Anonymous Attacks Monsanto (Video)
Via the Earth First! Newswire:
Anonymous, which briefly knocked the FBI and Justice Department websites offline as well as Music Industry websites in retaliation for the US shutdown of file-sharing site Megaupload, is a shadowy group of amazing international hackers.
The 8 Most Obnoxious Internet Commenters
I’m a combination of #8, #5, #6, #3 and #2. Which are you? (Don’t lie now, all Disinfo commenters are at least one.) Via Cracked:
Under every video on YouTube or Break, and under every story on Digg or even right here on Cracked, there is a mini-culture that forms down in the comment section. The hit-and-run nature of the comments means it’s fertile ground for some really annoying personalities to thrive.
These are the eight commenter personality types you’d most like to avoid, but can’t because they’re freaking everywhere.
#8. The Non-Believer
Typical Comment: “FAKE! Did you see how that guy exploded just BEFORE he hit the tree. Fake, don’t waste my time.”
Who Are They? They like to think of themselves as the jaded skeptic in a world full of gullible sheeple, determined to be a flickering light of truth in a dark internet full of lies and fake viral videos. “No one could really fart on…
Let’s Be Clear, Ron Paul Fucking Sucks. Here Are 20 Reasons Why
Before admirers of Representative Paul go crazy, I didn’t write this post (or the headline) and I don’t endorse it (neither does disinformation), but I am interested in your well argued debate as to whether or not the little red umbrella author is right about any (or all?) of his points:
Every single one of the candidates currently running for the Republican nomination is a walking disaster. But one of them, Texas congressman Ron Paul, seems to be getting a disturbing amount of support from liberals. Mostly that’s because his nut-job libertarian views happen to not sound so nutty on a handful of issues. He wants to end the War on Drugs. He is against the death penalty. He would not support a constitutional ban on gay marriage. He was opposed to the War in Iraq and wants to end all American military intervention abroad. All of that sounds pretty good to…
Warning: This Site Contains Conspiracy Theories
I am sure this question posed by Evgeny Morozov on Slate, “Does Google have a responsibility to help stop the spread of 9/11 denialism, anti-vaccine activism, and other fringe beliefs?” will be quite provocative for readers of Disinformation. As Evgeny Morozov writes on Slate:
In its early days, the Web was often imagined as a global clearinghouse — a new type of library, with the sum total of human knowledge always at our fingertips. That much has happened — but with a twist: In addition to borrowing existing items from its vast collections, we, the patrons, could also deposit our own books, pamphlets and other scribbles — with no or little quality control.
Such democratization of information-gathering — when accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangements — has been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and…
The Internet is a ‘Series of Tubes’; RIP Senator Ted Stevens, Americans Elect These F-ing People …
What Just Happened? Explaining SOPA / PIPA (Video)
From the intriguing Khan Academy (CBS News report here):
NYPD Developing Scanners To Detect Concealed Weapons
Via the Gothamist:
Presumably sick of all the bleeding heart liberals whining about civil rights, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has devised an elegant solution to sidestep the controversy over his department’s stop and frisk policy. Speaking at a State of the NYPD breakfast this morning, Kelly announced that the NYPD is developing a kind of infrared technology that will enable police officers to detect whether individuals are carrying guns under their clothing. Sure, it’s not as badass as shooting down a plane, but at least cops will finally be able to see what’s under our clothes without having to get out of their cars.
The mechanism, which the NYPD is developing with help from the U.S. Department of Defense, currently only works at a short range of three or four feet. But Kelly thinks they can improve it to scan citizens from a distance of up to 25 meters away. He announced this…
Stupid People Freaking Out About the Great (Intended) Wikipedia Blackout of 2012
To be expected, and I think Gawker has found some of the best ones:
Youth is no excuse … I call the members of this generation (and their educators) who are so confused, the WikiStupid.
Seeing And Hearing In The Future
In an interview with the Believer, key performance artist and electronic musician Laurie Anderson traverses a lot of ground. But one intriguing portion concerns her thoughts on sensory enhancement as the big advancement to come. If we can view, hear, and touch better and more intensely, will we be more alive?
Five thousand years from now — let’s say we didn’t find the God particle. We’re still looking. I think we probably won’t be making things of the nature that we are now. I think we’ll just be trying to appreciate things more. Maybe we’ll design better ears. I mean, our hearing’s crappy. We’ll have huge ears and we’ll be able to tune in to Mars, or we’ll have a hundred lenses through which we can look onto the surface of Mars with our so-called “bare eyes,” or look through our hands. We’ll be able to be in the present more effectively.
Satire: Democracy’s Most Unexpected Enemy
Nick Meador writes on his blog:
A 2009 study found that people tend to interpret ambiguous political satire according to their own views and self-image. This has enormous implications for satirical programs mocking democratic behavior, produced by media conglomerates that support Internet censorship. (The following is an essay that I was not able to place with a magazine, but still wanted to share with the world. Feel free to re-post on your blog or website, in accordance with the Creative Commons license. Just give me credit and link back here.)
