The Federal Regulatory Energy Commission has granted Google Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of the search giant, the right to behave like a utility.

The order grants Google Energy the power to sell energy, capacity and services at market rates.

Why does Google want to do this? Right now, the company rakes in billions of dollars from ads and it doesn’t have to have extensive support desks and remote repair teams — i.e., the kind of people power providers must have on staff — in order to do it. Selling power is a much more hands-on business.

Google has said it wants to go carbon neutral. With the FERC order, it can now effectively erect as many solar panels and install as many fuel cells as it likes without worrying about having purchased too much capacity; the company can now sell off the extra power it generates.

GreenTechMedia: It’s Official: Google Can Sell Power Like a Utility

See also:

Google’s Addiction to Cheap Power

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.

Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.

The claim that we’re making big profits on the back of newspapers also misrepresents the reality. In search, we make our money primarily from advertisements for products. Someone types in digital camera and gets ads for digital cameras. A typical news search—for Afghanistan, say—may generate few if any ads. The revenue generated from the ads shown alongside news search queries is a tiny fraction of our search revenue.

Wall Street Journal: How Google Can Help Newspapers

(via Wu)

Last night I linked to an interview with Rupert Murdoch in which he says that News Corp will probably de-index their sites from Google.

I figured it was all bluster. Search engine traffic is more valuable that Murdoch suggests, and there are probably plenty of people in high places at News Corp who know it.

But Cory Doctorow suggests:

So here’s what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he’s still having lurid fantasies inspired by the momentary insanity that caused Google to pay him for the exclusive right to index MySpace (thus momentarily rendering MySpace a visionary business-move instead of a ten-minutes-behind-the-curve cash-dump).

So what he’s hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you’ve never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year’s operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google.

Jason Calacanis has suggested this approach as a means to “kill Google.”

But it may actually be neither the death of Google, nor the death of News Corp if they are so foolish as to carry out this plan. It could be the death of the robots exclusion standard. I would guess News Corp would use robots.txt to de-index their sites. But it’s a “purely advisory” protocol that Google is under no obligation to honor. They could continue indexing News Corps if they so choose. So could every other search engine, big or small. And I’d guess they would if big content providers started going exclusive with search engines.

If News Corps puts all its contend behind a pay wall, this point is moot – Google and other search engines won’t be able to index it, and robots.txt will be fine. But it’s something to think about.

(Hat tips to Jay Rosen for the TimesSelect link and Chris Arkenberg for the Jason Calacanis video)

Rupert Murdoch has suggested that News Corporation is likely to make its content unfindable to users on Google when it launches its paid content starategy .

When Murdoch and other senior News Corp lieutenants have criticised aggregators such as Google for taking a free ride on its content, commentators have questioned why the company doesn’t simply make its content invisible to search engines.

Using the robots.txt protocol on a site indicates to automated web spiders such as Google’s not to index that particular page or to serve up lionks to it in users’ search results.

Murodch claimed that readers who randomly reach a page via search have little value to advertisers. Asked by Sky News political editor David Speers why News hasn’t therefore made its sites invisible to Google, Murdoch replied: “I think we will.”

Mumbrella: Murdoch: We’ll probably remove our sites from Google’s index

(via Jay Rosen)

I’d be quite happy to see News Corps shoot themselves in the foot, but I have the feeling people who actually know what they are talking about will stop this from happening.

Vint Cerf, Google’s internet evangelist, has unveiled a new protocol intended to power an interplanetary internet.

The Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol emerged from work first started in 1998 in partnership with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The initial goal was to modify the ubiquitous Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to facilitate robust communications between celestial bodies and satellites. [...]

The core issue is that TCP assumes a continuous (and fairly reliable) connection. DTN makes no such assumptions, requiring each node to buffer all of its packets until a stable connection can be established. Whereas TCP will repeatedly attempt to send packets until they are successfully acknowledged, DTN will automatically find a destination node with a reliable connection, and then send its payload just once. Given the latency of space communications and the minimal power restrictions placed upon satellites, DTNs approach seems prudent.

