Why the Pirates Will Always Win, or How I Learned to Love the RIAA/MPAA

First off, better let it be said that I won't be getting into the nitty gritty morals & ethics of distributing other peoples intellectual property for free. This blogpost instead will intend to take a brief, badly organised look at the history of file sharing, the current state of things, and then the unforeseeable future. A sort of sociological review of the internet's behaviour over the past ten or twenty years.

Piracy pretty much got underway as soon as people could 1) store media-related data digitally, and 2) connect with other people. So essentially, as soon as we had a large enough population with free time online and free space on their hard drives. Started with stuff like text files, 'cos that was all that the early systems had the bandwidth to store and distribute, but quickly moved on to music, games, video, etc. Nowadays, obviously, we'd be downloading a car if we could, but instead we have to stick to the intangible. (Roll on home 3-D printers.)

Obviously file sharing only became a problem when rights holders concluded that shared files meant lost revenue, so I'm gonna go out on a limb here and claim that the first major stage of piracy were those hazy days of P2P platforms. That's 'peer to peer'; software that served to allow you to connect your computer to either a centralised server, or to other examples of 'you', people who were sharing their libraries of copyright media with the world. Initially, Napster held the crown, and did so until they got the shit sued out of them by rights holders. They hosted files on their servers, so they were viewed as the digital equivalent of a greengrocer handing out his vegetables for free; its a business model which is hard to compete with, and so those who want to sell potatoes lose sales. 

Cue the death of the first generation of file sharing. What came next? Distributed peer to peer networks, exciting!

That'd be Kazaa, Limewire, BearShare, Gnutella etc. For some, those names might invoke a fuzzy sense of nostalgia; of infecting the family computer with viruses, of terribly quality music rips, of mislabelled films. (Pretty sure the first time I saw Eurotrip was because my mate was trying to download Spiderman. In this case, I'm rather glad it was mislabelled.) Onto the changes which made this lawyer proof; (or more accurately, made serious dolla for lawyers) instead of you connecting to a server, upon which someone is hosting thousands and thousands of copyright files, the system now works by you becoming a filthy, blood sucking, anti capitalist commie bastard. 

The program you're using connects other users of the same program in a giant socialist network, and indexes files 'n folders on your computer for other people to snoop through. When you search for, say, Avenged Sevenfold, it's searching other peoples computers for files named 'Avenged Sevenfold'. Say you have a worryingly impressive Robbie Williams collection, well guess what happens when someone out there searched 'Robbie Williams'. Okay, enough labouring the point.

What (mainly) killed this method? 

1. Malware writers realised just how easy it was to distribute their viruses this way. Set up a computer with thousands of mislabelled files, and you've got statistics and human stupidity on your side. This problem was made worse by the fact that there was no way for a downloader to comment on the quality of a file.
2. It was you connecting with someone else; a one on one connection. Even with today's connection qualities, this really slowed the rate at which one could download files. 

There was also ritual lawsuits, huge fines imposed upon filesharers designed to capture the interest of the media, and consequently scare people into stopping. This obviously didn't really work, but I believe a lot of rights holders were able to sue the shit out of quite a number of people, usually for money, occasionally imprisoning them. The platform was also a bit dodgy I recall; although you could specify which folders the program could broadcast the contents of, I wouldn't be surprised if various clients had holes which would allow nerdy types to snoop further than they were supposed to.

Predictably, piracy wasn't beaten. In fact, in this case, there was still no real worry about being singled out for punishment, it was simply that there suddenly existed a much better alternative.

It was developed by one Bram Cohen in 2001, and it was the BitTorrent protocol. I'll spare the techy details about its original intended purposes, (he didn't design it for piracy. honest.) but here's an attempt at a basic overview of how it was different from, say, Limewire, and how it solved the two problems I just pointed out with distributed P2P networks.

Instead of you connecting to one person, upon whose computer exists the file you're after, you connect to everyone in the network who has that file. Thus, you're downloading from twenty, thirty, four hundred, etc people at once. Result? Fast download speeds. Furthermore, you can only access the file you're after, you only ever share the file you've downloaded. Result? Damn near impossible to use a torrent client to snoop around other peoples computers.

