Group items tagged

The evershifting sands of media and content. Theoretically, as McLuhan says, the media is the message. Practically speaking, the world is full of examples of companies (Google/Apple) trying to control both the content and the infrastructure and there becoming very little difference between them.

"I think Google is gearing up to be potentially quite a formidable competitor to existing telcos and ISPs, given their moves into the infrastructure level," Warren Chaisatien, research director and principal analyst at Australian firm Telsyte, said. First they're making phones, now they're putting in the pipes.

Interesting article applicable to the issues with the digital divide. Most notable is the way that many developing countries are 'skipping' over technology-steps: ie, going straight to mobiles without any landline infrastructure or going straight to tablet computers without ever having desktops.

Howard Schdmit, The Whitehouse's Cybersecurity coordinator has revealed the US Government's plans for tackling attacks on it's networks. He has promised transparency. The official announcement (this bookmark) is very vague in it's initiatives. It will be interesting to see whether their can really separate US government networks from other parts of the Internet.  Cyber attacks are definitely increasing and play a major part in conflicts between countries. China amongst others is said to have attacked & attempted to hack and launch DoS attacks on US government networks and Russia shut down the Georgian communications infrastructure during the last week between the two countries et. )

Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests. The survey - of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries - found strong support for net access on both sides of the digital divide.

This BBC article is based on a extensive survey conducted over 26 countries about people's attitudes towards internet access. Apparently it is now considered a fundamental human right, along with access to basic infrastructure like roads and water.

This article is looking at the release of some details of former President Bush's secret cybersecurity plan. It focuses around the debate as to whether cybersecurity should be extended into infrastructure or scaled back. It will be interesting to see how President Obama will react to this issue especially now that many details have been made public which will spark interest and debate.

The Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit is taking place in Dallas and will discuss ways to protect the world's digital infrastructure and electronic threats. This summit recognizes the important of creating a coordinated front in order to counter the growing concern of cybersecurity. It will remain to be seen if cooperation between governments is actually possible...not likely.

This opinion piece raises interesting - and difficult - issues surrounding the NBN, and examines many key questions that involve its delivery. Key governance questions are raised, including political imperatives, taxation, and infrastructure delivery.

I found this recent pamphlet about "MicroPublicPlaces" from situatedtechnologies.net while hunting down Latour's Dingpolitik. Arendt's theory of acting (as opposed to Heidegger's thinking) in "The Human Condition" foreshadows Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action, in my opinion, and is seen here as operating in parallel with Latour's object-oriented democracry. Beginning with a critique of the current state of the public realm, they follow two trajectories: one through Hannah Arendt's "vita activa" and Bruno Latour's "dingpolitiks", and another through the history of information and computation technologies. Through the former they establish an understanding of the "public" as a space of difference that is held in common, while through the latter they formulate an infrastructure that could support such a contestable space. This leads them argue for a new public realm built on specific architectural programs (water purification plants, zoos, kindergartens, repair shops, chapels) and adaptive learning environments that initiate collaborative relations between people and machines. Their goal is to foster a manifold public through the participatory structures of MicroPublicPlaces.

don't forget the tooltip

After the Secretary of State in the US Hillary Clinton's speech on Internet freedom, open source source code repository SourceForge.net blocked access to IP addresses originating in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. Open source software provides important infrastructure to these oppressed and developing nations. I hope the American government can see what a blow this is to the infrastructure and fledgling industries in these countries.

Yugoslavia disappeared in the 1990s but the domain lingered on.

For Google, the project is a pre-emptive move to get a foothold in the living room as more consumers start exploring ways to bring web content to their TV sets.

How DNS server stuff ups caused China's firewall to go global in places recently - just like when Sweden disappeared for a few hours in 2009.

Everyone's probably bookmarked this article already! Sentencing senior Google execs on the grounds of profiting from illegal acts is probably also technically correct. Google's defense is the neutrality of the internet, which is questionable as Google do adjust content to suit, for their own profit. Which layer is this issue on? Will increasing controls on content change our internet beyond recognition? Marcuse says that tolerance can not tolerate hateful speech and acts or it is no longer truly tolerant. That's quite a conundrum!

Somewhere I read that to grasp the technology of the internet, computers and networking, you really only needed to understand: TCP/IP, the end to end principle, object-oriented programming and service based APIs. This summary of 10 serious networking papers is useful to have and also points to Blumenthal/Clark's key paper on the architecture of the internet: M. Blumenthal, D. Clark, "Rethinking the Design of the Internet: the End-to-end Arguments vs. the Brave New World," ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Vol. 1 , No. 1 (August 2001) pp. 70-109.

The rise of the internet economy has occurred at a time when the gender gap is increasing in IT and ICT areas. A deeper look at the nature of internet architecture and whether "code is law" might help answer 'which came first? the gender or the tech?'.