Tag Archives: internet

What I’m Reading, March 28, 2014

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The Internet, Where Languages Go to Die?, Ross Perlin, Al Jazeera America, March 18, 2014

We’re used to the triumphalist universalism of the digital utopians: Google organizes the world’s information. Facebook connects everyone. Twitter tells you what’s happening. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It’s all true — for a mere 5 percent of the world’s languages.

What few acknowledge is that the online world — when compared with offline, analog diversity — is very nearly a monoculture, an echo chamber where the planet’s few dominant cultures talk among themselves. English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic and just a handful of other languages dominate digital communication. Thanks to their sheer size and to the powerful official and commercial forces behind them, the populations that speak and write these languages can plug in, develop the necessary tools and assume that their languages will follow them into an ever-expanding range of virtual realms.

Copyright Alliance Attacks ChillingEffects.org As ‘Repugnant,’ Wants DMCA System With No Public Accountability, TechDirt, March 17, 2014

Sandra Aistars of the Copyright Alliance issued a statement during the recent DMCA-related hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee. As was noted earlier, a bunch of effort was made to turn the “notice and takedown” system into a “notice and stay down” system, and weirdly, the word “free” was thrown about as if it was synonymous with “infringement.”

Her statement details the shortcomings of the DMCA system from the expected position, citing the personal travails of creators like Kathy Wolfe, who for some reason has chosen to spend half her profits battling infringement. In general, it painted a bleak picture for future creativity, claiming that unless infringement is massively curbed, creators will stop creating. (There seems to be no place in this argument about the lowered barriers to entry, and the swell of creation that has enabled.)

But where her statement really goes off the rails (even for the Copyright Alliance) is with the attack on the popular copyright notice clearinghouse, Chilling Effects.

We Shouldn’t Arrest One More Person for Having Marijuana, Dice Raw, Blog of Rights, March 18, 2014

When you look at marijuana arrest data in the U.S., you’ll be floored to know that every 37 seconds, someone gets handcuffed and booked for weed-related crime, and Black people are 3.73 times more likely to be the ones arrested (communities of color have felt this to be true for a long time, and now we have the stats to back us up).

That doesn’t reflect the true voice of the people. In fact, 9 out of 10 adults in the U.S. don’t think a person should face jail time for a small amount weed. In 2010 alone, states spent $3.61 billion enforcing marijuana possession laws, yet many cities also experienced mass school closings that threaten to hinder the progress of our youth.

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What I’m Reading, March 17, 2014

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How did Irish-Americans get so disgusting? Andrew O’Hehir, Salon, March 15, 2014

Irish-Americans rapidly absorbed the lesson that the way to succeed in their new country was to reject the politics of class and shared economic interests and embrace the politics of race. One disgraceful result was the New York draft riots of 1863, the low point of Irish-black relations in American history, when Irish immigrants by the thousands turned on their black neighbors in a thinly disguised race riot. Irish-Americans were under no delusions that the ruling class of Anglo Protestants liked or trusted them, and anti-Irish and/or anti-Catholic bigotry endured in diluted form well into the 20th century. But by allying themselves with a system of white supremacy, the Irish in America were granted a share of power and privilege — most notably in urban machine politics, and the police and fire departments of every major city.

*** Continue reading →

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The saddest meme in Republican history

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The other day, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed that an unnamed Bain investor told him that Mitt Romney won’t release any more tax returns because that would demonstrate that he did not pay taxes for ten years. We don’t know who actually said that, so it is possible that Senator Reid is making it up. Politicians certainly lie through their teeth all the time–well, Mitt Romney does. I’m sure others do as well.

In response to this, people on the right could have just pointed out that Reid has not provided any evidence for his assertion besides his say-so, which would have gotten the point across that he made an unsupported (albeit plausible) accusation. But that would have been sensible, and this is the American right wing we’re talking about here.

First, they point out that Harry Reid will not release his own tax returns, which is irrelevant because Harry Reid is not running for president.

Not content to leave it at that, someone creates a Twitter hashtag suggesting (facetiously, one hopes) that Harry Reid is a pederast. I assume the intention was to demonstrate the impact of unfounded accusations, not to look like a group of schoolchildren who just learned a big word. The meme yielded gems such as this:

 

 


It’s always just hilarious when a person using “pederasty” as a cheap device for a lame attempt at satire uses words like “disgusting” to describe the other person. It is difficult to fully explain how an allegation made as part of an ongoing controversy over an unprecedentedly tight-lipped presidential candidate’s financial history is different from completely made-up accusations of pederasty by a bunch of Tweeters. Honestly, before yesterday it never would have occurred to me that such a distinction would be necessary. If you haven’t already figured out the distinction, there is no hope for your intellectual development beyond its current state, or you are currently under the age of six.

