EU ambassadors have agreed on a draft statement regarding "cooperation to combat terrorist use of the internet". Justice and Interior ministers are expected to endorse the document in June.

The EU draft text (which can be downloaded here [pdf]), lays out conclusions regarding the so-called "Check the Web", initiative launched by Germany, which currently holds the EU Presidency.
The Eurocrats reckon internet terror is a big deal.

From the viewpoint of the early 1980s, a lot of the things in the “real world” column are pretty science-fictiony. Botnets? Computer viruses available for free to anyone who looks for them? Malware? Spam? People carrying out their everyday lives over a computer network? Pictures of cats speaking l33t? Estonia?

Johannes Grenzfurthner and Evelyn Fürlinger of monochrom and Magnus Wurzer and Chris Veigl of SHIFZ traveled to San Francisco from Vienna for last weekend’s Maker Faire 2007. While they are in town I thought it would be great for people to hang out and have a few drinks with them before they return to Austria. So this Saturday, May 26th we are having a monochrom & SHIFZ meetup at Lucky 13 in San Francisco. We will be gathering around 8pm and should be there until around midnight or so. Here’s the invite on Upcoming.

monochrom & SHIFZ are two amazing art and technology organizations based out Vienna and together they co-produce Roboexotica, the annual festival of cocktail robots.

TIME:
7:30pm
Wed May 23

PLACE:
porn palace
415 jessie SF

WHO:
violet blue and guest on pain boys + electro-stim
http://tinynibbles.com

team unicorn - triumph of chastity and the legend of the unicorn
(amy jenkins, liisa pine, wendi flybutter)

monochrom - johannes and evelyn and their latest monochrom projects!
http://monochrom.at

shifz - magnus and chris on cocktail robotics
http://shifz.blogspot.com

kyle machulis (qDot) - surprise!

MC jacob appebaum
http://appelbaum.net

FREE ADMISSION but DONATIONS appreciated - all proceeds go to the SF Crisis Center

CASH BAR | 21+

SEX HACKS
with artists, technologists, designers, & geeks:

>> Norene Leddy: NYC-Based Artist Presents "The Aphrodite Project" GPS Platform Shoes for the Modern Sex Worker (theaphroditeproject.tv)

>> qDot: Offering Up His Custom Built and Frequently Teledildonic Sex Toy Hacks (slashdong.org)

>> Natasha Strange: Beloved San Francisco Dominatrix Demonstrates Hypnotic Electronic Mind Hacks (kittenwithawhip.com)

>> Johannes Grenzfurthner: of international art-technology-philosophy group monochrom on the upcoming sex + tech conference Arse Elektronika (monochrom.at)

Live, explicit demos make this an 18+ affair.

Curated, moderated, & instigated by Melissa Gira (Sexerati.com), for the Center for Sex and Culture

Monday, May 21st, 2007, doors at 7, science at 7:30
@ the Center for Sex and Culture
290 Division at 10th/Brannan, Suite 405
$10 - $20 Sliding Scale to benefit CSC
(no one turned away for lack of funds)
www.sexandculture.org

Mostly Private After Party at Shine (rsvp here, or to melissa at melissagira dot com)
1337 Mission Street
Between 9th and 10th
www.shinesf.com

Dear hostile deity,

I'm sorry if we offended you, but until you identify which "one true god" you are, we cannot take steps to appease you. We included the names of over 90 deities on our "Divining Pod" including several of you jealous gods. You sign your email "You know who I am", but in fact we do not. Are you one of the monotheistic deities such as Yahweh, Ahura Mazda, Akhenaten?
Or perhaps just one of those egocentric heads of a pantheon, such as Zeus or Ra?

In any case, it is time to stop being a bully. Those other gods are your peers and you need to treat them with some respect. Chances are that many of them have been worshiped by man longer than you, whoever you are. They say jealousy is a sign of low self-esteem.

We have nothing but respect for you, and all deities. You are a great god, I'm sure, but there are so many deities competing for our attention that we simply cannot spend every second worshiping you. Please don't take this as an offense or a slight. We'll always make room for you at the table.
Signed,
monochrom

Subject: Mortals, ye shall fail!
To: polytheism@monochrom.at

Abandon all hope. I am the all powerful god. All those other gods are suckers. You have offended me, the one true god, with your blasphemy. I shall never let your "Divining Pod" off the ground.
Signed,
You know who I am.

Law and Second Order: monochrom @ Maker Faire.
Saturday, May 19, 2007.
Link

The Divining Pod: International Year Of Polytheism @ Maker Faire.
Sunday, May 20, 2007.
Link

Roboexotica: Festival For Cocktail Robotics @ Maker Faire.
Saturday/Sunday, May 20+21, 2007.
We'll help our friends and co-organizers of Shifz.
Link

Sex Hacks: Arse Elektronika @ Center for Sex and Culture.
Panel with Norene Leddy, qDot, Johannes Grenzfurthner (monochrom), Natasha Strange, moderated by Melissa Gira.
Monday, May 21, 2007; 7:00 PM.
Link

"Something sinister is coming to San Francisco in May. The conditions for a zombie outbreak will be perfect on May 25th around 6pm. Stay tuned for further dispatches."

