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Jernej Prodnik

Amazon unpacked - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html

amazon political economy of the internet political economy of communication labour conditions

shared by Jernej Prodnik on 24 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • February 8, 2013 12:30 pm Amazon unpacked By Sarah O’Connor The online giant is creating thousands of UK jobs, so why are some employees less than happy?
  • Between a sooty power station and a brown canal on the edge of a small English town, there is a building that seems as if it should be somewhere else. An enormous long blue box, it looks like a smear of summer sky on the damp industrial landscape. Inside, hundreds of people in orange vests are pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle – the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time. They might each walk between seven and 15 miles today. It is almost Christmas and the people working in this building, together with those in seven others like it across the country, are dispatching a truck filled with parcels every three minutes or so. Before they can go home at the end of their eight-hour shift, or go to the canteen for their 30-minute break, they must walk through a set of airport-style security scanners to prove they are not stealing anything. They also walk past a life-sized cardboard image of a cheery blonde woman in an orange vest. “This is the best job I have ever had!” says a speech bubble near her head.
  • If you could slice the world in half right here, you could read the history of this town called Rugeley in the layers. Below the ground are the shafts and tunnels of the coal mine that fed the power station and was once the local economy’s beating heart. Above the ground are the trolleys and computers of Amazon, the global online retailer that has taken its place. As online shopping explodes in Britain, helping to push traditional retailers such as HMV out of business, more and more jobs are moving from high-street shops into warehouses like this one. Under pressure from politicians and the public over its tax arrangements, Amazon has tried to stress how many jobs it is creating across the country at a time of economic malaise. The undisputed behemoth of the online retail world has invested more than £1bn in its UK operations and announced last year that it would open another three warehouses over the next two years and create 2,000 more permanent jobs. Amazon even had a quote from David Cameron, the prime minister, in its September press release. “This is great news, not only for those individuals who will find work, but for the UK economy,” he said.
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  • Workers in Amazon’s warehouses – or “associates in Amazon’s fulfilment centres” as the company would put it – are divided into four main groups. There are the people on the “receive lines” and the “pack lines”: they either unpack, check and scan every product arriving from around the world, or they pack up customers’ orders at the other end of the process. Another group stows away suppliers’ products somewhere in the warehouse. They put things wherever there’s a free space – in Rugeley, there are inflatable palm trees next to milk frothers and protein powder next to kettles. Only Amazon’s vast computer brain knows where everything is, because the workers use their handheld computers to scan both the item they are stowing away and a barcode on the spot on the shelf where they put it. The last group, the “pickers”, push trolleys around and pick out customers’ orders from the aisles. Amazon’s software calculates the most efficient walking route to collect all the items to fill a trolley, and then simply directs the worker from one shelf space to the next via instructions on the screen of the handheld satnav device. Even with these efficient routes, there’s a lot of walking. One of the new Rugeley “pickers” lost almost half a stone in his first three shifts. “You’re sort of like a robot, but in human form,” said the Amazon manager. “It’s human automation, if you like.” Amazon recently bought a robot company, but says it still expects to keep plenty of humans around because they are so much better at coping with the vast array of differently shaped products the company sells.
  • The unassuming efficiency of these warehouses is what enables Amazon to put parcels on customers’ doorsteps so quickly, even when it is receiving 35 orders a second. Every warehouse has its own “continuous improvement manager” who uses “kaizen” techniques pioneered by Japanese car company Toyota to improve prod­uctivity. Marc Onetto, the senior vice-president of worldwide operations, told a business school class at the University of Virginia a few years ago: “We use a bunch of Japanese guys, they are not consultants, they are insultants, they are really not nice … They’re samurais, the real last samurais, the guys from the Toyota plants.” In Rugeley, the person with the kaizen job is a friendly, bald man called Matt Pedersen, who has a “black belt” in “Six Sigma”, the Motorola-developed method of operational improvement, most famously embraced by Jack Welch at General Electric. Every day, the managers in Rugeley take a “genba walk”, which roughly means “go to the place” in Japanese, Pedersen says as he accompanies the FT on a tour of the warehouse. “We go to the associates and find out what’s stopping them from performing today, how we can make their day better.” Some people also patrol the warehouse pushing tall little desks on wheels with laptops on them – they are “mobile problem solvers” looking for any hitches that could be slowing down the operation.
  • . . . What did the people of Rugeley make of all this? For many, it has been a culture shock. “The feedback we’re getting is it’s like being in a slave camp,” said Brian Garner, the dapper chairman of the Lea Hall Miners Welfare Centre and Social Club, still a popular drinking spot. One of the first complaints to spread through the town was that employees were getting blisters from the safety boots some were given to wear, which workers said were either too cheap or the wrong sizes. One former shop-floor manager, who did not want to be named, said he always told new workers to smear their bare feet with Vaseline. “Then put your socks on and your boots on, because I know for a fact these boots are going to rub and cause blisters and sores.” ©Ben RobertsAmazon workers in Rugeley process ordersOthers found the pressure intense. Several former workers said the handheld computers, which look like clunky scientific calculators with handles and big screens, gave them a real-time indication of whether they were running behind or ahead of their target and by how much. Managers could also send text messages to these devices to tell workers to speed up, they said. “People were constantly warned about talking to one another by the management, who were keen to eliminate any form of time-wasting,” one former worker added.
  • Watson said Amazon was supposed to send the council employment data every six months, but it had not done so. “We had no idea Amazon were going to be as indifferent to these issues as they have been, it’s come as a shock to us how intransigent they are,” he said. Inside the warehouse, Amazon employees wear blue badges and the workers supplied by the agencies wear green badges. In the most basic roles they perform the same tasks as each other for the same pay of £6.20 an hour or so (the minimum adult wage is £6.19), but the Amazon workers also receive a pension and shares. A former agency worker said the prospect of winning a blue badge, “like a carrot, was dangled constantly in front of us by management in return for meeting shift targets”. Amazon’s Darwinian culture comes from the top. Jeff Bezos, its chief executive, told Forbes magazine last year (when it named him “number one CEO in America”): “Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove, we’ll settle for intense.”
  • Ransdtad said it supplied a number of clients with “onsite-flexible workforce solutions”. It added: “The number of workers required by these clients fluctuates in response to supply and demand. When demand for clients’ products or services is high (for example during the Christmas period) the Randstad partnership allows local people to benefit from short-term work on a temporary contract, to help supplement our clients’ permanent workforce and deliver against order requirements.” Certainly, not everyone in Rugeley is upset about Amazon. A group of workers having a pint on a picnic table outside The Colliers pub near the warehouse gates said they liked their jobs, albeit as their managers hovered nervously in the background. One young agency worker said he was earning about £220 a week, compared with the £54 he had been receiving in jobless benefits. He had bought a car and moved out of his mum’s house and into a rented flat with his girlfriend, who he had met at work. “I’m doing pretty well for myself,” he said with a shy grin. “There’s always opportunities to improve yourself there.” Across the table, an older man, wagging two fingers with a cigarette pinched between them, said slowly: “It gives you your pride back, that’s what it gives you. Your pride back.” Many in the town, however, have mixed feelings. They are grateful for the jobs Amazon has created but they are also sad and angry about the quality of them. Timothy Jones, a barrister and parish councillor, summed up the mood. “I very much want them to stay, but equally I would like some of the worst employment practices to end.”
  • For Watson, the big question is whether these new jobs can support sustainable economic growth. In Rugeley, it is hard not to look back to the coal mine for an example of how one big employer could transform a place. . . . The Lea Hall Colliery opened officially on a soggy Tuesday in July 1960. Miners and their families huddled under marquees to eat their packed lunches and when the first coal was wound to the surface, three bands played an overture specially written for the occasion. It was the first mine planned and sunk by the Coal Board, the body set up after the second world war to run Britain’s newly nationalised coal industry, and the Central Electricity Generating Board was building a coal-fired power station right next door. It was a defiant demonstration of confidence in coal at a time of increasing competition from oil. “King Coal is not yet dead, as many would have it, but is going to be with us for many years to come,” the regional secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers told the crowd.
  • Soon, miners from all over the country were swarming to the modern new mine. The Coal Board and the local council built housing estates and schools to cope with the exploding population. “Peartree estate was built for the Geordies, the Springfield estate was built for the Scots and the Welsh,” remembered Brian Garner, who helped to build the mine when he was 16. “It was unbelievable, it was buzzing in the town, there was that much money about then. I could leave my job at 10 o’clock in the morning and start at five past 10 on another.” On Friday and Saturday nights, the queue outside the Lea Hall Miners’ Welfare Centre and Social Club would wrap right around the building. Rugeley’s mine was soon the most productive in the country. It was a “young man’s pit” with all the latest machines and techniques, says Ken Edwards, who started there at 25 as an electrician. The work was still dirty and dangerous, though. In 1972, a local reporter took a tour. “All is silent except for the movement of conveyor belts which carry the coal and the murmur of the air pumps. The blackness is relieved only by narrow shafts of light coming from each person’s headlamp,” she wrote. It took her two days to remove the black dust from her nails, ears, nose and hair.
  • The good times didn’t last. By the time the pit closed, four days before Christmas in 1990, a spokesman for British Coal told Reuters it was losing £300,000 a week. More than 800 people lost jobs that paid the equivalent of between £380 and £900 a week in today’s money. The town council’s chairman tried desperately to say something reassuring. “It has come as such a shock,” he told the local paper. “[But] we have got to do what many have done and look for new areas, particularly information technology and high technology. We have a lot of expertise and a wonderful geographical spot. There’s no reason why it should be the end for Rugeley.” From behind her desk in Vision estate agents, all purple paint and fairy lights, Dawn Goodwin sucks the air in through her teeth at the mention of Amazon. “We all thought it was going to be the making of the town,” she says. She expected an influx of people, including well-to-do managers, looking to buy or rent houses. But she hasn’t had any extra business at all. People are cautious because they don’t know how long their agency jobs with Amazon will last, she says. One of her tenants, a single young woman, got a job there but lost it again after she became ill halfway through a shift. She struggled to pay her rent for three months while she waited for her jobseeker’s benefits to be reinstated. “It’s leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouths,” Goodwin says with a frown. Even the little “Unit 9” café next to the Amazon warehouse hasn’t had a boost in trade. The women who run it reckon the employees don’t have enough time in their 30-minute break to get through security, come and eat something, and then go back in again.
  • In a cramped upstairs office at the Citizens Advice Bureau, Gillian Astbury and Angela Jones have turned to statistics to try to identify Amazon’s effect on the area. They haven’t had an increase in the number of people asking about employment problems or unfair dismissal, but nor has there been any improvement in the community’s problems with debt and homelessness. Their best guess is that people haven’t had enough sustained work to make much of a difference. Astbury says employment agencies are a “necessary evil”, but stresses it is hardly ideal for people to be bouncing in and out of temporary work, particularly when a job ends abruptly and they are left with no income at all until their benefits are reinstated. Workers leaving Amazon have had a particular problem with this, prompting the parish council to submit a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Work and Pensions to find out exactly how long local people are being made to wait for their social security payments to come through.
  • Far from the CAB’s little office in Rugeley, Britain’s economists are also puzzling over why the economy remains moribund even though more and more people are in work. There are still about half a million fewer people working as full-time employees than there were before the 2008 crash, but the number of people in some sort of employment has surpassed the previous peak. Economists think the rise in insecure temporary, self-employed and part-time work, while a testament to the British labour market’s flexibility, helps to explain why economic growth remains elusive. Angi Cooney, who runs C Residential, the biggest estate agent in Rugeley, thinks the nature of employment is changing permanently and people should stop pining for the past. It’s “bloody great” that a company like Amazon chose to come to “this little old place”, she says fiercely, looking as if she’d like to take the town by the shoulders and give it a shake. “People expect a job for life, but the world isn’t like that any more, is it?” Sarah O’Connor is the FT’s economics correspondent
Janja Petek

