Digital World « Tikkunista!

8. Cyberhumour

May-18-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Three amusing parodies or comments on life online, and one essential viewing. Watch “Welcome to Life”, a hilariously brilliant summary of where current trends might take us. And really, the others are pretty good.

* Welcome to Life Youtube 2 minutes

* Sharing on the Internet Teddy Wayne The New Yorker

…all I need to do is be self-referential about the technology you all use and I’ll replicate like the virus in “Contagion,” a movie that, if any of you saw it, will inspire you to now post me to the “Contagion” Facebook page. Look: “The Hunger Games,” “The Smurfs,” “ ‘The Smurfs’ Meets ‘Shame.’ ” This is too easy.

Hmm . . . What kind of ominous, doctored statistic can I make up? Did you know that twenty-four per cent of Facebook users have unwittingly divulged their credit-card information to third-party venders? Or that iPhone owners are more likely to suffer from thumb-stress-induced depression? Or that having an Android means you possess the gene for racism? True or not, you’ll post it, and fourteen of your friends will comment and repost it and feign concern about privacy issues and worry that they’re sad racists with carpal-tunnel syndrome, although they’ll stay online because they’re addicted and their lives are too humdrum for them to care about the protection thereof anyway.

What will Mark Zuckerberg do next? Who cares! You do, in an involuntary, Pavlovian way, which is why you’re reading me when you should be outdoors, talking with a loved one, listening to live music, knitting, doing nearly anything else! Make a limp statement about your technocratic dictator that masquerades as wit, you enslaved peon, and pass me on!

Interesting article—I’m referring to myself—about the death of bookstores and print media you just posted. Way to stave off the inevitable end in a gesture whose irony you seem to be only vaguely aware of. Put it on the “I Know the Difference Between Irony and Sarcasm” fan page!

* Traps pw0nd.com

* A Letter from Mark Zuckerberg Borowitz Report

Dear Potential Investor:

For years, you’ve wasted your time on Facebook. Now here’s your chance to waste your money on it, too. Tomorrow is Facebook’s IPO, and I know what some of you are thinking. How will Facebook be any different from the dot-com bubble of the early 2000’s?

For one thing, those bad dot-com stocks were all speculation and hype, and weren’t based on real businesses. Facebook, on the other hand, is based on a solid foundation of angry birds and imaginary sheep. Second, Facebook is the most successful social network in the world, enabling millions to share information of no interest with people they barely know.

…One last thing: what will, I, Mark Zuckerberg, do with the $18 billion I’m expected to earn from Facebook’s IPO? Well, I’m considering buying Greece, but that would still leave me with $18 billion. LOL.

Friend me,

Mark

8. Magic Films

Apr-27-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Clarke’s Law says , “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Four examples below, of which the first is essential watching. Trust me, you’ll be forwarding it to all your loved ones.

* Birth to 12 years in 2 min. 45 sec. Frans Hofmeester Vimeo

I filmed my daughter every week, from birth up until she turned 12 years old and then made this time lapse edit film.

* Müller – Wünderful Stuff The Presurfer

* Push To Add Drama Thanks Kyla

To launch the high quality TV channel TNT in Belgium we placed a big red push button on an average Flemish square of an average Flemish town. A sign with the text “Push to add drama” invited people to use the button. And then we waited…

* Amazing Painting With Glue (Thanks, Diana!)

4. Mali, Azawad (& Tunnelbear!)

Apr-13-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Azawad, the northern part of Mali which is the traditional home of the Tuaregs, has declared independence. I had been following this because I’m a fan of Tuareg music, in particular the band Tinariwen, which has many songs about the rebellion. I was hugely pleased when I discovered a New Yorker piece about the rebellion and Tinariwen, but then hit the bane of all non Americans: “This video/spotify/movie is not available in your area.” Enter, the Tunnelbear, free software (Mac or PC) that lets you bypass those restrictions. Now I can link to Jon Stewart again!

