Today a dutch court of law decided that ISPs XS4ALL and Ziggo¹ have to block all access to the Pirate Bay and related domains and IP-adresses² as requested by anti-piracy organization BREIN. The court reasoned that since BitTorrent user can(!) upload material as well as download it (which is legal in a lot of cases), the website of the Pirate bay should be censored, even though they stopped hosting a tracker years ago.

In principle this is terrible, but since the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, it shouldn’t really make things all that harder in practice. A few options off the top of my head, in order of increasing complexity:

• Use a proxy³
• Use a VPN³
• Use Opera Turbo (or Mini), you’ll get your pages through their servers in Norway, making it a VPN in some ways
• Similarly, you could use the Pirate Bay Dancing plugin for FireFox
• Use TOR
• The Wayback Machine mirrors the .torrents too
• Google has most of the magnetlinks in their cache
• Use a service like web2mail to get webpages sent to your email
• Use a shell-account³ and be creative from there:
• You could deploy your own service that scrapes the Pirate Bay and makes the pages or the .torrents (or even better: a single .torrent or magnetlinkcontaing them) available via:
  • mailing lists
  • a private tracker
  • freenet
  • usenet
  • IRC
  • Google-docs
  • sneakernet
  • an online notepad
  • filehosting sites
  • QR-codes embedded in youtube-clips

Add your own suggestions in the comments and make sure you spread your results as far as possible!

Updates:

•  XS4ALL is appealing the decision
• Anonymous payed BREIN a visit (and an unrelated company also called Brein)
• The Dutch Pirate Party has launched a Pirate Bay mirror! Let’s see if they will block the site of a political party.
• More in english
• Some Dutch sources and analysis

¹: ziggo.nl pops up a warning that the site doesn’t (fully) support my Opera Browser and suggests I switch to a different browser. I’d suggest that an ISP should be able to server proper standards-compliant pages.

³: Not one from the Netherlands, North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia or similarly afflicted countries of course

Fenriz (of the mighty Darkthrone) takes us through the history of black metal, from the first Black Sabbath, via Venom and Slayer up to the early nineties when the Norwegian wave hit the scene.

A great trip through metal history (Fenriz is also known as DJ Vast Knowledge Of Music, check his mixtapes and his Band of the Week) and quite educational for the newer fans.

And it’s always a pleasure to hear Fenriz talk about his passion, music and proving once again his motto ‘It’s not how many albums one has, but how MUCH one has heard’.

These guys are one of the best guitar-duos in the world, perhaps at the same level as King/Hanneman or Murray/Smith. They play so casually and cool and still sound just like on the record, genius at work!

Isahn is actually a music instructor (imagine having him as a music teacher at school…) and also has some amazing video’s for GuitarWorld called ‘Left Hand Path‘.

Check out Abbath playing ‘Kashmir’ and then the riff from ‘Tyrants’, I must admit I never noticed it before.

What a contrast to Ihsahn! Abbath clearly isn’t an instructor (as he readily admits) but a very skilled player nevertheless (“I’m very competent on my shit but also very incompetent…”) . You’ve just gotta love the noise and comments he makes while playing and how he plays with his face like he’s playing a live show in full corpsepaint, I guess it’s mandatory when playing these songs.

Some bonus material here:

Emperor: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Seems like a different edit of the same material

Immortal: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7   Battles in the North!

Winner of the ‘Childhood Renaissance 3′ contest at Worth1000.com. Some of the runner-ups are pretty good too!

I’d like to apologize to my readers (all three of you ), who kept visiting despite the lack of new content.

Now that I’m done hibernating I’ll be posting here more. I’ve still got some interesting things in my drafts-list and plans for some cool original content lined up!

I want to try to post more on metal and technology and less about political stuff, except where it touches on subjects really close to me.

While you’re waiting impatiently for the shiny new posts, kill some time reading Rudy Rucker‘s amazing  The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life , and How To Be Happy , or, if you’re more into fiction, the last issue of Flurb.

Ok, I lied, I hibernated  for the winter in the southern hemisphere too…

(via Froot.nl)

Check out this amazing cover of the best Black Metal song ever! The backstory makes it even more hilarious:

In 1959 Chip Ihsahn and Rocky Samoth met on the beach in California. They shared a love of crude reverb units, surfing, smoking illicit substances and driving cars with fake wood on the sides. They soon formed a surf band which had a variety of name changes including The Dark Devices, then The Xerasias, then The Embryonics.

The group soon evolved into the now well-known band The Thou Shalt Suffers. Soon, however,Rocky Samoth began to write surf music music outside of The Thou Shalt Suffers, and together with Chip Ihsahn and a new bass player called Woody Mortiis (later of his own eponymous band The Mortiises), The Emperors was formed. The Emperors toured with fellow surf group The Cradle of Filths, and after this tour the band ceased wearing surf clothing; they stated that it was becoming a trend and losing its original significance and symbolism.

In the autumn of that year, the police began to investigate the murder of Clint Euronymous of The Mayhems, naming Varg ‘Kenneth’ Vikernes (of The Burzums) as a suspect; this investigation eventually led to the incarceration of Rocky Samoth for arson, and of Walter Faust for the murder of Magne Andreassen.

Head over to Mr Meddled’s YouTube-channel for more Trve Kvlt 1960s surf rock by The Burzums, The Darkthrones and The Beherits!

(via Bazillion Points)