BigShinyThing

The marketing and communications industry often find its inspiration through outreach to ‘edgy’, street or political artists. Think Barbara Kruger‘s work with Selfridges, or street artist Speto’s posters for Brahma beer. At the occasional cost of some credibility points, everybody wins: artists get funding and exposure, brands get cooler creative executions than agency ‘creative’ teams could dream up unaided.

But sometimes, ideas are appropriated for campaigns without the consent of their creators. Consent can, at first glance, seem a particularly grey area for street art, say, or activist content. After all, if you’ve gifted an idea to the commons without a clearly-stated and enforceable license in place, what right have you to complain if that idea gets spotted by an agency and used to sell, say, soft drinks. Or indeed, sports shoes?

Consider, for example, Chalkbot — a robot which writes messages in chalk on the road as it bumps along behind another vehicle. You can send Chalkbot tweets, you can text it, you can probably email it. And whatever you send, ends up on the road, writ large in chalk. Chalkbot is cool. Geek cool. As we understand it, Chalkbot was developed by DeepLocal, and, via ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, is being used by Nike as part of its brand tie-up with the LIVESTRONG campaign of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, at the Tour de France (yes this can get confusing).

We first heard about Chalkbot on Twitter today. But actually, no — we didn’t first hear of it today. We first saw the technology demonstrated a few years back, at a Dorkbot event in London. The project was called StreetWriter, and its creators were a group of highly technical activists called the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA). Not just cool, StreetWriter was also political. Watch the video.

Chalkbot isn’t StreetWriter. Although based on IAA’s work, Chalkbot is far from political. It’s commercial. It’s also built, in part, by former IAA members. Nothing wrong with that in itself. DeepLocal present their version of its history on their website [thanks to Nathan at DeepLocal for providing us with that link in response to my earlier shoutout on Twitter].

Crucially, however, Nike and W+K’s press releases apparently make no mention of their robot’s activist ancestry.

Our problem with that? One word: Attribution — a key concern of us commons-loving content-creators. Play, mix, mash-up, create using what we’ve made, but give credit where credit’s due: show respect to those who came before, on whose ideas you build. This is simple: even leaving aside the politics, Nike should be putting some more love out. It seems the IAA shares our views on this. In the past hour or so, they’ve issued a press release which details their dissatisfaction with Nike’s appropriation of their work. Read it. Respond as you see fit.

This story is developing. We’ll keep you posted as and when Nike or its agencies make any public response.

Indeed that’s the case, under new plans from London Police. Event organisers in 21 London boroughs are requested to ‘co-operate fully’ with police, by completing the new Form 696 before the event, in the interests of ‘risk assessment’.

Requested are not only details of promoters and onsite security, but also the contact numbers and real names of all performers, description of the ‘expected audience’ and the genre(s) of music expected to be performed, the examples given on the form being bashment, R’n'B, garage. No surprise then that many feel the Met is actually planning to use this data to focus police attention on clubs where such ‘dangerous’ forms of music are to be played, as well as for the profiling of the scene(s) and communities who organise and attend.

According to early reports, the form also included questions about the ethnicity of expected audiences. The current version on the Met’s site doesn’t include such information, so we can’t comment on that.

Concerns have been raised by many, including once-Undertone Feargal Sharkey, who now heads up the music campaign organisation UK Music. There’s a petition running on the 10 Downing Street website, a FaceBook group has been set up, and the mainstream press are paying attention.

Simply misguided urban policing, or the precursor of some modern day version of the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill’s rave-busting criminalisaiton of ‘repetitive beats’? Watch and wait. More importantly, act against this.

[Thanks for Helen Noir for tipping us off to this]

Last week, US unemployment jumped to an official level of around 6.8%. But, according to MarketWatch, when you include

…discouraged workers and those whose hours have been cut back to part-time — [the numbers] rose to 12.5% from 11.8%. The number of workers forced to work part-time rose by 621,000 to 7.3 million.

The difference between those percentages offers a glimpse of the scale of the Precariat — those workers with the most tenuous connection to the Experience Formerly Known as Employment. The term Precarity has been kicking around for a while now in leftie Academia and the anti-globalisation movement, to describe

…a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. The term has been specifically applied to either intermittent work or, more generally, a confluence of intermittent work and precarious existence.

