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takyon writes:

Iceland has legalized blasphemy, which had been criminalized under a 75-year-old law, despite some opposition from the country's churches:

A bill was put forward by the minority Pirate Party, which campaigns for internet and data freedom. It came after the deadly attack the same month against French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris... As three members of the Pirate Party stood before parliament on Thursday, each said: "Je Suis Charlie", an expression used globally to express solidarity with the Charlie Hebdo victims. After the ruling, the party wrote on its blog (in Icelandic): "Iceland's parliament has now established the important message that freedom will not give in to bloody attacks." The blasphemy law had been in place since 1940, and anyone found guilty could have been sentenced to a fine or three months in prison.

The Catholic Church wrote in comments submitted after the bill was proposed: "Should freedom of expression go so far as to mean that the identity of a person of faith can be freely insulted, then personal freedom - as individuals or groups - is undermined." The Icelandic Ethical Humanist Association said that the new law included provisions to ensure that people could still be prosecuted for hate speech. [...] In the 2013 election, [Iceland's Pirate Party] gained three MPs for the first time, and polls now say it is the most popular party in Iceland, with the support of 32.4% of the country. In 2013, its members drafted a law calling for whistleblower Edward Snowden to be granted Icelandic citizenship.

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Original Submission

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More coffee.

When it comes to old notions that are used to stave off the need to embrace new business models in the digital age, nothing is more annoying than the whole "the masses just want everything for free" myth. That belief is snappy, punchy, and as simple to understand as it is completely and demonstrably wrong. But for a certain segment of the population, typically older generations of the kind that pine for the good old days when America was all apple pie and tasteful cartoons, the myth persists. Now, however, the myth is old. Old enough that it's begun to lose its flavor, like a piece of gum that you've been chewing on since Metallica shut down Napster. The new flavor is every digital success story that proves the myth wrong. Kickstarter happens to be my favorite example of this. What's remarkable about Kickstarter is that it's over half a decade old and, despite some still embracing the old myths, it's somehow still setting records in raising money for content producers.

Shenmue 3 isn’t only the fastest game to raise a million dollars on Kickstarter, it’s also the fastest game to raise two million dollars. The project was announced last night at Sony’s E3 press conference. It’s the follow-up the Shenmue 2, which was released fourteen years ago.

Were you to believe the legacy content producers, who insist the public are free-loading internet anarchists hell-bent on ruining everything and everyone, this shouldn't even be possible. The fact that records for raising money are being broken now is perfect in debunking every part of the myth. The money rolls in over a decade after the myth's creation, despite the expectation that every day would see an increase in younger generations just wanting "everything for free." The money rolls in six years into Kickstarter's existence, meaning nobody can claim that all this money is currently pouring in due to the embrace of some new platform, the popularity of which will quickly die away. The money rolls in for a video game, the exact kind of product that those who believe the myth would expect to be the most pirated.

What does this all mean? Kickstarter is on the verge of becoming the establishment now, if it isn't already. It's no longer the upstart experiment. It's firmly entrenched as a success story in the modern digital economy, taking its place alongside iTunes, Steam, and Netflix as snap-rebuttals to the old mythos. The truth is that there are conversations to be had about how to best operate within the digital economy, but those proselytizing the old gods against a greed that doesn't exist are no more useful in that discussion than flat-worlders might be in a conversation about astronomy. The myth is dead, gone the way of Zeus and relegated to a time before the counterexamples had borne fruit. The new question isn't whether content producers can get the public to pay for their goods; it's whether the now-established platforms can scale to keep up with the wider adoption of the platform.

Site performance is back up to speed. We're still monitoring everything. We've never seen anything like this. Thanks for your patience! #E3

— Kickstarter (@kickstarter) June 16, 2015

This was in response to the insane amount of interest and traffic generated by Shenmue 3. People flocking to Kickstarter so fast that the site couldn't keep up. People who others will tell you just want everything for free. The myth is dead. Long live the new business models.