Forty years of the internet: how the world changed for ever | Technology | The Guardian - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...internet-40-history-arpanet

history web changed world

shared by Janja Petek on 06 Mar 13 - Cached
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  • In October 1969, a student typed 'LO' on a computer - and the internet was born
  • Towards the end of the summer of 1969
  • a large grey metal box was delivered to the office of Leonard Kleinrock, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.
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  • At 10.30pm, as Kleinrock's fellow professors and students crowded around, a computer was connected to the IMP, which made contact with a second IMP, attached to a second computer, several hundred miles away at the Stanford Research Institute, and an undergraduate named Charley Kline tapped out a message.
  • It's impossible to say for certain when the internet began, mainly because nobody can agree on what, precisely, the internet is.
  • It's interesting to compare how much has changed in computing and the internet since 1969 with, say, how much has changed in world politics.
  • On the other hand, the breakthrough accomplished that night in 1969 was a decidedly down-to-earth one
  • Twelve years after Charley Kline's first message on the Arpanet, as it was then known, there were still only 213 computers on the network; but 14 years after that, 16 million people were online, and email was beginning to change the world; the first really usable web browser wasn't launched until 1993, but by 1995 we had Amazon, by 1998 Google, and by 2001, Wikipedia, at which point there were 513 million people online. Today the figure is more like 1.7 billion.
  • on New Year's Day 1994 – only yesterday, in other words – there were an estimated 623 websites.
  • On the one hand, they were there because of the Russian Sputnik satellite launch, in 1957, which panicked the American defence establishment, prompting Eisenhower to channel millions of dollars into scientific research, and establishing Arpa, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, to try to win the arms technology race. The idea was "that we would not get surprised again,"
  • "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face," they declared.
  • The few outsiders who knew of the box's existence couldn't even get its name right: it was an IMP, or "interface message processor"
  • It was already possible to link computers by telephone lines, but it was glacially slow, and every computer in the network had to be connected, by a dedicated line, to every other computer, which meant you couldn't connect more than a handful of machines without everything becoming monstrously complex and costly.
  • The solution, called "packet switching" – which owed its existence to the work of a British physicist, Donald Davies – involved breaking data down into blocks that could be routed around any part of the network that happened to be free, before getting reassembled at the other end.
  • Still, Kleinrock recalls a tangible sense of excitement that night as Kline sat down at the SDS Sigma 7 computer, connected to the IMP, and at the same time made telephone contact with his opposite number at Stanford. As his colleagues watched, he typed the letter L, to begin the word LOGIN.
  • One of the most intriguing things about the growth of the internet is this: to a select group of technological thinkers, the surprise wasn't how quickly it spread across the world, remaking business, culture and politics – but that it took so long to get off the ground.
  • In 1945, the American presidential science adviser, Vannevar Bush, was already imagining the "memex", a device in which "an individual stores all his books, records, and communications", which would be linked to each other by "a mesh of associative trails", like weblinks.
  • And in 1946, an astonishingly complete vision of the future appeared in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. In a story entitled A Logic Named Joe, the author Murray Leinster envisioned a world in which every home was equipped with a tabletop box that he called a "logic":
  • Instead of smothering their research in the utmost secrecy – as you might expect of a cold war project aimed at winning a technological battle against Moscow – they made public every step of their thinking, in documents known as Requests For Comments.
  • Deliberately or not, they helped encourage a vibrant culture of hobbyists on the fringes of academia – students and rank amateurs who built their own electronic bulletin-board systems and eventually FidoNet, a network to connect them to each other.
  • n argument can be made that these unofficial tinkerings did as much to create the public internet as did the Arpanet. Well into the 90s, by the time the Arpanet had been replaced by NSFNet, a larger government-funded network,
  • It was the hobbyists, making unofficial connections into the main system, who first opened the internet up to allcomers.
  • This was the software known as TCP/IP, which made it possible for networks to connect to other networks, creating a "network of networks", capable of expanding virtually infinitely
  • Nevertheless, by July 1992, an Essex-born businessman named Cliff Stanford had opened Demon Internet, Britain's first commercial internet service provider.
  • After a year or so, Demon had between 2,000 and 3,000 users,
  • the @ symbol was introduced in 1971, and the first message, according to the programmer who sent it, Ray Tomlinson, was "something like QWERTYUIOP".
  • A couple of years later I got my first mobile phone, which came with two batteries: a very large one, for normal use, and an extremely large one, for those occasions on which you might actually want a few hours of power
  • For most of us, though, the web is in effect synonymous with the internet, even if we grasp that in technical terms that's inaccurate: the web is simply a system that sits on top of the internet, making it greatly easier to navigate the information there, and to use it as a medium of sharing and communication.
  • The first ever website was his own, at CERN: info.cern.ch.
  • The idea that a network of computers might enable a specific new way of thinking about information, instead of just allowing people to access the data on each other's terminals, had been around for as long as the idea of the network itself: it's there in Vannevar Bush's memex, and Murray Leinster's logics.
  • Web browsers crossed the border into mainstream use far more rapidly than had been the case with the internet itself: Mosaic launched in 1993 and Netscape followed soon after, though it was an embarrassingly long time before Microsoft realised the commercial necessity of getting involved at all. Amazon and eBay were online by 1995. And in 1998 came Google, offering a powerful new way to search the proliferating mass of information on the web.
  • Google, and others, saw that the key to the web's future would be helping users exclude almost everything on any given topic, restricting search results to the most relevant pages.
  • It is absurd – though also unavoidable here – to compact the whole of what happened from then onwards into a few sentences: the dotcom boom, the historically unprecedented dotcom bust, the growing "digital divide", and then the hugely significant flourishing, over the last seven years, of what became known as Web 2.0.
  • The most confounding thing of all is that in a few years' time, all this stupendous change will probably seem like not very much change at all.
  • Will you remember when the web was something you accessed primarily via a computer? Will you remember when there were places you couldn't get a wireless connection? Will you remember when "being on the web" was still a distinct concept, something that described only a part of your life, instead of permeating all of it? Will you remember Google?
donnamariee

