The Babylonian Times

Greenwash Alert
Ron Oxburgh, Shell's new chairman, caused a great deal of excitement recently when he declared that he was “really very worried for the planet” (The Guardian, June 17). Apparently Lord Oxbough just had a profound epiphany: there is (no, but really!) such a thing as climate change, and it is actually caused (what nerve!) by carbon emissions. But don't reach for the champagne bottles yet, because it isn't as if Shell has any intention of reducing carbon emissions or anything like that. Apparently that's not even necessary, because there's a magic solution called “sequestration”: you keep burning fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow, but you just shove the emissions where the sun don't shine. “You probably have to put it under the sea but there are other possibilities. You may be able to trap it in solids or something like that”, said the Lord. Beautiful.
Well, believe it or not, there already is an excellent way of “trapping carbon dioxide in solids” - it's called trees. We're just cutting them down, a hectare every second in the tropics. Second, there is such a thing as the second law of thermodynamics. Sequestration is a process that reduces the entropy of carbon emissions, and thus requires investing energy - probably a great deal of it. Where is all that energy going to come from, Ron? Duracells?

Chinatown on Camera
Civil-rights activists in New York are reporting an amazing statistic: over the last two years, the number of surveillance cameras in Chinatown has increased seven times over. According to research by the Surveillance Camera Performers (the cheeky guys who do street-theatre in front of them), there are now 605 cameras in Chinatown: 565 on privately owned buildings; 38 on city, state or federal buildings; and 2 installed by the Department of Transport on city-owned poles.
What accounts for the utterly spectacular increase of video surveillance in Chinatown? You guessed it: September 11th. In the aftermath of the attacks, the NYPD created a permanently temporary “secure zone” all the way around its headquarters at One Police Plaza. No doubt heeding warnings from its new counter-terrorism chief, the police have sealed the southern gateway to Chinatown, which can now only be reached from its already-congested northern and western sides. The NYPD also stopped bus and garbage-removal service on Park Row, and, as far north as Kimlau Square, have filled it with reinforced-concrete barriers, military-style checkpoints, and - you guessed it again - surveillance cameras. Never before, not even in the darkest days of the anti-Communist paranoia of the 1950s or the anti-opium hysteria of the early 1900s, has Chinatown been confronted with such a open display of insensitivity, suspicion and armed force.

File-sharers repressed
It's been a bad few months for the peer-to-peer community. Scared for their profits, the music and software industries are stepping up their intimidation of file sharers. Isamu Kaneko, a professor at the University of Tokyo and author of Winny, the Japanese P2P software with encrypted networking capability, has been officially arrested on copyright-related charges. The charge carries up to three years in prison or a fine of up to 3 million yen (£15,000). Meanwhile in the US, the Recording Industry Association has began proceedings against another 493 defendants. In Korea, a private law firm has announced suits against 20 P2P users, mostly for downloading movies. And a 23-year-old man has become the first music sharer to be successfully convicted in Germany for copyright infringement. The snitch who revelad his identity was none other than company running Kazaa, on which the man uploaded his files. He has now been fined €8000 plus legal costs. This is one of sixty-eight similar cases brought before the German court by local music industry representatives. In addition to these, 24 cases are pending in Denmark and 30 more in Italy. Some 17 Danes have already coughed to their actions and have paid “compensation” to the music industry.
But as lawsuits mount, more and more people are switching to private means of file-sharing, which are much more difficult to track down. There are now many private FTP sites where users must get accounts from the system operator, where the file-sharing bonanza continues, in the meantime, beyond the greedy hands of the law.