Experiments in Cyberspace

This is probably one of my favorite things about the movie Anastasia was that song. One thing I wonder is this: in how much detail is okay to write about her on-line? I probably would've run over the damn thing and left its remnants in the parking lot here at work. Anyone who has been reading this web page for a while knows that I am a dedicated observer of human quirks and oddities, particularly the collection of human quirks and oddities that rides Chicago public transit. I guess I should thank them, really, for showing me that even a dedicated amateur anthropologist like me has limits. I guess I just wish that I had that experience or that feeling that puts the little extra spark in someone's eyes, and makes their smile just a little wider, even at the mention of their name. I mean overall it was a good vacation, I got to hang out with my cousins CorCor and Kny and JB and Nato, but the other baby cousin that I have is driving me up a wall. That just freaked me out for th

"I experienced the web as a powerful tool of organizing life and at the same time as a toy for organized waste of time." These are the words I bookmarked[1] when I read Elliot's The Screen Generation at cDc. Web as a medium of communication, hence a mere tool, cuts both ways. The underlying difference that sets it apart from other media is participating in content creation. Unlike TV for example, where you are forced to consume whatever the producers broadcast, content can be generated collectively. I consider any attempt that tries to push content, a state where the user is passive just like a TV viewer, as hostile and destructive for Internet culture. Sharing, participating, recommending, including your own input, searching, etc are the trademarks of Internet, they are what make it tick, and wonderful. I have recently come across a discussion about copyright, for comments to be specific. Who owns the copyright to a comment made for this post, the author or the do

The world wide web is rich. Even by the best estimate, search engines can only crawl one fourth of it. The rest? It is waiting for you to be uncovered by other methods so that they can see the daylight in the dark and dusty recesses of this cob web where they silently weep. Hidden treasures, interesting sites, rarely heard games, articles that few read... Some do not even use the hypertext, i.e. HTTP protocol. They are all waiting to be discovered, unhidden so to speak. Some might have already been found by spiders or bots, if only you could type those weird keywords in a search form... Some had their day. They cherished the victory, enjoyed the glory, only to be forgotten again. A spark, a momentary fame that did not last. Some can only be accessed via Internet Archive; if they were fortunate to be archived, of course. The servers that hosted them have probably been scrapped or thrown to a junk yard. They are all part of our culture . If we lose them, we also lose a part of o

Once a palm reader , a gypsy true to tradition said, "You will live until 2032, 80 years of age." She was wrong this time and a swan sang out sorrow. Web is a strange place. You cry for a friend whom you never met; yet you like him, just as sure as you will miss him. A +seeker has died yesterday. Short URL for this post

My fixation on digital video recording seems to open up new horizons and discoveries these days. While trying to hone my long gone theoretical knowledge on cameras, frames, slow motion and similar concepts, I come across such great artwork that it is impossible not to get distracted. One such example I'd like to share with you is the chalk animation of Lucinda Schreiber and Yanni Kronenberg. The video took six months from start to finish, four of which being full time. With 1900 frames shot and variable rates of 12fps, 8fps and 6fps, music of Firekites , a band from Newcastle, Australia accompanies the video (Autumn story). Absolutely stunning. Firekites - AUTUMN STORY - chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber on Vimeo . Short URL for this post

Swine flu has finally spread to cyberspace. Shocking as it may seem, visitors to INMI, the Japanese infectious disease center, have begun receiving mails titled "Information about Swine Flu," which reportedly contain computer viruses. No explanation has been given as to how the virus harms PCs. I usually take virus news light heartedly and always with a smile. Despite the harm they cause, they are also a symbol of human ingenuity for me. But this time, I have to say it is plain wicked, unnecessary and evil. We are on the verge of a serious epidemic and people are just trying to be a little more informed. Would it not be better if we tried to help them instead? Short URL for this post

The number one reason why people use digital video recording, DVR for short, is security. From small shop owners and families to big financial institutions, digital cameras are used everywhere and recorded tapes (a misnomer here obviously) or other media are stored for inspection purposes later. Though it is difficult to claim it stops abuse or theft, security by DVR has three immediate benefits: It is considered as a deterrent It drives down insurance costs Data stored occupies less space and is extremely portable.  Now, include other gadgets in e.g. stations, airports, city halls, traffic lights, subways, stores and whatnot into this cameraverse, it will not be wrong to say unless we decide to live in caves, our every move is under surveillance . Still, as far as our privacy is concerned, one can safely assume that it is intact just because of the sheer amount of data collected. Unless it is narrowed down, we are just one of the millions of pixels residing in those images, des

