Martijn Comes, "Radio Oblivion"



Kristin Kontrol, "X-Communicate" (Sub Pop). Dee Dee from Dum Dum Girls performs at BSP in Kingston on June 15.



Vox Urbana, "Cuentan Los Cerros"

Gizmodo reports that Senator Ron Wyden will introduce legislation next week that would roll back the government's new broader hacking power granted by the Supreme Court in April. The "Rule 41" allows federal judges to grant warrants to the FBI to use what they call “Network Investigative Techniques.” Anyone who has had their computer invaded would call that malware, and the government can use that malware on 10 or 10,000 computers, no matter the jurisdiction of those computers. And the rule allows judges to give warrants to search the computers of victims of cybercrime, even if that person isn't a suspect. “By compromising computer systems, it could leave it open to other attackers. What if the government has to turn off the computer’s protections to search it?,” Wyden told Gizmodo. “So if the government is out there turning of millions of security features in order to search computers, my view is that there could be some serious security threats.” Wyden's legislation will be just one sentence, saying that the changes to rule 41 will not go into effect. Congress has six months to pass such a measure before the rule change takes effect.

Photo from lawanddisorder.com

The New York Times reported that Michael Ratner, the civil liberties lawyer who also hosted the "Law and Disorder" radio show (which originated on WBAI and airs on WGXC at 10 a.m. Mondays), died May 11 from complications of cancer, according to his brother, Bruce, the property developer and an owner of the Brooklyn Nets. Ratner, 72, may be best known for successfully challenging the United States government’s detention of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay without judicial review. He also headed the Center for Constitutional Rights, and sued New York City to end wholesale stop-and-frisk policing. "Law and Disorder," with co-hosts Heidi Boghosian and Michael Steven Smith is a weekly syndicated radio program discussing access to rare (on the radio) legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, the right to dissent, and torture.

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Slate reports that last week four U.S. Senators sent a letter critical of the ConnectHome program that is supposed to help rural Americans get broadband internet service to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which runs ConnectHome. Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.V.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Angus King, I-Maine; and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., complained about the quality of the Internet that ConnectHome provides. ConnectHome sets up 4Mbps download and 1Mbps as broadband, though the Federal Communications Commission recently updated those figures to 25Mbps download speed and 3Mbps upload speed in January 2015. "Federal policymakers must ensure that taxpayer-supported infrastructure is sufficiently robust to handle demand. It is not only a matter of fairness that rural Americans can fully utilize broadband-enabled resources, but also a matter of ensuring that taxpayers are receiving the full economic development return on their investments," the senators wrote to the Agriculture Department. The FCC's Lifeline program for low-income Americans provides 10Mbps downloads. Most government internet subsidies, Slate reports, set aside $9.25 per household for broadband, which won't get anyone blazing internet speeds.

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Gizmodo pulls back the curtain on the supposedly neutral, computer-based algorithm of "trending" news on Facebook, which turns out to be none of those things. The site interviewed several former contract workers for Facebook who were curators, chosen to pick which stories Facebook features as trending news who said they were told to increase the profile of certain stories, and to ignore others that were popular among users. "In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists 'topics that have recently become popular on Facebook,'" Gizmodo wrote. The story's allegations that conservative news was played down by Facebook seems less impressive. One anonymous former Facebook news curator says, “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.” That sounds like a problem in any newsroom, not particular to Facebook. Another quote says, “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased." Did they follow the same procedure with first-sources from the far left? Probably the curators searched for more sources, and sources they knew and could trust, just like regular journalists. Facebook's news curation may have a bias against conservative news, and tends towards mainstream sources and stories, just like many other news outlets, and that part of the story seems very accurate. See the full story in Gizmodo.

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Boing Boing reports that the U.S. Navy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, now have a radio-controlled drone for the seas. The Navy's first ship without an on-board crew is a 132-foot Antisubmarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel called Sea Hunter, which cost around $120 million to build. The military claims new editions will only cost $20 million, and will be used to track enemy submarines, and will be testing off the California coast the next two years, starting with on-board personnel, just in case of some sort of failure over the radio waves.

