Internet « Tikkunista!

4. Control, and the Internet

Apr-27-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The internet seems to demand superlatives; it is the best of all possible inventions or the worst of all possible inventions. It will set us free, or enslave us forever. Our children are more aware than any generation, or less aware than any generation. Three looks at what is changing in the world online, and the effects on us, are followed by a challenge: an edited version of a Guardian look at the most Internet wired country in the world. But the name has been removed – if you can guess the country’s name before hitting the link, you’re more aware than I am. (You may be more aware anyway, but that’s a different issue….)

* Web Freedom Faces Greatest Threat Ever, Warns Google’s Sergey Brin The Guardian

The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”. “I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It’s scary.”

The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.

* danah boyd – Culture of Fear + Attention Economy = ?!?! Vimeo (30 minute video)

We live in a culture of fear. Fear feeds on attention and attention is captured by fear. Social media has complicated our relationship with attention and the rise of the attention economy highlights the challenges of dealing with this scarce resource. But what does this mean for the culture of fear? How are the technologies that we design to bring the world together being used to create new divisions? In this talk, danah will explore what happens at the intersection of the culture of fear and the attention economy.

* US And China Engage In Cyber War Games The Guardian

The US and China have been discreetly engaging in “war games” amid rising anger in Washington over the scale and audacity of Beijing-co-ordinated cyber attacks on western governments and big business, the Guardian has learned. State department and Pentagon officials, along with their Chinese counterparts, were involved in two war games last year that were designed to help prevent a sudden military escalation between the sides if either felt they were being targeted. Another session is planned for May.

Though the exercises have given the US a chance to vent its frustration at what appears to be state-sponsored espionage and theft on an industrial scale, China has been belligerent.“China has come to the conclusion that the power relationship has changed, and it has changed in a way that favours them,” said Jim Lewis, a senior fellow and director at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies thinktank in Washington.

* How Tiny **** Became An Internet Titan The Guardian ( Your challenge: name the country!)

“We realised that if the government was going to use the internet, the internet had to be available to everybody,” Viik said. … The country took a similar approach to education. By 1997 a staggering 97% of schools already had internet. Now 42 services are now managed mainly through the internet. Last year, 94% of tax returns were made online, usually within five minutes. You can vote on your laptop and sign legal documents on a smartphone. Cabinet meetings have been paperless since 2000.

Doctors only issue prescriptions electronically, while in the main cities you can pay by text for bus tickets, parking, and – in some cases – a pint of beer. Not bad for country where, two decades ago, half the population had no phone line.

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. Reddit

Mar-23-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Reddit supplies a lot of links for Tikkunista, and here’s a range of examples of why. We start with the miracle story of “Rome Sweet Rome”, in which a quick response to a reddit thread changes the redditor’s life. Then an AMA (Ask Me Anything) thread, one of reddit’s most popular feature. The discussion on correct terminology which occurs is fascinating and educational. An example of Reddit’s generosity, and a debate over copyright issues with digital media. (And U can haz a cute animal picture.)

* How One Response to a Reddit Query Became a Big Budget Flick Wired

It’s common for random questions to appear on Reddit’s front page, like “Is there a magnet capable of pulling the iron out of your body?” or “What is the most awkward thing you could say to a cashier while purchasing condoms?” That day, as Erwin scanned Reddit, a question caught his eye. It was posed by someone calling themselves The_Quiet_Earth: “Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU [Marine Expeditionary Unit]?” Erwin clicked on the question and a lively comment thread unfurled. Hundreds of people were whipping hypotheticals back and forth, gaming out the implications of a marines-versus-Romans smackdown. What’s the range of a Roman spear? How would the Romans react to a helicopter? What would happen when the Americans ran out of bullets?

Erwin, who studied history at the University of Iowa, had been posting on Reddit for about five months. He used the alias Prufrock451, a dual reference to the schlubby protagonist of a T. S. Eliot poem and the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451. …One day he wrote about the historical roots of the civil war in Liberia; another day he told a funny story about a shooting range in Iowa. He also uploaded a few pictures of European forts that he thought looked cool and a quote by Voltaire. In his atypicalness—Prufrock451 was pretty clearly a quirky character—he was entirely typical of a habitual Reddit user, and like many other redditors, as they are called, he found the site addictive…. Now, in response to The_Quiet_Earth’s question about time-traveling marines, Erwin started typing. He posted his answer in a series of comments in the thread. Within an hour, he was an online celebrity. Within three hours, a film producer had reached out to him. Within two weeks, he was offered a deal to write a movie based on his Reddit comments. Within two months, he had taken a leave from his job to become a full-time Hollywood screenwriter.

