Above: that’s McConnell on the right.

The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence.

McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering. He’s the nice-seeming guy who’s willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those who are not in the know. [...]

He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded. Or the tech could be useful if a computer got hijacked without your knowledge and used as part of a botnet.

Threat Level: Cyberwar Hype Intended to Destroy the Open Internet

Photo by Kris Krug

Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist and the co-founder and co-organizer of Cyborg Camp. You can find her on Twitter here.

Klint Finley: Please tell us what you mean by “cyborg anthropology” and explain what it is that you do on a day-to-day basis.

Amber Case: Cyborg anthropology is the study of human and non-human interaction, especially tools and networks that are formed by networks of human and non human objects.

My work relates to tracing the history of tool use and how it has affected culture over time.

For instance, one can look at a hammer and notice that over the last 300 years the design and function of the hammer has not changed very much.

The shape and form and function are still similar but when one looks at the first computers, which were large machines running on vacuum tubes, and computers now — one sees that the computer’s overall look and function and shape and size has drastically changed.

So then one must look at the idea of the hammer or knife. An animal must evolve a better tooth, or sharp edge in which to capture and kill prey. If a tooth breaks, or is not sharp enough, or the animal is not fast enough, that animal dies and cannot reproduce.

But the human has externalized the evolution by making a tool outside of their mouths. The knife is an extension of the tooth that can be thrown. The speed and excellence of the knife depends on the worker or the person who has power enough to have a worker who can create that tool.

Once we externalized objects and processes, we externalized evolution.

But the computer is different. Tool use has been physical for most of human evolution. Now we see computers as an interface not to the physical self, but to the mental self.

The mental self is an internal space, which is unseen, and a lot of what we see on a computer is unseen unless we look at it through an interface or portal.

So what I do in cyborg anthropology is consider how people upload their bodies into hyperspace, and how humanness is produced through machines and machines through humanness.

I also consider online presence, cell phones and the technosocial self.

Read the rest of this entry »

“The OpenNet Initiative estimates that at the end of 2009, 32% of all Internet users were accessing a filtered version of the Internet.”

ONI Releases 2009 Year in Review: Filtering, Surveillance, Information Warfare

(via Emily Cunningham)

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/southpaw2305/ / CC BY 2.0)

Installing the software takes barely a couple of minutes and requires minimal computer skills. You find the Freenet website, read a few terse instructions, and answer a few questions (“How much security do you need?” … “NORMAL: I live in a relatively free country” or “MAXIMUM: I intend to access information that could get me arrested, imprisoned, or worse”). Then you enter a previously hidden online world. In utilitarian type and bald capsule descriptions, an official Freenet index lists the hundreds of “freesites” available: “Iran News”, “Horny Kate”, “The Terrorist’s Handbook: A practical guide to explosives and other things of interests to terrorists”, “How To Spot A Pedophile [sic]“, “Freenet Warez Portal: The source for pirate copies of books, games, movies, music, software, TV series and more”, “Arson Around With Auntie: A how-to guide on arson attacks for animal rights activists”. There is material written in Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Italian. There is English-language material from America and Thailand, from Argentina and Japan. There are disconcerting blogs (“Welcome to my first Freenet site. I’m not here because of kiddie porn … [but] I might post some images of naked women”) and legally dubious political revelations. There is all the teeming life of the everyday internet, but rendered a little stranger and more intense. One of the Freenet bloggers sums up the difference: “If you’re reading this now, then you’re on the darkweb.”

Guardian: The dark side of the internet

(via Atom Jack)

I haven’t looked at Freenet in years, but it’s certain relevant to the discussion here about darknets.

In many ways this story is far field from our contemporary debates about network management, file sharing, and the perils of protocol discrimination. But the main questions seem to remain the same—to what degree will we let Western Union then and ISPs now pick winners and losers on our communications backbone? And when do government regulations grow so onerous that they discourage network investment and innovation?

