StatsCan's free data costs $2M--a rant

StatsCan’s free data costs $2M – a rant

What a colossal lack of imagination and sense of economic and social prosperity on the part of every government since Mulroney (who made StatsCan engage in cost recovery). In the United States open statistical data has helped businesses, the social sector, local and state governments, as well as researchers and academics. Heck, even Canadian teachers tell me that they've been forced to train students on US data because they couldn't afford to train their students on Canadian data. All this lost innovation, efficiency, jobs and social benefits for a measly $2M dollars (if that). Oh lack of vision, at all levels! Both at the top of the political order, and within StatsCan, which has been reluctant to go down this route for years.

Now that we see the "cost" this battle seems more pathetic than ever.

This bastardised libertarianism makes 'freedom' an instrument of oppression | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

In the name of freedom – freedom from regulation – the banks were permitted to wreck the economy. In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours. In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public healthcare; the government rips up our planning laws; big business trashes the biosphere. This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to exploit the poor.

Monbiot uses the idea of Negative Freedom from Isaiah Berlin's essay of 1958, "Two Concepts of Liberty" to shed light on ideas of freedom often raised in political debate. For Berlin's essay see, Two Ideas of Freedom (pdf).

The Water Army

Undercover Researchers Expose Chinese Internet Water Army - Technology Review

In China, paid posters are known as the Internet Water Army because they are ready and willing to 'flood' the internet for whoever is willing to pay. The flood can consist of comments, gossip and information (or disinformation) and there seems to be plenty of demand for this army's services.

Internet Water Army On the March - Slashdot

New submitter kermidge sends in an article at the Physics arXiv blog about what's called the "Internet Water Army," large groups of people in China who are paid to "flood" internet sites with comments and reviews about various products. Researchers at the University of Victoria went undercover to figure out exactly how these informational (or disinformational) floods operate, and what they learned (PDF) could lead to better spam-detection software. Quoting:
"They discovered that paid posters tend to post more new comments than replies to other comments. They also post more often with 50 per cent of them posting every 2.5 minutes on average. They also move on from a discussion more quickly than legitimate users, discarding their IDs and never using them again. What's more, the content they post is measurably different. These workers are paid by the volume and so often take shortcuts, cutting and pasting the same content many times. This would normally invalidate their posts but only if it is spotted by the quality control team. So Cheng and co built some software to look for repetitions and similarities in messages as well as the other behaviors they'd identified. They then tested it on the dataset they'd downloaded from Sina and Sohu and found it to be remarkably good, with an accuracy of 88 per cent in spotting paid posters."

Privacy and Security Fanatic: Irony: Surveillance Industry Objects to Spying Secrets & Mass Monitoring Leaks

Irony: Surveillance Industry Objects to Spying Secrets & Mass Monitoring Leaks In the continued spotlight on mass surveillance, WikiLeaks Spy Files posted Gamma videos teaching intelligence agencies how to hack iTunes, Gmail and Skype. But Tatiana Lucas, one of the people behind profiting from the secret snoop ISS conferences, wants you to believe that exposing surveillance methods will cost U.S. jobs, make companies hesitant to support government surveillance, and maybe stop Congress from updating a lawful-interception law. Yet this company that profits on mass monitoring fails to mention privacy rights, civil liberties, or human rights. By Ms. Smith on Sun, 12/11/11 - 1:49pm.

A rant on the practices of these companies--but who can blame Ms. Smith

There are such things as human rights and civil liberties even if some in the lucrative business of virtual force to monitor all of us don't like all the press focusing on the government deploying Trojans for remote searches. One such unhappy person is behind the Intelligence Support Systems (ISS) secret snoop conference for stealthy government spying. After the Wall Street Journal published 'Document Trove Exposes Surveillance Methods', ISS World Program Director Tatiana Lucas complained to the Wall Street Journal, "We are concerned that the article and others like it contribute to an atmosphere where Congress isn't likely to pass an updated lawful-interception law. The law would require social-networking companies to deploy special features to support law enforcement. Without the update, the opportunity for U.S. companies to develop and launch intercept products domestically for eventual export will be greatly curtailed."

Amazon's Very Clever Move, Yes, a Very Clever Move Indeed - Forbes

Amazon is now offering a reward to people who use its mobile price checking app, Price Check. This is a very clever idea indeed and it only requires a little tweaking of the press release to illustrate why:

I guess this is another rule of the information age. Crowd-source your inputs. If you need information, get the public to input the information for you. You get the information, and you also get the intelligence that this information mattered to a number of people--the more it mattered to the more important it must be.

BBC News - Iran shows film of captured US drone

US officials have acknowledged the loss of the unmanned plane, saying it had malfunctioned. However, Iranian officials say its forces electronically hijacked the drone and steered it to the ground.

Mark Zuckerberg Is Losing His War on Privacy - Technology - The Atlantic Wire

Mark Zuckerberg Is Losing His War on Privacy - Technology - The Atlantic Wire
Facebook settles with the FTC with these terms:

The proposed settlement – which is awaiting final approval from the agency commissioners – would require Facebook to obtain "express affirmative consent" if Facebook makes "material retroactive changes," some of the people said.
The agreement would require Facebook to submit to independent privacy audits for 20 years, the people said. Google Inc. agreed to similar audits in March, when it settled FTC charges of falsely representing how it would use personal information.

The WikiLeaks-Fueled Erosion of Civil Liberties Has Begun - Technology - The Atlantic Wire

The WikiLeaks-Fueled Erosion of Civil Liberties Has Begun - Technology - The Atlantic Wire

Wall Street Journal reporter Jennifer Valentine-DeVries sums up the implications of the case best with a leading question: "Should the government be able to collect information related to your Internet use without a warrant?" We now know that the federal court's answer is, "Yes."

Fast Company article on the struggle between the big four

The Great Tech War Of 2012 | Fast Company

The Great Tech War Of 2012 BY: FARHAD MANJOOOctober 19, 2011 Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon battle for the future of the innovation economy.

Atlantic Article on attack on the HathiTrust

The Fight Over the Future of Digital Books | Share on LinkedIn

Authors Guild v. HathiTrust is a strange legal twist. For an association of professional writers, the Guild seems to have forgotten some of the basic principles of its craft, such as not placing sympathetic figures like librarians in the role of villains. Almost comically, the Guild's press release trumpeting its lawsuit against HathiTrust augurs a dark day in the not-too-distant future when old works, including obscure Yiddish texts, are "abducted" and "released" to thousands of students and professors.

The core of the networked world of business

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011 - New Scientist

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

Dispatches from the information War

Boing Boing

The Revolution will be Digitised: Dispatches from the Information War by Heather Brooke

Brooke journeys to the hacker scenes in Berlin, San Francisco and Boston, and the radicalized halls of power in Iceland, and spins a story that does a good job of explaining what, exactly, happened with Cablegate: how the cables got out, the intrigues and infighting amongst the players (media, hackers, activists) and the governmental spin in response.

Here is one place where Brooke really opened my eyes: there are many people who make blanket assertions about the US government's manipulation of the press. But Brooke has concrete details, and the surprising intelligence that while the US does not have a "public broadcaster" like the BBC or public newspaper subsidies like Norway, it outspends both of them in its formidable press-offices at every level of government and military. In other words, the US doesn't have public news media, but it spends an equivalent sum on spin-doctors whose job it is to control the narrative in the "free-enterprise" press.

Brooke finishes the book with a manifesto of sorts, a call to arms to press, politicos and public to confront the coming deluge of data and channel it for transparency and accountability, but away from surveillance and invasion of privacy (a delicate operation, to be sure!) and to resist using the net as an excuse for more intrusive information policy. The book's website has more on this.

