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MPA Escalates Pirate Site Blocking in Philippines, Targeting Sflix and Myflixer

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) continues to play a key role in expanding global site blocking efforts. After helping to establish a voluntary site blocking agreement in the Philippines, the MPA also filed the first complaints under the new rule. Torrent site YTS was the first target, followed by popular pirate streaming sites SFlix and MyFlixer this week.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.




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Piracy Shield Crisis Erupts as AGCOM Board Member Slams Huge Toll on Resources

Critics of Italy's Piracy Shield are not difficult to find but, with its powerful and influential proponents rarely far away, getting heard is a considerable challenge. Not to mention getting anything done. After calling for the platform's suspension and meeting resistance in the wake of the recent Google Drive blocking blunder, AGCOM board member Elisa Giomi has gone public with a laundry list of concerns. It pulls zero punches.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.




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DAZN’s Piracy Shield ‘Smart TV’ Block Revoked After IPTV Portal Complaint

After DAZN received a warning for the blunder that saw Google Drive blocked in Italy, a company behind a smart TV video player app had a DAZN-initiated blocking decision revoked after a successful appeal. That may seem like a win, but the finer details reveal a legal framework that favors rightsholders so strongly, online services incurring liability for the actions of users seems inevitable.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.




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Piracy Kingpin Behind ‘Noonoo TV’ and ‘TVWiki’ Arrested in Korea

Korean authorities have shut down the popular video piracy service TVWIKI, which had millions of users. A special unit of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism arrested the alleged operator, who is also believed to be connected to other streaming platforms. These include OKTOON, which was also pulled offline, and piracy giant NoonooTV, which voluntarily threw in the towel last year.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.




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Aitchison College resignation: A wake-up call for educational integrity

Should institutions be indebted to political agendas, or be upholders of academic freedom and intellectual inquiry?



  • The Way I See It

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Pakistan's food waste crisis: An enemy from within our kitchens

In a country where millions go to bed hungry every night, 40% of the total food produced is being wasted annually.



  • The Way I See It

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Inclusive education is still a dream for many children

We need to address the systemic barrier that children with disabilities face in accessing inclusive, quality education



  • The Way I See It


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Florida high school footballer dies after collapsing during game

Chance Gainer's death marks the 12th football player to have died this year




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Pakistan's Affan Salman wins World Youth Scrabble Championship

Salman triumphed at the World Youth Scrabble Championship with a record of 20–4 and a spread of +1793




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Chinese teenager takes 7th gold of Paris Paralympics

Jiang Yuyan breaks the Paralympic world record in the women's 100m backstroke




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Paralympics wrap up with vibrant celebration in Paris, marking a 'historic summer'

More than 4,400 athletes from 168 Paralympic delegations partied despite persistent rain




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Pakistan dominates China 5-1 to reach Asian Hockey Champions Trophy semi-final

Green Shirts set to face traditional rivals, India, in final pool match on Saturday




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Pakistan hammer China to secure semifinal spot

The Green Shirts handed 5-1 defeat in the Asian Champions Trophy




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Prince Andrew's desperate bid to keep Royal lodge for THIS reason

Prince Andrew's desperate bid to keep Royal lodge for THIS reason

Prince Andrew is fighting to keep his home, Royal Lodge, despite King Charles wanting him to move out after cutting off his financial assistance.

According to Royal experts, the “disgraced” Duke of York is...




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Leonardo DiCaprio treats himself with Mexican getaway on 50th birthday

Leonardo DiCaprio treats himself with Mexican getaway on 50th birthday

Leonardo DiCaprio and his girlfriend, Vittoria Ceretti, recently jetted off to Mexico to celebrate his milestone 50th birthday.

The Oscar-winning actor was spotted boarding a private jet in Los Angeles with...




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Kate Middleton to dazzle with ‘bold yet sophisticated style' at Christmas Carol Service

Kate Middleton is expected to showcase a "bold yet sophisticated style" at her upcoming "Together at Christmas" Carol Service, according to a fashion expert.

Speaking with GB News, fashion guru James Harris predicted that the Princess of Wales’ outfit will potentially featuring...




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Sean "Diddy" Combs' shocking motive behind dating Jennifer Lopez unveiled

Sean "Diddy" Combs' shocking motive behind dating Jennifer Lopez unveiled

Diddy’s motive behind dating Jennifer Lopez in the past has just been unveiled.