These are tough questions, but the horrific problems of the “Victorian Internet” suggest that government overreach isn’t the only thing to fear. In 1876, laissez-faire “freedom for all” meant (in practice) the freedom for Henry Nash Smith to read your telegrams if he didn’t like who you supported for President. It meant freedom for Associated Press to block criticism of Western Union, and even to put potential critics and competitors out of business. And it meant freedom for a scoundrel to hijack the system at his leisure.

Sure enough, the technologies and debates are different. Still, one wonders what Charles A. Sumner would say today if told that net neutrality is a “solution to a problem that hasn’t happened yet.”

Ars Technica: How Robber Barons hijacked the “Victorian Internet”

(via /Social Physicist)

What are some of your favorite blogs?

Finland has become the first country in the world to declare broadband Internet access a legal right.

Starting in July, telecommunication companies in the northern European nation will be required to provide all 5.2 million citizens with Internet connection that runs at speeds of at least 1 megabit per second. [...]

In June, France’s highest court declared such access a human right. But Finland goes a step further by legally mandating speed.

CNN: Fast Internet access becomes a legal right in Finland

(via Disinfo)

It’s unclear to me – does this mean that telecom companies are required to provide this service for free, or does it mean it has to make it available to everyone (including people in remote areas)?

Evgeny Morozov makes a case similar to the one I made in my essay “Birthers adn the Democratization of Media“, only looking at dictatorships abroad (specificaly Iran and China).

Joseph Matheny in conversation with Jon Lebkowsky about the beginnings of the public Internet, hacking, phreaking and the rise and fall of the “C” word (Cyber) , social media and a host of other remembrances of recent history.

The GSpot: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl)

We’ve got to give law professor Eric Goldman credit: the man sticks with his predictions. On December 5, 2005, he made the startling claim that Wikipedia would “fail within five years.” On December 5, 2006, Goldman doubled down on his prediction, saying that Wikipedia “will fail in four years.” [...]

But the preservation of credibility this way comes at a huge cost. First, it means that Wikipedia has failed—at least when it comes to the original utopian idea of an encyclopedia that anyone, anywhere can edit at anytime. Those days are behind us, says Goldman; that might not be a bad thing, but it does mean that Wikipedia’s core talent pool now needs to solve the labor problem by finding new ways to reward those who donate so much time to the site—and do a better job welcoming newcomers.

Ars Technica: Despite changes, Wikipedia will still “fail within 5 years”

(via Theoretick)

After 30 years the plug will be pulled on what was once the finest online service on the globe. (CompuServe 2000, a newer iteration of CompuServe will continue.) [...]

CompuServe Classic introduced many of us cyberdinosaurs to services we now take for granted.

Online shopping? Stock quotes? Worldwide weather forecasts? CompuServe was providing all of that in the 1980s. Who needs color graphics, music and streaming videos? CompuServe could provide users with what they needed with plain text on a slow dial-up connection.

PaperPC: CompuServe Classic: So Long, Old Friend

I never used CompuServe. Along with The Well it’s one of those legendary old online services that I wish I had been around for.

Wikipedia is offering a new service allowing users to select articles from Wikipedia and have them printed as a book:

Step 1 – Creating the book from a collection of articles

The book collection menu, entitled “Create a book”, can be seen on the left hand side of the browser screen towards the bottom. It contains two links by default: “Add wiki page” and “Books help”. (See Fig 1).

By clicking on the “Add wiki page” link, the page currently being viewed is added to the collection. To add more pages you must navigate to the next desired page and click the “Add wiki page” link again. You can also add all pages in a category with one click. The number of pages in the book is shown in the menu on the left and is updated automatically.

If required, specific revisions (versions) of pages from their histories, can be specified in your book. See the experts page for details.

Step 2 – The book title

Once all the desired pages have been added, click the “Show book” button to review your book. Furthermore it is possible to add a book title and change the ordering of the wiki pages of the book (see details of how to do this in the Advanced functionality section).

Step 3 – Download or order a printed copy of your book

The finished book can be downloaded or ordered as a bound book. You can download the book, in PDF and OpenDocument format (viewable using OpenOffice.org software), by clicking the “Download” button (see Fig 3). To order the book as a bound book click the “Order book from PediaPress” button. Further information about printed books can be found in the FAQ.