Google's Privacy Principles

A message about privacy, but one that stresses how important your information is to them.

Chris Poole on Identity online

Web 2.0 Summit 2011: Chris Poole, "High Order Bit" - YouTube

Pre-crime -- coming soon

Terrorist 'pre-crime' detector field tested in United States : Nature News

Planning a sojourn in the northeastern United States? You could soon be taking part in a novel security programme that can supposedly 'sense' whether you are planning to commit a crime.

Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programme designed to spot people who are intending to commit a terrorist act, has in the past few months completed its first round of field tests at an undisclosed location in the northeast, Nature has learned.

Entertainment Industry Accounting

Hollywoodonomics: how Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix “lost” $167M – Boing Boing

The original post holds this out as an example of why only a fool accepts "net-participation" compensation for work associated with a film, but I think this is also a great example of why all financial numbers released by the entertainment industry should be treated as fiction until proven otherwise. Especially piracy "loss" figures, alleged contributions to national GDP, and job creation numbers.

Dubious tactics in fighting piracy

Private Anti-Piracy Investigator Spills The Beans | TorrentFreak

Boosting Statistics

“At this time, Short Round and I were trotted out to meet Neil and to show him our equipment and discuss tactics. Mr Gane gave the impression of being very committed to stopping the evil scourge of piracy and was far more media savvy than his predecessor.”

“He was adamant that we needed to boost our statistics to make the media sit up and take notice and that the large numbers would make it easier to get the local Police interested. This was especially difficult to do as local police had no jurisdiction over copyright infringing product and the AFP were desperately short on manpower. We were encouraged to find links to drugs and stolen goods wherever possible.”

“We discussed the formula for extrapolating the potential street value earnings of ‘laboratories’ and we were instructed to count all blank discs in our seizure figures as they were potential product. Mr Gane also explained that the increased loss approximation figures were derived from all forms of impacts on decreasing cinema patronage right through to the farmer who grows the corn for popping.”

Gane understood that the media was an essential tool towards AFACT’s goal of getting tougher copyright legislation in place. And for this purpose, it was a good idea to bend the truth a bit. The results of this recalculation are quite amazing.

“2002 impact estimates were $100 million to today’s figure of $1.36 billion in nine years…. That’s a lot of extrapolating,” Warren says.

Amazon and the book supply chain

Amazon Publishing: How it controls whole book supply chain - Sep. 27, 2011

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Amazon's low-priced bestsellers and Kindle e-reader are famous for changing the book industry. What's not so well known is how deeply Amazon's tentacles reach into all parts of the industry, including its growing interest in inking deals with authors to publish some of the hit books Amazon sells.

Booksellers and publishers are crying foul, saying they're being cut out of the chain by an aggressive Goliath. But some authors who have recently signed with Amazon Publishing say the company simply offered them a better, fairer deal than traditional publishers.

Climate change debate

Chart: How the Climate Change Deniers Won | Mother Jones

at this month's Republican debate in California, every presidential wannabe except Jon Huntsman denied that man-made climate change was a problem.

Chris Espinosa reflects on what the technology behind Amazon's new web browser means on his blog cdespinosa's posterous

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

Facebook and surveillance

Why Facebook's new Open Graph makes us all part of the web underclass | Technology | guardian.co.uk

At least Facebook is upfront about Social Graph. Facebook's abuse of its Like button to invade people's privacy is much less publicised. We all think we know how it works. We're on a website reading an interesting page and we click the Like button. A link to the page gets posted to our wall for our friends to see and Facebook keeps this data and data about who clicks on it to help it to sell advertising. So far, so predictable.

What most people don't know is that the Like button tracks your browsing history. Every time you visit a web page that displays the Like button, Facebook logs that data in your account. It doesn't put anything on your wall, but it knows where you've been. This happens even if you log out of Facebook. Like buttons are pretty much ubiquitous on mainstream websites, so every time you visit one you're doing some frictionless sharing. Did you opt in to this? Only by registering your Facebook account in the first place. Can you turn it off? Only by deleting your account. (And you know how easy that is.)

I log into Facebook rarely, and never check the box that says "Keep me logged in." Please don't tell me I am still being tracked.

The threat of hactivism

They’re watching. And they can bring you down - FT.com

The state of technology security overall is so weak that intelligence officials see hacking as one of the largest threats to western powers. While their top concern is nation-backed attacks, the lines between protesters, criminals and spies can be hard to discern. Gonlag is one of thousands who have joined an unprecedented wave of what has been dubbed “hacktivism”, referring to the combination of computer hacking with political activism. The largest and best known of these groups is Anonymous, a virtual mob that makes it easy for people with little technological aptitude to participate in protests, many of them illegal.

Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants

Lawful access / internet surveillance

Michael Geist - Can We Please Focus on the Real Lawful Access?

Lawful access, the government's planned legislation on Internet surveillance, has generated considerable attention over the past few days as the government decided against including it in its first omnibus crime bill. That decision generated media coverage, claims that the government backed down in the face of a 70,000 signature online petition, and a debate in the House of Commons in which Public Safety Minister Vic Toews stated that warrantless online wiretapping is not planned. While I recognize these developments feel like a cause for celebration, I fear there is a major problem developing as too much of this discussion doesn't actually involve the real lawful access.

In a piece in the Toronto Star, Geist goes into some details of what this will mean

The new system would require the disclosure of customer name, address, phone number, email address, Internet protocol address, and a series of device identification numbers.

While some of that information may seem relatively harmless, the ability to link it with other data will often open the door to a detailed profile about an identifiable person. Given its potential sensitivity, the decision to require disclosure without any oversight should raise concerns within the Canadian privacy community.

CRTC on Vertical Integration in canadian information environment

Michael Geist - The CRTC's Vertical Integration Decision: A Step in the Right Direction

The Commission considers that the record of this proceeding demonstrates that VI [vertically integrated] entities have both the opportunity and incentive to give undue preference by providing themselves with exclusive access, on various distribution platforms, to content that they control. As a result, a consumer would have to subscribe to the distribution platform owned by the VI entity to have access to the exclusive content. The potential increase in the market share of the distribution services that form part of the VI entity would provide an incentive for a VI entity to deny competing distribution systems access to popular programming.

The suburbs and lack of empathy

AlterNet: What Awful Reality TV and Suburban Living Have to Do With the Tea Party's Lack of Empathy

To help explain this phenomena, we might remember another signifying characteristic of the Tea Party: despite the enthusiasm for country music, Tea Partiers proliferate in suburban and exurban districts.

Interesting in light of our discussion today about networked individualism. These people feel an attachment to a group, but one that emphases their individualism--their lack of connection to those physically the closest to them. The idea of the function of reality tv is also interesting.

reality TV signals understanding that it’s filling the gossip void in the lives of lonely suburbanites, by filling the set design with familiar aspects of suburban lives, but then populating it with the real people experiencing dramas that are shut off from suburban dwellers who don’t have enough interconnections to gossip about their own neighbors.

You can’t be anonymous

Rare Charge in Protest - WSJ.com

New York City police monitoring a social media-fueled protest in Manhattan's Financial District have charged demonstrators with violating an obscure, 150-year-old state statute that bans masked gatherings.

Since Saturday, five people connected with the protest to "occupy" Wall Street have been issued a violation for running afoul of the antimask law, according to police.

technology and education

Views: The Challenge of Technology - Inside Higher Ed

Yet, the impact has been undeniable: e-mail, text messaging, Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, wireless, iPhones, iPads, Android, Skype, BlackBerry, Blackboard, mobile apps, the Cloud, and on and on. Today, you can use an app to find out what's for lunch at our campus, and one of our professors, Eric Chown, is even teaching a course on building these apps.