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New submitter Neil_Brown writes: The Supreme Court of the United States has today denied Google's request to appeal against the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's ruling (PDF) that the structure, sequence and organization of 37 of Oracle's APIs (application program interfaces) was capable of copyright protection. The case is not over, as Google can now seek to argue that, despite the APIs being restricted by copyright, its handling amounts to "fair use". Professor Pamela Samuelson has previously commented (PDF) on the implications if SCOTUS declined to hear the appeal. The Verge reports: "A district court ruled in Google's favor back in 2012, calling the API "a utilitarian and functional set of symbols" that couldn't be tied up by copyrights. Last May, a federal appeals court overturned that ruling by calling the Java API copyrightable. However, the court said that Google could still have lawfully used the APIs under fair use, sending the case back to a lower court to argue the issue. That's where Google will have to go next, now that the Supreme Court has declined to hear the issue over copyright itself.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hairless animals

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

micdotcom:

Watch: This is painfully accurate — especially what Cho says to Barry on her way out of the room

Genius.

No one seriously believed it was just US law enforcement agencies using repurposed war gear to track cellphone users, did they?

An investigation by the British news channel Sky News claims to have found evidence of fake cellphone towers operating in London and elsewhere that acts similarly to devices known as IMSI catchers, the most famous of which is manufactured under the brand name StingRay.

The results of Sky News' GDMK Cryptophone-enabled cell tower wardriving can be found in this file, which supposedly uncovered more than 20 cell tower imposters in London alone in a three-week period. We've still got the UK beat on nomenclature, though. IMSI catchers are pretty much always referred to as "stingrays" (actually a product name trademarked by manufacturer Harris Corporation). Due to the lack of official acknowledgement or FOA-ed documents, we're stuck with the clunky "ICT hardware," as produced by manufacturer Datong.*

*Time to crowdsource a better British nickname. We honestly can't be using "ICT hardware" in the future when further details inevitably leak out. You'd think the Brits would already have this handled, considering the split development of the language (American/English) has necessitated a need for an English-to-English dictionary at this point.

Here's what officials don't have to say about the Sky News revelations, which follows on the heels of previous investigations by The Guardian and the Times of London. The only thing on record -- outside of the inevitable refusal to confirm or deny -- is this statement, which implies the public's right to know what law enforcement is up to falls far, far behind law enforcement's need to bust bad guys.

“We’re not going to talk about it,” Met official Bernard Hogan-Howe told Sky News when asked for comment. “The only people who benefit [from a comment] are the other side, and I see no reason in giving away that sort of thing."

Of course. And then there's this "reassurance," which only states that whatever the police are doing with these devices, it's certainly not as bad as the worst case scenarios envisioned by the most overactively-imaginative.

“If people imagine that we’ve got the resources to do as much intrusion as they worry about, I would reassure them that’s impossible,” Hogan-Howe added without providing any evidence to support his claim.

But that's OK, because what we do know about IMSI catchers should be scary enough. They force phones to the "dumbest" connection -- 2G -- to better facilitate the interception of calls and texts. They indiscriminately hoover up all call data in the area and can often disrupt normal phone service. Their exisitence is routinely hidden from courts, judges and criminal defendants. And they've been deployed thousands of times by hundreds of law enforcement agencies without a warrant.

These are all reason the public should be made aware of the purchase and use of these devices. But because usage isn't as "intrusive" as Hogan-Howe fails to specify it could be, British citizens are apparently supposed to believe everything is perfectly fine.

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It’s ma birf-day! Well, technically not anymore in New Zealand, but the 25th of June is still going strong in America.

June, 24th

The seminal ’90s grunge affiliates Babes In Toyland played their first show in 13 years last night at a small venue called Pappy & Harriet’s in Palm Springs. The band played for 50 minutes in the tiny bar, which has a maximum capacity of 224 people. Check out Andrea Swensson’s review of the show over at The Current, and watch Babes In Toyland rip through their setlist in order below.

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Napalm Death are one of the most important bands to come out of the UK metal scene, period. Like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, they hail from Birmingham, one of the ugliest, most crushed-under cities in the country’s post-industrial West Midlands. Though they started out as a hardcore punk duo, they were calling themselves Napalm Death as early as 1982, and gigging and recording demo tapes. It took them until 1986 to get anything like a steady lineup, but they had a solid live reputation nonetheless, which got them signed to fledgling label Earache Records. Their first album, 1987′s Scum, was the third Earache release, following the Accüsed’s The Return Of Martha Splatterhead and a split LP between Heresy and Concrete Sox. In its own way, Scum was a split LP, too; it had two completely different lineups on its two sides, with the only constant being drummer Mick Harris.

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New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

June, 22nd

February, 3rd

February, 2nd