Measure The Time You're Wasting In Your Worth Per Hour

Having a brief flick through my Lifehacker feed, I came across this brilliant article introducing "Sloth Worth". 

Image licensed under CC0 License

It is an extension, for both Chrome and Firefox, that measures the amount of time you are wasting based on how much you earn (or value yourself) per hour. It needs to be enabled for specific sites, but once enabled it shows your total for all measured sites in the top left corner of that site (right now, my total is at £27.41 since this afternoon at £8 per hour, although I also turned it on for Duolingo and Lingvist to experiment how much value I'm using on "positive" endeavors).

Even though the extension is pretty simplistic, it's an eye-opener to how much time you actually spend doing unimportant things or procrastinating. Not to say that relaxing in your preferred way is useless. On the contrary; it's vital for your mental health. However, it's certainly a brilliant way to spur you onto more productive work or learning, if that is something you keep putting off.

The extension has its limits; I'd prefer breakdown of how much value is spent on each site, along with maybe catagories such as "education" or "entertainment", and a breakdown of the time of the day usually spent doing either. It'd also be cool to have a separate "positive" value indicator for time spent on more positive sites, to encourage you to engage with those sites more.

However, as I said, it is an eye-opener.

You can install the extension from their site at  https://qotoqot.com/sloth-worth/

Professors Hunted Down For Pro File-Sharing Opinion

Torrentfreak reports that Roger Wallis (a multimedia professor brought in to explain the positive aspects of file-sharing during trials against the Pirate Bay founders) had numerous attacks on his credibility during the trial after making the statement that piracy can actually boost sales in certain circumstances.

It isn't new for large corporations to use lawyers to attempt to discredit professors for disagreeing with their views (just look at anyone trying to portray anything negative about pharmaceutical companies), but it does represent an act of desperation on the part of the music/film industry that they have to resort to such personal attacks.

Full Article at Torrentfreak: "Pro File-Sharing Professors ‘Hunted Down’ by the Copyright Lobby"

Legally Download "TPB AFK": A Documentary on the Pirate Bay Trials (from The Pirate Bay; licensed for free distribution)

Abandon Ship! German Pirate Party Shipwreck In Elections?

In the last couple of weeks the German Pirate Party has failed to secure a seat in the state Parliament elections in Lower Saxony, with momentum fading since the rise of pirate parties across the world following attempted shutdowns and arrests over Bittorrent site The Pirate Bay.

This follows an apparent tirade of negative press and bad publicity over arguments within the party, as well as claims of being unable to shift the opinion that The Pirates are a single issue party concerned with copyright.

However, the profile of the German Party has in general risen since first coming onto the scene a year and a half ago. They are concerned a seperate political entity rather than a fringe party, and the recent result should increase state funding for the party.

Full Article at The Pirate Times: Lower Saxony Pirates Fail to Gain Seats in State Parliament

Fighting the Copyright Cowboys and their Copyright Crusade (aka RIAA)

I'm going to start right off with something that could be quite unexpected: copyright is something we need, and continue to need for the foreseeable future. "Are you serious?" You may be thinking. Why, yes I am; without licenses such as the General Public License, it is unlikely projects like Android, Firefox, OpenOffice/Libreoffice would thrive quite in the way they have done. Copyright law has given these projects the right to determine how others can use their program and source code, whether or not others can profit from it, the right to have code attributed back to the original project and the right to grant anyone the ability to look at the original source code and learn from it. Without copyright law, we really would be in a Wild West of ideas stolen and profited from by Copyright Cowboys; or rather, corporations with lots of money that could (and would) take any of this free software and sell it as their own, with no repatriation or acknowledgement to those that wrote it.

I also assert my right to have my writing here attributed to myself, and the right that only I may profit from it. It isn't so much about my going on a copyright crusade in order to protect my work, and it certainly isn't about me advocating a limiting of our internet freedoms just so you can buy a single, DRM protected right to read this article on only the devices I decide. It is simply me saying I put a decent 30 minutes in writing this, so don't fob it off as your own. Other than that, you are free to do as you please; my work is licensed under a Creative Commons license, so within those bounds you can be my guest.

But anyway. What absolutely angers me are these shadowy figures, in the UK and beyond, that (despite between £millions to £billions profits) claim piracy is "destroying jobs, income and livelihoods", and that because of this media companies and the police should have unprecedented powers to collect and snoop on ANYONE's data. While they are at it, they may as well be given the right to install cameras in our homes just to be doubly sure exactly WHO in a household is taking part in this crime which is certainly not victimless!

The attacks on our freedom of privacy, expression, and civil liberties is bad enough. But what offends me as well is this claim that it is all done in order to enforce the rights of content creators. Is that so? Does that mean, as an independent content creator, I have access to the same amount of police support/snooping in order to "protect" my intellectual property? I didn't think so. All these laws amount to are a protection racket perpetrated by the wealthy and vested interests of popular media. They are the mobs with easy access to guns and muscle. The reality is it is nothing to do with enforcing copyright laws; just enforcing it for those that can afford.

Fighting the Copyright Cowboys and their Copyright Crusade (aka RIAA)

I'm going to start right off with something that could be quite unexpected: copyright is something we need, and continue to need for the foreseeable future. "Are you serious?" You may be thinking. Why, yes I am; without licenses such as the General Public License, it is unlikely projects like Android, Firefox, OpenOffice/Libreoffice would thrive quite in the way they have done. Copyright law has given these projects the right to determine how others can use their program and source code, whether or not others can profit from it, the right to have code attributed back to the original project and the right to grant anyone the ability to look at the original source code and learn from it. Without copyright law, we really would be in a Wild West of ideas stolen and profited from by Copyright Cowboys; or rather, corporations with lots of money that could (and would) take any of this free software and sell it as their own, with no repatriation or acknowledgement to those that wrote it.

I also assert my right to have my writing here attributed to myself, and the right that only I may profit from it. It isn't so much about my going on a copyright crusade in order to protect my work, and it certainly isn't about me advocating a limiting of our internet freedoms just so you can buy a single, DRM protected right to read this article on only the devices I decide. It is simply me saying I put a decent 30 minutes in writing this, so don't fob it off as your own. Other than that, you are free to do as you please; my work is licensed under a Creative Commons license, so within those bounds you can be my guest.

But anyway. What absolutely angers me are these shadowy figures, in the UK and beyond, that (despite between £millions to £billions profits) claim piracy is "destroying jobs, income and livelihoods", and that because of this media companies and the police should have unprecedented powers to collect and snoop on ANYONE's data. While they are at it, they may as well be given the right to install cameras in our homes just to be doubly sure exactly WHO in a household is taking part in this crime which is certainly not victimless!

The attacks on our freedom of privacy, expression, and civil liberties is bad enough. But what offends me as well is this claim that it is all done in order to enforce the rights of content creators. Is that so? Does that mean, as an independent content creator, I have access to the same amount of police support/snooping in order to "protect" my intellectual property? I didn't think so. All these laws amount to are a protection racket perpetrated by the wealthy and vested interests of popular media. They are the mobs with easy access to guns and muscle. The reality is it is nothing to do with enforcing copyright laws; just enforcing it for those that can afford.