Sweden and Singapore come out top in a World Economic Forum study on the digital competitiveness of nations.

Read the original post:
Sweden is most ICT-wired country

Mike Daisey, the brash maestro of the monologue, takes Apple’s leader out to the digital woodshed in latest solo show, now at Woolly Mammoth Theatre.

Read more:
Peter Marks reviews ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’

Video courtesy of Asiapress . Also see: North Korea’s Digital Underground by Robert S. Boynton The Atlantic , April 2011 These media insurgents have a two-pronged strategy, integrating Cold War methods (Voice of America-like shortwave broadcasts in; samizdat-like info out) and 21st-century hardware: SD chips, thumb drives, CDs, e-books, miniature recording devices, and cell phones. And as with all intelligence-gathering projects, their most valuable assets are human: a network of reporters in North Korea and China who dispatch a stream of reports, whether about the palace intrigue surrounding the choice of Kim Jong Il’s successor, or the price of flour in Wŏnsan.

Visit link:
North Korea’s Citizen Journalists

One of the fastest growing websites across the pond, BeatThatQuote.com was purchased by Google this morning for more than $61 million (GBP 37.7 million). It wasn’t Google’s first acquisition of the year (that was eBook Technologies) — and it certainly won’t be its last. The search company picked up 48 different properties in 2010 (from Aardvark to LabPixies to Quiksee) and it plans to be just as “aggressive” over 2011, according to an interview with David Lawee , Google’s vice president of corporate development, in this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal . “I would love to have 25 more Andy Rubins working on projects with longer time horizons than more people are willing to invest in.” The acquisition of BeatThatQuote comes after a failed attempt to pick up Groupon last year for a reported $5 billion. A website that “helps its website visitors search, compare and apply for lower rates and cheaper prices on a different array of products including financial, insurance, legal servces, utilities and shopping,” according to a quick post on TheNextWeb , BeatTheQuote is currently bringing in more visitors than Facebook. ”Google is set to utilize BeatThatQuote’s technology to better deliver deals and financial comparisons, perhaps integrating it into its new deals service.” The purchase makes sense. Google’s new deals site is meant to compete with Groupon, which is rapidly expanding, and the company has a history of successfully integrating acquired talent and products into new spin-off services. Applied Semantics, acquired in April 2003 for more than $100 million, led to AdSense, Google’s popular (and multi-billion dollar revenue generating) advertising platform for Web developers, for example. And picking up Keyhole, Inc. the following year allowed Google to make much-lauded improvements to its Maps technology. As Google continues to expand — “I would love to have 25 more Andy Rubins here who are working on projects with longer time horizons than more people are willing to invest in,” Lawee told the Journal , referring to the man running the then-small firm Android, Inc., that Google acquired in 2005 — what other sites might it suck into its hungry maw? John Fernandez , a thoughtful power user of Quora who runs Online Marketing at IntraLinks, dared to answer that very prompt on the question and answer site. Google could purchase the struggling MySpace from News Corp., which is looking to unload the site, or Yammer in an attempt to more clearly define its social strategy, Fernandez quessed. Maybe it will pick up PeekYou, Blekko or Hunch, three sites that are doing interesting things in the search space. Or it could just buy a bunch of things that most people don’t care about. “Unfortunately, I’d expect a lot of purchases by Google in 2011 to be in this category, Fernandez wrote . “You’ll probably see a bunch of acquisitions to support the Android platform, acquisitions around the ‘boring’ hardware and telecom infrastructure to make servers faster and the like.” One example that falls into that last category is BlindType, which Google acquired in October of last year. Hoping to improve speed and reduce error rates, BlindType is a piece of software built for smartphones that recognizes the lack of tactile feedback on your handheld’s slick, glass surface and the problems that can cause. If a user starts typing “yjr” when beginning a sentence, BlindType assumes that he or she meant to type “the” and corrects the user’s message after noting a shift on the digital keyboard one space to the right. That might be boring to most because BlindType isn’t a splashy, multi-billion dollar service like, say, Groupon, but it has definite implications for the (important, and growing) smartphone industry.

