• What Do Sneakers on Telephone Wires Really Mean? - The Atlantic
• BasicsCard users buying banned cigarettes with welfare, bartering groceries for alcohol and cash - ABC News. In other words, people will buy whatever they want to buy and get around any system like this.
• Last Call — Medium (the death of print journalism): Contrary to the contrived ignorance of media reporters, the future of the daily newspaper is one of the few certainties in the current landscape: Most of them are going away, in this decade. (If you work at a paper and you don’t know what’s happened to your own circulation or revenue in the last few years, now might be a good time to ask.) We’re late enough in the process that we can even predict the likely circumstance of its demise.
• Wikihistory | Abyss & Apex: Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip.
• Community TV: Malcolm Turnbull confirms licensing for stations will end in 2015 - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): Community television will be booted off air by the Federal Government in a little over 12 months. His solution? Move online. Good thing everyone has access to a high speed national broadband network, right?
• Big Brother, watch out!Forget about the G20 sticker blitz, another kind of revelry may be a thorny issue | Cairns Post: SIXTY-year-old grandmother Myra Gold was asleep when four police officers raided her home. They were deployed to confiscate her phone, dig through her rubbish and search her car. For stickers. Anti-G20 stickers. The woman wasn’t cooking crack, she has no connection to any terrorist organisations and she wasn’t manufacturing homemade bombs in her back yard. Stickers. ... Myra’s sticker said, “G20 benefits the 1%”.
• On Death and iPods: A Requiem | WIRED: In all likelihood we’re not just seeing the death of the iPod Classic, but the death of the dedicated portable music player. Now it’s all phones and apps. Everything is a camera. The single-use device is gone—and with it, the very notion of cool that it once carried. The iPhone is about as subversive as a bag of potato chips, and music doesn’t define anyone anymore. Soon there will be no such thing as your music library. There will be no such thing as your music. We had it all wrong! Information doesn’t want to be free, it wants to be a commodity. It wants to be packaged into apps that differ only in terms of interface and pricing models. It wants to be rented. It wants to reveal nothing too personal, because we broadcast it to Facebook [...] I miss the time when we were still defined by our music. When our music was still our music. I miss being younger, with a head full of subversive ideas; white cables snaking down my neck, stolen songs in my pocket. There will never be an app for that. Of course there will never be an app for digging through second-hand CDs at your university markets, nor digging through crates of vinyl, nor waiting by the radio for your favourite song to come on. Perhaps every major change of technology brings these feelings on. Perhaps we curate our shared playlists with the same love and attention we used to put in to dubbing a mix tape for a friend. It just doesn't quite feel that way.

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