Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government” (en Español) (auf Deutsch) (in het nederlands) “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.
The piece of writing (via) which that quote introduces is intellectually substantial, but not all that difficult to read, so you might as well take a look at it yourself. He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself — to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known — it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Photo : yfrog.com/jbcc2y0j - Shared by egalite_twitted.
Photo : yfrog.com/dy8yw0j - Shared by egalite_twitted. Cablegate under DDoS attack. Fair Use: Please note that use of the Netcraft Blog is subject to our Fair Use and Copyright policies. For more information, please visit or email info@netcraft.com. WikiLeaks is currently under another distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This time the target appears to be cablegate.wikileaks.org – the website which hosts the leaked US embassy cables. When the cablegate site was launched on Sunday, WikiLeaks' main website at www.wikileaks.org was subjected to a similar attack, causing it to go offline for several hours. The cablegate site itself was not affected by those attacks. Today's attack is still ongoing, and has caused noticeable downtime over the past couple of hours: The cablegate hostname is still configured to use three different IP addresses on a round-robin basis, essentially acting as a load balancer, although this does not appear to have prevented the current attack from succeeding.
@zzepposs. Random Hacks Of Kindness For Humanity | SECTOR: PUBLIC. Increased productivity through development of information society. Press release 26.11.2010 11.19 Finnish original released on 26.11.2010 10.57 Information society development and digitalisation play a key role in sustaining Finnish well-being and increasing productivity. Efficient utilisation of information and communications technologies in different sectors of society leads to increased productivity. On 26 November 2010, the Government submitted to Parliament a report entitled ‘Tuottava ja uudistuva Suomi – Digitaalinen agenda vuosille 2011-2020’ (Productive and innovative Finland – digital agenda for the years 2011-2020). The report defines future objectives for the development of the information society along with measures necessary to achieve them. Key objectives for the upcoming years include the opening up of access to public data and its efficient use, promoting user-oriented service development, securing the position of ageing people as active citizens and promoting sustainable development by adopting new technologies.
Further information: WikiLeaks: The revolution has begun – and it will be digitised | Heather Brooke. Diplomacy has always involved dinners with ruling elites, backroom deals and clandestine meetings. Now, in the digital age, the reports of all those parties and patrician chats can be collected in one enormous database.
And once collected in digital form, it becomes very easy for them to be shared. Indeed, that is why the Siprnet database – from which these US embassy cables are drawn – was created in the first place. The 9/11 commission had made the remarkable discovery that it wasn't sharing information that had put the nation's security at risk; it was not sharing information that was the problem. The lack of co-operation between government agencies, and the hoarding of information by bureaucrats, led to numerous "lost opportunities" to stop the 9/11 attacks.
But data has a habit of spreading. Individually, we have all already experienced the massive changes resulting from digitisation. But when data breaches happen to the public, politicians don't care much. @mikkohypponen Assange links to you... WikiLeaks v the imperial presidency's poodle | Pratap Chatterjee. Anticipating Sunday's release of classified US embassy cables, Harold Koh, the top lawyer to the US state department, fired off a letter to Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, on Saturday morning accusing him of having "endangered the lives of countless individuals".
Thus Koh pre-emptively made himself the figurehead for the US government's reaction to the WikiLeaks release; the White House's subsequent statement has echoed his attack. Koh, a former dean of Yale law school, is also the man who authored a legal opinion for the Obama administration this past March stating that the president had the right to authorise "lethal operations" to target and kill alleged terrorists anywhere in the world without judicial review. This is in spite of the fact that other respected law professors and human rights organisations from Amnesty to Human Rights Watch have expressed grave worries that such actions also endanger the lives of countless individuals.
Magnum Photos Newsletter. G.B. WALES. Cardiff. Man with Teddy Bear at bus stop. 1973 © David Hurn/Magnum Photos A rare collaboration between a leading photographer and an eminent poet in which the poet responds to images, rather than a photographer or artists 'illustrating' a poem. Evolved from a previous assignment for The Independent in which John Fuller agreed to write about David Hurn's pictures as long as the 'captions' could be poetry". The result was a group of startlingly good poems which drew upon and illuminated a selection of Hurn's equally stunning images. Mistakes, like the ill-chosen furniture Of the settled life, surround me now.
