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Weather Balloon Servers Could Take Pirate Party to the Air

by Conor Sullivan on October 25, 2010 at 01:00 PM

One would think that the first place the Pirate Party would go to avoid the authorities would be international waters, but the copyright-flouting movement is thinking of ditching the sea for the clouds. According to Forbes's Andy Greenberg, the Pirate Party has announced its intention to launch a server via weather balloon in order to escape any legislation threatening its operation on the Earth's surface.

The plan is the brainchild of the Pirate Parties International (PPI), an umbrella group of the Pirate Party movement focused on intellectual property reform. PPI plans to launch a solar-powered balloon with an onboard computer built by the open-source manufacturer Gumstix. The signal would be read from the ground with Skygrabber software, famously used by Iraqi insurgents to steal enemy drone feeds from the sky. It's a lofty goal (literally), and Greenberg is skeptical that the pirates would be able to surmount the technical and logistical hurdles that lie between them and airborne sovereignty.

Arcade Fire and Google Team Up for HTML5-Powered 'The Wilderness Downtown'

by Conor Sullivan on August 31, 2010 at 12:30 PM

For a band whose lyrics pine so heavily for a technologically simple past, Arcade Fire has really pushed themselves into the forefront of Internet marketing with the announcement of their third feature length album, 'The Suburbs.' First, the Canadian septet drafted a handwritten postcard to their fans announcing their upcoming single, scanned it and uploaded the missive for the blogosphere to devour. Then, the group offered their album over at Amazon for the absurdly low cost of $3.99, and quickly thereafter partnered with YouTube and American Express to broadcast an entire concert at Madison Square Garden for all of the Internet to see for free. Now, in what is likely their coolest project, they have teamed up with Google to create 'The Wilderness Downtown,' an interactive HTML5 "Web video," that promotes their newest single, "We Used to Wait."

The endeavor, part of Google's 'The Chrome Experiment,' turns your Web browser into a multi-windowed canvas, in whose moving panes the user witnesses the interactive features of HTML5. The project is keeping with the song's theme of nostalgia for the past -- when "we" had to wait for communication from our distant confidants (recall the above postcard) to stay connected. The user inputs his or her childhood address, then watches and listens as multiple windows open up in sync with the song, creating a unique video of overlapping frames and windows. The user is later asked to write a letter to his or her childhood self, and then, whatever is written (or drawn), is incorporated into the adaptive onscreen video. Arcade Fire may preach about the dangers of technological evolution, but they're certainly not ignoring the creative benefits offered by new technologies.