However most people don’t have a need for regular satellite communication (well, our columnist Warren Ellis has that death ray of his), but Cerf sees his robust protocol having more down-to-Earth applications. Mobile networks, for example, must regularly cope with long periods of delay or loss – a train tunnel rudely interrupting a YouTube stream, for example. Perhaps looking to gain an edge on its competitors, Google has already integrated DTN into Android’s networking stack.

Wired UK: Google unveils protocol for an interplanetary internet

(via Wade)

Dick Cheney’s House: The Vice President’s digs at Number One Observatory Circle are obscured through pixelation in Google Earth and Google Maps at the behest of the U.S. government. However, high-resolution photos and aerial surveys of the property are readily available on other Web sites. [...]

The city of Utrecht in the Netherlands: Some sites say that the ban on this Dutch city was an apparent mistake, but it does hold relevance as an ancient city and has served as the religious center of the Netherlands since the eighth century. [...]

HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) Antenna Array on the Alaska/Yukon Border: This is part of the site for HAARP, which studies ionospheric-radio science.Miscellaneous

Focus: Blurred Out: 51 Things You Aren’t Allowed to See on Google Maps

(via Disinfo)

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

Blackle

(via Wadester23

Looks like Wikia lost the first round of what I called the Google-Wikipedia, Secrecy-Transparency war.

It is going to take more than just an open search platform to take on Google. Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced today that he is shutting down Wikia Search, the company’s experiment in creating better search results through crowdsourcing. Wikia Search attempted to port the Wikipedia model over to search by allowing anybody to modify results by including new links or moving natural results up the page. The initial launch last year was awful, but the experience improved over time. Still, it never really attracted anything more than a trickle of searchers. We are placing it in the deadpool.

Full Story: TechCrunch

(via StevenWalling)

Are there any other players in the “transparent search engine” field?

Disclosure: Renegade Futurist sells paid link advertisements.

This article explains how paid links are not actually the way well financed interests manipulate Google. They have more insidious ways to manipulate search results.

Paid Links and Sponsored Conversations are minor problems compared to SERP-engineering of this magnitude – however, what can really be done about such tactics? This isn’t just a matter of paid links – it’s the wholesale creation of a large ‘paid network,’ tied in with real world, offline events optimized to manipulate search engine results.

And keep in mind that the example above is just one piece of one small and relatively primitive operation (from ‘way back’ in 2006, and privately funded). This is the merely the point of the tip of a huge, honking iceberg. Reputation Management SERP manipulation will only get more subtle, powerful, and pervasive, as more and more money is put behind the effort and as tactics are honed.

In the face of the power of money, does Google really have a hope of keeping the ‘World’s Information’ free from massive “inaccuracies and inequities”?

And how hard will they really try?

I Want to Believe – in the Internet’s Great Promise, and in Google’s commitment to “Not Be Evil” while “providing unbiased, accurate, and free access to information.” I really do. So if there are any White Knights of Truth in the Googleplex, keep up the good fight. Rage, rage against the dying of the light …

But sadly, it’s difficult to reasonably hope that the internet can fare any better against corruption than any other information medium so far has. Print, radio, television … all almost totally co-opted by power and money. The internet, giving citizens the ability to search for information rather than merely have it fed to them, has such potential to break this trend – but only if that very ability to seek and find the truth is not, itself, corrupted.

Full Story: Pass the Mayo

(Thanks Justin)

“Researchers from Austria and Slovenia have developed a device called Brainloop which can be used to navigate in Google Earth:

Brainloop is an interactive performance platform that utilizes a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system which allows a subject to operate devices merely by imagining specific motor commands. These mentally visualized commands may be seen as the rehearsal of a motor act without the overt motor output; a neural synapse occurs but the actual movement is blocked at the corticospinal level. Motor imagery such as “move left hand”, “move right hand” or “move feet” become non-muscular communication and control signals that convey messages and commands to the external world. In Brainloop the performer is able – without physically moving – to investigate urban areas and rural landscapes as he globe-trots around virtual Google Earth. Through motor imagery, he selects locations, camera angles and positions and records these image sequences in a virtual world. In the second half of the performance, he plays back the sequence and uses Brainloop to compose a custom soundtrack by selecting, manipulating and re-locating audio recordings in real time into the physical space.”

