Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 206
February 8, 2014
Dead Media Beat: paper books as interior decoration
*Anything is possible in New York City, but this is especially suggestive because NYC was and is a tremendous center of paper publishing.
http://observer.com/2014/02/book-design/#axzz2sit6qQU2
(…)
“In an increasingly digital world, physical books have become a prop. Vintage books are repurposed to make lamps, clocks, night tables, iPod docks and key holders. Book covers adorn shirts, bags and high-end wallpaper designed to look like the covers of vintage Penguin Classics (“reproduced by kind permission of Penguin”). Books are everywhere, that is, except in tote bags and purses where Kindles now reside in their place.
” “Months ago, I saw a copy of White Noise sitting in a clothing store window in Soho,” David Patterson, a literary agent at Foundry Literary + Media, said of Don DeLillo’s breakout pomo masterpiece. “The jacket was, of course, ripped off, and the book was sitting on top of a stack of other chalk-colored books (all de sign books), and the whole [matching] aesthetic of the store was white arctic fur and chrome. I have no idea whether the irony of that was deliberate or accidental, but it sure was real.”
“Just as the Brooklyn sensibility of typewriters, record players and small-batch whiskey has infiltrated the mainstream, stacks of physical books are used to connote fashionable old-timeyness. Walt Whitman, with his flowing beard, rough-hewn linen shirt and suspenders, could easily be mistaken for a modern-day mixologist, and Ernest Hemingway would blend into the crowd in his heavy knit sweater and tweed jacket, waiting on line for a cortado at Stumptown.
” “There’s a trend right now towards being a little clubby, like the Harvard Club,” said Robin Standefer of Roman and Williams, the interior design team behind the retro aesthetic at the Ace and elsewhere. “It goes back to a kind of mid-20th-century obsession with the club as a place not just to eat or drink something but a place to have deep thoughts.”
“Deep thoughts are also apparently at home at the likes of J. Crew and Brooks Brothers, where book-lined walls add atmosphere and connote a customer who prizes quality and tradition, even as said customer peruses shawl-collared sweaters made in China.
” “Right now, a certain kind of smart is stylish,” said Jason Diamond, the literary editor at Flavorwire. “The old-school WASP-y prep school look is big, and that translates to books”…
Read more at http://observer.com/2014/02/book-desi...
Follow us: @newyorkobserver on Twitter | newyorkobserver on Facebook
Dead Media Beat: Data Archiving for Artists
*One can see, from this hands-on, informed discussion by people in the field, that this problem is nobody’s picnic.
*********************************************************************************************************
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 14:24:34 -0800
From: Rob Myers
Subject: Re: Data archiving for artists?
On 14/01/14 04:35 PM, Flick Harrison wrote:
How do you all save your data for your personal archives?
I publish everything on gitorious or keep it in private repos on
bitbucket, I keep copies on multiple USB hard disks, I backup offsite
via rsync and OwnCloud, and I keep multiple DVD backups at different
locations with family members.
I also convert work to new formats as they become popular and check that
work runs/displays in current versions of software periodically.
The expensive parts are the rsync and the hard disks. The laborious part
is making sure everything runs.
- Rob.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
From: “Tracey P. Lauriault”
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 11:46:48 +0000
Subject: Data archiving for artists?
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
The preservation of artistic digital objects was studied by the InterPARES
2 project. You will find information in this book:
- http://www.interpares.org/ip2/book.cfm
Also, you may find these guidlines useful:
-
http://www.interpares.org/ip2/display...
-
http://www.interpares.org/public_docu...
Here you will find a number of very interesting and useful case studies:
- http://www.interpares.org/ip2/ip2_cas...
I BCC’d the project director and will see if she can provide any additional
information.
Cheers
Tracey
–
Tracey P. Lauriault
http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com...
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/d...
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
Re: Data archiving for artists?
John Hopkins
temp
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 22:29:06 -0700
From: John Hopkins
Subject: Re: Data archiving for artists?
Ei FLick…
How do you all save your data for your personal archives?
Through a more-or-less constant energy input :: life-time and life-energy.
I’m just not sure how stable all my old films and videos are. I use BluRay
disks to backup raw footage from more recent projects, but a lot of my stuff
is just on redundant hard drives that I copy once in a while. A few major
things are in regional library collections and distribution where they are
safer.