I own an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple computer, and an iPod. My son George calls me "Apple Redundant." I think it's fair to say that we actually find ourselves on the brink of that revolution or evolution envisioned in the late '90s, but it happened organically and through innovation, surrounded by less hype and without the market exuberance. At least until recently.

How software eats everything

Marc Andreessen on Why Software Is Eating the World - WSJ.com

Today, the world's largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company—its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software.

Today's largest video service by number of subscribers is a software company: Netflix. How Netflix eviscerated Blockbuster is an old story, but now other traditional entertainment providers are facing the same threat. Comcast, Time Warner and others are responding by transforming themselves into software companies with efforts such as TV Everywhere, which liberates content from the physical cable and connects it to smartphones and tablets.

Today's dominant music companies are software companies, too: Apple's iTunes, Spotify and Pandora. Traditional record labels increasingly exist only to provide those software companies with content. Industry revenue from digital channels totaled $4.6 billion in 2010, growing to 29% of total revenue from 2% in 2004.

Tracking Users / selling to users

Less Web Tracking Means Less Effective Ads, Researcher Says - NYTimes.com

 

Research by Catherine Tucker, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, has found that European Union regulations that limit the tracking of Internet users were associated with a 65 percent drop in the effectiveness of online marketing. In other words, if Internet companies cannot track what you do online, they find it harder to pitch you stuff that you may be persuaded to buy.

This is relevant now because lawmakers in the United States are weighing legislation to regulate consumer privacy on the Internet, to the dismay of Internet giants that rely on advertising revenue. Ms. Tucker is scheduled to testify before a Congressional subcommittee on Thursday.

 

Vancouver Riots - running the footage

Vancouver Police Thought It Would Take 2 Years to Analyze Riot Footage - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

Chu says that the DMEPL will be able to process the 1,600 hours of footage in three weeks rather years. So what is this magical lab? It's actually just 20 workstations running a system called dTective from Ocean Systems, which works in combination with Avid Technology Media Composer to aid forensic analysis. Avid Lanshare connects the stations together to guide the workflow.

The real Julian Assange (?)

The treachery of Julian Assange | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer

You did not have to listen for too long to Julian Assange's half-educated condemnations of the American "military-industrial complex" to know that he was aching to betray better and braver people than he could ever be.

As soon as WikiLeaks received the State Department cables, Assange announced that the opponents of dictatorial regimes and movements were fair game. That the targets of the Taliban, for instance, were fighting a clerical-fascist force, which threatened every good liberal value, did not concern him. They had spoken to US diplomats. They had collaborated with the great Satan. Their safety was not his concern.

people staring at computers -- is it art of invasion of privacy

[PHOTOS] 'People Staring at Computers' Art

People Staring at Computers

A New York City "artist," who installed spyware onto public computers to snap photos of customers in Apple stores was visited by US Secret Service on week.

privacy

Man Posts Pictures Of The Creep Who Allegedly Stole His MacBook On Tumblr | Cult of Mac

oshua Kaufman claims that he recently had his MacBook stolen, and so he did what anyone who was smart enough to follow our guide to recovering your pilfered Mac would do: he logged into his Mac via Hidden and has been secretly snapping photos, taking screenshots and snapping the alleged perp ever since.

That’s him up there, and I got to say: that’s some pretty amazing furniture for an alleged MacBook thief. Unfortunately, Kaufman is having a hard time getting Oakland police to help him recover his Mac, but we’ve seen this happen before, and if history is anything to go by, crowd sourcing your Mac’s recovery tend to work pretty well.

Climate change lawsuit

Toronto News: Media lawyers not warm on climate scientist’s lawsuit - thestar.com

Media law experts say a libel lawsuit filed by a leading Canadian climate scientist could have enormous implications for newspapers and other online publishers, forcing them to police the Internet for stories picked up by everyone from bloggers to Twitterers.

The concerns arise out of a statement of claim filed by Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria professor and Canada Research Chair in climate modelling, over a series of articles published in the National Post between Dec. 9, 2009, and Feb. 2 of this year.

Weaver alleges the pieces, including a column which accused him of joining the “left coast Suzuki-PR-industrial complex” on global warming, were designed to destroy his reputation internationally.

Postmodernism and the Internet

Postmodernism: from the cutting edge to the museum | Art and design | The Guardian

Use Google's ngram viewer to look at the incidence of the word "postmodernism" in books since 1975 and you find a sharp rise, peaking in around 1997, then an equally sharp decline. Plot this against the use of the word "internet" and the comparison is startling. Almost unused before the mid-80s, "internet" overtakes "postmodernism" in 2000, and carries on rising. All avant-gardes are in the business of futurism. They make an attempt to inhabit the space they predict, and in so doing, they bring it into being. Postmodernism was, crucially, a pre-digital phenomenon. In retrospect, all the things that seemed so exciting to its adherents – the giddy excess of information, the flattening of old hierarchies, the blending of signs with the body – have been made real by the internet. It's as if the culture was dreaming of the net, and when it arrived, we no longer had any need for those dreams, or rather, they became mundane, part of our everyday life. We have lived through the end of postmodernism and the dawning of postmodernity.

The revision of Canada's Copyright Law

Geist: Canada pressed on copyright law, cables show

The government introduced revisions to Canada's copyright law before the election. As Michael Geist writes

That bill garnered some praise for striking a balance on difficult issues such as fair dealing, damages, and the liability of Internet providers. However, its approach to digital locks — which are used to control access to DVDs, CDs, and electronic books — was roundly criticized by consumer, education, and technology groups since it effectively ensured that inclusion of a digital lock trumps consumer and fair dealing rights. The bill’s digital lock rules largely mirrored those found in the United States.

However, Wikileaks released diplomatic cables reveal some interesting facts about the proposed revisions

newly released cables reveal that former industry minister Maxime Bernier raised the possibility of leaking the copyright bill to U.S. officials before tabling it in the House of Commons and a former policy official with industry ministers Jim Prentice and Tony Clement encouraged the U.S. to pressure Canada by elevating it on a piracy watch list.

 

Thoughts on your university education

Schumpeter: Angst for the educated | The Economist

Several economists, including Paul Krugman, have begun to argue that post-industrial societies will be characterised not by a relentless rise in demand for the educated but by a great “hollowing out”, as mid-level jobs are destroyed by smart machines and high-level job growth slows. David Autor, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), points out that the main effect of automation in the computer era is not that it destroys blue-collar jobs but that it destroys any job that can be reduced to a routine. Alan Blinder, of Princeton University, argues that the jobs graduates have traditionally performed are if anything more “offshorable” than low-wage ones. A plumber or lorry-driver’s job cannot be outsourced to India. A computer programmer’s can.

The future of Television -- Google's perspective

Eric Schmidt's MacTaggart lecture - full text | Media | guardian.co.uk

Eric Schmidt's MacTaggart lecture - full text

Read the full text of the Google chief executive's keynote speech from the 2011 Edinburgh TV festival

Gives a point of view--Google's--on the future of television, but also provides a good sketch of the media landscape in 2011.
Also gives Schmidt's list of things to pay attention to: "mobile, local and social" (p. 5).

Impact of Social Media on Social Movements

Beyond Streetbook - Technology Review

The subject continues to be debated, largely across a false dichotomy of Gladwell ("the revolution will not be tweeted") versus cyberutopianism ("it's a Facebook revolution!"). Amongst close followers, including many revolutionaries themselves, however, the reality is more subtle: The revolution will be tweeted, and Facebooked, but it will also be fought, sometimes bloodily, on the streets.

