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If there is something we’ve learned when learning all we can about the Nazis, it is how incredibly easy it is to take freedoms away and how sane the reasoning will sound. Unfortunately, recent events here in Finland have reminded me about all this.

After living in a free society for two decades people start to take their freedom for granted. They forget why things like freedom of speech and universal human rights are needed, and instead see censorship as a solution to their fears. Fed a steady diet of tabloids and Most Shocking Sexual Parking Violations on late night TV they see bogeymen under their beds and demand that their rights be taken away.

Now what does this have to do with anything? Well, the previous government of Finland, one of the most free societies on Earth, and with the best of intentions of course, enacted an Internet censorship law. In theory it was meant to make it harder to profit on the exploitation of children.

In practice, we get a secret list of “illegal” websites, put together by an unnamed, unsupervised bureaucrat. The blocking of this list is “voluntary”, but it was made clear that unless ISP’s complied it would be made mandatory.

After Matti Nikki published the list and criticised it for consisting of almost exclusively of ordinary porn sites that were not illegal, his site was added to the list and he was charged with aiding in the distribution of illegal pornography. This led to a public outcry that revealed some rather scary facts about the system. The sites are blocked based on domain. According to the police, one link to a site that the unnamed bureaucrat considers to be child porn will lead to the entire domain being blocked.

This means that a single spam link to a “suspicious” site on a forum or buried in blog comments could get a whole domain blocked. However, Google is excluded because according to police “it is a browser, not a site”. Webmasters (or the local law enforcement) are not notified and since the list is secret the only way to notice the block is to try and access the site. There is no real way to appeal the decision, only an email link (that initially didn’t even work) on the page that tells you that you tried to access an illegal site.

Simply put, one unnamed individual was given absolute power to block an entire country from accessing a website and label it child pornography. There is no way for anyone else to review the decisions and people who have spoken against this method of censorship have been accused of being child molesters. The minister of Communications basically reacts to criticism by sticking her fingers in her ears and going “Think of the children! Think of the children!”

Furthermore, this law is not only a question of freedom of speech, it’s a question of computer security. There are huge holes in the implementation that make the system a perfect tool for abuse, not only by the people running it, but by malicious individuals intent on harming the business and reputation of sites. And now that the filtering system is in place, there are already demands that it should also be used to block access to gambling sites and sites that violate copyright (the recording industry demands that Pirate Bay should be blocked, like in Denmark).

The good thing is that thanks to Matti Nikki there is now a public discussion and a demonstration that just started at the Parliament. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail and people again remember that the end does not justify the means.

(This post is in Finnish, and it’s about Finnish manga Oblivion High, that’s gonna be out soon. And it rocks.)

Ihan hiljattain putkahti sähköpostiin toimittajana uraa tehneeltä, Wreckin ruotsinkääntäjänäkin ansioituneelta Johanna Koljoselta vihjettä siitä, että häneltä on pukkaamassa kotimainen viisiosainen mangasarja Oblivion High. Empiiriset kokeet osoittavat, että Wreckereistä moni on myös mangusti, ja kotimainen manga tuskin on mikään ovista ja ikkunoista tursuileva ilmiö, ajattelin siitä täälläkin kertoa - ja kun tiedän, miten hemmetin hyvä kirjoittaja Johanna on, en voi kun suositella niille, joita aihepiiri kiinnostaa, tsekkaamaan setit ulos, kuten ameriikan maalla tavataan sanoa, saisikohan tähän vielä pari sivulausetta, ihan vaan kun vauhtiin päästiin.

Tässä vielä pieni minitiiseri tuloillaanolevasta sarjasta. Julkaisupäivä ekalle osalle on 31.3.08.

EDIT: Ja koko traileri löytyy tästä:

First teaser for AJ Annila’s Sauna has been released. There’s also a teaser website with a retroish text adventure/choose-your-own-story type of game. With more videos at the end for those who finish the game.

And yeah, we’re working with the same producers as Sauna, but it means that we’ve got a look at the script. It’s good.

Fresh from Facebook, the first picture from AJ Annila’s upcoming horror film Sauna. Tero (the producer) showed us a three minute promo yesterday and the film is looking really good.

2008 will be a bloody interesting year for Finnish movies. After decades of kitchen drama there are four Finnish horror films coming this year. First up is Dark Floors, the Lordi film on 8th of February. Without a set date are Sauna, Skeleton Crew from the makers of Kohtalon Kirja (who are practically our neighbors being based in Ylöjärvi) and the zombies in WWII film Stone’s war.

Huba -tiimin kaverit ovat saaneet uutta kamaa nettiin, nimittäin jo edesmenneen Yle Extran sketsiklinikassa palkitun pätkänsä MÄX - miesten kanava. Käykää katsomassa.