Multiple redundancy of particular information storage systems is necessary. A
record of those redundant copies is necessary as is some modicum of control over
them. If they are not subject to your control, then you should not consider them
in your redundancy count. (or you have to make a statistical guesstimate as to
the efficacy of your control over remote situations — as well as your local
situation)…
Older projects are on tape, which has a longer shelf life than SD cards, USB
sticks or HDD, but still dubious in the very long term.
Nothing is ‘permanent’ so look around to see what persists best! (chiseled
granite has a pretty long half-life depending on environmental exposure — the
Luxor Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde has done quite well over 3000
years)… How old are you? DO you have children? DO you have money? Are you a
member of the social elite of your nation-state? These are also factors as they
will affect the chances of your life information persistence.
Does anyone have efficient / affordable strategies for keeping their life’s
work safe? I’m talking many gigabytes of raw footage, video masters, project
files, etc.
Propagation and persistence of information (knowledge) requires consistent
energy input. (Another words, the archive is about continuously creating entropy
in the surroundings of the archive while maintaining/increasing the order of the
archive itself.
Speaking for myself, at one point a decade ago, I had 32 formats of magnetic
tapes in my archive. I finally said f*#k this, this’s ridiculous, so I started
to digitized as much as possible. and continued that at the highest resolution
that I can afford to store. But my digitizing optinos are nothing like those of
a major corporation or specialist operation. Five years, ten years down the
road, whatever is in your archive will be considered ‘retro’ in appearance or
style anyway. Ask all the artists who jumped on the ‘multi-media CD’ bandwagon
in the mid-90s to see their work!
I just contributed to Lori Emerson’s media archaeology lab
(http://loriemerson.net/media-archaeol...) a 20-year-old Apple 8500 A/V
machine with a lot of peripherals. She is really happy as it will be able
(should be able!) to deal with much of that said multi-media stuff…
I currently have a digital archive of around 200,000 ‘objects’ — audio, video,
text, image — and I spend a bit of time each day maintaining it (meta-tagging,
for example, is insanely life-time intensive, yet without meta-data, the archive
is much less useful to anyone but yourself).
I also have a rather large analog archive still, as well, and I pay to store it
(silver prints in archival cases, tapes, correspondence, negatives), but without
climate-controlled storage, the lifetime of ‘normal’ paper is measured in a
couple decades, silver film, can be a few hundred years, so far some objects I
have created are pushing 40 years old … they persist, but who knows how long
these relatively contemporary substances will maintain their internal order.
I scan everything I can that is scannable, but unless you want to take a chunk
of living time away from yourself and you enjoy being an archivist, it’s a
hopeless process.
At some point post-hydrocarbon, the human species will no longer know how to
retrieve or make sense of your life information, no matter what you do. And even
if you concentrate on using DNA as your information propagation medium, it will
persist only somewhat less long as the solar system at the very best …
CHeers,
JOhn
–
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
photographer, media artist, archivist
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 05:19:50 -0600
Subject: Re: Data archiving for artists?
From: temp
I’ve been learning from my late-career friends in NYC who are making their
archives.
I’ve been making an indexical archive (http://www.voyd.com) – if you
notice, it has the highest points, but is seriously full of holes – this
is a long-term project.
All media works are bring stored on redundant flash drives and catalogued
in a notebook. So far, flash drives are less fugitive than DVD-ROM, but
are also dependent on USB being in use. I am also placing them on a
redundant hard drive system – honestly, this seems the most reliable
method of use, as I have been able to migrate from floppy to hard drive
forward from 1992.
Except for about one or two pieces, I have also stayed away from
company-specific codecs and technologies, as I learned my lesson with The
Brain and Real Player.
QTVR aldo proved to be a bit of a problem for my Sprawl piece.
Another lesson I learned – you have much more leisure, and the work is
more fresh in your mind if you begin your archive at 50.
# distributed via : no commercial use without permission
# is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/n...
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
February 7, 2014
Universal malware for everybody
*That’s pretty impressive.