Precarity is most commonly associated with outsiders who compete for low-paying retail and service jobs. Perversely, a similar state of uncertainty falls to the skilled, individualistic young, working their time with zero job security as digital freelancers in the post-industrial economies. A familiar scene at your local coffee-shop franchise is probably the closest the depoliticised members of both groups come to meeting — the one group toiling behind the tills, the other slaving against client deadlines on their MacBooks, making each drink last half a day.

Precariat, meet Digital Precariat. Help yourself to sugar over there, by the door. On the way out.

Everyone loves a bit of self-regulation. But what happens when world-views collide?

Today it has emerged that a ruling by Internet Watch Foundation — a charity-status QUANGO established to help self-regulate internet content in the UK — has led a number of UK ISPs to block access to a (community-regulated) Wikipedia page for heavy metal band Scorpions.

Why? Because the entry includes an image of an album cover which features a naked child. Internet providers began to block access to the page after the IWF warned them the picture may be illegal under UK law. An IWF spokeswoman said a reader had brought the image to the foundation’s attention last week and it had contacted the police before adding the page to their content blacklist.

The album cover itself is a pretty nasty piece of 70s schlock art but it is widely viewable elsewhere on the Internet.

Censorship is a big issue for the Wikipedia community, and policy is hotly debated. In July 2008, Wikipedia community editors then made a joint decision not to remove the Scorpions cover art from the site. According to the discussion page from that time, “Prior discussion has determined by broad consensus that the Virgin Killer cover will not be removed.” Indeed, the current Wikipedia page for Scorpions explains that in the United States (where the websites of the Wikimedia Foundation are hosted), the image is not considered obscene under the criteria of the Miller test, which requires that an obscene work lack “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value” (as album art is used to “brand” the album, it is considered to be artistic).

On the other side of the fence, the IWF is a UK-based charity, funded by ISPs and others, and endorsed by the UK Government. It was established in the mid-90s to self-regulate around the issue of USENET porn. Since then the IWF’s remit has expanded to include identification of racist and criminally obscene content, although its focus still seems to be on images of the abuse of children. Unlike Wikipedia, their process and website offers for no community discussion. There is apparantly no way to object to or appeal against their classification.

To us, the message of this story is plain. The kinds of ground-up regulation and consensual decision-making we value on-line only exist — if they exist at all — at the discretion of the State and its possibly-well-meaning but generally opaque proxies. If you want a voice, get out and shout. Yes, you.

Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, has used his first big speech on broadcasting to voice his opposition to product placement. The minister in charge of what *you* get to watch also indicated he wanted to see self-regulation of violent, sexual and offensive content on the internet, somehow modeled on the 9pm television watershed.

Burnham is clearly living in lala-I’m-not-listening-land. Putting aside his ludicrous suggestions to monitor online content (good luck with that), his apparent dismissal of product placement is a Big Problem. Paid for product placement is increasingly looking like the only hope for beleaguered free-to-air UK TV channel ITV. TV ad revenues in recent years have fallen off a cliff and ITV had sought to make up the shortfall with money from gambling phone in competition lines. We all know how well that panned out.

Burnham asserts that product placement ‘contaminates’ programming. In the UK, many of our prejudices against product placement appear to have been formed from watching movies such as the Bond franchise, where placement is often clumsy and detrimental. This is strange, given that many homes have multichannel TV and are exposed to US programming – laden with placement – on both ITV and the myriad other channels. American Idol on ITV has to fuzz-out the Coke cups on the judges’ desk. But there is no such regulation of Horatio’s Hummer in CSI Miami, Dunkin’ Donuts in Will and Grace nor of the product references on reality shows such as Top Model. There’s simply too much *there*.

Moreover, US imports such as Seinfeld, CSI and Heroes are often held up as archetypes of fantastic TV. All are at least partially funded by product placement. Hell, they probably wouldn’t have been made had it not been for brands bunnying up the cash to be represented. Not that product placement is devoid of problems; script writers in the US continue to (rightly) complain that brands exert undue influence over the creative process. However, with an estimated $7bn to $10bn invested in product placement in the US every year, it’s increasingly hard to discount it as a revenue stream.

To be blunt, ITV and the UK advertising industry need product placement to happen. It’s their ‘get out of jail free’ card. With his ill-advised and ill-informed opinions on the subject, the culture minister may have just slammed the door shut.

Source: FT.

Update: Andy Burnham has also just launched a personal attack on the director of Liberty and leading human rights campaigner, Shami Chakrabarti. Clever.

