogantly fighting against us, even though he’s supposed to be our elected representative. He didn’t even bother turning up to the hearings today.

And these two things (The GCSB Bill, Snowden in Russia) are The Same Thing… and our TV News Media (who only ever seems to report on The Internet as though it’s a problem that needs solving), fails to make the connection… fails to see the arc of history. They’re utterly and completely useless – more embarrassing than the prime minister himself – they’re like a satire about a TV station that every night has to fill an hour with “news” without reporting any actual news. Kindof like a news station in 1930s Germany that will talk about anything except Nazis.

And enough people use the information the get from TV to vote… to elect “leaders” like John Key, who act on behalf of global corporatism rather than us.

So I’m at war with broadcast TV. We need to turn it into an irrelevant backwater as quickly as possible. We need to turn it into just another Youtube channel.

So… couple of things:

1) http://www.wibbitz.com/

This could be interesting – it turns RSS feeds into video presentation by pulling out what it thinks is core text, and superimposing it over photos/videos. It presents visually appealing, dumbed down blog content in other words. I think that’s ok – because what we need is something that runs in the background for people to watch while they’re having their dinner… filling the space that would otherwise need to be filled with conversation, which there’s far too much of already. Various blogs that talk about it, seem to think it will mean the end of various corporate video-production departments. I’m not sure it’s quite as good as that, however

unfortunately:

a) it only works on Apple devices, so fuck that.

b) the RSS converter in the video no longer appears on their site, so for all intents and purposes, it’s just a splash page… if you refuse to use Apple (because Apple are the worst abuser of open-systems there is. They’re worse than fucking Microsoft)

c) it talks like an American Droid (I want a Canadian Droid (that’s all I’ve ever really wanted (sigh)))

Still… interesting idea, and if wibbitz depends on special markup in the HTML, then we can just reverse-engineer it, and make our own distributed versions.

2) Silo-Independent Content Backup.

I think I’ve got together all the disparate threads now to build a system that will spider a site (and by that I mean WordPress blog… because that’s all I use now)… and take screen-shots of all the pages it links to… download, and serve locally all linked images (actually, I do this already. I don’t hotlink images at all), and (finally) download and (as a backup link) serve youtube videos… because youtube videos get censored ALL THE FUCKING TIME because of copy-monopoly bullshit.

Imagine youtube as the Alexandra Library – the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled… I mean it’s obviously not that, because it’s full of morons, but as a cultural artefact? It’s astonishing – it is SO much more impressive than any other Wonder Of The World, that it’s in an entire dimensional plane way above them. That said, we don’t actually know how impressive the original library at Alexandra was because it was burned down.

And likewise, youtube is constantly being burned… arsonists in the corridors, going from room to room, burning the things they don’t like. Copy-monopolists.

So we need a distributed means of storing video, and we need to either use it as a default, or failing that, backup.

Apropos of that, here’s a video from a New Silk Road… that we knew was going to be deleted as soon as it was put up, because it’s selling drugs…

… so I’ve preserved it for posterity. It’s an historical artefact.

Appears to work in all browsers, except Chrome.

3) live.bittorrent.com … which is a way of using bittorrent to stream video – and as far as I can tell, it works… you download a bit of software (unfortunate, but you need to do that with bittorrent apps)… run it (it runs in the background) and you can then stream video.

They haven’t released it to the web for broadcast purposes yet, which is sad and bogus. I’ve attempted to sign up for a beta thing… have yet to hear back. The terms say:

“This beta is for legitimate purposes only. By creating an account, you represent that you will not publish any content or take any action on or through our software or site that infringes or violates the rights of any other party or otherwise violates the law”

Which is bullshit, because the WHOLE PURPOSE of this sort of protocol/application is to facilitate mass civil-disobedience, because the laws are wrong, and they won’t be changed very easily because our governments are no longer legitimate. Not only do we NOT have a moral duty to obey the laws they pass (for the 1%), we actually have a moral duty to break them.

They may not say that is the purpose (in fact they are saying the opposite), but really, that’s what its purpose is. It’s purpose is to free information.

But anyway… could be interesting if it ever gets into the wild. That is the plan (apparently)… they’re just trying to get it stable before launching it.