In a throwback interview with Essence in 2007, the music mogul, who is currently being held at a detention centre in...




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Prince William marks the start of something new with Kate Middleton

Prince William marks the start of something new with Kate Middleton

Prince William’s shift into a new era of his life has just been brought to light.

A conversation surrounding this happened on The Sun’s Royal Exclusive, with reporter Bronte Coy and broadcaster Sarah...




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Prince Harry sparks frenzy because of his ‘terrorizing' plans for Christmas

Prince Harry sparks frenzy because of his ‘terrorizing' plans for Christmas

Prince Harry’s terrifying effect on Christmas in 2024, for the Windsors has just become a point of conversation.

So much so that one expert has even stepped forward to offer his thoughts on the...




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Meghan Markle planning silent sacrifice for Prince Harry's cold war this Christmas

Meghan Markle planning silent sacrifice for Prince Harry's cold war this Christmas

Insights into what Meghan Markle has planned for the Uk this Christmas have just been brought to light.

Information about this plan has been brought to light by an inside source that is close to...




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'We honour his sacrifice': Dr Usama's fight against COVID-19

It is a national tragedy and we will award him the status of national hero, says G-B CM




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Karachi's marine life and coastline under threat from waste and sewage pollution

Karachi’s coastline is deteriorating due to plastic and sewage waste, putting marine life at serious risk.




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Senate panel moves to criminalise necrophilia

Bill, making necrophilia punishable by life imprisonment, highlights the disturbing occurrences in Pakistan




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US imposes sanctions on Chinese institute, firms for supporting Pakistan's ballistic missile program

Washington had sanctioned China-based companies in October 2023 for supplying missile-applicable items to Pakistan




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PPP wins NA-171 by-election in Rahim Yar Khan by a landslide

PPP candidate secures 116,429 votes; PTI candidate receives 58,251 votes




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Hinduism being masqueraded as secularism in India, says AJK president

Masood says 13,000 Kashmiri boys have been abducted and kept in prison houses where they're being subjected to torture




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K-P wants revival of tourism hit hard by Covid

CM Mahmood Khan orders early opening of provincial tourism authority




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First phase of HingIaj road construction completed

Project was approved at a cost of Rs120 million




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Balochistan collects Rs2.5b from mineral sector

Computerised weighing scales have been installed




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‘Pakistan’s progress linked to Balochistan peace’

NA speaker chairs parliamentary committee meeting to discuss issues facing province




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NGO offers transgender people foreign scholarships

Programme will allow selected persons to attend month-long training in host country




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Youngster killed while shooting TikTok video in Karachi

Faraz lost control of car due to speeding, rammed into tree




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MQM-London ‘hitman’ apprehended

Police claim he was involved in over 100 murders




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CJP Isa slams bureaucrats' job quota for children, calls for merit-based hiring

Supreme Court reviews a case concerning government jobs allocated through a statutory regulatory order (SRO)




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Malaysian PM Anwar Ibrahim likely to visit Pakistan next month

This would be the first visit by a Malaysian prime minister to Pakistan in five years




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Analog Equivalent Rights (4/21): Our children have lost the Privacy of Location

Privacy: In the analog world of our parents, as an ordinary citizen and not under surveillance because of being a suspect of a crime, it was taken for granted that you could walk around a city without authorities tracking you at the footstep level. Our children don’t have this right anymore in their digital world.

Not even the dystopias of the 1950s — Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Colossus, and so on, managed to dream up the horrors of this element: the fact that every citizen is now carrying a governmental tracking device. They’re not just carrying one, they even bought it themselves. Not even Brave New World could have imagined this horror.

It started out innocently, of course. It always does. With the new “portable phones” — which, at this point, meant something like “not chained to the floor” — authorities discovered that people would still call the Emergency Services number (112, 911, et cetera) from their mobile phones, but not always be capable of giving their location themselves, something that the phone network was now capable of doing. So authorities mandated that the phone networks be technically capable of always giving a subscriber’s location, just in case they would call Emergency Services. In the United States, this was known as the E911 regulation (“Enhanced 9-1-1”).

This was in 2005. Things went bad very quickly from there. Imagine that just 12 years ago, we still had the right to roam around freely without authorities being capable of tracking our every footstep – this was no more than just over a decade ago!

Before this point, governments supplied you with services so that you would be able to know your location, as had been the tradition since the naval lighthouse, but not so that they would be able to know your location. There’s a crucial difference here. And as always, the first breach was one of providing citizen services — in this case, emergency medical services — that only the most prescient dystopians would oppose.