We’re huge fans of the work TheyWorkForYou put into archiving and making accessible the process of British Government. And we encourage you to help them out with a bit of crowdsourced video-tweaking if you can.

Meanwhile, we notice that the august Beeb has started twittering from Parliament. Last time we looked they had under 80 followers (including us!), but give ‘em a chance. A nice simple way to maintain some peripheral awareness of What Goes On in politics.

Activists haven’t been shy in exploiting digital and social media: witness the successes of IndyMedia‘s user-generated street news, and the burgeoning peer-to-peer video distribution community around Miro (formerly the Democracy Player). The message is clear: don’t just have a voice on the street — create content and share it for global benefit. And this message isn’t just for the hardcore: what else is Al Gore’s current.tv, if not a centre-left, normalising riff on Miro’s theme?

Politically aware citizens, armed with video cameras, open source video editing software and BitTorrenting skills, are accessing difficult places and telling important stories, independent of mainstream media agendas. But how to get that activist content out in front of a broader, less engaged audience?

Say hello to InfoGraffiti (positioning: Tell the World What They Need to Know). Coming on like current.tv after a week at the Anarchist Bookshop, InfoGraffiti aims to take activist media to the people, urban guerrilla stylee. The short version of their manifesto reads as follows:

• InfoGraffiti is a new information distribution service intending on eventually rivaling the mainstream press; we need your help.
• We want to distribute internet documentaries and information via a CD format that will play on good DVD players or PC’s.
• Access to a printing press and the large costs involved is what has stopped forward thinking progressive messages from getting out before.
• Social network and Social news site users are forward thinkers (in general) and most of them have CD burners.
• Between us then we have the biggest printing press the world has ever seen and InfoGraffiti wants to organise it.
• You download our ISO torrent (ISO=CD Image, Torrent=FAST method of download) burn it to CD, label it with a logo and then distribute it around our wonderful cities.
• The CD contains all the best documenataries, virals, and information from the web, chosen by InfoGraffiti users. It works on DVD players and PC’s.
• Place it on park benches, in lifts, in coffee shops, on bus seats and in libraries for our wonderful fellow citizens to discover.

We think they might be a bit optimistic with their planned weekly release schedule, but wish them luck. Now is probably a good time for InfoGraffiti’s distribution model: urban punters have been softened up by countless lame ‘experiential marketing’ campaigns on the streets, flogging cable TV and shampoo — when they pick up those CDs they’re going to expect trailers for Shrek IV, not Noam Chomsky’s media critique. Hopefully they’ll keep watching.

News from Old Europe, which goes something like this:

1. Organised labour has serious problem with management at bike factory
2. Workers occupy the factory, but rather than sitting on their arses waiting to be kicked out, they hit on the idea of using the resources around them to build their own branded bikes…
3. …and sell them on the internet to fund their struggle.

Fucking brilliant, and an inspiration to those of us in the knowledge precariate as well. Use your internet time at work wisely, fellow workers. You know what I mean.

[OK, this story is pieced together from dodgy Google translations. Not all of it might be 'really' true. However this is such a nice myth/meme that we couldn't resist.]

Bruce Sterling points us towards a new book-length study from RFE/RL, entited Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War Of Images And Ideas. The study offers a fascinating insight into the strengths and weaknessess of insurgent tactical media, including an evident technological and organisational sophistication — handy for production and distribution under extreme conditions:

Biographies of the best-known martyrs are sometimes lavish affairs. Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, the most famous jihadist to have died in Iraq, was the subject of a downloadable “encyclopedia” that includes not on numerous materials on the Jordanian militant’s life, but also a complete collection of his statements, essays on his beliefs and influence, and statements on the jihad in Iraq by Osama bin Laden. Formatted as a 7.7-megabyte self-contained mini-browser, the “encyclopedia” provides users with a table of contents and a convenient graphics interface.

[...]

The impressive array of products Sunni-Iraq insurgents and their supporters create suggests the existence of a veritable multimedia empire. But this impression is misleading. The insurgent media network has no identifiable brick-and-mortar presence, no headquarters, and no bureaucracy. It relies instead on a decentralized, collaborative production model that utilizes the skills of a community of like-minded individuals. (…)

The study authors conclude that:

The popularity of online Iraqi Sunni insurgent media [...] reflects a genuine demand for their message in the Arab world. A response, no matter how lavishly funded and cleverly produced, will not eliminate this demand. [...] efforts to counter insurgent media should not focus on producing better propaganda than the insurgents, or trying to eliminate the demand for the insurgent message, but rather on exploiting the vulnerabilities of the insurgent media network.