Via SANS
Cross-Platform Java Malware
(January 29, 2014)
Researchers have found Java-based malware that is capable of infecting
Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux systems. The malware exploits a known flaw
in Java 7 u21 and earlier for which Oracle released a patch in June
2013. The malware communicates with an Internet relay chat channel that
serves as a command-and-control server. The network of computers
compromised by this malware is used to launch distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/...
http://www.zdnet.com/cross-platform-j...
[Editor's Note (Ullrich): Not only does this malware run on different
operating systems, but it is also smart enough to add itself as an
auto-start program on each operating system.]
Web Semantics: Doge
*This is quite interesting and insightful. It alerts me that “web semantics” are bound to be replaced by some newer vernacular language that’s less web-centric; in the case of “Doge,” it’s the choice of font plus an image of a certain breed of dog that serve as the semantic platform. C0m1c 1337speak typing stunts, dependent on text-only channels, are going out of semantic style; it’s become the sort of thing your uncle used to think was witty.
http://the-toast.net/2014/02/06/linguist-explains-grammar-doge-wow/
(…)
“The second factor that goes into doge is the general principle of internet language these days that the more overwhelmed with emotions you are, the less sensical your sentence structure gets, which I’ve described elsewhere as “stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence” and which leads us to expressions like “feels,” “I can’t even/I’ve lost the ability to can,” and “because reasons.” Contrast this with first-generation internet language, (((
(…)
“The next generation of internet language
“In this sense, doge really is the next generation of LOLcat, (((
Call for Participation: Exceptionally Hard & Soft ware
*These Hamburg maker-scene people like to hack around with stuff like particle-physics gear.
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
Exceptionally Hard & Soft Meeting
pushing the frontiers of open source and DIY
DESY, Hamburg site, June 27-29 2014
@ehsmeeting
Collaboration between open source and research communities empowers open
hardware to explore new grounds and hopefully deliver on the “third
industrial revolution”. The first edition of the Exceptionally Hard and
Soft Meeting featured lectures delivered by international makers,
hackers, scientists and engineers on topics such as nuclear fusion, chip
design, vacuum equipment machining, and applied quantum physics.
Tutorials gave a welcoming hands-on introduction to people of all
levels, including kids.
EHSM is back in summer 2014 for another edition of the most cutting-edge
open source conference. This year we are proud to welcome you to an
exceptional venue: DESY, Europe’s second-largest particle physics
laboratory!
Previous EHSM lectures may be viewed at: http://ehsm.eu/2012/media.html
ATTEND WITHOUT PRESENTING:
Attendance is open to all curious minds.
EHSM is entirely supported by its attendees and sponsors. To help us
make this event happen, please donate and/or order your ticket as soon
as possible by visiting our website http://ehsm.eu.
Prices are:
* 45E – student/low-income online registration
* 70E – regular online registration (until February 1st)
* 95E – late online registration (after February 1st)
* 110E – door ticket
* 272E – supporter ticket, with our thanks and your name on the website.
* 1337E – gold supporter ticket, with our thanks and your
company/project logo on the website and the printed program me.
EHSM is a non-profit event where the majority of the budget covers
speakers’ travel and transportation of exhibition equipment.
SPEAKERS: SUBMIT YOUR PRESENTATION
Is there a device in your basement that demonstrates violations of
Bell’s inequalities? We want to see it in action. (((Hey yeah.
Me too. Do I have to wear a lead apron?))) Are you starting up a
company to build nuclear fusion reactors? Tell us about it. Does your
open source hardware or software run some complex, advanced and
beautiful scientific instruments? We are eager to learn about it. Do you
have stories to tell about your former job manufacturing ultra high
vacuum equipment in the Soviet Union? We want to hear about your
experiences. Do you have a great design for a difficult open source
product that can be useful to millions? Team up with the people who can
help implement your ideas.
Whoever you are, wherever you come from, you are welcome to present
technologically awesome work at EHSM. Travel assistance and visa
invitation letters provided upon request. All lectures are in English.
This year, we will try to improve the conference’s documentation by
publishing proceedings. When relevant, please send us a paper on
your presentation topic. We are OK with previously published work, we
simply expect high quality and up-to-date content.
To submit your presentation, send a mail to team@ehsm.eu with typically
the following information:
* Your name(s). You can be anonymous if you prefer. (((That might be handy.)))
