Online commenting: the age of rage | Technology | The Observer. For a while after his first TV series was broadcast in 2009, comedian Stewart Lee was in the habit of collecting and filing some of the comments that people made about him on web pages and social media sites. He did a 10-minute Google trawl most days for about six months and the resultant collected observations soon ran to dozens of pages.
If you read those comments now as a cumulative narrative, you begin to fear for Stewart Lee. A good third of the posts fantasised about violence being done to the comic, most of the rest could barely contain the extent of their loathing. This is a small, representative selection: "I hate Stewart Lee with a passion. Lee, a standup comedian who does not shy away from the more grotesque aspects of human behaviour, or always resist dishing out some bile of his own, does not think of himself as naive.
The "40,000 words of hate" have now become "anthropologically amusing" to him, he insists. The psychologists call it "deindividuation". Have they ever met? Profoundheterogeneity. “I am sitting here, six in the morning, I am staring at two people bascially naked in the shower together with 30 people watching and its like uh okay, but that’s the future.” -Josh Harris, We Live in Public Perhaps the most haunting film I have watched on publicity and the digital network is Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public. On the surface the documentary is about the Josh Harris and his various internet ventures.
But on a more significant level the film raises questions about what it means to “live” once that living is done almost exclusively in public. The movie covers several of Harris’s projects including “Quiet: We Live in Public” a bunker hotel in NYC where one hundred people agreed to have every aspect of their lives exposed to every other member of the community. Everything that happened was filmed, 24-7, and broadcast to the TVs around the hotel. About ten pages into the introduction of Jeff Jarvis’s new book Public Parts I started wondering if he had seen TImoner’s film. 1. Life in the Age of Extremes - Bill Davidow - Technology. The Internet causes connections to multiply and strengthen, creating a frenzy of positive feedback, which can drive people apart--not together Optimists have long dominated the cyber-landscape, firm and vocal in their belief that the Internet creates a more transparent world, and that the quick and easy access to information it provides is bringing the global population together into one enlightened chorus of harmony.
My perspective is different, and my goal in this, the first in a series of posts for The Atlantic, is to lay out the implications of an Internet-driven world. I have been deeply concerned that the Internet has created a centrifugal force that has the potential to tear us apart. Hobsbawm wrote: "The world of the third millennium will therefore almost certainly continue to be one of violent politics and violent political changes. " Central to my own viewpoint is the concept of positive feedback. The Internet is positive feedback's best friend. Image: David Blackwel/Flickr. What it Means Today to be 'Connected' - Lucy P. Marcus.
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die. — E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910) I was recently selected as one of Britain’s “best connected” women by Director, a business magazine.
Culture Desk: Bigger Brother: The Exponential Law of Privacy Loss. This past Tuesday, Facebook made a deal with the F.T.C.: from now on, the social-networking company can no longer humbug us about privacy. If we’re told that something we post on the site will be private, it will stay that way, unless we give Facebook permission to make it public. Or at least sort of. For a while. Facebook has been relentless in its effort to make more of what it knows about us—the music we listen to, the photos we take, the friends we have—available to more people, and it will surely figure out creative ways, F.T.C. or no F.T.C., to further that campaign.
The company’s leadership sincerely believes that the more we share the better the world will be. Meanwhile, Zynga has announced that it’s going to raise about a billion dollars in an impending I.P.O. These are just three stories from the past seven days. It’s impossible to exactly measure what per cent of our time is spent connected to the Internet: texting, shopping, surfing, browsing, sleeping.
Rate This Article: What’s Wrong with the Culture of Critique | Magazine. Photo: Brock Davis You don’t have to read this essay to know whether you’ll like it. Just go online and assess how provocative it is by the number of comments at the bottom of the web version. (If you’re already reading the web version, done and done.) To find out whether it has gone viral, check how many people have hit the little thumbs-up, or tweeted about it, or liked it on Facebook, or dug it on Digg.
