Blog Archives

Julian Assange interviews Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali

October 6, 2012
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The official description of 10th episode of The World Tomorrow reads as follows: A surprise Arab drive for freedom, the West’s structural crisis and new hope coming from Latin America. That’s the modern world in the eyes of Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali, two prominent thinkers and this week’s guests on Julian Assange’s show on RT.

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Online Now

September 26, 2012
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The description to this video reads “Journey into the world of contemporary online social interaction” and could be seen as a short, but compelling cinematic interpretation of many issues and concerns outlined in Sherry Turkle‘s groundbreaking “Together Alone: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other“. This video will resonate with many of the so-called “digital natives”.   In light this video’s targeted viewers, it is very interesting to read some of the comments made by reddit users after it was posted there. The comments vary along the entire spectrum: Even without their devices, I’ve seen coworkers ignore…

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Interview with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian Embassy

September 26, 2012
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Originally aired on GamaTV, August 30, 2012, Uruguayan journalist Jorge Gestoso interviews Julian Assange from within the Ecuadorian Embassy. In this wide-ranging and fascinating interview Gestoso asks Assange if the Wikileaks’ cause is worth dying for. Assange answers yes. The interview can be seen here:

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Anonymous leaks alleged governmental surveillance data

September 26, 2012
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The Anonymous collective recently released one million and one Apple UDIDs, the unique device identifiers used by Apple for its iPhones, iMacs, iPads, etc. Within their release-statement, Anonymous gave detailed information on the origin of these UDIDs, claiming that they came from an FBI computer. In fact the database they accessed had information on and from more than 12 million devices. Before publishing this information Anonymous edited out personal data such as names, cell numbers, addresses zip codes, etc. leaving only the data columns, which would enable users to look up whether their devices are listed or not. According to…

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CO2 emissions drop, but natural gas won’t save us

September 18, 2012
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Last month, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a drop in U.S. carbon emissions to a 20 year low, basically matching the carbon emissions of 1992. The media’s coverage of this report was brief and rather one-sided. Here are a few representative samples: Kevin Begos from the Associated Press: Many of the world’s leading climate scientists didn’t see the drop coming, in large part because it happened as a result of market forces rather than direct government action against carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere. While conservation efforts, the lagging economy and greater use of renewable…

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Applying the laws of robotics to smart phones

September 13, 2012
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The Three Laws of Robotics are a set of rules devised by the visionary science fiction author Isaac Asimov. In his books and stories these rules were introduced to ensure robots would serve the goal to maximize human well-being, serving their direct masters in the first place and secondarily any other human being. These rules read as follows: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.A robot must…

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Iceland Was Right, We Were Wrong: The IMF (by Jeff Nielson)

September 5, 2012
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Jeff Nielson has published an article well worth reading on the global financial crisis and its economic consequences. Originally published in The Street, the article explains the alternative strategy Iceland implemented to combat it’s dire situation after the financial meltdown and concludes that Iceland was not only different but right, which in turn suggests that everyone else was wrong. The following is a selection of paragraphs from the full article, which can be found here: Now in what may be the greatest economic “mea culpa” in history, we have the media admitting that this government/banking/propaganda-machine troika has been wrong all along. They have…

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Can democracy exist without trust? (TED lecture by Ivan Krastev)

September 5, 2012
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The following lecture is by Ivan Krastev, a political scientist and chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, in Sofia, a research and analysis NGO on democracy and trust.  Here are a few interesting quotes from the talk: Democracy is the only game in town. The problem is [when] people start to believe that it is not a game worth playing. And when we talk about the internet – yes it’s true, internet connected all of us, but we also know, that the internet created these equal chambers and political ghettos, in which for all your life, you can stay…

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Julian Assange interviews Nabeel Rajab & Alaa Abd El-Fattah (The World Tomorrow)

September 5, 2012
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In the fourth episode of RT‘s The World Tomorrow Julian Assange speaks with two leading Arab revolutionaries in the middle of conflict, Alaa Abd El-Fattah from Egypt and Nabeel Rajab from Bahrain. Alaa Abd El-Fattah is a long time Egyptian blogger, programmer and political activist. His parents were human rights campaigners under Anwar Sadat; his sister Mona Seif became a Twitter star during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and is a founder of the No Military Trials for Civilians group formed under the post-Mubarak military junta. El-Fattah was imprisoned for 45 days in 2006 for protesting under the Mubarak regime, and…

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The plastic bottle solar light-bulb (creative responses)

August 17, 2012
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From the category “Creative responses to environmental challenges“: The plastic bottle solar light-bulb. Simply cut a hole in your roof, stick in and seal a water filled plastic bottle, and you get a free, solar-powered daytime light-bulb.