What’s happened since?

Entire cities are using wi-fi passive tracking to track people at the individual, realtime, and sub-footstep level in the entire city center.

Train stations and airports, which used to be safe havens of anonymity in the analog world of our parents, have signs saying they employ realtime passive wi-fi and bluetooth tracking of everybody even coming close, and are connecting their tracking to personal identifying data. Correction: they have signs about it in the best case but do it regardless.

People’s location are tracked in at least three different… not ways, but categories of ways:

Active: You carry a sensor of your location (GPS sensor, Glonass receiver, cell tower triangulator, or even visual identifier through the camera). You use the sensors to find your location, at one point in time or continuously. The government takes itself the right to read the contents of your active sensors.

Passive: You take no action, but are still transmitting your location to the government continuously through a third party. In this category, we find cell tower triangulation as well as passive wi-fi and bluetooth tracking that require no action on behalf of a user’s phone other than being on.

Hybrid: The government finds your location in occasional pings through active dragnets and ongoing technical fishing expeditions. This would not only include cellphone-related techniques, but also face recognition connected to urban CCTV networks.

Privacy of location is one of the Seven Privacies, and we can calmly say that without active countermeasures, it’s been completely lost in the transition from analog to digital. Our parents had privacy of location, especially in busy places like airports and train stations. Our children don’t have privacy of location, not in general, and particularly not in places like airports and train stations that were the safest havens of our analog parents.

How do we reinstate Privacy of Location today? It was taken for granted just 12 years ago.




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Analog Equivalent Rights (6/21): Everything you do, say, or think today will be used against you in the future

Privacy: “Everything you say or do can and will be used against you, at any point in the far future when the context and agreeableness of what you said or did has changed dramatically.” With the analog surveillance of our parents, everything was caught in the context of its time. The digital surveillance of our children saves everything for later use against them.

It’s a reality for our digital children so horrible, that not even Nineteen Eighty-Four managed to think of it. In the analog surveillance world, where people are put under surveillance only after they’ve been identified as suspects of a crime, everything we said and did was transient. If Winston’s telescreen missed him doing something bad, then it had missed the moment and Winston was safe.

The analog surveillance was transient for two reasons: one, it was assumed that all surveillance was people watching other people, and two, that nobody would have the capacity of instantly finding keywords in the past twenty years of somebody’s conversations. In the analog world of our parents, that would mean somebody would need to actually listen to twenty years’ worth of tape recordings, which would in turn take sixty years (as we only work 8 out of 24 hours). In the digital world of our children, surveillance agencies type a few words to get automatic transcripts of the saved-forever surveillance-of-everybody up on screen in realtime as they type the keywords – not just from one person’s conversation, but from everybody’s. (This isn’t even exaggerating; this was reality in or about 2010 with the GCHQ-NSA XKEYSCORE program.)

In the world of our analog parents, surveillance was only a thing at the specific time it was active, which was when you were under individual and concrete suspicion of a specific, already-committed, and serious crime.

In the world of our digital children, surveillance can be retroactively activated for any reason or no reason, with the net effect that everybody is under surveillance for everything they have ever done or said.

We should tell people as it has become instead; “anything you say or do can be used against you, for any reason or no reason, at any point in the future”.

The current generation has utterly failed to preserve the presumption of innocence, as it applies to surveillance, in the shift from our analog parents to our digital children.

This subtle addition – that everything is recorded for later use against you – amplifies the horrors of the previous aspects of surveillance by orders of magnitude.

Consider somebody asking you where you were on the evening of March 13, 1992. You would, at best, have a vague idea of what you did that year. (“Let’s see… I remember my military service started on March 3 of that year… and the first week was a tough boot camp in freezing winter forest… so I was probably… back at barracks after the first week, having the first military theory class of something? Or maybe that date was a Saturday or Sunday, in which case I’d be on weekend leave?” That’s about the maximum precision your memory can produce for twenty-five years past.)

However, when confronted with hard data on what you did, the people confronting you will have an utter and complete upper hand, because you simply can’t refute it. “You were in this room and said these words, according to our data transcript. These other people were also in the same room. We have to assume what you said was communicated with the intention for them to hear. What do you have to say for yourself?”

It doesn’t have to be 25 years ago. A few months back would be sufficient for most memories to be not very detailed anymore.

