Hasta La Gadget!

Performance artists. What won’t they do for attention? One guy, French artist Abraham Poincheval, is spending 13 days inside a taxidermy bear. That’s right. He is camping out inside of a dead bear.

He is doing this for his performance art piece “Dans La Peau de l’Ours” (“Inside the Skin of the Bear”) at the Hunting and Wildlife Museum in Paris through April 13, 2014. And also for attention. It’s just how artists are. Poincheval will remain enclosed in a cramped compartment inside of the bear. Kind of like a bear baby in the womb.

The “performance” is being streamed live via two cameras if you’re into that kind of thing. Watch man and bear co-exist in a truly weird way.

Whooah, we’re half way there
Livin’ in a bear
Take my hand and we’ll make it – I swear
Livin’ in a bear

[via BBC News via Laughing Squid]

When you think about it, does anyone really know what’s going on behind the scenes of the internet? While you’re attempting to figure out how “42” is the obvious answer to that, French regulator ARCEP is moving ahead with an investigation into Verizon and AT&T. Specifically, the two have failed in an attempt to block the aforesaid entity from investigating interconnection agreements.

For those unaware, these types of deals are widely viewed as being able to undermine net neutrality, and we’ve seen the FCC look into similar matters here in the United States. The long and short of it is as follows: with high-bandwidth services growing rapidly, ISPs far and wide are contemplating the move to extract additional revenue out of backbone providers by charging them to deliver heavy traffic to end users. It’ll be interesting to see what ARCEP digs up — something tells us the findings will be known well beyond the borders of France.

Filed under: Internet, Verizon, AT&T

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Via: GigaOM

Source: ARCEP

ISPs in the US are just getting around to enforcing a “six strikes” policy against illegal P2P sharing, but France is now contemplating a crackdown on the streaming and direct downloads of pirated content. Hadopi, the government organization behind the country’s existing “three strikes” law, released a new report that proposes websites take a page from YouTube’s book and actively monitor content by using recognition algorithms and the like to take down things that are presumed illegal. If a site weren’t to cooperate after a round of warnings, it might face penalties including DNS and IP blocking, domain name seizures and even financial repercussions that involve having their accounts with “payment intermediaries” (think PayPal) suspended. As for enforcement of this potential government mandate, the dossier posits that it could lean on internet service providers instead of hosting services, which according to EU law, can’t be forced to conduct widespread surveillance. For now, these suggestions aren’t being made policy, but Hadopi is mulling them over.

[Image credit: keith.bellvay, Flickr]

Filed under: Internet

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Via: Ars Technica

Source: Hadopi (1, translated), (2, PDF)