More:
Google Acquires BeatThatQuote, Plans Aggressive Growth in 2011

With a statement that largely flew under the radar last week, HarperCollins voluntarily joined a small group of publishers adding to the increasing frustrations of librarians around the country. Any new titles licensed from library e-book vendors will only be allowed to circulate 26 times before the license deal expires, HarperCollins announced. (Currently Simon & Schuster and Macmillan, two other members of what is considered the “big six” in traditional publishing, don’t allow e-books to be circulated in libraries at all–but they’re in the minority.) “HarperCollins is committed to the library channel,” the publisher said in a short statement. “We believe this change balances the value libraries get from our titles with the need to protect our authors and ensure a presence in public libraries and the communities they serve for years to come.” How many years to come? Publishing is constantly being opened to new formats and has, on the whole, been moving away from the traditional ink-on-paper products we’re used to seeing on shelves. It seems libraries–and their readers–are more accepting of this than publishers, who are grasping with their (ever less influential) hands to a business model that was and unnecessarily punishing libraries in the process because they’re one of only a few institutions I can think of that will reliably stick to the law. (If you told me I could only share a digital book 26 times, I’d agree, sign the contract and quickly find a way to send it to all 27 of my friends.) Readers have shown an interest in checking out digital e-books and librarians are trying to–are going to–make that possible. But, in the face of tightening budgets, options are limited. “Yes, seriously. They think they need to protect authors from libraries,” Mike Masnick responded on Techdirt . “That’s–to put it frankly–insane. It seriously makes me question whether authors should be comfortable with HarperCollins as a publisher, when it seems to be making moves that clearly go against an author’s best interest.” There are other publishers, and ones that seem to understand the direction that the industry is moving in, ones that are concerned with getting the material to readers in any format they express an interest in. Will authors seek them out instead? “[T]his kind of move doesn’t make HarperCollins look good or like it has any recognition of the digital world,” Masnick wrote. “It should be a major turn off to authors who do recognize where the market is headed.” Whether the announcement drives authors away from the publisher will be seen in the coming months, but one thing is certain: A select group of librarians aren’t happy. The change in the publisher’s legal language sparked the development of a single-serving website, boycottharpercollins.com , that answers a simple question–”Are we still boycotting HarperCollins?”–and provides a brief explanation: “As of Tuesday, March 01, 2011 , HarperCollins is still limiting the number of times an ebook can be borrowed from your library, so the boycott is on ” (emphasis in original). “Yes, seriously. They think they need to protect authors from libraries,” Mike Masnick responded. “That’s–to put it frankly–insane. Maintained by librarians Brett Bonfield and Gabriel Farrell, boycottharpercollins.com explains that putting circulation limits on e-books could encourage libraries to buy additional copies–but that’s just speculation at this point. “[L]ibraries have limited budets, especially in the current economy, so there is a good chance that libraries will spend the same amount on e-books they are already spending but offer less variety because they would have to buy more copies of the most popular items,” Bonfied and Farrell wrote . Or maybe libraries will just cut HaperCollins books out of their rotation entirely. A 26-loan limit doesn’t make any sense. Josh Marwell, HarperCollins’ president of sales, told Library Journal last week that the 26 circulation limit was carefully chosen and was arrived at only after “considering a number of factors, including the averge lifespan of a print book, and wear and tear on circulating copies.” But Bonfield and Farrell point out that many libraries are still circulating century-old books. And besides, the compromise has been made: There are restrictions on libraries already in place that make loaning an e-book similar to loaning a traditional book. For example, many libraries have arrangments with publishers and vendors that prohibit them from lending out more than one digital copy of a book at a time, and often only for two weeks. Librarians aren’t willing to give any more than they already have.

Go here to see the original:
Boycott HarperCollins: Publisher Limits Library E-Book Lending

The explosion in smartphone apps has given investors and entrepreneurs optimism that the digital music business is poised to finally become profitable.

Link:
Investors Are Drawn Anew to Digital Music

Q:  I spent a considerable amount of time updating my LinkedIn profile with past work experiences and my education. Is there a way to take all of that and build traditional ink-on-paper resumes for distribution? A : Visit the LinkedIn homepage, log in and you won’t find the word resume anywhere. Navigate to your own personal profile and the only place it appears is on the right-hand sidebar where you might be prompted to import an existing resume to make your profile as complete as possible. But this is the digital age. It makes more sense — doesn’t it? — to build your digital resume, your portfolio and list of both past and current projects, online and then turn it into a printable document, rather than the other way around. Turns out, you can do just that. And most users of LinkedIn — and there are now more than 90 million of them in over 200 countries and territories — have already added their complete work history, contact information and more on the site. That is, after all, the kind of information that LinkedIn was built to showcase. Over at LinkedIn Labs, an experimental offshoot that the company runs to showcase small projects and new features built by LinkedIn employees, a Resume Builder allows you to transform the data you’ve already entered on your profile into a printable page. “Turn your LinkedIn Profile into a beautiful resume in seconds,” the Resume Builder’s page reads. “No more messing around with multiple Word and PDF documents scattered all over the computer. Pick a resume template, customize the content, and print and share the result to your heart’s content.” It’s simple. Visit the Resume Builder, sign in with your LinkedIn account, and choose from more than ten different templates. The builder does a good job of transferring your content over and making it presentable. If you have to make a few tweaks to the page before printing it and presenting to potential employers, the builder is Tools mentioned in this entry: LINKEDIN LINKEDIN RESUME BUILDER More questions? View the complete Toolkit archive .