Firefox OS won't magically succeed just because it's open source - see webOS | Technolo... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...firefox-os-open-source-failure

shared by donnamariee on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Firefox OS won't magically succeed just because it's open source - see webOS The siren song of open source means some people think Firefox OS could take the smartphone market by storm - but that's what they thought about webOS
  • Open source" operating systems are the siren call of the internet. For years, we were promised, Linux was going to be the Next Big Thing on the desktop; the tired old empires of Windows and MacOS were going to be pushed aside, and everyone was going to embrace Linux (though quite which distro wasn't clear). From infants to grannies, they would all see the light, and install software that was built with the user in mind - as long as the user was someone who could hold the idea of the concentric circles of file ownership (root/wheel/std) in their head
  • Despite the fevered imaginings of a fair number at the time, there was simply no chance that webOS was going to go anywhere without direct help from HP; and HP wasn't going to give it that help, since it had plenty of troubles of its own.
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  • LG has indicated that it will be using webOS in its Smart TV line (which, in passing, suggests that Google's hopes of having a multi-manufacturer-pronged assault on the living room with Google TV are being chipped away; Samsung has gone its own way, Sony offers a mixture of Google and its own smart TV offerings, and now it looks like LG isn't exactly all-in). Though that might, in time, become something that it uses on phones or tablets, you'd be crazy to bet on it. LG is smart enough to know that TVs are a world away from phones and tablets, both in terms of the user interaction experience, and the demands that they make for user acceptance.
  • But the siren song of open source OSs becomes deafening when you look at the other announcement to come out of Mobile World Congress, in which Mozilla is touting its Firefox OS as the anathema to the world's ills - or at least those afflicting the smartphone industry. What does Moziila chief executive Gary Kovacs think is going to be the unique selling point of the Firefox OS phones that he expects to see in 2014? "Our goal is to level the playing field and usher in an explosion of content and services that will meet the diverse needs of the next two billion people online," he said in Barcelona, adding "We're not trying to get in the middle of an operating system fight; what we are trying to do is be the catalyst to drive more development around the open web."
  • The problem for Firefox OS is that it doesn't have a dedicated hardware backer. Sure, Sony has said that it will make some phones using it. ZTE and Alcatel say they will build hardware that will run it. And Kovacs points to the fact that Firefox OS will run HTML5 apps - not "native" apps (in the sense that iOS or Android apps run natively). That might put a questionmark over whether, by some analysts' measure, the FFOS phone is truly a "smartphone", since their definition for that includes "running apps on a native API". (That's why Gartner and IDC don't class Nokia's Asha phones as smartphones.)
  • So how did Android succeed? Three things. First, Google get a vibrant app ecosystem going even before there was a single phone: it had competitions for apps, with a $10m fund to seed developer ideas. By April 2008 there were almost 2,000 Android applications; two-third came from outside the US. Among the offerings: photo-enhanced driving, on-the-fly party mashups with maps, maintaining passive surveillance on your family's whereabouts. (Some things never change.) Second, it was able to go to Verizon, which was looking enviously at how AT&T was able to offer the iPhone, and suggest that Android phones - when they came along - could be the answer to that competitive challenge. And third, it was Google - the gigantic search-engine-and-everything-else company with the international reputation. If Google was doing a new generation of smartphone software (and if Apple had validated the idea), then it looked like a good deal for everyone. And handset manufacturers were eager to find an alternative to Microsoft.
  • Android is gigantic - some version of it might be on a billion phones this year - meaning there's no obvious need for another open source OS. What, after all, is FFOS actually going to do that Android doesn't, or that iOS or Windows Phone or BlackBerry can't? Yes, we've heard that the target isn't the west, but the developing world; that still doesn't explain why a Chinese handset manufacturer would deploy FFOS rather than Android, whether the Google version or a forked one that could connect to a local app store.
  • Even worse, FFOS is at an immediate competitive disadvantage because the principal browser on smartphones now is based on WebKit. Chrome uses it, MobileSafari uses it, BlackBerry uses it, and Opera uses it too now. That leaves only Internet Explorer on Windows Phone standing alone. Developers writing HTML5 apps will naturally write for compatibility with WebKit, which is always going to behave slightly differently from Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. For FFOS's sake, you have to hope the differences aren't big.
  • That's the trouble with the magical thinking that often attaches to open source projects. Making webOS open source didn't solve its problems; it simply shoved them off into a siding. Having an open source mobile OS didn't guarantee Android's success; the efforts of Google, and the timing in the market, did that.
  • Perhaps for that reason, people have high expectations for the Ubuntu OS and phone, with its fabulously complex array of gestures for control. Bad news, dreamers: it's going to fail in the market too if Canonical attempts to market it as a hardware-software combination - that is, sells Ubuntu phones at retail.
Gabrijela Vrbnjak

BBC News - Web code weakness allows data dump on PCs - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...technology-21628622