So: the major difference is that these networks of pirates are generated according to what you're downloading. To download a torrent, a prospective file sharer has to have two things; a torrent client, and the torrent file itself. The client is a program which manages the network; it makes sure you do a little bit of uploading (with the data you have) and a lot of downloading (of the data you don't have). The torrent file itself functions a bit like a ... magic flag. It connects you to other people who're flying the flag, thus allowing you to download from them, and you to upload to them (or, once you've got your file, to upload to the next flag which pops up out of the ether).

My apologies if the last two paragraphs made very little sense, that was harder to explain than I thought.

Anyway, the advantage of you having to download a torrent file to get in on the party is that people can leave comments regarding the quality of the files that it points to. Thus, its easy for someone to point out that the file is in fact a virus, or that the sound is out, or that there's a watermark on the picture, etc etc. Result? Increased quality for pirates! Also, we may recall that piracy is generally illegal, and specifically pisses off some very rich and powerful organisations. With Limewire & co, anyone could connect; you just needed the P2P client. With torrents, you need the torrent file. Thus, guard your torrent files, and you control who gets in on the network. Consequently, a lot of file sharing communities are invite only, (waffles.fm, what.cd, demonoid.me etc) and a good number exist which are closed. If you're not in already, you're not getting in. Sucks for us plebeian pirates without the contacts, but hey, you can pretty much guarantee your safety to download whatever you please.

The disadvantages? As with shizzle like Limewire, file sharing done this way relies on people to upload as well as download. It's all very well maxing your connection speed downloading from 200 people at once, but this is only if there's 200 people 'seeding' the torrent. No seeds? No download. This also means that a torrent effectively 'dies' when the last person stops seeding. Also, on open networks, (think the Pirate Bay) its very easy for companies to take pirates to court. Lots and lots and lots of people have been taken to court for downloading via BitTorrent, into the hundreds of thousands at least. The numbers have increased massively in the past two or three years as rights holders have started subcontracting their dirty work to specialist companies.

(I will be getting onto 'why pirates will always win' soon enough, I promise.)

So finally, we come on to the final and most recent popular method of file sharing. Direct downloading. This is where a company allows users to hosts files, (for the non legit ones, say... megaupload, rapidshare, depositfiles, sharebee) and allows, in most cases, anyone to download them. You may be forgiven for thinking we've therefore gone in a full circle, that Napster had it right from the start, but there is one subtle difference, once again designed to make lawyers dolla, and to keep these file sharing companies from being prosecuted too often. This is that it is their users which upload the files, not the owners of the company. The company executives can therefore say, with a remarkably straight face, that they have no intention of letting their users share copyright files, and will of course delete any files which they find to contain someone else's intellectual property. Of course, most companies wait for the rights holders to get in touch before deleting them, and then what with admin 'n all, take a good week to remove the file, by which time it's been uploaded another thirty times.

Of course, as we know, although this keeps hosting companies on the right side of the law, this has never stopped rights holders (and often the US government/FBI) from doing what they can to remove file sharing companies from the internet and sue the shit out of their owners. Unfortunately, this rarely works 'cos:

1. There's more than one file hosting company. As the top one gets taken down, others step up to take their place. Only reason Megaupload briefly became king was because Rapidshare had to start deleting all their piracy-related-files.
2. They're not hosted in places with strict file sharing laws, and not in places with extradition treaties to the USA. Megaupload was hosted in New Zealand. Rapidshare in Switzerland. Hotfile in Panama. There's definite exceptions to this claim; Mediafire for example is hosted in Texas.

What with companies suing users of torrents, direct downloading is seen as relatively safe for the downloader. The problem comes when you own the company, or when you are uploading buttloads of copyright files. Why then do these companies exist, and why do individuals upload so much of other peoples intellectual property? Simply because it's a working business model. Hosting companies can charge a relatively low fee to allow users to download ridiculous amounts of data, and fill their sites with adverts for the free users. Piracy therefore got pushed into a corner which generated a lot of advertising & subscription revenue for the company owners. Woops.