“The revolutionaries of any decade will become the reactionaries of the next decade, if they do not change their nervous system, because the world around them is changing. He or she who stands still in a moving, racing, accelerating age, moves backwards relatively speaking.” – Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising (1)
On Thursday, December 1, 2011, Stephen Colbert addressed the Stop Online Piracy…
The Leak That Made America
Well, no surprises in the Iowa caucus. Gingrich, Bachman and Perry beat themselves into irrelevance and the voters remain undecided whether their priority is to be impoverished by Wall Street wh*res like Mitt Romney or burned at the stake by puritanical simpletons like Rich Santorum. If the Democratic Party’s Achilles heel is a lack of conviction and willingness to fight for its stated beliefs, the Republican Party’s fatal flaw is its love of stupidity.
But that’s just us, the electorate. Supposedly the great education and ethical commitment of professional functionaries should mitigate against the creeping culture of mediocrity that’s overtaken American culture in the last 50 years. Does it really, though? For example, do the judges deciding the fate of Bradley Manning have clue # 1 that their nation’s very founding legal principle owes its existence to a state department leak in 1773? Do any of them remember the Hutchinson Letters Affair?
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| Benjamin Franklin |
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| Bradley Manning |
On the face of it, the late 18th century should, by all rights, have represented a gratifying period of peace and contentment within the British Empire. The vicious civil wars that marked the 17th century had finally been resolved with the decisive defeat of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745. A remarkably stable political settlement had been achieved which conclusively destroyed the arbitrary power of absolute monarchy…
Media Roots Radio: Cyberculture, NDAA, OWS, GOP
Via Media Roots:
Abby & Robbie Martin discuss the age of information in the 21st century and philosophize what the ability to instantaneously connect with people worldwide has done to modern society; the subjectivity of “truth” as history becomes re-written with every passing generation; Alan Moore v. Frank Miller on Occupy Wall Street; The passing of the new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that allows the indefinite detention of American citizens; the GOP race as a parody of itself with the candidates running and how voting for Ron Paul would be a fun social experiment if nothing else than to spoil the GOP primary.
Let’s Prevent American Internet Censorship!
Writes Nick Meador:
[Note: This post has been censored by the author in protest of the "rogue sites legislation" (i.e., Internet censorship) currently being considered by U.S. Congress. The full text will be made available soon.]
Dear Internet friends,
As you may already know, I create audio/video mash-ups by crossing older films and music videos with newer music, with varying levels of editing to the original visual content. In a sense, it has become a hobby of mine over the past few years, and I find it very rewarding. My own activity has been inspired in some ways by the mash-up culture more prevalent in music during the last decade.
During my Masters of Journalism program in 2007-2008, I learned that this is legal behavior because of the “fair use” aspect of U.S. copyright law. That says people can use copyrighted works for non-commercial, transformative purposes that add value to the material but don’t hinder the profitability of the…
WikiLeaks Releases Spyware Firm Videos That Show How to Hack Email, Skype, WiFi
Kim Zetter writes on WIRED’s Threat Level:
What better way to sell your wares than to produce a marketing video showing exactly how your product works? Even if that product is spyware, marketed to oppressive regimes.
WikiLeaks, as part of its Spy Files trove of documents, released on Thursday a series of videos from Gamma International, a UK-based firm that markets the Finfisher spyware.
The video shows how the company’s product can be used to sniff WiFi networks from a hotel lobby, hack computers and cell phones, or intercept Skype communications and siphon encryption passwords.
This 28-Year-Old Wants to Kill Credit Card Use
Alyson Shontell reports in Business Insider:
There’s a tiny 12-person startup churning out of Des Moines, Iowa. Dwolla was founded by 28-year-old Ben Milne; it’s an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit cards completely.
Milne has no finance background, yet his little operation is moving between $30 and $50 million per month; it’s on track to move more than $350 million in the next year. Unlike PayPal, Dwolla doesn’t take a percentage of the transaction. It only asks for $0.25 whether it’s moving $1 or $1,000.
We interviewed Milne about how he is building a credit card killer and Square rival from the middle of the nation where VCs and press are scarce.
Facebook, Google, And YouTube In 1997 Format
Miss that classic feeling of using the internet back when it was fresh? Now you can feel it once again — via Once Upon by Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied:
Three important contemporary web sites, recreated with technology and spirit of late 1997, according to our memories.
Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.03 and a screen resolution of 1024×768 pixels, running under Windows 95. We recommend using a Virtual Machine or appropriate hardware, connected to a CRT monitor. If such an environment unachievable, it should be possible to experience the piece with any browser that still supports HTML Frames. The transfer speed of our server is limited to 8 kB/s («dial-up» speed).