To illustrate further: consider that the NSA is known to store copies even of all encrypted correspondence today, on the assumption that even if it’s not breakable today, it will probably be so in the future. Consider what you’re communicating encrypted today — in text, voice, or video — can be used against you in twenty years. You probably don’t even know half of it, because the window of acceptable behavior will have shifted in ways we cannot predict, as it always does. In the 1950s, it was completely socially acceptable to drop disparaging remarks about some minorities in society, which would socially ostracize you today. Other minorities are still okay to disparage, but might not be in the future.

When you’re listening to somebody talking from fifty years ago, they were talking in the context of their time, maybe even with the best of intentions by today’s standards. Yet, we could judge them harshly for their words interpreted by today’s context — today’s completely different context.

Our digital children will face exactly this scenario, because everything they do and say can and will be used against them, at any point in the future. It should not be this way. They should have every right to enjoy Analog Equivalent Privacy Rights.




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Analog Equivalent Rights (8/21): Using Third-Party Services Should Not Void Expectation of Privacy

Privacy: Ross Ulbricht handed in his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court last week, highlighting an important Analog Equivalent Privacy Right in the process: Just because you’re using equipment that makes a third party aware of your circumstances, does that really nullify any expectation of privacy?

In most constitutions, there’s a protection of privacy of some kind. In the European Charter of Human Rights, this is specified as having the right to private and family life, home, and correspondence. In the U.S. Constitution, it’s framed slightly differently, but with the same outcome: it’s a ban for the government to invade privacy without good cause (“unreasonable search and seizure”).

U.S. Courts have long held, that if you have voluntarily given up some part of your digitally-stored privacy to a third party, then you can no longer expect to have privacy in that area. When looking at analog equivalence for privacy rights, this doctrine is atrocious, and in order to understand just how atrocious, we need to go back to the dawn of the manual telephone switchboards.

At the beginning of the telephone age, switchboards were fully manual. When you requested a telephone call, a manual switchboard operator would manually connect the wire from your telephone to the wire of the receiver’s telephone, and crank a mechanism that would make that telephone ring. The operators could hear every call if they wanted and knew who had been talking to whom and when.

Did you give up your privacy to a third party when using this manual telephone service? Yes, arguably, you did. Under the digital doctrine applied now, phonecalls would have no privacy at all, under any circumstance. But as we know, phonecalls are private. In fact, the phonecall operators were oathsworn to never utter the smallest part of what they learned on the job about people’s private dealings — so seriously was privacy considered, even by the companies running the switchboards.

Interestingly enough, this “third-party surrender of privacy” doctrine seems to have appeared the moment the last switchboard operator left their job for today’s automated phone-circuit switches. This was as late as 1983, just at the dawn of digital consumer-level technology such as the Commodore 64.

This false equivalence alone should be sufficient to scuttle the doctrine of “voluntarily” surrendering privacy to a third party in the digital world, and therefore giving up expectation of privacy: the equivalence in the analog world was the direct opposite.

But there’s more to the analog equivalent of third-party-service privacy. Somewhere in this concept is the notion that you’re voluntarily choosing to give up your privacy, as an active informed act — in particular, an act that stands out of the ordinary, since the Constitutions of the world are very clear that the ordinary default case is that you have an expectation of privacy.

In other words, since people’s everyday lives are covered by expectations of privacy, there must be something outside of the ordinary that a government can claim gives it the right to take away somebody’s privacy. And this “outside the ordinary” has been that the people in question were carrying a cellphone, and so “voluntarily” gave up their right to privacy, as the cellphone gives away their location to the network operator by contacting cellphone towers.

But carrying a cellphone is expected behavior today. It is completely within the boundaries of “ordinary”. In terms of expectations, this doesn’t differ much from wearing jeans or a jacket. This leads us to the question; in the thought experiment that yesterday’s jeans manufacturers had been able to pinpoint your location, had it been reasonable for the government to argue that you give up any expectation of privacy when you’re wearing jeans?

No. No, of course it hadn’t.

It’s not like you’re carrying a wilderness tracking device for the express purpose of rescue services to find you during a dangerous hike. In such a circumstance, it could be argued that you’re voluntarily carrying a locator device. But not when carrying something that everybody is expected to carry — indeed, something that everybody must carry in order to even function in today’s society.