And for those who don’t speak Finnish, the Huba guys have a subtitled version of their previous film. They are seriously funny.

From the Finnish independent filmmakers, an oldskool production crew that goes by the name Acid Cinema is about to release their next short film in 27.12., and although I have *no* idea on what will the film be about and what the heck is going on there, the teasers sure look interesting. As YouTube seems to be sucking pretty rough today, you can also download the teasers from here (first teaser) and here (second teaser).

Here’s the first trailer:

And the new teaser released today:

Acid Cinema is known from their earlier films like Protocop, Juoppojen sota and Planet of the Bouncers, and they have a pretty convincing catalog of 20 short films released before The Jolly Scoundrel.

The Trailer for the Lordi movie Dark Floors has been released. Of all the places in the (virtual) world it’s available on Habbo Hotel. Check out the trailer there.

The video size is ridiculously small it’s hard to say much about the film yet, but what I can see it looks pretty cool. Though for us Finns it’s hard to take Lordi seriously as evil monsters. Even though the Eurovision song contest is close to hell winning it made the band national heroes.

Swimming pool, sauna, a table literally filled up with alcohol and food, 4chan, guitar hero and around 50 people was the name of the game for this weekend, when Energia team threw a pikkujoulut-party here in Tampere, the center of the world. The main reason for the party was actually our collective birthday - the Energia office team 140 years birthday. Me, Samuli, Antti, Jarmo and Laku all have b-days pretty close to each others, and since last year we learned that it’s pretty stupid to buy together gifts to each one of us each week, so we just decided that we’ll invite our friends and have a party.

Samuli, Atte and Monto are enjoying the pool. Sorry about shitty picture quality, if I find somebody with better pictures, I’ll try to throw a better one here.

The place we rented was this cool joint with sauna, enough space and as a super bonus - a pretty large swimming pool (the place is called Kotilosauna - it’s reasonably priced, so if you wanna have a good party in Tampere, get that place - end of commercial break!). We had asked everybody to bring along some alcohol and something to eat, and pretty soon there was around nine thousand (maybe a little over) bottles of vodka, beer, koskenkorva and wine to keep us entertained.

I’ve never been a huge fan of company parties actually, since in most cases they have two major flaws: a) somebody has organised a shitload of stupid little ‘games’ to entertain guests, and b) the people would rather be somewhere else than spending time with the same boring faces they barely manage not to kill at workplace during weeks. And usually it gets pretty dirty in the end, somebody says something to somebody, somebody fucks wrong person or something like that… you know the drill.

With Energia, it’s a bit different. Although Antti might disagree, we actually enjoy spending time with each other and our closest business associates - and on top of it all, we are so cool and hypersexy it’s just an aura of awesomeness that nothing else is required! We also decided not to organize any specific program - my experience is, that if you have enough alcohol and the critical mass of good people is reached, nothing else is required.

Only speciality for the evening we had planned - which I would like to suggest also to everybody thinking of something funny in party - was that we looped a slideshow of pictures I had been collecting from 4chan for the last couple of months during the whole party. It’s not intrusive, doesn’t require music to be turned out for example and people sitting silently, and the pictures can just flip in the background, but if somebody wants to have a good 10 minutes of laughter after few drinks, nothing could be better. Me and Antti were literally rolling on the floor with our eyes wet when we just had a little break from sauna and watched some slides.

My personal opinion is that Guitar Hero is the cancer that’s killing good parties. I’ve been to couple of GH-ridden parties and just hate to stand and watch people playing like shit some tunes I would actually like to listen. But regardless of what I had specifically asked for, Laku brought X-box and Guitar Hero… But I have to say it was a good thing. The place was big enough for us to listen to *real* music in the pool room, and the GH-freaks really had a good time playing the game in the adjacent room. So, I think what we learned from this was that Guitar Hero fits to parties ONLY if there’s another same-size room with a stereo playing real music and people are not forced to listen/watch GH.

So, eventually everything went well. It was unbelieveable, but having invited around 50 people there, there was not a single asshole around (a pool full of dicks, though…), not a single passing-out-in-a-toilet-situation, no fights or arguments, only damn good party and nice pikkujoulu. Afterwards we headed - as it seems to be our habit - to YO-talo, where the things kept going on to early morning hours.

Same time next year, I guess!

Ps. as an eye-opening experience, Johanna, our scriptwriteress, brought some cheese and mustard from I think Denmark along, and although at first combining them together seemed like blasphemy to me, they went together very well! Just try, buy Koti Sinappi for example and some Mustaleima, and try them together, it’s great!