Darkness at Noon

Eric Lee and his baby, Labourstart, have always been great innovators when it comes to Union’s use of online technologies. And consistent with that is his new initiative: the Labourstart Techblog.

Labourstart is a large and complex site that translates into many languages. Often he runs into little glitches that he can’t figure out. Now, he just posts these little glitches on the blog and poepl comment to provide a little assistance.

The website gets fixed and the blog serves as an archive for other web developers who have run into the sam problem. Brilliant!

As I mentioned here, the ACDJ made a submission to the Inquiry into the Disclosure regimes for charities and not-for-profit organisations.

It’s now available from the Parliament of Australia website here. A list of all submission can be found here.

Well the only semi-decent paper in the country has decided to cut it’s staff by 30%. That’s 550 journalists and editorial staff who will no longer have a job. Needless to say this has two pretty significant problems.

Firstly, no one likes to see people loose jobs. Especially as unnessisarily as this.

Secondly, it’s going to make the quality of the paper decline further. Then where are people like myself going to turn for their news? The Oz?

So I urge you all to go to http://www.fairgofairfax.org.au/petition/ and sign the petition, then send a letter to the editor at letters@theage.com.au

On Friday the ACDJ put in a submission to the Inquiry into the Disclosure regimes for charities and not-for-profit organisations.

It hasn’t been published on the Parliament of Australia site yet as it needs to be checked by the committee before they do that so I’ll wait to post it here before I do.

But the inquiry has important implications for non-profit groups and community empowerment.

Two submissions that have already been put on the site I’m sure will be well worth the read are OurCommunity.com.au’s (disclaimer: they are my former employer) and The Australia Institute.

The Australian Building and Construction Commission is really about the most egregious abuse of the rights of construction workers this country has seen in 100 years.

Yes, there used to be some issues with ‘Union Thugs’ but, as someone who works in the Union movement, I can tell you those days are well and truly gone and have been for some time.

So there is no excuse for the commission. Laws already exist that protect employers, we don’t need additional regulation that actively vilifies construction workers.

Anyway, a new site has been released and is worth keeping your eye on: Rights On Site.

Let’s get rid of this abomination.

(via Slashdot) Nate Andreson has an article about Warner consultant Jim Griffin coming around to the idea of blanket music licensing where a fee is built into your ISP costs and you have free access to the catalogs of participating record companies. It’s an idea I’ve advocated in the past, however I’d rather see it broadened to be something more like radio licensing fees but the difference is nominal.

One thing does strike me though. I’ve also said that we are entering a new era of cultural consumption and delivery. From that there will be winners and losers (just like there are winners and losers now with a highly centralised oligopoly of record companies that control the vast majority of cultural output). The reason I favour the new model is that I feel it is more democratised and puts everyone on a level playing field.

So if we go with a blanket music licensing situation, you are still entrenching record companies, and big ones at that. That’s a mistake of the past I’d like to avoid because those going it alone would never get a cut of this.

As Jazzy Jeff has notes in The Pirate’s Dilemma, many musicians have made money without record labels but no record label has ever made money without musicians. So why should the power always sit with the record label?

While we’re on this topic (are we ever off it?) Defamer (!?!) notes the following:

As mentioned yesterday, the first AC/DC studio album in eight years is due for release in the next few months, so naturally a bunch of songs from the record have leaked (it’s just not a hotly-anticipated release if you can’t listen to crappy 64kbps snippets of the hit single online!) - but what makes this leak different from all the others is that the eager Acca fans have inadvertently created one of the most brilliant pieces of YouTubery since the last brilliant piece of YouTubery we claimed was the best ever. Because the songs themselves haven’t actually been leaked, per se. In short: the fans attended the music video shoot, heard the song, remembered how it went, and then rushed home to their guitars, webcams and, in the case of this champion, their best Brian Johnston dress-ups, and “leaked” the song, second-hand. Are you ready to rock?!

Prepare for total domination as “Brian Johnson himself” performs Rock ‘N’ Roll Train in his bedroom:

Prepare to rock:

(Via Kevin Kelly @ the Technium).

Cliff ‘cliffski’ Harris, over at Positech is a game developer who sells his games for $20. Despite this now cost, people are still pirating his games and he wanted to find out why. So he asked them. The response was quite interesting and the majority of responses (of which there were hundreds) focused on barriers to using the game including DRM, payment methods and so on. In the end, the overwhelming repose was that people wanted to play the game now, not after they had overcome these barriers. There was also a high level of poorly made games. Why would you pay for a game that wasn’t really slick?

