The Web We Lost - Anil Dash

The Web We Lost - Anil Dash:

"So here's a few glimpses of a web that's mostly faded away"

'via Blog this'
Blogger Anil Dash has some perceptive comments about the way the web has changed and somehow we didn't notice.

Eric Schmidt: How We Outrace the Robots - NYTimes.com

Eric Schmidt: How We Outrace the Robots - NYTimes.com:

"Throw in robotics, 3-D printing, and faster telecommunications, and things get tougher for the average worker. Robots may hollow out the factories in China, which count on cheap human labor, and bring manufacturing back to the United States. Those machines will need people to service them, and those people will need to be reasonably skilled."

'via Blog this'
Eric Schmidt's distopian vision of the future

Presentation of Hactivism

Hacktivisim on Prezi

John Kay - Fetish for making things ignores real work

John Kay - Fetish for making things ignores real work:

"When you look at the value chain of manufactured goods we consume today, you quickly appreciate how small a proportion of the value of output is represented by the processes of manufacturing and assembly. Most of what you pay reflects the style of the suit, the design of the iPhone, the precision of the assembly of the aircraft engine, the painstaking pharmaceutical research, the quality assurance that tells you products really are what they claim to be."

'via Blog this'

Twitter Kills the Fail Whale, One Tweet at a Time - NYTimes.com

Twitter Kills the Fail Whale, One Tweet at a Time - NYTimes.com:

"In a post on the company’s engineering blog, Twitter said people sent 31 million election-related tweets on Tuesday alone. From 8:11 p.m. to 9:11 p.m. P.S.T., Twitter processed an average 9,965 tweets per second, with a one-second peak of 15,107 tweets per second at 8:20 p.m., the company said. In 2008, by comparison, people sent just 229 Twitter messages per second on election night. That’s about 43 times more messages per second for this election."

'via Blog this'

Big Healthy Brother: 'Google Now' Surprises Users By Tracking Miles Walked and Biked - Forbes

Big Healthy Brother: 'Google Now' Surprises Users By Tracking Miles Walked and Biked - Forbes: "“Does this surprise ‘feature’ strike you as more creepy than not?” asked a friend via email. “Your phone was tracking how far you were walking and biking without telling you???”"

'via Blog this'

Amanda Todd, Michael Brutsch, and Free Speech Online : The New Yorker

Amanda Todd, Michael Brutsch, and Free Speech Online : The New Yorker:

"What you could call the Brutschean world view—which takes anonymity as the only meaningful form of privacy, and a key element of free speech—is nearly an article of faith in these lower levels of the Internet. But it has tentacles that extend to higher, more powerful places. Scholars often approvingly quote EFF.org founder John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which, among other utopian visions, holds that “our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.” The founding myth of the Internet was its offer of a way to escape physical reality; the freedom to shape yourself, to say anything, became a sort of sacred object.
But, as the scholar Mary Anne Franks has observed, women haven’t actually achieved this “bodiless” freedom online. They are embodied in distributed pictures and in sexual comments, whether they like it or not. The power to get away from yourself, like everything else, is unevenly distributed. Women have become, as Franks put it, “unwilling avatars,” unable to control their own images online, and then told to put up with it for the sake of “freedom,” for the good of the community. And then they are incorrectly told, even if the public is behind them, that they have no remedies in the law. They are shouted down by people with a view of freedom of speech more literal than that held by any judge."

'via Blog this'

Reddit user Violentacrez fired from job after Gawker exposé | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Reddit user Violentacrez fired from job after Gawker exposé | Technology | guardian.co.uk:

"The Reddit user whose identity was revealed in an extensive Gawker exposé has revealed that he was fired from his job at the weekend.
Michael Brutsch, a 49-year-old programmer from Texas, said on Reddit that he had been told not to return to work after Gawker revealed that he was Violentacrez, a prolific user linked to posts filled with racism, misogyny and incest."
'via Blog this'

After today's class, I found this update to the Reddit case we discussed in class.

It's Not About You: The Truth About Social Media Marketing | LinkedIn

It's Not About You: The Truth About Social Media Marketing | LinkedIn:

"I recently attended an event with a large number of advertising executives.  All of them are coming to grips with the change from the era of push media to the era of social media, which might more properly be called "pull media."  At its core, the social revolution allows people to consume what they want, when they want, and largely on the recommendation of friends and other non-professional influencers.  Attempt to graft old models onto it and you are doomed to struggle; find models that are native to the medium and you will thrive."
'via Blog this'

Good article with a lot to think about.