Case in point for this would be the rather amusing saga of Kim Dotcom, (yes, he changed his name) owner* of megaupload and related file hosting & streaming websites. After the FBI realised that forcing a company to remove all of its copyright content just means that they get more money as people re-upload the content, (rapidshare) they went for the nuclear option, which is to seize the domain name and bring criminal charges against him. Unfortunately, Kim made quite a lot of money, quite a lot of which is now going to a team of extremely cunning lawyers. The current situation is that the FBI is demanding that New Zealand extradite Dotcom to the US. New Zealand isn't taking too kindly to this, especially seen as though the FBI are refusing to let Dotcom's lawyers see the evidence against him. In all likelihood, the FBI used some dodgy and rather illegal wire-tapping methods to gather evidence. The stalemate is therefore that Dotcom's lawyers can legitimately complain if they're not allowed to see the evidence against him, and will be able to challenge the admissibility of the evidence in court if they do.

Megaupload is still down and out, but the net result is that other file hosting companies aren't quaking in their booties, as this case is proving that there's always a loophole to wriggle through.

* Apparently Dotcom doesn't actually own Megaupload 'n related, his wife does. Who is officially a citizen of somewhere else. Which stops her from being culpable. Blah blah. More lawyer cunningness I suspect.

If our short historical overview has taught us one thing, it must be that technologies move faster than the law ever can. It should also tell us that a good number of people will always be willing to take a (historically and currently) extremely small risk to get something for next-to-nothing. To top it all off, it should also tell us that many nerds strangely enjoy playing the rebel, and thinking of new and clever ways to playfully screw with the system.

We're currently at the situation where piracy is mostly shared between BitTorrent traffic and direct downloading. If, for example, the whole world agreed on making downloading torrents illegal, I predict that within a month, someone would rewrite the protocol so it wasn't technically a torrent any more. It just worked the same. Think magnet links, the current preferred successor to torrent files; they function the same, and without having to download a new client, but they're just different enough for laws to be unable to deal with them without another lawyer saying the legal equivalent of 'ah yes, but...'

With direct downloading, as we've seen by current developments, it's a bit of a hydra and generates enough revenue for the owners of websites to protect themselves in a court of law. The RIAA & MPAA (Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America; i.e. the rights holders who've joined together to take on the pirates.) must, to be honest, be kicking themselves by this point; the last thing they wanted was people beginning to claw their way toward being as rich & consequently powerful as they are.

I therefore can feel pretty safe in claiming that piracy will never die. Even if bills like SOPA or ACTA get eventually pushed through, even if ISPs are forced to start monitoring every byte of traffic between individuals, there will always be a way for those who wish to pirate. I suppose the job of the rights holders is though simply just to ensure that piracy doesn't become the accepted standard for music, literature, film & TV acquisition, and to keep the mainstream population out of websites like the pirate bay; do that and they'll always get their millions, and they'll always stay on top.

As I said at the start, I've tried to stay out of the moral & ethical arguments surrounding the sharing of other peoples intellectual property: that will potentially be the subject of a later blogpost, as it really deserves its own forum. I'd also like to apologise for the total mish mash-ness of this post, this was written on the fly and I'm sure I've missed out a lot, come across as hugely biased (I am) and generally explained things badly. I'll try to edit it into something slightly more cohesive, and possibly provide diagrams to help explain just wtf I'm on about at various points.

It Hasn't Been a Drill for Quite Some Time.

To the media, and presumably also NSA/GCHQ, its a 'cyber war'. To the techies at their keyboards, its being called Infosec. The latter is perhaps a more descriptive and less emotive term. 

As with most examples of human conflict over the past millennia, its being fought over resources and due to fear. And as with most recent examples of human conflict as instigated by Western developed nations, its another example of a pre-emptive strike. Case in point, the US & Israel have essentially admitted to developing Stuxnet & Flame for the specific purpose of sabotaging Iran's nuclear efforts. 

I could blather on all day about the professional and truly fiendish design of these two viruses, but I have enough to do today. Best just describe their main features. Stuxnet, we know, was changing the spin cycles for centrifuges; clearly the US & Israel feel that Iran's nuclear programme is a genuine threat, and are worried that Iran is that close to developing weapons grade material. Flame appeared to be doing the same thing, but also rather a lot more. The virus itself was only discovered after someone realised it had infected a number of Iranian oil refineries, which hints, along with the rather more modular design, that this tool was being used in multiple areas. 

Three nearly entirely irrelevant images.

Just look...