* The Crisis in Mali Al Jazeera

In the past two months, the West African nation of Mali has become embroiled in a power struggle. On March 21, disgruntled army soldiers overthrew President Amadou Toumani Touré and dissolved the constitution. The military junta responsible for the coup explained that they were ill-equipped to address security issues in northern Mali, largely due to the government’s lack of material support. For the past several months, the Malian army has unsuccessfully tried to quell a rebellion in northern Mali led by the MNLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad). MNLA members are from various ethnic groups but are primarily Tuareg or Kel Tamasheq, meaning speakers of the Tamasheq language. The Kel Tamasheq are a nomadic and pastoralist people who travel throughout the Sahelian region of West Africa. The MNLA capitalised on the frenzy which accompanied the coup and quickly gained control of northern Mali, roughy half of the country.
* All Hail Azawad New York Times
Here’s yet another contentious line drawn in the sand of the Sahara desert: The northern half of Mali has just declared independence, and would henceforth like that you call it Azawad, pretty please. “We solemnly proclaim the independence of Azawad as of today,” Mossa ag Attaher, a rebel [1] spokesman, told the France 24 TV channel on Friday, April 6.
The Tuareg rebel group announced it would cease hostilities, and asked the international community to recognize Azawad’s independence, in order to speed along the process of state-building: “Now the biggest task begins,” Mr. Attaher said. It is still unclear what form of government the rebels of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, known by its French acronym MNLA, are proposing, or who would be the chief executive of the new state.

* Culture Desk: Rebel Music: The Tuareg Uprising in 12 Songs by Tinariwen The New Yorker

Over the weekend, Tuareg rebels in West Africa made a rapid advance, capturing the cities of Kidal, Gao, and Timbuktu. If Mali is shaped somewhat like a butterfly, the rebels now claim to control its entire vast northern wing. The Tuareg people, longtime camelback masters of the barren byways of the central Sahara, have fought repeatedly over the past fifty years for a desert homeland autonomous from the mostly Bambara-speaking south. This revolt is already their most successful by far, fuelled by an influx of Libyan weapons commandeered during Muammar Qaddafi’s last gasp. Today, the main rebel group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (M.N.L.A.), claimed that they’ve advanced as far as they intend to, and said they’re ready to negotiate. But a splinter rebel faction called Ansar Dine wants to impose Sharia law across the country, and this morning its black flag was seen flying over Timbuktu.

Meanwhile, another group of Tuaregs is making its way across Europe. They’re the rock band Tinariwen, and they’re midway through their latest world tour. In February, Tinariwen won the Grammy for Best World Music Album for “Tassili,” which includes contributions from members of TV on the Radio and Wilco. In November, they made an appearance on the Colbert Report. They’re scheduled to play five shows in the U.S. in June. But twenty years ago, they were rebels themselves, and they haven’t ruled out becoming rebels once more. “We are military artists!” Abdallah Ag Alhousseini, one of the group’s guitarists and singers, recently told a journalist from Algérie News. “Today, if we see that our brothers need fighters rather than musicians, we will go to the front, because we are always ready to answer the call of the preservation of our land, our values, and our culture. This is what we do through music, and we will do it again with arms!”

So far, Abdallah has stuck to music; this week, he and his bandmates have been performing in France. But the battlefield is there with him, because the history of Tuareg insurrection is written throughout Tinariwen’s lyrics. Here, then, is a brief survey of fifty years of Tuareg uprisings as told through twelve Tinariwen songs. (Plus a Spotify playlist of all twelve.)

* Download TunnelBear

In the preceding piece, there are links to Colbert and Spotify, both of which will inform you that they are not available in your country,(if you’re not in the US.) Not no more. Tunnelbear is a free program for Macs and PCs that lets you use convince the computer at the other end that you are in the US (or the UK). I use it; it works. Review from Macword follows…MacWorld Review(4/5 stars) TunnelBear is a Virtual Private Network (VPN) tool that connects your computer to the net through a gateway in the UK or the US. Any online service that checks the origin of your internet connection will see TunnelBear’s server details instead of your own….Our place is not to judge how you might use TunnelBear. We’re simply reviewing how well it works and it works very well indeed. We’ve used several anonymising services in the past. TunnelBear is more consumer-friendly, with a very-easy-to-configure interface. A dialog pops up, styled like an old, wooden radio. You simply switch to On and decide whether you want to use a UK or US server. That’s it.