clevercode html5 browser bug

shared by Gabrijela Vrbnjak on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The loophole exploits a feature of HTML 5 which defines how websites are made and what they can do.
  • Developer Feross Aboukhadijeh found the bug and set up a demo page that fills visitors' hard drives with pictures of cartoon cats. In one demo, Mr Aboukhadijeh managed to dump one gigabyte of data every 16 seconds onto a vulnerable Macbook. Clever code Most major browsers, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari, were found to be vulnerable to the bug, said Mr Aboukhadijeh. While most websites are currently built using version 4 of the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), that code is gradually being superseded by the newer version 5. One big change brought in with HTML 5 lets websites store more data locally on visitors' PCs. Safeguards built into the "local storage" specification should limit how much data can be stored. Different browsers allow different limits but all allow at least 2.5 megabytes to be stored. However, Mr Aboukhadijeh found a way round this cap by creating lots of temporary websites linked to the one a person actually visited. He found that each one of these associated sites was allowed to store up to the limit of data because browser makers had not written code to stop this happening. By endlessly creating new, linked websites the bug can be used to siphon huge amounts of data onto target PCs. Only Mozilla's Firefox capped storage at 5MB and was not vulnerable, he found. "Cleverly coded websites have effectively unlimited storage space on visitor's computers," wrote Mr Aboukhadijeh in a blogpost about the bug. Code to exploit the bug has been released by Mr Aboukhadijeh and he set up a website, called Filldisk that, on vulnerable PCs, dumps lots of images of cats on to the hard drive. So far, no malicious use of the exploits has been observed. In a bid to solve the problem, bug reports about the exploit have been filed with major browser makers. More on This Story .related-links-list li { position: relative; } .related-links-list .gvl3-icon { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; } Related Stories Firefox smartphone partners revealed 24 FEBRUARY 2013, TECHNOLOGY Flash Player exits Android store 15 AUGUST 2012, TECHNOLOGY HTML 5 target for cybercriminals 02 DECEMBER 2011, TECHNOLOGY $render("page-see-also","ID"); $render("page-newstracker","ID"); Related Internet links Feross Aboukhadijeh The BBC is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites $render("page-related-items","ID"); Share this pageShare this page1.4KShareFacebookTwitter Email Print In association with $render("advert","advert-sponsor-module","page-bookmark-links"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); More Technology stories RSS Computer glitch hits Mars rover Nasa's Curiosity Mars rover is put into "safe mode" after a computer glitch caused by corrupted files. US plans small-ship drone launches Hackers breach Evernote security $render("advert","advert-mpu-high"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); Top Stories http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/6618
  • found the bug and set up a demo page that fills visitors' hard drives with pictures of cartoon cats.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • because browser makers had not written code to stop this happening. By endlessly creating new, linked websites the bug can be used to siphon huge amounts of data onto target PCs.
  • found a way round this cap by creating lots of temporary websites linked to the one a person actually visited
  • Most major browsers, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari, were found to be vulnerable to the bug
  • was not vulnerable
  • Mozilla's Firefox
  • bug reports about the exploit have been filed with major browser makers.
Blaž Gobec

Everything you need to know about the internet | Technology | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ternet-everything-need-to-know

technology web2.0 socialmedia EverythingAboutInternet

shared by Blaž Gobec on 05 Mar 13 - Cached
  • The internet has quietly infiltrated our lives, and yet we seem to be remarkably unreflective about it.
  • All of which might lead a detached observer to ask: if the internet is such a disaster, how come 27% of the world's population (or about 1.8 billion people) use it happily every day, while billions more are desperate to get access to it?
  • THE WEB ISN'T THE NET
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  • So the thing to remember is this: the web is huge and very important, but it's just one of the many things that run on the internet. The net is much bigger and far more important than anything that travels on it.
  • On the internet, web pages are only one of the many kinds of traffic that run on its virtual tracks.
  • 5 COMPLEXITY IS THE NEW REALITY
  • 6 THE NETWORK IS NOW THE COMPUTER
  • 7 THE WEB IS CHANGING
  • But in fact, the web has gone through at least three phases of evolution – from the original web 1.0, to the web 2.0 of "small pieces, loosely joined" (social networking, mashups, webmail, and so on) and is now heading towards some kind of web 3.0 – a global platform based on Tim Berners-Lee's idea
  • For baby-boomers, a computer was a standalone PC running Microsoft software.
  • First, the companies (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft) who provided search also began to offer "webmail" – email provided via programs that ran not on your PC but on servers in the internet "cloud".
Katja Jerman

Digital rights advocates wary of new 'six strikes' initiative for online piracy | Techn... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ital-six-strikes-online-piracy

piracy CAS ISP online

shared by Katja Jerman on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The Copyright Alert System (CAS) was devised by a coalition of internet service providers (ISPs), content owners and the US government to curb illegal downloading by alerting "casual infringers" when illegal filesharing is detected on their IP address
  • Initially, the alerts are intended to be educational. They tell the customer what happened and how they can prevent it from happening again. If pirating continues to happen through the IP address, users will receive the message again, followed by messages that ask them to confirm they have seen the alerts. The fifth and sixth alert are called mitigation alerts and will temporarily slow users' internet speeds, depending on the ISP.
  • CAS has also been criticized because the person who audited the MarkMonitor software to ensure that it fairly identifies copyright violations is a former lobbyist for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), one of the industry groups fronting money for system.
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  • Jill Lesser, executive director of the Center for Copyright Information said in an interview with On the Media that the program is meant to abet the "casual infringer".
  • McSherry said that people engaged in wholesale commercial infringement wouldn't be fazed by the system because they are familiar with ways around the system.
  • The newest attempt to thwart illegal filesharing in the United States launched Monday and while the "six strikes and you're out" initiative seems to offer light penalties, digital rights advocates are concerned that it lacks transparency.
  • Copyright Alert System (CAS)
  • was devised by a coalition of internet service providers (ISPs), content owners and the US government to curb illegal downloading by alerting "casual infringers" when illegal filesharing is detected on their IP address.
  • Initially, the alerts are intended to be educational.
  • . If pirating continues to happen through the IP address, users will receive the message again, followed by messages that ask them to confirm they have seen the alerts. The fifth and sixth alert are called mitigation alerts and will temporarily slow users' internet speeds, depending on the ISP.
  • It's certainly not how we should be doing copyright policy,
  • it's a private copyright system and it doesn't have the protections and balances that the public copyright system has.
  • to ensure that it fairly identifies copyright violations is a former lobbyist
  • McSherry said that people engaged in wholesale commercial infringement wouldn't be fazed by the system because they are familiar with ways around the system
  • This failed to have a significant effect on pirating, and the industry stopped suing these type of casual users several years ago.
  • Katja Jerman on 06 Mar 13
     
    article 1
Rebeka Aščerič

BBC News - Children 'must know web limits' says Wales commissioner - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...uk-wales-21333477

internet ipraktikum children bbc limits

shared by Rebeka Aščerič on 05 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Adults must impose the necessary checks and balances to keep children safe online, says the children's commissioner for Wales.
  • "All children and young people don't seem much of a distinction between their online and offline lives,"
  • Mr Towler told BBC Radio Wales. "It's all just one thing and they get really excited by the opportunities the internet affords and sometimes parents get a little scared about that and worried about what their children are accessing." 'Crossing the road' Continue reading the main story “Start Quote They're all running around with handheld computers these days, they're not just on phones ” End Quote Keith Towler Children's commissioner Mr Towler said he talks to children in lots of different settings and they "still enjoy playing outside as much as they ever did". He said we need to recognise that the internet provides fantastic opportunities for education and learning and its making sure that children access that safely. He said that was a real challenge for parents and carers. "It's a bit like crossing the road, you try to teach your children the best way of crossing the road well. We need to teach our children the best way of using this fantastic resource. "I think too many parents are very very scared of the internet and because they're so scared they will say 'Oh I don't understand it'". Handheld computers The commissioner also praised Hwb, the virtual learning environment, which he said provides protection for children using the web in schools. Mr Towler said: "We've got to get parents and carers to recognise that children do operate in the digital world. They're all running around with handheld computers these days, they're not just on phones. "They can access whatever they want whenever they want and parents need to engage on that. " "We need to remember that children and young people are much more savvy than sometimes we think they are, and they are much more responsible than sometimes adults think they are so its not all doom and gloom. "What we need to do is put the right checks and balances in place and what children always want from parents and carers is to understand what the boundaries are, and that's our job to do that." Sangeet Bhullar, executive director of Wise Kids, added that the digital landscape was "evolving rapidly" and up-to-date data was needed on how children and young people in Wales related to it. More on This Story .related-links-list li { position: relative; } .related-links-list .gvl3-icon { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; } Related Stories Web safety lessons urged for infants 05 FEBRUARY 2013, EDUCATION &amp; FAMILY Online chat 'should be monitored' 22 JANUARY 2013, TECHNOLOGY Body to promote digital teaching 22 JUNE 2012, WALES $render("page-see-also","ID"); $render("page-newstracker","ID"); Related Internet links Children's Commissioner for Wales The BBC is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites $render("page-related-items","ID"); Share this pageShare this pageShareFacebookTwitter Email Print In association with $render("advert","advert-sponsor-module","page-bookmark-links"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); More Wales stories RSS Army base shuts in defence shake-up An Army base in Pembrokeshire is to close with 600 troops transferred to St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan. Soldiers' conman jailed three years Wales recall Warburton and Jones <!--
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  • "I think too many parents are very very scared of the internet and because they're so scared they will say 'Oh I don't understand it'".
  • "What we need to do is put the right checks and balances in place and what children always want from parents and carers is to understand what the boundaries are, and that's our job to do that."
Anja Pirc