As threats to public security increases day by day, there is a growing demand for more surveillance in all aspects of our lives. E-mails, Facebook profiles, search queries, surfing habits, you name it, are all recorded and used. Now, considerable amount of that data is for marketing purposes and it can be viewed either good or bad depending on its exact purpose. Some of it are in the hands of the law enforcement agencies for apparent public safety. Still, I can not help but be concerned. If you told me a country like Australia would propose a country wide Internet censorship, I would not believe you, or Germany would shut down sites like Wikileaks , no, I would say it was unlikely, either. Nor would I believe copyright treaties would be negotiated behind closed doors. And, no, I would not think it was possible for a company like Airbus, or any company if that matters, to spy on staff bank accounts for due diligence. Not in those parts of the world anyway. But they all happened.

A precious item for anyone who cares. Carlo M. Cipolla 's "The Basic Laws of Stupidity" is a short essay I can heartily recommend. You can read the full on-line version at Fravia's. I am inserting just the headlines here, only to remind myself of the foolish mistakes I have done in the past and will undoubtedly do in the future. "What about present?" you may ask. Everything seems sooo right now that one should later look back in time to judge. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places

"After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year. We'll share more details this summer. For now, please sign in or visit the help center for more information." Those are the words that welcome you if you visit GeoCities main page . Established in 1994, the free hosting service helped many to take their first steps in the cyber world. Yahoo bought it for $3.6 billion in 2001. I still have a few accounts there. Many incomplete pages, trials, experiments, some stuff I like to keep on-line but not want them easily found reside in GeoCities. I even remember using the service for image hosting. There are legendary sites disguised as innocent personal pages there. From mirrors of once popular cracking tutorials to +ORC's secret gateway, GeoCities helped the dream, the dream of a place where people and information will flow free, regardless of which sex, race or religious affiliation they belong to. Curtain falls, an era ends. Short U

Yesterday, I finally took the plunge and registered an account with Twitter. Since you had to follow at least one person, or so I assumed, I picked Onion, only to regret it approximately ten minutes later. True to its fame, Onion was at the top of its form and more than 100 tweets filled my home page in no time. You can waste/spend your entire life by following Onion only. Despite the fact that I follow the magazine for years, I will delete it. Another side effect is my account seems to have been all screwed up, today. Apparently I am somebody else now, a Frank Grangetto to be exact, a Matt Schwartzwalder and Rachel Leggett are both me, and whatever... Leave it to another day to sort it out.   This experiment provided me some insight, though. Search engines make a very good job of what they are supposed to make: searching what is already written. But how do you search what is thought but not written? For that I believe, Twitter can be a very good alternative. I had this novel

As attacks on privacy exponentially increase and censorship attempts go uncensored, a few optimistically try to accomplish what the cyberspace dream once promised. The pendulum swings, each swing being a bit closer and more threatening, deafening the ears of a handful while millions cheer with joy. The digital imprimatur does not even bother to knock our door. As daring as the times may be, the faint light of hope still lingers. Version 0.7.2 of I2P Anonymous Network has just been released. I2P is an anonymizing network, offering a simple layer that identity-sensitive applications can use to securely communicate. All data is wrapped with several layers of encryption, and the network is both distributed and dynamic, with no trusted parties. It is an effort to build, deploy, and maintain a network to support secure and anonymous communication. People using I2P are in control of the tradeoffs between anonymity, reliability, bandwidth usage, and latency. There is no central point in

Life is a good teacher. Up to now, it has never occurred to me a short domain name could be an advantage. I have always assumed, because I do it that way, people could bookmark a site when they like it regardless of the length of its name. Though I do not use it, social networking sites like Twitter changed my mind. I suddenly realized how difficult it must be to write a tweet about an article on this site without the aid of URL shortener services. Just writing the part "experimentsincyberspace/2009/04/" with the protocol prefix consumes 52 characters. I am not saying you will not be found. I am talking about the extra step, often tedious, of the necessity of shortening the URL. A very good idea could be having a short URL handy beneath or above your articles so that people can easily use it. Rather than having your visitors do it, you can take the extra step and place a short link yourself. In addition, keeping your URL intact can be a marketing and branding advantage.