In "Streetbook," John Pollock deftly illustrates the impact of social media tools in Tunisia and Egypt, the two countries in which, thus far, we have seen the true Arab Spring. Pollock's conclusion—that digital tools contribute greatly to the offline organizing necessary to topple a regime—fits the narrative put forth by the various activists he interviews (as well as the many I've seen speak at various fora this year), while his narrative offers an insider's view into just how those tools have been used.

Understanding Apple's supply chain

Apple COO Tim Cook could be in line to replace Steve Jobs - Nov. 10, 2008

Tim cook arrived at Apple in 1998 from Compaq Computer. He was a 16-year computer-industry veteran - he'd worked for IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) for 12 of those years - with a mandate to clean up the atrocious state of Apple's manufacturing, distribution, and supply apparatus. One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia.

"This is really bad," Cook told the group. "Someone should be in China driving this." Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, "Why are you still here?"

Khan, who remains one of Cook's top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, and, without a change of clothes, booked a flight to China with no return date, according to people familiar with the episode. The story is vintage Cook: demanding and unemotional.

Almost from the time he showed up at Apple, Cook knew he had to pull the company out of manufacturing. He closed factories and warehouses around the world and instead established relationships with contract manufacturers. As a result, Apple's inventory, measured by the amount of time it sat on the company's balance sheet, quickly fell from months to days. Inventory, Cook has said, is "fundamentally evil," and he has been known to observe that it declines in value by 1% to 2% a week in normal times, faster in tough times like the present.

Drop Down Web Form Cyber Attack

Chinese state TV shows military cyber hacking clip - The Globe and Mail

Media
YouTube: The Internet Storm is Here

The screen then changes, showing a box with the words “select attack target” and “input target IP address”. A scrolling marquee at the top of the box reads “China’s People’s Liberation Army Electronic Engineering Academy”.

The user then selects Minghui.org, a website of the banned spiritual sect Falun Gong, from a dropdown menu containing a list of other Falun Gong sites and clicks the “attack” button.

Unrest could come to Canadian cities

Look out – Canada, too, could catch the riot virus - The Globe and Mail

Instead of reducing and flattening economic distinctions, globalization has made them sharper. The world is not flat, but spiky, unequal and divided. Nowhere is that more apparent than within our cities. As I recently argued in the Financial Times, there is a real danger that riots like London's will become a feature, not a mere bug, of global cities.

Canada's cities might not have the extreme class divides of London, New York or Los Angeles, but the gulf is getting wider. The streets of Yorkville and downtown Vancouver are filled with Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Mercedes and the occasional Ferrari and Lamborghini. The average price of a detached single-family home in Vancouver is more than $1-million. Toronto's housing prices continue to escalate too.

London Riots

Darcus Howe, a West Indian Writer and Broadcaster with a voice about the riots.

London Riots and CCTV

Why CCTV has failed to deter criminals | Technology | guardian.co.uk

 

I've lost track of the number of people who've asked me to comment on David Cameron's insane plan to cripple Britain's internet in times of civil unrest by blocking Twitter and other services. In case you're wondering where I come down on it, well, let's say that it's not just a bad plan, it's also an ineffective one.

It's only been a week, after all, since Cameron's government concluded that the Digital Economy Act's web censorship plan wouldn't be implemented because downloaders would have no trouble getting around the blocks it would throw up. If people who want to download movies can evade Britain's censorwall, then so can people who want to organise riots. Duh.

This is also applicable in some ways to the Vancouver Stanley Cup Riots, and talks about Vancouver.

After the London riots, one thing is certain: anyone promoting CCTVs for deterrence is most likely selling something, probably CCTVs.

 

books and ebooks

Hardback sales plummeting in age of the ebook | Books | guardian.co.uk

Although BookScan has yet to begin monitoring digital sales across the UK market, the Association of American Publishers announced this week that "explosive growth" means ebooks now account for 13.6% of the adult fiction market in the US, with total ebook sales increasing by over 1,000% over the last three years. Amazon, meanwhile, has sold over a million copies of ebooks by bestselling authors including James Patterson, Stieg Larsson, Suzanne Collins and Lee Child.

"It really does look like ebook sales are actually cannibalising physical sales," said Breedt, although the decline in hardback fiction sales is also down to the general economic climate, he added. "The early part of the year was particularly tough for retail. The first quarter was the hardest so far for people's pockets since 2009."

An argument about what the internet has done to media

How the internet has all but destroyed the market for films, music and newspapers | Media | The Observer

Over the past decade, much of the value created by music, films, and newspapers has benefited other companies – pirates and respected technology firms alike. The Pirate Bay website made money by illegally offering major-label albums, even as music sales declined to less than half of what they were 10 years ago. YouTube used clips from shows such as NBC's Saturday Night Live to build a business that Google bought for $1.65bn. And the Huffington Post became one of the most popular news sites online largely by rewriting newspaper articles. This isn't the inevitable result of technology. Traditionally, the companies that invested in music and film also controlled their distribution – EMI, for example, owned recording studios, pressing plants, and the infrastructure that delivered CDs to stores. Piracy was always a nuisance, but never a serious threat. The same was true of other media businesses: the easiest place to get a newspaper story was from a newspaper.

Digital preservation

When Data Disappears - NYTimes.com

Mr. Sterling has a point: for all its many promises, digital storage is perishable, perhaps even more so than paper. Disks corrode, bits “rot” and hardware becomes obsolete.

But that doesn’t mean digital preservation is pointless: if we’re going to save even a fraction of the trillions of bits of data churned out every year, we can’t think of digital preservation in the same way we do paper preservation. We have to stop thinking about how to save data only after it’s no longer needed, as when an author donates her papers to an archive. Instead, we must look for ways to continuously maintain and improve it. In other words, we must stop preserving digital material and start curating it.

The free flow of information

Was Aaron Swartz Stealing? | The Awl

Since the July 19th indictment of Aaron Swartz for surreptitiously whooshing nearly five million JSTOR documents onto a laptop concealed in an MIT network closet, there's been a lot of codswallop written about JSTOR, about Aaron Swartz and about the public's right to access documents in the public domain. A 24-year-old computer prodigy and political activist, Swartz has been caricatured as either a hero or a villain; likewise JSTOR. The U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen M. Ortiz, who brought the charges against Swartz: she might be a bit of a villain, okay. Information wants to be free, it's been said. But whether this means free of charge or merely liberated from its confines is a distinction most often left unmade.

Information Overload

Internet use and transactive memory - Contemplative Computing

As they conclude,

The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

How secure is my password

Test yours--
http://howsecureismypassword.net/

The great reset

Richard Florida "How the Great Reset Has Already Changed America"
The Atlantic

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics projections, the US economy remains on track to generate 15 million new jobs over the next decade. 6.8 million of them will be high-skill, high-wage work in the knowledge, professional, and technical sectors of the economy. The other half will be much lower-paying, low-skill work in the routine service sector of the economy. More than 45 percent of the US workforce -- 60 million workers -- already do this kind of work, and they earn just half of what factory workers make -- and only a third of what professional, technical and knowledge workers are paid.

If we're serious about creating good, family-supporting jobs, we have no choice but to upgrade those service jobs and turn them into adequate replacements for the blue-collar jobs that have been wiped out. We did it 70 or 80 years ago when we transformed manufacturing jobs from low-paid, dangerous work into high-paid jobs; we must do it again.

