Experiments in Cyberspace

German government is trying to push a law that will prevent employers to check their prospective employees' Facebook data. The draft presented by Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere is a lame -still positive, though, attempt to address surmounting problems created by social networks: It will be illegal to become a Facebook friend with an applicant in order to check out private details as some people seem to be indiscriminate about whom they accept as a friend. If an employer turns down an application based on the Facebook postings, a rejected job applicant could take the company to court and claim damages. The new law also aims to limit video surveillance in the workplace like lavatories and locker rooms after a public outrage when it was discovered that some corporations have been checking on employee e-mails and filming sales clerks during coffee breaks. However, de Maiziere continues, Employers will still be allowed to run a search on the web on their applicants. Anything ...

I missed the computer revolution by a few years. True, I could have caught up if I had really wanted to (this statement is not entirely true) but I was in the wrong place and Madame Fortune had swung me on a different path. I tried to find and correct the missing pieces in the years to come and to a great extent I was successful. Barring programming, I can almost do anything on/with a PC. Then came the next revolution: the mobile phone. I did not like it very much. Maybe this can be attributed to my age at that time. I do not remember where I read it but it was something like this: humans are quick and eager to grasp (and use) innovations only up to a certain age. Then, we tend to be more conservative. So, apart from its basic and originally intended use, i.e. talking, I hardly use a mobile phone. I usually find it impractical. I did not make a fuss or give a second thought about it until I decided to observe how people and friends around me used their computers. Their interactio...

I had been expecting the claims guy from my insurance company to come by my work yesterday and check out the damage on my vehicle from the accident I was in on Friday. I was expecting to have to be assertive about having a homebirth so I was kind of nervous. The pregnancy books say its more and more common towards the end of pregnancy, but man am I having trouble in this department lately!! Arthur is putting a little foot on my ribs more and more often now, so I guess he has run out of other places to stick it! Im still pissed off about the other day, and I really, really, really hate Toby Keith even more now. "What Should I write about?" was the question I asked to my blog drone after a long hiatus. It muttered something along those lines above.

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,...

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...