(Be sure to check out the video on the Neurophilosophy site)

via Neurophilosophy

Brainloop

Each Burning Man has a different theme, chosen by Harvey. This year’s theme is “The Green Man.” Burning Man, an extravaganza characterized by the consumption of huge quantities of fossil fuel, has discovered environmentalism. It is attempting to offset the 28,000 tons of carbon it estimates the event generates (counting all those flights and long drives for its far-flung attendees), and the organization is belatedly switching to biodiesel generators to provide most of the event’s electricity.

Most controversially, the organization wants to bring as many green-energy companies as possible into what Harvey calls a world’s fair of clean tech. Google (Charts, Fortune 500) is going to help produce an online 3-D search service called Burning Man Earth.

Full Story: Business 2.0.

For those seeking a small, free alternative, Autonomous Mutant Fest starts this weekend. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to make it down there this year, but I believe Nick Pell and some other esoZone/Portland Occulture folks will be on hand.

Like the a bespectacled kid brother of Earthdance, Yuri’s Night has taken off. This year there were well over 100 events around the globe, from Beijing to Prague to Lagos, and though some of them were probably little more than astrogeeks playing Moby records, the Yuri’s Night held in Mountain View, something more unusual happened.

The event took place at the NASA Ames Research Center, which is where they do stuff like build space-faring robots and study microbes on extra-solar planets. The Center is an imposing, vaguely Ballardian environment: enormous hangers, wind tunnels, empty runways and defeated institutional buildings lying on the edge of the Bay. But on the evening of Friday the 13th, the center opened its doors to raw food vendors, Black Rock sculptors, feral half-nude hoopers, and the nasty electronic breakbeats of the Glitch Mob. In other words, Burning Man spilled onto the nerd turf of the military-industrial complex.

Also on hand were robot designers, private astronauts, shills handing out Google schwag, and a handful of rumpled NASA scientists behind demo booths talking to people wearing purple cowboy hats and furry brassieres about earthquake prediction devices and cutting-edge global visualization tools.

Full Story: Techgnosis.

And check out some of their other episodes of Bullshit! I watched a bunch of them last night. The ones on recycling and environmentalism were particularly good (and eye-opening).

There’s a bunch of them on Google Video. Even one on “Stupid 9-11 Conspiracies,” “Alien Abduction,” and the PETA.

NOTE – The one entitled “Alien Abduction” on Google Video is actually about profanity.

If you haven’t heard, an online prankster named Michael Crook is trying to abuse the DMCA to have unflattering pictures of himself taken off of web sites. 10 Zen Monkeys (RU Sirius’s new zine) and the EFF are fighting back. I’m suggesting everyone put a pic of Crook and a link to the 10ZM page to 1. Spread the pic far and wide in defiance of the DMCA and 2. Google bomb for the term “michael crook.”

Here’s a snip of code to add a pic and link to your own site. By standing up to intimidation and spreading the word about this case, you can help the fight for free speech online.

Why not? From MyDD: “And no one called right-wing bloggers “unscrupulous” when they did this to John Kerry in 2004. They opened the pandora’s box on this one, and they can ram their criticisms for me taking it up a notch upward and to the left.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Klint has been nice enough to allow me to continue posting bits of occult novelty to his wonderful site here, as I’ve since discontinued Occult Design in favour of pursuing business endeavours here in Edmonton and my work in the field of visual communication design.

But a happy hello to everyone and for today, I just wanted to drop these tidbits I came across this morning via Boing Boing, in case anyone here missed it:

Can hearing voices in your head be a good thing?

Psychologists have launched a study to find out why some people who hear voices in their head consider it a positive experience while others find it distressing.

The University of Manchester investigation – announced on World Hearing Voices Day (Thursday, 14th September) – comes after Dutch researchers found that many healthy members of the population there regularly hear voices.