Online privacy: Difference Engine: Nobbling the internet | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...online-privacy

privacy networking internet social social networking

shared by Anja Pirc on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • TWO measures affecting the privacy internet users can expect in years ahead are currently under discussion on opposite sides of the globe. The first hails from a Senate committee’s determination to make America’s online privacy laws even more robust. The second concerns efforts by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an intergovernmental body under the auspices of the United Nations, to rewrite its treaty for regulating telecommunications around the world, which dates from 1988, so as to bring the internet into its fief.
  • The congressional measure, approved overwhelmingly by the Senate Judiciary Committee on November 29th, would require criminal investigators to obtain a search warrant from a judge before being able to coerce internet service providers (ISPs) to hand over a person’s e-mail. The measure would also extend this protection to the rest of a person’s online content, including videos, photographs and documents stored in the "cloud"—ie, on servers operated by ISPs, social-network sites and other online provider
  • a warrant is needed only for unread e-mail less than six months old. If it has already been opened, or is more than six months old, all that law-enforcement officials need is a subpoena. In America, a subpoena does not need court approval and can be issued by a prosecutor. Similarly, a subpoena is sufficient to force ISPs to hand over their routing data, which can then be used to identify a sender’s various e-mails and to whom they were sent. That is how the FBI stumbled on a sex scandal involving David Petraeus, the now-ex director of the CIA, and his biographer.
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  • No-one imagined that ISPs would one day offer gigabytes of online storage free—as Google, Yahoo!, Hotmail and other e-mail providers do today. The assumption back then was that if someone had not bothered to download and delete online messages within six months, such messages could reasonably be considered to be abandoned—and therefore not in need of strict protection.
  • wholesale access to the internet, powerful mobile phones and ubiquitous social networking have dramatically increased the amount of private data kept online. In the process, traditional thinking about online security has been rendered obsolete. For instance, more and more people nowadays keep their e-mail messages on third-party servers elsewhere, rather than on their own hard-drives or mobile phones. Many put their personal details, contacts, photographs, locations, likes, dislikes and inner thoughts on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox and a host of other destinations. Bringing online privacy requirements into an age of cloud computing is only fit and proper, and long overdue.
  • the international telecoms treaty that emerged focused on how telephone traffic flows across borders, the rules governing the quality of service and the means operators could adopt to bill one another for facilitating international calls. As such, the regulations applied strictly to telecoms providers, the majority of which were state owned.
  • he goal of certain factions is to grant governments the authority to charge content providers like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter for allowing their data to flow over national borders. If enacted, such proposals would most certainly deter investment in network infrastructure, raise costs for consumers, and hinder online access for precisely those people the ITU claims it wants to help.
  • a proposal sponsored by the United States and Canada to restrict the debate in Dubai strictly t
  • o conventional telecoms has met with a modicum of success, despite stiff opposition from Russia plus some African and Middle-Eastern countries. Behind closed doors, the conference has agreed not to alter the ITU’s current definition of “telecommunications” and to leave the introductory text concerning the existing treaty’s scope intact.
  • The sticking point has been what kind of organisations the treaty should apply to. Here, one word can make a huge difference. In ITU jargon, the current treaty relates only to “recognised operating agencies”—in other words, conventional telecoms operators. The ITU wants to change that to simply “operating agencies”. Were that to happen, not only would Google, Facebook and other website operators fall under the ITU’s jurisdiction, but so too would all government and business networks. It seems the stakes really are as high as the ITU’s critics have long maintained
nensic

Under the regime of precarity: bring your own device | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...recarity-bring-your-own-device

mobile internet PC neoliberal economic policy precarity monopoly

shared by nensic on 05 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • At one and the same time technocracy and financial oligarchies find here an ideal medium to extend their influence and their control of individuals in space and time.
  • At one and the same time technocracy and financial oligarchies find here an ideal medium to extend their influence and their control of individuals in space and time. This explains the fierce struggle going on among key market players.
  • Today large communities use devices like smartphones, tablets, e-readers and ultrabooks to navigate this new ecosystem.
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  • The growing dynamic of mobile internet, today accounting for 12% of all internet traffic,[ii] signals a new ecosystem where living bodies, machines, networks, code, data, territory and time interact.
  • The first iPhone, in 2007, inaugurated the new phase of the cognitive era, just as the PC heralded the decline of the industrial phase. Five years later, Apple no longer has a monopoly: hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets are sold every year and the total number of these active devices will be soon 2 billion. It took the PC thirty years to reach this level of diffusion.
  • The hundreds of thousands of apps, available in just a few years, originate from the intersection of two factors:
  • The desire and necessity to have simple, functional and fast devices able to do specific tasks on the go.
  • the operative skills to develop apps for popular mobile platforms such as Iphone Operating System (IOS) or Google Android.&nbsp;
  • Apps galore
  • Apple likes to play on the ambiguity in a form of propaganda that exalts the “revolutionary” spirit of technological innovation
  • as a way of consolidating their strictly neoliberal economic policy.
  • War over the immaterial
  • Often these machines play opposite functions: as a tool to create new forms of horizontal communication and social interaction or as bait for a capillary exploitation.
  • A political analysis of mobile devices
  • Marketing and communication campaigns portray these devices as commodity fetishes, characterizing a new phase of capitalism often described as cognitive because based on knowledge.
  • In the following phase, the spread of the first mobile devices – cellphones and laptops – provided an initial impulse for a blurring of life and work, imposing with mobile calls, emails or SMS a new type of real-time processing, regulating the rhythms of life
  • In the new biohypermedia environment, the key change lies in the combination of miniaturizing and mobilizing these pieces of equipment, allowing them to always be within the body’s reach in any context.
  • they augment physical reality[ix] with every kind of information – commercial, cultural, ecological – and act more and more as biomedical sets for the control, correction and support of our vital biological functions.
  • The PC has a central function as the medium for linguistic and written processes - its typical uses often tied to the logical concatenation of thought and the priority management of sequences over time.
  • But mobile devices concentrate complex perception of stimuli in terms of spatial organization and intervene in emotional responses. PC work in this way occupies our left hemisphere, while the continual interactions of a smartphone engage the right hemisphere.
  • In contemporary neoliberalism, these devices become an essential means of rent and profit, through a fine capture of what we generate by living with them and using them. At one and the same time technocracy and financial oligarchies find here an ideal medium to extend their influence and their control of individuals in space and time.
  • The PC became a liberating tool for social cooperation in the workplace of a booming third-sector.
  • In the sphere of multinational ICT[x] Corporations a war is being waged over the design and deployment of immaterial enclosures
  • Even though all this is based on freeware and open source, they trick us into believing that the iPhone 5, Windows 8 or Jellybean[xi] are miracles that descend from Mount Olympus and for which we should be grateful as to the gods.
  • Unlike automobiles or, to a lesser degree, PCs, the use value of new mobile devices is no longer determined merely by the initial design but can be moulded by the final user.
  • The innumerable websites, blogs and forums in every language globally blooming and growing are a workshop for worldwide exchange where the digital means are developed that could be used to withdraw workers both from precarity and &nbsp;from total submission to a life of labour. &nbsp;
  • Microsoft is no less defensive of its monopoly: with Intel and other accomplices, they introduced a new firmware to boot Windows 8 PCs that, substituting the old BIOS,[xv] makes it impossible or very complicated to install Linux or other operating systems on new laptops.
  • Despite hesitations related to “security” problems, today companies allow or even oblige people to use their own devices
  • So, if you were one of those many who found the latest tablet, smartphone or hybrid touch device under the tree this year, be aware that you won’t be the only one pleased: under the regime of precarity, bring your own device if you want to survive.&nbsp;
  • nensic on 05 Mar 13
     