As announced at a press conference in Berlin's Cafe Einstein in spring 2006, the Vienna group monochrom has assumed ownership of all trademark and usage rights of the artist Joerg Schlick's "Lord Jim Lodge". Schlick, who died in December 2005, developed the brand name together with Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Wolfgang Bauer during the 1980s. This takeover has far-reaching consequences for numerous artistic endeavors. In cooperation with the Berlin art consulting agency Teyssandier-Springer, monochrom has lodged claims asserting its rights in the affair while simultaneously inviting the owners of the works in question to negotiate a satisfactory out-of-court settlement.
Shortly before the artist's death, monochrom purchased from Joerg Schlick in a package deal all rights pertaining to intellectual property, copyright, trademark, and usage in accordance with national and international regulations.
In May 2006 monochrom had already succeeded in landing the first returns from the partial transfer of the logo to the American soft drink manufacturer The Coca Cola Company. From these funds it was possible to enter into takeover negotiations with additional art and cultural organizations, thus furthering the group's vision of working toward an economic restructuring of the so-called Austrian "art scene". The results will be officially announced shortly. In celebration of their exceptional art-market performance, monochrom and Art Consulting Teyssandier-Springer - in cooperation with the partner firms Galerie Bleich-Rossi, Austroarts Consulting, MuseumsQuartier Wien, The Coca Cola Company, Landesbund Kunst & Kultur Kärnten, Ströck Art Center and Künstlerbedarf Hirmke, Hrabalekgasse 9a – invite you to take a painted look back at the business year 2006/2007.

The main theme of this year's camp is the world we want to live in tomorrow. We try, however, to create a certain focus on a number of topics that we regard as important for the near future. We want:

• flying and non-flying autonomous robots
• security, encryption and anonymity
• software projects
• technologies for the day after the climate change
• rapid prototyping and fabbing
• software and hardware for disaster-resistant infrastructure
• bringing broadband to the countryside
• politics and propaganda
• anti-crowd-control tactics and technologies
• lock picking
• alternative energy systems
• citizen surveillance, data mining technologies, and social networks
• data forensic methods
• all things radio (preferably digital)
• self-sustaining and -reproducing hardware
• pollution free transport systems
• hacker anthropology and sociology of the scene
• flying cars, saucers and carpets
• 42
• tesla generators
• telecommunication technologies
• FPGA based analysis
• military technologies
• all kinds of voting computers
• ebooks
• satellites and rockets

(and countermeasures against all of the above).

Verizon is one of the phone companies currently being sued over its alleged disclosure of customer phone records to the NSA. In a response to the court last week, the company asked for the entire consolidated case against it to be thrown out—on free speech grounds. The response also alleges that the case should be thrown out because even looking into the issue could violate state secrets, of course, but a much longer section of the response tries to make the case that Verizon has a First Amendment right to "petition" the government. "Based on plaintiffs' own allegations, defendants' right to communicate such information to the government is fully protected by the Free Speech and Petition Clauses of the First Amendment," argue Verizon's lawyers.

#1 Des'ree - Life
I don't want to see a ghost,
It's the sight that I fear most,
I'd rather have a piece of toast,
Watch the evening news.

# 2 Snap - Rhythm Is A Dancer
I'm as serious as cancer,
When I say Rhythm is a Dancer.

# 3 Razorlight - Somewhere Else
And I met a girl,
she asked me my name,
I told her what it was.

# 4 ABC - That Was Then But This Is Now
More Sacrifices than an Aztec priest,
Standing here straining at that leash,
All fall down,
Can't complain, mustn't grumble,
Help yourself to another piece of apple crumble.

# 5 U2 - Elevation
I've got no self control,
Been living like a mole now,
Going down, excavation,
High and high in the sky,
You make me feel like I can fly,
So high,
Elevation

# 6 Toto - Africa
The wild dogs cry out in the night,
As they grow restless longing for some solitary company,
I know that I must do what's right,
Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.

# 7 Oasis - Champagne Supernova
Slowly walking down the hall,
Faster than a cannonball,
Where were you when we were getting high?

# 8 Duran Duran - Is There Something I Should Know?
And firey demons all dance when you walk through that door,
Don't say you're easy on me you're about as easy as a nuclear war.

# 9 Human League - The Lebanon
Before he leaves the camp he stops,
He scans the world outside,
And where there used to be some shops,
Is where the snipers sometimes hide.

# 10 Black Sabbath - War Pigs
Generals gathered in their masses,
Just like witches at black masses.

Gspell is a great little add-on for Mac users to add system-wide spelling recommendations from Google search results. For 10.4 users, Tiger's had spell-checking from the New Oxford American Dictionary built in, but even that has its limits when it comes to brand-new words and company names. Gspell's solution is to search Google to find spelling recommendations based on top results. This comes in handy when typing in people's last names, or site names that are slight variations of real words, such as Digg, Yelp, and CNET.