Germany's registration authority has suspended investigative journalism site Wikileak's Internet domain registration without a notice. The action comes two weeks after the house of the German WikiLeaks domain sponsor, Theodor Reppe, was searched by German authorities. Police documentation shows that the March 24, 2009 raid was triggered by WikiLeaks' publication of Australia's proposed secret Internet censorship list. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) told Australian journalists that they did not request the intervention of the German government. The publication of the Australian list exposed the blacklisting of many harmless or political sites and changed the nature of the censorship debate in Australia. The Australian government's mandatory internet censorship proposal is now not expected to pass the Australian senate. It is also worth mentioning a secret draft of international copyright treaty negotiated behind closed doors by some

Goldman Sachs has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website goldmansachs666.com. According to the C&D letter, dated April 8, the bank is rattled because the site 'violates several of Goldman Sachs' intellectual property rights' and also 'implies a relationship' with the bank itself. Morgan claims he has followed all legal requirements to own and operate the website and that the header of the site clearly states that the content has not been approved by the bank. The uninitiated can read and learn what Streisand effect is while those in the know may wish to purchase goldmansucks.com domain which is still available at the time of writing this post. Short URL for this post

After reading and reading again what I wrote about Google's proposal to acquire Twitter , I started thinking, and thinking again. What makes Twitter valuable commercially? If you had told me people would frantically post and follow short messages 5 years ago, I would have laughed at your face. Yet, here they are, swamped in a frenzy of 140-character texts. But does that make it worth spending millions? Said post, probably under the influence of bright analysts, claimed an information value for businesses to realign and improve their products and services existed. True but an incomplete judgment, because it misses an important element: Mobile connectivity . Teens of my generation had one electronic tool: computers or PC's. It was new, it was cool and it let us go to places not seen or heard before (I stopped short of writing where no man had gone before). The promise or prophecy, -correction- dream of Gibson's cyberspace locked us in basements and dark rooms for many a

It will shortly, if ICANN's new proposal holds up, that is. According to Paul Levins, VP corporate affairs, any domain name will be possible, subject to your imagination, The familiar .com, .net, .org and 18 other suffixes — officially "generic top-level domains" — could be joined by a seemingly endless stream of new ones next year under a landmark change approved last summer by the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, the entity that oversees the Web's address system. Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly. A rapper might apply for a web address ending in .hiphop. [...] To beat a competitor to the punch, a company might decide it needs to control a new generic domain, such as .cereal or .detergent, but it would be costly. The currently proposed application fee is $185,000, plus an annual "continuance" fee of $25,000. If more than one company wants a suffix, there could be a bidding w

After Google's April 2009 PageRank update, there has once again been a commotion and confusion about the issue of links in paid-for-posts and how they affect PageRank. As far as Google is concerned, their stand is crystal clear. Their webmaster guidelines dictate a nofollow attribute on such links as Google's Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye explain , Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results. We enjoy working with webmasters, and an added benefit of our working together is that when you make better and more accessible content, the internet, as well as our index, improves. This in turn allows us to deliver more relevant search results to users. If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines. Such links can hurt relevance by cau

I am not adding anything. Joice and rejoice to better understand the financial crisis we are in, as seen by Mark Mitchell in his book The Story of Deep Capture : The Columbia School of Journalism is our nation's finest. They grant the Pulitzer Prize, and their journal, The Columbia Journalism Review, is the profession’s gold standard. CJR reporters are high priests of a decaying temple, tending a flame in a land going dark. In 2006 a CJR editor (a seasoned journalist formerly with Time magazine in Asia, The Wall Street Journal Europe, and The Far Eastern Economic Review) called me to discuss suspicions he was forming about the US financial media. I gave him leads but warned, "Chasing this will take you down a rabbit hole with no bottom." For months he pursued his story against pressure and threats he once described as, "something out of a Hollywood B movie, but unlike the movies, the evil corporations fighting the journalist are not thugs burying toxic waste, the