Radiohead, "Burn The Witch"



Radiohead, "Daydreaming"

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Techcrunch reports that just about the only problem with the Periscope app is that the broadcasts are deleted after 24 hours. So on May 4 the company fixed that, as now users can save broadcast by putting a #save in their titles. The app lets anyone with a Twitter account stream video through their cell phones, through a very simple interface. Now the company is developing controls for saving recordings for various periods of time but not forever. Periscope and, through Twitter, its 300 million possible users are trying to compete with 1.6 billion possible broadcasters through Facebook Live.

John Eggerton at Multichannel.com reports that four House Democrats want FCC chairman Tom Wheeler to make all broadcast station files machine readable so they can be more easily searched and inspected. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), ranking member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Communications Subcommittee, Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), and Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) sent an April 29 letter urging Wheeler "in the near term" to fulfill his pledge to make the files accessible. In 2012, the FCC made TV station public files available online in a central, FCC-administered database, with cable and satellite TV, and radio added to the mandate this year. Public broadcast files contain records of stations fulfilling public service commitments and what political ads they have aired, and other public information. Two weeks ago, while the measure failed, 179 members of Congress voted to support Luján's H.R. 4179, the Fair and Clear Campaign Act, an amendment to an FCC bill that would have required public files be machine readable. "With unprecedented spending from super PACs on broadcast advertisements during the current election cycle, this commonsense request is an essential first step to shedding sunlight on our current political system," the legislators wrote to Wheeler.

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The Intercept reports that a new study from Oxford’s Jon Penney shows evidence that the mere existence of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity, stifling free expression. The study found 87 percent of Americans were aware of Edward Snowden's 2013 leaked documents about how the government spies on Americans. Since then, there has been, “a 20 percent decline in page views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that mentioned ‘al Qaeda,’ ‘car bomb’ or ‘Taliban,'" according to the report. “If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat to proper democratic debate,” Penney wrote.

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A Nashville sports reporter was fired for delivering a Prince-themed sports report hours after the musician’s death. Fox affiliate WZTV let him go after ten years, calling his April 21 report "insensitive." In another radio miscue, a child brought to a studio for Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day on April 28, took out National Public Radio's West Coast broadcast of "Morning Edition." The child took the feed off the air for one minute and 13 seconds. Gawker got an internal email from NPR:

"This error was caused by the head of Engineering Department. As part of Take our Daughters to work day studio 42 demonstration. One of our junior journalists was somehow able to press the exact sequence, and perfectly timed live insert panel to insert studio 42 into the stream 1. I kid you not. Although labor laws prevent me from actually hiring the kid (cause he does have a future-but I gave him my card) This resulted in studio 42 being inserted into the stream, causing a lengthy impairment."

FCC April 2016 Open Meeting airs at 2 a.m. Mon. May 2 on Wave Farm Radio and WGXC.

WGXC and Wave Farm Radio are airing "Reveil" Sat. April 30, tracking the sounds of dawn around the planet. At 5:20 a.m., Zach Poff's Pond Station took over the feed, airing the hydrophones in the pond. Above is a video of the sounds above the water line at 5:20 a.m. at the Wave Farm pond.

Victoria Keddie, "Chamber Music Part C"



Licht-Akiyama Trios, "Tomorrow Outside Tomorrow" (Editions Mego)



Wire, "Numbered" from "Nocturnal Koreans."

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Techdirt reports that the U.S. House of Repressentatives, after 20 years of complaints, passed a requirement that would close a loophouse that allowed the government to read any email over 180 days old. Any communication on a server more than 180 days was considered abandoned and accessible to government officials without a warrant. That was because back in 1986 you downloaded your email off a server. But now with cloud computing and web mail, that all has changed, and the law makes no sense. The House voted unanimously April 27, 419 to zero with 14 absent for the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The Senate still must pass the bill, but what bill passes the House 419 to zero these days?