The combination of mental disease and access to guns leaps out at almost everyone in connection with the Virginia Tech shootings. But from there ideas and advocacies tend to become amorphous and tinged with hopelessness. There is consensus that something should be done to intervene earlier in threatening forms of psychological disturbance, and as a psychiatrist I agree and also recognize some of the social obstacles to doing so. But while there will always be mentally ill people, a few of whom are violent, it is our gun-centered cultural disease that converts mental illness into massacre.

Indeed, I would claim that a gun is not just a lethal device but a psychological actor in this terrible drama. Guns and ammunition were at the heart of Seung-Hui Cho's elaborate orchestration of the event and of his Rambo-like self-presentation to the world. When you look at those pictures, you understand how a gun can merge so fully with a person that a man who makes regular use of it could (in the historical West and in Hollywood) become known as a "gun."

Some years ago, the distinguished historian Richard Hofstadter told me that, after a lifetime of studying American culture, what he found most deeply troubling was our country's inability to come to terms with the gun -- which in turn strongly affected our domestic and international attitudes. Emotions of extreme attachment to and even sacralization of the gun pervade American society, and commercial interests shamelessly manipulate those emotions to produce wildly self-destructive policies.

Bernard Taper dreamed about Raphael's "Portrait of a Young Man,'' the most prized painting looted by the Nazis that has never been found. He spent two years searching for the Raphael in ravaged post-World War II Germany -- and for many other works he did recover -- as an art-intelligence officer with the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the U.S. military.

"It's the most valuable single thing that's still missing,'' says Taper, a longtime writer for the New Yorker, one-time Chronicle reporter and retired UC Berkeley journalism professor. He tracked down many artworks in 1946 and '47, including objects German peasants had looted from an abandoned train carrying booty pilfered by Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring. A connoisseur of luxury, Göring had amassed thousands of paintings, sculptures and others works during his tenure as the second-most powerful man in Nazi Germany.

Clinton Eugene Curtis, a former programmer for NASA and Exxon has finally come forward to testify before the US Judiciary that he was enlisted by Republicans to create a program which could guarantee Bush's presidential election victory.

MacLockPick™ is a valuable tool for law enforcement professionals to perform live forensics on Mac OS X systems. The solution is based on a USB Flash drive that can be inserted into a suspect's Mac OS X computer that is running (or sleeping). Once the software is run it will extract data from the Apple Keychain and system settings in order to provide the examiner fast access to the suspect's critical information with as little interaction or trace as possible.

What does "chu" mean? The answer is not available on the Wikipedia disambiguation page. My fellow Dreamcast owners may particularly be wondering about this. If you've played Space Channel 5, you will probably recall that all the cute alien opponetnts say "chu" to indicate you need to press the A button.

According to Princeton University professor Peter Singer, the top 0.01 of taxpayers or 14,000 Americans earn an average of $12,775,000 with total earnings of $184 billion. The rest of the 0.1 percent, or 129,600 individuals, now have an average income of just over $2 million. And the top 0.5 or 575,900 have an average income of $623,000.

Prof. Singer calculates that if the folks in the top 10 percent donated between 10-30 percent of their income, it would raise $404 billion, an amount that would eliminate half of global poverty. And they wouldn't be left to scrimp on their sumptuous lifestyles.

As an accompanying program to the first Can't-Stop-the-Serenity-Screening in Austria, and the first screening of the movie in English in Graz we plan to have a panel discussion on the 21st of June 2007. In this discussion we want to explore the emancipatory potential of Science-Fiction and the realization of this potential in mainstream genre movies.

We welcome a variety of texts: i.e., on particular movies, character studies and comparisons, on the history of the genre, on the ambitions of single directors, on fandom, or anything else you can imagine.

Since this discussion isn't targeted solely to Science-Fiction scholars or fans, we would recommend sending in easy-to-understand texts which would be accessible to a non-hardcore audience.

We're especially looking forward to texts which include a gender-aware perspective.

In order to initiate this panel, we invite SF-scholars, fans, political activists and film critics to send in their views on the topic as short articles and participate in the discusion: 5 pages max., 12 pt, CV, and list of publications (not mandatory!).

Since Can't Stop the Serenity Graz is a charity event to support the local Women Shelter and the global women rights advocacy group Equality Now!, and because of the fact that money is more than tight right now, we'll only be able to refund transportation costs.

All articles we receive will be published on this site indefintely, if it's not against the author's will.

32. Turn right at Long Wharf 0.1 mi
33. Swim across the Atlantic Ocean 3,462 mi
34.Slight right at E05 0.5 mi
7,463 mi (about 31 days 11 hours)

I like to move into the "fields" to record something "real" and to focus on sounds we normaly filter from perception. Massive noise causes constant stimulus satiation and as a result we filter our acoustic input broadband. Filtering noise/sound means also to filter information, communication and natural environments. That's why I run BikeMike.