Julian Assange, editor of WikiLeaks was, apparently a player with a passport. In Sweden he had two one-night stands with girls that turned out to be friends. They got together and decided to press charges (Daily Mail. The charge is sexual misconduct, not rape per se, but ‘withdrawal of consent’. Feministe goes into more detail, but the issue is that Assange supposedly continued sex after a condom broke, and without a condom in the other case. It is easy to dismiss these women as activist groupies, but that’s unfair to abused women worldwide. This specific case doesn’t seem like abuse, however. What may be the most telling is that one of the women earlier published something called ’7 Steps To Legal Revenge’ (another Daily Mail).

I suppose it was just a matter of time. The government has begun monitoring and cracking down on Internet speech in earnest. This includes arresting people for Facebook/SMS rumours and shutting down various websites. LankaeNews journalist Prageeth Ekneliyagoda is still missing, after over a week. Various websites have been blocked or shut down and there are reports that a Chinese team has been brought in to help the government monitor stuff. I think the Internet needs to have some regulation but this, like a lot of other law, is just being used to crack down on people that think different. Rumors and outright lies on state media are condoned, and most SMS and Facebook spam comes from that side.

Apparently three chaps have been arrested for sending false rumors over SMS and Facebook. I wonder if it’s those damn 94112512102 buggers that have been bunging up my inbox, though that stuff was pro-Mahinda. The problem with the law here is that it tends to be just another thing to bash people over the head with. I don’t know anything more about this case besides the SMS that came out of Ada Derana. I wonder if they’re also going to crack down on the people that spread false info through Rupavahini and state media. The SMS election spam is a problem and it went both ways. I personally got the most from the MR camp. I wonder who the chaps that got busted are.

There seems to be a fair amount of trolls on Kottu revealing personal information. This has disheartened some bloggers, but I was doing some reading and there are protections. Passionately Patient is already removed from wordpress.com for violating their terms of service. I’m looking at how the Blogger Content Policy. For now you can ‘Flag’ his blog as objectionable (as shown above). If you do find it objectionable.

So, I got this video of a cat waiting for a prawn, which he never gets. It’s a metaphor for life, and destiny. And density. I put a Cure song over it to cover for the paucity of the content. Now, however, it seems that Warner has canoodled YouTube into scanning the track against their music and then muting it. But it’s a 20 second video of a cat which like three people are going to watch, featuring back catalog music. I can understand Warner demanding a share of that ad revenue, or demanding a free ad with a link to that song on iTunes, but I fail to see how muting the song makes any business sense. It’s effectively a free ad, there’s a direct advertising channel built in, but instead all you get is silence. I don’t know when the music business became more about suppression that expression, but that business model has changed.

I thought I had lost this document forever, but thanks to Google Desktop, I finally found it again. It’s a paper I wrote on the historical context of Copyright, specifically how copyright is not some moral law. Copyright didn’t exist until 1710, and it didn’t exist for a reason. In oral culture the medium was community memory – if you didn’t share media it disappeared. My argument is that the web as a medium is closer to oral culture than print, but that’s another paper. This one is purely history.

I found this data on zeropaid.com Peer2Peer Networks January 24, 2004 Network Users: 9,009,263 P2P Networks January 11, 2003 Network Users: 6,415,653 P2P Networks April 11, 2002 Network Users: 2,224,289

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