Experiments in Cyberspace

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,...

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 t...

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...