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The Lights Are Going Out

January 27, 2011 - 9:54pm — StephenK

Things are apparently developing in Egypt. There is an unconfirmed report that Egypt is totally offline. The Electronic Frontier Foundation posted to Identica about a separate report about the Internet being cut off in Egypt. Caroline McCarthy at CNET notes that Twitter is presently being blocked in Egypt. Later reporting by Elinor Mills at CNET notes that blocking is on the rise in Egypt and Associated Press reporters are unable to communicate. Nina Shea at National Review Online's group blog The Corner notes that these reports of disruption are not anomalies which is echoed by Matthew Shaffer there as well. Agence France-Presse notes that cellular telephone service is disrupted in addition to the reports of Internet disruption.

The situation in Egypt, much like the recent case in Tunisia, illustrates fundamental flaws in the nature of Internet access. Even though the system is purportedly designed to route around outages like this, failure seems to be easily caused. In conjunction with the proliferation of computer sound cards and software like fldigi, the deployment of radiofax service by outside powers to distribute information may be advisable. Examples of what this might look like are available online. Though such would have required specialist equipment twenty years ago that method for information distribution can take advantage of consumer-grade computer and radio hardware.

This situation continues to develop...

Creative Commons License
The Lights Are Going Out by Stephen Michael Kellat is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at erielookingproductions.info. -- Read More

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LISTen: An LISNews.org Podcast -- Episode #139

January 24, 2011 - 12:46am — StephenK

"You may or may not have noticed LISNews fell off the Internet on Saturday..."

In this episode we talk about our interesting outage, how to find the podcast when there is an outage, and have an essay that takes a reasoned look a public finance.

Related links:
LISNews on Twitter
LISNews on Identica
The new feed location you must point your podcatcher at ASAP: feeds.feedburner.com/LISNewsNetcasts
Ars Technica: Fake keyboard PCs via custom Android drivers
New York Times: Digital Unreliability
Media Network: No blogging in Saudi Arabia without government permission

Creative Commons License
LISTen: An LISNews.org Podcast -- Episode #139 by The Air Staff of Erie Looking Productions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. -- Read More

13:48 minutes (5.53 MB)
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LISTen: An LISNews.org Podcast -- Episode #137

January 17, 2011 - 12:28am — StephenK

This week's episode contains a replay of the most recent episode of TVO's program Search Engine about the censorship situation in Tunisia. We follow up last Tuesday's release of Search Engine by bringing the story up to date with events that happened since.

Another episode of LISTen will be released late Tuesday night/early Wednesday overnight with content that is more traditional.

Related links:
The episode of Search Engine being replayed
Ars Technica on Twitter vs. Tunisia
Committee to Protect Journalists on Tunisian Censorship
BBC News reporting on Tunisian censorship...in 2005...
The Voice of America on the Tunisia situation
Story by Aidan Lewis on BBC News about the situation in Tunisia
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news on the ex-President of Tunisia fleeing to Saudi Arabia
France24 on the possibility of more incidents like this

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License.
Based on a work at www.tvo.org.

18:12 minutes (7.29 MB)
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LISTen: An LISNews.org Podcast -- Episode #136

January 11, 2011 - 10:28pm — StephenK

This week's tardy podcast brings discussion of the upgrade to the LISNews back-end and a news miscellany.

As referenced in the episode, your podcatcher should be pointed at the following target to best receive the program in case we have to switch to any backup systems through the technical wizardry of variable endpoints:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/LISNewsNetcasts

Related links:
The Register on the net neutrality debate at CES 2011
Larry Downes on the net neutrality debate at CES 2011
Nate Anderson of Ars Technica on a short-coming to the net neutrality order
Wikipedia on FidoNet
Wikipedia on UUCP
LockerGnome on Internet Alternatives
Megan McCardle on Borders
The Register on Overwhelming Smut Online in Australia

6:43 minutes (6.15 MB)
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And the podcast audio payloads have disappeared...