* I am a transsexual woman Ask me almost anything. Reddit

akharon: Can you explain for the luckily hetero-born, satisfied with it, white males like myself what caused you to want to change to a woman? Perhaps it’s just because I don’t know any, but while I can totally get homosexuality (they simply are attracted to the same sex in the same way I’m attracted to the opposite), I just don’t understand putting myself in your shoes. So much of our identities and roles in society are based upon gender, from the products marketed towards us, the biological differences that will affect our opinions and responses to various things, etc. When did you feel that you would be happier as a female, and were you ever previously happy as a male? What sort of time did you take to make the decision to part with your parts, and is there any regret in that? Are you out as a trans woman, or is that something you prefer to keep hidden? Beyond the “fuck you, I have the right”, what do you see as hurdles to overcome for the T community to get the same level of acceptance that the LGB has in the last 10-15 years?

MissJess: Thanks for probably the best question yet. Okay, I have felt I should have been born female since a very young age- my mom said I expressed desire to be a girl at the age of 2… A desire my parents tried to socialize out of me. Because of this I became sort of a introvert and depressed… Over time my gender disphoria became worse and worse- it was making me a bad person. I projected all of my unresolved gender issues onto everyone- and I was so jealous of other women that it started to turn to resentment. But once I came to terms with my own stuff, all those bad feelings towards others disappeared- off like a light switch…. Two years have passed and I’ve never been happier- my only regret is not doing it sooner in life. As far as hurdles for the trans community, there are many- but a big one in my eyes is how others view us- whether or not people are accepting I feel many see trans folks as merely something to have an opinion about and forget that we’re real people

* Join Us in Helping One of Our Own reddit

We first got to know reddit user Dacvak (David A. Croach) when he was a moderator of gaming, IAMA and some other subreddits. We got to know him even better when he applied for the Community Manager job at reddit and came out to San Francisco for an interview. We were so impressed with him that we offered him the job, which he accepted. He gave notice at his previous job, and got everything ready to move across the country from Pittsburgh to San Francisco to start working with us at reddit HQ.

A few days before he was supposed to move out here, he called us up and let us know that he had just received some bad news. He had gone to his local doctor to get checked out after feeling particularly run down, and it turned out that he had leukemia and needed to get to a hospital immediately. Since then he’s had three inductions of chemotherapy. Now the doctors say his best chance is for a perfect-match bone marrow transplant. So, that’s what we at reddit are going to help find for him, and we hope some of you join us.

* A Discussion Of Artificial Scarcity Re Digital Media Lending In Libraries reddit

This is called artificial scarcity – you create an artificial system that enforces scarcity on an unlimited good, because that’s the simplest way of milking it for cash. It fits the old resource constrained model of physical goods that we’ve become used to – and crafted economic systems around – over the last few millennia.

There is very little gold, it’s hard for individuals to get more, therefore it has value. Air is plentiful, it’s easy for individuals to get more, therefore it has no value. Note that economic value has no correlation to actual value, in this example, just to scarcity.

However, this model doesn’t fit digital things at all – they are, by their nature, unlimited in quantity and duplication and distribution are virtually cost free. Duplication also produces a copy perfect in every way – and leaves the original intact – meaning that you can make an infinite number of copies, and distribute one to everyone on the planet for free, without ‘stealing’ the ‘original’ file – it’ll still be there.

This means that digital things are sort of like Air in our example – they have no value under our current economic systems, because they are not just abundant, but truly infinite in supply.

6. Media: You are the Target

Feb-24-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: There’s a fine old saying, “If you’re not paying for a service, you’re the product, not the customer”. As the ways that information about your habits can be gathered and electronically massaged increases, that information becomes an exceedingly valuable commodity. We look at how that works, starting with Target (to “celebrate” their opening in Canada yesterday), then looking at Google (on which you can to something to control your history) and Facebook (on which you can’t). And, in a “little brother watches back” mode, we pass on useful information about a free and useful program (for making your own personal backups only of DVDs you already legally own, of course.)