6. The New Aesthetic

Apr-07-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: This week I discovered “The New Aesthetics”, so you get to follow today. It’s an artistic movement… but Bruce Sterling and James Brindle explain it well enough that I won’t try. Some of the links are brilliant, and most are worth exploring. The last link is an ever expanding list of works, so what you get first may (or may not) be the best. I am in love with Robot Flaneur, however….

* Bruce Sterling’s Critique And Love Note To “The New Aesthetic” Boing Boing

Bruce Sterling’s “An Essay on the New Aesthetic,” [Wired Magazine] is a dense, difficult, exciting critical look at the New Aesthetic, a kind of art movement centered in my neighbourhood in east London (“If you wanted a creative movement whose logo is a Predator supported by glossy, multicolored toy balloons, London would be its natural launchpad.”). Sterling was set afire by a panel at SXSW this year, and hammered out this essay in response. It’s part critique, part mash-note, and makes larger points about our relationship to machines and the aesthetics of their output (“an eruption of the digital into the physical”).

… the New Aesthetic is culturally agnostic. Most anybody with a net connection ought to be able to see the New Aesthetic transpiring in real time. It is British in origin (more specifically, it’s part and parcel of region of London seething with creative atelier “tech houses”). However, it exists wherever there is satellite surveillance, locative mapping, smartphone photos, wifi coverage and Photoshop.

The New Aesthetic is comprehensible. It’s easier to perceive than, for instance, the “surrealism” of a fur-covered teacup. Your Mom could get it. It’s funny. It’s pop. It’s transgressive and punk. Parts of it are cute. It’s also deep. If you want to get into arcane matters such as interaction design, computational aesthetics, covert surveillance, military tech, there’s a lot of room for that activity in the New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic carries a severe, involved air of Pynchonian erudition.

* #sxaesthetic James Bridle booktwo.org

One of the core themes of the New Aesthetic has been our collaboration with technology, whether that’s bots, digital cameras or satellites (and whether that collaboration is conscious or unconscious), and a useful visual shorthand for that collaboration has been glitchy and pixelated imagery, a way of seeing that seems to reveal a blurring between “the real” and “the digital”, the physical and the virtual, the human and the machine. It should also be clear that this ‘look’ is a metaphor for understanding and communicating the experience of a world in which the New Aesthetic is increasingly pervasive.

What has been brilliant about the New Aesthetic for me, personally, is that it has produced work, it has made me see and think about the world in a strange way, out of which thinking strange things have fallen, like Rorschmap and Robot Flaneur and Balloon Drones and Shadows, of which more anon.

* The New Aesthetic

An ongoing collection of links to works in this field

7. Data Mining

Apr-07-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: A set of articles which look at the implications of the set of digital data that trails behind out behind us like a wake from a motorboat. Given the data, (and they have been) what don’t they know about us? The second piece, about the program “Girls Around Me” is an brilliant example of why social media is dangerous.

* ‘A Test You Need to Fail’: A Teacher’s Open Letter to Her 8th Grade Students Common Dreams

“…what I hadn’t known—this is my first time grading this exam—was that it doesn’t matter how well you write, or what you think. Here we spent the year reading books and emulating great writers, constructing leads that would make everyone want to read our work, developing a voice that would engage our readers, using our imaginations to make our work unique and important, and, most of all, being honest. And none of that matters. All that matters, it turns out, is that you cite two facts from the reading material in every answer. That gives you full credit. You can compose a “Gettysburg Address” for the 21st century on the apportioned lines in your test booklet, but if you’ve provided only one fact from the text you read in preparation, then you will earn only half credit. In your constructed response—no matter how well written, correct, intelligent, noble, beautiful, and meaningful it is—if you’ve not collected any specific facts from the provided readings (even if you happen to know more information about the chosen topic than the readings provide), then you will get a zero.

