profoundheterogeneity “I am sitting here, six in the morning, I am staring at two people bascially naked in the shower together with 30 people watching and its like uh okay, but that’s the future.”-Josh Harris, We Live in Public Perhaps the most haunting film I have watched on publicity and the digital network is Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public. On the surface the documentary is about the Josh Harris and his various internet ventures. About ten pages into the introduction of Jeff Jarvis’s new book Public Parts I started wondering if he had seen TImoner’s film. Jarvis in Brief Before I attempt to explain all of my concerns/problems with this book, I want to start by laying out Jarvis’s argument. In this regard Jarvis tells a history, a brief one, of how technological transformations have historically produced discussions about values and culture. In this regard Jarvis says that when you pull back and take the long view of privacy you learn two things. “Do you feel any closer to definition of privacy? 1. 2.
Stop Online Piracy Act: Can the geek lobby stop Hollywood from wrecking the Internet? Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. In a time of legislative gridlock, the Stop Online Piracy Act looked like a rare bipartisan breakthrough. The bill, known as SOPA, promised a brave new Internet—one cleansed of “rogue websites” that hawk pirated songs and movies as well as counterfeit goods. For Congress, the legislation’s goals amounted to a can’t-lose trifecta: uphold justice, protect legitimate businesses (and jobs!) A lonely few, at first. But something happened on the way to easy passage and the flourish of the president’s signature: The Internet fought back. In theory, SOPA enlists Internet service providers and advertising networks to filter out the “worst of the worst” sites, most of them based offshore. As these critiques began to mount, the open-Internet groups were joined by a growing coalition of SOPA haters. Suddenly the bill had opponents in Congress. Campaigns to save the Internet from nefarious legislation aren’t anything new. Rep.
What it Means Today to be 'Connected' - Lucy P. Marcus by Lucy P. Marcus | 12:10 PM October 13, 2011 Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. I was recently selected as one of Britain’s “best connected” women by Director, a business magazine. Connecting with people and innovative ideas is more important than ever. The integration of social media tools, like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and Facebook, and the use of technologies like video Skype means that when used to best effect, the online and offline exchange of ideas can be seamless and without the restrictions of distance and time. One of the most exciting developments that technological advances have facilitated is the breaking down of the hierarchy of ideas, allowing great ideas to bubble to the surface from virtually anywhere. I have found myself asking a question via Twitter, sending the query out into the ether, only to have some of the most creative and interesting solutions coming back in very short order. Why?
Culture Desk: Bigger Brother: The Exponential Law of Privacy Loss This past Tuesday, Facebook made a deal with the F.T.C.: from now on, the social-networking company can no longer humbug us about privacy. If we’re told that something we post on the site will be private, it will stay that way, unless we give Facebook permission to make it public. Or at least sort of. For a while. Facebook has been relentless in its effort to make more of what it knows about us—the music we listen to, the photos we take, the friends we have—available to more people, and it will surely figure out creative ways, F.T.C. or no F.T.C., to further that campaign. The company’s leadership sincerely believes that the more we share the better the world will be. Meanwhile, Zynga has announced that it’s going to raise about a billion dollars in an impending I.P.O. These are just three stories from the past seven days. It’s impossible to exactly measure what per cent of our time is spent connected to the Internet: texting, shopping, surfing, browsing, sleeping.
Hacked! - Magazine As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the “cloud”—remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity—a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be. A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years’ worth of hacked and deleted e‑mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now—and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future. On April 13 of this year, a Wednesday, my wife got up later than usual and didn’t check her e‑mail until around 8:30 a.m. The previous night, she had put her computer to “sleep,” rather than shutting it down. When she came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all. We thought that “other than this” was a nice touch.
Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, a pair of bills that threaten Internet freedom Photograph by Sean Gallup/Getty Images. The United States of America was forged in resistance to collective reprisals—the punishment of many for the acts of few. In 1774, following the Boston Tea Party, the British Parliament passed a series of laws—including the mandated closure of the port of Boston—meant to penalize the people of Massachusetts. These abuses of power, labeled the “Intolerable Acts,” catalyzed the American Revolution by making plain the oppression of the British crown. More than 200 years later, the U.S. Congress is considering bills that would lead to collective reprisals against online communities.* The Senate’s PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House are supposed to address copyright infringement and counterfeiting. The interconnected nature of the Internet fostered the growth of online communities such as Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. If you think this scenario is unlikely, consider what happened to Mooo.com earlier this year.
How Two Scammers Built an Empire Hawking Sketchy Software | Magazine Illustration: Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo Before they built an international underworld empire — before they weaseled their way onto millions of computers, before their online enterprise was bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, before they were fugitives wanted by Interpol — Sam Jain, now 41, and Daniel Sundin, 33, were just a couple of garden-variety Internet hustlers. The two, who met around 2001, started out with a series of relatively modest scams and come-ons. Then, in August 2003, Jain and Sundin had a breakthrough thanks to the arrival of the so-called Blaster worm. Coincidentally, Sundin had already written some firewall software called Computershield. Source: Panda Security The plan worked. Over the next few years, imitators sprang up. IMI employees didn’t know each other’s real names — everyone just went by an online nickname.