Presumably industrial espionage here mostly, but I can so easily picture military types having things patiently explained to them by rather paler, skinnier types. After a while, they get the picture, possibly say something like 'so its sort of like kicking the legs from underneath them, but we don't need to use bombs or cut off their supply lines?' Then, after some relatively heavy cognition on the part of the military type, the glowing realisation that this makes warfare cheaper and easier wins over the disappointment of not being able to bomb anything.

...how far we've come.

Onto a different slice of wildly inaccurate future-monging, remember the bitching I did about unmanned drones? I wrote that ages before I posted it and things are still moving forward, basically toward vehicles that can stay aloft for longer, can fly higher and quieter, and carry larger and larger payloads. Thus, we can perhaps assume that this is an area of significant interest for military tech/research companies. Soooo, with the amount of money being poured in, and the effectiveness of these machines, we can perhaps assume that remotely controlled, unmanned vehicles are the future of warfare. 

Lets drift thirty years into the future, by which point these are also used for general surveillance, (you know governments wanna do it) and our thoroughly pissed off 'enemy' nation states have got a whole lot better at this cyber war thing. Incidentally, lets hope countries with booming IT/programming sectors such as India or China are friends with us by then, 'cos they can outcode us already. Anyway, I basically predict that it won't be too long before someone at least figures out how to jam communications going to drones, if not gain some degree of control. Iran already managed to snarfle a drone that went down (lets assume accidentally) in their territory, so you can bet they & other countries are going to have Top Men working on reverse engineering and finding out what they can. We also periodically see news reports that say things like 'blah blah admitted that an unnamed US defence contractor had its servers compromised and lost blah blah documents relating blah unnamed blah technologies'. 

Sure bodes well.

Some crappy sources:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/telecom/security/us-military-system-design-badly-compromised-in-march-cyber-attack [millitary gettin' h4xxd]

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/drone-virus-kept-quiet/ [millitary gettin' h4xxd]

http://mythoughtsoninfosec.wordpress.com/ [smidgeon on Stuxnet/Flame at the bottom]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-israel-developed-computer-virus-to-slow-iranian-nuclear-efforts-officials-say/2012/06/19/gJQA6xBPoV_story.html [US & Israel admit to authoring Stuxnet]

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2406087,00.asp [US & Israel admit to authoring Flame]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18517841 [Same as above two]

EDIT 29/06/12 : http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18643134

"American researchers took control of a flying drone by hacking into its GPS system"

On the positive side, this means they're aware of the potential issues. As you'd expect and hope.

The 'War on Terror', declared to have begun nearly 10 years ago, is, according to one of its chief proponents, still 'not over'.

Tony Blair was kind enough to speak on Radio 4, claiming that the apparent 'threat' would end only when 'we defeat the ideology'. He even went so far as to claim that it was 'deeply naive' to believe that the US & UK response to 9/11 attacks were to blame for extremist Muslim factions. Evidently Blair is continuing to only listen to MI5 when they agree with him - Stella Rimington, former head of MI5 described the response to 9/11 as 'a huge overreaction' in a Guardian interview.

Instead, we are supposed to believe the Time-magazine rhetoric of 'terrorists hate us because they hate our freedom', spouted time and time again in American news reports, television shows and even children's colouring books*. If political leaders are to be believed, then we are also supposed to believe that 9/11 was an unprovoked attack.

Perhaps though, there are other reasons why the 'War on Terror' is apparently not yet over. Not withstanding that humans have been trying to kill each other since we worked out how, ignoring the CIA financing & training Afghan militant groups from 1979 to 1989 and discarding that tricky difficulty of defining the difference between a solider defending our freedom and a terrorist assaulting it.

Take for instance that little reported week-to-week occurrence in Northwest Pakistan; drone strikes. They've been occurring for the past seven years, and reported strikes have gradually stepped up in intensity until, based on estimates and official reports, for the past four years, an average of 500 people are being killed every year.

It's difficult to imagine how people must feel living in areas where at any time, 25,000 feet above their heads, a 66 foot wingspan drone may be circling, loaded with a 500lb laser guided bomb. I think I'd feel rather terrorised, really.

The CIA do not report any civilian deaths, but the Bureau of Investigative Journalism claim that at least 385 civilians, including over 160 children, have been killed. Pakistan's Interior Minister claims that 'drone missiles cause collateral damage. A few militants are killed, but the majority of victims are innocent citizens'.