* Short bio
* Title of the presentation
* Abstract
* How much time you would like
* Full paper (if applicable)
* Links to more information (if available)
* Contact information (e-mail + mobile phone if possible)
* If you need us to arrange your trip:
* Where you would be traveling from
* If you need accommodation in Hamburg
We will again have an exhibition area where you can show and demonstrate
your work – write to the same email address to apply for space. If you
are bringing bulky or high-power equipment, make sure to let us know:
* What surface you would use
* What assistance you would need for equipment transport between your
lab and the conference
* If you need 3-phase electric power
(note that Germany uses 230V/400V 50Hz)
* What the peak power of your installation would be
Tutorials on any technology topic are also welcome, and may cater to all
levels, including beginners and kids.
We are counting on you to make this event awesome. Feel free to nominate
other speakers that you would like to see at the conference, too – just
write us a quick note and we will contact them.
KEY INFORMATION:
Conference starts: morning of June 27th, 2014
Conference ends: evening of June 29th, 2014
Early registration fee ends: February 1st, 2014
Please submit lectures, tutorials and exhibits before: May 15th, 2014
Conference location:
DESY
Notkestrasse 85
22607 Hamburg, Germany
WE ARE LOOKING FORWARD TO WELCOMING YOU IN HAMBURG!
- EHSM e.V.
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Mark Fisher wringing their hands over exhaustion, the financial crisis, aesthetic resistance and the ‘slow cancellation of the future’
*These guys are two acute critics, and I totally get it about their atemporality riffing from 2013, but this very with-it discussion from just one year ago feels more than one year old to me. Not that these two gentlemen are going to get what they want from tomorrow’s cultural developments — heavens no, being leftists, they’ll be just as frustrated as ever — but the tenor of the times is changing. The era of the Twitter/Facebook street upheavals is over. It didn’t amount to much. Now it’s the top of the heap that’s gnawed by existential bafflement. It’s like watching Putin swagger around in the half-built semi-ruins of Sochi, a spectacle that cost more than ever before while delivering dangerous levels of deeply-felt humiliation.
*In early 2014, I haven’t seen so much cognitive dissonance, and heard so much new language used, in quite a while. “When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, it means things will change in ways that are unimaginable.”
*I’m not saying that things will *improve,* mind you, and I don’t think Mark or Bifo will be dancing on tables about any of it, but the cultural and political attitude the two of them are describing here won’t last much longer. Things are going to change in large and truly peculiar ways that don’t fit within this mental wireframe of 2008-2013.
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/give-me-shelter/
(…)
“FRANCO ‘BIFO’ BERARDI
“It isn’t easy for me to answer, because you’ve put your finger on a painful wound – that is, our present theoretical impotence in the face of the de-humanizing process provoked by finance capitalism. This feels like a sort of personal defeat. But I can’t deny reality, which seems to me to be this: the last wave of the movement – say 2010 to 2011 – was an attempt to revitalize a massive subjectivity. This attempt failed: we have been unable to stop the financial aggression. The movement has now disappeared, only emerging in the form of fragmentary explosions of despair. I use the term ‘the movement’ to refer to any form of mass action which is able to change the prevailing culture and perception. This is why I don’t think that in Greece at the moment we have a movement. It is only a despairing reaction to the devastation – it is reactive and isolated.
“We should be able to produce a theoretical model which assumes that the form of subjectivation that we used to know is now over. The mutation that has infested the post-alphabetical generation – that is, the first generation to learn more words from the machine than from the mother – has deeply eroded the ability to solidarize. A process of social recomposition of precarious labour seems impossible, at least in the form of collective action, political solidarity and class consciousness. I really don’t know if that means that my generation is unable to see the new process of social composition that will one day give the new generation the opportunity to free themselves from fear and loneliness.
“Mouffe writes that ‘various modes of artivist intervention influenced by the Situationist strategy of détournement like The Yes Men are very effective in disrupting the smooth image that corporate capitalism is trying to impose, bringing to the fore its repressive character’. This may be true, but the unveiling of the repressive character of power is not going to bring about rebellion. On the contrary, it only reinforces a sense of impotence. The techniques of subversion have been quite efficient in ‘revealing’ the true nature of financial capitalism, but consciousness of what is real is not class consciousness. It isn’t enough to only see the danger – you also need to be able to escape it or to dispel it. The majority of people hate finance capitalism but, as far as I can see, this hatred is turning into depression rather than into autonomy.