Read this article:
Use Your Existing LinkedIn Profile to Build Printable Resumes

Thought America’s Web obsession was building a nation of basement-dwelling blog fiends? Think again: a new study indicates that the Internet is facilitating the development of more voluntary organizations while strengthening the bonds in old ones. A new study released by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, entitled ” The Social Side of the Internet ,” highlights the ongoing role that the Internet is playing in social organization. Pew found that while 75% of all American adults are active in some kind of voluntary group or organization, Internet users are more likely than others to be active and engaged: 80% of Internet users participate in groups, compared with 56% of non-Internet users. Social media users are even more likely to be active: 82% of social network users and 85% of Twitter users are group participants. The Pew Internet data essentially reinforces Clay Shirky’s thesis in Here Comes Everybody  (2008) on organizing in the digital age: As new innovations in media and information technology make communication infinitely more efficient, the costs of organizing plummet, creating more opportunities for collective action in the digital realm. Communities like Reddit and 4chan, for example, do have a “home base” on a particular website, yet have no need to deploy firm-like systems of complex rules to reduce the costs of engaging in communal activity; they simply act, with minimal direction. While 75% of all American adults are active in some kind of voluntary group or organization, internet users are more likely than others to be active and engaged. But Pew Internet’s study also suggests another interesting factor: Active Internet users are more likely to reinforce pre-existing social or civic organizations than seek out new contacts for new organizations. According to Pew, American adults active in groups were asked about three potential reasons for being active in social or civic groups. Some 59% of adults cited “accomplishing things as part of a group that they could not accomplish on their own” as their primary incentive. An almost equal number (57%) say that keeping up with news and information about subjects that matter to them is a major reason. While there are obvious demographic differences — low income adults and African-Americans are slightly more likely than others to cite meeting new people who share their interests as a major reason to participate in social and civic groups — the majority of American adults cited participating in substantive, identity-based activities as the major incentive to become involved in a social or civic organization. I’m reminded of the cautionary tale of technology espoused in the pages of Robert D. Putnam’s  Bowling Alone (2000), the much debated sociological expose on American community which introduced the phrase “social capital” into the American intellectual lexicon. Putnam — who discussed his work with The Atlantic in a 2000 interview —  pointed to the gradual “individualizing” of our leisure time through television and other technological innovations as an eroding force in American social life; every man had the potential to end up forever a basement-dweller, pwning their opponents in StarCraft in a semi-coherent miasma of white noise without engaging in any meaningful civic actvitiy. While Putnam’s thesis has been heavily discussed in the past decade, the Pew Internet study serves as a gentle, if cursory, rejoinder. Technology has served to enhance, rather than erode, the communal organs so crucial to American civil society: 68% of all Americans (internet users and non-users alike) said the internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to communicate with members . Some 75% of internet users said that.  62% of all Americans said the internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to draw attention to an issue . Some 68% of internet users said that.  60% of all Americans said the internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to connect with other groups . Some 67% of internet users said that.  59% of all Americans said the internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to impact society at large . Some 64% of internet users said that.  59% of all Americans said the internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to organize activities . Some 65% of internet users said that.  52% of all Americans said the internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to raise money . Some 55% of internet users said that.  51% of all Americans said the internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to recruit new members . Some 55% of internet users said that.  49% of all Americans said the internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to impact local communities . Some 52% of internet users said that.  35% of all Americans said the internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to find people to take leadership roles . Some 35% of internet users said that. Technology may not be the corrosive force that Putnam imagined in American life. Instead, it may provide new lifeblood for civic organizations by making participation cheap and easy, if in a different form. Americans may not want to bowl alone: they just prefer to do it online, from the comfort of their homes.

