Some Additional Thoughts

Oftentimes the very technologies that were initially designed to help us, become counterproductive by introducing levels upon levels of redundancy. We start to make “lists of our lists” and what used to take one sheet of notebook paper and a pen, now takes six software programs and a consultant.

Now What?

Now that I have a blog, a webpage, and a Twitter account….what the hell do I do with them? Are they going to help me write more or better? Probably not. If anything, they are just more distractions;toys. Do I use them as a forum to air my grievances against my roommate, my town, my environment? (Actually, this idea has some merit.) I guess I could post endless tweets about news items that continuously feed across the bottom of my browser, ( I’m sure plenty of people have RSS feeds.), but frankly I find people that do that annoying. When I get a tweet from someone I am(was) following that contains the same info I just read five minutes ago…it’s like, why the fuck even have this?

Ultimately,(at least in my case), these devices; outlets are simply platforms to exercise my ego. When you have no product to sell; no agenda to push-what other reason is there?  Hopefully, I occasionally post a blog entry, a tweet, a video, or a toy that makes someone a little happier, a little more informed, or, perhaps, a little less bored.

Happy surfing.

Avatar

In Indian reincarnation legend, an Avatar is a being that has attained union with the spirit and has returned to earth to help mankind. Today, the term is widely used to denote those funky little representations people use on various social media sites. It is also the name of James Cameron’s movie being released next month.

Now, I generally don’t hawk products or services unless I’m really impressed. Last night, I went to: http://www.avatarmovie.com, which is the “preview” site for the December release. This is unlike any trailer site you’ve probably seen. The actual “sneak” is a software download that’s pretty slick. I don’t want to give away any details, (go see for yourself), and spoil the fun. After seeing this download, I think this movie is going to be pretty awesome.

Twitter

You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.

-Pink Floyd

Time

These days “you twitter and waste” would be more appropriate. With a tool like Twitter, it is easy to constantly update it with useless, inane information. Hopefully, I won’t do that.

Yes, I have recently joined the Tweeters; even after kinda poking fun at it in a previous blog post. I realized that it’s a great tool to instantly update your website without writing an entire post like this. (Being inherently lazy, this is a very attractive feature for me.) But what really convinced me was that I found myself using Twitter Search quite often to stay abreast of the latest “buzz”. Being an information junkie, the attractiveness of this feature is/was fairly self-evident.

Hopefully, I don’t succumbed to the temptation of Twitteritis and start to write “inane tweets”.

Happy “Black Friday”.

 

The Life of an Information Junkie

I am a certified information junkie. (Is there a twelve step program for this?) When I fire up my browser on any given morning, I am immediately greeted with a streaming, aggregated RSS feed that gives me my first “rush” of data; and my first nest of tabs.Like all junkies, that first hit is never enough. After reading a couple articles, I then open my Gmail and start to respond to the entries that accumulated in the fifteen minutes I slept. (Damn, no Wave invite yet.) The juice is flowing through my veins, but like a crackhead, the thrill is quickly gone. It’s time to go to my connect.

Google Reader is the Tony Montana of data. You want some data..maybe a little more….maybe just a tad more. There is no limit.

I am now on a serious “run”. Twelve hours, 300 windows, 1200 tabs, 55 videos, 35 software downloads, 36 uninstalls, and 120 pdf downloads later; I sleep my necessary 15 minutes and do it all over again. Betty Ford-here I come.

 

Critical Infrastructure?

Infragard

Then there's Infragard. Coordinated by the FBI, it's is a fellowship of federal, state, local, industry, and academic cybercrook catchers and watchers. Infragard has about 33,000 participants in almost 90 cities around the country, and you can apply to become a member yourself. The point is to build an accessible community for the FBI to contact on any given cyber-crime problem, especially in the private sector, where IT managers and policy folk are understandably touchy about this stuff. "No governmental entity should be involved in monitoring private communications networks as part of a cybersecurity initiative," warned Gregory T. Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology, speaking before that Senate hearing.

Mindful of these concerns, Infragard hangs out around the margins between government and the private sector, "to promote ongoing timely dialogue," in the FBI's own words. Its chapters work with FBI Field Offices in the same geographic area. Infragardians conference on the latest technology and hold hacking contests.

Here's the deal, as far as we can tell. You join Infraguard and become part of the FBI's information cohort. In exchange, you get the following cool stuff:

• "Network with other companies that help maintain our national infrastructure. Quick Fact: 350 of our nation's Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard.
• Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards and much more.
• Learn time-sensitive, infrastructure related security information from government sources such as Department of Homeland Security and the FBI."

Needless to say, this makes people nervous. The Progressive magazine ran an exposé about Infragard in 2008 titled "The FBI Deputizes Business." The piece suggested that the organization may have given its members authority to "shoot to kill" in national emergencies. The FBI strongly denies this. "Patently false," FBI Cyber Division director Shawn Henry called the assertion. But it's likely that civil-liberties-minded observers will continue to squint at Infragard for the foreseeable future.

-Matthew Lasar

 

The Latest Internet Buzz

Since I practically live on the internet these days, I guess I might as well start writing daily,(yeah, right), posts about the latest buzz. I’ll try to be somewhat consistent. Be gentle, this is a virgin feature.

Yesterday, the net was all about the Chrome OS and the Beta release of Office. I got my copy of Office and will be using it. The UI looks pretty cool, but I have yet to use it. ( Give me a break, I only got it ten minutes ago.) I’ll keep you informed.