“Mouffe adds: ‘One could also mention a variety of urban struggles like “Reclaim the streets” in Britain, the “Tute Bianche” in Italy, the “Stop Advertising” campaigns in France or the “Nike Ground-Rethinking Space” in Vienna – there exist a great variety of types of artistico-activist practices and of modes of communication-guerrilla.’ In the last 15 years, however, activism has been totally unable to stop the systematic offensive of corporations and financial agencies. Look at the last wave of struggles against the financial dictatorship, from UK Uncut to the Spanish acampada to Occupy Wall Street. This wave of movements has produced an effect of widespread awareness among the majority of the population, but it hasn’t slowed the dismantling of social life.
“Not only is political activism unable to change the reality of finance capitalism, but the mainstream political parties cannot do anything if they do not follow the automatisms of power. Look at Barack Obama’s failure to change the American distribution of wealth, notwithstanding the huge support that he gathered in 2008. ‘Yes We Can’ turned swiftly into derision when he was obliged to bend to the force of financial power. I think that autonomy is only possible when people become able to change their daily lives – by breaking the links of dependence on consumerism and exploitation, for instance. In the last two or three years, however, I’ve started to believe that this precarious generation is unable to start a process of autonomization. This is because of a sort of psychic frailty produced by precariousness, competition and loneliness.
MARK FISHER
“That is a very moving and honest answer, but I actually think you highlight the strengths of Mouffe’s position. Those strengths have, I think, to do with political strategies, rather than aesthetic ones. Mouffe’s examples of subversive or counter-hegemonic art were very unconvincing – the strategies of détournement she referred to have long since been incorporated by capital. Nothing sells better than anti-capitalism – look at the way corporations are depicted in Hollywood films such as Wall E [2008] and Avatar [2009]. It’s asking too much of art or culture to expect it to provide resources for overcoming the decomposition of solidarity that you so acutely describe. Art and culture are themselves the victims of this decomposition. Under post-Fordist working practices, neo-liberal ideology and communicative capitalism, social imagination struggles to find the time to grow. The current austerity programme in the UK – with its attacks on social housing, welfare benefits, squatting and higher-education funding – will make the unpressured time in which social imagination could develop even scarcer.
“It’s not that the rise of finance capital is unstoppable, it’s that the strategies that the movement has deployed against it are not the right ones – it is easy for capital to route around them. Which is not to say that important things have not happened in the last decade or so: the wave of insurrection in the Middle East in 2011, for instance, showed that the so-called end of history is now over. But an intelligent system needs to learn from its failures, not keep repeating them. As David Harvey has said, we shouldn’t fetishize particular organizational forms. Rather, we need to do what neo-liberalism has done, and use an ensemble of different strategies….”
The Texas Petawatt Kickstarter
*That’s one of the odder Kickstarter projects, but if you like gigantic Texan lasers, you oughta give that a look.
*It’s always fun to be the guy who pushes the Kickstarter over the limit with, like, five extra bucks.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1437149198/the-superlative-light
The National Cyber Awareness System and the Sochi 2014 Olympic Games
*I appreciate the effort made here, but this is really a strange cultural artifact. Imagine reading this in 1985, or 1995, or even 2005. There’s scarcely a sentence in here which lacks some alarming cyberculture neologism.
*************************************************************************************
From: US-CERT
National Cyber Awareness System:
ST14-001: Sochi 2014 Olympic Games
02/04/2014 10:20 AM EST
Original release date: February 04, 2014
Overview:
Whether traveling to Sochi, Russia for the XXII Olympic Winter Games, or viewing the games from locations abroad, there are several cyber-related risks to consider. As with many international level media events, hacktivists may attempt to take advantage of the large audience to spread their own message. Additionally, cyber criminals may use the games as a lure in spam, phishing or drive-by-download campaigns to gain personally identifiable information or harvest credentials for financial gain. Lastly, those physically attending the games should be cognizant that their communications will likely be monitored.