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Where the Government Creates, the Private Sector Sexifies

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I mean “sexify” in the sense of “make marketable” or “desirable”–“sexy,” to use the parlance of our times. I am specifically referring to the internet. Al Gore did not invent the internet, and he never claimed he did. It was actually a decades-spanning effort of government agencies and private companies with government contracts, gradually building computers and networks that could eventually integrate to create a truly decentralized, global system.

768px-Internet_map_1024

Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005. Lines are color-coded according to their corresponding RFC 1918 allocation as follows:
Dark blue: net, ca, us
Green: com, org
Red: mil, gov, edu
Yellow: jp, cn, tw, au, de
Magenta: uk, it, pl, fr
Gold: br, kr, nl
White: unknown

Many of the essential components of what we now call the internet actually would have been foolish ventures, had private companies undertaken them. Perhaps it was a gamble by the government, but it was a gamble that paid off big. According to Farhad Manjoo at Slate:

In 1960, an engineer named Paul Baran came up with the idea of a packet-switching network. Baran was working for the RAND Corporation, a government-funded think tank, and he’d been looking for ways to create networks that would survive a disaster. Baran saw that the country’s most basic communications infrastructure—especially the telephone network maintained by AT&T—had several central points of failure. If you took out these central machines, the entire network would fail. His insight was to create a decentralized network, one in which every point was connected to every other point in multiple ways—your message from New York to San Francisco would get split into packets and might pass through Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta, Tampa, or St. Louis. If one of those nodes were taken out, most of your message would get through, and the network would still survive. Continue reading →

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Some phishing advice…

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If you want me to think that you are e-mailing me from the Federal Reserve Bank of America…

phish070812

…use a better e-mail address than “Sparkylok6.” Seriously, folks.

Also, I’m pretty sure there is no entity specifically titled the “Federal Reserve Bank of America.”

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This “internet doomsday” thing apparently is not a hoax, but it’s also not a cause for panic. Who knew?

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463px-Virus_rezon

This is what happens when you search for image files labeled “computer virus.”

When I first saw the posts about the “internet doomsday” virus and something that is supposed to happen on July 9, I assumed it was a hoax or a phishing scam. Considering that I first read about it in someone’s Tumblr feed did not necessarily inspire my confidence. That said, Snopes has apparently confirmed its authenticity, and multiple news sites have reported on it:

Thousands could lose access to the Internet on July 9 due to a virus, DNSChanger, that once infected approximately 4 million computers across the world.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation first gave details about the virus last November, when it announced the arrest of the malware’s authors. The virus, as its name indicates, affected computers’ abilities to correctly access the Internet’s DNS system — essentially, the Internet’s phone book. The virus would redirect Internet users to fake DNS servers, often sending them to fake sites or places that promoted fake products. Once the FBI shut down the operation, it built a safety net of new servers to redirect traffic from those infected with the virus.

But that safety net is going offline next Monday meaning that anyone who is still infected with the virus will lose access to the Internet unless they remove it from their machine.

You can make sure your computer is okay in 2-3 relatively easy steps (I can’t say with 100% certainty that all of this is legit, but I’ve checked around quite a bit. Still, proceed at your own risk):

1. Get your IP address for your computer. If you don’t know it, use a site like WhatIsMyIP.com.

2. Check to see if your computer has the virus (specifically, check to see if your IP address is linked to one of the rogue DNS servers associated with the virus). You can do this through the FBI or through the DNS Changer Working Group (DCWG). If the test comes up negative, congrats, you’re done, go back to looking a lolcats or whatever it is you do during the day.

3. If you’re positive, the DCWG has tools you can use to clear the virus from your computer. My computer is clean, so I don’t know how this part works.

Good luck!