Whether you think of this as a campaign of military oppression against the people of various countries, (this doesn't just happen in Pakistan) or as pre-emptive strikes which are required to stop terrorist organisations from gaining enough power to mount another serious attack, it cannot be claimed that 'surgical strikes' really are surgical.

Obama's top counter terrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, is quoted to have said 'there hasn't been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.' According to Reuters, the second largest death toll for a drone strike took place on July the 12th with 45 'suspected militants' killed in multiple missile strikes.

Returning to Tony Blair's claims, is this really the way to go about defeating 'the ideology'? Of course, on the other hand, if we didn't go around provoking wars, who will buy our guns?


*bit.ly/ovZ3WW

[Sources]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/asia/12drones.html?_r=2&hp (CIA claims 'a yearlong perfect record')

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/12/us-pakistan-missile-idUSTRE76B0I320110712

http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/09/01/911-coloring-book-sparks-outrage-from-muslim-group/

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gwbush911jointsessionspeech.htm

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2035838/9-11-anniversary-Tony-Blair-says-war-terror-over.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/18/stella-rimington-9-11-mi5

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_attacks_in_Pakistan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

Tour of the Toon

Decided to take my camera for a walk at some strange hour. 

Results? Blur 'n some rather strange colour casts.

Dutifully exaggerated in photoshop.

Hipsters Do Not Exist

 Is that a check shirt I see? Hipster. Thick rimmed glasses? Hipster. Fixed gear bicycle? Hipster. Ushanka? Doc Martens? Keffiyeh? Dirty, filthy, alternative, post rock, omg-so-nerdy microbrew-swilling hipsters, the whole lot of you.

I'm trying to make a point here, honest. Hipsters are people who generally tend to avoid stereotypes, labelling, and anything mainstream. As far as I can tell, they're also generally people who take an active interest in indie films, 'alternative' music, all that jazz. Rarely jazz actually. Anyway, so by definition, we're talking about a group of people who actively avoid being grouped, even if its being done ironically. Why then, is hipsterism an accepted current fad-trend-subculture thing?


Emos were pretty obvious; you weren't an emo if you didn't wear eye liner and straighten your hair, you weren't an emo unless you hung around outside local gigs talking about Hawthorne Heights. Scene kids too, you just needed the hair to defy gravity at the back and an interest in some weird kind of screamo-electro crossover. Going back before emo kids, moshers also appeared to be fairly easy to spot. Baggy jeans, black hoody, chain, desire to mosh. Easy.

I'm sure you've spotted the obvious dichotomy by now; you can't really define stereotypes for a group that defines itself by actively avoiding stereotypes. I'm 99% sure that this point has been made a million times over, but sorry, I don't read your blog, so what would I know?

All this said... read, hipsters definitely exist. They're even a little more easily spotted than some previous fad-cultures, I reckon, because they're the ones out there with their DSLR cameras taking pictures of CCTV cameras. (Ironically, I've done this. It was a first year uni assignment, I therefore feel justified in being predictable.) But if hipsters exist as a mockable entity, then surely their mass culture actions are nothing other than self defeating?

Perhaps we could all mentally split hipsterism into two cults; tru-hipsters and psuedo-hipsters. Tru-hipsters would be the ones that started playing the accordian because they liked the sound, the ones that shut themselves in their room researching 90's indie because they got bored of Slint, and the infinite other potential possibilities of culture based oddity. The other would have to be the shunned group of plebian norms, who are self proclaimed nerds solely because they played pokémon. The immediate problem with such an attitude is that noone would want to be the aforementioned shunned plebian norms, and would thus define themselves as tru-hipster, probably going to insane lengths to do so.

This reminds me, I forgot another rather important part (I think) of hipsterism: the carefully cultivated attitude of Not Giving A Flying Fuck What You Think. The hypothetical course of events presented two sentences ago would obviously turn that one on its head as well.

My personal feeling (and I'm told this is the purpose of a blog) is that soon enough, popular-ish culture will find a new and exciting outlet for Urban Outfitters to capitalise on, and the majority of hipsters will move on. The relative few that remain will, I imagine, be secretly rather happy, just as goths and emos* did, and dubstep fans one day will.

Such is popular culture, and I'm honestly cool with that. Though when flares come back in and we can't buy straight cut jeans, I'll be first out there with the molotovs.