Rumors have surfaced up that the number one search engine Google is in late (early according to some) stages to acquire Twitter for an undisclosed price above $250 million. Twitter has recently rejected an offer by Facebook for $500 million worth of Facebook shares. Why would Google want Twitter? Michael Arrington argues Twitter's real value is in search. It holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet, and Google doesn't even have a horse in the game: More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually, or simply gather the information to see what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong. And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer. People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That's valuable stuff. Twitter know

A high-quality, full-length work print of "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" - the movie is to be released on May 1 - has hit the bit-torrent sites last night.  Not unexpectedly, the film industry's responses have demonstrated how confused they are. One producer behind another major summer franchise insists that while piracy is a serious problem that needs a "focused and visionary response" from the movie industry, a leak like this may not actually cut that deeply into Wolverine's ticket sales. Well, what can I say? Although English is not my mother tongue, even I know the difference between piracy and leak: Piracy is done by an outsider by any means necessary, whereas leak is by an insider with a discrete motive. It is somewhat absurd to blame people with piracy when you leak something voluntarily or discretely. And this comment probably makes all arguments of Hollywood (RIAA) about piracy null and void: People who are going to download and watch it on the

Here comes a new and brave experiment in the wild wild web: Annodam Films has released the feature film 'Blank' from writer director Rick L. Winters, with leading characters played by D'Angelo Midili, Darlene Sellers, Jason Adkins on March 21, 2009 on several popular torrent sites for everyone to enjoy. It is our concept that if people like the movie they will go back and make a donation or purchase the movie at www.blank-movie.com , thus allowing us to make another film and release it in the same manner. After the end credits of the movie BLANK there will be a trailer for one of the next feature films we are planning to film and release Peer to Peer. The thing that makes this film unique is that it is a co-op based concept where the entire cast and crew worked on a deferred percentage of the films gross. In other words, the cast and crew own a percentage of the films gross, so the profits are not going to Hollywood executives but instead into the pockets of the filmma

The next time an overnight snow begins to fall, take two bricks and place them side by side a few inches apart in your yard. In the morning, the bricks will be covered with snow and barely discernible. The snowflakes will have filled every vacant space between and around the bricks. What you will see, says Ivan Biaggio, an associate professor of physics at Lehigh University resembles a phenomenon that, when it occurs at the smallest of scales on an integrated optical circuit, could hasten the day when the Internet works at superfast speeds. Biaggio, is part of an international team of researchers that has developed an organic material with an unprecedented combination of high optical quality and strong ability to mediate light-light interaction and has engineered the integration of this material with silicon technology so it can be used in optical telecommunication devices. The material, which is composed of small organic molecules with high nonlinear optical susceptibilities,

Renown auto maker Mercedes-Benz will start offering hybrid buses under the brand of "Citaro" soon. The bus will be be manufactured under the initiative of Daimler's "Shaping Future Transportation" with an aggressive target of zero emission. The initiative started in the mid 90s first with diesel-electric hybrids and continued with today's fuel celled ones (lithium-ion) as part of a research project called NEBUS. The reason I am interested in this technology is because I favor hybrids more than hydrogen-based vehicles where food supplies are at stake. It seems to me using plants or crops to generate energy is a bad idea. They are scarce or will be so in the near future. I am not into car tech and I could get it all wrong. So, take it with a grain of salt.

It is no secret that I am not a big fan of social bookmarking . Don't get me wrong, I love sharing stuff with friends. I simply missed the train of stumbling, twitting and whatnot; or to put it more correctly, I had gotten used to a system of my own long before social media services were scattered all around the web. Yet, they have been a fact of our lives. I have just added a few bookmarking buttons here in the hope that they will be useful to those who are accustomed to the phenomenon and can't live without it. I hope I did the coding right. I included a few bookmarking sites which I thought to be popular and beneficial. The real purpose of this post, however, is to thank the developer Joost de Valk of Sociable , a popular Wordpress plug-in. I sort of shared his styling and ported here. I really do not like others where, after an accidental mouse over a pop up springs up, an event I find highly distracting. Others make a call home and if there is a problem there, your

Back in the days when USENET was USENET, I collected a lot of fractal pictures; from alt.math if my memory serves me right. The year should be 1998. The term fractal was coined by Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975, with the Latin root "fractus" meaning broken or fractured and many did not hesitate to slip into the fractal dimension in the newsgroups. Then occurred a frenzy of posting fractals, geometric shapes based on iterative equations where each part was a reduced copy of the whole. Here is a small selection from my favorites:   Jungle   Bluebird   Demon   Fetus   Napkins   A poem   Snail Hope you enjoy them.