Although hearing voices has traditionally been viewed as ‘abnormal’ and a symptom of mental illness, the Dutch findings suggest it is more widespread than previously thought, estimating that about 4% of the population could be affected.

continued via EurekAlert

As well as:

Google Books promotes banned books for Banned Books Week

Google Book Search and the American Library Association have teamed up to offer searchable indices and library links to banned books, in celebration of Banned Books Week (Sept 23-30). Included in the catalog are 1984, Lolita, Lord of the Flies, the Great Gatsby, The Color Purple, Brave New World, Naked Lunch, Invisible Man, Cats Cradle, and many other titles that made me a better person for having read them. Link

And this little graphical gem: the Major Arcana of the tarot as interpreted by John Coulthart… like traffic signs to the oracular road of life.

So a couple weeks ago I woke up one morning this page was open in my browser:

http://www.woc.org/public/pamphlet/this_book.html.

I don’t remember who sent it to me, and there was no browser history behind it. Google and Technorati didn’t turn up any pages linking to it.

Anyone ever seen it before?

Update: Turns out Bill e-mailed it to me. Mystery solved.

I was kind of tripped out reading this article about Jorn Barger – blog pioneer and man behind the great Robot Wisdom blog – a while back. Jorn as a homeless blogger wearing a Google cap and carrying a panhandler sign that reads “Coined the term ‘weblog,’ never made a dime.” This scene signifies something, but I don’t know what.

Borges’s story about a map as big as the territory it represented compared to Google Maps:

It is in these days that we are witnessing the collective creation of a map even more exact that Borges could imagine; one that describes the limits, the roads, and the shores of every territory on the planet. At the same time it uncovers another ambition more perfect and occult: that every shepherd or “emperor” can edit their own map as they wish, they can forge their own version of the world. In that map we will have a blueprint of human life: Things moving, crimes, thefts, migrating animals, childhood memories, imaginary battles between good and evil, hookers and ogres, real-time weather. In all, anything that can be pointed down to the soil and be named. (Mira!)

Apparently a hoax: Zombie Outbreak in Cambodia (can’t find this in the bbc archives or any other reference to it on google news… and it just sounds crazy)
(via Hyperstition).

Apparently real: It rained shrimp in California saw something about this on the Cabal yesterday, found this story on Google News.

And an old link from Slashdot: Bacteria programmed to act like computer.

The word biopunk has been bandied about for some time now. Google already has over 1,000 results for a search on the term. R.U. Sirius wrote a piece in Rolling Stone a couple years ago about the possibility of garage biotechnologists, a movement he called biopunk. But I’d like to throw a new meaning for the concept out there: the near future (already here?) biotechnology black market.

The biotechnology market has already captured the imaginations of the business world. For the past few years it’s been hyped as the next big thing, the new dot-com bubble. For instance, Paul Allen wants to turn a neighborhood in Seattle into a biotech industry fueled urbanist utopia.

Ample private and federal investment is being poured into biotech research, but I expect U.S policies banning cloning research and limiting funding for stem cell research will effectively limit the U.S.’s role in biotechnology development. Less restrictive policies and/or cheaper labor will give Europe, Russia, and Asia advantages in the global biotech industry.

But other factors will drive an underground biotechnology market: the crippling expense of prescription drugs, health insurance, malpractice insurance, and student loan debts.

Chemistry students have been making money manufacturing LSD, MDMA, and other illegal drugs for years. But the demand for black market prescription drug clones could create a new use for the college chemistry lab. Imagine thousands of undergrads manufacturing HIV meds and other expensive drugs for cheap underground resale.

Meanwhile, medical school students, un-licensed doctors, or even licensed doctors trying to keep up with insurance payments will be performing a myriad of unauthorized procedures. Genesis P. Orridge could be at the forefront of a movement again. Sex changes are nothing new, but P. Orridge and Lady Jaye’s sex change as installation art project is on the forefront of the body modification movement, which constantly grows more extreme. Face transplants are about to become a reality. But these black market surgical procedures won’t be limited to weird body art projects. Uninsured Americans will be seeking all types of surgical procedures on the black market, and finding students and doctors to perform them will become increasingly easier.

