general

Financial blogger Barry Ritholtz says this well:

Many of the web's most important and integral websites are protesting seriously flawed legislation called SOPA.* It would greatly damage the linking structure of the internet, allowing companies to close down websites on flimsiest of premises. It would criminalize even pointing to any site that itself points to a site where there is a Copyright violation.**

Over the years, the copyright cartel — this includes Disney and other major content companies — have bought themselves a Congress. They prevented works that were scheduled to enter the public domain, as envisioned in the US Constitution, from doing so.

SOPA is the latest attempt to censor the public’s access to independent information and manipulate copyright laws. The new law works to their own benefit and the public’s detriment.

*There is another bill called PIPA in the Senate that internet experts say is equally bad.
**Alleged copyright violation. Copyright is a grey area so all you have to do is claim infringement to mess with an innocent party.

Missed some of the questions on the twitter feed for last night's streaming video talk at Art Micro-Patronage. Sorry I didn't get to talk more about Glass Popcorn but it was great to hear from his fan base. One non-Glass query was:

U draw very similar blob like shapes on CCDS can u talk about these shapes

H.P. Lovecraft (who in real life was disgusted by sea food) wrote often about jellyfish creatures from dimensions with "wrong geometries" breaking through into our world. As it turned out, it wasn't fiction. I find these monsters are less scary at night and in old cemeteries than when erected in public plazas in daylight by government officials.

Sorry if you asked a question during my streaming talk tonight on the Art Micropatronage website and I ignored you. I only saw a handful of questions that came in. The AMP folks believe it's because "twitter doesn't show tweets when the hashtag is the same as the username" so if you had @AMPatronage and #AMPatronage in the same tweet nothing showed up in the #AMPatronage search results I was refreshing. Bummer.

Below are questions and comments that came in, many of which I didn't see. I will answer, uh, some of them in an upcoming post.

what about 4D?

Tom do you see yourself in glass popcorn? do you have a little glass in you?

tom talk about dump.fm

U draw very similar blob like shapes on CCDS can u talk about these shapes

would u be happie or sad if glasspopcorn made a song called "Im Tom Moody"

"immediate medium" my new band name

*how well can pixel art be translated into 'real life' art objects? what changes when its removed from its original medium?

Can u talk about dump as a place where art blossoms amongst filth

**Do you play games?

**Do u think ur work really has that much in common with 8 bit sprites?

you gat Skype?

Talk about glasspopcorn please Im lonely

wut about web video

Wanna video chat?

Is pixel art the new minimalism?

How Do U feel about "Glass Popcorn" this question is optional.

Who is the best dumper?

Hi Tom moody what is ur favorite hip hop song u heard in 2011?

*Can you expand on your 1st reason a little bit? What do you mean access the medium on its most basic?

*Can you talk about the altar format of your piece and how you view the altar format in general ?

MSPaint 4evar

*Answered (or at least addressed) during the talk.
**Discussed without seeing the question.

Update: A few shouts were omitted from the above list--I saw them, thanks for the kind words.

Back in '09 we complained about Comcast's service "Domain Helper," which redirects requests for non-existent URLs to a Yahoo search page. The company has now ceased using Domain Helper because it's incompatible with the DNSSEC internet page-naming security specifications, which it just implemented. Their statement:

When we launched the Domain Helper service, we also set in motion its eventual shutdown due to our plans to launch DNSSEC. Domain Helper has been turned off since DNS response modification tactics, including DNS redirect services, are technically incompatible with DNSSEC and/or create conditions that can be indistinguishable from malicious modifications of DNS traffic (including DNS cache poisoning attacks). Since we want to ensure our customers have the most secure Internet experience, and that if they detect any DNSSEC breakage or error messages that they know to be concerned (rather than not knowing if the breakage/error was "official" and caused by our redirect service or "unofficial" and caused by an attacker), our priority has been placed on DNSSEC deployment -- now automatically protecting our customers...

Translation: (i) "We'll treat you like idiots until it's no longer in our interests to do so" and (ii) "I meant to do that."
TechDirt reads this as an unintended admission that the anti-piracy schemes of the SOPA and PIPA bills won't work:

Comcast (an official SOPA/PIPA supporter) has rolled out DNSSEC, urged others to roll out DNSSEC and turned off its own DNS redirect system, stating clearly that DNS redirect is incompatible with DNSSEC, if you want to keep people secure. In the end, this certainly appears to suggest that Comcast is admitting that it cannot comply with SOPA/PIPA, even as the very same company is advocating for those laws.

(Because SOPA/PIPA envision a system for redirecting traffic away from allegedly offending websites).