 A Danish art group that specializes in targeting world leaders has succeeded in offending its latest victim — right on his home territory. They managed to smuggle an advert insulting the Iranian president into a Tehran newspaper.
Less than a year after Danish cartoonists ignited protests across the Muslim world with their depictions of Muhammad, another group from that country has risked offending Iran’s president by calling him a “swine” in a hidden message included an advertisement that got past censors and editors at the Tehran Times.
Surrend, a Danish art group that targets world leaders, successfully submitted an advertisement to the newspaper that, at first glance, expressed support for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The half-page ad, submitted under the name of “Danes for World Peace,” features a picture of Ahmadinejad and a series of statements sympathetic to his regime: “Support his fight against Bush,” “Iran has the right to produce nuclear energy,” and “Evil U.S. military stay home.” Surrend’s members told the editors they wanted to express their solidarity with Iran and make amends for the publication of cartoons of Muhammad published in their own country, reported the German daily, Der Spiegel.
- But what the advertising editors at Tehran Times missed was that the first letter of each phrase formed an acrostic that, top to bottom, spelled “S-W-I-N-E.” On it’s website, Surrend describes itself as a “street-art group” that was started in the winter of 2006 “during the funeral of Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic.”
Since August 2006, three new freesheets, 24 Timer, Nyhedsavisen and Dato, have been launched in Denmark. That brings the total number of free papers up to 5, for a country of only 5 million inhabitants. Christina Ove Holm, journalism analyst and writer for Nyhedsbrevet Danske Presse, spoke to the Editors Weblog in an interview about the ongoing ‘freesheet war’, considering the effects it had on the traditional newspaper industry, the benefits and inconveniences for the population, as well as the future for free papers. Read this story at editorsweblog
A documentary shown by Turkey’s state broadcaster, TRT, earlier this week depicts Sweden as a barbarian land responsible for the genocide of Sami and Roma peoples. Sweden’s acts of ethnic cleansing are said to have continued until the 1980s. Kerstin Brunnberg from Sveriges Radio was interviewed in connection with the film. In the documentary her voice is dubbed into Turkish and she confirms Sweden’s systematic destruction of the Sami peoples. Brunnberg has described the interview as ‘absurd’. The film has come in for severe criticism from various quarters in Turkey. The Swedish embassy in Ankara and the Turkish foreign ministry have both criticised the content of the film, according to Sveriges Radio. TRT had planned to show the film a total of eight times but has now removed it from its schedule until further notice. (The Local,December 15, 2006)
The blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007, according to technology predictions by analysts Gartner. The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100m. The firm has said that 200m people have already stopped writing their blogs. Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so. He said those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on. Last month blog tracking firm Technorati reported that 100,000 new blogs were being created every day, and 1.3m blog posts were written. Technorati is tracking more than 57m blogs, of which it believes around 55 per cent are ‘active’ and updated at least every three months. (BBC News, December 15, 2006)
 As the end of a full year of Mozart celebrations nears, the musical scores of his complete works have been made available for free on the web. The bound volumes of the composer’s works, which consist of over 24,000 pages, have been posted on the internet by the International Mozart Foundation located in Salzburg, Austria. The books are a digitised version of the prestigious ‘New Mozart Edition’ (’Neue Mozart Ausgabe,’ or NMA) which is considered the gold standard of Mozart editions. The edition serves as an aid to authentic performances, as well as providing music researchers with an accurate text based on available sources, such as Mozart’s autographed manuscripts. NMA-online will further aid research, as well as enabling non-experts to access the composer’s scores in a user-friendly manner. Visitors to the website (http://dme.mozarteum.at) can search for specific symphonies, concertos or even single lines of text, writes Deutsche Welle. The site has some traffic problems the moment, but check back later.
Recently I picked up classical guitar again and I have enjoyed two sites in special for that hobby of mine. First of all Classtab that hosts tons of quality tabs, videos and midis. Most tabs are in different versions which is great for newbies advancing technically with a piece. Secondly I use the cool metronome at MetrononeOnline. I needed a metronome and went shopping by Google for it, and there is was free on the web. The site also gives you a clean “A” for tuning your instrument.