* I'm talking Snowing & The Saddest Landscape here. No BFMV.

* I don't have many images of hipsters on my computer, and am too hungover to search out good ones. The above will have to do for now.

I believe it was Oscar Wilde who once said;

'If economists cared,

they'd do a different job'

Such an illuminating notion is obviously applicable to any job where an employee must regularly flaunt the moral codes which society generates. Some people seem trapped in employment they don't care about, but somehow lack the motivation to do a different job. I'm thinking all those pen pushing, form filling bureaucratic jobs that exist; surely ten years later noone cares about the contents of all those applications and reports. Some jobs are just like that of the economist or the investment banker though; the worker simply must not care for ethical or moral concerns. Perhaps a slaughterhouse operative cares not for the cows. Perhaps a bailiff doesn't care about those he or she visits. Perhaps an editor of a newspaper doesn't actually care about the events he or she reads daily.

 

Presumably in the latter case, if an editor cared, actually cared, about the subjects of every journalistic article he read, newspapers would only publish happy things, or there would be more murderous-editor-rampages.

Shit, maybe if we all actually cared. Like, proper cared I'm talking now. Impossible levels of caring. Maybe the world would be a nicer place. Chefs would refuse to charge for their foodstuffs, customers would demand to pay. CCTV cameras would record thousands of alien acts of kindness every day. People would give way in supermarkets, children would worry they were disturbing old people, Wu Tang Clan basically wouldn't exist.

Anyway, that's obviously all total jibberish, so lets have some black and white photos.

 

 Kinda creepy.

 

Kinda heartwarming.

Kinda vertigo.

Kinda wat.

Kinda atmospheric.

Exciting stuff. To finish things off, here is a link to a half hour mix by this amazing DJ I'm into right now. I'm kidding; I did it, so it sucks. I personally recommend sticking it on whilst predrinking, ideally about an hour before you go out.

[Warning : Politics]

Breaking : Blog Post Whines "World Unfair"

Herein lie my thoughts on Syria 'n related shizzle. Specifically the recent uprising, how it compares with Libya, and, of course, how the media have portrayed things.

So the Syrian uprising apparently started on 26th January 2011, generally with the same ideological roots as the rather wider spread 'Arab Spring'. In Syria specifically, the protestors were irate about the Ba'ath Party being in power for 40 odd years. The Libyan civil war/uprising seems to have been a pretty similar story in terms of causes, and it apparently began on the 17th February 2011. As the worst of the violence appears to be over, there are tentative claims emerging regarding the death toll. One AP/Guardian article claims 'at least' 30,000 in the worst six months.

In both cases, those do-gooders the UN Security Council were discussing the possibility of military interventions, and in both Libya & Syria, those UN Council members representing Western countries (the US & the EU) generally favoured at least some form of intervention. Russia & China supported military intervention in Libya, but have vetoed even an official condemnation of Syria. The Arab League and the 'GCC states'  (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, states around there basically) have condemned Syria and Libya. I'll get onto Israel in a sec.

That is the official line of the big wigs then, as far as I can tell. Actual actions and steps taken by individual states occasionally appears to produce exactly the opposite effect to their official stance. Strange.

Anyway, less of the decision makers, onto a quick profile of the two main baddies under the spotlight. Libya: Colonel Gaddafi. Syria: President Assad. Both countries are pretty rich in oil, and both countries are or were net exporters to most of the members of the UN Security Council. Libya holds the largest proven oil reserves in Africa; their oil production, for example, was 4.8 million barrels erry day in 2006. Syria, by comparison, is small fry. Peak oil production was hit in 1995, at 600,000 barrels per day. In 2005, it was reported to be at 450,000.

We like our oil. I'm sure you can guess where my brain is leading me already, but I'll spit it out anyway. Libya, when having a long, bloody, drawn out civil war, is probably not exporting as much oil as We want. I'll even go conspiracy nuts and wildly speculate that some oil hungry customers gave Gaddafi a call and told him something along the lines of 'sort out this bloody mess before the media get ahold of it.'

Anyway, back to wild speculation at least based on facts. Syria, when having a longer and potentially bloodier civil war, aint hurting billionaires abilities to play the buy-and-sell game, and so isn't costing someone their profits.

