Edward Snowden’s Christmas message to the UK nation

As mentioned previously, Edward Snowden’s alternative Christmas message to the UK Nation was short and packed with depth.

Ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has delivered an “alternative” UK Christmas message, urging an end to mass surveillance. The broadcast was carried on Channel 4 as an alternative to the Queen’s traditional Christmas message. Mr Snowden focused on privacy, saying: “A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.” The 30-year-old has temporary asylum in Russia after leaking details of US electronic surveillance programmes.

I’ve clipped it to Archive.org, (mp4, ogg, mkv, webm, avi) under some kind of fair use and that this should be available to all the public, wherever they be. As you can see the bit torrent sharing isn’t going so great at the moment. I did upload to Youtube but it was blocked within 4mins by the Youtube bot. Kosso also made a copy here.

So reflection of my issue trying to convince my dad yesterday, how would Snowden’s alternative Christmas message work?

“…The technology of George Orwell’s 1984 are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go.”
 Great use of 1984, something almost everyone has heard of. Its something which keeps coming up again and again. Well here is Snowden telling you its worst than you can even imagine.
“A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.”
Ok so hopefully the take away is your grandchildren will never experience what you had when growing up. For the rest of us, this should make a lot more sense. Even myself who’s a very public person, will always fight for those who require and seek privacy. I know what Vince Cerf said about privacy may actually be an anomaly but we need to pursue it for the sake of the next generation.
“Together we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying.”
Practical and simple advice. And he’s kind of right. So simple…

Me personally would happily give away parts of my privacy in return for non-surveillance and the ability to remove and delete history.

A couple of things people have sent me recently

Been a little quiet recently, mainly due to the season of partying and ending up ill with the flu…

Anyway I’m back…

Ok silly and funny… Thanks Tim Dobson.

Just so Tragic! Thanks Martinrue

Forgot who sent this to me but its a interesting one… How much eye contact, depends on your aim I guess.

Surround Video on the Steam box?

Surround Video

Following my last post …

Theres a another interesting thing Gabe said in his interview about the steam box,

Do you envision a Steam Box connecting to other screens outside the living room?

The Steam Box will also be a server. Any PC can serve multiple monitors, so over time, the next-generation (post-Kepler) you can have one GPU that’s serving up eight simultaeneous game calls. So you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it. We’re used to having one monitor, or two monitors — now we’re saying let’s expand that a little bit.

Well that certainly helps solve the surround video setups in the future.

This is something I was sniffing around Sony as a R&D project many years ago. I wonder if MHL could make almost any device surround video possible now? Still needs setting up, a projector and a massive parabolic mirror however…

Surround Video on the next Xbox?

Lots of rumours about the next Xbox currently… but the most interesting thing I’ve heard is… around the more powerful Kinect and multidisplay output.

I instantly started wondering if finally BBC R&D Surround video could work in real time on consoles? Something I was wondering if the Playstation3 could do a while ago.

I know they maybe thinking about multiscreen type applications but actually surround video is a perfect fit… imho

More on that Youtube Video

After I got a automatic/robot take down for my intrusive TV demonstrate from the Black Mirror episode 2. I’ve decided to see what I can do to get the video back online, by going through the YouTube process instead of just posting it somewhere else.

However there seems to be little I can do…

Copyright Info: Intrusive TV?

Your video, Intrusive TV? , may include content that is owned or administered by these entities:

  • Entity: Channel 4 Content Type: Audiovisual content

As a result, your video has been blocked in these locations:

Guernsey, Ireland, Isle of Man, Jersey, United Kingdom

What should I do?

No action is required on your part. Your video is still available everywhere not listed above.

What can I do about my video’s status?

Please note that the video’s status can change if the policies chosen by the content owners change. You may want to check back periodically to see if you have new options available to you.

Under certain circumstances, you may dispute this copyright claim. These are:

  • if the content is mistakenly identified and is actually completely your original creation;
  • if you believe that your use does not infringe copyright (e.g. it is fair use under US law);
  • if you are actually licensed by the owner to use this content.

I need more information. I want to learn more about the dispute process.

Please take a few minutes to visit our Help Centre section on Policy and Copyright Guidelines, where you can learn more about copyright law and our Content Identification Service.

So as you can see its only blocked in the country of its origin, which strikes me as totally backwards…! Oh well, I could say a lot about this but to be totally fair, its not Channel4… Its some automated process doing automatic takedowns on behalf of Channel4. Who was it that said code is law?

Inception on youtube

Imran showed me a video about inception (massive spoiler alert, do not watch before you seen the film) over twitter and I started to check out the related videos, theres some really funny stuff out there.