    "Bring your own device (BYOD) is a business policy whereby employees bring personally owned mobile devices to their place of work and use them to access privileged company resources such as email, file servers and databases as well as their personal applications and data."
donnamariee

How social networks have changed our world | Techi.com - 0 views

www.techi.com/...etworks-have-changed-our-world

shared by donnamariee on 17 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • How social networks have changed our world
  • social networks have evolved from simple communication hubs to veritable agents of change; galvanizing thousands of people over political discourse, creating and changing industries, and all in all, transforming people’s lives
  • Today, more than 600 million users worldwide are active on this website. Approximately 200 million people are active on twitter
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  • None of these social networks even excited at the beginning of the decade. While these figures may be mere numbers for many people, the impact of social network goes far and deep. Here are a few areas in which social networks have had lasting and arguably permanent effects.
  • social networks have altered the operational model of politics and public service
  • Facebook
  • touchstone for how non-profit organizations, environmental activities, and political factions reach out to thousands of potential volunteers and donors
  • Twitter is being used by almost all progressive politicians to promote their causes. Thanks to the social networks, politics is no longer limited to the political elites; people voice their opinions, share their ideas, and even communicate with politicians on a one-on-one basis. It’s a technology lesson that progressive politicians have to learn or else, risk losing to the tech savvy youth of today.
    • donnamariee
      donnamariee on 17 Mar 13
       
      Twitter is being used by almost all progressive politicians to promote their causes. Thanks to the social networks, politics is no longer limited to the political elites; people voice their opinions, share their ideas, and even communicate with politicians on a one-on-one basis. It's a technology lesson that progressive politicians have to learn or else, risk losing to the tech savvy youth of today.
  • Marketing and advertising are transforming themselves from industries reliant on mass market channels to those that must embrace the power of the customer, and attempt to engage in conversations with them. Often, a “middle man” (such as news paper reporter) ultimately determined that what was written or said. The ability to bypass gatekeepers and facilitate direct interactions with consumers and communities is very important.
  • Some news websites already present visitors with a list of stories recommended by their friends because they realize an endorsement from ‘someone you know’ carries extra weight
  • From traffic updates, to natural riots, anyone and everyone who has access to social networking sites can report his/her version of such events. Sifting through the humongous amount of news, speculations and analysis are abilities that a New Media user must now possess.
  • It is not uncommon to see small or home grow businesses that operate solely through their Facebook accounts. In fact, for businesses, interaction via social network has almost become a yardstick to test out their customer service
  • With Google+ being launched recently, it is clear that all technology giants have realized the critical role that social networks will lay in shaping our lives. It is no longer about implementing the latest, cutting edge technology; it is about how seamlessly and organically a social network merges in our lives, and affects every aspect of it. The lines between real and virtual lives have now blurred to the extent of becoming invisible
  • donnamariee on 17 Mar 13
     
    essay theme 2
Jernej Prodnik

Google raises privacy fears as personal details are released to app developers | Techno... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...e-privacy-fears-app-developers

google privacy technology guardian personal details surveillance surveillance society

shared by Jernej Prodnik on 25 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Google raises privacy fears as personal details are released to app developers Campaigner says tech giant's policies don't make it clear that Google Play users who buy apps give over information
  • Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 February 2013 14.39 GMT
  • Google Play: the personal details of app buyers are released to developers Google could face a third privacy row in a two years, after a leading campaigner called for the US government to investigate the fact that the names, geographic region and email addresses of people who buy apps from its Play store are passed on to the app developers without users' explicit permission.
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  • Ben Edelman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, says that analysis of Google's terms and conditions relating to its Google Play store and Google Wallet transaction system (used for buying apps) doesn't show any clauses where users are specifically told that their emails will be sent on to the developer. He also warns that developers could use that information to "track and harass" people who have given apps low ratings or requested refunds. And hackers – or malicious developers – could create personalised emails to send out to people to steal passwords (phishing) or install "updates" that were actually malware.
  • Google says it has to provide some location data about which country apps are bought in so developers can calculate the correct amount of tax to pay. But that does not explain why it passes on buyers' names and email addresses, which together with a postcode could be used to identify a person's location and address."Google's prior privacy blunders have put [it] under higher scrutiny," Edelman says, pointing to the 20-year consent order with the US Federal Trade Commission that Google signed in March 2011 in the wake of its Buzz social network fiasco – followed by a record $22.5m fine in August 2012 for hacking Apple users' browsers to install tracking cookies. It has also been fiercely criticised in Europe for its changes in March 2012 to its privacy policies, which data protection chiefs said could mean "uncontrolled" use of personal data.
  • Eric Butler, a freelance software developer of the Tapchat and Farebot apps, tweeted in July 2012 "I wonder if most Android users realise that when you buy an app in the Play Store the seller [of the app] can see your name, email address and phone."Following the row, he has noted on his blog that "Because the entire experience of purchasing Android apps is so sloppy, it's not unreasonable to assume that this privacy issue was actually an oversight." But, he says, "Google should follow Apple's lead and offer users and developers better privacy protection."
  • Another developer, Jesse Wilson, pointed out the same problem in November on Google+, and was quickly echoed by Chris Lacy, who said that "as a developer I never asked for this information, I have no need for it, and I simply do not want to be a custodian of such information."Lacy added that "As a consumer, this is distressing on many levels: there is no fair warning that this information will be transferred … trusting my personal information to Google is one thing. But with this system, users are unknowingly having to trust their information to a third party. There's no way to know what security measures that third party might have in place." He added that it meant that the app developer "has gained my personal information without requesting the appropriate permissions via the app."
  • Google has said that passing on the details does not breach its privacy conditions. In a quote to Siliconvalley.com, a representative told the site that "Google Wallet shares the information necessary to process a transaction, which is clearly spelled out in the Google Wallet privacy notice."
Jernej Prodnik

Facebook Now Allows Friends To Promote Posts, But Privacy Concerns Arise - Internationa... - 0 views

au.ibtimes.com/...osts-privacy-concerns-2013.htm

facebook international business times privacy political economy of communication political economy of the internet surveillance society surveillance

shared by Jernej Prodnik on 24 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Facebook Now Allows Friends To Promote Posts, But Privacy Concerns Arise
  • By Ian Kar | February 16, 2013 8:27 AM EST On average, Facebook posts are seen by approximately 16 percent of your friends; with Facebook’s newest feature, however, more of your friends may start seeing your best moments on the social network more often, because users can now pay to promote their friend’s posts.
  • Facebook hopes that with this new service, quality content supported by you and your friends will&nbsp; be featured at the top of your News Feed.&nbsp;Some users have already received the new feature, but the gradual rollout&nbsp;will continue with Facebook users with fewer than 5,000 total friends and subscribers.&nbsp;
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  • Facebook has dealt with many privacy issues in its nine years on the Web, but unlike most of the past issues that deal with broader concerns like “data mining,” the new promoted posts service could have a greater impact on individuals, like its increased potential for cyberbullying.One problem is your friend doesn’t need your explicit permission to promote your posts. So, for instance, if one of my friends from college decides to promote an old embarrassing photo of me, I won’t be able to prevent the picture from getting to the top of the News Feed for a large percentage of my friends.
  • We’ve reached out to Facebook to talk about any safeguards that will be put in place to prevent cyber bullying, but they didn’t get back to us by the time this article went up.In addition, there’s no way to determine who promoted the post, so, as&nbsp;TechCrunch notes, a friend promoting an article written by me could be perceived as a shameless plug by me in an effort get more of my friends to check out my article (which is totally true by the way).However, Facebook notes there are a lot of benefits to the service. A Facebook spokesperson released a statement to AllFacebook on Friday, describing the feature:
  • “If your friend is running a marathon for charity and has posted that information publicly, you can help that friend by promoting their post to all of your friends,” the post said. “Or if your friend is renting their apartment out and she tells her friends on Facebook, you can share&nbsp;the post with the people you and your friend have in common so that it shows up higher in news feed and more people notice it.”As you can see, Facebook’s new feature has a number of potentially beneficial uses like fundraising for a friends’ charity or publicizing events to increase attendance, and can even make somewhat tedious tasks like finding an apartment be a little less difficult.
  • Facebook will want to monitor this new feature to see how it’s used. It has the potential to be really lucrative and turn Facebook into a network more like&nbsp;Reddit, where popular posts dominate the front page on a merit basis, but it could be used maliciously to embarrass or play pranks on friends – only time will tell. Facebook is planning on emphasizing its mobile platform in 2013, and it will be interesting to see if the Promoted Posts feature will be included in its mobile plans. In the company’s most recent earnings report, Facebook said mobile ad revenue accounts for 23 percent of its total ad revenue. To contact the editor, e-mail: editor@ibtimes.com
Jernej Prodnik