More Info: Wikipedia

Wikipedia Books FAQ

(via Robot Wisdom)

This is one of the business models I suggested for newspapers.

“In his masterwork, Flow, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi tells us that the two major components affecting our ability to control and direct our mental resources are time and attention.

On the first, time, most of our verdicts are the same: we don’t have enough of it.  In the case of the second, however, the analysis is murkier. While we can all agree that there are a multitude of demands on our attention, it’s not exactly clear whether this is good, bad or neutral. Some would say, for instance, that the attention dividing practice of multitasking is an essential skill for being successful, while others claim that multitasking is a widespread cultural myth; something we aren’t capable of no matter how hard we try.

Maggie Jackson has taken a position in the core of controversy with her book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, in which she argues that our ability to focus attention is facing colossal challenges which we will either manage to meet, or risk falling into a cultural black hole.  She recently spent some time with Neuronarrative discussing the science behind attention, whether we can train ourselves to be more focused, and what she believes we must do to avert an attention deficit “dark age.”

(via Neuronarritive)

Global Business Network (GBN) is a consulting firm that grew out of Shell’s Planning Group, Stanford Research Institute, and Stewart Brand and the community based around his “Whole Earth” businesses. In other words, it’s an unlikely alliance of oil industry insiders, mad scientists, and hippie visionaries. They specialize in “scenario planning.”

Schwartz has also studied Tibetan Buddhism and worked closely with Willis Harman, a key figure in the transpersonal psychology movement in San Francisco. Before accepting a post at Shell’s Planning Group, he worked at SRI International, the famed Menlo Park, California, research outfit that came up with the widely used psychographic measuring system known as VALS (for “values and life styles”). SRI also developed the computer mouse. Schwartz’s is a tame résumé by the standards of GBN.

Full Story: Hatch 23

“The proliferation of blogs and emails may be partially responsible for the increase in anger of recent years. We can learn a lot about the emotions that motivate many blogs and emails, as well as reactions to them, from, believe it or not, a few observations of animals.

Anger, for instance, is the fight part of the primitive fight/flight/freeze response common to all mammals. It functions primarily to protect self and juvenile offspring from harm. Activation of the fight/flight/freeze response requires a dual perception of threat and vulnerability. Animals respond to lesser threats with greater anger, fear, or submission (freeze) when they are wounded, starving, sick, or recently traumatized.

The activation of fight over flight/freeze is determined by the annihilation potential of the threat. A raccoon will ferociously fight a rat to defend her newborn pups but not a cougar. Thus more anger is observed in powerful animals, which tend to be predatory. Powerful animals use anger to defend and acquire territory and resources, thereby reducing threats to the survival of self and juvenile offspring.

Social animals have to make choices about where to go, who gets to eat what and mate with whom, and when all these things happen. They must develop some kind of executive function to make necessary choices as a group. Most social animals, including humans, answer this challenge by organizing into a hierarchy, in which individuals achieve rank. Ascending up the hierarchy increases status, along with access to resources, with most of both bestowed on a chief executive, i.e., alpha males or matriarchs. (Really, this is leading to blogs and emails!)”

(via Psychology Today)

Ted Nelson, creator of the web pre-cursor Xanadu and author Computer Lib, has a new book out called Geeks Giving Gifts – it’s a history of computing from ancient times until now.

