The reappearance

Quite awkward to blog about swedish politics in english, but as I am trying to keep english as the main language of this blog, I hope you understand…

Anyhow, a few days ago the swedish minister of justice Beatrice Ask presented an outrageous idea that suspected sex buyers ( yes, that is a criminal offence in Sweden ) could have a snail mail in an unusual color sent home to them, basically saying “you are a suspect of this crime”. The unusual colour is to have your neighbours and family members to know about it.

This has by many been called “medieval methods” by mimicking the “skampåle” – a device used for public humiliation of criminals, of which the latest time of usage in Sweden is1855 (according to swedish wikipedia at the time of this writing.).

And now as lightning out of a blue sky (swedish proverb, basically meaning “how very unexpected”, but here in a quite sarcastic way), the swedish politician Tomas Bodström is totally mad at the proposal, and demands that Ask stops being the minister of Justice immediately. What is extremely interesting is that Bodström once himself (as the previous minister of justice 2002-2006) proposed and paved the way for privacy-damaging laws in the past. This is now the head line news for at least three ( ! ) of the largest swedish newspapers on the net (Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet) as well as a lot of other smaller news papers.

A few years ago the social democrats in Sweden made a very infamous politician their new party leader. That person was Mona Sahlin. I still can’t beleive it’s their actual intent of letting her actually run for elections. It must have been a tactical choice…

Bodström – having been quite out of political news on the latest – is a perfect match for that. He is probably still widely popular among the general population – having written a book and being into the popular sport soccer. He even went as far as to claim (lie?) that he was to move to USA with his family to try and remove any suspicions that he might want to get back to power any time soon.

I have been suspecting this for quite a while, and now it really must be just a matter of weeks ( maximum a month or two ) until he is back in politics – this time as the leader of the largest party in Sweden. Probably shifting the attitude in their favour by some extent. ( Now that shouldn’t be so hard if you consider how bad support Mona actually seems to have ).

Oh and by the way. Both Ask and Bodström are both the nemesis of the swedish Pirate Party. A party that fights against having a too strong state authority in the sense of police authority and surveillance. Claiming that privacy in life is so valuable to people that it should be put into the list of human rights, and that these rights clearly should extend out on the internet as well as in society as a whole. Without anyone to protect truly liberal values today we will soon be as badly off as those British ingsoc’s of today are ( or worse! ). How could a tax cut or increase of just a few percentage points be more valuable than your right to talk in private with people on the internet or your right of talking on the phone without being wiretapped? Surveillance is a punishment that should be used by society for those who have shown not to care about the most important laws – it is not a tool to be used on free citizens who are not the subject of some criminal investigation!

It is still hundreds of times more likely in all stable democracies to walk across the street and be killed by a car than in some terrorist attack. In Sweden it is more like 1 to 7000 if you count the only possible terror attack that has occured the last 70 years. And as a matter of fact that “attack” was done in the midst of WW2, so calling it a “terrorist” attack is not entirely uncontroversial.

(See what I did there by the way?)

The FRA-law passed

The FRA-law passed in the “riksdag” (parliament) a few days ago.

This means in practice that the FRA (military information service) are allowed to spy on all electronic communication from and between virtually all swedes without any kind of suspicion.
Both the liberals and conservatives have shown in to consecutive elections that they have no idea what democracy is about.

I think that this will lead to greater support of small parties like the “sweden democrats” and the pirate party who are currently not in the riksdag. The sweden democrats are quite close to get into the riksdag.

This will probably lead to a dangerous combination (sweden “democrats” + FRA-spying established = effective systematic persecution of homosexuals, immigrants and so on will be possible given enough votes to establish draconic and fascist laws to allow this).

In short: the democracy in Sweden is on a dramatic downfall. The riksdag will have to do all they can to change this before it is to late! Many things indicate that this very well might happen in the 2010 election.

Collisions and time slots

Now the clock is ticking down the last few weeks of this semester.

Two exams to go.
As promised, the result of our CDIO project:

Will perhaps be back in a few days with a new post. Many things have happened. And more are to come.

Conditional sentence

On May 5 some large Swedish newspapers reported about a the sentence of a well known file-sharing case.

The 31 years old Swede got a conditional sentence. This in practice means that the Swedish police force will be able to break into anyones apartment as fast as the copyright lobby whistles to confiscate their very most personal belongings on the hard drives.

Be it related to work, love, sex, medicine, economics, politics or whatever!

This is perhaps what sickens me the most.

In Sweden we will have a right government for some few more years. Some years ago (2002-2006) we had a left-green government. Now we have seen how both of these traditional “sides” of politics brutally and fanatically fail to address the issues of file-sharing and personal integrity in a way that the people* find just, a cornerstone of every liberal democracy.

* More than 1,3 million swedes do share copyrighted material over the Internet.

If are swedish, you can read more about this case here, here and here.

Also, feel free to give him economical support . He probably needs it!

—-

Now time for some hours of sleep after a long day.

Testing, testing…

Hi.

It’s been a while since I last wrote…

Haven’t got the speed up on this writing yet..
Since last, a few things have happened:

The CDIO project in computer vision is nearly finished. We will make a short promotional movie for it (remember that CDIO is supposed to simulate the whole process including marketing and consumer contact), which will most probably be made available (along with other videos where project-members will be trying it out) on youtube and other places. This weekend we have spent some 40-60ish hours performing all the tests on the systems and sub-systems.

Me and Johan bought ourselves a real Rubik’s cube today. I have solved it 3 times today but still don’t know how to do the last layer. I miss the knowledge about certain algorithms, and refuse to learn them until I have thoroughly found a satisfying way to learn them. 🙂

Will post more info on thesis related stuff when I can say something interesting about it for certain. But I can spoil that if everything goes well, maybe I’ll not live in Linköping much more than a month from now 🙂

Both exciting, stressing and a bit scary 🙂

I still have a few friends over here who I will most probably visit at least some times each semester or so. Also perhaps some technical and economical obstacles that have to be overcome.

I am growing even more interested in buying a nice little eeePc 900. The new model in the popular eeePc-series – a series of very small, cheap and easy to use laptops. The 900 model has a ~9″ lcd screen, 12 (or 20) Gb of SSD memory, 512 Mb internal memory, a celeron processor and very small size, as you can see here:

It is supposed to cost about 399€ which is quite cheap compared to most laptops, and extremely cheap if you take the size into account. To summarize: a small laptop that you really can take with you everywhere, on a trip, to all your friends, to school (not much bigger than any course-book, and smaller than some thick ones). Ok: one thing to be said… You don’t want this if you want to be able to play the latest and coolest games, but hey… thats what you have gaming consoles and stationary computers for 😉

A brave new blag

Finally I have got one too. A brave new blag.

Here I will describe what happens in my life and interesting things i stumble across, be it politics, religion, culture or whatever.

First I have to recommend listening to In Flames new album here.
It’s a shame it seems they have removed all but one of the new songs prior to release… (The Mirror’s truth).
Anyway they should be all over youtube by now.

Also check this out. A blag full of wonderful humor.
Now it’s time for breakfast and studies.

Hello world!

Ok. This seems to be some silly standard first-post-ever which I didn’t find before I wrote my own first one…