When the only alternative to having your Constitutionally-guaranteed privacy is exile from modern society, a government should have a really thin case. Especially when the analog equivalent — analog phone switchboards — was never fair game in any case.

People deserve Analog Equivalent Privacy Rights.

Until a government recognizes this and voluntarily surrenders a power it has taken itself, which isn’t something people should hold their breath over, privacy remains your own responsibility.




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Analog Equivalent Rights (12/21): Our parents bought things untracked, their footsteps in store weren’t recorded

Privacy: In the last article, we focused on how people are tracked today when using credit cards instead of cash. But few pay attention to the fact that we’re tracked when using cash today, too.

Few people pay attention to the little sign on the revolving door on Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It says that wi-fi and bluetooth tracking of every single individual is taking place in the airport.

What sets Schiphol Airport apart isn’t that they track individual people’s movements to the sub-footstep level in a commercial area. (It’s for commercial purposes, not security purposes.) No, what sets Schiphol apart is that they bother to tell people about it. (The Netherlands tend to take privacy seriously, as does Germany, and for the same reason.)

Locator beacons are practically a standard in bigger commercial areas now. They ping your phone using wi-fi and bluetooth, and using signal strength triangulation, a grid of locator beacons is able to show how every single individual is moving in realtime at the sub-footstep level. This is used to “optimize marketing” — in other words, find ways to trick people’s brains to spend resources they otherwise wouldn’t have. Our own loss of privacy is being turned against us, as it always is.

Where do people stop for a while, what catches their attention, what doesn’t catch their attention, what’s a roadblock for more sales?

These are legitimate questions. However, taking away people’s privacy in order to answer those questions is not a legitimate method to answer them.

This kind of mass individual tracking has even been deployed at city levels, which happened in complete silence until the Privacy Oversight Board of a remote government sounded the alarms. The city of Västerås got the green light to continue tracking once some formal criteria were met.

Yes, this kind of people tracking is documented to have been already rolled out citywide in at least one small city in a remote part of the world (Västerås, Sweden). With the government’s Privacy Oversight Board having shrugged and said “fine, whatever”, don’t expect this to stay in the small town of Västerås. Correction, wrong tense: don’t expect it to have stayed in just Västerås, where it was greenlit three years ago.

Our analog parents had the ability to walk around untracked in the city and street of their choice, without it being used or held against them. It’s not unreasonable that our digital children should have the same ability.

There’s one other way to buy things with cash which avoids this kind of tracking, and that’s paying cash-on-delivery when ordering something online or over the phone to your door — in which case your purchase is also logged and recorded, just in another type of system.

This isn’t only used against the ordinary citizen for marketing purposes, of course. It’s used against the ordinary citizen for every conceivable purpose. But we’ll be returning to that in a later article in the series.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.




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Analog Equivalent Rights (13/21): Our digital children are tracked not just in everything they buy, but in what they DON’T buy

Privacy: We’ve seen how our digital children’s privacy is violated in everything they buy with cash or credit, in a way our analog parents would have balked at. But even worse: our digital children’s privacy is also violated by tracking what they don’t buy — either actively decline or just plain walk away from.

Amazon just opened its first “Amazon Go” store, where you just pick things into a bag and leave, without ever going through a checkout process. As part of the introduction of this concept, Amazon points out that you can pick something off the shelves, at which point it’ll register in your purchase — and change your mind and put it back, at which point you’ll be registered and logged as having not purchased the item.

Sure, you’re not paying for something you changed your mind about, which is the point of the video presentation. But it’s not just about the deduction from your total amount to pay: Amazon also knows you considered buying it and eventually didn’t, and will be using that data.

Our digital children are tracked this way on a daily basis, if not an hourly basis. Our analog parents never were.

When we’re shopping for anything online, there are even simple plugins for the most common merchant solutions with the business terms “funnel analysis” — where in the so-called “purchase funnel” our digital children choose to leave the process of purchasing something — or “cart abandonment analysis”.

We can’t even simply walk away from something anymore without it being recorded, logged, and cataloged for later use against us.

But so-called “cart abandonment” is only one part of the bigger issue of tracking what we’re interested in in the age of our digital children, but didn’t buy. There is no shortage of people today who would swear they were just discussing a very specific type of product with their phone present (say, “black leather skirts”) and all of a sudden, advertising for that very specific type of product would pop up all over Facebook and/or Amazon ads. Is this really due to some company listening for keywords through the phone? Maybe, maybe not. All we know since Snowden is that if it’s technically possible to invade privacy, it is already happening.