Read the original:
Pew: Internet Spurs Development of Voluntary Organizations

It would take about half a million HDTVs, according to Discover magazine, to properly appreciate this image, which is the most complete map of the universe ever made. Produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, what you see here is about one-third of the entire sky, which was built by assembling images taken over a dozen years by the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Visit the Sloan website to blow up some of the images used to create this map and it’s clear that the massive amounts of data contained here will be invaluable for astronomers who previously worked with a map constructed by the Palomar Sky Survey in the 1950s using photographic plates. View more Pictures of the Day . Image: Sloan Digital Sky Survey . Via Discover magazine .

Here is the original post:
Picture of the Day: The Most Complete Map of the Universe

In the digital age, the printed book has received a stay of execution from an unlikely source: designers.

View original post here:
Design Notebook: Selling a Book by Its Cover

After readers found a piece detailing best practices for taking care of your personal archives helpful, the team at the Smithsonian Institution Archives reached out to us about a new post they were working on concerning the organization of digital photographs. Timed perfectly to coincide with the close of the holiday season (finally), this post serves as a basic introduction to preserving all of the memories you made over the past few weeks. This post was also published on the Smithsonian Institution Archives’ THE BIGGER PICTURE blog. It is used here with permission. It was written by Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, an electronic records archivist. See more posts about the Smithsonian .   Clean Sweep in the New Year: Organizing Digital Photos Digital photography has made it much easier to capture special moments in our lives. Folks who carry camera phones can always be ready to point and shoot everything from an impromptu family football game to a carefully staged portrait of folks in matching sweaters. There is no longer any need to worry about having only two shots left on a roll of film during the school play or coming back from the drive-through Fotomat or drugstore with fuzzy prints. The holidays provide great opportunities for lots of picture taking. Now, as the season is winding down, can be the perfect time to organize recent digital images you’ve made, while events and memories are still fresh in your mind. Make the time. Set aside an afternoon or evening to focus on your digital images. Transfer them to your computer from your phone or digital memory card. Quite often you only need to connect your camera to your computer to conduct a step-by-step transfer to it. There also are a variety of image software programs to do this on a PC or Mac. These programs can manage your images by date, location, or name, and provide editing functionality such as sharpening, cropping, and red-eye removal. Be aggressive about deleting bad images. Delete blurred, duplicate, or unwanted photos. This can be done on the camera before your transfer pictures to the computer or after. If you do this on the camera, you don’t have to worry about the need to delete an image twice. File names. Photos usually import into computers with a string of letters and numbers that is part of the camera’s default naming standard such as DSCN0070.JPG and provide no description about the images themselves. Some newer cameras do allow you to set some of the naming formats. Consider renaming the set of images to something more meaningful. Some options include the date, the name of the person or event, or some combination of all of them. I recommend at least including the date in some manner. 122010_1.jpg 122010_2.jpg Max122010_1.jpg Max122010_2.jpg NewYears122010_1.jpg NewYears122010_2.jpg Another option is to group the images into named folders within the ‘My Pictures’ folder on the computer or within the image management program. In some instances you can use batch processes to name the files and/or folders. Be consistent once you adopt a naming standard. Metadata (data about data). Some programs also provide the option to add keywords and other information about an image. Facial recognition is another feature with some packages that allow you to assign the name to a person and the program will match up other photos of that person in your files (it is not perfect and will select other people in some instances). This additional data can make searching easier. Multiple copies . Even if you do not plan to print out your images, you can store copies with an online photo sharing service and share them with others. Print out the best ones. I still believe in printed images, and there are a number physical stores or online photo printing companies that will create prints. Backup. Don’t rely only on the images stored on your computer or device. While you may have the images on a photo sharing site mentioned above, also keep copies on CDs, external hard drives, or thumbdrives. And don’t forget about these backups either as you change hardware and software. Investing a little time now to organize this year’s holiday memories will pay off in the future. Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig is an electronic records archivist for the Smithsonian Institution Archives. Images: 1. Matching Christmas sweater, by Matthew Bietz, Creative Commons; 2. Kodak Fotomat, 1960s, by Roadsidepictures, Creative Commons; 3. This image was renamed from DSCN2773 to Max_Alex_102010_1.JPG, Courtesy Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig; 4. Printing photos, by Chuck Brown, Creative Commons.