A funny thing has quietly accompanied our era’s eye-gouging proliferation of information, and by funny I mean not very funny. Technoculture critic and former Wired contributor Erik Davis is concerned about the proliferation of reviews, too. Of course, Yelpification of the universe is so thorough as to be invisible. Our ever more sophisticated arsenal of stars and thumbs will eventually serve to curtail serendipity, adventure, and idiotic floundering.
There’s an essential freedom in being alone with one’s thoughts, oblivious to and unpolluted by anyone else’s. Life demands assessment. Technology Provides an Alternative to Love. Two decades of the web: a utopia no longer. The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It. Here’s Why. Fred Wilson recently posted a great video on his blog with the CEO of Forrester Research, George Colony. The money slide is the graphic below. The chart shows three scarce resources and their improvements over time. The top line is available storage (S), the middle line represents processing power (following Moore’s law) or (P) and the bottom line is the Network (N). In it he asserts that the web is dying and in its ashes will see the rise of the “App Internet.” He’s right about this.
Colony’s presentation is intriguing (and worth a watch if you have a few minutes) because I love to see when informed people make arguments that are different than you ordinarily hear (and different from my own views). In the end, Seth Godin’s comments on Fred’s blog post said it best: In other words, nobody can really assert authoritatively what the future of tech or the Internet will hold. George’s Arguments 1. 2. 3. In this era the computing model known as “client / server computing” was popularized. 1. Could the Internet Ever Be Destroyed? The raging battle over SOPA and PIPA, the proposed anti-piracy laws, is looking more and more likely to end in favor of Internet freedom — but it won't be the last battle of its kind. Although, ethereal as it is, the Internet seems destined to survive in some form or another, experts warn that there are many threats to its status quo existence, and there is much about it that could be ruined or lost. Physical destruction A vast behemoth that can route around outages and self-heal, the Internet has grown physically invulnerable to destruction by bombs, fires or natural disasters — within countries, at least.
It's "very richly interconnected," said David Clark, a computer scientist at MIT who was a leader in the development of the Internet during the 1970s. "You would have to work real hard to find a small number of places where you could seriously disrupt connectivity. " On 9/11, for example, the destruction of the major switching center in south Manhattan disrupted service locally. Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin | Technology. 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.
Revealed: US and China's cyber war gamesWashington's plan to beat web censorsChina struggle to regain control of the internetHow open is your internet? "There's a lot to be lost," he said. Censoring the Internet: It's Not Just for China Any More! - James Fallows - Technology. Stop Online Piracy Act: Can the geek lobby stop Hollywood from wrecking the Internet? Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. In a time of legislative gridlock, the Stop Online Piracy Act looked like a rare bipartisan breakthrough. The bill, known as SOPA, promised a brave new Internet—one cleansed of “rogue websites” that hawk pirated songs and movies as well as counterfeit goods.
For Congress, the legislation’s goals amounted to a can’t-lose trifecta: uphold justice, protect legitimate businesses (and jobs!) , and make the Web safer for law-abiding consumers. Who could be against that? A lonely few, at first. When the legislation was introduced in the House last month by Rep. But something happened on the way to easy passage and the flourish of the president’s signature: The Internet fought back. In theory, SOPA enlists Internet service providers and advertising networks to filter out the “worst of the worst” sites, most of them based offshore.
As these critiques began to mount, the open-Internet groups were joined by a growing coalition of SOPA haters. Rep. Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, a pair of bills that threaten Internet freedom. Photograph by Sean Gallup/Getty Images. The United States of America was forged in resistance to collective reprisals—the punishment of many for the acts of few. In 1774, following the Boston Tea Party, the British Parliament passed a series of laws—including the mandated closure of the port of Boston—meant to penalize the people of Massachusetts.