* How Companies Learn Your Secrets New York Times

Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. …In the past, that knowledge had limited value. After all, Jenny purchased only cleaning supplies at Target, and there were only so many psychological buttons the company could push. But now that she is pregnant, everything is up for grabs. In addition to triggering Jenny’s habits to buy more cleaning products, they can also start including offers for an array of products, some more obvious than others, that a woman at her stage of pregnancy might need.

Pole applied his program to every regular female shopper in Target’s national database and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. …About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

[Later] on the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

* Google and Your Web History

As of March 1st all searches you’ve done on Google become accessible data to marketeers. If you’re okay with that, no problem. If you’d rather that your deep interest in 18th century hand-forged horseshoes (for example) did not become accessible, go to google.com/history and remove all your web history. If you never log into Google, (i.e. you don’t have a gmail account), you’re safe.

* Facebook Tracking Is Under Scrutiny USA Today

Facebook officials are now acknowledging that the social media giant has been able to create a running log of the web pages that each of its 800 million or so members has visited during the previous 90 days. Facebook also keeps close track of where millions more non-members of the social network go on the Web, after they visit a Facebook web page for any reason…..Facebook’s efforts to track the browsing habits of visitors to its site have made the company a player in the “Do Not Track” debate, which focuses on whether consumers should be able to prevent websites from tracking the consumers’ online activity.

* VLC hits 2.0 - Boing Boing

Freeware. Mac and Windows compatible.

After many years of work, Video LAN Client (VLC), the all-powerful free/open video-player, has hit 2.0, with an amazing roster of new features. The new version is called Twoflower,” and it cuts through DRM like butter, disregards patents and plays and converts pretty much any video you throw at it….Completely reworked Mac and Web interfaces and improvements in the other interfaces make VLC easier than ever to use.

6. Tech Fail

Feb-10-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: A set of funny and insightful looks at when technology fails: “captchas”, those letter/number combos we’re forced to enter to prove we’re not spambots; the horrible keyboards we have (and we’re not even getting into how the letters are laid out!), and the yellow pages, an obsolete technology that needs to be buried before it gets to the landfills.

* Password Check New York Times

To retrieve your password, type the letters and numbers in the box below:

Sorry, that was not correct. The “1” was actually an upper-case, sans-serif “I.” Please try again by typing the following letters and numbers, this time using your non-dominant hand and with one eye closed:

Sorry, the second “X” was also lowercase. It looked larger because it was closer to the screen than the first. Please try again by retyping the words you see in this box….

* Caps Lock Has To Go, And Other Proposals For Improving The Computer Keyboard Slate Magazine

I was in the company of several family members and friends, and had just mistyped my Gmail password for the 458th time in calendar 2011. I knew straightaway what had gone wrong—caps lock was depressed by accident—but instead of simply taking my lumps and re-entering my password, I vented: “Is there anything on the computer keyboard more annoying than the caps lock key?”

Yes, my companions told me matter-of-factly, there is. Thirty minutes of conversation ensued, with each participant attempting to outdo the others with tales of keyboard frustration and fiery screeds relegating various keys to eternal damnation. The conversation was painfully nerdy, yet cathartic—and eye-opening.

Since that initial conversation, I’ve spoken with dozens of folks about computer keyboard annoyances, and I’ve compiled a list of five small-scale adjustments that would greatly improve the typing experience. My goal in compiling this list is narrowly tailored. I don’t want to fundamentally change the way we type—I don’t have time to learn the Dvorak keyboard, and I suspect you don’t either. These are small, one-key fixes that could make typing easier, faster, and less prone to error.

* Funny note to Yellow Pages in Canada Boing Boing

7. Hollywood and the Pirates

Feb-03-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Cory Doctorow links to a clear diagram showing how media profits are up; another famous author figures out that giving your books away for free makes you more money, and a sidesplittingly brilliant “Shouts and Murmurs” from the New Yorker suggests the MPAA’s next approach.

* Media Profits Up (Thanks, Cory)

A fine diagram showing how profits in video games, music, books, and films are all rising, despite the cries and whimpers of the legacy entertainment industry players.