My games aren’t as good as they could be. Ironically, one of the things that reduces your enthusiasm to really go the extra mile in making games is the thought that thousands of ungrateful gits will swipe the whole thing on day one for nothing. It’s very demoralizing. But actually talking to the pirates has revealed a huge group of people who really appreciate genuinely good games. Some of the criticisms of my games hit home. I get the impression that if I make Kudos 2 not just lots better than the original, but hugely, overwhelmingly, massively better, well polished, designed and balanced, that a lot of would-be pirates will actually buy it. I’ve gone from being demoralized by pirates to actually inspired by them, and I’m working harder than ever before on making my games fun and polished.

A final note is trying to make it easier for people to buy my games. I’m really hassling my payment provider to support amazons one-click method. For me, I think that’s even more convenient than Steam. I’m always doing what I can to make buying them as quick and easy as possible.

It’s an interesting case study and well worth a read.

I always love a bit of youth activist training. Too often these things are just done on an ad hoc basis with little regard for the necessary reflection and thoughtfulness. Moreover, I think it’s great to activate our youth and impart the knowledge of more experienced activists. That’s why I thought this initiative deserved a plug:

The SEARCH Foundation is initiating an exciting new training program for young activists interested and engaged in left/progressive social change. The dates of the training are Saturday September 13th and Saturday September 20th.

The training sessions will consist of an inter-generational dialogue and exchange with veteran activists who will share their experiences, knowledge and ideas with younger activists. This will be done through exploring case studies of previous Australian campaigns and social movements and analysing the successes/failures of these campaigns. Political education will be a key component of the trainings with an emphasis on exploring theoretical perspectives and key vision and values which run across all progressive social movements. Particular skills sharing sessions will also take place, focused on how to organise campaigns and develop strategy and tactics.

The veteran activists participating for this training are Merle Thornton (Women’s movement), Pat Healy (Freedom Rides) and John Higgins (Maritime dispute).

Young activists will have access to a network of experienced and supportive left/progressive activists with possibilities of mentoring, sharing of ideas and solidarity on campaigns. The veteran activists involved have had considerable experience in successful mass movements, which include: the environment movement, union activism, women’s movement, indigenous rights, refugee and asylum seeker campaigns, human rights, as well as many more.

This is an opportunity to make some new activist friends, be supported while being active and gaining some insights into progressive political strategies for Australia’s future.

Participants will also have the opportunity to take part in a mentoring program with a veteran activist as well as help create an activist network where support can be given and information is freely shared.

More details here.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m quite suspicious of anything Microsoft does. I’m also a huge fan of all things open source.

One of the darlings of the FOSS movement is Apache. As I understand it between 6% and 70% of all web servers run on Apache. They are fast, stable and reliable, far more so than any Microsoft web server. I know I wouldn’t use anything else and that this site and everything the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice does online is brought to you by an Apache web server.

The other thing about Apache is that it’s licensing is quite relaxed. While everything under a GNU/GPL license has the “share alike” condition, requiring you to license any derivatives of the original in the same way, Apache’s licensing agreement does not. In other words, it’s quite possible to take the software, modify it, and make it closed source.

So, when Microsoft decided to give the Apache Foundation $100,000 a year, I get very worried. Unfortunately, anything else I could write her is speculation. And Bruce Perens has already done a lot of that work for me:

If they [Microsoft] have to live with open source, the Apache project is Microsoft’s preferred direction. Apache doesn’t use the dreaded GPL and its enforced sharing of source-code. Instead, the Apache license is practically a no-strings gift, with a weak provision against patent lawsuits as its most relevant term. Microsoft can take Apache software and embrace and enhance, providing their own versions of the project’s software with engineered incompatibility and no available source, just as they forced incompatibility into the Web by installing IE with every Windows upgrade.

IE is derived from Mosaic, the original Web browser, open source with a license similar to Apache’s. So, this isn’t a new strategy. The plan, then, could be to have Microsoft servers vie for dominance with their own – Microsoft specialized – versions of Apache applications. Or it could be that Microsoft sees itself replacing Linux in the market as a hosting platform for open source. Microsoft would run open source and .NET, while Linux would just run open source, and Mono, which is always going to trail behind .NET as Wine has trailed behind Windows.

(the rest of the article is well worth a read)

I know a lot of jobs will be lost and that’s a really terrible thing, but it’s hard to feel bad about this:

STARBUCKS will close 70% of its Australian stores and slash more than half of its workforce as the once-mighty coffee giant battles an economic downturn in the US, its own rapid expansion and local competition.

So long, fair well.

So here is one for the mathematicians amongst us: If 61 stores is 70% of Starbucks cafe’s in Australia, how many will be left for us to try and shut down?