I have made a small experiment for the last two days. I visited some 50 blogs yesterday and bookmarked only the ones that I had no desire to read for any reason. Today, I revisited them. To my surprise, at least 10% of them turned out to be very good. This led me thinking, how come did I miss them? The following video in which a corporation is assigned to design the traffic stop signs we all love to see might help: Believe it or not, I have been to such a meeting!

When a network settles down, and is not so new anymore, it can be quite a challenge to keep it’s activity level. Should a network then transform into a so-called ‘organized network’? Organizing a network does not necessarily mean decreasing the level of spontaneity to make way for rules and hierarchy: it can provide a place for sustainable knowledge sharing and production. As Ned Rossiter argues in his book Organized Networks (2006), face-to-face meetings are crucial “if the network is to maintain momentum, revitalize energy, consolidate old friendships and discover new ones, recast ideas, undertake further planning activities, and so on.” Network Cultures Winter Camp is therefore meant for those networks and (potential) network members that need support to gather in real life, conspire, discuss and make the necessary steps forward. Winter Camp does not have an (academic) educational or training component, but there is a lot to learn. Winter Camp will be organized by the Institute o

For whom you would ask. Well, definitely not for the so called copyright holders. Riyaz Jariwalla a solicitor who specialises in contentious matters sums up the trial nicely, Swedish filesharing providers Pirate Bay yesterday celebrated a victory in only its second day of its trial for allegedly assisting copyright infringement. The rights holders were unable to prove to the satisfaction of the court that files which were illegally distributed had been used on Pirate Bay. The prosecution which represented Warner Bros, MGM, Universal and EMI had to abandon the majority of the claims. Even if the case unfolds differently, the big labels lose ground on the public relations front. There is a growing dislike towards them thanks to ridiculous I should say charges pressed to individuals in the USA and I witnessed a fair amount of people who stopped buying any product from those big corporations. I am aware that making such a generalization is often wrong but that is what it is. Riyaz put

The ever notorious bit-torrent tracker The Pirate Bay trial begins in Stockholm, Sweden. Three years ago the police raided the Bay's headquarters and seized their servers on the grounds that the Pirate Bay helped distribute copyrighted material. The popularity of the site steadily increased from then on and there is even a political party (The Pirate Party) defending alternative copyright laws. The accusations have been summed up in a 4,000 page paper. One particular note worth mentioning is Jim Keyzer, one of the police officers raided the peer to peer tracker three years ago is now an employee of Warner Bros. The curious may check the Pirate Bay blog . I am sure they will give some details about the progress of the trial from time to time.

Burhan was a phenomenon, to say the least. He was the most successful "on board" marketer doing business on the ferries crossing the Bosphorus. He was so popular that people deliberately delayed their purchases to see what he would be selling  on that day's voyage. His secret? quality merchandise money back guarantee and above all, an interesting combination of goods. Last item on the list was particularly important. He never sold a single item alone. There was first the prime product of the day, the flagship so to speak, and a secondary one, which was definitely intriguing. It was hard to resist the temptation. The bargain was there, together with the trust which was earned over the course of years Burhan conducted his business, a track record hard to beat. He refused all offers to build a company, saying he was making more than enough. He really was. Microsoft is planning a campaign or so I have heard, a free update to Windows 7 for buyers of Vista, which reminded

