Entries Tagged 'Personal' ↓

There’s been questions coming our way about the olympics - are we going to promote it on The Pirate Bay or not. The answer is ‘No!’

First of all, sports are not that interesting! Politics however is. Helping out promoting a country like China is not in anyones interest besides their oppressive government. I’m quite surprised that the discussions about China versus human rights have been so quiet during the olympics. In my opinion the olympics should never be held in a country like that.

I feel a bit sick in my body when I see that journalists are upset that they would have to use a restricted Internet during their stay in China - and that they’re OK with going there anyhow, when the restrictions are lifted for them, personally. It’s sickening! Everybody needs to demand freedom for the people, not only freedom for some lucky ones. It’s spineless.

During the trip to Bolzano Rasmus asked me a question about which programming language I felt was the most beautiful. My answer was quite quickly Assembly. In particular I feel that Motorola 68K assembly is very beautiful. The simple reason for that is that I grew up with it.

Ever since I got the question I’ve been thinking about it in the back of my mind. The question evolved into this: Is code art? It has many parallels. It’s easy - when you know how to. It’s beautiful - if you’re into that sort of beautifulness. It can be very complex - and it can be very simple. Simple code (and simple art) can be more estetically appealing because of the simplification.

C, PHP and other higher levels of languages is in my mind not that beautiful. Programming in a high level language makes you feel in control of the source code itself, not the computer. Assembly (and only assembly) is more of a conversation with the machine. You talk about what it should do, in baby steps and it follows. You’re the director, the producer and the machine is the actor. There is no middle man, there is a clean conversation between the two parties that are involved — or three, if you’re into handling more processors. It’s stunningly beautiful when you get it to work and you can trust it to always work because you’re agreeing upon what will happen at any stage in your conversation.

With higher level programming the control and the conversation is lost –  but can it still be art? It has to be, otherwise I don’t know why I’m smiling when I see my smart solutions. It’s another layer of the art of code. Instead of participating in a direct conversation, it offers you to reply to it. The end result can be just as good.

The conclusion — code is art, art is easy and it doesn’t matter how you participate as long as you do.

We’re finally in Bolzano!

After travelling from Sweden, through Berlin, Ingolstadt, some parts of Austria and into Italy, we’ve now arrived to Bolzano for the Manifesta art biennal.

There’s alot of stuff happening. It’s too much to write about right now, but I still wanted to update a bit. Pictures are available, they’re awesome! This trip is very special. It will never be copied, it’s impossible!

I’ll update more later. Tomorrow is opening day!

Last night we arrived in Berlin. I went to sleep after we parked the bus, and woke up early.

Todays plan is to have a big party. You’re very welcome to join the party if you’re nearby - more info on the s23m site.

System 23 Modified (S23M) arrived in Malmö today. We took some photos of the extraordinary system! Tomorrow I will embark together with my fellow art loving pirates to travel with the system to Bolzano. Hope to see you on the road!

Today, S23M embarked on it’s virgin voyage from Stockholm to Bolzano, Italy. Piratbyrån and The Pirate Bay have been invited to Manifesta 7, the big artbiennal.

Tomorrow the bus leaves from Malmö. I’m joining the trip and I’m looking forward to do some art together with my friends. For me, this will be a very analog tribute to the past years or working with the art of kopimism! I’m super happy about it and I hope I will meet a lot of our fellow pirates on the road to Bolzano.

For more information, please visit the S23M project site!

Granted, The Pirate Bay has been initiating a lot of projects that we want to do. The Video Bay, Playble and Secure P2P are all ambitious projects that we’ve embarked upon and still not finished.

To those who complaint - well, fine. Most of the projects are projects that we’ve started, someone from our nearby area has then leaked it and then it’s all over the news. We get pushed to do stuff then instead of doing it for pure fun which is when we work the best together.

We’re only three people doing these projects. Most of the time, we’re actually only two. And we have day jobs as well. And everytime something happens on the Internet, the media requires us to take action or talk about it. I myself would spend around 4-5 hours - daily - to talk to the media about various issues. That’s not a joke, it’s 4-5 hours _daily_ that I spend just talking. It’s hard to keep up your dayjob and also a relationship at that pace.