Link:
Clean Sweep in the New Year: Organizing Digital Photos

Jaron Lanier’s recent lengthy essay about Wikileaks is not really about Wikileaks; thus, it is unsurprising that he misses the central lesson of this affair. From the beginning, he makes the fundamental conceptual mistake of conflating individual human beings and powerful institutions, like governments and corporations; he then takes off on a dystopic vision of a world dominated by an imagined “nerd supremacist” ethic of complete transparency, collapse of private life, and unrestricted information flow, in which humanity is the slave of the machine. Horrifying as this vision is, it simply distracts from the main lessons of the Wikileaks affair: the increasing control of (relatively) unaccountable corporations and states over the key components of the Internet, and their increased willingness to use this control in politicized ways to impose a “dissent tax” on content they find objectionable. Ability to disseminate one’s ideas on the Internet is now a sine qua non of inclusion in the global public sphere. However, the Internet is not a true public sphere; it is a public sphere erected on private property , what I have dubbed a “quasi-public sphere ,” where the property owners can sideline and constrain dissent. When Lanier says that privacy “is not about anachronistic prohibitions on information flow, but about personhood” and “that everyone has a right to keep a private sphere private,” as a scholar of privacy and the Internet , I wholeheartedly agree; I have written about this many times. However, Lanier then argues this right on behalf of institutions and governments, claiming that endeavors like Wikileaks are akin to social networking sites in destroying privacy, thus impeding the development of “personhood.” He presents Wikileaks as a harmful example of the “nerd ideology” that is exposing us all, to the detriment of us all. Lanier thus conflates the right to privacy of persons with the privilege of non-disclosure that states may sometimes exercise. Raising personhood in this context is irrelevant and dangerous. Misguided legal fictions aside, states and corporations are not persons and should not enjoy the considerations, such as an inherent right to privacy. On the contrary, they are subject to the people’s right to transparent and accountable governance. Institutions, may, under certain conditions, exercise a privilege not to disclose particular kinds of information to the general public, but then only with justification. Any implied equation of these powerful institutional agents with humans made up of flesh, vulnerability is both morally and analytically suspect.. A “fair” fight between non-equals is not fair, and being blind to power is an implicit endorsement of the powerful. Further, while one may disagree with the particular methods chosen by Wikileaks–and I certainly have my criticisms–the suggestion that we live in a world in which states and individuals have both become too transparent makes me wonder if Lanier is writing about not this reality, but one of the virtual ones he helped pioneer. It seems to me that states (and corporations) have become increasingly secretive and opaque, while people are increasingly exposed. This divergence was lampooned quite effectively by Saturday Night Live. “I give you private information about corporations for free,” SNL’s Assange quipped , “And I’m a villain. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s the Man of the Year.” Nerd Power vs. Corporate Power Much of Lanier’s piece revolves around “nerd ideology,” a topic of much concern to him; indeed, it is the subject of his last book, ” You Are Not a Gadget .” I’m sympathetic to much of what he has to say about this. I agree that there is sometimes almost a fetishization of information for its own sake. In my talk about Wikileaks at the Personal Democracy Forum recently, I emphasized that we should not see information by itself as a change agent and that a glut of information, especially without context and political leverage, may not result in meaningful change. That, however, is not an argument for less information. I also share Lanier’s distaste for the “Internet is coming alive as a new, singular, global, post-human, superior life form …  a global brain” discourse, again much discussed in his book. Lanier apparently sees “Anonymous,” the loosely-affiliated groups of individuals that are associated with the distributed denial-of-service attacks against corporations that targeted Wikileaks, as subscribers to the “global brain” idea. Fine, down with the global brain. But how is this in any way but the most tangential connected to Wikileaks? First, neither Julian Assange nor Wikileaks is associated with Anonymous. His few public statements on this issue have been to distance his organization from them. Second, is Anonymous’ campaign–a few, relatively unsuccessful, virtual protests by a group most estimate to be mostly composed of teenagers–really the main thing Lanier sees when he looks at what this whole affair has shown us about the Internet? It is one thing to be personally concerned about nerd ideology, it is quite another to see nerd ideology everywhere to the exclusion of all else . During these past weeks, rather than a nerd takeover, I saw the crumbling of the facade of a flat, equal, open Internet and the revelation of an Internet which has corporate power occupying its key crossroads, ever-so-sensitive to any whiff of displeasure by the state. I saw an Internet in danger of becoming merely an interactive version of the television in terms of effective freedom of speech. Remember, the Internet did not create freedom of speech; in theory, we always had freedom of speech–it’s just that it often went along with the freedom to be ignored. People had no access to the infrastructure to be heard. Until the Internet, the right to be heard was in most cases reserved to the governments, deep pockets, and corporate media. Before the Internet, trees fell in lonely forests. The Wikileaks furor shows us that these institutions of power are slowly and surely taking control of the key junctures of the Internet. As a mere “quasi-public sphere,” the Internet is somewhat akin to shopping malls, which seem like public spaces but in which the rights of citizens are restricted, as they are in fact private.  