(We have to assume here these people still need to learn how to install a simple adblocker. But still.)

At the worst ad-dense places, like (but not limited to) airports, there are eyeball trackers to find out which ads you look at. They don’t yet change to match your interests, as per Minority Report, but that’s already present on your phone and on your desktop, and so wouldn’t be foreign to see in public soon, either.

In the world of our analog parents, we weren’t registered and tracked when we bought something.

In the world of our digital children, we’re registered and tracked even when we don’t buy something.




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Analog Equivalent Rights (15/21): Our digital children’s conversations are muted on a per-topic basis

Privacy: At worst, our analog parents could be prevented from meeting each other. Our digital children are prevented from talking about particular subjects, once the conversation is already happening. This is a horrifying development.

When our digital children are posting a link to The Pirate Bay somewhere on Facebook, a small window sometimes pops up saying “you have posted a link with potentially harmful content. Please refrain from posting such links.”

Yes, even in private conversations. Especially in private conversations.

This may seem like a small thing, but it is downright egregious. Our digital children are not prevented from having a conversation, per se, but are monitored for bad topics that the regime doesn’t like being discussed, and are prevented from discussing those topics. This is far worse than preventing certain people from just meeting.

The analog equivalent would be if our parents were holding an analog phone conversation, and a menacing third voice popped into the conversation with a slow voice speaking just softly enough to be perceived as threatening: “You have mentioned a prohibited subject. Please refrain from discussing prohibited subjects in the future.”

Our parents would have been horrified if this happened — and rightly so!

But in the digital world of our children, the same phenomenon is instead cheered on by the same people who would abhor it if it happened in their world, to themselves.

In this case, of course, it is any and all links to The Pirate Bay that are considered forbidden topics, under the assumption — assumption! — that they lead to manufacturing of copies that would be found in breach of the copyright monopoly in a court of law.

When I first saw the Facebook window above telling me to not discuss forbidden subjects, I was trying to distribute political material I had created myself, and used The Pirate Bay to distribute. It happens to be a very efficient way to distribute large files, which is exactly why it is being used by a lot of people for that purpose (gee, who would have thought?), including people like myself who wanted to distribute large collections of political material.

There are private communications channels, but far too few use them, and the politicians at large (yes, this includes our analog parents) are still cheering on this development, because “terrorism” and other bogeymen.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.




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Analog Equivalent Rights (16/21): Retroactive surveillance of all our children

Privacy: In the analog world of our parents, it was absolutely unthinkable that the government would demand to know every footstep you took, every phonecall you made, and every message you wrote, just as a routine matter. For our digital children, government officials keep insisting on this as though it were perfectly reasonable, because terrorism, and also, our digital children may be listening to music together or watching TV together, which is illegal in the way they like to do it, because of mail-order legislation from Hollywood. To make things even worse, the surveillance is retroactive — it is logged, recorded, and kept until somebody wants all of it.

About ten years ago, a colleague of mine moved from Europe to China. He noted that among many differences, the postal service was much more tightly controlled — as in, every letter sent was written by hand onto a line in a log book, kept by the postmaster at each post office. Letter from, to whom, and the date.

At the time, three things struck me: one, how natural this was to the Chinese population, not really knowing anything else; two, how horrified and denouncing our analog parents would have been at this concept; three, and despite that, that this is exactly what our lawmaker analog parents are doing to all our digital children right now.

Or trying to do, anyway; the courts are fighting back hard.

Yes, I’m talking about Telecommunications Data Retention.

There is a saying, which mirrors the Chinese feeling of normality about this quite well: “The bullshit this generation puts up with as a temporary nuisance from deranged politicians will seem perfectly ordinary to the next generation.”

Every piece of surveillance so far in this series is amplified by several orders of magnitude by the notion that it you’re not only being watched, but that everything you do is recorded for later use against you.

This is a concept so bad, not even Nineteen-Eighty Four got it: If Winston’s telescreen missed him doing something that the regime didn’t want him to do, Winston would have been safe, because there was no recording happening; only surveillance in the moment.

If Winston Smith had had today’s surveillance regime, with recording and data retention, the regime could and would have gone back and re-examined every earlier piece of action for what they might have missed.

This horror is reality now, and it applies to every piece in this series. Our digital children aren’t just without privacy in the moment, they’re retroactively without privacy in the past, too.

