HIST 390-001 The Digital Past Fall 2013

Can you name the U.S. city with the fastest internet connection? Not many can. This article talks about how this particular city has the fastest internet.

Interesting article about hackers who have received a lot of attention

New website that generates your old Facebook statuses to make odd possible new ones that could either make sense...or it couldn't.

Just for fun, a story about James Van der Beek guy who was on "Dawson's Creek," which was *THE* hot show in 1998, and some of the differences between being famous then and being famous now. On the one hand, you're more exposed now (thanks, iPhone); on the other hand, there are more ways to make pieces of 'the real you' public: " At least on Twitter, I put out some bits of my sense of humor. Whereas in '98, when I was being mobbed by girls, they were just looking to go crazy about anything and could use the excuse, you know, to scream and go mad." Just FYI, I myself have never seen Dawson's Creek, but I remember when it was big, and I know someone who's rewatching all the episodes on Netflix now and live-tweeting them.

This article discusses a power struggle between David Karp and the new CEO of Tumblr.

This is just a fun YouTube video with examples of altered pictures. This shows all the aspects of Photoshop and the tools that can be used to deceive viewers. Many are obvious, but some make you double-take.

This is an interesting article about stars who are against photoshop or think it portrays an unrealistic expectation about how they look on magazine covers

Here's a great story related to the issue Milan raised of authenticity in photographs -- during any disaster, lots of fake photos circulate, such as these "from" Superstorm Sandy.

Activist in china have found a way to circumvent government censorship

This article talks about how the Internet's naming and numbering system regulated by ICANN will be having a conference about "Internet governance, principles and proposed frameworks for global Internet cooperation, and a roadmap for future Internet governance challenges."

This opinion piece discusses a secret trade treaty called the Trans Pacific Partnership and whether it is a form of extreme censorship. According to this piece, the treaty has been compared to the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Example of Skype facing possible criminal charges for its surveillance and involvement with the NSA.

Whoa! Thanks for posting, Lizzie. And Claire, too!

Interesting updated article about skype spying!

An article that goes more in-depth of the presentation I gave on Yelp CEO/Co-Founder Jeremy Stoppelman and how Yelp has the power of online reviews affects businesses.

Sorry if this double-posts, I had to switch windows. So this is less "internet" and more "tech innovation", but it was so cool I just had to share it. This company has developed a piece of hardware (shaped exactly like a credit card), that can actually be swiped in credit card machines, that holds all of your personal credit, debit, and gift card information. You switch between cards using a button on the device, you add them to the card via a phone app and an attached card swiper, and as it's linked to your phone, it'll alert you if you get too far away from the card (in the case of leaving it on a table and walking away, or forgetting your wallet on the way out of the house, for example).

Big news today: a ten-year-old lawsuit about Google Book Search has been resolved in Google's favor -- basically, the law has ruled that it was okay for Google to scan in-copyright books because it had no plans to publish the whole version of those in-copyright books online in http://books.google.com. Compare this to what we've heard about celebrity photographs and Pinterest. Here's a quotation from the story: "When Google started work on its book search engine a decade ago, the company realized that getting the approval of copyright holders would be a logistical nightmare. Not only would major publishers likely demand high fees for permission to scan their books, but for many older works, it would be difficult to even figure out who the appropriate copyright holder was. So Google took a gamble, scanning library books without seeking copyright holders' permission and relying on copyright's fair use doctrine as a justification."

This was the super computer I was talking about in class today, the one that won on Jeopardy.

Fascinating article on grassroots alternatives to paying a company like Verizon for Internet access. If enough of these community-built networks come into being and link to each other, we'll have a brand-new Internet!