Hacktivists
A number of hacktivist campaigns may attach themselves to the upcoming Olympics simply to take advantage of the on-looking audience. For example, the hacktivist group, Anonymous Caucasus, has launched what appears to be a threat against any company that finances or supports the winter games. This group states the Sochi games infrastructure was built on the graves of 1 million innocent Caucasians who were murdered by the Russians in 1864. According to Trusted Third Party analysis, the group has been linked to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Russian banks in October 2013. Therefore, the group is likely capable of waging similar attacks on the websites of organizations they believe financed Olympic related activities; however, no specific threat or target has been identified at the time of this report.
Olympic coverage
Whether viewing live coverage, event replays, or checking medal statistics online, it’s important to visit only trusted websites. Events which gain significant public interest and media coverage are often used as lures for spam or spearphishing campaigns. Malicious actors may also create fake websites and domains that appear to be official Olympic news or coverage that can be used to deliver malware to an end user upon visiting the site (also known as drive-by downloads or wateringholes).
NBCUniversal offers exclusive coverage of the games for viewers via NBC, NBCSN, MSNBC, USA Network, NBCOlympics.com and corresponding Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts. Viewers should be wary of any other source claiming to provide live coverage. As always, it is best to visit trusted resources directly rather than clicking on emailed links or opening attachments.
Purchasing tickets or merchandise at the Games
According to the official Winter Olympics website: http://www.sochi2014.com, Visa will be the only card accepted for all purchases including tickets and merchandise at the Games. Tickets may only be purchased through Authorized Ticket Resellers (ATR). Individuals can validate the authenticity of an ATR offering tickets by using the “Website Checker” tool available on the official Sochi website. The designated ATR in the United States is CoSport, and at the time of this report, individuals purchasing tickets through CoSport may only pick up their tickets at CoSport’s Host City Collection Center in Sochi, Russia. Any ticket offer from a site not recognized as an ATR or accepting payment methods outside of VISA are likely fraudulent and should be met with skepticism.
Traveling to Sochi
When traveling abroad it’s important to know your host countries laws and policies, particularly when it comes to privacy. Russia has a national system of lawful interception of all electronic communications. The System of Operative-Investigative Measures, or SORM, legally allows the Russian FSB to monitor, intercept, and block any communication sent electronically (i.e. cell phone or landline calls, internet traffic, etc.). SORM-1 captures telephone and mobile phone communications, SORM-2 intercepts internet traffic, and SORM-3 collects information from all forms of communication, providing long-term storage of all information and data on subscribers, including actual recordings and locations. Reports of Rostelecom, Russia’s national telecom operator, installing deep packet inspection (DPI ) means authorities can easily use key words to search and filter communications. Therefore, it is important that attendees understand communications while at the Games should not be considered private.
Russia also retains broad inbound encryption license requirements. Taking laptops and other devices into the country is unrestricted; however software may be inspected upon departure. This means, any computer or software containing sensitive or encrypted data may be confiscated by Russian authorities when individuals depart from the country . Travelers may want to consider leaving personal electronic devices (e.g. laptops, smartphones, tablets) at home or alternatively bring loaner devices that do not already store sensitive data on them and can be wiped upon return to your home country. If individuals decide to bring their personal devices, consider all communications and files on them to be vulnerable to interception or confiscation.
References
Message from Caucasus Anonymous on Operation Pay Back for Sochi 2014 to Russian government
NBC Olympics
NBC Sports Pressbox
CoSport
As Sochi Olympic venues are built, so are Kremlin’s surveillance networks
How deep packet inspection works
Use Caution When Traveling With Encryption Software
Author: NCCIC Watch & Warning
This product is provided subject to this Notification and this Privacy & Use policy.
Scott Smith at Lift14: The Sharing Economy Backlash
*Wow, Storify can be a weird reading experience. It’s almost entirely curated reactions from people in the audience of the LIFT conference listening to a speech. And yet this storified artifact is just sitting there neat and inert now, like some existence-proof that “events are the new magazines.”
*Also, it looks like the “Sharing economy” is transmuting into Big Sharing faster than I myself ever managed to digitally share any physical thing with anyone. It makes me want to rush out in the street and give away free pencils.
http://storify.com/LIFTconference/lift14-scott-smith-the-sharing-economy-backlash
Silicon Valley Needs to Lose the Arrogance or Risk Destruction
*That’s an interesting point of view. I’d point out that Silicon Valley has always been extremely keen on its auto-destruction. Getting people to junk everything in disgust and buy in again at a higher performance level is the very way of life there.
