“This Is Not A Film” by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who is under house arrest in his country for alleged “propaganda against the regime,” will be screened under the Free Jafar Panahi Program of the 13th Cinemanila. The film was smuggled from Iran in a Flash-Drive hidden inside a cake to Cannes for screening a few months back.

Manila Bulletin



This is a microSD card. Currently on sale in the UK for under £14.

It can hold 32GB of information. That’s a little abstract, so let me break it down in to more understandable units.

32GB is, roughly,

30,000 minutes of music.

That’s 21 days worth of listening. Or, if you prefer, 700 CDs.

40 standard definition movies.

20 high definition movies.

35,000 novels.

Those books would take up over a kilometre of shelving.

What I’m trying to get at, is this. It’s quicker to send a 32GB card through the post than it is to download its entire contents. The cards are small enough to hide anywhere.

This is what happens is countries like Cuba.

Only about 2% of Cubans can get online, but it doesn’t matter. You don’t need the internet. The news may be a little stale by the time you read it, but it gets around. Whole stacks of HTML files from news websites are dumped onto USB drives.

James Scudamore in Intelligent Life

I don’t know what will happen to the Internet. SOPA, DEA, and HADOPI all conspire to break the way we share knowledge – under the benign guise of copyright protection.

And yet all it takes is a dozen USB sticks, a few memory cards, and very little effort to break their embargo.

Ever since Gutenberg started the information revolution, vested interests have tried to burn books. We’re just going to have to create more and more books until their efforts are overwhelmed.

Further discussion on HackerNews.

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