It is a fact that free, libre and open source software (floss) use is on the rise. Still, the momentum is not as steep as developers want it to be. One major handicap for propagation of floss applications is the lack of clear and concise documentation. Some may argue that there is enough documentation to get anyone going. Not quite so! A few months back I wrote a how-to about uploading a favicon to a Blogspot blog . Yesterday, I asked a friend who had a blog, if he could upload a favicon according to my instructions in the article. He tried and came back telling me he was unable to understand it. What went wrong? Apparently I failed to put my feet into the shoes of a completely novice user. What was clear for me, was not so clear for him. It is really a sort of black voodoo to accomplish such a task. Human mind plays tricks and thoughts outpace words. I came across Floss Manuals a few days ago, and that is why I arranged the aforementioned test. FLOSS Manuals make free sof

Obviously the Conficker virus is going stronger than I thought. 20 technology firms including Microsoft, Verisign, Symantec and F-Secure have joined forces to find the source and/or the developer of the virus also known as Downadup, Sasser and Kido. They are offering $250,000 to anyone who can provide the information needed. Conficker is still spreading at an alarming rate of 2.2 million computers a day. Those who are running Windows operating system are strongly encouraged to apply the patch Microsoft released late October. It is also worth noting that the algorithm of the worm (this is the correct term) is still a mystery in spite of all the efforts by anti-virus companies.

The authorities from Los Alamos National Laboratory, a nuclear arms reasearch facility in New Mexico, USA have finally admmitted 69 of their computers are missing. Leaving aside the significance of the number 69, the lab spokesperson Kevin Roarke has said that there was no important information stored in the computers. Surely, I am not in a position to dispute Roarke's claim until I am finished with all the files (this is the joke part). All in all, I feel much safer now. I know that researchers in Los Alamos are simple souls just like me, surfing internet with their PC's. What a relief!

Cuba is soon to get into the list of countries with a national Linux distribution. The interesting government of Cuba, which until last year did not allow her citizens to own a PC or a cellular phone, has made a quantum leap according to our man in Havana. The distro has been introduced in 13. International Technology Fair to the enthusiastic spectators. Hector Rodriguez, Dean of Faculty of Open Source Software at University of Havana said: "Linux is ideologically more convenient for us." Closed sourced commercial  operating systems like Microsoft are not allowed into Cuba because of U.S. embargo.

Gods must be hungry as they are looking for more pain and misery. Nine Iranian bloggers (five of them ethnic Azeris ) will be jailed and whipped for good measure to satisfy and feed the ever starving Gods so that stormy weathers will cease, crops will flourish and harvests will yield record levels of produce. What did these bloggers do? I really can't tell as my Persian is rusty and the damn alphabet is not Latin, but apparently they upset a few religious figures with colorful turbans with their articles in their blog, which is usually blocked or temporarily closed so that they will behave. Go Gods!

Protection is not confined to your bedroom or another convenient place as this year's Valentine's Day approaches. Those old, sorry mature enough to remember the havoc caused by the cute "I Love You" and "Love Letter" viruses will sadly remember. How time flies, doesn't it? The damages had exceeded 6 billion dollars, then. You can of course say "it's worth it," or a similar cliche but better be protected rather than sorry. Possible names for these lovely bugs to reappear on or around this naughty day of February might be "You are beautiful", "From me to you", "I wanna hold your hand", "Only you", "Love at first sight", "I am addicted to you", "Our song", "Save the last dance for me", "Helter Skelter" (O.K., this one's a joke)... But you get the drill. Be vewy vewy careful!

Some headlines from the Vienna Document by the Open Cultures Working Group hosted by "Towards a Culture of Open Networks" - a collaborative program developed by Sarai CSDS (Delhi), Waag Society (Amsterdam) and World-Information.Org (Vienna). While global information cities increasingly resemble neo-medieval city states, market concentrations establish a dominion over knowledge. On the way to information feudalism, diversity seems to loose out. We applaud all initiatives that reclaim the benefits of new communication technologies for the common public. We know that the future is too precious to leave it to experts; digital human rights in everyday life are everyone's concern. We trust nodes open of information cultures to explore the diversity of choices in the shaping of information societies based on semiotic democracy. We recognize that street level open intelligence is of high public value and a cultural process that is highly dependent on information climat

  Tomorrow we shall witness a penumbral (not full) lunar eclipse. It will be visible in Eastern Europe, Middle East, Western Africa while the Moon is rising, and in North America while the Moon is setting. In places to the east of Iran, the event can be observed all night. As you may know 2009 is World Astronomy Year and I invite everyone to participate the observation.