And here’s the really scary part, kids: The questions you were asked were written to elicit a personal response, which, if provided, earn you no credit. You were tricked; we were tricked. I wish I could believe that this paradox (you know what that literary term means because we have spent the year noting these kinds of tightropings of language) was simply the stupidity of the test-makers, that it was not some more insidious and deliberate machination. I wish I could believe that. But I don’t.

I told you, didn’t I, about hearing Noam Chomsky speak recently? When the great man was asked about the chaos in public education, he responded quickly, decisively, and to the point: “Public education in this country is under attack.” The words, though chilling, comforted me in a weird way. I’d been feeling, the past few years of my 30-plus-year tenure in public education, that there was something or somebody out there, a power of a sort, that doesn’t really want you kids to be educated. I felt a force that wants you ignorant and pliable, and that needs you able to fill in the boxes and follow instructions. Now I’m sure.

* This Creepy App Isn’t Just Stalking Women Without Their Knowledge, It’s A Wake-Up Call. Cult of Mac

The only way to really explain Girls Around Me to people is to load it up and show them how it works, so I did. I placed my iPhone on the table in front of everyone, and opened the app. “Okay, so here’s the way the app works,” I explained to my friends.

…. I pressed the button for my friends. Immediately, Girls Around Me went into radar mode, and after just a few seconds, the map around us was filled with pictures of girls who were in the neighborhood. Since I was showing off the app on a Saturday night, there were dozens of girls out on the town in our local area. “These are just regular girls. See this girl? Her name’s Zoe. She lives on the same street as me and Brittany. “

…“Okay, so they know that their data can be used like this for anyone to see? They’re okay with it? …They know they’ve checked in, right?”

“But wait! It gets worse!” I said, ramping things up.”Let’s say.., I really like the look of this girl Zoe — she looks like a girl I might want to try to get with tonight — so I tap her picture for more information, see what I can find out about here.”

I tapped on Zoe. Girls Around Me quickly loaded up a fullscreen render of her Facebook profile picture. The app then told me where Zoe had last been seen (The Independent) and when (15 minutes ago). A big green button at the bottom reading “Photos & Messaging” just begged to be tapped, and when I did, I was whisked away to Zoe’s Facebook profile.

“Okay, so here’s Zoe. Most of her information is visible, so I now know her full name. I can see at a glance that she’s single, that she is 24, that she went to Stoneham High School and Bunker Hill Community College, that she likes to travel, that her favorite book is Gone With The Wind and her favorite musician is Tori Amos, and that she’s a liberal. I can see the names of her family and friends. I can see her birthday.”

* Data Mining You Engelhardt Informed Comment

On March 22nd, Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Jr. signed off on new guidelines allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a post-9/11 creation, to hold on to information about Americans in no way known to be connected to terrorism — about you and me, that is — for up to five years. (Its previous outer limit was 180 days.) This, Clapper claimed, “will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively.”

Joseph K., that icon of single-lettered anonymity from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, would undoubtedly have felt right at home in Clapper’s Washington. George Orwell would surely have had a few pungent words to say about those anodyne words “practically and effectively,” not to speak of “mission.”

For most Americans, though, it was just life as we’ve known it since September 11, 2001, since we scared ourselves to death and accepted that just about anything goes, as long as it supposedly involves protecting us from terrorists. Basic information or misinformation, possibly about you, is to be stored away for five years — or until some other attorney general and director of national intelligence think it’s even more practical and effective to keep you on file for 10 years, 20 years, or until death do us part — and it hardly made a ripple.

If Americans were to hoist a flag designed for this moment, it might read “Tread on Me” and use that classic illustration of the boa constrictor swallowing an elephant from Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. That, at least, would catch something of the absurdity of what the National Security Complex has decided to swallow of our American world.

7. M.I.T.: Public Access to Knowledge & Tools

Mar-02-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: (Full disclosure: as an alumnus, I’m biased, but.) What these all have in common is a continuing desire amongst the MIT community to make knowledge freely available to everyone. (One could probably put Tikkunista in this context.) We start with the learning initiative, which makes MIT courses freely available online; salute recently retired Prof Lewin, of the Physics dept, whose brilliant lectures are available for free online (three notable ones below); and end with a fascinating interview with the founder of Dropbox, which allows sharing between different computers/tablets/smart things also for free.

