Technology

The Story of Electronics has just been released

By Renee Blanchard
November 9, 2010

The US based Story of Stuff Project has just released their next film, The Story of Electronics. It cleverly explains how the electronics industry ‘design for the dump’ instead of ‘design to last’ practices are hurting our environment and the health of workers who recycle our old products. The film reiterates what Greenpeace and other environmental organizations around the world have been asking the electronics industry for years, eliminate hazardous substances, take responsibility for obsolete products, and redesign electronics to last longer.

Last week, Greenpeace released the 16th edition of the Guide to Greener Electronics applauding the progress the industry has made. Philips released the first ever PVC and BFR free TV, the Econova, and Panasonic put into place a TV take back program in India, another industry first. These steps forward are a welcome momentum, but what Greenpeace, and this film shows, is more green solutions in the electronics industry is desperately needed.

Though its possible to find many more PVC and BFR free products on the market than in 2006 when the Guide to Greener Electronics was first launched, the industry is still lacking in efforts to take responsibility for the end of life of its own products. And as our Cool IT campaign is demanding, the electronics industry must also use their innovation to create solutions to combat climate change.

The Story of Electronics says that if all our obsolete electronics products ended up in the garage of the electronics industry’s CEOs we would definitely see more and safer recycling programs across the world, I couldn’t agree more. Right now, legal and illegal exporting of electronics products are moving from developed to developing nations where workers are breaking down mobile phones and laptops with rudimentary tools and practices with little to no protection. And the UN estimates that upwards of 40 million tons of e-waste is generated globally each year.

In 2008, Greenpeace campaigners traveled to Ghana to expose the hidden hazardous involved in ‘recycling’ e-waste in developing nations with no infrastructure to do so safely. Not only are the workers being poisoned by the leaching and releasing of toxic chemicals as they break down our old electronics, but so is the water and the land around these scrapyards.

The Story of Electronics is a great film that shows us the lifecycle of the electronics products we have in our homes and what changes the industry must make in order to truly produce greener products.

Renee’s original post is here:
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/news-and-blogs/campaign-blog/first-reduce-our-electronic-waste/blog/28310

and Greenpeace’s vastly varied activities can be found here:
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/

Let’s Play A Game

Editor’s Note:  It may be enticing to click on the video screen first, but please browse at this first link first.

http://www.americasarmy.com/

Call of Duty, Black Ops Trailer – Product release date set as 11-9-10 -

Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture. Today… it’s
Wednesday, September 8, 2010

More Here @ 3 pm (PST)

Est. 1964 Re-Incarnated by Public Demand

This is the original, 60’s, counter culture, LA Free Press. Today’s Best Alternative View & Our Old Hippie Headlines, Too! A Head Trip for Smart Minds.

(This article refers directly to today’s issue of the Los Angeles Free Press. If  you have not begun at the beginning of the series, please click HERE.   If you have, but have not yet seen today’s issue, click HERE.)

Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture. Today it’s…

…all about: How we’ve let the war in and, if we’ll ever, again, want to say “Nevermore”?

by Steven M. Finger

Commercials that push every button – honor, pride, education, friendship, the adventure of parachuting, undersea diving, flying in that open helicopter just ohhh so casually.  And games, too – even more exciting than all that music in the commercials.  And you get to shoot ‘em up, without ever getting shot yourself.  Wait… you do get shot… but, just a moment… there you are, ‘re-spawned’, good as new, another 1,000 lives to go.

How much fun is it?  Here’s a quick – and VERY old figure – within the first 2 years of its 2002 release, America’s Army was downloaded 16 million times, for 600 million missions; 4 million players registered in (yes, gave their names and birth dates.)  They were, primarily, between the ages of 13 and 21.  And then they spent, in just those two years, 60 million hours playing.  Of course, they can play all day for free.  (Your tax dollars at work!)

Apparently, the experience is not only good for recruitment, it has helped along an entire industry, computer war games for children and adults alike.  One game, Call Of Duty (actually a series) surpassed 55 million units worldwide, that’s $3 billion in retail sales – and that was as of almost a year ago.

More on what this actually means… back at 6.

Here are the keywords to our thinking today: NIMH, National Institute of Mental Health, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, Computer Wargames, Military Recruitment, U.S. Army military recruitment, Family, Community, Public Service, Military Service, U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, U.S. Marine Corp, U.S. Air Force,  Changing Society, Self-Improvement, Social Change, Society & Culture

Here are links to today’s items:

[1] Let’s Play A Game

[2] Best Military Commercial Ever?

