I’ve posted an interview I did with one of the Swedish hackers in Malmö a few weeks ago. I was surprised at how demanding transcription is—trying to type quickly enough to keep up with the recording, while still inserting the correct punctuation to make it readable. The word count balloons quickly, too. The formal interview part of my talk with Olle was only about 20 minutes, but it wound up being close to 2,000 words.
One cool thing about Sweden is that it has relatively strong legal protections for freedom of speech and online privacy, especially by European standards. As a result, it’s something of a hotspot for peer-to-peer file sharing and copyright infringement. The other day, I slept in the same basement as one of the Pirate Bay admins. I felt a little bit like I was in the presence of internet royalty.
The pirates in Sweden have even created an organized political party to lobby for changes to copyright law in Sweden. Recently, the youth wing of this party, Ung Pirat (Young Pirates) received around $159,000 from the government bureau tasked with giving money to youth organizations to encourage young people’s participation in politics. Ung Pirat is apparently the third largest youth political organization in Sweden, and the money is distributed according to membership.
Yesterday I went to see this art exhibition, Electrohype, here in Malmö. Billed as “the fifth biennial for computer based and technological art,” only a few of the exhibits really fit what I would consider “computer based” but most of them were pretty interesting regardless.
Ralf Baecker, Calculating Space, 2007
Due to the arrival of visiting relatives, I had to move out of the place I’ve been staying for the last week or so. I was planning on staying at the local hostel, but neglected to make a reservation. I sort of figured, “Who the heck goes to Malmö in January?” and assumed getting a bed would be no problem. Whoops. No room at the inn tonight. I made a reservation for tomorrow, but was left stranded for this evening. Faced with a choice between ~90 euro for a fancy-ish hotel room, or ~10 euro to hang out in an all-night internet cafe, I made my selection. It’s actually one of those gaming cafe places, and it’s surprisingly busy at 5 am. I am vastly under-utilizing a serious gaming PC for light web surfing and lighter dozing.
However, Europe has absolutely nothing on Japan when it comes to all-night internet places for people with no place to sleep, where they even have a name for such people, the 90s-sounding “cyber-homeless”:
I received the following throughly entertaining spam email yesterday:
Ref. Number: NM/BC921245/KY17
STAATS LOTERIJ HEADQUARTERS
Lotto Winner of 1,000,000.00 Euros
Ticket number: 46939
ELECTRONIC MAIL AWARD WINNING NOTIFICATIONCONGRATULATIONS!!!
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Mrs.Bonita Larron
For STAATS LOTTERY, NETHERLANDS.