-27 Hierarchy (ancient beginnings)
-26 Alphabets (ancient beginnings)
-25 Punctuation (ancient beginnings)
-24 Encryption (ancient beginnings)
-23 Making Documents Hierarchical (18th Century)
-22 They All Invented Computers (hardware) (1822)
-21 They All Idealized Computers (software idealizations) (1843)
-20 Database (1880s)
-19 Voting Machines (1892)
-18 Intellectual property (1923)
-17 The Mainframe Era
-16 Computer Sound and Music (1947)
-15 Computer Graphics in Two Dimensions (1950)
-14 Computer Games, 1951
-13 Disk Drive Wars (1956)
-12 Engelbart’s NLS (1958)
-11 Xanadu (1960)
-10 Computer Graphics in Three Dimensions (1960)
-9 – The ARPANET – Getting the Message Across (1962)
-8 Instant Messaging and Texting (1960s)
-7 Computer Movies (1963)
-6 Shared Texts (1965)
-5 Email, 1965
-4 Hypertext Goes the Wrong Way (1967)
-3 Object-Oriented Programming (1967)
-2 Local Networking (1970)
-1 Datapoint– the Personal Computer with a Mainframe Mentality (1970)
0 UNIX*– Modern Computer History Begins (1970)
1 Malware and Security (1973)
2 The Era of Dinky Computers: Kits and Stunts (1974)
3 The PUI Dumbs Down the Computer (1974)
4 Paperdigm: the PUI Dumbs Down the Document (and Turns the Computer into a Paper Simulator) (1974)
5 The PUI Takes Away Our Ability To Write and Organize (1974)
6 Personal Computing (1977)
7 The World Wars (1977): Consumer Operating Systems: Microsoft Versus Apple Versus Everybody
8 Spreadsheet (1979)
9 The Domain Name System, DNS (1983)
10 Open Source (and Linux) (1983)
11 The Internet– Enjoy It While You Can (1989)
12 The Simple Early Web, 1989
13 PUI on the Internet– the Browser Salad (1992)
14 Cyberfashion (1993)
15 The URL Rejiggers Net Addresses (1994)
16 Web Biz: The Dot-Com World and the New Monopolies (1995)
17 Streaming Goes Private (1995)
18 Google (1996)
19 The World Wars Go Mobile– PDAs, Cellphones
20 Web 2.0– Walled Gardens, Cattle Pens, Collaboration Places Sort Of

Geeks Bearing Gifts Chapter Summaries

(via Robot Wisdom)

New site from Danny Chaoflux:

Welcome!

A new site for occultnik fucktard mutant astral warriors.

The site is two-fold. Imageboard forums that are all out nonsense [for the most part], and a blogroll with carefully selected RSS feeds plugged into it.

We got IRC going on, and more plans for random bells and whistles down the line.

The blog can be viewed by itself at neopostnow.net, and it still needs some work. [Feeds are not set up at the moment.]

I wanted to release the site on the Solstice, so screw perfection, here it is. Enjoy.

Chaosneverdied.com

Better site explanation forthcoming.

More forums were planned, but I didn’t want to get too carried away this early in the game.

Enjoy!

Chaos Never Died

My discussion at CyborgCamp will be at 3:30 PM PST. Live video streaming at Mogulus, if they keep me in the big room (if people aren’t interested I’ll be in a smaller room w/o video).

Rudy Rucker: Early Days of Cyberpunk, an except of his memoir:

Gibson was an impressive guy from the start. He was tall, with an unusually thin and somewhat flexible-looking head. When I met him at one of the con parties, he said he was high on some SF-sounding substance I’d never heard of. Perfect. He was bright, funny, intense, and with a comfortable Virginia accent.

Plus: Ballardian examines the roles of Hakim Bey and J.G. Ballard in the history of Cyberpunk

“Blogging has become something of a pop culture phenomenon. It’s a virtual platform that gives everyone – from novice to novelist – a unique voice and presence on the vast World Wide Web. The ultimate in self-publishing, upgraded for the 21st century.

But like the virtual social networks that bring people from around the world together, it seems like a natural progression then that bloggers would branch out from their individual self-expression and seek group affiliation. In the horror arena, a group of stalwart bloggers joined forces earlier this year to form the peculiarly named League of Tana Tea Drinkers (or LOTT D). The brainchild of John Cozzoli, who has helmed his own long-running blog called ZOMBOS CLOSET OF HORROR which explores the horror genre as reflected in all media and pop culture, LOTT D now includes 29 member blogs and continues to grow. Impressive in its variety, the LOTT D boasts member blogs covering everything from Frankenstein to Godzilla, slasher films to zombies, and childhood terrors to comic books. Spend a few hours perusing the LOTT D’s member blogs and you’ll find everything you need for a serious horror fix — from serious film commentary to some of the funniest genre observations, insightful original essays to button-pushing opinion pieces, and heaps of useful book and films reviews from classic to current.