Cyber-espionage report from the Globe and Mail

All cursors point to China in global hack attack that threatens nations - The Globe and Mail

In the latest indication that cyber-espionage campaigns have become a major threat to the wealth and security of nations, a foreign entity has been exposed for trying to steal secrets from more than 70 organizations – including two Canadian government departments and the World Anti-Doping Agency in Montreal.

wire fraud

Aaron Swartz indicted on charges of "wire fraud, computer fraud" etc.

Aaron Swartz indicted on charges of "wire fraud, computer fraud" etc.

Swartz is known around these parts for being a programmer, long-time blogger, early employee of Reddit, and legal enthusiast. Nick Bilton, writing for the NY Times Bits blog:

Geist: Competitive Conditions prompt web data-cap debate

Geist: Competitive conditions prompt Web data-cap debate - thestar.com

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has struggled for years to deal with an issue that lies at the heart of Internet services in Canada: how can it foster greater competition from independent Internet providers while also addressing telecom and cable company concerns about network congestion.

In 2009, the CRTC believed it found the right solution. It established Internet traffic management guidelines (often referred to as net neutrality rules) that created limits on how Internet providers could throttle or limit download speeds and it encouraged providers to use “economic measures” such as data caps to manage demand by making it costlier to consume large amounts of data.

How many jobs has the internet killed?

V. Vale complains about Internet cultural holocaust | Beyond The Beyond

1) massive discounts no “local” merchant could afford to give
2) “free” illegal downloads of the entirety of the world’s cultural output, thus chopping off at the root any chance of lengthy artistic development and maturation
3) billions of shocking / titillating images, films, videos and words whose net effect is even more passivity-inducement and lethargy
4) fake social networking whose RESULT is: nobody gets together in the same room anymore — too much trouble. Everyone’s at home consuming images and audio on an electronic screen, writing inconsequential fluff, and twittering their lives away…(Yes, a few who can still afford it, sit “alone together” in coffeehouses, glued to their electronic devices).
5) in sum, constant, hypnotizing distraction so that silence and solitude have become unthinkable, obsolete and positively quaint…

WikiLeaks' Brilliant MasterCard Commercial Parody

There are some people who do not like change, for everyone else there is Wikileaks.

More on the Vancouver Riots

10 challenging perspectives on social media & the Vancouver riots

The past week has been a laboratory in the power and limitations of online dialogue. While I have been troubled by the number of simplistic, hostile or unconsidered posts and comments about crowdsourcing the identification of rioters, I have more often been astounded by the depth of comments, willingness to engage with complexity and especially, by people’s willingness to publicly rethink their initial response.

Apple Supply chain

Forensic Study of the iPhone's Supply Chain Reveals Unexpected Results - IndustryWeek Forums

So how much of the iPhone is actually made, not just assembled, in China? According to the WSJ article, not much: only 3.6% of an iPhone’s components are built in China. In fact, nearly twice as much of the gadget’s parts are made in the United States (6%), where of course Apple is located and where the product was developed. Most of the iPhone, it turns out, is made in Japan (34%), with 17% being built in Germany, 13% in South Korea, and 27% being made elsewhere.

Nike Articles -- 2

The New Nike

FILLING THE ORDERS
Nike also overhauled its supply-chain system, which often left retailers either desperately awaiting delivery of hot shoes or struggling to get rid of the duds. The old jerry-built compilation strung together 27 different computer systems worldwide, most of which couldn't talk with the others. Under Denson's direction, Nike has spent $500 million to build a new system. Almost complete, it is already contributing to quicker design and manufacturing times, and fatter gross margins -- 42.9% last year, up from 39.9% five years ago. Nike says that the percentage of shoes it makes without a firm order from a retailer has fallen from 30% to 3%, while the lead time for getting new sneaker styles to market has been cut to six months from nine.

Nike Articles -- 1

The Nike Story? Just Tell It! | Fast Company

The Nike Story? Just Tell It!
By: Eric RansdellDecember 31, 1999
The best way for a company to create a prosperous future is to make sure all of its employees understand the company's past. That's why many veteran execs at Nike spend time telling corporate campfire stories.

Organizational Charts

Organizational Charts | Bonkers World
Imaginative, but probably wildly inaccurate.

Privacy

Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

The nothing-to-hide argument is everywhere. In Britain, for example, the government has installed millions of public-surveillance cameras in cities and towns, which are watched by officials via closed-circuit television. In a campaign slogan for the program, the government declares: "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear." Variations of nothing-to-hide arguments frequently appear in blogs, letters to the editor, television news interviews, and other forums. One blogger in the United States, in reference to profiling people for national-security purposes, declares: "I don't mind people wanting to find out things about me, I've got nothing to hide! Which is why I support [the government's] efforts to find terrorists by monitoring our phone calls!"

This piece helps one understand just how difficult this issue is and how difficult it is to make a coherent argument against the "nothing to hide" argument.

Vancouver Riot 6

After a Loss in Vancouver, Troubling Signals of Citizen Surveillance - Alexandra Samuel - Harvard Business Review

Documentation and narration is a core part of social media culture. There's nothing wrong with social media users snapping photos or video as part of their organic experience of an event. Whether it's for a Facebook update now or a blog post you're writing tomorrow, posting live images is a routine part of telling a story online.

But it's one thing to take pictures as part of the process of telling your story, or as part of your (paid or unpaid) work as a citizen journalist. It's another thing entirely to take and post pictures and videos with the explicit intention of identifying illegal (or potentially illegal) activity. At that moment you are no longer engaging in citizen journalism; you're engaging in citizen surveillance.

See also lots of comments

Vancouver Riots -- great overview with links

J-Source.ca -- The Canadian Journalism Project

The Vancouver riot aftermath gives us a sobering glimpse of the future of the Internet, some commentators are noting. Has society created the court of Facebook? First there was the phenomenon of riot tourism photos – people taking pictures of themselves in front of burning cars. Bleacher Report notes that technology has outpaced crowd violence researchers. Compared to the pre-social media 1994 hockey mob dust-up, it was a tale of two riots. Twitter gave the incident global legs, arguably stoking increased international coverage.

But now social media has taken on a new surveillance role. A Facebook photo page has given rise to what some are calling online vigilantism, leading to complaints of harassment. Self-deputized citizens have created wanted posters. No wonder the now-famous kissing couple is media shy! As for the role of professional journalism, one commentator welcomed the riot for, if nothing else, switching off the spin zone and getting reporters back on the news beat.

Simon Fraser University’s public affairs department has provided a list of faculty and students available for comment on the riot. The Victoria Times Colonist has posted a gallery of global front-page coverage.

Vancouver Riots 5

Vancouver riots shape the future of the Internet - Crowdsourcing.org

Document summary:


When we shape the future of the Internet, we are also shaping the future of the world as a whole. Today we still live in a world that defines "real life" as what happens offline, but it won't be long before our online lives gain equal attention. We are transitioning towards a significantly -- perhaps even primarily -- digital society, and during that transition we will go through a series of critical junctures that define our understanding and norms of what can and should be possible online.

Vancouver Riots 4

Social media used to identify Vancouver riot suspects | Techi.com

A Facebook page has been started and there are already hundreds of photos and almost 60,000 likes. The Vancouver Police have also used social media and sent out Tweets asking for photos where they can identify the people.

Take a look at just a few selected images below with faces clearly identifiable. Do you have any pics of your own? Why not upload them now and help get these people off the streets?