While that’s hardly a revelation in itself, danah boyd’s latest essay gets down and dirty with the manner in which the FaceBook/Myspace communities reflect or present (American) class divisions… boyd goes to pains to point out that this is subjective research, but it’s provocative reading independent of any cold hard facts… do you know your “subaltern” from your “hegemonic” teens?

Her summary thoughts:

It breaks my heart to watch a class divide play out in the technology. I shouldn’t be surprised — when orkut grew popular in India, the caste system was formalized within the system by the users. But there’s something so strange about watching a generation splice themselves in two based on class divisions or lifestyles or whatever you want to call these socio-structural divisions.

We challenge you to slip some of this concern into your next social media client presentation, you FaceBook-fetishising media hegemonists, you. At least, please, keep it in mind when you have client money to throw at online communities. There’s an opportunity here to make the world a little less closed for a whole generation of socially-excluded digital natives. If you aren’t part of the solution…

An installation of new works by Peter Kennard and Cat Picton Phillips with original works by James Cauty and DFace at the Leonard Street Gallery, E2. Go See.

An eagle-eyed observer on the iDC mailing list (who admittedly found this news on Slashdot) recently noted that Facebook applications — those silly little ‘hug me/kiss me/make love to me now, right here, coz honey we’re the last two people on earth and ain’t neither one of us gonna see that sunrise tomorrow’ plugins — are maybe not quite as innocent as they seem. The clue is tucked away in the Facebook Platform Application Terms of Use. Section (II) is in essence a grant of all — repeat all (with the exception of your real-world contact details) — the data Facebook stores about you, to any application you choose to enable.

So: in return for the ability to ‘spank’ your buddies on Facebook (yee-hah!), application creators get to know all manner of succulent facts about your online existence — how often you log in, who your friends are, which groups you’ve joined… and much more. Think about it.

There is — of course — no such thing as a free service. Facebook (I hear) has ads on most pages. I don’t see ‘em because I have decent ad filters. But you can bet those ads are tailored to your profile as Facebook’s data-miners see it. Maybe you’ve balanced that value exchange mentally, and decided that for you the fun of Facebook is worth a few dodgy banners. But we don’t think we’re the only ones who object to the same amount of personal information going to the creators of teeny applications which only briefly amuse. And we’re betting that many of those apps only exist to suck up and sell on all that lovely personal data.

Who’s feeling well and truly ‘spanked’ now?

Of course, you can just refuse application requests. That’s no big deal. But why don’t we have some fun with this? We wouldn’t be the first to try and subvert the engines of social media capitalism. Take the long-established Google Will Eat Itself project, for example:

We generate money by serving Google text advertisements on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself – but in the end “we” own it!

By establishing this autocannibalistic model we deconstruct the new global advertisment mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-based economic model.

After this process we hand over the common ownership of “our” Google Shares to the GTTP Ltd. [Google To The People Public Company] which distributes them back to the users (clickers) / public.

Likewise the hypothetical (?) Amazon Noir, which uses a crafty bot to steal digital copies of books from the retailer:

The bot will outwit Amazon’s “search inside the book” system, making up to 5,000 inquiries per book and assembling the individual parts afterwards to compile entire books. This would allow “users to ‘legally’ copy and redistribute copyright books from amazon.com.”

Crafty.

So why not spank back on Facebook? We’re thinking of building a Facebook app to do just that. Enable it, and it will slurp up all your Facebook data, same as all the others apps. The difference would be that it will be upfront about its function — only people who want to donate their data to our database need install the thing in the first place. Then, we end up with a huge pool of valuable user data — and some good free press. We go out and sell that data: to marketeers, researchers, whoever pays the highest price. And everyone who contributed gets a proportional share of the profits (if any). Ok, no-one will get rich, but it will raise awareness, be an interesting bit of hacking and maybe a bit of a laugh. Brothers and sisters, we are the means of production. Let it begin.

So that’s what £400k spent on Wolff Olins’s endless meetings and stale Pret sarnies bought us. Good to see that some of the money ‘freed-up’ by the arts funding cuts we mentioned earlier has been spent so wisely.