Radio World reports that Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Mignon L. Clyburn bragged to the audience at last week's National Association of Broadcasters convention about the success of the low-power FM service. “As you know, low-power FM radio service was created as a way to serve local and/or underrepresented groups within communities,” she said, according to a text of her remarks from the commission. “In just over two years since the LPFM filing window opened, 1,900 construction permits for new LPFM stations have been issued with the expectation that by the end of this year, there will be approximately 2,000 LPFM station operating on the air. This phenomenal success story will result in a diversity of new viewpoints and hyper local content that is so desperately needed in our country.” Clyburn, one of the three Democrats on the commission, spoke to a crowd once very hostile to the idea of low-power FM. The NAB and National Public Radio once argued that allowing community access to underused frequencies by tiny stations would interfere with larger stations. What they really thought was that adding community radio stations would steal their audiences. Turns out they are wrong on both counts, as studies have found that listening to the radio leads to more listening to the radio, not less, and that attracting new audiences helps similar stations.

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On April 25 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Justice Department announced approval of Charter Communications merger with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, deals valued at $88 billion. The two Internet service providers combined could control 70 percent of the nation's 25Mbps-and-up broadband subscriptions, Ars Technica reports. Last year's FCC Net Neutrality ruling considered internet service a public utility, and in this public utility, one company owns more than two-thirds of the market. The Justice Department only approved the merger with the prohibition that the combined company may not enter into anti-competive deals with programmers that would keep shows and movies off streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu. The FCC says Charter agreed not to impose data caps on users for seven years, and must abide by the net neutrality rules even if the rules are overturned in a federal appeals court case. “The cumulative impact of these conditions will be to provide additional protection for new forms of video programming services offered over the Internet,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said. Free Press President Craig Aaron disagreed. "Customers of the newly merged entity will be socked with higher prices as Charter attempts to pay off the nearly $27 billion debt load it took on to finance this deal," Aaron said. "Charter and Comcast now have unprecedented control over our cable and Internet connections. Their crushing monopoly power will mean fewer choices, higher prices, no accountability and no competition." The new company will be the second-largest broadband provider, with 19.4 million broadband subscribers, and third-largest video provider, after Comcast and DirecTV, with 17.3 million customers.

Darren Orf at Gizmodo rounds up what the public now knows about the Apple vs. FBI case of the San Bernardino terrorist's iPhone. FBI Director James Comey told a crowd in London April 21 that the U.S. government paid someone to hack open the phone. He said they were paid more money than Comey would make for the remainder of his seven years and four months as FBI director which is at least $1.34 million. Comey says, “It was, in my view, worth it,” although all reports indicate the FBI did not find any useful information on the phone. Perhaps Comey is referring to the legal fees saved, as the Justice Department ended its lawsuit against Apple when the FBI broke into the phone. Read the full story at Gizmodo.

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At 12:09 p.m. April 21, KCMP (89.3 FM), the Minneapolis radio station known as The Current, played Prince’s “The Beautiful Ones,” and didn't play a song by any other artist for over 48 hours. The pop star Prince died that day, and that caused many people to want to hear Prince's music. But Prince had a unique marketing and sales campaign among most musicians, with no songs available online except for the new Tidal service. Radio stations playing all Prince CDs and LPs became the source for mourners, and the Minnesota station with long ties to the pop star was the logical choice of many. Last year, Prince helped the station with a “Prince A-to-Z" marathon, and after his death the station toured his albums first chronologically, and then played every song alphabetically. The Current station also had reporters the first day at Prince's Paisley Park Studios, and at the First Avenue club where the the movie "Purple Rain" was filmed, and where Prince often performed.

Sturgill Simpson, "In Bloom" from "A Sailor's Guide To Earth"



xiu xiu, "Plays the Music of Twin Peaks."



Mendi + Keith Obadike, "Numbers Station [Furtive Movements]" (excerpt)
This is a 2min excerpt from a 25min live performance and installation. This project sonifies New York Police Department Stop and Frisk data. Mendi + Keith read numbers from NYPD reports while generating sine tones from this same NYPD database. This two channel sound installation was created and broadcast (via shortwave radio) during a live performance at the Ryan Lee Gallery in New York.
Numbers Station [Furtive Movements] is the 1st in a series of works. The 2nd work, Numbers Station [Red Record] was performed at The Metropolitan Museum's Breuer building on 3/2016.



Vetiver, "Stranger Still (Daniel T remix)" (Easy Sound Recording Co.)



Bajah, "Breaking My Heart" produced by Brooklyn’s Teleseen, 7" on Someplace Called Brooklyn.