Here are some of the photos:

Vancouver Riots 3

UBC student apologizes for role in Vancouver riot, criticizes social media mob | Vancouver, Canada | Straight.com

On the online mob, she writes:

I honestly think that the reason why people are so strongly targeting people like me is because people are upset. They are drunk off of emotions, and want to do everything they can to fix their city. I completely understand that and like I said, am not proud of myself! Collaborating to clean up the city? Excellent way to remediate the mess. IDing people? Very helpful for the VPD – saves time and money for the cops and in the end for our city. Harassing people, ruining their lives, and finding unlawful punishments? Not at all helpful. It gives the cops more things to deal with, and is in a way a form of anarchy. The laws were made for everybody to follow: criminals and spectators alike. So for you to disregard the laws makes it seem like you are an anarchist…starting a mob…based on social media…starting to get the picture yet?

Anyways, long story short, venting your anger on people does not make the situation better, so feel free to ID people and help in ways that you can, but don’t ruin our lives!

Vancouver Riots 2

Social Media Vigilantism and the 2011 Vancouver Hockey Riots - Techvibes.com

The worst anybody could possibly do in Vancouver right now is defend any of the actions represented in the Vancouver hockey riots last Wednesday. But have people in this city been taking on vigilante roles in condemning, and in some cases threatening, people depicted in these photos?

With the number of cameras wielded by people in the streets, we've arrived at a point where surveillance has become ubiquitous in the public. For years, people condemned the surveillance cameras that were being installed in public places, but now, people wield them with a sense of pride and responsibility. With the widespread use of this technology, and the potential for exposure in social media, community members have a lot of power in regulating the behaviour of others.

Vancouver Riots 1

Social media expert concerned Vancouver riot could set precedent for Internet surveillance | Vancouver, Canada | Straight.com

Alexandra Samuel, the director of the Social and Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, said that while she’d like to see “every last one of these folks prosecuted”, she’s concerned about the public way in which riot participants are being identified.

Facebook and Tumblr pages have sprung up encouraging users to upload photos of riot instigators and identify them.

“I think we need to differentiate between using social media to hold law enforcement and to hold abuses accountable, and using social media as an extension of the state’s role in law enforcement,” Samuel told the Straight by phone.

the network and social uprisings

Networks are not always revolutionary: by Cory Doctorow

The answer, I think, is that networked communications were necessary, but not sufficient, to a successful Egyptian uprising. The emails and tweets and status updates coming from Tunisian revolutionaries inspired their comrades in Egypt (some of whom they'd met face-to-face in regional meetings organised by the likes of the Open Society Initiative, but whose social connections were continued and reinforced by the net).

Richard Clarke on China's cyber espionage

Richard Clarke: China's Cyberassault on America - WSJ.com

In justifying U.S. involvement in Libya, the Obama administration cited the "responsibility to protect" citizens of other countries when their governments engage in widespread violence against them. But in the realm of cyberspace, the administration is ignoring its primary responsibility to protect its own citizens when they are targeted for harm by a foreign government.

computers and the law

Welcome to Robot, Android & Automaton LLP - The Globe and Mail

Robot lawyers obviously can’t replace human intuition, or perfectly predict the outcomes of individual cases. Nor can they totally replace the experience of human lawyers. But Prof. Katz argues that a computer that can chew through reams of cases, judgments and judges’ citations – more than any human lawyer could ever digest – and spit out a percentage chance of success could be very useful to clients who are looking for a second opinion.

“The real weakness of human reasoners is aggregation or scale. You can’t do these things at that level. No person can,” he said

the supply chain and the network

The intelligence quotient: Canada’s new place in the global supply chain - The Globe and Mail

For Canadian companies, winning market share means adding value. Here’s a look at how Transformix Engineering, based in Kingston, achieves that while handling a key project: building a high-speed machine to assemble a four-part valve for the soft-drink industry.

Internet personalization

The Filter Bubble: how personalization changes society - Boing Boing

Pariser doesn't believe that this is malicious or intentional, but he worries that companies with good motives ("let's hide stuff you always ignore; let's show you search results similar to the kinds you've preferred in the past") and bad ("let's spy on your purchasing patterns to figure out how to trick you into buying stuff that you don't want") are inadvertently, invisibly and powerfully changing the discourse.

See also this NYTimes piece on Online Personalization

Climate change and scientific literacy

Tornadoes, climate change, and real scientific literacy - Boing Boing

What we have here is not a failure to communicate and accept the obvious effects of climate change. Instead, it's a failure to communicate and accept a critical point of how science works, without which scientific literacy is reduced to mere talking points. This is about nuance and uncertainty, and if the American public doesn't get those things, then we'll never get climate change.

Climategate

Climategate: What Really Happened? | Mother Jones

IT'S DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE how a guy who spends most of his time looking at endless columns of temperature records became a "fucking terrorist," "killer," or "one-world-government socialist." It's even harder when you meet Michael Mann, a balding 45-year-old climate scientist who speaks haltingly and has a habit of nervously clearing his throat. And when you realize that the reason for all the hostility is a 12-year-old chart, it seems more than a little surreal.

Interesting question...

What did the Internet cost? - Boing Boing

Hey there. I'm a student of the School of Library and Information Sciences at the University of Iowa. Our beloved sadist, er, professor has asked us as a class to figure out how much the internet costs. All of it, globally, from the very beginning. The electricity it takes to run every server, every laptop. The salaries. The grants. The cost of every bit of fiber optic cable in the ground around the world, every little detail.

Some of the responses are very interesting.

Anonymous or anonymous members of Anonymous

FT.com / Technology - Hackers point finger over Sony incursion

Two veterans of Anonymous have acknowledged that members of the cyber-activist group are likely to have been behind the recent hacking attacks on Sony, in spite of the group’s official denials.

An individual or handful of supporters of Anonymous’ well-publicised operation to disrupt Sony services – dubbed OpSony – went further than the rest of the free-speech campaigners expected when they broke into the electronics company’s network and stole account details, according to one person within the group.

boredom a creation of the 19th C (?)

Genevieve Bell, Intel anthropologist - 10 visions of the future. A must read - claudiabenassi's digital mix

Why? It’s all because boredom isn’t deemed possible until the industrial revolution. Before that you had idle and as Bell tells us “boredom and idle are two very different things”.

“It’s become impossible to do nothing. We all now feel that we should be doing something.”

“There is a notion that not being connected means you are bored. Not being bored means you are connected.”

Unfortunately for Bell, it’s really hard to study.

when the smart phone becomes just the phone

Phone Tipping Point Countdown Reset | asymco

I call it the Phone Tipping Point because it’s the moment when I expect we’ll stop using the word “smartphone”.

see also http://web.me.com/hdediu/Smartphonecountdown/Welcome.html

Motivated Reasoning

A Matter of Motivated 'Reasoning' - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com

The reality is that “facts” are unlikely to mean much to those who believe in their gut that Obama is not American. Political psychologists call this “motivated reasoning.” It goes something like this: I dislike someone; I learn something positive that should make me feel better about him; instead, I dislike him as much or even more. This is clearly irrational, but our feelings about people are complicated, and we tend to hold on to them even in the face of contradictory information. This is not unique to those who dislike Obama.

Piracy in emerging economies

Why poor countries lead the world in piracy | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Social scientist and Social Science Research Council director Joe Karaganis oversaw the production of the report Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, billed as "the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging economies, with a focus on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia". This weighty, 440-page report took 35 researchers three years to produce, and it is a careful, thoroughly documented rebuttal of practically everything you've ever heard or read about copyright infringement in the poor world.

Surveillance Society

Internet privacy: At every turn, our privacy is compromised by technology | Observer editorial | Comment is free | The Observer

What these developments presage is a perfect storm of surveillance, orchestrated not by the state but by huge corporations. Meanwhile, information commissioners across Europe try to enforce data protection laws that were crafted in the mainframe era, long before the founders of Google, Facebook et al were born.