* MIT Launches Online Learning Initiative Technology Review

After almost 10 years of giving teachers and learners around the world free online access to nearly all MIT’s undergraduate and graduate course materials through OpenCourseWare, MIT is upping the ante.

In December the Institute announced an initiative that will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform. Code-named MITx, the effort will organize and present course material to enable students to learn interactively at their own pace, take part in online laboratories, receive individual assessments, and communicate with one another. MITx will operate on an infrastructure of open-source, scalable software….

MIT expects this learning platform to enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. The eventual plan is to host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.MIT will also make the MITx open learning software available free, so that other universities and learning institutions, such as K–12 school systems, can use the software for their online education offerings.

First Course online: Check the description for 6.002x Circuits and Electronics to learn what physics and math you need to be successful, watch a short introductory video, and enrol. The course, which runs March 5–June 8, is free but you must register and complete the assignments to earn an MITx certificate.

* The Professor Who Brings Physics to Life Technology Review

For 43 years, Lewin taught as many as 600 students a semester in MIT’s three introductory physics courses—8.01, 8.02, and 8.03—and consistently drew rave reviews. In 1999 the Institute began videotaping the 94 lectures from the three courses, and in 2004 OpenCourseWare started posting the videos, which could be viewed free of charge by anyone with an Internet connection. The lectures soon spread to YouTube, iTunes U, and Academic Earth, and in 2007 the New York Times caught wind of the traffic, profiling the physics professor in a front-page feature as an international “Web star.”

…On May 16, 2011, Lewin celebrated the release of his book by taking his notes out once more to deliver one last lecture in 26-100. The hall was filled beyond its capacity with current and former students, faculty, and fans. For Lewin, that last lecture—of more than 800 he has given in the hall—was a bittersweet high.

“You know you’ve got them in your hands,” he says. “You know that you could do anything with them that you wanted. You also know in a way it’s the last time that you will do that. Then you know that it comes to an end. It’s very emotional for me. But the beauty is, two million people watch me every year. And that will only increase.”

Sample Lewin lectures available

–How to Make Teaching Come Alive

–The Birth and Death of Stars

–The Wonders of Electricity and Magnetism

* Dropbox: Founder Drew Houston Simplifies the Cloud Technology Review

One file-hosting service in particular has evoked the kind of devotion ordinarily accorded social-networking services or beloved hardware manufacturers: Dropbox, the product of a startup founded in 2007 by MIT computer science students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. The service lets people use almost any computing device to store files in folders in the cloud as thoughtlessly as they store files in folders in their device’s memory. For most users, the service is free.

TR: Why did you want to start a company in a field—Internet file hosting—where there were so many competitors? I count as many as 15, including Apple’s new iCloud service.

Houston: For me, it goes all the way back to MIT, where there is a campus network called Athena. You can sit down at any of thousands of workstations and your whole environment follows you around: not just your files but where your icons were on your desktop. Then I left and discovered that no one had really built that for the rest of the world.

…TR: Tell me the requisite founder’s tale.

The breaking point for me was a bus ride. I went down to Boston’s South Station to ride the Chinatown bus to New York. I was thrilled to open my laptop and have four hours where I could finally get some work done. But I had that sinking feeling that something was wrong, and I started feeling in my back pocket for my thumb drive, and of course I could just see it sitting on my desk at home. So I sulked for about 10 or 15 minutes and then opened up the [text] editor and wrote some code that I thought would solve the problem. And I met up with Arash through a mutual friend at MIT, and he decided to drop out with a semester left, and we went to California and got to work….