Here is the only known picture of the so called 500 Rupee / 10 dollar laptop , the Indian Sakshat . Unfortunately it is anything but a PC. It can connect to a network, has limited disk space and can make a calculation or two. Apparently, the digital divide is to stay with us for some time.

Sousveillance, original French, as well as inverse surveillance are terms coined by Steve Mann (Toronto, Canada) to describe the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant. "Surveillance" denotes the act of watching from above, whereas "sousveillance" denotes bringing the practice of observation down to human level (ordinary people doing the watching, rather than higher authorities or architectures doing the watching). If you are in Aarhus Denmark around or on Feb 8-9 and do not know what to do, Sousveillance , the art of inverse surveillance conference is an event not to be missed. From the web site: Moving away from cameras and directional microphones, face and voice recognition, the pervasive technologies offer not only the ability to gather and organize huge amounts of dissimilar data, but as well on grounds of these to predict probable patterns of behavior. Commercial mobile variants of Google Maps, YouTube or Facebook are by far the onl

Four Google executives in Italy is facing trial over a video shown in that country. If found guilty, they will be sentenced up to three years in jail. This is an interesting case. Let me sum up: The video recorded by a cell phone was about four male high school students in Turin harassing a 17-year-old boy with Down syndrome. Google removed the video in 24 hours after receiving the complaint. All four offenders were caught, possibly with the help of the video. The lawsuit is not against Google but the people working for Google. As you might have guessed it, what makes this interesting is the last item in the list above. Apparently, it is getting riskier to work for Internet companies as you can all of a sudden find yourself looking at the judge because, a co-worker slipped and some unwanted content is uploaded; some may think you deliberately allow the content be distributed; you did not remove the content right away and spent some time with your family instead; this will

Too good to be true? Well, after 100 thousand rupee (2000 usd) car Tata Nano, 800 rupee (15 usd) L10 mobile phone, apparently India managed to make a 10 dollar laptop, in spite of criticism by many experts. The concept of cheap laptops which will abridge the big digital divide between rich and poor, is the dream child of Prof. Nicholas Negraponte of MIT with his OLPC, One Laptop Per Child Project. The OLPC's XO PC costs roughly 200 dollars and has been sort of a huge success in South American countries. The Sakshat laptop PC, if true can really be a dream come true for many living in undeveloped countries. Like in every wonderful story, there is a catch. I have seen some sources citing the price of Sakshat as 5000 rupees or 100 dollars. We shall see the actual price tomorrow at the press conference. Still, even a hundred dollar price tag is good enough.

  Google's popular geography program Google Earth's new version offers users to explore oceans and the red planet, Mars. Google Earth 5.0   has been introduced at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, to a group of spectators including former U.S. vice president Al Gore, (the man who allegedly invented the Internet among other things). Joke aside, the new version is really cool, especially the ocean layer. Not only it gives viewers an amazing 3D experience of our oceans, you can find interesting stuff ranging from informative articles and photographs provided by National Geographic, BBC Earth, etc to ship wrecks - an indispensable tool for will-be treasure hunters. 

You have a message to pass, you want people hear you out. Do you really think blogging is the only way? Web offers a variety of means to distribute content, your ideas and your thoughts, if you are creative enough. But why use one if you can use them all? Take a look at the Blueful way (requires Java, JavaScript, Flash, sound and a modern browser) and let me know what you think. Image: Blue Web by Vivienne Kelly

As readers of this blog are aware, my view of using social media is not mainstream, or should I say it is unorthodox. I strongly believe that achieving higher ranks in search engine results will yield more positive returns in the long run, as opposed to getting to the front pages of social media sites. Although this opinion is based more on intuition rather than raw data, I do have some statistics albeit limited in depth and scope. I paid a visit to an internet cafe whose owner is a friend of mine. After a full day's observation, here are my preliminary findings: From a total of 54 customers, none visited a social media site. 60% of those said "yes" when asked if they had made a query using a search engine that day. The most popular application was MSN's instant message service. I will go on and speculate that, a considerable percentage of social media users is made up of bloggers themselves and commercial site owners. For any blogger who wants to target casu