Apple's supply chain

Apple factories accused of exploiting Chinese workers | Technology | The Observer

The Centre for Research on Multinational Companies and the human rights group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (Sacom) have a track record in investigating the human cost of China's economic boom. The interviews they recently conducted in Shenzhen and Chengdu, which have been passed to the Observer, are sometimes heartrending.

"Sometimes my roommates cry when they arrive in the dormitory after a long day," one 19-year-old girl told investigators. "It's difficult to adapt to this work and hard to be away from your family."

Myths of the Information Age according to Robert Darnton

5 Myths About the 'Information Age' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Confusion about the nature of the so-called information age has led to a state of collective false consciousness. It's no one's fault but everyone's problem, because in trying to get our bearings in cyberspace, we often get things wrong, and the misconceptions spread so rapidly that they go unchallenged. Taken together, they constitute a font of proverbial nonwisdom. Five stand out:

Reality and traditional media business models

Reality Check for News - Guilt Trips Aren’t a Business Model - NYTimes.com

Jarvis sets out to disabuse existing media players of some of the myths and rationalizations they have for why people should pay them for their content. For example, he says:

“Should” is not a business model. You can say that people “should” pay for your product but they will only if they find value in it.

and later adds:

Virtue is not a business model. Just because you do good does not mean you deserve to be paid for it.

Review of book on WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency: Micah Sifry explores the history, successes and failures of online transparency - Boing Boing

Micah Sifry's WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency is a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at the promise and limits of Internet-based transparency efforts. Sifry looks at everything from digital sunshine laws to the Iranian election to Cablegate, and examines what has worked to make the world's governments and corporations more accountable and when technology-driven transparency efforts have failed. His postmortem on the Obama administration's largely abandoned transparency efforts are particularly sharp, especially in light of how much mileage the few successful government transparency projects delivered.

Climate Gate and its effect

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones

Climategate had a substantial impact on public opinion, according to Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. It contributed to an overall drop in public concern about climate change and a significant loss of trust in scientists. But—as we should expect by now—these declines were concentrated among particular groups of Americans: Republicans, conservatives, and those with "individualistic" values. Liberals and those with "egalitarian" values didn't lose much trust in climate science or scientists at all. "In some ways, Climategate was like a Rorschach test," Leiserowitz says, "with different groups interpreting ambiguous facts in very different ways."

US government lab hacked -- advanced persistent threat

Top Federal Lab Hacked in Spear-Phishing Attack | Threat Level | Wired.com

Zacharia called the attack against the lab “sophisticated” and compared it to so-called “advanced persistent threat” attacks that hit security firm RSA last month and Google last year.

The attacker used an Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability that Microsoft patched on April 12 to breach the lab’s network. The vulnerability, described as a critical remote-code execution vulnerability, allows an attacker to install malware on a user’s machine if he or she visits a malicious web site.

Freedom on the net report

freedomhouse.org: Freedom on the Net 2011

In order to illuminate the emerging threats to internet freedom and identify areas of opportunity, Freedom House created a unique methodology to assess the full range of elements that comprise digital media freedom. This report examines internet freedom in 37 countries around the globe. The study’s findings indicate that the threats to internet freedom are growing and have become more diverse. Cyber attacks, politically-motivated censorship, and government control over internet infrastructure have emerged as especially prominent threats.

No information on Canada, but the questions and methodology outlined could be applied to Canada.

online identity

Online Identity Isn’t a Transaction — It’s a Feeling: Tech News and Analysis «

Former Twitter CEO Evan Williams noted in a blog post this weekend that online identity is one of the thorniest issues any web-based service has to deal with — in part because the word “identity” means a number of different things. Williams tried to parse the term’s various meanings in his post, including authentication, reputation and personalization. But one thing he doesn’t really grapple with is that what we mean by “our identity” can change depending on where we are and what we’re doing, and that may be the most difficult problem of all to solve.

the end of email

Is Email’s Reign Coming to an End? - NYTimes.com

The report’s authors highlight the fact that, while the respondents believed they would newer technologies like VoIP and videoconferencing increasingly in the future, the more traditional tools like email and the office landline showed a noticeable downward trend.

These findings shouldn’t be surprising; having a greater range of useful (and relatively inexpensive) communications tools at our disposal means we can pick the best tools for a given job, which should make our communications more effective. The availability of tools like Dropbox and box.net, for example, has greatly simplified the process of sharing files with others, and should mean fewer people trying to send large files as email attachments. And for internal office communications, social business tools like Yammer and Chatter make for easier conversation than can be had over email distribution lists.

I have blogged about this before. Email is one of those technologies used more but defined by many as doomed. I am sure it will be complemented by other technologies--which may take the place of some messages. But, I do not myself experience a decline in the messages in my inbox. I am waiting for some stronger evidence before I buy this one.

the TV can go

Plugged-in Canadians value Internet over other media - The Globe and Mail

A survey of plugged-in Canadians suggests most value their Internet access over their TV, cellphone and newspaper subscriptions.

And if they could keep just one service, they'd stay online.

The Canadian Media Research Consortium, based out of the University of British Columbia, commissioned the online survey and found 42 per cent of respondents said the Internet would be the last service they'd cut. Twenty four per cent said they'd keep their cable TV and 17 per cent each would keep their cellphone service or newspaper subscription.

The Conservatives and their proposed Internet Surveillance Law

Canadian Privacy Law Blog: Why internet privacy matters

The Internet is not quite like the real world. When you go to a library, you don't have to provide ID or leave a record of what you looked at or that you were even there. When you step into a store in the real world, you don't necessarily leave a trace of what you perused and what you bought (if you paid cash). You can send an anonymous letter to the editor of your local newspaper to voice an unpopular opinion without giving your name or any other identifying information. (They probably will not publish it, but that's beside the point.) But the Internet doesn't work like that.

looking for work. Remember to self-Google first.

You've been Googled: what employers don't want to see in your online profile | Guardian careers | guardian.co.uk

So, what will employers want to find, and what will put them off? Luci Baldwin, IPC Media resourcing and recruitment manager, says anything constructive and positive will work in a candidate's favour. "Evidence of involvement in community activities, a presence on a business network such as LinkedIn, and anything to demonstrate good communication skills are key attributes we look for," she said.

"Written material should be positive and error-free. So much the better if there is evidence of teamwork, or an account of some really special project a candidate has been involved with. Anything constructive and memorable can go a long way to supporting an individual application."

And what about the bad stuff? Shuvo Loha, director of headhunting specialists Janikin Rooke, starts simply. "It would worry me to find negative remarks about a person or from them," he says.

Journalism and Theft

Why Arianna Huffington is Bill Keller’s Somali Pirate « zunguzungu

The real problem, however, is that journalists are, by their nature, thieves of words. You can call it what you like; you can say “Possibly I am old-fashioned,” and talk about how “actual journalists are laboring at actual history, covering the fever of democracy in Arab capitals and the fever of austerity in American capitals” (Keller) or you can brag about the “148 full-time editors, writers, and reporters engaged in the serious, old-fashioned work of traditional journalism” (Huffington), but all this “old fashioned” stuff is just a way of covering over something really basic about what “actual” journalists “traditionally” do, all the time: write down what other people say. They can exercise editorial discretion in how they integrate and harmonize the various quotes they‘ve aggregated. They can confirm, they can contextualize, and they can (very rarely) manage to witness something with their own two eyes. They can produce collages out of stolen scraps. And they should do these things. But at the core of the journalistic process is the act, inescapably, of taking other people’s texts, weaving them together, and then placing them under your byline (with appropriate citation) and profiting from the activity.