The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It. Here’s Why Fred Wilson recently posted a great video on his blog with the CEO of Forrester Research, George Colony. The money slide is the graphic below. The chart shows three scarce resources and their improvements over time. The top line is available storage (S), the middle line represents processing power (following Moore’s law) or (P) and the bottom line is the Network (N). In it he asserts that the web is dying and in its ashes will see the rise of the “App Internet.” He’s right about this. Colony’s presentation is intriguing (and worth a watch if you have a few minutes) because I love to see when informed people make arguments that are different than you ordinarily hear (and different from my own views). In the end, Seth Godin’s comments on Fred’s blog post said it best: In other words, nobody can really assert authoritatively what the future of tech or the Internet will hold. George’s Arguments 1. 2. 3. In this era the computing model known as “client / server computing” was popularized. 1.
Life in the Age of Extremes - Bill Davidow - Technology The Internet causes connections to multiply and strengthen, creating a frenzy of positive feedback, which can drive people apart--not together Optimists have long dominated the cyber-landscape, firm and vocal in their belief that the Internet creates a more transparent world, and that the quick and easy access to information it provides is bringing the global population together into one enlightened chorus of harmony. My perspective is different, and my goal in this, the first in a series of posts for The Atlantic, is to lay out the implications of an Internet-driven world. I have been deeply concerned that the Internet has created a centrifugal force that has the potential to tear us apart. Hobsbawm wrote: "The world of the third millennium will therefore almost certainly continue to be one of violent politics and violent political changes." Central to my own viewpoint is the concept of positive feedback. The Internet is positive feedback's best friend. Image: David Blackwel/Flickr.
The NS Profile: Tim Berners-Lee Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web among a small circle of fellow computer enthusiasts. Today, the 56-year-old Briton remains one of the internet's most vigorous advocates. Its vast success, however, has had a downside: it has exposed him to a bombardment of requests from visionaries, obsessives and rubberneckers, as well as hordes of children demanding help with school projects. Berners-Lee has never been an enthusiastic self-publicist. “I have built a moat around myself, along with ways over that moat so that people can ask questions. That the creator of the web - a father of two children, separated from his wife and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he pursues his research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - has to live like an electronic Howard Hughes is just one of the many paradoxes that his invention has thrown up over the past two decades. It feels odd to picture him struggling to convince people of the web's potential.
Rate This Article: What’s Wrong with the Culture of Critique | Magazine Photo: Brock Davis You don’t have to read this essay to know whether you’ll like it. Just go online and assess how provocative it is by the number of comments at the bottom of the web version. (If you’re already reading the web version, done and done.) To find out whether it has gone viral, check how many people have hit the little thumbs-up, or tweeted about it, or liked it on Facebook, or dug it on Digg. A funny thing has quietly accompanied our era’s eye-gouging proliferation of information, and by funny I mean not very funny. Technoculture critic and former Wired contributor Erik Davis is concerned about the proliferation of reviews, too. Of course, Yelpification of the universe is so thorough as to be invisible. Our ever more sophisticated arsenal of stars and thumbs will eventually serve to curtail serendipity, adventure, and idiotic floundering. There’s an essential freedom in being alone with one’s thoughts, oblivious to and unpolluted by anyone else’s. Life demands assessment.
US internet providers hijacking users' search queries - tech - 04 August 2011 Read full article Continue reading page |1|2 Editorial: "Hijacking web searches for cash threatens net success" Update: Since the practice of redirecting users' searches was first exposed by New Scientist last week, we have learned that all the ISPs involved have now called a halt to the practice. They continue to intercept some queries – those from Bing and Yahoo – but are passing the searches on to the relevant search engine rather than redirecting them. Original story posted on 4 August 2011 Searches made by millions of internet users are being hijacked and redirected by some internet service providers in the US. Reese Richman, a New York law firm that specialises in consumer protection lawsuits, today filed a class action against one of the ISPs and Paxfire, which researchers believe provided the equipment used to hijack and redirect the searches. The hijacking seems to target searches for certain well-known brand names only. Buy, buy, buy The process is highly contentious.
Could the Internet Ever Be Destroyed? The raging battle over SOPA and PIPA, the proposed anti-piracy laws, is looking more and more likely to end in favor of Internet freedom — but it won't be the last battle of its kind. Although, ethereal as it is, the Internet seems destined to survive in some form or another, experts warn that there are many threats to its status quo existence, and there is much about it that could be ruined or lost. Physical destruction A vast behemoth that can route around outages and self-heal, the Internet has grown physically invulnerable to destruction by bombs, fires or natural disasters — within countries, at least. It's "very richly interconnected," said David Clark, a computer scientist at MIT who was a leader in the development of the Internet during the 1970s. Such a move would be "an act of cyberwar," Clark told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. "Whether we can effectively strike that balance is a difficult challenge and work in progress." © 2012 TechMediaNetwork.com.
Online commenting: the age of rage | Technology | The Observer For a while after his first TV series was broadcast in 2009, comedian Stewart Lee was in the habit of collecting and filing some of the comments that people made about him on web pages and social media sites. He did a 10-minute Google trawl most days for about six months and the resultant collected observations soon ran to dozens of pages. If you read those comments now as a cumulative narrative, you begin to fear for Stewart Lee. A good third of the posts fantasised about violence being done to the comic, most of the rest could barely contain the extent of their loathing. This is a small, representative selection: "I hate Stewart Lee with a passion. Lee, a standup comedian who does not shy away from the more grotesque aspects of human behaviour, or always resist dishing out some bile of his own, does not think of himself as naive. The "40,000 words of hate" have now become "anthropologically amusing" to him, he insists. The psychologists call it "deindividuation". Have they ever met?