Experiments in Cyberspace

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...