Amanda Todd's alleged tormentor named by hacker group - British Columbia - CBC News

Amanda Todd's alleged tormentor named by hacker group - British Columbia - CBC News:

"Anonymous published the name and address of a Vancouver-area man that the group claims was bullying and preying on Todd via the internet.
The activist group, which often uses a caricature Guy Fawkes mask as its logo, claims the 32-year-old man has also made postings to child pornography sites.
The man himself has now been threatened online by others vowing to carry out vigilante justice, a development that worries Vancouver defence lawyer Eric Gottardi."
'via Blog this'

Hactivism meets vigilantism meets anonymity meets privacy meets moral and legal issues.

In Technology Wars, Using the Patent as a Sword - NYTimes.com

In Technology Wars, Using the Patent as a Sword - NYTimes.com: "However, many people argue that the nation’s patent rules, intended for a mechanical world, are inadequate in today’s digital marketplace. Unlike patents for new drug formulas, patents on software often effectively grant ownership of concepts, rather than tangible creations. Today, the patent office routinely approves patents that describe vague algorithms or business methods, like a software system for calculating online prices, without patent examiners demanding specifics about how those calculations occur or how the software operates."
'via Blog this'

Rise of drones in UK airspace prompts civil liberties warning | World news | The Observer

Rise of drones in UK airspace prompts civil liberties warning | World news | The Observer: "Drones will be commonplace in the skies above the UK within a decade, according to a European commission document suggesting that hundreds of firms will develop new uses for them.
But the claims have prompted concerns from civil liberties groups, who fear that the unmanned aircraft will result in more forms of surveillance. Some 95% of drones in operation are used by the military, but the document notes they now also have "great potential for civil applications"."
'via Blog this'

Social networks own us all – it’s time we returned the favour - The Globe and Mail

Social networks own us all – it’s time we returned the favour - The Globe and Mail:

"Because on the Web we perform our most clickable selves, academics and the writers who read them have segued from discussing “Internet fame” to saying the Internet makes us all famous. Progressive observers, like Alice Marwick or Rob Horning, are concerned with the commodification of self via social media and “microfame.” Whether micro or macro, the trade-off for fame is privacy, and – particularly in the case of Facebook – we’re sacrificing wider and wider swaths of it for (usually, relatively) narrow public recognition."

'via Blog this'

Interesting reflections on a number of subjects from social networks to art and music to reality tv.

Why the Internet Is About to Replace TV as the Most Important Source of News - Derek Thompson - The Atlantic

Why the Internet Is About to Replace TV as the Most Important Source of News - Derek Thompson - The Atlantic: "But the larger story is the rise of the Web, which has surpassed newspapers and radio to become the second most popular source of news for Americans, after TV. This is the graph from the report, in my opinion:"

'via Blog this'

According to the line chart in this article, people are now getting more of their news from the internet than from newspapers or radio, and it seems only a matter of a short time before it surpasses television. In addition, the number of people who get news from all sources except the internet has been steadily dropping since the early 90s.

Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image - NYTimes.com

Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image - NYTimes.com: "Most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, The Times found."

'via Blog this'

However, BoingBoing links to a responding piece by Diego Doval

a lot of lead bullets: a response to the new york times article on data center efficiency

Ottawa casts wary eye on Chinese telecom giant - The Globe and Mail

Ottawa casts wary eye on Chinese telecom giant - The Globe and Mail: "A May 8 presentation for the Department of National Defence, written by the Communications Security Establishment and titled “Supply Chain Threats to Canada,” devotes three pages to Huawei and discusses “proposed measures” that could be implemented. Ottawa’s computer and communication networks depend heavily on telecom companies."

'via Blog this'

The Globe and Mail reports on security fears that Huawei could manufacture hardware that facilitates spying by the Chinese government.

Neil Young: Piracy Is 'The New Radio,' Way To Get Your Music Heard

Neil Young: Piracy Is 'The New Radio,' Way To Get Your Music Heard: ""It doesn't affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio," Young said in January. "I look at the radio as gone ... Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around ... That's the radio. If you really want to hear it, let's make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.""

'via Blog this'

An interesting view of online music and music piracy. But, will his idea of a new high quality music standard not also be subject to piracy?

Does Google Know More About You Than You Think? Take this test. - Forbes

Does Google Know More About You Than You Think? Take this test. - Forbes: "But Google, more than likely, already knows a great deal about you. It’s not right all the time, but with me, it was pretty accurate, pegging me for a 25-34 year old male interested in Finance, Strategy Games, Travel and Louisiana. And shopping, too for my sins. Granted, all that stuff is pretty easy to figure out while I’m constantly googling directions to restaurants in New Orleans, but still, they about nailed my essential character, or at least the ads I’m likely to see.

Click here to see who Google thinks you are.

Did they get it right? Let us know in the comments."

'via Blog this'

Follow the link to the article which contains a link to Google which will allow you to see what assumptions Google is making about you.

