Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Interesting rhyming couplets

# Sleepwalking into the surveillance state headlines - Woman Loses Job Due to Error in FBI Criminal Database sez Wired. The Guardian looks at how the UK state intelligence actively monitors political activism.

# Economist dolphins and Doctor sharks. HT DPF for the latter (that went global quick, eh?)

# Interweb wars - Gripping Hand and Aardvark take a couple of bites at the Orwellian Top Secret ACTA treaty. Steven Price's Media Law Journal points to a very interesting symposium. Next month, the Law Commission, InternetNZ and the Ministry of Justice are hosting a seminar on the Internet and the courts. It will be looking at issues such as:

• Undermining of suppression orders
• Lack of jurisdiction over material hosted outside NZ
• Online discussion of crimes and trials potentially being a contempt of court
• Jurors who “Google”
• How deleting a story doesn’t remove it from caches and syndication feeds
• How do media and Internet publishers find out what actually has been the subject of a suppression order?
• Online criminal offending databases, and the right to a fair trial
• Is education or incarceration needed for Internet publishers who commit contempt

# The collected unconscious - Jung's Red Book has finally been released. The New Yorker features some of Jung's fascinating drawings, while Charlie Kaufman interprets selected images from Jung's head live on stage.

# Goldman Squid - The improbably named Lloyd Blankfein, head beak of Goldman Sachs, has been on the charm offensive. He has classed his minions as the most productive people in the world and calling it all God's work.

# Speaking of squid, I had some time to kill yesterday. After I finished my cigarette at the waterfront while schoolgirls were celebrating the end of uniformity, I went to visit Te Papa's big squid. Sure, I was expecting it to be bigger, but it was an unexpected pleasure that old school TV star Roger Gascoigne was explaining that as underwhelming as it is, it is the biggest captured so far. Do you know how hard it is to catch a big squid?