Without running off to count articles, and play havoc with statistics, I'm going to make yet another unsupported claim. This one is that we all heard about Libya and the rebels and Gaddafi a whole lot more than we did about Syria and the rebels and Assad. It was just generally in the news quite a lot; Libya more so than Egypt, more so than Syria. I'll posit a few ideas as to why this was the case, if you'll forgive me.

a) Audiences were getting pretty apathetic once they'd seen the 50th report detailing bullet ridden hospitals and the struggles of freedom fighters. The media (yeah, all of them) judged public opinion wouldn't support another series of articles on another country, and so moved on to the next flavour of the month.

b) Governments were interested in pushing a transition in Libya, one way or another. So politicians, spokespeople & PR chaps were made available for comment; gave away juicy quotes, accidentally leaked reports, made inflammatory remarks. They provided data and quotes relating to the situation in Libya, and journalists working 18 hour days took the easy option out, and wrote the story about Libya.

c) The Libyans were better able to contact and draw sympathy from journalists & the media than the Syrians. Whether by communication blackouts for the Syrians, or the Libyans just being better at Twitter.

I imagine the true reasons for media discrepancies in reporting is a whole lot more complicated, and takes in way more factors.

Final point, one impressively biased study entitled 'the Israeli position towards the Syrian Intifada' concludes that Israel would prefer for the status quo to continue, for the Syrian regime not to be peacefully overthrown, and for Syria to continue to exist in a state 'of sectarian conflict that would continue as long as possible, rather than a Syrian transformation from situation of struggle to one of freedom and democracy.'

And hey, Israel does have some pretty powerful friends on the world stage.

Incomplete list of Sources:

If you want to know where I got a specific fact, please ask & I'll point it out!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9835879

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/01/us-syria-idUSTRE80S08620120201

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Libya#Oil_sector

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria#Economy

http://english.dohainstitute.org/Home/Details/5ea4b31b-155d-4a9f-8f4d-a5b428135cd5/284e36f8-7bd1-4d84-89a6-a1e9ee1b835a#aa7

I've just written about 8 introductions and deleted them all. Pretty sure nobody wants to read introspective musings about mentally justifying clogging the tubes with yet more vain mediocrity anyway, so instead, I'm just going to plunge straight into the content.

Be warned, and I apologise in advance for this intensely boring first-post, that there may be images of designer sinks popping up here and there. That is to say, it's unlikely I'll get through all my favorites before getting hungry or bored. To be brutally honest, I doubt these are entirely designer anyway, many are probably just designed. The obvious difference being that I can design a sink and I am not a sink designer.

Sadly.

 

This one, for example, totally looks like it might just be a bit of concept art. I reckon it works 'cos it kinda looks like a section of a falling stream of water? Sink-form analysis required plz.

I'm also really hoping that the existence of this image means that someone out there was commissioned to design some mental sinks. Perhaps I could find evening classes in avant-garde bathroom product design.

I don't actually want to be paid to design exquisite bathrooms for the rich and famous. Mostly, my hoarding of unusual-sink-pictures ('cos I definitely can't afford an actual-unusual-sink) stems from a desire to have a magnificent bathroom in my mansion when I'm older. 

Entertaining notions of the mad desires of celebrities is somewhat entertaining though. Cliff Richards wants a bath with an underwater tunnel leading to another bath. Yoko Ono wants a self cleaning beach floor, Johnny Depp wants one in black gloss and without any straight lines, etc etc, you get the picture.

Anyway, in a break from porcelain dreams, time to check the tiles! Is that some Roman/Greek inspired cleansing experience? Obviously for it to be truly authentic we'd need to know that the pipes were lead. Assessing whether or not this is the case wouldn't even require a spanner, a simple maths question directed toward your host will probably suffice.

I'm getting carried away now, apologies. Last one, a classic crowd pleaser, ol' spiral. Another bit of concept art methinks, but I reckon you could have a lot of fun, as long as it came with a plunger. Ideally you could train a toad or something to ride a small skateboard, underwater, round 'n down the spiral.

Anyway, I'm clearly starting to make less and less sense, so I'll finish here. Cheers for actually reading at least sentence, and apologies for the mish mash style, it'll hopefully improve as I post. When I post. If I post. Eek.

Next week, an essay on the potential benefits of introducing brown bears into the UK.