  Either Google is onto something - a new experiment perhaps or a hack- or entire web is harmful and full of malicious content according to Google. The image shows the lame search for "MSN". However, if you click the link, rather any link on search engine result page, this is the screen that welcomes you: "Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer." Do you really think we cannot trust the world wide web any more? Do children need protection to such an extent? I do not know, you decide. :-)

  Here is my nominee for best hack of the current year. Traffic signs in Austin, Texas have been hacked by a group of anonymous horror movie enthusiasts! The electronic signs at Lamar and Martin Luther King Jr. boulevards had a surprise for today's drivers. For starters, they were not boring. One could even say they were stimulating. Do not ask me what they stimulate! The signs read this morning "Caution! Zombies Ahead.", "Run for Cold Climates", "The End is Near", "Nazi Zombies Run!" A good thematic selection, I should say; horror, environmental, apocalyptic, and classic WW-II. Don't drink and drive!

Woke up, got out of the bed. A bitwise shift to the right, there am I, ready and charming than ever. Checked the mirror. No, one bit is slightly off. A shift to the left and another to the right; click, clang, it is O.K. now. Good! First impression is important. After the dusting sectors of the ever-spinning hard drive, I am loaded back on memory. Threw myself on Information Highway, my journey begins. Got the time from an NTP server. How come did I sleep this long? Something is wrong, terribly wrong. The handles, they are NOT right. Where is everybody? Phatal Error, Acidic Nature, Corruptor, Social Distortion, MalHavoc, Manifest Destiny, Mind Shadow... Where are they? A few routers more. Here is a crowded place. With a funny name: Facebook. Who would name his site like that? Lame... But they can be here. Worth a look. Oh no! Real names, real information? Don't they know? Didn't anybody tell? I'd better forget the masses and concentrate. Can they be here? No, don'

Chris 'The Falcon' Han has compiled the songs with "love" in their titles. The point, however, is his use of sequencer interface. It acts as the visual of the mix for a functional and aesthetic experience. I cannot say I agree with the songs chosen but I have to admit I liked the feeling while watching it. Love Songs from Chris 'The Falcon' Han on Vimeo .

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim will invest $250 million in the New York Times. "Slim's money will be used in critical pay-backs that are due late Spring this year," Janet Robinson of Times has said. So far, so good. I am glad for the newspaper but who on earth is Carlos Slim? Reportedly, he is the owner of Banco Inbursa and Inmobiliaria Carso among other companies. And he suddenly felt the need to invest in a troubled industry, media; not in a TV, a dot com or an initially shining technology co. Call me a skeptic but I attribute the erosion of trust in journalism to mostly such deals. A newspaper is only as good as it is critical, the more the better, and my experience with such financing methods in this part of the world is not very pleasant. Such money is poured into media to provide leverage for creditors against competition, their competition, not the newspaper's. Let us hope this one does not turn sour.

According F-Secure's latest report, this lovely worm going with the names Downadup, Kido and Conficker has so far affected close to 9 million computers (figure does not include corporations who forgot to patch their systems and hiding the fact they are infected). Since this place is not a technical site, we will not go into details like how to remove it, anti-virus software, on-line scanners and such. Instead, we will try to tackle the urge for writing such a magnificent (in spite of the damage caused, its code deserves recognition) program. In his article "Ethics and the Urge" [1], Guido Sanchez of VIPER (Viral Inclined Programming Experts Ring) discusses about lame boards [2], several ways to dispose of them, and also the ethics involved in making someone's life miserable just because they are evolutionarily ranked just below slime mold: There's a certain board in Colorado, called the Sound Doctrine BBS {303-680-7209}, and I call up... After downloading some

Jake Wall's software AnimalLink uses SMS and GPS technology to prevent elephants hoarding the farms in Kenya. So far, 44 of these lovely and big creatures have been tagged with the software that reports their current position to authorities. Wall estimates thousands of dollars of damage have been avoided after the elephants were tagged. AnimalLink sends the exact position of the elephants to a server in Nairobi and if the animals are getting close to a farm, rangers are dispatched to prevent the incident. The software cannot unfortunately do much against illegal hunters and poachers, however, Wall is upgrading it so that AnimalLink will send a text message if an elephant does not make a move for more than five hours. Image: Save the Elephants