Playble is still coming along. It hit some barriers with both cooperation within the team and with problems with Stim which I’ve written about before. It’s still on the todo-list. Same thing with The Video Bay - but we decided to put it on hold until there is a good enough p2p-streaming system. We where planning to release it without p2p but decided not to do that since we want it good or not at all. Secure P2P is the project of Tiamo but then we started to talk to BT Inc if they would implement some of the ideas instead and also we’re trying to convince them to put out a license that would prohibit them from making BitTorrent a closed system. That way they would have to stay true to the community, which we found a better idea then re-inventing the wheel all over again.

We’re sorry for being slow - but it’s also that we have lots of ideas and ambitions but we’re too few people. Instead we would love for some actually skilled PHP-coders and webdesigners to join our team. The problem we have is that every time we go look for them, they turn out either to not be flexible our the good ones disappear among the crappy ones. So if you know someone - who is REALLY skilled, and flexible when it comes to payments and who understands IRC - tell him (or preferably her) to talk to us.

Also, I’m working on another system, which is my baby. It’s going to be released soon, actually, as it’s closing to finish. And that’s what’s been stealing most of my working time right now, besides all the ACTA, FRA demonstrations, interviews and legal matters.

To close off - yes, we’re not wearing suits to work, we’re just too in love with the internet and have too little time.

I’m not a big fan of politics. I’m not a big fan of voting. Especially not for a party that only cares about one cause. That’s my biggest problem with the Swedish Pirate Party. I prefer to vote for a party that has a sound idea about all the questions that are important, not only one. A lot of people have asked me why I’m not that fond of PP and that’s essentially the answer they’ve got.

However, during the past few months, I’ve been frequently amazed at how great the people within PP has behaved. Especially their work with the FRA-law has been something that impressed me. That’s why I today decided to support them a bit more, not just morally as I’ve noticed I have done more and more. Don’t get me wrong - I’m all for their changes they want to do (I say they’re not even going far enough, but still better than most) - but now I know that they’re needed and I know that they’re doing a good job. I will keep on having a nice relationship with them, and I decided today to put in a monthly monetary transfer to them. I suggest all of you to do this! Go to http://www.piratpartiet.se/donate (International) or http://www.piratpartiet.se/guldpirat (Swedish). Do it right now, everything helps. Also, when The Pirate Bay are getting questions about cash donations we’re now sending them the link to PP’s donate page. I hope they will gain some from this. (But just to be clear - the profit made on the TPB merch store will of course still go to Piratbyrån, who also do a really important and I would say even more interesting work.)

(No, I will not join the Pirate Party though - I’m not allowed to vote in Sweden anyhow).

Another suggestion - I just read the book Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. You should also read it.

So, it’s the second day at Reboot. It’s as always very nice people here, but I was a bit scared by one of the speakers that made the whole audience hug eachother and now he’s playing “Somewhere over the rainbow” which is supposed to be heartful and needy. Holding my lecture with Magnus in two hours, I have a surprise for him. Just an internal joke.

Anyhow, so many people have a hard time following the news flow about FRA so I made a small surveillance site. It monitors the news flow and collects all relevant data about FRA - just as they want to do. It’s based on some AI, which is kinda what FRA wants. But for us who wants to follow the debate, you can go to http://piratbyran.org/franews/ to see it. There’s also an RSS feed in there for those who need it. Oh, and it’s free, breaks no privacy and it’s smart. And yes, there’s a problem with the RSS containing nothing but links for now. All big Nordic media and valuable blogs are monitored by the system, so you should miss very little of the interesting news.

(For those who missed it: http://piratbyran.org/pbnews/ is the same type of thing but for piracy / file sharing related news.)

Tomorrow I’m going to Reboot10 in Copenhagen. On Friday I will hold a lecture together with Magnus from Piratbyrån. The topic is ACTA and what to do about it, hope to see you there for these two days. The event is always very interesting and I really enjoy to meet the people there.