Jan. 27th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 4

Jan-27-2012 | Comments (0)

1. Followups

Bird’s Eye: A fine quartet of pieces that arrived too late for last week. We start with a superb War Tard column on just why the US wants to attack Iran, and it’s not about nuclear bombs, but oil. The first piece in a long while that’s made sense of the oncoming war. As always, War Tard does a fine job of looking at strategies. A quick and powerful graph shows the congressional support for PIPA/SOPA the day before and the day after the Internet blackout. Meet the Preppers! A subculture with the slogan, “Armegeddon ready: are you?” And music! The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, and the Thai Elephant Orchestra produce sounds the like of which you’ve never heard. Click on.

* Why The Us Wants To Attack Iran War Tard

Iran is sitting on the fourth largest oil deposit on the planet and has huge reserves of natural gas and that’s a sweet energy prize by any account. It’s kind of like Inca gold and the Spanish Main in the 16th century… everybody wants a piece of the action. …

The interesting player here in all this is China. Though a long way from being a military superpower, its economic power is rising fast, so fast that the US and Europe fear the loss of traditional Western dominance of the global economy. The gaping weakness of the Chinese rise is energy supply. And without a credible naval fleet to protect the flow of spice, the weakness of China gets exposed… Chinese dependence on sea borne oil delivery and their susceptibility to a blockade sometime in our proxy resource war future. What the West really fears here in the global energy game of Risk, is Iran having unfettered control of its own huge energy reserves, selling those reserves outside the dollar to geopolitical rivals (China) and facilitating the rise of a pan Pacific hegemon that could contest Western dominance at some point later this century.

That’s why Iran is in the cross hairs. Their whole nuke program is symbolic of their determination not to play nice in the petro dollar chess game and the question remains, will they get Tomahawked this year because of it?

* How The Internet Blackout Affected Congressional Support For Pipa/Sopa Boing Boing

* Subculture of Americans prepares for civilization’s collapse Reuters

When Patty Tegeler looks out the window of her home overlooking the Appalachian Mountains in southwestern Virginia, she sees trouble on the horizon. “In an instant, anything can happen,” she told Reuters. “And I firmly believe that you have to be prepared.” Tegeler is among a growing subculture of Americans who refer to themselves informally as “preppers.” Some are driven by a fear of imminent societal collapse, others are worried about terrorism, and many have a vague concern that an escalating series of natural disasters is leading to some type of environmental cataclysm.

…Tegeler, 57, has turned her home in rural Virginia into a “survival center,” complete with a large generator, portable heaters, water tanks, and a two-year supply of freeze-dried food that her sister recently gave her as a birthday present. She says that in case of emergency, she could survive indefinitely in her home. And she thinks that emergency could come soon. “I think this economy is about to fall apart,” she said.

* New Music Futility Closet

The 10-member Vienna Vegetable Orchestra plays instruments created entirely from fresh vegetables, including the carrot recorder, the pumpkin tympanum, the zucchini trumpet, and the bean maraca. These must be fashioned anew before each concert, because the old instruments are made into soup.

The Thai Elephant Orchestra, created by American expatriate Richard Lair and Columbia neurologist David Sulzer, improvise on drums, gongs, harmonicas, and sawmill blades. To date they’ve released three CDs.

9. Oh Brave New Web, That Hath Such Pages On It!

Jan-13-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: OK, boils and germs, it’s fun time! Start by playing with fluid: drag your mouse through the “liquid” and watch. You can change the variables for a different effect. Then look at all the classic “restart” commands from computers back into the 1980’s. Click and watch that s.l.o.w restart. Remember those icons crawling across the screen, just as they used to? And learn about Spirals, Fibonacci, and pine cones in a pair of videos that pass “delightful” without even slowing down.

* Fluid 2.0

* The Restart Page: Free Unlimited Rebooting Experience From Vintage Operating Systems

* Doodling in Math: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant (Thanks, Bonnie!)

Part 2 is here

7. Will It Go Round in Circles?

Dec-23-2011 | Comments (2)

Bird’s Eye: It will! In all three of these, things go around in circles. Nuff said?