Why Modern Innovation Traffics in Trifles - WSJ.com

Why Modern Innovation Traffics in Trifles - WSJ.com: "What's behind innovation's turn toward the trifling? Declinists point to several possible culprits: America's schools are broken, investors and executives have become shortsighted, taxes are too high (sapping the entrepreneurial spirit), taxes are too low (preventing the government from funding basic research). Or maybe America has just lost its mojo."
'via Blog this'

Interesting article on the issue of innovation.

Hardware is dead | VentureBeat

Hardware is dead | VentureBeat: "I go to China every four or five months for work. I have to visit all the corporate headquarters in Beijing and Shanghai, but the highlight of every trip is the day I spend at Hua Qiang Road North in Shenzhen. Pretty much every piece of electronics we use today is sourced and manufactured within 100 miles of Shenzhen, and Hua Qiang is the city’s electronics shopping district.

On my last trip, in July, I met a ‘procurement’ consultant, and he told me which of the 50 mega malls in the area to visit to buy tablets."

'via Blog this'

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2012/09/apple-says-new-iphone-5-feature-gives-life-meaning.html

 

September 12, 2012

Apple Says New iPhone 5 Feature Gives Life Meaning

Posted by Andy Borowitz

SAN FRANCISCO (The Borowitz Report)—Apple rocked the gadget world today with the news that the iPhone 5 includes a new feature that gives shape and purpose to previously empty and meaningless lives.
As Apple explained at its launch of the device, the new feature is an improved version of its personal assistant, Siri, that has been endowed with a quality missing from the previous model: empathy.

In a demonstration before a hushed crowd of Apple enthusiasts, an app developer named Josh asked the new Siri, “Why didn’t my parents love me?”
Siri’s response, “Your parents were too self-absorbed and narcissistic to recognize your essential beauty and value as a human being,” brought many in the Yerba Buena Center audience close to tears.
Apple C.E.O. Tim Cook closed out the launch with perhaps his boldest claim to date about the company’s new phone: “We believe that the iPhone 5 will make your current relationship obsolete.”
Wall Street rallied on the news, with tech analysts expecting millions of Apple customers to purchase an iPhone 5 to replace their existing boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse.
But in the words of Apple devotee Tracy Klugian, who was present at today’s launch, such expectations are overdone: “Most Apple snobs I know started putting their Apple products before their relationships a long time ago.”

"Living in the Shetlands, I didn't understand the impact of what we were doing," he says. "I didn't understand the impact on the real world. And now that I'm here in Spalding, and I've been a lot in London, I kind of see that the world does go round and it's not about hiding in a bedroom."
What seems incredible, even now (and maybe, especially, to Jake), is how a slightly troubled teenager living on the two-sheep island of Yell, in the Shetland Isles – a place as isolated and remote as anywhere on Earth – came to find himself at the heart of a radical global political movement.
But then, maybe that's the point. When I met Gabriella Coleman in Edinburgh she'd spent the previous evening meeting one of her contacts, who lived in a remote croft in the Scottish countryside. "He cooked me pheasant," she said. Olson, too, found that a disproportionate number of contacts she met "lived in out-of-the-way places".
For Jake, living in the Shetlands, the internet became his everything. It was where he made friends and socialised. "It's where I learned almost everything I now know. The thing I miss the most is Wikipedia. I mean, at school I learned to knit. I'm actually a pretty good knitter now." Jake had a somewhat difficult childhood, and that (combined with the knitting lessons) led him to drop out of school at 13, shortly after his stepfather was killed in an accident.

from the Guardian "Anonymous: behind the masks of the cyber insurgents" 

• Carole Cadwalladr
• guardian.co.uk, Saturday 8 September 2012 21.47 BST

Hundreds of cyber attacks blamed on group that hacked Google in 2009 - The Globe and Mail

Hundreds of cyber attacks blamed on group that hacked Google in 2009 - The Globe and Mail: "Although the hackers were never publicly identified, the incident heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing over growing evidence that a significant number of cyber attacks against U.S. institutions originated from China.

“It was big news at the time, but what people don’t realize is that this is happening constantly,” said Eric Chien, a manager in Symantec’s research group. “They haven’t gone away, and we wouldn’t expect them to go away.”

Symantec said on Friday the hackers behind Operation Aurora have focused on stealing intellectual property, such as design documents from defense contractors and their suppliers, including shipping, aeronautics, arms, energy, manufacturing, engineering and electronics companies."

'via Blog this'

Why the "Open Data Movement" is a Joke

Why the "Open Data Movement" is a Joke

A government can simultaneously be the most secretive, controlling Canadian government in recent memory and be welcomed into the club of "open government". The announcements highlight a few problems with the "open data movement" (Wikipedia page):

• It's not a movement, at least in any reasonable political or cultural sense of the word,
• It's doing nothing for transparency and accountability in government,
• It's co-opting the language of progressive change in pursuit of what turns out to be a small-government-focused subsidy for industry.

