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Jan 25 2012
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News, Media & Sport

Julian Assange to host his own talk show

The tale of Julian Assange, which will undoubtedly be made into an Oscar-nomiated movie at some point in the next decade, continues to take another intriguing twist. It was announced this week (24th January) that the founder of Wikileaks will host a talk show on an English-language television channel controlled by the Kremlin, Russia Today.

The programme, rather grandiosely titled The World Tomorrow, will start in mid-March and feature half-an-hour long interviews with ten “key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries” according to the Russian broadcaster. A separate statement from Wikileaks says “the show is intended to draw together controversial voices from across the political spectrum – iconoclasts, visionaries and power insiders – each to offer a window on the world tomorrow.” A replacement for Oprah Winfrey, this clearly ain’t. Both organisations seem as if they’re hoping for headline-grabbing conversations.

Anything that Assange does is steeped in controversy and he’s still facing battles of his own. In 2010 his website was condemned by US authorities for releasing classified information and shortly afterwards he was arrested of sexual assault allegations in Sweden. He is currently appealing against extradition to the Scandinavian country and the UK Supreme Court will consider his appeal next month. It’s been revealed that The World Tomorrow will be filmed a week before this hearing.

The success of this is entirely dependant on who are the interviewees. Is it going to be people we’ve not heard of or well-known figures? Or a mixture of the two? No one really knows yet but if he gets the right people it could be quite fascinating. It also depends on Assange’s own skills as an interviewer and that could be a downfall since Assange isn’t necessarily someone who has bags of charisma.

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Jan 20 2012
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News, Media & Sport

This war between government and online anarchists must stop

As I mentioned in my last blog post (I’ve got to stop beginning posts like this, it’s just getting annoying now) the hacking collective Anonymous went after a series of major websites last night. This has happened because US authorities have chosen to close down Megaupload in order to clamp down on piracy.

The scale of the arrest is quite huge: each person arrested have been charged with five counts of copyright infringement and conspiracy. This includes the founders who were arrested by local police in Auckland, New Zealand. The maximum jail sentence for copyright infringement? Five years. The maximum jail sentence for conspiracy to commit racketeering and money laundering? Twenty years. This is also all rather timely following the SOPA/PIPA outrage and goes to show that perhaps SOPA/PIPA isn’t needed to go after people who are hosting copyrighted material.

The one major problem of this whole battle between the authorities and online anarchists is that it weakens the prospect of proper dialogue between people who have the power to make laws and citizens. If you thought that the idea of a compromise was a stretch before all this kicked off then it seems like a near-impossibility at this moment in time. The longer that this ‘war’goes on the less likely we are to make major process on an issue that has polarised politicians, the entertainment industry and internet users for at least a decade.

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Jan 20 2012
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News, Media & Sport

SOPA strike: The aftermath

A couple of days ago I blogged about the SOPA strike that was occurring on the internet, including Wikipedia’s 24-hour take-down of its own site in protest. This did lead to a series of amusing things on social media such as the #FactsWithoutWikipedia hashtag whilst the Guardian did a liveblog (what else?) that asked its reader to ask any question in the hope that their writers would find the answers by traditional means – encyclopedias and copies of Who’s Who?

I guess now is a good time to take stock of how successful this protest has been and whether or not it will actually change anything. Fight for the Future, a team of five led by Tiffiniy Cheng put out a video to show what SOPA and PIPA would do – I linked to it in my post yesterday. It has gone viral to the tune of 3.6m views at the time of writing.

It also seems that those views have translated into people taking direct action and it seems like it’s starting to pay off. Senators including Marco Rubio of Florida, John Cornyn of Texas and Orrin Hatch of Utah have withdrawn their support for the bill after they received a barrage of e-mails and phone calls from people concerned over what effect the proposed bill would have on the internet. This infographic from Pro Publica shows the dramatic swing of support following the events of Wednesday:

Obviously, there’s still a lot of legs in this story if we’re to consider recent developments. Last night saw the closure of Megaupload, showing that the government doesn’t actually need SOPA to shut down things they don’t like, and this saw hacking collective Anonymous retaliate by hacking websites such as the RIAA, MPAA, Universal Music Group and the Department of Justice.

If anything, this can sum up the contradiction of the internet quite well; one day we’re persuading people to directly contact politicians, the next we’re audibly cheering on people hacking into websites. It’s a funny old e-world.

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Jan 18 2012
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Occupy London to be evicted

Earlier today at 2:30pm the City of London Corporation found out that it won its bid to evict the Occupy London anti-capitalist protesters outside St. Paul’s Cathedral. A lawyer representing them has asked the camp to remove all bedding, tents and so on. The protesters are apparently highly likely to appeal the decision. The Judge Mr Justice Lindale said:

The City had no sensible choice but to do what it has. Conscious of its duties under statute, it gave the defendants an ample opportunity to remove the protest camp without the need for time and money to be spent in legal proceedings. It has, I believe, behaved both responsibly and fairly throughout.

This all started back in November when the corporation filed High Court proceedings after the Occupy London group failed to leave. The City claimed that the protesters were blocking highways that they own and they also had concerns over health and safety. Negotiations were attempted but they didn’t result in a positive outcome.

What would have permitted the camp to remain where they are? The brutal truth is not a lot. I wrote a piece for the Daily Blot last autumn that had a ‘wait and see’tone to it; don’t judge them until they are gone, essentially. Well, now that it looks like they will be gone soon, it’s hard to think of anything that it truly achieved apart from raising awareness of a complex political issue.

Or, to look at it another way, in the Netherlands last year a social-media led group of activists that share many of the same political ideals actually managed to prevent bankers at ING receiving huge bonuses and start a period of what that article calls a ‘period of introspection and soul-searching’ What did Occupy London do? Aside from setting up their own cities and groups and organisations, very little. This emphasises the fact that in this day and age of protesting it’s more about what kind of action you take as opposed to just anything.

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Jan 18 2012
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The BBC isn’t recruiting the locals at MediaCity

The bad press about the BBC’s MediaCity base in Salford will just not go away. Today it has been revealed that out of 680 new jobs, only 26 of them went to people from Salford. That’s less than 5%. Oh dear.

Local Labour MP Hazel Blears said:

The BBC needs to up its game and start to employ local people for local jobs.

Ken Lee, human resources director for BBC North, said:

We believe that this is a promising start. The BBC has recruited from across the north of England based on skills and experience, not by postcode.

In semi-related news, new unemployment benefit claimant figures show that the amount of claimants in the Salford and Eccles constiuency has gone up by 14.8%.

Of course I am being slightly unfair to Ken Lee. It’s not a bad thing to recruit based on skills and experience but it does raise an interesting question: is it a responsibility for the BBC to stimulate the local economy by recruiting people from the area or not?

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