If you think the freedom of the Internet could never be taken back, I implore you to read the history of radio. Technologies that start out as peer-to-peer and citizen-driven can be and have been taken over by corporate and state power. So, no, I fail to be moved by Lanier’s horror of  “Anonymous,” apparently the epitome of nerd ideology, whose most fearsome member charged to-date with Wikileaks-related attacks is a 16-year-old Dutch kid . Anonymous’ support for Wikileaks hardly makes Wikileaks a leading proponent of nerd ideology by association any more than Wikileaks is Kevin Bacon, but Lanier wants to write about Nerd Ideology. The actions by Anonymous were barely the equivalent of virtual sit-ins, and had very little effect. Jaron Lanier should know better how to judge the true impact of these small-scale DDoS attacks, regardless of the brief media hysteria. The real cause for concern is the emergence of an Internet in which arbitrary Terms-of-Service can be selectively employed by large corporations to boot content they dislike. What is worrisome is an Internet in which it is very easy to marginalize and choke information. The fact that information is “there” in a torrent, or openly on a website that is not easily accessible or has been vilified, is about as relevant as your right to shout at your TV.   It has become obvious that, increasingly, contentious content is going to require infrastructure far above and beyond what is necessary to support content that is mainstream, power-friendly, or irrelevant. And further, contentious content will likely be cut off from being funded through people-power, as was shown by the speed with which Paypal, Mastercard and Visa, representing almost all the conventional and easy ways to send money over the Internet, moved to cut off Wikileaks. Platforms such as Apple, which maintain total control over content in their increasingly-appliancized devices , are another worrisome trend in this direction. (Apple swiftly moved to censor the lone Wikileaks App that made it through its app store). What the Wikileaks furor shows us is that a dissent tax is emerging on the Internet. As a dissident content provider, you might have to fight your DNS provider. You might need to fund large-scale hosting resources while others can use similar capacity on commercial servers for a few hundred dollars a year. Fund-raising infrastructure that is open to pretty much everyone else, including the KKK, may not be available. This does not mean that Wikileaks cannot get hosted, as it is already well-known and big, but what about smaller, less-famous, less established, less well-off efforts? Will they even get off the ground? These developments should alarm every concerned citizen, even those who are thoroughly disgusted by Wikileaks. This is the issue that the Wikileaks furor has exposed, not nerd ideology. This is the story and likely will be more important than the release of diplomatic cables (which were already available to millions of people) through major newspapers after scrutiny by journalists. This question will stay with us even if Wikileaks dissolves, and Julian Assange is never heard from again. The Bits of the Internet As a former professional programmer (in a previous life), I cannot resist briefly commenting on two somewhat technical claims made by Lanier. First, Lanier argues that the digital architecture of computers causes things to end up in binary states at the macro level, i.e. we are either completely opaque or completely transparent. This analogy rests on a false premise. The binary system can represent numbers to any degree of precision one wishes, and can even be said to have an advantage over analog systems which cannot be as precise in representing in-between numbers. In fact, if degrees of gray are your goal, a digital system is your friend whereas analog systems are limited by the precision of measuring and sensing devices. It is no problem to distinguish 1.573234512345 from 1.573234512342 in a digital system. The true reasons for the uncomfortable exposure of our information are not in silicon but in human affairs and macro-structures: legal, political and corporate. We don’t have sufficiently-developed laws protecting us as our commons have moved to privately-owned spaces on the Internet . Lanier misses the fact that this is an issue of design, motive and choice. It would be just as easy, and just as technically feasible to design a different kind of Facebook. I agree that the ease with which information can be copied makes exposure easier and in that point, there is a link between Facebook and Wikileaks. However, to understand the structure of our Internet commons, one needs to look at relations of power. The purely techno-deterministic story told by Lanier misses that point. Second, Lanier argues that, just as object-oriented programming made program flow easier to control, we should have orderly flow of information between different components of the social structure, i.e. between powerful institutions, governments, their diplomats and the people. His implication is that unstructured flow of information will be like “spaghetti code,” in that it will result in unpredictable and undesirable consequences. In object-oriented programming, each module is opaque to each other; one only has inputs and outputs and no view of the internal workings. Lanier’s lesson from object-oriented programming seems to be that citizens should always sit down and wait till the government module spits out whatever output it deems appropriate for us. (In fact, Lanier’s argument, exporting technical design considerations to human affairs, seems like a perfect example of nerd culture and the kind of reasoning he’s inveighing against.) I don’t believe that a “don’t ask, don’t tell” relationship between a state and its citizens is a moral position, especially for citizens of the most powerful nation on Earth, which is still engaged in multiple wars around the world. Again, surprisingly for a whole piece on Wikileaks, that fact only enters the discussion when Lanier invokes, in his words, “the canonical unfortunate fellow in Afghanistan who translated for a US diplomat and counted on the USA to keep it secret.” Besides the fact that such cases are not known, these cables were available to about three million people (which has led me to argue elsewhere that their true impact may be in collapsing the insider/outsider boundary, rather than revealing deep secrets). I trust and hope that U.S. diplomats had the good sense not to put sensitive names in such a widely available resource. What I wonder is can one really write a whole piece about Wikileaks and not mention that administration after administration continues to be awfully secretive about these wars we are engaged in that are killing real people, surely a pressing a concern that must be raised when discussing the exposure of these cables. I reiterate that one does not need to be a fan of Wikileaks to reject the notion that rather than demand increased transparency and disclosure from institutions with power, we should trust them because trust is a human value. Going back to my starting point, it appears that Lanier is once again conflating human-to-human relations and human-institution relations and suggesting that the same principles should apply to them. A world in which humans don’t trust each other is indeed cold and inhumane. A world in which we trust powerful institutions merely on principle is one where we abdicate our responsibilities as citizens and human beings.

