geekdom

Google: threat or menace

Published on February 16, 20111 Comment

It’s a bit self serving, but this Torrentfreak article about Google censorship does raise a genuine concern about its power as the world’s number one search engine:

Apparently Google has decided that its users should not be searching for the keyword BitTorrent, so why list any results then? It’s the beginning of the end.

Jamie King, the founder of Vodo – a platform where artists can share their work with million of people at no cost – agrees with this assessment. Searching for one of their perfectly legal releases on Google used to suggest the word “torrent” with a link to the download page, but not anymore.

“Google already showed it will censor for the highest bidder — China Inc. springs to mind. Now it’s doing it for MPAA & Co.,” King told TorrentFreak.

“I guess it’s simple: our favorite search monopoly cares less about helping the thousands of independent creators who use BitTorrent to distribute legal, free-to-share content than they do about protecting the interests of Big Media in its death throes.”

If you’re not on Google, you’re effectively invisible on the internet. Google therefore has an inordinate amount of power, yet barely any accountability. As a commercial organisation, their only responsibility is to their bottom line, fluff about “not being evil” notwithstanding, Yet having say a nationalised version of Google would not fill me with confidence either. Google is one of the ‘net’s natural chokepoints and what we need to get if we want to keep the internet free is a decentralised Google. Think what might have happened had Google censored the news of the Egyptian revolution.

You follow me on Twitter…

Published on February 8, 20111 Comment

A piece of graffiti found in Amsterdam Noord. Roughly translated it means “you follow me on Twitter, but will cross the street when you meet me”. No idea who put it there, but it’s been there for at least a year or so. Thanks to my nifty new HTC Wildfire phone I finally could photograph it.

It’s not called the Third Wave for nothing

Published on January 10, 20111 Comment

I missed this back in late November, but apparantly a minor blogstorm erupted when Cosma Shalizi posted his “semi-crank pet notion” that the singularity had already happened

The Singularity has happened; we call it “the industrial revolution” or “the long nineteenth century”. It was over by the close of 1918.

Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check.

Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check.

Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.

Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check.

Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, “the coldest of all cold monsters”? Check; we call them “the self-regulating market system” and “modern bureaucracies” (public or private), and they treat men and women, even those whose minds and bodies instantiate them, like straw dogs.

An implacable drive on the part of those networks to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere? Check. (“Drive” is the best I can do; words like “agenda” or “purpose” are too anthropomorphic, and fail to acknowledge the radical novely and strangeness of these assemblages, which are not even intelligent, as we experience intelligence, yet ceaselessly calculating.)

And two months later I end up wondering why, because this is hardly controversial or new. If the dirty little secret of science fiction is cribbing from history, than cyberpunk’s dirty little secret is how much it ripped off the ideas of futurologist Alvin Toffler. The Third Wave was cyberpunk’s bible aqnd you can see a direct line from it to Gibson’sNeuromancer or Sterling’s Schismatrix as these authors embraced its vison of a future of relentless change, where the old political and economical schemas were worthless and new economies and ways of living needed to be invented. The world was going to be transformed, but Toffler never pretended this was anything new.

It was after all the Third Wave, not the First Wave. That had been the invention of agriculture and its subsequent spread over the world, not yet completed when the second wave happened, the industrial revolution, also not yet completed now the third wave, the computer and internet and biotech and $insert_favourite_kewl_new_technology revolution is happening. Three singularies, not The singularity. Cosma was pushing on a door not just already open, but never closed in the first place.

But it is good to be reminded sometimes that all this talk about singularies and the uniqueness of the technological revolution we’re now living in, part libertarian technofascism, part nerdgasm, is just another test of Marx’s observation that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as an Ipad presentation.

Some links

Published on January 6, 2011

Strange Horizons has put out their science fiction year in review and the interesting thing is: no mention of Iain M. Banks. Funny, for me Surface Detail was one of the best books I read this year, but no peep of it in SH’s list. Reviews elsewhere have been lacklustre as well, something that I’ve noticed before with the previous “new” Culture novels. It’s as if the original three novels have set expectations so high that everything that Banks has done afterwards is consciously or not compared to the impact the original trilogy had. Hardly fair, but perhaps inescapable.

Now for something completely different. We knew crows were clever, but they are even more clever than we thought. New Caledonian crows have long been known to use twigs to pry insects out of trees, but now experiments have proven that these crows know how to adapt their tools for multifunctional use by poking at a rubber spider with a twig. It sounds like nothing, but these are probably the first non-mammal species shown to have the mental capacity and creativity to not only use tools, but adapt them for other uses and, as the Wired article also notes, use them in sequence: using a twig to get a twig to get food. I’ve had co-workers who showed less promise…

Finally, would you like some cheese with that white whine?

QotW: Alex on stupid, stupid security schemes

Published on December 14, 2010

Casting a geek eye on l’affaire Wikileaks, Alex finds time to rant about Mastercard SecureCode:

hat a horrible idea Mastercard SecureCode (and its pal Verified by Visa) is. I already hated it before this – it’s a password, that should be a strong password because it’s financial, but that I don’t use that often and therefore can’t remember, and it trains you to accept the idea of typing confidential information into a random web site you didn’t ask for. Essentially all phishing requires you to type your bank details into something that you didn’t ask for. Forcing the public to type their bank details into some random website they didn’t ask for is howling insane. Right?

I like the Dutch IDEAL (sic) payment method better: pay through your own internet banking account rather than fart about with credit cards and stupid password schemes. Especially because the schemes Alex mentions allows you to actually create a new password/account everytime you use it, as long as you know your credit card details (name, card number, secure code on the back of the card). Which means it’s not actually any safer than using a credit card without Mastercard SecureCode. It’s security theatre that provides you with a false sense of security while actually not being any safer and worse, teaches you bad habits.