But, enough enough already with the sarcasm. More constructive critics might argue that the desire for “reaching out and engaging young people” (presumably that’s a reference to the ‘funky’ shapes and colours, a la Thompson Twins 7-inch sleeves circa 1982) could have been more usefully satisfied by — for example — actually reaching out and engaging with them. London has a unique street-art culture, and that 400k could surely have funded some ongoing recognition of and support for the nascent design talent on the streets of East London — which might have generated some real interest in the design aspects of the Olympics amongst young people. And just maybe, a better logo. A sadly missed opportunity.

(BST’s editor points out that it does look just a teeny bit new rave. Maybe. If you squint. Hard. After downing a litre of ‘vodka’ at a mid-week Dalston lock-in.)

Anyways. You know you’re experiencing a post-’that kidney show hoax‘ sign-o-the-times moment when the BBC News blog speculates that the whole thing might be a set-up to get publicity, after which the plan is to replace the controversial identity with one ‘made by the people for the people’.

We believe they really do think that their design rocks. The suspicious absence of ‘approved’ comments on the official london2012 blog posting also suggests that they don’t want anyone cluttering up their special happy place with naysaying negativity. Maybe they need ‘blogging’ explained to them, as well as ‘design’.

Children’s drawings and paintings of the coca eradication spraying programme in Columbia.

Via DrugStrat via Alcohol and Drugs

Many Dalston residents are less than happy about plans for regeneration (or gentrification, depending on your politics and focus) of the Dalston Junction area. Regardless of local opposition, development seems to be powering ahead.

For the past couple of months, the banners and signs of the protesters have been fighting a propaganda war with official posters portraying the brave new world planned by London Transport, Mayors Pipe and Livingston, and a consortium of developers.

The battle for hearts and minds escalated over the Easter break: the blandly cut-and-paste architectural renderings of the happy happy ‘Dalston to be’ riveted to the hoardings at the 38 bus stop on Dalston Lane have accumulated some creative amends at the hands of anti-development activists.

Note the sinister concentration-camp motto over the razor wire penning in the citizens of the gated community: SHOPPING MACHT FREI.

We’ve uploaded more high resolution images on Flickr. As in Hogarth, there is much detail worthy of attention: ASBO-branded shopping bags, anyone?

If you want to visit, go soon before the Powers That Be erase all sign of it. Map here. The site is just across the road from the Dalston Peace Mural — a 1985 celebration of Hackney’s collective anti-nuclear action during the Cold War.

Forbes reports that because an ordinance intended to keep predators away from children has made it nearly impossible for them to find housing, the five convicted sex offenders are living under a noisy highway bridge with the state’s grudging approval. The five men under the Julia Tuttle Causeway are the only known sex offenders authorized to live outdoors in Florida, said state Corrections Department spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger.

They have fishing poles to catch food, cook with small stoves, use battery-powered TVs and radios and keep their belongings in plastic bags. Javier Diaz, 30, has trouble charging the GPS tracking device he is required to wear; there are no power outlets nearby.

You just pray to God every night, so if you fall asleep for a minute or two, you know, nothing happens to you.

says Diaz, who arrived this week. He was sentenced in 2005 to three years’ probation for lewd and lascivious conduct involving a girl under 16.

The conditions are a consequence of laws passed in Florida and elsewhere around the US to bar sex offenders from living near schools, parks and other places children gather. Miami-Dade County’s 2005 ordinance says sex offenders must live at least 2,500 feet from schools.

“They’ve often said that some of the laws will force people to live under a bridge,” said Charles Onley, a research associate at the federally funded Center for Sex Offender Management. “This is probably the first story that I’ve seen that confirms that.”

Before taking up residence under the causeway, some of the men were initially told to live under the Dolphin Expressway flyover near 12th Street and 12th Avenue. It is used as a parking lot for a courthouse, but it is also across the street from Kristi House, a center for sexually abused children.

Trudy Novicki, executive director for the Kristi House, wasn’t pleased when she learned about her new neighbors while reading the Miami New Times, which first reported the story.

“As a child advocate and someone that treats children that have been sexually abused, my answer is keep them in jail,” Novicki said.

“This is not an ideal situation for anybody, but at this point we don’t have any other options,” said Plessinger. “We’re still looking. The offenders are still actively searching for residences.”

“If we drive these offenders so far underground or we can’t supervise them because they become so transient, it’s not making us safer,” Plessinger said.

