Category: Politics

Time to mix it up!

ccMixter logo
Oh, I bet this is gonna be fun! The good people at ccMixter.org (related to CreativeCommons.org) are sponsoring a cool contest:

This is a contest for artists to mix audio tracks under 4 minutes which use provided voice samples from Ben Franzen and Kembrew McLeod‘s forthcoming film, “Copyright Criminals.” Samples from the film include voiceovers from De La Soul, DJ Qbert, members of Public Enemy, Matmos, Coldcut, members of Negativland, and others. The best overall winner will be included prominently in the film and the top 11 other entries are to be included on a companion CD.

'my new hot and sexy diamond' from frischmilch on Flickr.com
There’s some great source material to work with; if you haven’t checked out the 10+ minute preview of the film, I definitely recommend it. Personally, I love this line from Harry Allen (of Public Enemy fame):

I’ve never, I’ve never really heard a completely original music idea by anyone…

The way he repeats the first two words has a neat rhythm to it and lots of potential as a loop element, and you gotta love the sentiment…

You’ve got until the end of February, so get busy!

Currently listening to: The excellent “The battle” from Lady Sovereign’s Vertically challenged EP. This is an amazing display of ultra-high-speed UK grime spitting; the skill of it just blows me away. Yup, this is another fine Xmas prezzie, this time from Sub-Evil Boy – rock on!

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I definitely wouldn’t try this at home

Time to make a long distance call
Richard M. Smith has a nifty (if risky) idea for finding out if Big Brother is reading your e-mail as it wends its merry way through the back alleys of the IntarWeb. The basic trick is to set up some new e-mail addresses, where one is inside the U.S. and one is outside the U.S., and then send e-mail between them that’s (a) likely to gain the (probably unwelcome) attention of the Feds and (b) contains a URL that said snoopers are going to want to follow. Create that URL on some web site where you have admin access, make sure it’s not accessible anywhere else, and the keep an eye on the access logs. If someone visits, it’s presumably because they’ve been reading your naughty e-mails.

It’s a pretty clever scheme and would probably work, but I can’t imagine actually doing it. Do I really need Dick Cheney’s buds coming ’round at teatime for a chat? I’m thinking my time would be better spent working for a change in the current paranoid political climate in the U.S. than tinkering around with this sort of stuff and inadvertently getting strip searched on my way to Germany as a result.

Props to Boing Boing via del.icio.us for the link.

Currently listening to: The amazing 7 CD + massive amounts of cool text Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton that my folks got me for Christmas. This is a truly monster piece of musicology – the kind of thing that ought to be on our coffee table if (a) we had one and (b) the cats wouldn’t sleep on it (or worse).

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