But though it can't be guaranteed, There is a crest to every slope, Forgiveness in another's need Of you, a need that gives you hope. » View image» Request information about Fine Art prints» View more photographs by David Hurn Writing the Picture by David Hurn Look inside the book Buy the signed book now. IQ.ORG. The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another....We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men.
Gustav Landauer, Schwache Stattsmanner, Schwacheres Volk! , June, 1910 Wed 29 Aug 2007 : Iirrationality in argument The truth is not found on the page, but is a wayward sprite that bursts forth from the readers mind for reasons of its own. I once thought that the Truth was a set comprised of all the things that were true, and the big truth could be obtained by taking all its component propositions and evaluating them until nothing remained.
I would approach my rhetorical battles as a logical reductionist, tearing down, atomizing, proving, disproving, discarding falsehoods and reassembling truths until the Truth was pure, golden and unarguable. (with apologies) link. Improving data visualisation for the public sector. Pyongyang-vows-unpredictable-consequences-seoul-war-games from rawstory.com. By Agence France-PresseSaturday, November 27, 2010 10:20 EDT North Korea warned Saturday of “unpredictable consequences” if the United States and South Korea go ahead with naval exercises in the Yellow Sea, days after launching a deadly attack on the South. The USS George Washington aircraft carrier and its battle group were planning four days of exercises with South Korea from Sunday as a show of force after Pyongyang stunned the world with its artillery strike.
The planned drill has also heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing, which regards the Yellow Sea as its own ancestral waters and has refrained from condemning its communist ally Pyongyang over Tuesday’s attack. Washington has stressed that the manoeuvre is “defensive in nature”, was planned before North Korea’s attack, and is not aimed against China. “We’ll engrave this outrage deep into our bones,” he said. Many newspaper editorials demanded an urgent military overhaul. Agence France-Presse. "What Is Data Visualization?" Asks Truly Meta, Complex Venn... A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Networks. Worst EU Lobbying Awards. Wales: severe weather warnings. Google Wave Comes Back From the Dead. Google Wave, which was thought to be all but extinct after Google ended development on the project, has been given new life, thanks to Apache. Once considered the e-mail killer, Google Wave was one of the most-hyped launches of 2009.
I'll be the first to admit that I got swept up by the excitement. At the time of launch though, I said that Google Wave would either succeed spectacularly or completely bomb. Unfortunately, my latter prediction came true: Google's realtime communication tool was a failure. That was supposed to be the end of the story, but now Google Wave has resurfaced in a new proposal to the Apache Software Foundation. The proposal's three goals are to migrate Wave's codebase from Google to the ASF's infrastructure, to get Wave back to a state where development can be continued and to add new committers to the project. Apache Wave is still a proposal though; the ASF still has to accept the project. Sarah Palin: 'We've got to stand with our North Korean allies' | Richard Adams | World news. Sarah Palin never claimed she could see Russia from her house – that was Tina Fey – but she went one better on Glenn Beck's radio show in discussing the tensions in the Korean Peninsula and saying: "We've got to stand with our North Korean allies".
A transcript of the radio show reads: Interviewer: How would you handle a situation like the one that just developed in North Korea? Palin: Well, North Korea, this is stemming from a greater problem, when we're all sitting around asking, 'Oh no, what are we going to do,' and we're not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is going to do.
So this speaks to a bigger picture that certainly scares me in terms of our national security policy. But obviously, we've got to stand with our North Korean allies – we're bound to by treaty.... Interviewer: South Korean. It wasn't long before Twitter wags got on the case: Coldest Night So Far -30.9C | News. The lowest early winter temperature so far was recorded at Sodankylä in Finnish Lapland, -31 degrees Celsius on Thursday evening. Cold weather is expected to continue and it is likely that more November low temperature records will be broken. The -30 degree mark was also broken at Utsjoki and Enonontekiö in the far north. In southern parts of the country, night time temperatures were 5 to 7 degrees below freezing and in central regions around -10.
According to the Finnish Meteorological Institute, the next few days will be unseasonably cold, with temperatures this chilly nationwide seen only about once a decade. Some of the lows forecast for central regions have only been recorded once a century. "Overall, the northern hemisphere is not, however, colder than normal. Finland last saw a similar late November freeze in 2004. Harsh Weather Delays Train Services Several train services faced delays on Thursday owing to harsh weather conditions. Can Martha teach the government not to think it’s Google? By Tom Watson I find it difficult not to like Francis Maude.