* Paulo Coelho Calls On Readers To Pirate Books The Guardian

Bestselling Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho is joining in with a new promotion on the notorious file-sharing site the Pirate Bay, and calling on “pirates of the world” to “unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written”.

Coelho has long been a supporter of illegal downloads of his writing, ever since a pirated Russian edition of The Alchemist was posted online in 1999 and, far from damaging sales in the country, sent them soaring to a million copies by 2002 and more than 12m today. His latest move goes a step further, however, joining in with a new programme on The Pirate Bay and exhorting readers to download all his work for free.

Signing off as “The Pirate Coelho”, the author told readers on his blogabout “a new and interesting system to promote the arts” on The Pirate Bay. “Do you have a band? Are you an aspiring movie producer? A comedian? A cartoon artist? They will replace the front page logo with a link to your work,” wrote Coelho. “As soon as I learned about it, I decided to participate. Several of my books are there, and … the physical sales of my books are growing since my readers post them in P2P sites.”

* “Before the Movie Begins” Jacob Sager Weinstein The New Yorker

…If you wish to opt out of any of the above terms and conditions, you must now walk up to the screen and check one or more of the following boxes with an indelible black Magic Marker:

[ ] By checking the box below, but not this box, I indicate my denial of these terms and conditions.

[ ] By checking the box above, but not this box, I indicate my acceptance of these terms and conditions, unless I have also checked the box below, in which case I indicate my denial, unless I have checked a total of three or more boxes, in which case I have passed beyond denial, cycled through anger, bargaining, and depression, and am now back at acceptance.

[ ] I agree that, for the purposes of box-checking, “above” shall be defined as “below” and “below” shall be defined as “above,” unless the box below is checked.

[ ] Ceci n’est pas un box.

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.

4. The Fight Against SOPA

Jan-20-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Last Wednesday hundreds of web sites went dark to protest SOPA and PIPA, anti-piracy laws before the US Senate that would force sites that link to effectively close (including Tikkunista, among many others). Cory explains why these bills must be fought; the L.A. Times lists the companies who led the fight against it; Ars Technica explains how effective it was (19 senators have come out against it since Wednesday), and Andy Borowitz is funny. Again.

* SOPA: As Boing Boing Sees It Cory Doctorow

On January 18, Boing Boing will join Reddit and other sites around the Internet in “going dark” to oppose SOPA and PIPA, the pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world. Boing Boing could never co-exist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. …If we failed to take this precaution, our finances could be frozen, our ad broker forced to pull ads from our site, and depending on which version of the bill goes to the vote, our domains confiscated, and, because our server is in Canada, our IP address would be added to a US-wide blacklist that every ISP in the country would be required to censor.

This is the part of the post where I’m supposed to say something reasonable like, “Everyone agrees that piracy is wrong, but this is the wrong way to fight it.” But you know what? Screw that.

Even though a substantial portion of my living comes from the entertainment industry, I don’t think that any amount of “piracy” justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the consequences of one’s actions. Big Content haven’t just declared war on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the “fun” Internet: they’ve declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their oppressors, every abused kid who used the net to reveal her father as a brutalizer of children, every gay kid who used the net to discover that life is worth living despite the torment she’s experiencing, every grassroots political campaigner who uses the net to make her community a better place — as well as the scientists who collaborate online, the rescue workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings.

The contempt for human rights on display with SOPA and PIPA is more than foolish. Foolishness can be excused. It’s more than greed. Greed is only to be expected. It is evil, and it must be fought.

* Who Protested? L.A. Times

* What Were The Results? Ars Technica

PIPA support collapses, with 19 new Senators opposed

Members of the Senate are rushing for the exits in the wake of the Internet’s unprecedented protest of the Protect IP Act (PIPA). At least 13 members of the upper chamber announced their opposition on Wednesday. In a particularly severe blow for Hollywood, at least five of the newly-opposed Senators were previously co-sponsors of the Protect IP Act.

The newly-opposed Senators are skewed strongly to the Republican side of the aisle. An Ars Technica survey of Senators’ positions on PIPA turned up only two Democrats, Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who announced their opposition on Wednesday. The other 11 Senators who announced their opposition on Wednesday were all Republicans. These 13 join a handful of others, including Jerry Moran (R-KS), Rand Paul (R-KY), Mark Warner (D-VA), and Ron Wyden (D-OR), who have already announced their opposition.

