Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 666
March 31, 2010
The Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future
*These Pew Foundation surveys are always pretty good.
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Impact-of-the-Internet-on-Institutions-in-the-Future.aspx
Here are some of the respondents: Clay Shirky, Esther Dyson, Doc Searls, Nicholas Carr, Susan
Crawford, David Clark, Jamais Cascio, Peter Norvig, Craig Newmark, Hal Varian,
Howard Rheingold, Andreas Kluth, Jeff Jarvis, Andy Oram, Kevin Werbach, David Sifry,
Dan Gillmor, Marc Rotenberg, Stowe Boyd, John Pike, Andrew Nachison, Anthony Townsend,
Ponoko and Makerbot, together at last
*The press release. Katy, bar the door….
Make a robot that makes things at Ponoko dot com.
Design and make your own desktop 3D printer:
· Download the free MakerBot case designs, customize and click to make;
· Select a MakerBot robotics kit;
· Make it yourself.
In a new twist on Ponoko's popular personal factory concept, creators can now use the world's easiest making system to design and make their own desktop factory.
MakerBot Industries – makers of open source 3D printers – h...
Yahoo 1995
Meanwhile, on a formerly innocuous London fairground
*Y'know, if I were Boris Johnson, I would have gone for that thing in a hot second.
*There's something loveable about the guy. He's growing on me. This gobboon makes Vegas and Shanghai look timid. Even Dubai would blink. Britons get what they vote for with Boris. He's becoming the Fiorello LaGuardia of Weird.





A series of pipes
*It's merely a matter of time until everything we do here looks at least this eccentric, and probably much more so.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/deadmedia/





Intimacy Lotus and Intimacy Black
*Interesting to see Dutch wearables designers getting dresses to do more of what dresses do — (be provocative) as opposed to getting dresses to do more of what computers do (blink and beep a lot).
Call for fashion designers for 'Intimacy Lotus' and 'Intimacy Black'
Artist Daan Roosegaarde and V2_Lab are looking for two fashion designers
(M/F) to contribute to the 'Intimacy' series.
'Intimacy White' (2009), the first dress in the series, is made out of
smart foil that becomes transparent when...
China China China Yahoo! hack hack hack
*I kinda hate to go on and on about this, but really, they're just going on and on and on.
*I wonder why these Chinese spooks are so eager to hack journalists when everybody
else is perfectly contented to just starve them out of existence.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTOE62U04X20100331
Hacking attacks similar to Gmail attacks reported in Jan ((("Similar to?" It's gotta be the same guys.)))
By Lucy Hornby and Alexei Oreskovic
BEIJING/SAN FRANCISCO, March 31 (Reuters) - Yahoo email accounts ...
Crushing the culture of virtue
*I rather doubt we've heard the last of this Phillip Blond guy. He sounds like an ideal propagandist for junking dysfunctional government and replacing it with preachy, radical social-media structures based on people feeling good about themselves.
http://www.respublica.org.uk/media/red-tory-intrigues-and-infuriates
(..)
Blond is best on his analysis of how civil society has been squeezed out between an increasingly intrusive, authoritarian state and an invasive market capitalism. By civil...
March 30, 2010
The Rambling Firewall of China
Oops…
–DNS Error Extends Great Firewall of China
(25th March 2010)
Problems with a root DNS Server in China caused computers in the United
States and Chile to come under the control of the Great Firewall of
China, resulting in requests to sites such as Facebook, Twitter and
YouTube to be redirected to Chinese servers.
Once the server, operated
by the Swedish service provider Netnod, was disconnected from the
Internet, the problem was resolved. The problem was first noticed by
NIC Chile, that...
Myhrvold & Swade Discuss Babbage's Difference Engine
*I never realized that Nathan Myhrvold had name-checked the novel that William Gibson and I wrote on Babbage while describing his ten-year struggle to finish two of these machines. That's very touching.
*It's also touching to realize that a third Difference Engine will never be built — at least, never by those authentic methods. The world doesn't have an army of Myhrvolds and Swades any more than it ever had an army of Babbages.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1sEowi1Txc





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