From Amnesty International (Irish section):

Every year, throughout the world, more than half a million people are killed by armed violence - that’s one person every minute. Every government around the world is responsible. Their lack of control on the arms trade is fuelling conflict, poverty and human rights abuses - worldwide.

The Control Arms campaign is asking governments to toughen up controls on the arms trade. Our Million Faces petition is collecting photos and self-portraits from around the world to reach our goal of one million faces by June 2006. We will use these faces to send a powerful, global message of support to the world’s governments for an International Arms Trade Treaty.

Be one in a million. Join us today.

Add your face to the Million Faces petition. We urgently need 17,000 faces added to the petition from people in Ireland by 19th May 2006. Help us achieve this target by adding your face.If you blog, consider putting this message, or a version of it, on your own blog. If you have email-tolerant friends, forward the information to them. Add your own face, and look at what else you can do to support this campaign.

(adapted for blogging by Daithí)

The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) publishes quite a lot of data online, and after seeing a brief note in one of the Sundays about the Irish figures (sorry, no link), I went hunting on the ABC site to learn more about the sales of copies of UK newspapers in (Ro)Ireland. So this is my result from the March 2006 figures…

News of the World 163,146
The Sun 111,838
The Sunday Times 108,368
Daily Star 100,584
The Daily Mail 82,787
Daily Mirror / Daily Record 75,590
Daily Star - Sunday 61,616
Sunday Mirror 44,420
The People 42,305
The Mail on Sunday 21,672
The Observer 13,139
Racing Post 10,717
Sunday Express 7,706
The Times 4,836
The Guardian 4,357
Financial Times 4,128
Sunday Mail 3,879
Daily Express 3,460
The Daily Telegraph 3,312
The Sunday Telegraph 3,300
Independent on Sunday 2,602
The Independent 2,045
Scotland on Sunday 2

Some interesting conclusions and observations:

• Two people getting Scotland on Sunday? Where do they find it?
• Three times as many people buy the Observer on a Sunday as the Guardian during the week. Unusual, given that other papers (e.g. Independent / IoS, Daily Telegraph / Sunday Telegraph) are broadly the same on weekly and Sunday issues.
• 4,357 Guardian readers. How many of them outside Trinity College? (Incidentally, the Times and Guardian have similar sales figures in Ireland, despite the Times having double the readership of the Guardian in the UK…)
• Although all copies were discounted, the Mail’s first month in Ireland was very impressive.

A unique alliance from across the broadcasting, telecoms, technology, new media and advertising sectors is voicing its concerns about the draft Audiovisual Media Services (AMS) Directive that is currently under discussion in Brussels. The UK government has serious concerns about the draft Directive and is currently discussing these with other Member States.

The key movers in this ‘unique alliance’ are Intellect (”the trade association for the UK high-tech industry”) and the Broadband Stakeholders Group (a government-stakeholder partnership, with Intellect acting as secretariat. The website (audiovisualstakeholders.org has a longer list of signatories to a paper (more on this in a second), including mobile phone operators (e.g. Vodafone, T-Mobile), broadcasters (e.g. ITV, Channel 4, Five), the ISP Association, etc. The Associated Press mistakenly says that Intel are involved (they aren’t, but ‘NTL’ are - perhaps an overly helpful subeditor thought it was an abbreviation?)

Anyhoo, all this fuss is about the update to the EU’s Television Without Frontiers directive; a proposal for which was published just at the end of 2005. The various bigwigs and mediumwigs involved in Intellect and the BSG have responded with a critical paper, which can be summarised as ‘nice try, but we’d prefer selfregulation, if it’s alright with you’. Their concern is with the prospect of ‘nonlinear’ AV services (primarily webcasting/online video-on-demand/mobile phone services/etc) being regulated, along similar lines to existing television services under Television W/O Frontiers (Stone Age version).

This is about to get very interesting. The website and paper are opening shots, but they appear to be preparing for a major fight.

So, a friend (who will remain nameless, to protect the oh-so-innocent) called over earlier this weekend to show off his newly-installed copy of Windows Vista, which of course is due for release in … well, quite a while ago, actually. The new official dates are November 2005 for some editions and January 2006 for others. Anyway, various versions have been circulating, and this was a reasonably recent limited release.

So, he fired it up and showed off some features. Like switching between applications at the touch of a key, with an ability to see all the applications in minature versions. And a full, powerful, speedy search of the hard disk. And floating little applications. And an application for sorting and managing photos. And…

Of course, the Mac users out among you will be wondering why this sounds so familiar. It turns out that virtually every feature of note is something that’s already implemented on OS X. Now this isn’t a case where Apple are going to go off and sue Microsoft, as they unsuccessfully did in the 80s over the concept of using ‘windows’ etc - some of the features are already available in third-party apps anyway - but there is a certain amusement in seeing features that are taken for granted on one platform being part of the Great Leap Forward on another.

Anyway, I return to my computer and network connection after a short absence, and find this useful heads up from John Naughten’s blog. By odd coincidence, I was browsing some of his past Observer columns on a current topic of side interest, Chinese web censorship (one of his useful and very prescient articles is at the end of the preceding link; do click on it). And so, I came across his link to this video spoof. Basically, it’s the audio from a Microsoft presentation on Vista, with all the various ‘upcoming features’ acted out on an existing Mac system. It’s long, but still a useful illustration.

Lawrence Lessig is calling it “the most important and powerful book in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years”. Amazon is selling it for £20, but there is a free PDF to download (note: this is a large file (>3mb), try individual chapters if this bothers you) simultaneously published today. The licence for the download is Creative Commons, BY-NC-SA (which publications under the research and writings tabs above will be, when I get around to doing it!). Another interesting element is the book’s wiki, which will (over time) include summaries, links etc.

I’m talking about “The Wealth Of Networks” (ISBN 0300110561) by Yochai Benkler (Yale, Law). The publisher’s summary describes it as “a this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy” and says that the author “describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained—or lost—by the decisions we make today”. At first glance, it’s quite sociological in tone, and closer to Manuel Castells (Network Society etc) than to Lessig, Vaidhyanathan etc. I’ve only read the introduction and dipped into other bits so far, so I’ll post a more detailed review in the near future.