lix blog

by artist Marc Johns

DuckDuckGo is a beautiful, fast and secure search engine, which actually cares about the users privacy and does not track you.
As too few people yet know about that amazing search engine I thought about a way how to promote it.
Here’s my solution for sysadmins and webmasters:

Include the following rewrite rule into your .htaccess on the Apache Server.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

SetEnvIf Referer "google.([_a-zA-Z-]+/)" promote_duck
SetEnvIf Referer "yahoo.com" promote_duck
SetEnvIf Referer "baidu.com" promote_duck
SetEnvIf Referer "bing.com" promote_duck

Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=promote_duck
ErrorDocument 403 http://duckduckgo.com/?q=$1&kz=-1

This will cause that every referrer request by Google, Yahoo, Baidu and Bing will be redirected to DuckDuckGo, showing the according search results.

=^.^= Lx

P.S. Here’s the forum discussion regarding this issue.

Rabaka_2009_Africana Critical Theory – Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, from W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral

Rabaka, R. (2009). Africana Critical Theory – Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, from W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. New York.

Download: [ogv],[mp4]
Source

A Social Simulation Experiment on the UK Riots

Abstract:
Following the 2011 wave of political unrest, going from the Arab Spring to UK riots, the formation of a large consensus around Internet censorship is underway. Beyond all political consideration of consequences in terms of freedom of expression, the present paper adopts a social simulation approach to show that the decision to “regulate” or restrict social media in situations of civil unrest results in higher levels of violence. Building on Epstein’s (2002) agent based model, several alternative scenarios are generated. Systemic optimum, represented by complete absence of censorship, not only corresponds to lower levels of violence over time, but allows for significantcant periods of social peace after each outburst.

Antonio A. Casilli
Telecom ParisTech

Paola Tubaro
University of Greenwich

August 14, 2011

Source
Download study

[Update 20th August 2011]
Article by Slavoj Žižek on the meaning of the riots

A Palestinian schoolbook says: “Are hackers a problem where you live?” 😎
They probably live next door…

Propaganda by Meister

This week Cory Doctorow gave a great talk about this (*sigh*) boring old issue of Freedom and Human Rights in the age of the knowledge society at the ACM Siggraph Conference in Vancouver.

For further reading:
EFF
Cory’s Blog

A couple of days ago I’ve seen “An African Election“, a documentary movie of the 2008 Presidentual elections in Ghana by Jarreth Merz. The film offers an unusually deep insight into political processes in central Africa and fondly reminded me of “Heart of Darkness“.

I warmly recommend to watch Jarreth’s impressive Film.

Today, Andy , is YOUR day! – Happy Birthday!