These abuses of power, labeled the “Intolerable Acts,” catalyzed the American Revolution by making plain the oppression of the British crown. More than 200 years later, the U.S. Congress is considering bills that would lead to collective reprisals against online communities.* The Senate’s PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House are supposed to address copyright infringement and counterfeiting. The interconnected nature of the Internet fostered the growth of online communities such as Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. If you think this scenario is unlikely, consider what happened to Mooo.com earlier this year. US internet providers hijacking users' search queries - tech - 04 August 2011. Read full article Continue reading page |1|2 Editorial: "Hijacking web searches for cash threatens net success" Update: Since the practice of redirecting users' searches was first exposed by New Scientist last week, we have learned that all the ISPs involved have now called a halt to the practice.
They continue to intercept some queries – those from Bing and Yahoo – but are passing the searches on to the relevant search engine rather than redirecting them. Original story posted on 4 August 2011 Searches made by millions of internet users are being hijacked and redirected by some internet service providers in the US. Reese Richman, a New York law firm that specialises in consumer protection lawsuits, today filed a class action against one of the ISPs and Paxfire, which researchers believe provided the equipment used to hijack and redirect the searches.
The hijacking seems to target searches for certain well-known brand names only. Buy, buy, buy The process is highly contentious. The NS Profile: Tim Berners-Lee. Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web among a small circle of fellow computer enthusiasts. Today, the 56-year-old Briton remains one of the internet's most vigorous advocates. Its vast success, however, has had a downside: it has exposed him to a bombardment of requests from visionaries, obsessives and rubberneckers, as well as hordes of children demanding help with school projects. All expect him to exist as some kind of open-source human being. Berners-Lee has never been an enthusiastic self-publicist. Nowadays, he shelters behind carapaces of email gateways and protective staff. He seldom gives interviews. “I have built a moat around myself, along with ways over that moat so that people can ask questions. Nevertheless, Berners-Lee is campaigning for ever more openness, pushing for the internet to exist as a free-for-all, unfettered by creeping government interference or commercial intrigue.
The vast expansion of the web demands a change of ethos, he believes. How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords. How Two Scammers Built an Empire Hawking Sketchy Software | Magazine. Illustration: Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo Before they built an international underworld empire — before they weaseled their way onto millions of computers, before their online enterprise was bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, before they were fugitives wanted by Interpol — Sam Jain, now 41, and Daniel Sundin, 33, were just a couple of garden-variety Internet hustlers.
The two, who met around 2001, started out with a series of relatively modest scams and come-ons. Capitalizing on post-9/11 paranoia, Jain sold anti-anthrax gas masks. Exploiting the anxieties of aspiring non-English-speaking immigrants, he helped run a green card lottery site that tricked applicants into paying for an INS form that the government provides for free. Together, the two men sold gray-market or counterfeit versions of popular software. They marketed all these dodgy ventures with a mix of hyperaggressive tactics, including classic black hat tricks like “browser hijacking” and “typo-squatting.” Hacked! - Magazine. As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the “cloud”—remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity—a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be.
A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years’ worth of hacked and deleted e‑mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now—and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future. On April 13 of this year, a Wednesday, my wife got up later than usual and didn’t check her e‑mail until around 8:30 a.m. The previous night, she had put her computer to “sleep,” rather than shutting it down. When she came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all. We thought that “other than this” was a nice touch. Anonymous 101: Introduction to the Lulz | Threat Level.
Think Again: Cyberwar -- By Thomas Rid. One Per Cent: Anonymous members tricked into giving up bank details. "Is the Web Closing?" by Esther Dyson. We, the Web Kids - Alexis Madrigal - Technology. Culture Desk: How to Get Privacy Right. Scamworld: 'Get rich quick' schemes mutate into an online monster. Malware and computer viruses: They’ve left porn sites for religious sites. How To Tell Who’s Tracking You Online. I'm Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web - Alexis Madrigal - Technology. Big Mac Attack: Apple Security Bruised after OS X Infections. "Cyber War and Peace" by Joseph S. Nye. Cyberwarfare: what Richard Clarke and other fearmongers get wrong.