Unless you’ve been literally living under a rock. you’ve heard about Google’s new Chrome OS. In my post on internet history, I concluded that most apps would migrate to the cloud. It makes sense. I don’t know about you, but the first thing I fire up is my browser. And in my browser favorites/bookmarks is a folder called “browser apps”. Dude,it’s packed. I can do a lot of things on-line. Why have all these programs that you have to fire up, when you could use only one.

I believe in brevity-get to the point and shut-up. I’ve done that. Ciao.

 

 

Intellectual Entitlement

I am autodidactic. I technically never finished high school. (I did eventually take the GED and take a few college courses.) Subsequently, there are great holes in my knowledge base. I may know a little html, a little javascript, etc, etc, but the other day, for example, I had to ask someone how to burn a movie to dvd. (I download software not movies.) Most of my learning is the ol’ trial and error method.And believe me, there’s been plenty of errors. In the computing arena, there have been a few memorial ones-like the time I downloaded a virus in the early days of Netscape. (Must have been that yak porno site from Uzbekistan.) We, still to this day, don’t know what the fuck it was. All I know is that we ended up replacing the entire motherboard. Now that’s a gnarly virus.

In the writing arena, my mistakes are self-evident. Most of these are intentional; some are not. (Thank God for Livewriter. Without prompts, this article would resemble your daughter’s fifth grade comp class assignment….probably does anyway.) I break a lot of grammatical rules because I know what I want to say and how to say it. And I’m not going to be limited by rules that say that I shouldn’t start a sentence with “and”. I use “----“ and “;” and “….” quite often in the wrong place. It indicates my mood as I’m writing. And isn’t that what writing is all about…..getting your thoughts out to the world?

Time for me to check my Reader,(probably got 100 entries), and see what’s new and weird on the internet today. Have fun. I will.

Technology and Art

OK, so l haven’t posted anything written to this blog in quite a while. Shoot me. I’ve recently acquired a new toy and have been playing with it; as you can see. Buuutttt, I figured it was about time to write something…just to prove I still can.

Lately, my appreciation of technology has increased tenfold. Clarke was right when he said that: “Any sufficiently advance technology is indistinguishable from magic”. If you stop and just think about it abstractly for a minute, our advances have been amazing in the last twenty years. I can type words onto a computer screen and voila!…a movie pops up that can be seen all over the world. How the hell would you have explained that to someone eighty years ago?

Unlike a lot of of people that have a certain level of fear when it comes scientific knowledge, I embrace it wholeheartedly. I see digital media as one of the greatest advances in human history. The field has been leveled and a vast number of people now have a platform to present their work. Everyday, I get on the internet and am amazed by the ingenuity of people all over the planet.

My own webpage (pier51.com) started off without any clear aim, but I find myself now posting videos, browser apps, widgets, and goofy stuff that I run across on a daily basis. Hell, maybe I’ve actually found some direction here. I’ll just continued doing what I’ve been doing and see where it takes me.

Video Experiment 3

Why I Love Santa Barbara from John Bielecki on Vimeo.

Some Old Film Of San Francisco

Download An Mp3 and Go To Jail

"The Copyright Wars and the recent grotesque expansion of rights and remedies should be regarded as a legal equivalent of the subprime mortgage crisis: cancers on our system that were foreseeable and preventable but for greed, a failed ideology that the unregulated private pursuit of profit is also in the best interest of the public, and worldwide lack of political courage to admit to and take responsibility for the damage caused by copyright laws that harm rather than serve the public."

"The term graduated response should be replaced with a more accurate term 'digital guillotine,' reflecting its killing of a critical way people connect with the world and in some cases, eliminating their ability to make a living. If proportionality is a hallmark of civilization, the digital guillotine is the hallmark of barbarians... The French Revolution shows that when we are in the throes of a moral panic, harsh, disproportionate measures can be made to appear essential."

"Corporate copyright owners live in fear, especially fear of their own consumers. Those consumers are young, tech savvy, and have wrested control over corporations' physical product from them, an unthinkable act 10 years ago. The result is a classical moral panic against youth... The Copyright Wars are a fight against our own children and it is a fight that says everything about the adults and very little about the children."

"The DMCA is the 21st-century equivalent of letting copyright owners put a chastity belt on someone else's wife."

"I cannot think of a single significant innovation in neither the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries."

William  Patry

Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars

In September, I posted an article about the Cybersecurity Act and its possible consequences. Well, the Obama administration is at it again with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. This agreement, which may be passed by the time you read this, has in its internet chapter the followings points:

    ISPs will have to police the copyrights on user-generated content. They will be required to deter unauthorized storage and transmission of  “ infringing” content.
    “Notice-and-takedown” will be an ACTA requirement. Whether or not a piece of content or media violates a copyright will be arbitrary. Without any proof of actual violation, the content will be removed by the ISP as soon as a takedown notice is issued. The takedown will be enforced regardless of considerations such as fair use.
    Requires ISPs  to cut off internet access for copyright violators.  A three-strikes rule will apply. ISPs will be required to terminate the user's account after three complaints from the content owner.
    Extending criminal enforcement to both (1) cases of a commercial nature; and (2) cases involving significant willful copyright and trademark infringement even where there is no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain. Non-commercial infringement could lead to criminal penalties, even jail time.

It’s time to take the kiddies to bed because this article is about to go into tirade mode.

Hey, government dudes, listen up.  You’re telling us, (We the people), that we can lose our internet access and be put in jail for downloading a fuckin’ song? Are you out of your collective minds? I just don’t think you quite get it.

The internet has always been about sharing. In the early days before browswers, Flash movies, and AOL/Time Warner; people shared information, code, etc. That’s what “opensource” is all about. I’ve been on the internet a long time, (I remember using text only bulletin boards), and the community is pissed. Get a clue!