Read more:
Wikileaks Exposes Internet’s Dissent Tax, not Nerd Supremacy

After hitting Paypal, Mastercard, and Visa, pro-WikiLeaks forces may hit the United States Senate website with a denial-of-service attack next. According to a poll set up by the ad-hoc group , Operation Payback, the Senate could be their next target. It leads voting ahead of Re-attacking Mastercard, Re-attacking Visa, Sarah Palin’s website, and Authorize.net. Out of a total of 1179 votes cast (as of 5:22 pm), 445 of them went to attacking the Senate website. This iteration of Operation Payback formed in response to companies like PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard cutting off WikiLeaks from their services. It is composed of members associated through the loose network of people known as Anonymous , which specializes in denial-of-service attacks, among other general mischief. For more on how the group organizes itself, The Economist has a great piece called, ” The 24-Hour Athenian Democracy .” It’s important to remember that these denial-of-service swarms are not attacks or “hacks” in the sense that they break or break into the computers running a website. Rather, they clog up the pipes leading to the website so that others can’t access it. In that sense, they are non-destructive attack. Perhaps the best off-line analog is picketing, although obviously it’s hard to do a one-to-one mapping of the digital onto the real. At least one Dutch teenager has been arrested in recent days in connection with Anonymous’ activities. And for clarity’s sake we should also note that Anonymous is not affiliated with WikiLeaks in any way. The latter organization issued a statement neither condoning nor condemning the attacks.