(Well, this horror is a reality that comes and goes, as legislators and courts are in a tug of war. In the European Union, Data Retention was mandated in 2005 by the European Parliament, was un-mandated in 2014 by the European Court of Justice, and prohibited in 2016 by the same Court. Other jurisdictions are playing out similar games; a UK court just dealt a blow to the Data Retention there, for example.)

Privacy remains your own responsibility.




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2. Shipping costs (Germany)

2.1. For shipping within Germany we charge a flat rate per order 5.95 EUR shipping costs .

2.2. In the case of pickup, the seller informs the buyer first by email that the goods ordered by him are ready for pickup. After receiving this email, the buyer can pick up the goods after consultation with the seller. In this case no shipping costs will be charged.

2.3. From a gross order value of 99.00 EUR we ship freight-free .

2.4. When paying by cash on delivery a COD surcharge of EUR 3 applies.

3. Shipping costs (Zone 1 - Europe EU)

3.1. For shipping in Zone 1 - Europe EU we charge a flat rate per order 10.95 EUR shipping costs .

3.2. Countries : Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark (except Faroe Islands, Greenland), Estonia, Finland (except Åland Islands), France (except Overseas Territories and Departments), Greece (except Mount Athos), Ireland, Italy (except Livigno and Campione d'Italia), Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands (except non-European areas), Austria, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain (except Canary Islands , Ceuta + Melilla), Czech Republic, Hungary, Cyprus / Republic (except northern part)

3.3. From a gross order value of 199,00 EUR we ship carriage paid .

4. Shipping costs (Zone 2 - Europe without EU)

4.1. For shipping in Zone 2 - Europe without EU we charge a flat rate per order 20.95 EUR shipping costs .

4.2. Countries : Aland Islands (Finland), Andorra, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Mount Athos (GR), Bosnia-Herzegovina, Campione d'Italia (IT), Ceuta (E), Faroe Islands (DK), Georgia, Gibraltar (GB),United Kingdom (except Channel Islands), Greenland (DK), Guernsey (GB), Island, Jersey (GB), Canary Islands (E), Kazakhstan, Kosovo (Serbian Province), Croatia, Liechtenstein, Livigno (IT), Macedonia, Melilla (E), Moldova (Republic), Montenegro (Republic )), Norway, Russian Federation, San Marino, Switzerland, Serbia (Republic), Turkey, Ukraine, Vatican City, Belarus, Cyprus / Republic (northern part)

4.3. From a gross order value of 499.00 EUR we ship carriage paid .

4.4. Please note that in the case of cross-border deliveries, additional taxes (e.g. in the case of an intra-community acquisition) and / or duties, e.g. in the form of customs duties which must paid by yourself.

5. Shipping costs (Zone 3 - World)

5.1. For shipping in Zone 3 - World we charge a flat rate per order 30.95 EUR shipping costs .

5.2. Countries : Egypt, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Yemen, Jordan, Canada, Qatar, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria Tunisia, USA, United Arab Emirates

5.3. From a gross order value of 899.00 EUR we ship carriage paid .

5.4. Please note that in the case of cross-border deliveries, additional taxes (e.g. in the case of an intra-community acquisition) and / or duties, e.g. in the form of customs duties which must paid by yourself.

6. Shipping costs (Zone 4 - World)

6.1. For shipping in Zone 4 - World we charge a flat rate per order 40.95 EUR shipping costs .

6.2. Countries : All countries and areas that are not assigned to zones 1, 2 or 3.

6.3. From a gross order value of 899.00 EUR we ship carriage paid .

6.4. Please note that in the case of cross-border deliveries, additional taxes (e.g. in the case of an intra-community acquisition) and / or duties, e.g. in the form of customs duties which must paid by yourself.

7. Delivery time

The packed orders are picked up daily at 2.30 p.m. (Monday - Friday) by DHL / Deutsche Post. Thus, depending on the amount of shipping volume, all orders that we received by 2 p.m. and where the availability of all products in the shopping cart are "in stock (ready for dispatch)" on the same day handed over to our shipping service provider DHL / Deutsche Post. If products have the status "available (ready for dispatch in approx. 2-5 working days), we will order them from our suppliers and send them to you after we have received them. If you choose to pay in advance, we will wait until the payment has been received has been received in our bank account.

In general: ➜ delivery time = ready for dispatch + parcel delivery time

Ready for dispatch in ...