[3] Best Military Commercial Ever – ‘Enhanced’

[4] NIMH Researchers Talk About Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Encrypt Your Phone Conversations! Make Them Secure From Big Brother!

http://zfoneproject.com/   This is the url where you can obtain information and a free download of Phil Zimmerman’s new program, zphone, allowing anyone to have phone conversations that can not be overheard by hackers, criminal or political.

Phil Zimmerman is the developer of the program Pretty Good Privacy. PGP is widely used on the internet by companies and individuals to maintain privacy. Big Brother does not like this program because PGP can prevent the government from viewing exchanges between individuals on the internet i.e. internet-tapping.  As a result, Zimmerman has a long history of involvement in litigation with the government over legislation and rules preventing the export of PGP to other countries. The L.A. Free Press will provide you with more information about zphone as this story develops.

Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture. Today… it’s
Wednesday, September 1, 2010

More Here @ 3 pm (PST)

Est. 1964 Re-Incarnated by Public Demand

This is the original, 60’s, counter culture, LA Free Press. Today’s Best Alternative View & Our Old Hippie Headlines, Too! A Head Trip for Smart Minds.

(This article refers directly to today’s issue of the Los Angeles Free Press. If you have not yet seen it, please, before reading further, click HERE.)

Yesterday, it was the Counter Culture. Today it’s…

all about who’s looking into our life and why, and how we, individually and collectively, have come to say no way, no more.

by Steven M. Finger

Thought it was important to let you know, via our first Item, that the invasion of privacy (in this case, pronounced as the British do…priv’acy) is not just an act of our government, but spreading throughout Europe like the latest fashion.

With that point made, we needed to return back to the US to make another one that may surely affect the future of our country.   Most of us know of the Patriot Act, and we know it circumvents many civil rights we hold dear.  But few of us have considered – may not even have known – of the impact it has on the rights of students.  (Click here to review that posted article.)

In our earlier Series on the growing distrust of our government and the consequent rise of movements and third parties, students – educated, motivated and not willing to have their needs lowly prioritized – will be striving to be a larger component of the political process.  The Patriot Act may put a brake on that.

On the other hand, an act of outright defiance – by what many consider one of the most meek and mild-mannered professional groups (librarians!!) – virtually ground one of those Patriot Act provisions to halt.  While the article here speaks about the Chapters of the American Library Association putting forth resolutions, the word is that many a librarian simply put the regulation aside by refusing to record what books a patron choose to read.

They are lessons well-learned:  divided we stand…, and personal courage shapes nations.

Our final Item ties more closely to those to lessons than you might suspect:  it enables you to take a personal stand and it leads to a tale of personal fortitude and intrigue – another act of defiance that said, loud and clear that our personal business is our own business, here’s a wall for your peeking eyes.

Here are the keywords to our thinking today: Big Brother in Britain, Fair Trials International, James Slack, Surveillance Society, ACLU, Personal Privacy, Patriot Act, Section 203, Section 215, Section 901, Student Activist Groups, Students, Terrorists, American Library Association, Lauren Barack, Librarians, Patriot Act, Section 206, Section 215, Section 505, Cell Phone Encryption, PGP, Phil Zimmerman, Pretty Good Privacy, zphone, Art Kunkin,  L.A. Free Press, Los Angeles Free Press, Changing Society, Self-Improvement, Social Change, Society & Culture

Here are links to today’s items:

[1] European police to spy on Britons: Now ministers hand over Big Brother powers to foreign officers

[2] Patriot Act Stands Over Students

[3] Librarians Push Against Patriot Act

[4] Encrypt Your Phone Conversations! Make Them Secure From Big Brother!

Every Click You Make, Big Brother Is Watching You

— Illustration: 1984 movie prop.

Last week the Wall Street Journal ran a terrific series of stories called “What They Know.” The general subject was personal privacy—or the lack of it—in the digital world, and the first article in the series explained how websites routinely track your movements on the web and collect a genuinely astonishing amount of personal information about you in the process. The Journal examined 50 sites using a test computer and discovered that these sites collectively installed a total of 3,180 tracking files—an average of 63 tracking files per site:

The state of the art is growing increasingly intrusive, the Journal found. Some tracking files can record a person’s keystrokes online and then transmit the text to a data-gathering company that analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person’s social connections. Other tracking files can re-spawn trackers that a person may have deleted.

….Some of the tracking files identified by the Journal were so detailed that they verged on being anonymous in name only. They enabled data-gathering companies to build personal profiles that could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.

A full list of the sites they examined is here. The most intrusive were dictionary.com and msn.com, which installed over 200 tracking files each. The least intrusive were craigslist.org and wikipedia.org.

What to do about this? Read more…