*Silicon Valley also cheerfully risked destruction from urban sprawl, California megaquakes, polluted groundwater, wildfires, urban riots and climate change. So far so good for them, and I’d rank popular discontent with geek rich-guy arrogance as maybe #11 on the Silicon Valley existential threat list.
*However, if it doesn’t rain in California, the tech biz is in for it. California will become a new Dust Bowl with an Okie migration in reverse. That sounds very prepper and alarming, but you should never rashly underestimate the likelihood of something weird that has already happened historically.
*You can get along pretty fine with bitterly unhappy customers — just look at American cable broadband, financial services, gasoline, nuclear power, Detroit cars, coal, health insurance, etc etc — but nobody anywhere manages without water.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/time-is-running-out-for-california-drought-relief-17030
*Worse yet, CO2 levels are continuing to climb; it’s driving Californian climate into realms hitherto unknown, and it’s getting worse. There are lots more California summers coming. All the summers that a spinning planet can give.
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2014/02/silicon-valley-backlash/
by Bill Wasik
“When an industry has a hold on the public imagination, it’s easy to forget just how fickle that imagination can be. By 1946, when women were nearly rioting to get their hands on scarce pairs of nylon hose, plastic had emerged not merely as an enormous business but as the very stuff of dreams, a substance poised to shape the American future. Soon after, plastic spurred visionary industrial designers toward entirely new forms, dramatic curves and swoops that would have been impossible in a preplastic age. Twenty years later, though, the love affair was over—a reversal captured in a famous scene from 1967′s The Graduate, when Dustin Hoffman’s dissolute title character receives some career advice from a family friend: “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.”
“UNLIKE ANY OTHER INDUSTRY, TECH RELIES ON NOT MERELY TRUST BUT FAITH THAT A LEAP INTO THE UNKNOWN WILL BE REWARDED.
“It was a savagely ironic line, and not because plastic use had declined (it hadn’t) or because plastics firms were bankrupt (they weren’t) or even because plastic had become widely known as an environmental disaster in the making (it hadn’t quite, yet). The irony ran far deeper than that: To a sophisticated audience in 1967, “plastic” had come to stand for everything wrong with the culture, for what Tom Wolfe would soon call the “poor old Formica polyethylene 1960s America,” with its superficiality, its acquisitive domesticity. This new generation had heard all about the marvelous plastic future, and they wanted no part of it.
“Since the late 1970s, we’ve dreamed in silicon, not plastic. From the personal computer to the MP3, from the Internet to the smartphone, a seemingly unending stream of computer-based innovations has kept Silicon Valley aloft not just in profits but in the public imagination.
“But by the waning days of 2013, when protesters smashed a window of a Google commuter bus in Oakland, California, it seemed as if the psychic bond with Silicon Valley might be fraying. There was the shock over revelations that the National Security Agency had used “backdoors” at the data centers of tech giants to siphon off private communications. There was the outrage at Uber, the venture-backed car service, over its practice of using “surge prices” during peak demand to charge seven or eight times the normal rate.
“When Silicon Valley Comes to Stand for Everything Wrong with the Culture
“In the Bay Area, where tech salaries and IPO riches have pushed the cost of living to the breaking point, the rancor cut deep on subjects ranging from Twitter’s sweetheart tax breaks to working-class families displaced from local neighborhoods.
“As the rest of the economy struggled, tech bigwigs repeatedly proved themselves to be out of touch, whether it was Facebook cofounder Sean Parker’s lavish Lord of the Rings-inspired wedding or mega-VC Vinod Khosla’s privatization of one of California’s historically public beaches.
“It’s all adding up to a nasty picture of Silicon Valley — of an industry that hoovers up personal data and reaps massive profits from its use, preaching a gospel of sharing but refusing to share back. The criticism has become so pronounced that even The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, hardly bastions of anti-corporate activism, have taken to warning (respectively) about Silicon Valley’s “arrogance problem” and “the coming tech-lash.” The latter article predicted that in 2014, tech executives would “join bankers and oilmen in public demonology.”…
Bruce Sterling's Blog
- Bruce Sterling's profile
- 1195 followers
