Posts Tagged ‘Internet’
The Man Who Made You Put Away Your Pen
Listen on NPR:
When was the last time you actually set pen to paper and mailed off a personal letter to someone? It’s probably been awhile — and the man to blame is Ray Tomlinson.
Back in 1971, Tomlinson was a young engineer at the Boston firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman — known today as BBN Technologies. He’d been given a task: Figure out something interesting to do with ARPANET, the newborn computer network that was the predecessor of the modern-day Internet.
“We were working on ways in which humans and computers could interact,” he tells NPR’s Guy Raz. But instead, Tomlinson started tinkering with the interaction — or lack of it — between distant colleagues who didn’t answer their phones. He eventually found a way to send messages from one computer…
‘60 Minutes’ Still Says Hackers Caused Brazilian Blackout, Ignores Other Evidence
I’m one of those strange non-senior citizens who watches 60 Minutes on a regular basis (having a TiVo helps). So due to the controversy over a 2007 electrical blackout in Brazil that affected over 3 million people, I was expecting an update from 60 Minutes this week. They are sticking with their original story, still calling it “cyberwar”, and no mention that it might be due to poorly-maintained infrastructure, as WIRED and other sources say. My favorite part of the WIRED story is that the Brazilian government says their electric control systems aren’t connected to the internet.
Here’s the counter-story from Marcelo Soares at WIRED:
A massive 2007 electrical blackout in Brazil has been newly blamed on computer hackers, but was actually the result of a utility company’s negligent maintenance of high voltage insulators on two transmission lines. That’s according to reports from government regulators and others who investigated the incident for more than a year.
In a broadcast Sunday night, the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes cited unnamed sources in making the extraordinary claim that a two-day outage in the Atlantic state of Espirito Santo was triggered by hackers targeting a utility company’s control systems. The blackout affected 3 million people. Hackers also caused another, smaller blackout north of Rio de Janeiro in January 2005, the network claimed…
Mommy Bloggers or Corporate Shills?
P.J. Huffstutter and Jerry Hirsch writes in the LA Times:
On most days, Andrea Deckard can be found in her home office, digging through stacks of coupons and grocery receipts for money saving tips and recipes that she can share with readers of her Mommy Snacks blog.
That is, when the stay-at-home mom isn’t being wined and dined by giant food companies. Earlier this year, Frito-Lay flew her to Los Angeles to meet celebrities such as model Brooke Burke and the Spice Girls’ Mel B, while pitching her on its latest snack ad campaign.
More recently, Nestle paid to put her and 16 other so-called “mommy bloggers” — and one daddy blogger — up at the posh Langham Huntington hotel in Pasadena, treated them to a private show at the Magic Castle in Hollywood and sent packages of frozen Omaha Steaks to their families to tide them over while the women were away learning all about the company’s latest product lines.
In return, Deckard and her virtual sisterhood filed Twitter posts raving about Nestle’s canned pumpkin, Wonka candy and Juicy Juice drinks.
“People have accused us of being corporate shills,” said Deckard, a Monroe, Ohio, mother of three whose junkets have also included a free trip to Frito-Lay’s Texas headquarters. Deckard, noting that she is up front with her readers about such trips, said they are educational for her and her fans, and “just fun.”
Besides, she added, “it’s not like I sold my soul for a chocolate bar.”
Secret Copyright Treaty Threatens Internet Freedom
From Boing Boing via Bytestyle.tv:
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad. It says:
* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
U.S. Justice Dept. Asked for IndyMedia’s Visitor Lists
Kevin Bankston writes on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website:
Can the U.S. government secretly subpoena the IP address of every visitor to a political website? No, but that didn’t stop it from trying.
In a report released today, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston tells the story of a bogus federal subpoena issued to independent news site Indymedia.us, and how the site fought back with EFF’s help. Declan McCullagh at CBSNews.com also has the story.
The report describes how, earlier this year, U.S. attorneys issued a federal grand jury subpoena to Indymedia.us administrator Kristina Clair demanding “all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” for a particular date, potentially identifying every person who visited any news story on the Indymedia site. As the report explains, this overbroad demand for internet records not only violated federal…
Jim Carrey’s Web Site: A Bizarre Visual Treat
Michelle Kung in the Wall Street Journal:
This weekend, the blogoverse has been all abuzz about Jim Carrey’s new Web site. Speakeasy was a bit suspicious, given how the site’s launch was timed to coincide with the opening of the actor’s tepidly-reviewed “A Christmas Carol.” So we checked out the site with a little bit of cynicism. We were pleasantly surprised.
The Flash-heavy site, created by 65 Media, the Web designers behind the landing pages for Hollywood movies like “Ratatouille” and “Land of the Lost,” is a bizarre, mind-bendy experience into the world of Jim Carrey. When you click on any of the site’s tabs — broken into News, Biography, Filmography and Origins — the screen launches visitors on an in-your-face, Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole journey, zooming and twisting through various landscapes until you arrive at your final…
Google Unveils Protocol For An Interplanetary Internet
From Wired UK:
Vint Cerf, Google’s internet evangelist, has unveiled a new protocol intended to power an interplanetary internet.
The Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol emerged from work first started in 1998 in partnership with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The initial goal was to modify the ubiquitous Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to facilitate robust communications between celestial bodies and satellites. [...]
The core issue is that TCP assumes a continuous (and fairly reliable) connection. DTN makes no such assumptions, requiring each node to buffer all of its packets until a stable connection can be established. Whereas TCP will repeatedly attempt to send packets until they are successfully acknowledged, DTN will automatically find a destination node with a reliable connection, and then send its payload just once. Given the latency of space communications and the…
Josh Harris: The Warhol of the Web
Andrew Smith writes in the Guardian:
I couldn’t have been more surprised to find Josh Harris in Ethiopia. In Manhattan in the mid-1990s, he had been “the Warhol of the Web” — one of the first internet multimillionaires, who took the $80m fortune he’d made and started to explore the possibilities and implications of this new technology, to the point of self-destruction. In the process, he became the focal point of the downtown New York scene that, for heady extravagance, rivalled anything from the 1960s or 1970s.
His Millennium Eve party, called Quiet: We Live in Public, ran for over a month, during which an ad-hoc community of human subjects lived in pods in a six-storey Broadway warehouse, each pod wired up and effectively functioning as a TV channel, streamed live to the web via Harris’s online TV portal at Pseudo.com. It was 1,000 times more vital and acute than the still-nascent Big Brother. “Don’t bring your money,” Harris said. “Everything here is free.”
Quiet featured a shooting range you could hear from the street, a banquet hall, theatre, temple, club, giant game of Risk, and a public shower area, all covered by cameras. But more than anything, it offered its residents complete freedom. There were drugs and public sex — at one point, Harris, in the guise of a clown called Luvvy, attempted to coordinate simultaneous orgasms between three couples.
Just about anything that could happen did happen, and many people have called it an experiment. But Ondi Timoner, director of We Live in Public, a Sundance-winning documentary about Harris that opens in the UK next week, shrewdly calls it a metaphor. My feeling is that Harris wasn’t saying, “This could happen” but “This will happen”. This is where the technology is taking us; and what’s more, it’s where we want to go.
More in the Guardian. Here’s the trailer:
Secret Copyright Treaty Leaks. It’s Bad, Very Bad
Many thanks to Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing for publicizing this. Certainly not change I can believe in:
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad. It says:
- That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
- That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications,…
Facebook Unveils Postmortem Profile Option
This past week, Facebook announced that they are now offering a “memorialization” option for the profiles of deceased users. Friends and family can “memorialize” the accounts of dead loved ones, so that they are locked from future logins, stripped of contact information, and no longer appears in “Suggestions” (i.e. ‘You haven’t poked Joe in a while! Click to send him a message!’). The dead person profile option is obviously ripe for abuse. Here’s what was written about it on the official Facebook blog:
If you have a friend or a family member whose profile should be memorialized, please contact us, so their memory can properly live on among their friends on Facebook. As time passes, the sting of losing someone you care about also fades but it never goes away.
…
Happy 40th Birthday, Interwebs!
Interesting little story behind the first actual message sent between two machines over a data connection:
(CNN) — It was 1969 and a busy year for making history: Woodstock, the Miracle Mets, men on the moon — and something less celebrated but arguably more significant, the birth of the Internet.
On October 29 of that year, for perhaps the first time, a message was sent over the network that would eventually become the Web. Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer science at the University of California-Los Angeles, connected the school’s host computer to one at Stanford Research Institute, a former arm of Stanford University.
Forty years ago today, the Internet may have uttered its first word.
Twenty years later, Kleinrock chaired a group whose report on building a national computer network influenced Congress in helping…
Fast Internet Access Becomes a Legal Right in Finland
Saeed Ahmed writes on CNN:
Finland has become the first country in the world to declare broadband Internet access a legal right.
Starting last July, telecommunication companies in the northern European nation were required to provide all 5.2 million citizens with Internet connection that runs at speeds of at least 1 megabit per second.
The one-megabit mandate, however, is simply an intermediary step, said Laura Vilkkonen, the legislative counselor for the Ministry of Transport and Communications. The country is aiming for speeds that are 100 times faster — 100 megabit per second — for all by 2015.
“We think it’s something you cannot live without in modern society. Like banking services or water or electricity, you need Internet connection,” Vilkkonen said. Finland is one of the most wired in the world; about 95 percent…
How The Internet Is Altering Our Brains
Fox News reports on a new UCLA study:
Adults with little Internet experience show changes in their brain activity after just one week online, a new study finds.
The results suggest Internet training can stimulate neural activation patterns and could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults.
As the brain ages, a number of structural and functional changes occur, including atrophy, or decay, reductions in cell activity and increases in complex things like deposits of amyloid plaques and tau tangles, which can impact cognitive function.
Research has shown that mental stimulation similar to the stimulation that occurs in individuals who frequently use the Internet may affect the efficiency of cognitive processing and alter the way the brain encodes new information.
“We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even…