* Concrete Buffer Gone Wild The Presurfer

* Dogs Decorating A Christmas TreeThanks, Diana

* Water Levitated By Tibetan Singing Bowls via Reddit

Tibetan singing bowls, ancient instruments used for meditation, can be manipulated to produce droplets that levitate, bounce and skip across water. When one adds water to a Tibetan singing bowl and plays – often by tracing the edge with a mallet – the bowl’s haunting sound is accompanied by ripples on the water’s surface. That’s because the mallet pushes on the side of the bowl – made from bronze alloy that is more malleable than glass – and deforms it on a microscopic scale. The deformation pushes on the air and the water, forming waves. The air waves are sound; the water waves race around the ring. If they are sufficiently excited, the waves break and eject droplets.

4. 1984 Redux

Nov-25-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: “On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette Packet — everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed — no escape.” Orwell, 1984. In Orwell’s dystopia, telescreens monitored your every move. These days, License plate scanners are one of a number off ways that happens. The ACLU article started a fine discussion on Reddit; we append two comments. And a look at those who wear masks and fight back, from Wired.

* License Plate Scanners Logging Our Every Move ACLU

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that the District of Columbia is engaging in widespread tracking of citizen’s movements using automated license plate readers (ALPRs). According to the Post, the D.C. police:

Are running more than one ALPR per square mile;
Are planning on sharply increasing the density of these devices until they form a “comprehensive dragnet;”
Retain the time/date/location/tag number even of innocent people for whom nothing is found to be wrong;
Store that data in a database for three years.

It has now become clear that this technology, if we do not limit its use, will represent a significant step toward the creation of a surveillance society in the United States. The Post article cites a number of examples in which the technology has proven useful to police. Of course, if the police track all of us all the time, there is no doubt that will help to solve some crimes — just as it would no doubt help solve some crimes if they could read everybody’s e-mail and install cameras in everybody’s homes. But in a free society, we don’t let the police watch over us just because we might do something wrong. That is not the balance struck by our Constitution and is not the balance we should strike in our policymaking.

* Two Reddit comments on the ACLU Post Above

Hillwiki

GPS cellphones
GPS car navigation
[1] Wireless smart meters that record your home power usage by the minute. You could lose in court because it was proven your alibi of ‘being home watching TV’ was not possible because no TV or lights were on, and your 500W garage door opener didn’t turn on until 1:13am
Traffic cameras
Worst of all: your internet usage and emails
Credit card/debit purchases
Reward points/miles
About 50 other things

Or maybe I’m just paranoid.

RoughWaterAhead

i did a blind move from florida to california. lived on the streets, finally got a new apartment, still to this day haven’t gotten another car or drivers license. no change of address forms or anything like that, called my bank to let them know and that was it. no facebook, no myspace; i wasn’t trying to hide, but i wasn’t really trying to be found.

a year later, a random college that i had done surveys with tracked me down instantly when they wanted to do another survey. they figured out my landlords phone number and convinced my landlord to call me, took almost no effort at all on their part.

my point is, between the publicly available information about us, and the information we post on the internet, hell, even satellites these days, unless you’re so serious about privacy that you’re faking your death, it’s probably best to assume you have no privacy at all from this point forward.

* Anonymous 101: Introduction to the Lulz Wired

Also this year, Anons released documents on, or d0xed, several police organizations and one prominent police vendor in retaliation for heavy-handed law enforcement reaction to occupations associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement. They’ve fought with child pornographers, hacked Sony repeatedly, and even tried to release compromising pictures to blackmail Bay Area Rapid Transit spokesman Linton Johnson into resigning. (Johnson claimed to have authored and then defended BART’s controversial decision to shut off mobile phone service in BART stations to pre-empt an anti-police brutality protest.)

They’ve created law enforcement excitement that’s verged on panic, given net and media pundits hyperbolic logorrhea about “cyber terrorism” and “cyber freedom”, and happily skipped between damn funny, deeply disturbing, and self-aggrandizing, depending on the mood of the hive mind at the moment.

But what is Anonymous? In this in-depth series “Anonymous: Beyond the Mask,” we’re going to do our best to answer that

8. Black Friday Shopping Tips

Nov-25-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: We’ll start with Adbusters, as today is “Buy Nothing Day”. Not sold on buying nothing? Here are the top 100 highest rated products on Amazon, worth a scan (Vox pop, click shop as the Romans almost said.) Still not sure. Well, what every Tikkunista reader needs is … ok, maybe not every, maybe only a few, or even none. But look at it. Ain’t nothing like it, nowhere.

