Category: Life

In the last week, I’ve accomplished what can only be summarized as a shitload.

When the trailer was released on April 9th, I still had no script, no semblence of how the movie would be put together. That’s because I wanted to wait until I had *all* the footage together before proceeding. At that point, I still had 2 confirmed interviews to take care of, as well as organize a few more.

Well, those interviews came and went, and I have in my hands a final script. Getting that script done is the product of hours of work: going through all the footage, summarizing each point of each interviewee, timecoding it, creating draft scripts, creating more drafts… reviewing it all. I’ve now begun sequencing the final footage.

To give you an idea of where I’m at in all of this, after the sequencing is done, I’ll script and record voice over work. Then, I’ll insert stock footage, music, special effects, etc. At that point, the film will be complete. I still forsee it being done within 2 weeks.

Because I now know what the film is going to be like, I have given it a new title. It is one which is more applicable to the end project:

In other news, I’ve decided to drop the use of all Magnatune music in the film. Though I’ll still utilize the interview with the Magnatune CEO and so forth, I found that I simply can’t afford to license the music professionally. Even with my budget, licensing the music would likely cost in the hundreds/thousands of dollars.

Now its true that Magnatune releases its music under the Creative Commons for non-commercial use. The issue here is that my film, despite it being released non-commercially, may be displayed in commercial venues (film festivals.) If that happens, then I’d have to pay up the big bucks to Magnatune. Big bucks I simply don’t have.

The cheaper alternative for me is getting my audio tracks from royaltyfreemusic.com. They charge about $100/CD, which is still alot cheaper than Magnatune. And I can use the music commercially. Plus, they have some pretty decent tunes and their license gives me alot more flexibility than Magnatune’s commercial use license.

Source: Reporters sans frontieres

Reporters Without Borders has obtained a copy of the verdict in the case of Jiang Lijun, sentenced to four years in prison in November 2003 for his online pro-democracy articles, showing that Yahoo ! helped Chinese police to identify him.

A few months ago, Yahoo helped jail a pro-democratic man for 20 years. His crime was to help organize pro-democracy rallies. He had never committed assault, stolen, or done anything illegal by Canadian standards. But expressing pro-democracy in China is illegal, and so he was jailed. Of course, all that was possible with the help of Yahoo’s cooperation with the Chinese authorities.

Then, sometime later, we learned that Google would implement a Chinese search engine. One that would, of course, filter out anything unwanted by the Chinese Government. Such as, say, pictures of a certain incident in 1989.

Now, we stand by yet another case. Yahoo, we find today, has helped jail a man for four years. His crime? Writing pro-democracy articles online. Free speech at its very undisputable essence, being thrown away and worse. For what?

Money. That’s all this is about really. Had Yahoo not cooperated, they would of risked sanctions that would of been a big financial blow to them. They would of lost footing in a critical market, while its competitors went ahead.

And of course, it isn’t a sense of morality that guides corporations – its those little bills of paper. Now it so happens that money and morality often go forcefully hand in hand, thanks to our legal system. It enforces fines to certain unethical acts, and so companies abide by them to save money.

But there are things for which our laws apply not, and then we see the true morals of these entities. Or should I say the lack thereof. But the thing is, its not the companies to blame. Investors, who are even worse than these companies, would pull out all their funds out of a corporate stock if it turned out that that corporation would sacrifice a big market and their future health for ethics. If the ethics had a return, then maybe investors would consider otherwise.

So what’s a company to do? Sacrifice their wellbeing, or have a few democratic chumps in a Communist country tortured?

No, it isn’t the company’s fault. They’re stuck in the position they’re in. Its a sad testament to today’s world. Of course, the government, the only ones that could enforce changes for the better, won’t do anything about it.

Interfering with the operations of another country is bad politics. And plus – if the USofA enforced any laws, then the companies affected would move their HQs elsewhere. That’s bad for the economy. So the government is staying out of this.

But then I remembered: everyone got upset in the US because they learned companies were selling people’s private information. That passed laws. Its the people – the people have the power. But will the people do anything about it? Nope. No one cares about a lone Chinaman.

But what kind of the world is it we live in, when we’d rather torture someone for being pro-democracy, than see a company’s stock go down.

Oh how we take our freedom for granted.

I was having a large comment spam problem. It was to a point that spammers were sending me spam comments once an hour.

I finally set out to do something about it. I could of used Bayesian filtering, but I didn’t want any false positives. Blacklists? Didn’t want my site being reliant on external machines. Finally settled on a “catchpa” – a system of user response.

Unauthenticated users now have to enter a code that’s written beside a box in the comment field when they want to post. Yes, its an annoyance. However, this code is legible enough that it isn’t too annoying, and it has succesfully killed off 100% of my incomming spam.

Maybe one day spammers will try to use CPU-intensive OCR technologies to bypass such systems. But they have so many unprotected blogs to spam right now that it isn’t worth it to them.

I hate spammers. Thanks to them, one of my email addresses is virtually useless now. Spammers are the main reason botnets exist. And now, they’ve forced inconveniences onto visitors of my site and others due to their incessant abuse of a free Internet.

Oh dear oh dear. Let me quote this article from CBS:

(CBS4) BOSTON It’s called Leetspeak – the online language kids use to speed up communication and keep their parents guessing. The code has developed a dangerous edge to it. But Leetspeak, the secret code of numbers and letters, is changing and Internet safety experts want to warn parents about it.

“There are too many predators out there that could endanger their kids’ lives or sexualize them too early,” says Internet safety expert and family therapist Barbara Melton. “And leetspeak is just a gateway to all that.”

I, for one, find this quite funny. The reporter is obviously trying very hard to make up a story where there is none. Throw in a bit of anachronyms, kids, fears of online predators, and stir it all & bake for 40 minutes. The only reason such stories work is that the audience that reads this crap doesn’t know any better.

A few things wrong with this: first off, leetspeak isn’t changing. The reporter only says that to make the story seem more threatning, more sensational. Second of all, it isn’t “secret” by any means. Again – used to make the danger of predators that everyone’s so paranoid about more plausible.

But what’s absolutely most wrong with all of this, is saying that leetspeak is somehow a gateway for predators to exploit children. Yes, it is a means of communicating and therefore utilized by predators. But to somehow suggest that leetspeak increases the threat of predators is proposterous. If leetspeak is to be blamed, then might as well blame the English language – after all, predators use that too.

If anything, this article does raise the issue of the obvious disconnect between the reporter’s generation and that of the youth today.