January 4, 2011 - 11:59pm — StephenK

Due to circumstances beyond our control, podcast payloads have been temporarily disabled.  From a suitably equipped Macintosh or Linux computer bearing the curl package, the following command will download the audio of LISTen #135 for you:

curl -C - -L -o “LISTen-135.mp3“ http://ubuntuone.com/p/WgV/

A duplicate of the episode audio is being hosted on Ubuntu One temporarily during this period of transition for the back-end to LISNews.

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LISTen: An LISNews.org Podcast -- Episode #135

January 3, 2011 - 12:36am — StephenK

The simplest description to this week's episode: "WARNING. This program will contain material deemed unacceptable and explicit by some listeners. We apologize to the more sensitive members of the audience and note that listener discretion is advised."

Related links:
Changes at Disruptive Library Technology Jester
First Amendment versus Net Neutrality: Can It Shield ISPs?
Legal Insurrection -- WikiLeaks endangering Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai
The Atlantic -- WikiLeaks endangering Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai
SoftLayer versus WikiLeaks
Terms of Service supplanting general law

Nightmares by Design by Severed Fifth

Creative Commons License -- Read More

14:18 minutes (5.73 MB)
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LISTen: An LISNews.org Podcast -- Episode #134

December 27, 2010 - 12:45am — StephenK

This week's episode contains a zeitgeist update, a book review, and a discussion of the latest by the FCC on net neutrality. Musical numbers under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licenses are aired in lieu of public service announcements this week.

Related links:
LOLCat Bible
Ars Technica on Net Neutrality #1
Ars Technica on Net Neutrality #2
Ars Technica on Net Neutrality #3
The Register on Net Neutrality
eWeek on Net Neutrality
Michelle Malkin on Net Neutrality, claiming that Internet access is not a civil right
Huffington Post on Net Neutrality #1
Huffington Post on Net Neutrality #2
The Office of the Federal Register on the Congressional Review Act
Politico looking at the Congressional Review Act's possible use against the net neutrality order
Washington Examiner: Senator DeMint versus the FCC
Ars Technica: "Republicans on new FCC net neutrality rules: kill!"
Slate: "If the FCC Had Regulated the Internet -- A counterfactual history of cyberspace."
Fox News: "Republicans Aim to Block FCC's New Internet Rules Before They Go Into Effect"
News Telegram: "FCC amok"

The FCC's Net Neutrality order in PDF format
The FCC's Net Neutrality order in Microsoft Word format

Nightmares by Design by Severed Fifth from which we played "Drill Down"
Jimmy Carter by 20lb Sounds

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

15:07 minutes (6.06 MB)
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Notice of Programming Disruption

December 19, 2010 - 11:45pm — StephenK

Sleepy Shadow

Erie Looking Productions regrets to inform you that, like the cat named Shadow pictured above, we need some rest. The current run-up to Christmas has created operational difficulties that prevent us from presenting LISTen: An LISNews.org Podcast and The Burning Circle on December 20th.

We plan to return on December 27th. Thank you for your patience and consideration.

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LISTen: An LISNews.org Podcast -- Episode #133

December 13, 2010 - 12:37am — StephenK

There is no news miscellany this week. We take a look instead in further depth at the zeitgeist on-site.

The mainstream media is depressing us pretty badly as all they seem to talk about in libraries are these few topics: retirements, deaths, and budget cuts. That also cuts into things we can talk about. With an effectively non-existent budget, we don't have the capacity of an organization like Reuters or Agence France-Press to do original reporting. The Air Staff chose in this episode to make a call for materials submissions for potential airing. Audio cassettes, reel-to-reel tapes, and audio CDs would be acceptable while microcassettes and DAT cassettes would not be. The episode audio has more details but for the avoidance of doubt the mailing address stipulated is:

Erie Looking Productions
P.O. Box 1658
Ashtabula, OH 44005
United States of America

Related links:
The social networking tool poll

9:23 minutes (3.77 MB)
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