Piracy as a market failure

Geist: Canadian-backed report says music, movie, and software piracy is a market failure, not a legal one - thestar.com

Trademark and copyright holders frequently characterize piracy as a legal failure, arguing that tougher laws and increased enforcement are needed to stem infringing activity. But a new global study on piracy, backed by Canada's International Development Research Centre, comes to a different conclusion. Following several years of independent investigation in six emerging economies, the report concludes that piracy is chiefly a product of a market failure, not a legal one.

The Social Science Research Council launched the study in 2006, identifying partner institutions in South Africa, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, and India to better understand the market for media piracy such as music, movies, and software. The result is the most comprehensive analysis of piracy to date.

Online Reputation Management Business is Growing

Erasing Individual’s Digital Past - NYTimes.com

And then there is the Philadelphia physiologist who became unwittingly linked to a consumer advocacy site, when it listed him as a graduate of a distance learning school that was shut down. “I felt totally victimized because there was nothing I could do,” said the physiologist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want added attention. “My case load started to dry up.”

At first, some tried manipulating the Web results on their own, by doing things like manually deleting photos from Flickr, revising Facebook pages and asking bloggers to remove offending posts. But like a metastasized cancer, the incriminating data had embedded itself into the nether reaches of cyberspace, etched into archives, algorithms and a web of hyperlinks.

After failing to rid the negative sites on their own, most turned to a new breed of Web specialists known as online reputation managers, who offer to expunge negative posts, bury unfavorable search results and monitor a client’s virtual image.

Hacking the security at RSA Security

The RSA Hack: How They Did It - NYTimes.com

But on Friday RSA shed some light on the nature of the attack. In a blog post titled “Anatomy of an Attack,” the company’s head of new technologies, Uri Rivner, described a three-stage operation that was similar to several other recent prominent attacks on technology companies, including a 2009 attack on Google that it said originated in China.

In the attack on RSA, the attacker sent “phishing” e-mails with the subject line “2011 Recruitment Plan” to two small groups of employees over the course of two days. Unfortunately, one was interested enough to retrieve one of these messages from his or her junk mail and open the attached Excel file. The spreadsheet contained malware that used a previously unknown, or “zero-day,” flaw in Adobe’s Flash software to install a backdoor. RSA said that Adobe had since released a patch to fix that hole.

APT stands for Advanced Persistent Threat.

From 40 years ago, an idea of the future but no idea, really.

Prophecies of the Internet, 1971 - Boing Boing

as we looked through our library of Baran's brilliant, and still-relevant, research papers, we came across a mind-blowing report from 1971, titled "Toward a Study of Future Urban High-Capacity Telecommunications Systems." At the time, Baran and his IFTF colleagues were considering how the military's ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, might someday change our everyday lives if it became publicly accessible. This particular report contained a delightfully prophetic page of forecasts titled "Brief Descriptions of Potential Home Information Services."

It is true these are amazing predictions, but still so rooted in the print and TV technologies of the day. They reveal just how fundamental the change has been.

Tracking cellphone users' locations

Data Protection: Betrayed by our own data | Digital | ZEIT ONLINE

In a report prepared for Germany’s Constitutional Court in July 2009, the hacker group described what kind of information could in theory be collected according to the country’s data retention (Vorratsdatenspeicherung) rules and what could be gleaned from it. The court later stopped data retention as it was practiced at the time, but law enforcement officials and the government have by no means abandoned the concept. The possibilities offered by such seemingly harmless data are just too seductive. In the next few weeks, the German government is set to decide on new data retention rules.

Remembering Norman Horrocks

I had the good fortune to know Norman for a few years. In life, the dispensation by which we meet and know any other human being is mysterious. Fortune, good or bad, can lead us in unpredictable directions.

I reflect thus, because, knowing Norman was from Manchester, I once asked him about Thomas De Quincey. Thomas De Quincey was also born in Manchester, and he famously ran away from the Manchester Grammar School to begin the adventures which he describes with such poignancy in Confessions of an English Opium Eater. I asked Norman whether he too had gone to the Manchester Grammar School.

Well, Norman said, I was set to write the entrance exam, but … Manchester United was playing that day, so I went to the football game and didn't write the exam.

He mentioned his father's disgust and displeasure with his action. But Norman, looking back on his younger self, gave the impression of having no regrets. Norman enjoyed telling stories, and he enjoyed telling me this one. Others have lived in regret of such thoughtless youthful actions, imagining other paths that lost opportunities might have opened up. And, those of us fortunate enought to know Norman, can only be thankful that his choices allowed our paths to cross.

--
I have spent some hours today working on an html version of a page of recollections of Norman written by friends and colleagues. So, I decided I should add my own recollection of this remarkable person.

collecting

Watching the collectors | things magazine

Only Collect: ‘Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting” may explain the architect’s obsessions with books, but in the post-print era, what do we hoard?’. Mimi Zeiger in Domus on the state of the contemporary collector and the outlet for their obsession. Collecting has evolved: ‘But given the spate of books, exhibitions, Tumblrs, and websites that document and compile material appearing within the discipline and beyond, I suggest that the archive itself has become not a mode of collection, but the thing in itself to be collected.’

personal digital libraries

Ask Slashdot: Huge Digital Media Libraries - Slashdot

"Like many slashdotters, I have several TB of digital media: music, books, movies, tv shows, games, comics, you name it. I've put it all in a few HDs, but handling it all has proven to be less than optimal. I'm covered when it comes to music, since [pretty much any music player/library manager] allows me to quickly find songs by interpreter, album, genre... For everything else, all I have is a series of hierarchical folder structures, but hierarchies have limitations.

Gamification

SXSW 2011: The internet is over | Technology | The Guardian

Depending on your degree of immersion in the digital world, it's possible that you've never heard the term "gamification" or that you're already profoundly sick of it. From a linguistic point of view, the word should probably be outlawed – perhaps we could ban "webinar" at the same time? – but as a concept it was everywhere in Austin. Videogame designers, the logic goes, have become the modern world's leading experts on how to keep users excited, engaged and committed: the success of the games industry proves that, whatever your personal opinion of Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft. So why not apply that expertise to all those areas of life where we could use more engagement, commitment and fun: in education, say, or in civic life, or in hospitals? Three billion person-hours a week are spent gaming. Couldn't some of that energy be productively harnessed?

Seth Priebatsch has more ideas for gamification:
His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly
designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation
when they fail. A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like
you've failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad
students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them
strive for the high score? This kind of insight isn't unique to the
world of videogames: these are basic insights into human psychology and the role of incentives, recently repopularised in books such as Freakonomics and Nudge.

stresses on journalism

SXSW 2011: Jay Rosen on bloggers v journalists | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Mainstream journalists' antagonism towards bloggers, he suggested, was sustained by the huge stress they find themselves under, which stems from five developments:

1. The collapsing economic model of newspapers.

2. Journalists having to face new kinds of competition.

3. A shift in power to the audience.

4. New patterns of information flow in which information moves horizontally from citizen to citizen as efficiently as vertically.

5. Erosion of trust and related loss of authority.

Sneering at bloggers was a way journalists avoided confronting these developments. In short "this is fucking neurotic."

Computers doing your work: reading

Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software - NYTimes.com

The most basic linguistic approach uses specific search words to find and sort relevant documents. More advanced programs filter documents through a large web of word and phrase definitions. A user who types “dog” will also find documents that mention “man’s best friend” and even the notion of a “walk.”

The sociological approach adds an inferential layer of analysis, mimicking the deductive powers of a human Sherlock Holmes. Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people — who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.