* Buy Nothing Day + Buy Nothing ChristmasAdbustersCulturejammer Headquarters

You’ve been sleeping on the streets for two months pleading peacefully for a new spirit in economics. And just as your camps are raided, your eyes pepper sprayed and your head’s knocked in, another group of people are preparing to camp-out. Only these people aren’t here to support occupy Wall Street, they’re here to secure their spot in line for a Black Friday bargain at Super Target and Macy’s.

Occupy gave the world a new way of thinking about the fat cats and financial pirates on Wall Street. Now lets give them a new way of thinking about the holidays, about our own consumption habits. Lets’ use the coming 20th annual Buy Nothing Day to launch an all-out offensive to unseat the corporate kings on the holiday throne.

This year’s Black Friday will be the first campaign of the holiday season where we set the tone for a new type of holiday culminating with #OCCUPYXMAS. As the global protests of the 99% against corporate greed and casino capitalism continues, lets take the opportunity to hit the empire where it really hurts…the wallet.

* 100 of Amazon’s best, highest-rated products

* What You Want in BedYoutube 30 seconds

6. Contrary to What Some Believe….

Oct-28-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Folk wisdom is sometimes not so wise. Here are a few comments from Guardian writers who disagree with the belief that the world is more violent, that population growth is the major problem we face, and that wi-fi is dangerous to children.

*The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven PinkerBook review The Guardian

When you heard that a gunman had slaughtered scores of Norwegian teenagers on a holiday island earlier this summer, did you think that here was another symptom of our sick and violent world? So did I, until I read Steven Pinker’s brilliant, mind-altering book about the decline of violence. Pinker does not deny that individual human beings are capable of the most appalling acts of savagery. But the test of our propensity for violence is how the rest of us respond. Once it would have been basic human instinct to react to violence on this scale with more violence. But where were the reprisals, the mob rampages, the demands for the torture and killing of the perpetrator? Instead, the Norwegian people responded with remarkable compassion and restraint: love-bombing instead of real bombing. What happened in Norway this summer showed just how peace-loving we have become.

Pinker thinks that most of what we believe about violence is wrong. To convince us he sets himself two tasks. First, to demonstrate that the past was a far nastier place than we might have imagined. Second, that the present is far nicer than we might have noticed.

* Why Population Hysteria Is More Damaging Than It Seems Vanessa Baird The Guardian

Although low-income countries were responsible for more than 52% of population growth between 1980 and 2005, they were responsible for only 12.8% of the growth in global carbon emissions, according to David Satterthwaite, director of London’s International Institute of Environment and Development. High-income nations, meanwhile, provided only 7% of population growth but 29% of growth in emissions. The reason is simple: so unequal are global consumption levels that one European or North American may be responsible for more emissions than an entire village of Africans.

…But surely, any reduction in population growth is better for the environment than none? Population is certainly a multiplier, but that does not make it the cause of the problem. As the Australian writer Simon Butler puts it: “People are not pollution. Blaming too many people for driving climate change is like blaming too many trees for causing bushfires.”

* The Dangers Of Wi-Fi Radiation Technology Guardian

The Guardian also has a story about the programme in today’s paper, Scientists reject Panorama’s claims on Wi-Fi radiation risks, by James Randerson. It’s a topic we’ve covered numerous times already, of course. Examples include Is Wi-Fi bad for you?, Are mobile phones and Wi-Fi to blame for the world’s ills?, Is there any proof that Wi-Fi networks can make you sick? and, last August, an Ask Jack query. There was also a piece from Kate Figes, A wireless warning, on the Comment is Free blog, which was discussed here under Wireless technology made me sick, claims author Kate Figes. The Health Protection Agency says a person sitting within a Wi-Fi hotspot for a year receives the same dose of radio waves as a person using a mobile phone for 20 minutes.

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