Having amassed a daily audience of a billion people, Reuters is now aiming to build its readership among computers. The UK.-based news and financial information service on Monday launched two new products to automate financial trading based on news content. The first is Reuters NewsScope Real-time, which clients can use to drive automated trading based on news stories. The service meta tags story content to identify the industry sectors, companies, and other data that might be useful to financial traders. The second is Reuters NewsScope Archive, which lets the company’s clients analyse news stories in conjunction with market performance to test and refine strategies to profit from headline-driven market moves. (Information Week,December 13, 2006)
BBC reporters in Russia working in fear
The Times reports that the Russians are suspected of involvement in the disruption of the BBC’s Russian Service FM broadcasts in Moscow and St Petersburg, at the height of coverage of the poisoning in London of former Russian security agent Alexander Litvinenko. The FM transmitter that carries the 4-hour daily broadcast in St Petersburg was off the air from 13 November to 1 December. During this period the poison story broke, Litvinenko died and, in a final statement, accused Putin of his murder. In Moscow the FM broadcasts went off air on 24 November, the day after Litvinenko’s death, and have not resumed since. Sarah Gibson, the head of the BBC Russian Service, told The Times that this was the first time that the FM transmissions had been stopped. She said that the Russians had blamed ‘technical difficulties’ for the suspension. The service is still broadcast on shortwave and mediumwave, but the FM transmission is the most accessible in the Russian capital, where most of the one million Russian Service listeners live. A member of the Russian Service said that the 40 Russian journalists working for the BBC in Moscow were fearful for their safety if the Litvinenko story continued to dominate the headlines. (The Times via Media Network Weblog,December 11, 2006)
A new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists has found that the rise in Internet journalism has fuelled an increase in the number of journalists imprisoned around the world. According to the group’s new census, 134 journalists are now in prison worldwide, and one in three jailed journalists is now a blogger, online editor or web-based reporter. The annual study found that China, Cuba, Eritrea, and Ethiopia are currently the top four jailers among the 24 nations who imprison journalists. The most common charges against journalists are allegations of ‘antistate’ crimes such as subversion, divulging state secrets, and acting against the interests of the state. The largest professional category in the study continues to be print journalists, with 67 cases of imprisonment this year, but the second largest category is now that of online journalists, with 49 cases. The number of web-based journalists imprisoned has increased every year since the study recorded the first case in 1997. US video blogger Joshua Wolf is among those counted in the survey. (Editor and Publisher,December 08, 2006)
The UK’s newspaper circulation body is changing the way it measures internet traffic, making it easier to make comparisons between print sales and website usage figures. ABC Electronic, a division of the media industry-owned body that audits website usage based on companies’ own internal traffic logs, is to replace page impressions with unique users as its principle online measure. Page impressions is a measure of the volume of traffic on a website, while unique users provides a clearer guide to reach. ABCe is making the switch to its measurement methodology following a ruling by the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards. ABCe, the online arm of the Audit Bureau Circulation, measures website traffic for a range of media companies including, in the newspaper sector, the likes of the Guardian, Daily Mail, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Times and Sun. A number of other measurement companies, including ComScore and Nielsen NetRatings, also offer measurement figures by unique users. However, ABCe is the only body to certify statistics using the server logs of websites. (Media Guardian,December 07, 2006)
In the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who was allegedly kidnapped and tortured by CIA agents, German media is reporting that prosecutors listened in on conversations between el-Masri’s lawyer and journalists. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily, prosecuting attorneys targeted talks between Khaled el-Masri’s lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic, and reporters from the German weekly magazine Stern as well as the German public broadcaster ZDF. Prosecutors were apparently seeking more information about el-Masri’s alleged kidnappers and in January this year, requested the Munich District Court to have Gnjidic’s phone lines tapped, Stern magazine reported. Prosecutors have justified their actions by saying el-Masri’s kidnappers could have tried to contact him in order to threaten him or offer him a deal. The Munich-based lawyer Thilo Pfordte, who is representing Gnjidic at the Constitutional Court, said he saw it as more likely that prosecutors were interested in knowing what Gnjidic told journalists than tracking down the kidnapping culprits. (Deutsche Welle,December 07, 2006)
 Newspaper Index recently moved to a faster and better 64bit server in order to handle our growing traffic. To make sure that our users get pages in time even when we are slashdotted we looked around for some caching software in adition to the hardware improvements.
Hilli, who handles the server, suggested the cool new application Varnish HTTP accelerator and it is actually serving these pages you are browsing right now. It is extremely fast, the server is doing nada and the only bottleneck right now is the 100 MB backbone - or so it seems. There are competitors out there, but Varnish beeing an BSD license open source application, is outperforming them all. Varnish is ten to twenty times faster than the Squid Web Proxy Cache and even the commercial accelerators are far behind.
The funny thing about Varnish is that the development is sponsored by the Norwegian newspaper VG. They had as the largest online newspapers in Norway (I think the largest in Scandinavia) constant problems with heavy traffic loads. In 2005 they initiated the development of an application written from scratch that could accelerate/cache their web content. The wellknown BSD-programmer Poul-Henning Kamp got involved together with the Norwegian Linpro and in a few months they build Varnish. Now it is running on VG’s servers. VG had 12 servers but now they can handle all the traffic on one server, thanks to Varnish - and they still have not had enough trafic to test the limits! VG.no has Alexa Rank 1584 today.
But why does a newspapers support the development of free open source software? Anders Berg from VG Multimedia said earlier this year to linmag.no:
“We are enjoying open source sofware and we see this (supporting Varnish) as a great way to give a little back to the community.”
He estimates that Varnish will save VG about 150.000 USD a year in reduced hardware expenses - Nearly the same as the price for building Varnish. Using the commercial alternative Akamai would have costed VG many times that sum.
Poul-Henning is not sure if he can tell who, but he says that at least two of the danish top-ten websites are now using Varnish and the application is beeing picked up right now all over the world.
Thanks to the innovative team VG, Poul-Henning and Linpro!
Reporters Without Borders voiced deep concern today about a fatwa (religious decree) issued by an Iranian ayatollah calling for two journalists in neighbouring Azerbaijan to be killed for an allegedly blasphemous article. The fatwa?s targets are Rafiq Nazar Oughlo Taghizadh of the Azerbaijani fortnightly Sanat (’Industry’) and his editor Samir Sadaght Oughlo. The offending article was written by Taghizadh, 56, for the newspaper?s 6 November issue. Entitled ‘Europe and us,’ its claim that European values were superior to those of Muslim countries sparked outrage in both Azerbaijan (a Muslim country) and Iran. Fazel Lankarani, one of the Islamic Republic of Iran?s leading ayatollah?s, issued the fatwa in response to appeals for advice from Azerbaijani Muslims. Posted on his website (www.lankarani.org) on 25 November, it calls for both the ‘apostate’ journalist who wrote the article and the editor who published it to be killed. (Reporters without Borders,December 04, 2006)
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