Photo credit: ‘Virus rezon’ By DROUET (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Getting right to the point with social media (or, It all comes down to smut in the end)

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'Pinterest User Pie Chart' [Fair use], via G4I don’t get Pinterest. I think I have made that pretty abudantly clear in recent months. I have a few “boards,” to which I will “pin” things from time to time (my board entitled “Food porn“) is far more popular than it probably deserves to be, considering the level of inattention give to it. I never, however, browse through other people’s pins the way I might scroll through my Facebook news feed or my Tumblr dashboard. It’s just not my thing.

Don’t get me wrong; I think Pinterest is a brilliant idea, and it has been wildly successful. It just doesn’t necessarily appeal to my particular sensibilities. Maybe it’s because I’m a dude, although I doubt it is as sociologically significant as that (for me, anyway.) Whether or not by design, Pinterest primarily appeals to women, possibly a first for the internet. Of course, this being the world in which we live, someone has to ask how to make a service like Pinterest more appealing to the sausage-bearing crowd. And because it is the internet, it eventually comes back to the question of how many X’s we can post. Perhaps not surprisingly, these two questions overlap.

To review the state of what I will artfully call Smut in Social Media:

  • Facebook won’t allow anything over an “R” rating.
  • Twitter might let you get away with a little “X” now and then.
  • LinkedIn has no idea what you are talking about right now.
  • Tumblr saw your three X’s and raised them to a level of perversity heretofore unimagined. Seriously, you are never more than 2-3 mouse clicks away from an animated GIF of activities that Porn Valley might not even know exist.

(Please note that I use the word “smut” in a purely descriptive sense.) Continue reading →

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Homeless people offer wifi service at SXSW

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secret wifi hotspotThe latest gimmick to come out of SXSW has troubled quite a few people while also offering a valuable service. A marketing company called BBH has provided several homeless people with mobile wifi hubs–I think that’s the right term, but I’m not much of a techie–so people can quickly access the internet in downtown Austin, where the sheer mass of people makes accessing the 3G network problematic.

The plan has caused pretty substantial controversy, with reporting in the New York Times and even on BBC News.

I’m of two minds on the matter. For one thing, the name of the program, “Homeless Hotspots,” seems exploitative. Actually, the whole program seems exploitative in one way or another. At the same time, it is offering an opportunity that did not otherwise exist. I think the real debate should be in how the program is managed and how revenues are distributed–payments go directly to the company via PayPal.

Alternet offered a reasonable criticism of the program:

Mark [West] told us that they found him through a homeless shelter in Austin, where he has a case manager helping him look for employment. He doesn’t have an option while he’s out providing internet to check and see how much money he’s earned, but he had cards to hand out to passersby as well with his name on them (he was writing his name on the cards with a Sharpie) so that they could find and donate to him directly.

“The weather and the holidays were kind of sketchy,” he said, “I’m very confident that I’ll have something before summer. I took this opportunity to work now.”

“It’s your company,” he stressed, “What you bring in is what you bring in. They bought the devices, they’re allowing us to use the devices to bring in our own revenue.” But as my colleague Matt Bors noted, when you actually own your own business, no one takes away your supplies after four days. You don’t work for a suggested donation. You work for a salary, for an hourly rate, when you work for a company.

BBH compared the work to the street newspapers that homeless people in many cities use to raise money, but the key difference there is that in those cases, the newspapers are written by the homeless, and contain content that has political views. In this case, Mark cannot use the service he is providing, nor are the users of his service getting his story or his political views.

Of course, this is assuming that the point of the program is to spotlight the problem of homelessness, as opposed to offering a gimmicky service. The major difference between wifi service and newspapers, in my opinion, is that newspapers exist almost solely to convey viewpoints and opinions. The “Homeless Hotspots” program is primarily about allowing people in downtown Austin to get on the internet. Whether they are somehow exploiting or mistreating the homeless people involved in the program, I suspect, is the real controversy. I’m just not convinced that this is a particularly strong argument. Putting homeless people on a sort of technological display seems preferable to a different extreme, as noted by John Cole:

How is paying someone to distribute wifi access any different than paying someone to work in your food stand at SXSW for a week? I don’t see anything unseemly or wrong about it at all- they are providing a service and making some money, and I fail to see how it is different from a vendor selling t-shirts or bottled water.

And the fact that they are using homeless people seems to be better than what normally happens any time a big conference comes to a big city, which is basically they are cleared off the streets and penned up out of sight and out of mind. Again, maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t get what is so awful about this.

My jury is still out on this. Discuss.

Photo credit: ‘secret wifi hotspot’ by woodleywonderworks, on Flickr.

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