He’s affable, decent and thoughtful. Unlike many of his colleagues, he’s making a difference. It’s easy for Francis, though. He has a secret weapon. He has Martha Lane Fox. And, as every geek knows, Martha is the kindest, most charming revolutionary internet genius you can ever wish to meet. On top of that, she runs the best karaoke bar in all of London town. This week, Francis, in customary fashion, chose not to steal too much of the limelight from Martha when they jointly launched her report into the future of government internet services. Martha recommended a series of sensible, pragmatic changes to the government’s web estate. You don’t go to three different web sites when you want to buy pants, bras and kitchen knick-knacks from Marks and Spencer dot com after all. These changes sound simple. I was so irritated with the brush off that I phoned James Purnell direct.
Still, James Purnell’s loss is Francis Maude’s gain. Networked Culture » Networks and Collaboration. Open Rights Group | It's our birthday! Celebrating 5 years of ORG. November 24, 2010 | Jason Kitcat It's our birthday! Celebrating 5 years of ORG Today we're celebrating five years of the Open Rights Group. It's been an incredible journey from an online pledge to building a succesful campaigning organisation with full-time staff fighting for your digital rights. Why not join today? Helping us to celebrate is our patron, the marvellous Neil Gaiman who sent us this video message: Today we're also publishing our annual report which gives an overview of what ORG has been up to in the past year. Impressed with ORG's achievements? Every new supporter giving at least £5 a month between now and 10th December will receive a free copy of "Tales from the Public Domain: Bound By Law?
" Join today by direct debit or another method. "If you thought the first five years of campaigning for digital rights were important, the next five will be crucial. "As Vinton Cerf often likes to say, 'The Internet is for everyone. "ORG's cause is just and must prevail! " Offer details: What’s Your Favorite Gov 2.0 Read? Contribute to the CfA Book List. » Code for America.
In just a few weeks, our inaugural class of fellows will be coming together in San Francisco for the first time. These are folks from all kinds of different backgrounds and strengths, who will be spending a year putting their heads together to find creative solutions to civic problems. This is an exciting but challenging task -and we want to make sure they are ready for it with the best possible foundation and tools. That’s why we need your help to put together the Code for America Book List, a set of thought-provoking books to challenge, inspire and inform our fellows’ work throughout the year.
Submit your recommendations in the comments below. The emergence of Gov 2.0 is still fairly new, but there have been a lot of great books published in this space between government and technology. This idea draws its inspiration from the TED Conference’s Book Club, which features works meant to inspire their diverse group of attendees for a more interesting discussion. Photo Credit: patrickgage. Digital by default proposed for government services. Public services should be delivered online or by other digital means, the government has announced in response to a report published by Martha Lane Fox today.
The report, and the government’s initial response, argues for a channel shift that will increasingly see public services provided digitally ‘by default’. Martha Lane Fox, the UK Digital Champion, has published a report Directgov 2010 and Beyond: Revolution Not Evolution that calls for radical improvement to Government internet services to provide higher quality and more convenient 24/7 services to users. In her report to the Minister of the Cabinet Office she argues that as well as delivering better services for citizens, shifting 30% of government service delivery contracts to digital channels has the potential to deliver gross annual savings of more than £1.3 billion, rising to £2.2 billion if 50% of contacts shifted to digital.
Martha Lane Fox, UK Digital Champion, said: Save net neutrality and the Open Internet. Cardiff MP wins social media award | Cardiff. I'm at The Hardwick in Llanover. 'Pervy' private chat case springs back into life. How the Network Will Make Our Cities Smart and Transform the World. Kinect now supported in OpenFrameworks - Freenect.
Basics of the Unix Philosophy. Warning: Your Attention is Under Siege - Tony Schwartz. How do the codes of practice help us work better? By Helen from the Dare2Care Wales team. McDonald's and PepsiCo to help write UK health policy | Politics. Educational Video: The Top Cultural & Educational Video Sites. List of cognitive biases. Login. Science Story | Dissecting the Neural Circuitry of Fear. Gwenn Seemel How I make sure my art doesn’t get ripped off on the Internet. Yochai Benkler: "From Free Software and Wikipedia to a Field of Cooperative Human Systems Design" | Havens Center. Share photos on Twitter. List of eponymous laws. F1 by Mozilla Labs.