The New Politic
June 2012
21 posts
“Urban oyster-tecture infrastructure would take up more land than standard techniques, but the end result is beneficial for everyone and everything. It is nearly self-sustaining and creates value-added urban landscapes. Many impaired estuaries in coastal areas are an unsightly blight. Redesigning them to be a hub for oyster-tecture could bring them back to life as new park space, preserves, and wild lands. They also provide a charming example for cities trying to differentiate themselves by showing their commitment to sustainability and the future.”
—oyster-tecture, by Neil Chambers. An interesting perspective on urban futures through the oyster lense, so to say. (via betaknowledge)
Everyone is a Media Organisation
Of course here sustainability comes into play. If we charge the next generation of journalists with upholding journalistic standards, they must somehow become removed from institutional structures that do not serve balanced reporting. How can we do that?
One way is to equip them with the tools to begin collectives, to build loose digital reporting networks, to become stakeholders in their own media enterprises, to use all available channels to reach audiences far greater than perhaps print or even radio ever could. And, to earn a living from their work. Every journalist has the power to become a media organisation. The tools are there, the audience is there, the need is there.
May 2012
54 posts
Play
Play
“The possession of Knowledge, unless accompanied by a manifestation and expression in Action, is like the hoarding of precious metals-a vain and foolish thing. Knowledge, like wealth, is intended for Use. The Law of Use is Universal, and he who violates it suffers by reason of his conflict with natural forces.”
—The Kybalion (via lucifelle)
Chinese Hacker Dictionary
[This is like one of those “What the Heck is the Internet?” articles from 1994, except it’s for a Chinese internet most of us will never try to use.]
1) 攻击 Gongji Attack
2) 黑名 Heiming Blacklist
3) 冲击波 Chongjibo Blaster (Worm)
3) 攻破 Gongpo Breach
4) 可破密的 Kepomide Breakable
5) 基于CGI攻击 Jiyu CGI Gongji CGI-based attack
6) 闯入 Chuangru Crack
7) 赛博朋克 Caibo Pengke Cyber Punk数据驱动攻击 Shuju Qudong Gongji Data-Driven Attack
9) 字典式攻击 Zidianshi Gongji Dictionary Attack
10) 拒绝服务 Jujue Fuwu Denial of Service
11) 分布式拒绝服務 Fenbushi Jujue Fuwu Distributed Denial of
Service
12) 域名服务器 Yuming Fuwuqi DNS spoofing
电子欺骗 Dianzi Qipian
13) 窃听 Qieting Eavesdropping
[…and so on]
ClubOrlov: Making the Internet Safe for Anarchy →
cluborlov.blogspot.com
Back in the USSR, to spy on your conversations, the KGB had to come and install a bug in your apartment. That was quite a job in itself. One agent was assigned to track each of your family members, to find a time when there was nobody home. Another agent had to then stand watch, while a couple more would pick the lock, move a piece of furniture, neatly cut out a piece of wallpaper, drill a hole, install the bug, glue and retouch the wallpaper so that it looks undisturbed, and put the furniture back in place. Then the conversations overheard by this bug had to be recorded, and someone had to stand by to swap the bulky reel-to-reel magnetic tapes. Finally, somebody had to go through all the tapes, listening for seditious-sounding snippets of conversation. Often the entire eavesdropping mission failed because of some trivial oversight, such as a deadbolt locked one turn too many or a cigarette butt of the wrong brand left in an ashtray, because it would cause the quarry to suddenly become careful, turning up the radio or the television when discussing anything important. Even if something vaguely seditious could be discerned, it sometimes happened that the person charged with listening turned sympathetic toward his quarry, in a sort of reverse Stockholm syndrome, because the dissidents he was spying on turned out to be forthright, honorable, likeable people—unlike his own detestable superiors. If found, the seditious content had to be laboriously transcribed.If it became necessary to map out the quarry’s social connections, the process was, again, laborious. Transcripts of phone conversations and surveillance tapes had to be correlated against photographs of persons walking in and out of the apartment or seen talking to the quarry. Sometimes letters had to be steamed open and read to determine the nature of the relationships. If seditious documents were found, which were normally typed, then an attempt was made to determine their origin based on the ownership of the typewriter, which could be matched by comparing minor imperfections in characters and small deviations in their alignment against a library of typed samples maintained on file, except that the documents were often typed through five layers of carbon paper, making the characters too blurry to make such identification possible.
Compare that to the situation in the US today, where CIA/FBI/NSA/Homeland Security is quite far along in forming one giant security apparatus that dwarfs the quaint old KGB in both intrusiveness and scope, though probably not in effectiveness, even though modern technology makes their job trivial to the point where much of it can be automated. There used to exist privacy protections written into US law, but they are in the process of disappearing as a result of new legislation, such as the CISPA bill making its way through Congress now. But whether or not a sweeping abolition of privacy rights makes it into law, your online privacy is gone. Since the government can now detain you indefinitely without ever charging, trying or sentencing you, and has full access to your digital data, legal niceties make little difference. Nor does it matter any longer whether or not you are a US citizen: the firewall between CIA (which was supposed to only spy on foreigners) and FBI has disappeared following 9/11, and although this practice violates several acts of Congress, you would be foolish to wait for anyone to do anything about it.
via ClubOrlov
One Recorded Future
Sorry to break into the editorial voice here, but I thought I’d connect a few dots in a way that a quote and a handful of links might not.
1) Palantir, is a data mining cybersecurity firm, spun out of PayPal.
2) Palantir wanted to work with BoA to attack Wikileaks, in case you needed a reminder than even a financial transaction company is ultimately political.
Money quote from that first link, by Palantir CEO:
“Palantir Technologies does not build software that is designed to allow private sector entities to obtain non-public information, engage in so-called ‘cyber attacks’ or take other offensive measures.
After which should be tacked, “publicly, anymore, after we got caught doing exactly that.”
3) Recorded Future, is another data mining company, and is joint-funded by the CIA and Google.
4) The NSA will not be saying whether or not there is a relationship between the NSA and Google.
5) All of which is to say, talking about whether or not Facebook can make money at advertising is missing the point. What FB probably won’t mention in a conference call is all the lucrative government contracts that are available for at least the next foreseeable century, selling data to whomever. Data mining could easily be the next military-industrial complex. Hell, even if data mining turns out to be next to useless for tracking people’s pseudonymous twitter handles or whatever, that’s no reason it couldn’t be insanely profitable. I mean, the F-35 is going to cost $323 BILLION to even get a single plane ready to stealthily violate the sovereignty of some country’s borders, and it hasn’t even blown up a single suspected insurgent SUV yet. Asking how Facebook is going to make any money in advertising is like asking how Lockheed is going to make any money selling aircraft to the dwindling middle class.
Pathology of Power
In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department’s activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation’s most sensitive work.
“I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything” was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn’t take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ”Stop!” in frustration.
“I wasn’t remembering any of it,” he said.
