Diaroogle - Search for bathrooms in New York City

The mobile-ready NYC toilet search engine with the unfortunate name. No really. And you can add your own favorite water closets as you go.

Political protests get Americans arrested in China

BoingBoing broke the bad news this morning:

Beijing: Five US activists detained after lighting up "Free Tibet" LED Throwies banner near Olympics site and
[Graffiti Research Lab's] James Powderly detained in Beijing for planning pro-Tibet "L.A.S.E.R. Stencil" art protest

Internationally known artist, technologist and co-founder of the Graffiti Research Lab, James Powderly, was detained in Beijing early this morning while preparing to debut a new work and technology of protest, the L.A.S.E.R. Stencil. According to a ?twitter? message received today by Students for a Free Tibet at approximately 5 pm Beijing Standard Time, Powderly had been detained by Chinese authorities at 3 am. His current whereabouts remain unknown.

[...]

Students for a Free Tibet has staged six protests in Beijing over the last two weeks, placing the issue of Tibet?s occupation front and centre as China hosts the Olympic Games. The protests have included a dramatic banner hang near the Bird?s Nest Stadium; a display of Tibetan flags near the Bird?s Nest just before the opening ceremony began; a symbolic die-in at Tiananmen Square; a protest by a Tibetan woman with flags outside Tiananmen Square; a blockade of the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park; and ?Free Tibet? banner hang outside the CCTV headquarters. Thirty-seven members and supporters have been detained and deported, not including those detained today.

James and the other protesters who have been arrested deserve our support and respect. Let's hope they all get to come home soon as some other protesters have.

Wikipedia vs Gilligan's Island: A sea change in human activity

... television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way ... that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is ....

We live in a disruptive time. As humans turn away from TV and begin to participate in making media, community, tools and meaning, we have a surplus of brainpower and time to apply to making a better world together. Viva la difference!

Ron English: Take America back, Obama

Writers in Republic of Georgia protest Russian invasion

The scene in Georgia is very young still, and these Tbilisi writers are only 50 miles or so away from the Russian occupied area.

Rough videos

Rough at Tate Modern - UK history


Stormie and Rough brighten up Perth Australia

FotoFlexer

Edit photos online and save them to your favorite locations. If you don't have your own photo editor this is for you.

The Mac has a blog

And new prints!

Satanic Plumber Archive

400+ news articles from over two decades on underground New York City subjects..... City Hall Station, graffiti writers busted, Hickey + Ski interview, the Ket saga, the High Line story, WTC diagrams, subway blacksmith, TATs profile, Freedom Tunnel, Caine RIP....... it's all there and more.

via SaneSmith

Street Art and Aesthetics: The Renaissance of Cute

Nick Mount has just published a great article in Walrus, a Canadian magazine. It discusses the relationship between fine art, lowbrow, graffiti, street art, merchandise and collectibles, among other things. Nick does a good job explaining what's going on by taking the long view.

TATS Cru sues over mural removal in NYC

Another shameful moment for Rev. Al Sharpton.

Only unpopular speech needs free-speech protections. This legally done mural on private property was censored by people who didn't agree with it. And that's just not the way we do things in the USA.

The "Stop Snitchin'" mural, painted on the side of an East Harlem bodega with the permission of the building's owner in 2006, featured a rat with a noose around its neck and the phrase that police say has left many of the city's crimes unsolved.

In July, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the Rev. Al Sharpton and others painted over the mural and invited the media to watch, charging that the mural hampers the justice system and promotes violence.

The Hunts Point-based Tats Cru, which has turned its street graffiti into a worldwide commercial enterprise, says the city's action has violated its right to free speech.

Stacey Richman, the group's lawyer, says city officials violated federal defamation and slander laws by painting over the mural.
"If you or I or anyone else did this, we would be arrested for criminal mischief," Richman said. "It was not about endorsing a negative connotation. It was about getting discussion going."

The mural destruction mob claimed the owner said they could erase it. TATS representatives say the owner was threatened with fines if he did not agree. Perhaps they will get another demonstration of the Streisand Effect for their trouble.

Jobs on farms, various countries

Working farm jobs can be an interesting way to travel or to survive in the more rural areas, and it's good clean work (and good muddy work). Organic farms sometimes trade work for a place to stay too. It's harvest season, so there's plenty to do right now.

Good, cheap, software classes online

Here's a good place to get some training on lots of software and online topics. For $25 you can have a month of access to the entire 30,000+ library of online tutorials, or you can buy them one at a time on CD, and so on. For less money than one college course costs, you can have a full year of access to their courses. Become the Flash expert you want to be, learn 3d software, get some solid HTML training, and get yourself a better, more fun job. Education costs a little but pays back a lot more.

Houston writer who was wrongfully arrested wins lawsuit!

"Article" was arrested for allegedly resisting arrest (WTF?) while painting during a legal workshop he was giving at an arts festival, in 2006. He stood up for his rights and finally won the case against the city of Houston, Texas. He and his lawyer will get nearly $20,000 in the settlement.

Sex Education online by Planned Parenthood

Good info by a trustworthy organization. Too bad that so many idiots will try to prevent you from seeing it. Sex education helps tremendously in preventing pregnancy and diseases. Fight for your right and your teen's right to know the truth. Support Planned Parenthood. Science over fear.

FontStruct

Create, share, hide, modify, and download TrueType fonts -- using this Web-based lettering tool.

Mfone sentenced to 2.5 years in prison

Pittsburgh's so-called graffiti king was sentenced today to 2.5 years in prison and ordered to pay restitution and perform community service after pleading guilty to causing nearly $300,000 in property damage.