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Julian Assange interviews Cypherpunks (The World Tomorrow)

July 28, 2012
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In the 8th and 9th episode of RT‘s The World Tomorrow, Julian Assange is joined by cypherpunks from the US, Germany, and France to discuss the future of our increasingly digitalized world.  What is the ultimate purpose of Twitter, Facebook and other social media? What is the current state of online privacy and data protection? These are some the questions examined in this excellent two-part discussion with people who understand perhaps better than anyone else the challenges that cyberspace poses to human freedom. Part I: Part II:

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Freedom of thought and open-source software (lecture by Eben Moglen)

July 28, 2012
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Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, as well as founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center and long-term supporter of organizations like the Free Software Foundation, is a lecturer and free software/open-source advocate. Though the following lecture and interview only covers so much, they do serve as a good introduction to his extensive body of work. Why Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media and Why Free Media Require Free Technology This lecture was held during the Re:publica 2012 conference in Berlin. It describes in detail why the current societal model, in which proprietary…

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The recycled can solar heating panel (creative responses)

July 15, 2012
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From the category “Creative responses to environmental challenges“: The recycled can solar heating panel: Newfoundlander Jim Meaney found a creative way to reuse can’s to build cheap but effective solar panels to heat homes and save energy.

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Children speak out on the climate crisis

June 28, 2012
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Twenty years ago a 12-year-old girl named Severn Suzuki addressed delegates in Rio de Janeiro during the summit’s plenary session on behalf of the world youth. In the following segment DemocracyNow! revisits that passionate, prescient, and powerful and speech that “silenced the world for 6 minutes”.  Some quotes from the speech: Coming up here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future. Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come. I am here to speak on behalf of…

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Julian Assange interviews Moazzam Begg and Asim Qureshi (The World Tomorrow)

June 25, 2012
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From the website of the The World Tomorrow: [The fifth episode] of The World Tomorrow takes us to the very heart of America’s War on Terror: Guantanamo Bay. Julian Assange sat down with a former Gitmo prisoner and a rights campaigner fighting for those still trapped behind the wire. Ten years ago the war on terror prompted the opening of the facility.  Now, more than three years after President Obama ordered its closure, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, like the war in Afghanistan, remains with us. Over a year ago, Wikileaks blew the lid on Gitmo by releasing a cache of…

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Augmented and bot-mediated reality

June 13, 2012
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While Google’s  Project Glass has recently generated quite a stir with the possibilities of augmented reality, the idea is not exactly new.  In the 1990’s MIT Cyborgs carried around huge backpacks stuffed with computer hardware to remain connected to the digital world via their clunky screen-goggles. Sherry Turkle, an MIT researcher herself, discusses them in an article entitled “Always-on/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self,” which analyzes how augmented reality transforms human interaction into a world in which people are ensnared in round-the-clock digital social networks. Yet the official description for the Google’s Project Glass is just as optimistic as Turkle’s analysis is cynical: We believe technology…

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Sun-powered system to provide electricity, heat and cooling to rural schools and clinics (creative responses)

June 13, 2012
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From the category “Creative responses to environmental challenges“: Sun-powered system to provide electricity, heat and cooling to rural schools and clinics. This system, developed and introduced by MIT students showcases yet another amazing technology to utilize solar energy. The students also founded a nonprofit company to further develop the system and get spread it’s use around the world.

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Cob houses built with local clay (creative responses)

June 13, 2012
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From the category “Creative responses to environmental challenges“: Cob houses built with local clay Cob, which is made from clay, is a material that has been around for centuries, but was abandoned in favour of concrete and other material. Though not exactly a new “invention” these houses are easy to build and come at a astonishingly low costs. For a whole documentary dedicated to cob houses check out: First Earth: Uncompromising Ecological Architecture

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Julian Assange interviews Rafael Correa (The World Tomorrow)

June 3, 2012
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In the sixth episode of RT‘s The World Tomorrow, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador discusses the media, government corruption, and his country’s relationship with the United States. The interview opens with the circumstances surrounding the attempted coup in Ecuador in 2010, during which the president was taken hostage. Following the attempted coup, Correa embarked on a furious and controversial counter-offensive against Ecuador’s media. In this interview he explains the media’s role in the events of 2010 in terms of the vested interests of media corporations. He claims that corporate owners of the media “disguised as journalists, are trying to do politics,…

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Catastroika: privatization goes public (documentary)

May 27, 2012
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With its on-going “debt crisis” Greece has emerged as a target for economic “solutions testing.” So far austerity and large-scale privatization seem to be the favored  treatment, as prescribed by the putative economic experts–the IMF and the EU banking sector.  In June 2011 Democracy Now hosted a debate with Hara Kouki and Costas Panayotakis, discussing the imposed economic measurements that triggered widespread protest throughout Greece and led to ridiculous new levels of privatization, such as the Greek police force renting out their officers and helicopters to private individuals. And a related documentary, “Catastroika: privatization goes public,” was recently released, analyzing the transfer…

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