Elijah Meeks's Blog, page 6

Oh Blog!

You can't leave anything alone on the Internet for more than three days without it crashing spectacularly.  Still, it's better than ZModem.

It's more a tweet masquerading as a blog post, so I leave you with a link to the latest security patch to WordPress, and direct your attention to the pings.  WordPress, like so much of the New Web, is so unprepossessingly international that it hardly seems fitting to draw attention to it.

Twitter gets DOSed, 4Chan not Responsible?

Twitter was taken down by the last trick known to the "hacker" community.  Oh sure, passwords still get stolen and personal information still gets used to humiliate the semi-public figures of the Internet, but it's all done in a remarkably low-tech manner, using the digital equivalent of old-style private eyes.  All that's left for script kiddies is the poor distributed denial of service, used indiscriminately for destroying racist talk show hosts or random AT&T customers.  Like a Sergio Leone v

Wikipedia is Dying!!!

A new data set on Wikipedia edits and new article creation is being breathlessly touted as a sign that Wikipedia has reached its peak and is pointed toward inevitable decline.  I think the biggest problem with Wikipedia is that it draws out amateur criticism and analysis.  First off, it's not like Wikipedia statistics are hidden away in an archive in Tibet, written in a mysterious Fujian script–it's all publically available.  Which begs the question, why is the state of Wikipedia in 2006 somehow

Bad Egg has Value

I'm digging through the Zork source code for mysterious purposes to be revealed later, but I figure I can share some of the more interesting bits with the world at large.  I'm one of those people for whom Zork was a seminal childhood experience, and I'd place it along with Seven Cities of Gold and Hero's Quest (Later called Quest for Glory) from Sierra.  Not that Breach II and Zaxxon didn't show up, but there was an emergent narrative character to these three games that has always stuck with me.

Not Content with Fiscal Bankruptcy

California, that teetering, bankrupt, furlough-doling entity that was once the swaggering bully of these United States…

I have it on good authority that the California Arts Council so badly wanted a hokey, hipster, digital art piece for their California Arts Day Poster competition, that they've decided to eschew traditional art as too stodgy and not have any poster at all.  It's hard to find the original call, but it had such warning signs as the use of the word "mash up".

Defining Censorship in the Digital Age

Modern censorship isn't about stopping the flow of information, that would be impossible, it's about making the barriers of access to it so high that users can't easily find it.  Censorship (High barriers, privilege-based production benefits) exists on a spectrum, opposite from peer collaboration (Low barriers, commons-based production benefits).  It's relationship to artistic and technological innovation is not clear (Metaphor dies without or with too much prudence and censorship) but the popul

Provides 7XP, and Mutton

And then, of course, there's something like this:

MMORPG, oil on canvas

The Future of Learning in the Digital Age

Available here.

tl;dr The university needs Wikipedia more than Wikipedia needs the university.

The Death of the King of Pop as Digital Phenomena

Thanks to Wikipedia’s tech-blog we can see how Michael Jackson’s death looks from the perspective of server load and traffic:

Wikipedia Load Spike - MJ RIP

Traffic Spike

This kind of epiphenomenon is the bread-and-butter of research that tries to interpolate social causes from digital reverberations.  Not that any such research is going on, but once we’ve all grown sick of mining vulgar Latin textbooks for word preference, we’ll develop procedures to handle stuff like this.

Are Internet Activists the Ultimate Paper Tigers?

I recently received an email from my aunt, who works for the International Rescue Committee.  She’s in the Sudan, helping people as she’s done for years now.   Her work, and the work of people like her, who are willing to place themselves in harm’s way to educate and ameliorate, stands in stark contrast to the growing hacktivist movements.  While the attempt, for instance,  to ID Iranian paramilitary forces, may provide some support to protesters in Iran, I’m starting to wonder how much real cha