Of course, those policy restrictions will create another biotech black market: clandestine cloning research labs and illegal human testing projects. Illegal human testing is almost certainly already a reality. And even with recent improvements in the job market, there are still thousands of desperate unemployed people to be taken advantage of.

And let?s not forget R.U. Sirius?s frightening prediction from his Rolling Stone article: garage production of germ weapons.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been running Google ads for the past couple months, and have added some Amazon affliate links recently as well. I’m still undecided as to whether these ads are worth the money they make. Traffic has only increased since I started running the ads. Probably because I’ve been better about posting. But I wanted to give you, dear reader, the chance to let me know what you think about this advertising business.

1. Do you mind the ads on Technoccult?

2. Do you read Technoccult on the web or entirely in your feedreader?

3. Do you prefer to read whole feeds in your feedreader, or do you prefer only excerpts?

4. Would you prefer an ad-free exceprt feed to a ad supported full feed?

5. Would you pay a small fee (say, $1 – 5 a year) for an ad-free full feed?

6. If you use a feedreader, which one do you use? (The Cabal counts).

(I will probably be updating this on an ongoing basis)

General coverage: Boing Boing, ETcon itself, Plasticbag, Smart Mobs, Social Beasts, Wired News, and Zephoria NEW: ETcon WIKI with tons of notes

Mobile Hacks [PDF] by the Mobile Whack team.

Tom on Cory (intellectually, as it were…), and text of Cory’s talk

Google is Harder than It Looks notes by Doctorow

Tech Dirt on Reuter’s spin of Trippi’s etcon talk

Nokia CTO Speech: etcon (from smart mobs)

danah’s Revenge of the User

Molly’s presentation [pdf]

Tom Coates’s notes and commentary on Trippi

danah’s comments on Trippi

danah’s notes on Social Hacking meets Techno Hacking

Tom’s comments regarding the role of journalism as part of the Digital Democracy panel

Cory Doctorow’s notes on Transcendant Interactions

Doctorow’s notes on The Future of Cyberspace Economies

Doctorow’s notes on Many-to-Many Technologies in the
Defense Department

Doctorow’s notes on
Leveraging RSS at Disney: from Collaboration to Massive Content
Delivery

Doctorow’s notes from O’Reilly’s opening keynote

The TIP Records album Mystery of the Yeti 2 has a song by Hallucinogen called “the Herb Garden” in which there is a sample attributed to entheogen researcher Christian Raetsch and transcribed by fUSION Anomaly:

“you have heard of the yeti? the ubanamanamanala snowman? that is of course not an animal or a prehuman being, that is originally one of the shamans gods, the real name is Banjhakri, that means the shaman of the forest… so therefore nobody will ever find the yeti in nature, because you have to go in trance and then you’ll find the Yeti easily…”

“uhm, the Banjhakri uhm, the (…) man or the, the (…) shaman, the forest shaman, he wears a skin of, uhm… d-d-d-deer (jibberish) the symbol of this mushroom!”

“the yeti loves to drink shnaps too, so he’s like a real shaman… he, uhm, uh, if you want to contact him, you have to put some alcoholic offerings in front of the forest.”

“he has one dreadlock, that’s in honour of Shiva… i ask ‘then why don’t you have dreadlocks all over?’ he said ‘because, you know i’m, uh… pupupupu ap tepepep un nenenenn umndibdibdib dsedsedse de ann ktsingngngng to have dreadlocks all over’”

So this got me curious. I did a Google search, but didn’t come up with much promising material. According to this source: “Ban Jhakri is also the Nepali word for the smallest type

of yeti, so it appears that yetis do exist, at least in the spirit world” and I found a site selling back issues of a transpersonal psychology journal with an article about “The ‘calling’ the yeti, and the banjhakri ‘forest shaman’ in Nepalese shamanism.” The other pages I could find were in other languages and couldn’t be translated. I also found that the term “Ban Jhakri” is often used to simply mean shaman. Someone on Barbelith says that the Yeti guarded Shangri La- but he’s a tabloid writer so I’m skeptical. I’m just wondering if anyone out there has any information that might clear this up, or suggest some further reading on the yeti/shamanism connection.