Aaron Swartz files reveal how FBI tracked internet activist | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...i-tracked-classified-documents

internet activist guardian political communication internet activism activism aaron swartz fbi surveillance surveillance society big brother

shared by Jernej Prodnik on 24 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Aaron Swartz files reveal how FBI tracked internet activist Firedoglake blogger Daniel Wright publishes once-classified FBI documents that show extent of agency's investigation into Swartz
  • Amanda Holpuch guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 February 2013 22.42 GMT
  • A blogger has published once-classified FBI files that show how the agency tracked and collected information on internet activist Aaron Swartz. Swartz, who killed himself in January aged 26, had previously requested his files and posted them on his blog, but some new documents and redactions are included in the files published by Firedoglake blogger Daniel Wright.Wright was given 21 of 23 declassified documents, thanks to a rule that declassifies FBI files on the deceased. Wright said that he was told the other two pages of documents were not provided because of freedom of information subsections concerning privacy, "sources and methods," and that can "put someone's life in danger."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The FBI's files concern Swartz's involvement in accessing the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (Pacer) documents. In pursuit of their investigation, the FBI had collected his personal information and was surveilling an Illinois address where he had his IP address registered. Aaron H. Swartz FBI File by Daniel Wright
  • One page reads: "Washington Field Office requests that the North RA attempt to locate Aaron Swartz, his vehicles, drivers license information and picture, and others. Since Swartz is the potential subject of an ongoing investigation, it is requested that Swartz not be approached by agents." The FBI also collected information from his social networking profiles, including Facebook and Linkedin. The latter proved to be a catalog of his many notable accomplishments, which include being a co-founder of Reddit, a founder of a website to improve the government, watchdog.net and as metadata adviser at Creative Commons.
  • Information from a New York Times article about his Pacer hack was also included in the files, though strangely, since the article can still be read online, the name of the article's other subject, Carl Malamud, was blocked out.Hacking collective Anonymous released a State Department database Monday in memory of Swartz. The files included employees' personal information such as addresses, phone number and emails.
Jan Keček

Smartphone operating systems: Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...s-bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed

smartphone ipraktikum internet networking

shared by Jan Keček on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • IF YOU have a new smartphone, it is almost certainly either an Apple iPhone or one of the many devices that runs on Google’s Android operating system. According to IDC, a research firm, more than 90% of the 228m smartphones shipped in the last quarter of 2012 belonged to one of the two dominant species. Android is the bigger bea
  • st. Its share has grown as the smartphone market has boomed, to about 70%.
  • Most Windows smartphones are made by Finland’s Nokia, which dropped its own plans for a new system when it threw in its lot with the American software giant. BlackBerry, a Canadian company formerly called Research In Motion, hopes to recover lost glories with BlackBerry 10, which appeared in January after much delay.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Mozilla, a non-profit organisation best known for Firefox, a web browser, unveiled plans to bring a smartphone operating system to market. Called Firefox OS, it has the backing of 18 mobile operators based in countries from Asia to Latin America.
  • One reason for the challengers’ optimism is that a lot of ground is unoccupied.
  • BlackBerry and Microsoft have the advantage of familiarity; 80m people use BlackBerrys. Companies’ information-technology departments trust them as secure. Microsoft hopes that Windows’ dominance of personal computers can be transferred to mobiles. With that in mind, all new Windows devices, on desks, on laps or in hands, have the same look, with “tiles” for touching, not clicking.
  • Whereas most applications on Apple and Android devices have been written for those systems, Firefox OS uses open standards. In principle, apps based on it can run on any device connected to the web.
petra funtek

ScienceDirect.com - International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - A new look at sof... - 1 views

www.sciencedirect.com.nukweb.nuk.uni-lj.si/...S107158191100125X

shared by petra funtek on 11 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Soft lifting refers to the process whereby a legally licensed software program is installed or copied in violation of its licensing agreement. Previous research on this pervasive kind of unethical computer use has mainly focused on the determinants of this unethical act, which are rooted in personal, economic, technological, cultural, socio-political, or legal domains. However, little is known about the symbolic power that soft lifting has on the sense of self. Based on recent advances in behavioral priming, we hypothesized that soft lifting can influence the signals one sends to oneself; more specifically, soft lifting may prime individuals to experience an inauthentic sense of self, which, in turn, prompts further unethical behavior. In Study 1, we showed that participants, primed with the memory of a recent soft lifting experience, cheated more than participants recalling a recent experience of purchasing authentic software or than control participants. Moreover, feelings of inauthenticity mediated the priming effect of soft lifting on dishonest behavior. In Study 2, participants primed with soft lifting showed a greater willingness to purchase a wide range of counterfeit products over authentic products. Besides those antecedents or correlates of soft lifting already identified in the literature, educators should pay more attention to the negative impact of soft lifting on the self-images of users, which may go beyond computer-related behaviors. Priming may provide a new direction for HCI researchers to examine the impact of computer-use-related factors on users' perceptions, motivations, and behaviors.
donnamariee

Technology and productivity: The hollow promise of the iEconomy | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...technology-and-productivity

tech ieconomy

shared by donnamariee on 02 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Apple is the most creative, innovative and envied technology company of our time,
  • spring of 2000,
  • Cisco and its ilk as the internet transformed the economy.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • If fact there is little sign in the data that machines are displacing humans any faster than usual
  • Perhaps because of uncertainty, though that’s a poor explanation for a phenomenon occurring globally.
  • How to put a price on the contribution of Facebook or Twitter to the Arab spring?
  • IN THE battle between David Einhorn and Apple over the latter's $137 billion cash hoard lies a deeper lesson about the outlook for the economy. Mr Einhorn, an activist investor,&nbsp;says Apple clings to its money out of a “Depression mentality”. Perhaps. But the more mundane explanation is that Apple, like many of the world's big companies today, is generating more cash from its existing product line than it can usefully plough back into new projects.
  • Today, we all know Apple’s products, and a lot of us own one. Yet it is hard to identify the impact they or any of today's social-media giants have had on productivity. I was at first delighted with the convenience and freedom to read documents, check Twitter and search the web on the iPad mini I got in December, but it occurred to me recently that this was at best an incremental improvement over doing it on my BlackBerry or laptop. It also provides me with many more ways to waste time. As Tom Toles, the Washington Post’s cartoonist, puts it:
  • No doubt some of those YouTube videos were being watched over Apple products. Not that I blame Apple for Penney’s culture (after all, Google owns YouTube), but it is a reminder that the social-media revolution has been a mixed blessing. Yahoo at one time stood atop the Internet but the ability of its workers to do their job from anywhere may be backfiring on productivity
  • are genuine benefits of social media and the related hardware. In its first few decades the computer/internet revolution re-engineered business processes, enabling companies to interact with each other and customers in more ways at lower cost than ever, producing measurable, bankable results. Now, it’s leading to brand-new consumer products, many of whose &nbsp;benefits are unmeasured or unmeasurable.
inesmag