Twenty-two states and hundreds of municipalities have sex offender residency restrictions, according to a California Research Bureau report from last August. It states in the executive summary:

“Banishment: to expel from or relegate to a country or place by authoritative decree… to compel to depart.” Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Second Edition.

Banishment was a form of legal punishment in Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy and England. Colonial America received its share of banished English thieves and other offenders, as did Australia. During the American Revolution, the colonies banished English loyalists. More recently, the former Soviet Union restricted inmate’s rights upon release from the Gulag to 101 kilometres from large urban centers, resulting in a number of rural settlements.

Today, some communities in the United States banish sex offenders from living in their midst, resulting in a difficult dilemma: where can these offenders live, and where can they best be supervised and receive treatment, if available?

As of Sunday April 1st, the Arts Council’s Grants for the Arts scheme will suffer a whopping 35% cut. This means that during the funding year 2007/2008, only £54m will be awarded, down from £83m in the current financial year. If, like us, you were always the last to picked for the team at school or if you simply believe that the arts matter then Get Involved: you can join the Arts Council debate. Also, read The Guardian‘s blog on the matter — today’s post is by Peter Hewitt, Chief Executive of the Arts Council. Go on. Add a comment.

And go to this:

OPEN SPACE EVENT TO ADDRESS FUNDING CUTS:
11TH APRIL, 7PM, SHUNT VAULTS, LONDON BRIDGE

This meeting is free of charge. To reserve a space please email: hannah@shunt.co.uk.

ZDNet reports that Ile-de-France, the political district of greater Paris, has plans to give 175,000 schoolchildren and apprentices a USB drive loaded with open-source software. The keys will be given to 130,000 secondary school pupils and 45,000 first year apprentices at training centres at the start of the 2007 school year. The aim of the project is to give “students a tool of freedom and mobility between their school, cybercafes and their home or friends.” The operation will cost around €2.6 million [hard to see how but hey]. The president of the regional council, Jean-Paul Huchon, is a self-confessed ‘partisan of the rebalancing of the supply of proprietary and open-source software’ who previously welcomed the launch of the Firefox 2 browser and led the support for a creation of a competitiveness hub based on open source.

And if they’re doing it, why aren’t you?

The mobile phone has become the most ubiquitous symbol of our connected society, and worldwide, mobile telephony has a much broader presence than more ‘advanced’ digital technologies. But phone technology, traditionally, has been locked down and proprietary, with international calls hugely expensive — obstacles to the use of phones as tools to mobilise the global grassroots.

Two recent projects from the activist/hacker underground suggest that all that might be about to change.

Exhibit A: Blasterisk. Not only does this phone service offer global calls at local rates (from and to normal mobiles or landlines), but includes a (tiny but growing) pool of ‘short-dial’ numbers which connect direct to IndyMedia news desks worldwide. Using Blasterisk, citizen reporters anywhere in the world can instantly – for the price of a local call – phone into IndyMedia with on-the-spot breaking news, updates, calls for action. And unlike email, the service is cheaply accessible to anyone with a phone — Blasterisk reaches places the Internet doesn’t, and does it in real time.

In a similar vein, Exhibit B: the Bureau of Inverse Technology’s Antiterror Line, a sousveillance tool for the collection of “live audio data on civil liberty infringements and other anti-terror events.” Anyone can call in and leave a message — a “spoken report or in-progress recording of an anti-terror attack”. The system uplinks your audio recording direct to the BIT online terror database: an “audio accumulation of micro-incidents which individually may be inactionable but en masse could provide evidence for a definitive response.” [via Textually]

Of the two, Blasterisk is clearly the most sophisticated, offering as it does both a networking tool for activists and a direct channel for media distribution (via IndyMedia). And it’s built on the industrial strength open source Asterisk telephony platform, so has plenty of scope for growth and tweaking…

“The street finds its own use for things”. Blasterisk and BIT demonstrate that it’s also finding a louder voice through creative hacking.

Spotted in Dorothy Perkins on Oxford Street, London this afternoon — a mannequin sporting a ‘revolution’ t-shirt and a red beret. This is not a Banksy intervention. A great moment of What Were They Thinking? Or maybe the middle market fashion chain is hoping to start a revolution in viscose…

UPDATE: on closer inspection this just gets weirder. The mannequin also appears to be sporting a Palestinian scarf…