Daniel J. Montano, 22, of Highland Park pleaded guilty May 16 to 79 counts of criminal mischief for an 18-month graffiti vandalism spree that plagued Lawrenceville, East Liberty, Bloomfield, Shadyside and Oakland.

Montano also was sentenced to five years' probation, and ordered to perform 2,500 hours of community service in the city and pay $232,584 in restitution. Montano is best known by the tags "MFONE" and "MF."

City police have described Montano as the country's most prolific graffiti artist. They said he has caused nearly $750,000 in property damage from Pittsburgh to San Francisco, where his mother lives.

The claim that he's the city's or the country's most prolific graffiti writer is probably sensationalism designed to create a tougher sentence for him in court, but no doubt Mfone is up, and now he's up the river as well. This is a cruel and unusual sentence for a nonviolent property offender, so let's hope that he gets out on parole quickly or has an effective appeal down the road.

This is the latest in a series of big time jail sentences for writers in the US since GK set the pace. It would be a mistake to think at this point that a first offender would get off with a warning, so be careful out there, and pay for the lawyer if you get popped. The UK and Czech Republic also have a track record of putting writers away for years at a time. The Czech penalty is 5 years.

How posting online can get you busted UPDATE

UPDATE: Burning Black says that with a little work you can change your computer's MAC address as needed.

---

Recently, writers have been arrested for:

* showing throwups and tags on MySpace
* showing videos of their illegal actions on YouTube
* posting bombing photos to forums
* other people posting their trains on forums

The way this generally works is that everything you do online technically requires that the IP (internet protocol) address of your computer be recorded by the web servers at the sites you visit. Sometimes the IP address simply points at your ISP (internet service provider, for example: AOL, Comcast, BT etc.), but those companies can figure out who was doing what at a particular time, and web servers also record the time. So together, quite often, the webserver info and the ISP info lead straight to your bedroom. So if you have a local cop or reporter who hates you, s/he may do the work to track you down over the net.

Sites that care about your privacy, like Art Crimes, do not keep logs of user activity. Unfortunately most sites want to keep that information so they can count visitors and sell more advertising or simply have some way to ban some people temporarily from a forum. Some sites keep webserver logs forever and others dump them after some amount of time.

Google tracks everyone's search terms, for example, but now they say they will throw the IP addresses away after 18 months. But they have been forced to give massive amounts of YouTube logs to Viacom in a copyright dispute and this week won the right to anonymize them first. If those logs had been stored in an anonymized state they would not have posed the risk to millions of people that they did.

Posting copyrighted materials is illegal (expensively) and yet digging through everyone's records in order to find out who uploaded what is the wrong way to address it. Terrorism is terrible, but spying on everyone's phone calls in order to find the dirty dozen is not an acceptable solution either. Unfortunately the US Congress thinks this is fine and passed a law about that this month (FISA).)

My point here is that we all are being tracked by governments and media giants routinely, and that your favorite little forums can give you up by accident or through being forced to give up those logs they save. Your own equipment can leak information that's dangerous to you.

To get a bit more anonymity online, you need to use public computers or free wifi that you don't have to sign up for, but if you use your own computer or phone, it can still leave its own unique ID number behind (MAC address). Even your camera or camera phone can give up important info such as the exact location (GPS) and time and date you took the photo, camera type, etc., if you don't erase that info (EXIF) before you upload.

The best policy is not to incriminate yourself by posting your own illegal acts online, because technically, you may not be able to delete them, ever. Even then it's possible that someone else's posting of your illegal stuff will get you in trouble, so it's best to try to control what you've got out there and how it represents you, by restricting access to or usage of your photos. Same advice goes for those drunken orgy photos, of course.

Slick, Extended Conversation

in URB: Culture, by Michael Vazquez

Estria interview

There's a great interview with Estria (San Francisco) in Nichi Bei Times.

See his paintings at estria.net and screenprinting at SamuraiGraphix.

New Orleans' Insane Anti-Graffiti Law

Interesting article in general, with lots of pictures ... Near the end it reveals this:

"In the recently ended session of the Legislature, state Rep. Anthony Ligi of Metairie successfully sponsored a bill that skyrockets the penalties for graffiti. Currently the maximum fine in New Orleans is $500, plus community service, restitution and a possible six months in jail. Beginning Aug. 15, the maximum fine increases to $10,000 with a prison term of up to 10 years. Ligi, a lawyer and real estate title insurance agent, said he believes that Louisiana judges will be able to apply looser local penalties or the more stringent state penalties as they see fit.

"If it's a kid who's written his girlfriend's name on a wall, a judge will see it one way," Ligi said. "If it's somebody who's marked up an office wall and done thousands (of dollars) in damage, it gives the judge more options."

So not only do they have a stupid law, but they plan to enforce it selectively depending on who does it and what's written? That sounds like poor, minority kids going to jail, as usual in the South. I hope some heroic lawyer and judge step up to strike this for the cruel and unusual - and potentially racist - punishment that it is. New Orleans needs community service and community art, not more young people in jail for nonviolent property crimes.

When will the government in Louisiana get a clue and join the civilized world? This is the same state that recently decided to teach wishful thinking instead of science.

the restless debt of third world beauty

Faith47 from South Africa

She's in Berlin this August with the show of the same name.

It opens August 8 7pm at ATM gallery

New Web development course - Free

The best thing about this is that it's put out by Opera so it's committed to the standards. If your site is built on standards, it just works for everyone. It's been a long time since some good courseware appeared, and this is new, so check it out.

Graffiti Practice Book - Free PDF

Download and print a free coloring book with dumpsters, trucks, and other familiar but boring surfaces to decorate.
- From Fakeproject Corporation.

Catalog from the Street Art show at Tate Modern

For sale, the book.