In short, the open data movement is a joke. Those who are on the political left who lend their support to it have some hard decisions to make.

Canadian Intellectual Property Office gets its own quiz wrong | Academicalism

Canadian Intellectual Property Office gets its own quiz wrong | Academicalism: "The Canadian Intellectual Property Office has posted an online quiz on “IP basics,” inviting the average citizen to test one’s knowledge of copyright.

Weirdly, the second question in the Copyright section shows as correct an answer that is incorrect.

What constitutes a copyright infringement?
* Reproducing an article without the owner’s permission
* Playing songs on the radio without the owner’s permission
* Recording the performance of your favourite group without permission
* All of the above"

'via Blog this'

Whether the digital era improves society is up to its users – that's us

Social media in particular has inexorably changed the world, driving openness and fear – but it is not beyond our control

Danah Boyd

Social media in particular has inexorably changed the world, driving openness and fear – but it is not beyond our control

The Guardian: 21-April-2012

By restructuring the networks, technology can destabilise hierarchical power. Those who can control the flow of information and those who can control people's attention are extraordinarily powerful. The only people more powerful than those who control the networks are those who can make the networks. It's no longer simply about broadcasting a message; it's about setting in motion mechanisms to draw attention to you. If you want power in a networked society, you need to orchestrate control over the information ecosystem.

Boyd tries to make sense of Castells's challenging list of types of power operating in networks

• Networking power is the power that comes from people's inclusion or exclusion from a particular environment.
• Network power is the power that stems from setting up the rules for inclusion or exclusion.
• Networked power is the power that underpins those who can set the rules by imposing their will on others.
• Network-making power is the type of power possessed by those who can connect people and flow information.

See Castells: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skcUYhRaEas

The Economist: The third industrial revolution The digitisation of manufacturing will transform the way goods are made—and change the politics of jobs too

the Economist: 21-April-2012

A number of remarkable technologies are converging: clever software, novel materials, more dexterous robots, new processes (notably three-dimensional printing) and a whole range of web-based services. The factory of the past was based on cranking out zillions of identical products: Ford famously said that car-buyers could have any colour they liked, as long as it was black. But the cost of producing much smaller batches of a wider variety, with each product tailored precisely to each customer’s whims, is falling. The factory of the future will focus on mass customisation—and may look more like those weavers’ cottages than Ford’s assembly line.

BBC - Newsnight: Paul Mason: Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere

BBC - Newsnight: Paul Mason: Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere: "Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere
"

At the heart of it all are young people, obviously; students; westernised; secularised. They use social media - as the mainstream media has now woken up to - but this obsession with reporting "they use twitter" is missing the point of what they use it for. 
In so far as there are common threads to be found in these different situation, here's 20 things I have spotted:
1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future

'via Blog this'

A mounting body of evidence finds that the spread of mobile technology is adding to news consumption, strengthening the appeal of traditional news brands and even boosting reading of long-form journalism. But the evidence also shows that technology companies are strengthening their grip on who profits, according to the 2012 State of the News Media report by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Report from the the Pew Research Center

Cloud computing will create more jobs than the early Internet did, because cloud applications and platforms will transform the entire IT landscape. The recent Sand Hill study confirms it.

report from Sand Hill (pdf) and from Forbes

Canadian businesses and governments are lagging several western nations in the “Internet economy” and are being warned that they risk falling even further behind unless they take immediate and more aggressive action. The Internet contributed $49-billion to Canada’s gross domestic product last year, representing 3 per cent of the country’s economy, a report to be released Monday by the Boston Consulting Group estimates. It is projected to hit $76-billion by 2016, or 3.6 per cent of GDP.

from the Globe and Mail

This escalating numerology has been necessitated by an explosion in the volume of data surging round our digital ecosystem from developments in science, technology, networking, government and business. From science, we have sources such as astronomy, particle physics and genonomics. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, for example, began amassing data in 2000 and collected more in its first few weeks than all the data collected before that in the history of astronomy. It's now up to 140 terabytes and counting, and when its successor comes online in 2016 it will collect that amount of data every five days. Then there's the Large Hadron Collider, (LHC) which in 2010 alone spewed out 13 petabytes – that's 13m gigabytes – of data . The story is the same wherever you look. Retailers such as Walmart, Tesco and Amazon do millions of transactions every hour and store all the data relating to each in colossal databases they then "mine" for information about market trends, consumer behaviour and other things. The same goes for Google, Facebook and Twitter et al. For these outfits, data is the new gold.

from the Guardian