This is the time it takes to hand over the packaged goods to our shipping service provider.
This period of time can vary depending on the product or product option. This is always displayed in the detailed overview of each product:



Delivery time is always depending on three factors:

  • product availability
  • chosen payment option
  • destination country


As a general rule:

delivery time = ready for dispatch + package run time


On this a tiny sample calculation:

With "on stock (ready for dispatch)" and with an average package run time of 1-2 working days (DHL inside Germany), a total package run time of 1-3 working days is resulting. (For delivery inside EU the total package run time increases by 1-3 weekdays, for delivery outside EU and Continental Europe by 3-8 working days).

Ready for dispatch in...

It´s about the time needed to deliver the prepared package to our shipping provider.

Depending on the product the term can be different. This is always shown in the detailed view of the product:




Following terms are possible:

  • in stock (ready for dispatch)
  • available (ready for dispatch ca. 2-5 work days)
  • availability notification after order received
  • curr. not available (delivery time upon request)


Please consider, that with an time designation of 2-5 working days the product has to be ordered at the distributer/producer. Delivery takes place after arrival in our stock.

You´ll find an overview of all payment options here: payment methods




hi

kunstform?! BMX Shop at Highway to Hill in Berlin



We have send all our staff from 15 May 2015 - 17 May 2015 to the Highway to Hill BMX festival in Berlin Mellowpark. They will recharge energy and motivation that's why kunstform?! BMX Shop will be close on Friday, 15.05. and Saturday, 16.05. At Monday we will be back with new power.

Thank you for your understanding and we would be happy to see one of you there.

You can get more information about the event here: Highway to Hill Mellowpark / Berlin




hi

BMX Jam at HipHopOpen in Stuttgart





kunstform BMX Team at HipHopOpen BMX Jam in Stuttgart


On 18th of july we did have the chance to organise a relaxed BMX Street and Flatland Jam at the hiphop open musical festival in Stuttgart! Our friend OKOO MEDIA / Gideon Merz (http://www.okoomedia.com) made a little video about our teamrider like Miguel Franzem, Miguel Smajlji, Kevin Nikluski, Robin Kachfi, John Krämer and also he catched some moments of the event! It was such a good session!

Thx to all the riders which created a very postiv and special vibe during the Jam!

Cheers Daniel!





hi

BMX Männle Turnier 2017 - BMX Highlights





BMX Männle Turnier 2017 - BMX Highlights


From the 12th to the 13th of August 2017, the 9th BMX Männle Turnier took place at the Skatepark in Tuttlingen, Germany. As every year, many spectators and BMX riders appeared to the "Männle Turnier", where there wasn't only a BMX contest for boys and girls, there was also a "best trick", and a "jump the carton" contest. How it all looked, look here! Have fun with the video, your kunstform BMX shop!

rankings:

BMX Amateur
1. Moritz Kuhn
2. Mika Köhler
3. Justin Dennell

BMX Girls
1. Lotta Grüber
2. Stephanie Rohr
3. Elisa Dünger

BMX advanced
1. Zeno Lehmann
2. Nils Jacob
3. Tim Rude

BMX Pro
1. Mätti Hilber
2. Janis Oriovich
3. Chris Halbritter

BMX Best Trick
Nils Jacob

Jump the carton
Michael Dunger 2,10 Meters

Video: Robin Kachfi

Musik: Ryan Little - ballet

Subscribe our youtube channel: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/kunstformbmxshop




hi

Brügglesjam 2017 Highlight Video



Brügglesjam '17 from DaCrew. on Vimeo.



Brügglesjam 2017 Highlight Video


The Brügglesjam 2017 in Schweinfurt was pure fun! Check the highlight video now! Enjoy the the video, Your kunstform BMX Shop.

Rankings:
1. Daniel Peter
2. Kalle Frank
3. Johannes Spahn
4. Johannes Winkelmann
4. Alex Schmitt


Video: DaCrew



Subscribe our youtube channel: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/kunstformbmxshop




hi

Highway to Hill 2018 - BMX Festival



From the 12-13 of May 2018, the Highway to Hill BMX Festival will take place at the Mellowpark in Berlin again. Ride BMX and enjoy the good times!

Check the highlight video from last year!



All the best, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!

What:
Highway to Hill 2018 - BMX Festival

When:
12-13 May 2018

Where:
Mellowpark Berlin
An der Wuhlheide 250-256
12459 Berlin


More infos on Facebook.