* How Did People Cope? Andy Borowitz

Internet Blackout Forces Millions to Interact with Each Other

The blackout of thousands of Internet sites in protest of the proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation forced millions of people across the country to interact with each other today. Reports of interpersonal interactions created panic from coast to coast as Americans braced themselves for the horror of awkward silences and unwanted eye contact.

And even as officials warned people to remain calm, millions affected by the blackout feared the worst: conversations with members of their immediate family.

7. Social Media: Reddit and Quora

Jan-13-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Social media, or web 2.0… whatever you call it, it’s growing. Reddit’s numbers speak for themselves, (2 billion pageviews in Dec!) but it’s the subreddits in which it lives. If you were diagnosed with a disease, and wanted to talk to others about their experiences with alternative treatments, there’s a subreddit for that specific disease, almost certainly. If you can’t figure out why your printer won’t run under Lion, go to the Mac subreddit. If you’re a Toronto Maple Leafs fan (my deep sympathy, by the way)…. Quora is similar in that it has user created content, but there’s less discussion, and more emphasis on experience from doctors, economists, screenwriters, police officers, and military veterans. There are two sample links, one of particular interest to Canadians.

* 2 Billion & Beyond Reddit

In December 2011, reddit served 2.07 billion pageviews. Crazy. Here are some details: 2,065,237,338 pageviews; 34,879,881 unique visitors; 12.97 pages / visit

And, more importantly, our community stats: 100,000+ subreddits; 8,400+ subreddits with over 100 subscribers

*How reddit works

The most important fact is that reddit is not a single community; it’s an engine for creating communities.

A subreddit is a class of online community, just like mailing lists, forums, and chatrooms are. Each of the thousands of subreddits is a distinct community with its own purpose, standards, and readership. Subreddits are the secret to reddit’s growth. As communities have scaled up, more focused ones have branched off of popular topics and posting practices.

* What is it like to be a drug dealer? Quora

In a single word, being a drug dealer was exhilarating. Immense rewards, more than I realized at the time, but also unbelievable stress, unavoidable paranoia, and most difficult of all, an existence in a world that does not ‘exist’ by traditional standards….

* What Is Life Like As The Scion Of A Head Of Government? Quora

For the first 13 years of my life, my father was the prime minister of Canada. My parents separated when I was seven or eight, and my brothers and I continued to live with our father in the PM’s official residence, 24 Sussex Drive, in Ottawa, although our mother purchased a home a few blocks away and we spent a lot of time with her as well….

6. Outside the Lines

Jan-06-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: After taking Ron Paul seriously, let’s wade further into the swamp of unacceptability to ask a few more uncomfortable questions. Despite at least one unfortunate phrase, Pellissier’s article raises very interesting questions, and the discussion that follows is also fascinating. Like many, I was hugely educated by Peggy McIntosh’s classic article on “White Privilege”, so I’m fascinated at the deconstruction of it in the current CounterPunch. David Lindorff challenges our fear of hitchhiking, and Louis CK challenges the standard way of selling albums, and wins, bigtime.

* Why is the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews so high? Hank Pellissier, Ethical Technology

Ashkenazi Jews, aka Ashkenazim, are the descendants of Jews originally from medieval Germany, and later, from throughout Eastern Europe. Approximately 80% of the Jews in the world today are Ashkenazim…
Their median IQ is calculated at 117 in From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (2000), published by Cambridge University Press. This is 10 points higher than the generally-accepted IQ of their closest rivals—Northeast Asians—and almost 20% higher than the global average. … Here is a brief list of Ashkenazi accomplishments in the last 90 years.

Nobel Prizes: Since 1950, 29% of the awards have gone to Ashkenazim, even though they represent only 0.25% of humanity. Ashkenazi achievement in this arena is 117 times greater than their population.

Hungary in the 1930s: Ashkenazim were 6% of the population, but they comprised 55.7% of physicians, 49.2% of attorneys, 30.4% of engineers, and 59.4% of bank officers; plus, they owned 49.4% of the metallurgy industry, 41.6% of machine manufacturing, 72.8% of clothing manufacturing, and, as housing owners, they received 45.1% of Budapest rental income. Jews were similarly successful in nearby nations, like Poland and Germany.

