Information R/evolution
One more viddie from the same guy who did the previous video and The Machine is Us/ing us
A vision of students today
If you still read this blog, how true does this ring?
Deep Packet Inspection
Read this excellent article on the current status of packet inspection on the Internet. The technology they have available to get rid of net neutrality is quite powerful, and really really scary.
Deep packet inspection meets ‘Net neutrality
Welcome HTEC A 07
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Still Having Difficulty With The Clark vs. Descartes Problem?
I was recently surfing the web- marveling at how vast and unorganized the internet really is… when I came across an undelivered speech prepared for a conference on Science & Literature in 1991 in Montreal. It happened to be about the nature of the mind and intelligence. In short: a fascinating read. Thought I’d post it! Have fun!
~Jeff
http://www.beanblossom.in.us/larryy/MindAndIntelligence.html
William Gibson on NSA wiretapping
I can’t explain it to you, but it has a powerful deja vu. When I got up this morning and read the USA Today headline, I thought the future had been a little more evenly distributed. Now we’ve all got some…
The interesting thing about meta-projects in the sense in which I used them [in the NYT editorial] is that I don’t think species know what they’re about. I don’t think humanity knows why we do any of this stuff. A couple hundred years down the road, when people look back at what the NSA has done, the significance of it won’t be about terrorism or Iraq or the Bush administration or the American Constitution, it will be about how we’re driven by emerging technologies and how we struggle to keep up with them…
I’m particularly enamored of the idea of a national security “bubble…” Technologies don’t emerge unless there’s someone who thinks he can make a bundle by helping them emerge…
I’ve been watching with keen interest since the first NSA scandal: I’ve noticed on the Internet that there aren’t many people really shocked by this. Our popular culture, our dirt-ball street culture teaches us from childhood that the CIA is listening to *all* of our telephone calls and reading *all* of our email anyway.
I keep seeing that in the lower discourse of the Internet, people saying, “Oh, they’re doing it anyway.” In some way our culture believes that, and it’s a real problem, because evidently they haven’t been doing it anyway, and now that they’ve started, we really need to pay attention and muster some kind of viable political response.
It’s very hard to get some people on-board because they think it’s a fait accompli…
I think it’s [the X-Files, Nixon wiretapping, science fiction]. I think it’s predicated in our delirious sense of what’s been happening to us as a species for the past 100 years. During the Cold War it was almost comforting to believe that the CIA was reading everything…
In the very long view, this will turn out to be about how we deal with the technological situation we find ourselves in now. We’ve gotten somewhere we’ve never been before. It’s very interesting. In the short term, I’ve taken the position that it’s very, very illegal and I hope something is done about it.
Interview from Open Source
Complete Audio (Gibson comes in around minute 35)
The Wikipedia Controversy
One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is also controversial: if anyone can edit entries, how do users know if Wikipedia is as accurate as established sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica?
Nature article: Internet encyclopedias go head-to-head
Additional information (.doc)
Britannica responds: Fatally Flawed (.pdf)
Nature’s rebuttal (.pdf)
A Manifesto for Networked Objects
The first-order consequence of the Internet of Things is a network in which socially meaningful exchanges takes place, were culture is made, experiences circulated through media sharing — only with objects and human agents. Whereas the Internet of Non-Things was limited to human agents, in the Internet of Things objects are also active participants in the creation, maintenance and knitting together of social formations through the dissemination of meaningful insights that, until now, were not easily circulated in human readable form…The Blogject capacity for producing effects is powerful because it has always been pervasively, ubiquitously, everywhere tethered to the far reaching, speedy, robust network of social exchange and discourse that humanity has constructed.
Julian Bleecker’s homepage
Manifesto for Networked Objects post
Direct link to article (.pdf)
Daniel’s discussion (with response from Bleecker!)
More of Daniel’s discussion
How to stop worrying and love the internet
By Douglas Adams
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back - like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust - of course you can’t, it’s just people talking - but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV - a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’. |link|