The mission of the LOTT D is outlined on its virtual homepage:

“Our mission is to acknowledge, foster, and support thoughtful, articulate, and creative blogs built on an appreciation of the horror and sci-horror genre. Horror bloggers are a unique group of devoted fans and professionals, from all walks of life, who keep the horror genre, in all its permutations and media outlets, alive and kicking. Often spending long hours to keep their blogs informative and fun, horror bloggers share their unique mix of personality, culture and knowledge freely to fans of a genre difficult to describe, but easy to love.”

DSM recently caught up with Cozzoli (aka ILoz Zoc) and five of his LOTT D compatriots for an informal discussion about this groundbreaking new consortium of horror bloggers. Joining him are Stacie Ponder, FINAL GIRL proprietress and AMC columnist extraordinaire, Lance Vaughan (aka Unkle Lancifer), co-creator of the childhood terror site KINDERTRAUMA, August Ragone , author and renowned authority on Japanese film and culture who helms THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND GODZILLA, John Morehead, academic and explorer of the social, cultural, mythic, archetypal, imaginative, creative, and even spiritual aspects of the fantastic at his blog THEOFANTASTIQUE, and Mike Petrucelli (aka Pax Romano), witty commentator on the queer subtext of horror films from BILLY LOVES STU.”

(via Dark Scribe Magazine)

“Two and a half years ago, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne penned an editorial for The Wall Street Journal, warning that widespread stock manipulation schemes – including abusive naked short selling – were threatening the health of America’s financial markets. But it wasn’t published. “An editor at The Journal asked me to write it, and I told him he wouldn’t be allowed to publish it,” Byrne says. “He insisted that only he controlled what was printed on the editorial page, so I wrote it. Then, after a few days, he got back to me and said ‘It appears I can’t run this or anything else you write.’”

The Journal never changed its stance. But last week, the editorial finally saw the light of day at Forbes – after Byrne added a few paragraphs explaining that naked shorting had hastened what could turn out to be the biggest financial crisis since The Great Depression. “With a traditional short sale, traders borrow shares and sell them in the hope that prices will drop. A naked short works much the same way – except the shares aren’t actually borrowed. They’re sold but not delivered. By the middle of the summer, these unresolved “stock IOUs” – as Byrne calls them – were pilling up in four Wall Street giants already struggling to stay afloat: investment banks Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. On July 12, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued an emergency order banning naked shorts in a host of major stocks, and all four of those names were on the list.

The order expired in mid-August, and in the weeks since, Lehman Brothers has filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch has swallowed into Bank of America, and Fannie and Freddie were seized by the US government. Then, on September 17, the SEC issued a new order meant to curb naked shorting of all stocks. “These several actions today make it crystal clear that the SEC has zero tolerance for abusive naked short selling,” read a statement from SEC chairman Christopher Cox. “The Enforcement Division, the Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, and the Division of Trading and Markets will now have these weapons in their arsenal in their continuing battle to stop unlawful manipulation.”

In the wake of the SEC’s crackdown, the mainstream financial press has acknowledged that widespread and deliberate naked shorting can artificially deflate stock prices, flooding the market with what amounts to counterfeit shares. But for years, The Journal and so many other news outlets ignored Byrne’s warnings, with some journalists – most notably a Forbes.com columnist and former BusinessWeek reporter named Gary Weiss painting the Overstock CEO as a raving madman. Byrne has long argued that the press dismissed his views at least in part because Weiss – hiding behind various anonymous accounts – spent years controlling the relevant articles on Wikipedia, the “free online encyclopedia anyone can edit.” “At some level, you can control the public discourse from Wikipedia,” Byrne says. “No matter what journalists say about the reliability of Wikipedia, they still use it as a resource. I have no doubt that journalists who I discussed [naked shorting] with decided not to do stories after reading Wikipedia – whose treatment [of naked short selling] was completely divorced from reality.”