USA (today): Ashkenazi Jews comprise 2.2% of the USA population, but they represent 30% of faculty at elite colleges, 21% of Ivy League students, 25% of the Turing Award winners, 23% of the wealthiest Americans, and 38% of the Oscar-winning film directors.

The important question is… Why is the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews so high? Is the reason genetic, environmental, cultural, educational? A unique combination of several?

Here are eight theories….

* Complicating “White Privilege” » Paul Gorski Counterpunch

I dove into the white privilege discourse as part of my training as an anti-racism educator in the mid-1990s, just a few years after my white educator peers had started shuffling through their knapsacks. The shuffling often occurred back then, as it does today, in white caucus groups, organized dialogues among white educators. During these dialogues we more or less took turns pouring the contents of our knapsacks onto the floor before encouraging each other to “own” whatever came out, taking responsibility for racism. Rarely did we get around to talking about what it meant to be an anti-racist or for racial justice. Rarely did we use those dialogues to grow ourselves into more powerful change agents. This, I think, persists as a problem in white caucusing and other forms of race dialogues today: too much conversation about how hard it is to be a white person taking responsibility for white privilege; way too much thinking that the dialogue, itself, is the anti-racism rather than what prepares us for the anti-racism.

…Here, then, is the rub: We, in the white privilege brigade, often, and somewhat generically, in my opinion, like to say that racism is about power. That word, power, might be the most often-spoken word in conversations about white privilege. Rarely, though, do we speak to the nature of power beyond the types of privilege so eloquently expounded upon by Peggy. This is where critical race theory, with its frameworks for deconstructing racism, has flown past the white privilege discourse. Critical race theorists centralize the fundamental questions too often left unasked in conversations about white privilege: What, exactly, does power mean in a capitalistic society? Why, in a capitalistic society, do people and institutions exert power and privilege? What are they after?

* America, Land of the Fearful, is No Place to Hitch-Hike Dave Lindorff NationofChange

Yesterday, I hitch-hiked to the gym. If I tell that to any of my friends, they look at me like I’m crazy. Yet if I had said the same thing 40 years ago, it would have been like saying, “I just drove over to the store” or “I just had lunch.” No one would have batted an eye.

….Are things crazier today? No! They are safer. That’s what is so weird about people’s unwillingness to give a hitcher a ride these days. All the crime statistics show that crime is about where it was in the ‘70s (total crime in 2009 was the same as in 1968, with homicides down to the lowest rate since 1964, while violent crime in general has been falling since 1990 and is now at the level it was in 1973). What’s way up is fear. We have a media that live and breathe crime reporting, and always as lurid as possible. The more gruesome the story, the better. And we have a government that is all about generating fear — fear of crime, fear of immigrants, fear of terrorists, fear of poor people, fear of the 99%, fear of hitch-hikers, you name it.

* The Results Of Louis Ck’s Experiment (Who’s Louis CK?)

The experiment was: if I put out a brand new standup special at a drastically low price ($5) and make it as easy as possible to buy, download and enjoy, free of any restrictions, will everyone just go and steal it? Will they pay for it? And how much money can be made by an individual in this manner?

It’s been 4 days. A lot of people are asking me how it’s going. I’ve been hesitant to share the actual figures, because there’s power in exclusive ownership of information. What I didn’t expect when I started this was that people would not only take part in this experiment, they would be invested in it and it would be important to them. It’s been amazing to see people in large numbers advocating this idea. So I think it’s only fair that you get to know the results. Also, it’s just really cool and fun and I’m dying to tell everybody. I told my Mom, I told three friends, and that wasn’t nearly enough. So here it is….

…It’s been about 12 days since the thing started and yesterday we hit the crazy number. One million dollars. That’s a lot of money. Really too much money. I’ve never had a million dollars all of a sudden. and since we’re all sharing this experience and since it’s really your money, I wanted to let you know what I’m doing with it. People are paying attention to what’s going on with this thing. So I guess I want to set an example of what you can do if you all of a sudden have a million dollars that people just gave to you directly because you told jokes.

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