Read more here:
Pro-WikiLeaks Group May Attack U.S. Senate Website Next

At the end of November, Joe Sjoberg went missing. He was last seen by his roommate on Monday, November 29, in Madison, Wisconsin, where the two shared a home. A graduate of Carleton College in Minnesota known for his extroversion and warm, welcoming personality, his disappearance was a shock to those who knew him. Distraught, Joe’s family filed a missing persons report, and a case was opened with the Madison Police Department. But while the Madison Police conducted their investigation in the usual manner, Joe’s family and friends refused to wait by the phone for news. The family started a Facebook group entitled ” HELP JOE SJOBERG MISSING. ” The Facebook page has since become a home base for a Web-wide mobilization effort, a call to arms to find Joe and bring him home safely to his parents and friends. But Joe’s brothers, Robert and Patrick, didn’t stop there, pushing a flyer with Joe’s face and standardized message onto Facebook, Twitter, and social news forums throughout the Web. “Beginning on Thursday, Dec. 2, we launched a massive social media campaign, spanning forums from Facebook to Reddit to Craigslist to Twitter, with retweets and posts numbering in the tens of thousands,” said Rachel Mandell-Rice, a friend of Sjoberg family, via email. “Celebrities such as Jimmy Fallon, Craig Ferguson, Sports Illustrated writer Peter King, and ESPN commentator Matthew Berry have posted this news on their twitter feeds. The sheer magnitude of the campaign has prompted one blogger to refer to it as a ” Social Media Amber Alert .” While even the most casual observer understands the boost that a mention from Twitterati like Ashton Kutcher or Kim Kardashian can provide to a cause, the campaign to find Sjoberg extends far beyond mere awareness to coordinated action. “On December 4, 2010, we learned that Joe had researched private airstrips in Wisconsin. Within 90 minutes of posting a request for help on the ‘Joe Sjoberg Missing’ Facebook page, volunteers had contacted the almost 600 private airstrips in Wisconsin, and faxed or emailed flyers with information,” Mandell-Rice told me in an email. “Subsequent posts for help have received an overwhelming response, allowing us to contact over 200 Wisconsin-area hotels and more than 200 local hospitals. Volunteers have emailed or faxed hundreds of flyers to gas stations and local businesses. They have also searched miles of airport parking lots in Milwaukee, Madison, and Chicago. Without social media, this process would have taken police weeks to complete.” On Reddit, where Redditors have for years been responsible for enourmous acts of charity and benevolence, the  AskReddit  thread generated more than 400 responses suggesting methods of tracking down Sjoberg, including accessing his bank records and emails. Within 90 minutes of posting a request for help on the Facebook page, volunteers had contacted the almost 600 private airstrips in Wisconsin The disappearance of Joe Sjoberg is more than just a human interest story about a community spontaneously built around finding one man. Social media has proven an incredibly effective resource at tracking people down, even those who don’t want to be found. In August 2009, Wired writer Evan Ratiff  tried to disappear completely; he bought prepaid cell phones, disguises, and gift cards to avoid being recognized or tracked through his bank account. He shaved his head. He carefully monitored his phone usage and IP addresses so as not to leave a digital footprint. He took on a fake identity and created a new life for himself in New Orleans. Wired offered a reward to readers who could track down Evan, say the code word (“fluke”), and snap a picture. After several months of cat-and-mouse with casual readers and participants from communities like Reddit and 4chan, Ratiff found himself cornered. “You wouldn’t happen to know a guy named Fluke, would you?” The game was up. But the everyday citizens after Ratiff were motivated by a monetary prize. What drove thousands of complete strangers to lend their efforts to hunting Sjoberg? Compassion and sympathy are obviously answers: many Redditors shared similar stories of friends and family who had simply disappeared. In the digital world, the faintest sense of horror over a distant family’s pain is incentive enough for a stranger to help. As Clay Shirky noted in Here Comes Everybody , social media has drastically reduced — if not totally eliminated — the costs of participating in collective action, especially those costs associated with distance. The search for Joe Sjoberg “has gone global,” Mandell-Rice said. “People as far away as Egypt, Spain and Thailand pitching in to help.” With conventional police departments often overburdened with heavy caseloads, the capacity to crowdsource support from a vast online network may serve as a useful resource for future instances like this. “You don’t need a background in public relations or technology to do something like this,” Mandell-Rice said. As I write this story, there’s no certainty as to Joe’s fate. Concerned friends and family swoop into the Reddit and Facebook groups to share updates and support; many reach out to their existing networks, for retweets and Facebook posts. But the scope and strength of the response has proven invaluable to Joe’s family and friends. “In all honesty, we don’t know if we will ever find Joe, or if he’s even alive. What we do know is that the more people who see his picture and read his story, the more likely we are to get some kind of closure from this,” Mandell-Rice said. “While our hope is to use our story to spread awareness of Joe’s disappearance and to get him home safe, we understand that his disappearance alone is not national news. We believe, however, that our ability to leverage social media into immediate action is a compelling and timely story. Our search has been extensive and wide reaching, yet conducted completely through the Internet,” Mandell-Rice said. “It is an experience that offers hope to all families who suffer this kind of a tragedy. There is something that can be done. There is hope.” If you want to raise awareness of Joe’s disappearance, tweet “Please RT, #JoeSjoberg has gone missing in WI. Please help us find him. http://bit.ly/ieE12p  or  http://on.fb.me/HelpFindJoe.

The rest is here:
The Social Media Amber Alert: A Personal Story

TalkTalk and BT win the right to judicial review of the Digital Economy Act, which could demand action against illegal file-sharers.

Read more:
ISPs to get net piracy law review