(via Investigate The SEC)

(Many people believe that the current financial crisis is mainly due to the domino effect of the sub-prime mortgage collapse. This is just a part of the equation. The illegal practice of naked short selling has been going on for years under the radar of the SEC. It’s a complicated practice to explain, let alone uncover. This is why the SEC has a temporary ban on ALL short selling (some financial experts disagree with this). “Naked short selling” and “short selling” are two different things. For good definitions on short selling and naked short selling read the excellent articles provided by Investopedia.com.)

“Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books from way back in the day? You know, the ones that read non-linearly and offered choices like:

If you decide to start back home, turn to page 4.
If you decide to wait, turn to page 5.

Of course you do. Well, director Chris Lund has done us one better: The Outbreak is a choose your own adventure film about-you guessed it-a zombie outbreak. Visit the site and as you watch the movie, you’re presented with choices you have to make in order to move the plot along. Depending on what you choose, a different sequence in the film is cued up. Decide on the right course of action, and you live on to the next sequence. Make the wrong choice, of course, and you die a brain-munchingly gruesome death.”

(The Outbreak via Tor)

“The woman behind the infamous e-mail that aired criticisms of Sarah Palin to millions across the cyber-globe sat at a computer screen scrolling through unread messages, as dozens more popped into her inbox. “Let’s see, what is the next one?” Anne Kilkenny said with a smile, killing time before her family attended a Saturday evening church service. She clicked and skimmed the words: “Hateful liar.”

Kilkenny, 57, lives with her husband and son in a one-level home surrounded by raspberry bushes, crab apple trees, birch and fireweed. She speaks in a high-pitched voice, cheerful as a grade school teacher, pausing for deep breaths between thoughts. She parts her steel gray hair down the middle, wears ankle-length skirts, irons meticulously and grows potatoes and asparagus in her backyard.

After Sen. John McCain named Palin, the governor of Alaska and former mayor of Wasilla, as his Republican vice presidential running mate on Aug. 29, friends of Kilkenny’s in other states began asking, “What do you know about her?” Two days later, Kilkenny decided to set down her observations about Palin in a 24,000-word sober critique, e-mailed to 40 of her friends in the Lower 48.”

(via The L.A. Times)

A new site called “42 Blips” has just been launched. It’s like Digg but for Science Fiction.

(42 Blips. h/t:Tobias Buckell’s Blog)

Found in an old, dilapidated copy of “Good Omens”, possibly from a convention held long, long ago:

“Room Party, Friday night at 9:30, Room 3064, Hosted by Bruce Schneier; Come celebrate the publication of another travelogue, and whatever else we can think of worth celebrating.” It must of been a great party because I can’t remember a thing! Anyway, here’s a good interview with Bruce.

“It’s been ten years since Bruce Schneier – founder of security monitoring firm Counterpane Internet Security – launched his newsletter, Crypto-Gram, which expanded from covering computer security issues to a broader investigation into security issues of all sorts. Now Counterpane belongs to BT, where Schneier is chief security technology officer, and as he tells global technology editor John C Tanner security is still a hard sell.

Telecom Asia: Your background is computer security and cryptography – how did you end up applying that knowledge into the world at large?

Schneier: I think it’s just what happens when I start looking at something. I start looking at the bigger picture. The first sort of major milestone was the post 9/11 issue. I just couldn’t stop writing, and that’s how I processed what happened.

T.A: It seems you’re better known now for your writings on security than for the company you founded, Counterpane. For those who don’t know, what did Counterpane do before it was bought by BT, and what’s its status now?

Schneier: Counterpane is part of BT professional services in BT Americas, though it’s selling worldwide. And it’s still doing what it was doing, and the core is real-time security monitoring. The idea is that there are lots of security products out there, but if you’re not watching them, they don’t do any good. So that’s always been what it was, and then there’s a whole suite of services built around security monitoring. There’s all sorts of management, device management, configuration help, but all built around real-time monitoring. That’s a critical piece BT needed, and we started working together, and then they decided to just to buy us. The other thing we get out of it is that BT also bought INS. So this amalgamated group is the INS security consulting services and our managed security services.”

(via Telecomasia. h/t: Schneier on Security)