How to keep your privacy online | Ask Jack | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 2 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...t-privacy-web-browsers-cookies

website privacy google network

shared by inesmag on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • I would like my browsing and Google searches to be private. I don't want targeted advertising and I don't want to feel that anonymous companies are harvesting my clicks to learn all about me.
  • When the web was young, and a lot less shiny, web pages were fixed (static) and – barring browser quirks – everybody saw much the same thing. Today, much of the web is dynamic, which means that what you see has been adapted or possibly constructed on the fly just for you.
  • From your point of view, the advantage is that the websites you visit will be personalised to suit your needs and tastes. From the website's point of view, the advantage is that it can also personalise its prices and advertising to try to suit your needs and tastes, and increase your propensity to click and buy.
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  • On the web, the rule is: if you're not paying, then you are what's being sold.
  • Probably the simplest way to reduce personalisation is to use an anonymising service. Instead of accessing the web directly, you access it via a third-party proxy server, so your that requests are mixed in with thousands of others. These services usually allow you to control cookies, turn JavaScript on and off, withhold "referrer details" and so on.
  • Nonetheless, it's often useful to have access to an anonymous proxy service, and everybody should find one they like. Examples include The Cloak, Megaproxy, Proxify and ID Zap. There are also networked open source privacy systems such as Tor and I2P.
  • Google also tracks your progress across hundreds of thousands of websites via Google Analytics. To opt out of this, install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on (Beta), which Google offers for Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera. However, some sites use different analytics software or track visitors in other ways you will be unaware of. Ghostery may help reduce these.
  • Finally, Facebook Connect is a potential privacy problem because it "allows users to 'connect' their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site".
  • In general, the more you do online – social networking, cloud computing etc – the more your privacy and security are at risk. Reducing that risk involves effort and inconvenience, so it's up to you to find an acceptable compromise
Blaž Gobec

SXSW 2011: The internet is over | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...sxsw-2011-internet-online

sxsw future guardian trends internet over

shared by Blaž Gobec on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • After three days he found it: the boundary between 'real life' and 'online' has disappeared
  • If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won't, of&nbsp;course, because they'll be too&nbsp;busy playing with the teleportation console
  • If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they're doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed. You're still creating the web, but without the conscious need to do so. "Our phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications,"
  • Videogame designers, the logic goes, have become the modern world's leading experts on how to keep users excited, engaged and committed: the success of the games industry proves that, whatever your personal opinion of Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft.
  • Three billion person-hours a week are spent gaming. Couldn't some of that energy be productively harnessed?
  • His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation when they fail.
  • A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like you've failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them strive for the high score?
  • "is an interactive technology inspired by snakes."
  • the internet is distracting if it stops you from doing what you really want to be doing; if it doesn't, it isn't. Similarly, warnings about "internet addiction" used to sound like grandparental cautions against the evils of rock music; scoffing at the very notion was a point of pride for those who identified themselves with the future. But you can develop a problematic addiction to anything: there's no reason to exclude the internet,
  • we come to treat ourselves, in subtle ways, like computers. We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation. But "we were not meant to operate as computers do," Schwartz says. "We are meant to pulse." When it comes to managin
  • g our own energy, he insists, we must replace a linear perspective with a cyclical one: "We live by the myth that the best way to get more work done is to work longer hours."
Blaž Gobec

Why Facebook's new Open Graph makes us all part of the web underclass | Technology | gu... - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...book-open-graph-web-underclass

facebook plans graph opengraph underclass

shared by Blaž Gobec on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • ou're not paying for your presence on the web, then you're
  • just a product being used by an organisation bigger than you
  • When you use a free web service you're the underclass. At best you're a guest. At worst you're a beggar, couchsurfing the web and scavenging for crumbs. It's a cliché but worth repeating: if you're not paying for it, you're aren't the customer, you're the product.
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  • Your individual account is probably worth very little to the service provider, so they'll have no qualms whatsoever with tinkering with the service or even making radical changes in their interests rather than yours. If you don't like it you're welcome to leave. You may well not be able to take your content and data with you, and even if you can, all your URLs will be broken.
  • if you really care about your site you need to run it on your own domain. You need to own your URLs. You'll have total control and no-one can take it away from you. You don't need anyone else. If you put the effort in up front it'll pay off in the long run.But it's no longer that simple.
  • Anyone who's ever run a website knows that building the site is one thing, but getting people to use it is quite another. The smaller your real-world presence the harder it is. If you're a national newspaper or a Hollywood star you probably won't have much trouble getting people to visit your website. If you're a self-employed plumber or an unknown blogger writing in your spare time, it's considerably harder.
  • Social networks have changed all that. Facebook and Twitter now wield enormous power over the web by giving their members ways to find and share information using tools that work in a social context.
  • Either way, your social network presence is more important than your own website.
  • But increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to starve.
  • es, that's nearly 34,000 new Facebook apps created in one day by customers of just one hosting company.
  • What Facebook is doing is very different. When it records our activity away from the Facebook site it's a third party to the deal. It doesn't need this data to run its own services.
  • orst o
  • all, the way Facebook collects and uses our data is both unpredictable and opaque. Its technology and policies move so quickly you'd need to be a technical and legal specialist and spend an inordinate amount of time researching Facebook's activities on an ongoing basis to have any hope of understanding what they're doing with your data.
Maj Krek

Kill the Internet-and Other Anti-SOPA Myths | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...rnet-and-other-anti-sopa-myths

internet myths SOPA nation

shared by Maj Krek on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • in the wake of protests by dozens of websites and large numbers of their users, as well as a virtually unanimous chorus of criticism from leading progressive voices and outlets, including Michael Moore, Cenk Uygur, Keith Olbermann, Alternet, Daily Kos, MoveOn and many people associated with Occupy Wall Street. Judging by the fervor of the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests, a casual observer might think the advocates of the anti-piracy bills were in the same moral league as the torturers at Abu Ghraib.
  • But before we celebrate this “populist” victory, it’s worth remembering that the defeat of SOPA and PIPA was also a victory for the enormously powerful tech industry, which almost always beats the far smaller creative businesses in legislative disputes. (Google alone generated more than $37 billion in 2011, more than double the revenue of all record companies, major and indie combined.)
  • One example of anti-SOPA rhetorical over-reach was a tendency by some to invent sinister motives for the sponsors. On his usually brilliant show The Young Turks, Uygur said that SOPA’s sponsors were “pushing for a monopoly for the MPAA and to kill their competition on the Internet.” This is untrue. They wanted to kill those entities that steal their movies and make money off them, either directly or indirectly. There really is a difference
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  • that stopped allowing children to put up their own drawings of characters like Mickey Mouse because of fear of copyright lawsuits. Examples such as this, or of a theoretical risk of parents being charged for the right to have kids sing “Happy Birthday”, are demagogic. The underlying issue is scale. There is a profound moral difference between loaning a friend a book and posting, without permission, the content of bestsellers for commercial gain—and people and legislators ought to take that distinction into account.
  • since iTunes and Amazon and are surviving, Napster’s original model was legally killed and Kim Dotcom was apprehended, no new laws are needed. The status quo may be what we end up with, but that doesn’t make it inevitable or right. Human beings have created the piracy problem and although, like any kind of crime, society can’t eliminate it entirely, we can decide whether or not to seriously try. &nbsp;
  • What is good for Google and Facebook is not always going to be what’s best for the 99 percent. (And of course Microsoft and Apple et al. are extremely aggressive when it comes to protecting their intellectual property rights).
  • on the content of some of the Kool-Aid that has recently been served and help swing the pendulum back, if only a little, in a direction in which intellectual property can be nourished. Otherwise, we will be complicit in accelerating the trend of the last decade, in which those who write code get richly rewarded, while those who write the music, poetry, drama and journalism that are being encoded have to get day jobs.
  • To be sure, the legislators who crafted the ill-fated bills and the film industry lobbyists who supported them have little to be proud of.
  • In a widely viewed anti-SOPA/PIPA speech on Ted.com, Internet philosopher Clay Shirky similarly attributed dark motives to the studios. The targets are not Google and Yahoo
  • If he means a friend sharing Marianne Faithfull’s version of &amp;ldquo;Visions of Johanna&amp;rdquo; with me on Facebook, then the accusation is absurd.
  • ek in his 25,000-square-foot compound surrounded by a fleet of Merced
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