As you may have noticed various sites and domains that I manage went black - or rather redirected to http://protestsopa.org/ or to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It probably does not wag the tail of anyone, but I felt that is incumbant upon me to express my support for freedom of speech and that I am prepared to defend it.

The Stop Online Piracy Act is H.R.3261, and the Protect-IP Act is S.968 both are propsed laws in the US of A.

The intent of both pieces of legislation is to combat online piracy. The problem is that the legislation, as written, is vague and overly-broad. The intention may be good and justified, but the implementation would be nothing short of legal censorship and discrimination.

It'd grant the executive the power to simply shut down information sources. In fact, if the law passes, it would not even require a court order to ban a service! A simple note would suffices to censor information, unless the provider of the content can prove and assure (monitor) that his/her site does not facilitate the commission of criminal violations.

There are times that everyday reasonable activities can be construed as piracy, but the actual problematic word is facilitating, as it opens the door to condemning sites that simply link to other sites.

Since the USA directly or indirectly controls most of the internet's infrastructure, and the proposed legislation has been written in a manner in which they specifically take into account “foreign rogue sites”, the legislation will, should it pass, have an impact upon the world as a whole.

These acts could have a significant impact on the way in which we currently use the internet: Free Speech is only as strong as the weakest link.

Thanks to many activist sites (see links above and below) this is easy. If you are US resident, complain at your senator(s). If you are elsewhere, there are local efforts: e.g. join contacting the German minister of foreign-affairs who is supporting the law in the US!

Note that, Europe with the upcoming ACTA law is not too far behind. Act now!

For more information about SOPA/PIPA, please see:

• Wikipedia's background information
• EFF's graphical overview
• Google's stance

Celebrating the inclusion of sndfile-waveform into libsndfile-tools sounds like this:

After some creative interlude we eventually completed Carolina's trip from Ushuaia all the way down south to NordKapp, spending two weeks in Finland's Lappland on the way. - gorgeous and relaxing.

Besides an unbelievable ammount of unripe berries we did encounter too many mosquitoes (not bugs and luckily no sand-flies), yet found free-wifi in the most unexpected spots under the midnight sun.

Starting off with the night train from Helsinki to the midnight-sun film-festival in Sodankylä..

View slide-show

Dave Phillips has written a nice article featuring my recent work on the Ardour3 video-timeline for the Linux Journal.

It is titled An Ecology Of Ardour.

Snapshots of the emotion-forecast as presented during FIAC at the Showoff festival in Paris.

View Image Gallery (images by M. Benayoun)

View Image Gallery

..skiing pneumonia… Picture Gallery

You got to talk to someone some day
'coz when the words are gone is too late.

I need a statement from thee,
Right now.
An explanation for thee,
Right now.
Clarification of thee,
Right now.
Some good communication,
Somehow.

Why? why? why?
Do ordinary people specialize?

[from Keziah Jones': beautiful emily]

I spent last week at V2_ in Rotterdam setting up WorldSkin - an Interactive A/V Installation by renowned artist Maurice Benayoun - for presentation during the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2010.

A visit to World Skin is a poignant experience. Armed with a camera, visitors are placed in a sinister war zone that is visualized on a large projection screen in 3D animation and video. By operating photo cameras visitors may take pictures of the war scenes and experience how the camera becomes a 'weapon' that enables them to wipe out the projected images. Only the outline of the taken picture is left as a silhouette in the projection. Visitors can take a print of the photos they shot with them.

World Skin was first presented 1997 and win the Golden Nica Award at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz 1998.

The Implementation:

The original version ran on a SGI Onyx System. This years installation is a re-design using openGL, openAL and openCV but featuring the original 1997 Graphics by Raphaël Melki and 4.1 Surround-Sound from Jean-Baptiste Barrièr.

The navigation:

Only the driver using a “wand” (aka Bluetooth Gamepad) can decide about the group trip. In this way, he has the role of a “bus driver”. Everyone can ask about the path alterations.

The photographers:

The participants are active. They have to decide about the group's movements. Otherwise they cannot take pictures of what they are seeing. Several SLR cameras hanging from the ceiling allow them to take photos. Instead of opening its shutter to capture the image, the camera sends coordinates to the computer at the time of release.

The taken shots:

With the camera - a old-fashioned SLR spiked with a 3D tracking system - the visitor can frame the virtual show at leisure. He chooses angles, frames and release time.

The triangulation is implemented with Wii-accelerometers for tilt and rotation (Pitch & Roll) mounted in the Camera, while a web-cam located above the front-screen combined with openCV software is used for detecting the position and horizontal angle (Yaw) of the cameras. Thus, the machine can compute the frame corresponding to the viewer, in relation to the scene and time of the shot.

The World Skin:

For each shot, the corresponding surface (divided into silhouette fragments) is removed from the virtual databases. It looks like a white projection made the set pixels disappear, covered by the camera field. The white fragments constitute a rectangle (the frame), only from the exact point of view of the shot. In other words, the perspective takes over again and we can discover the white surface fragments vanishing into the set depth.

The photography:

After the session, the visitor exits the CAVE and finds a printer and a screen presenting the website, where the last shots are sent in real time. He can leave the place with a printed copy of the shots.

(If Flash is installed JavaScript is activated, you can watch a video inside this web page.)