Anit-Social Media

Social Media is

Facebook and Twitter The Pathological Problem

Twitter and Facebook don't connect people – they isolate them from reality...

Guardian The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness, according to a leading American sociologist.

"A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological," MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.

Turkle's book, published in the UK next month, has caused a sensation in America, which is usually more obsessed with the merits of social networking. She appeared last week on Stephen Colbert's late-night comedy show, The Colbert Report. When Turkle said she had been at funerals where people checked their iPhones, Colbert quipped: "We all say goodbye in our own way."

Turkle's thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.


Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US

The list of attacks on social media is a long one and comes from all corners of academia and popular culture. A recent bestseller in the US, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, suggested that use of the internet was altering the way we think to make us less capable of digesting large and complex amounts of information, such as books and magazine articles. The book was based on an essay that Carr wrote in the Atlantic magazine.

It was just as emphatic and was headlined: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Another strand of thought in the field of cyber-scepticism is found in The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov. He argues that social media has bred a generation of "slacktivists". It has made people lazy and enshrined the illusion that clicking a mouse is a form of activism equal to real world donations of money and time.

Other books include The Dumbest Generation by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein – in which he claims "the intellectual future of the US looks dim"– and We Have Met the Enemy by Daniel Akst, which describes the problems of self-control in the modern world, of which the proliferation of communication tools is a key component.

Turkle's book, however, has sparked the most debate so far. It is a cri de coeur for putting down the BlackBerry, ignoring Facebook and shunning Twitter. "We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us," she writes... the social media generation, suggesting that Facebook was created by people who failed to fit in with the real world.

Is this creating the uncivil culture that has no empathy? 
Fellow critics point to numerous incidents to back up their argument. Recently, media coverage of the death in Brighton of Simone Back focused on a suicide note she had posted on Facebook that was seen by many of her 1,048 "friends" on the site. Yet none called for help – instead they traded insults with each other on her Facebook wall. Read on at Guardian

Computer Virus's Turn 25

"Happy anniversary Brain Virus, the first bit of malware capable of infecting a DOS-based PC. Back in those relatively innocent times, the brothers actually embedded their real names and business address in the code and later told Time magazine they had written the virus to protect their medical software from piracy. Who knows what they were really thinking, but by all accounts the Brain Virus was relatively harmless. Twenty-five years later, most malware is anything but benign and cyber criminals pull off exploits the Alvi brothers never envisioned."
Read more of this story at Slashdot

Tweet Age Wasteland... world of the web

• 107 trillion emails were sent
• 89% of that email was spam.
• Domain Names: Over 202 million are already taken. *
• There are 1.97 billion internet users in the world. That's 14% more than last year. Asia has 825 million, Europe has 475 million, North America has 266 million.
• There are 152 million blogs
• There were 25 billion tweets sent.
• Facebook had 600 million members.

There are a lot more numbers in Pingdom's post.

GOV on Facebook

"Congress was broadcast live on Facebook for the first time in history. Now you can waste time and not get work done by watching Congress waste time and not get work done." —Jimmy Fallon

Lost and sad generation of digitally diluted.

Hope for Change in Microsoft

Apparently MS is getting tired of getting kicked around by IOS and Android... Can they catch up at this point? 

CES: Microsoft Hacks Up Next OS as SOC

With the Pre-CES Keynote made by [Steve Ballmer], the announcement came that the next iteration of their operating system being available in SOC specific form.  This will lead to windows being able to run a very diverse hardware set in a much more efficient manner than it does right now.  Microsoft displayed 4 different versions of what the next generation prototypes are from 4 different manufacturers but there has been no work done yet on the GUI for SOC as [Ballmer] was very clear to mention that more than a couple of times. 

The picture below is Intel's iteration of System on a Chip.

Read more at HackAday

How you can't avoid online tracking....

Where ever, where ever you are... I will follow

Even after you set your browser to delete existing cookies and ban new ones, download super-cookies and use the tools created by pro-privacy programmers, there's one data-gathering technique that you simply cannot avoid. Your computer has hundreds of settings that control things like the main interface language (English, Korean, etc.), sound and screen resolution settings, and the color schemes people set for their Microsoft Word documents.

As you scroll the Internet, most websites automatically take snapshots of your settings. That information, combined with data on where you connect to the internet, can be used to track your movements around the web and build a profile about each visitor. To see how effective this is at tracing individual users, I ran a test designed by Eckerseley called Panopticlick on my own computer. I've only had this computer for about a month, so I haven't even taken the time to open my control panel and customize the settings for the track pad, keyboard, screen, etc. (The program doesn't search for computers or beacons on your computer.)

Nevertheless, Panopticlick found 20 bits of identifying information on my Mac. Using those bits, it could tell that I was a unique user and not one of the 1.3 million people who ran the test before me.

How to avoid online tracking. (Hint: you can't.)

FCC approves controversial ‘Net Neutrality’ regulations

RawStory -  Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), who has championed "Net Neutrality" in the past, said the FCC's proposed rules would actually "destroy" the principle of "Net Neutrality."

The rules authored by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski would require ISPs to allow their customers to have access all legal online content, applications and services over their wired networks and prohibit unreasonable network discrimination.

But the plan would also allow for a greater fractioning of the Internet and data rationing on mobile and wired networks, according to analysis of the policies. Major network stakeholders like Verizon and AT&T would be able to sell bandwidth in capped tiers, with overage charges for users who download too much information, and certain types of data traffic like peer-to-peer file transfers could be banned altogether.

If they pass and telecoms are allowed to move forward with their plans, "the Internet as we know it would cease to exist," Sen. Franken concluded in an editorial published by Huffington Post.

"The FCC will be meeting to discuss those regulations, and we must make sure that its members understand that allowing corporations to control the Internet is simply unacceptable." Read more at RawStory

WTF has a new meaning Zuckerberg

Society FAIL - Zuckerberg, TIME Magazine's Person of the Year

WTF!... Welcome To Facebook

new cloud computing looks like a plan "to push people into careless computing"

Guardian...making extensive use of cloud computing was "worse than stupidity" because it meant a loss of control of data, warns Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the operating system GNU.

Now he says he is increasingly concerned about the release by Google of its ChromeOS operating system, which is based on GNU/Linux and designed to store the minimum possible data locally. Instead it relies on a data connection to link to Google's "cloud" of servers, which are at unknown locations, to store documents and other information.

The risks include loss of legal rights to data if it is stored on a company's machine's rather than your own, Stallman points out: "In the US, you even lose legal rights if you store your data in a company's machines instead of your own. The police need to present you with a search warrant to get your data from you; but if they are stored in a company's server, the police can get it without showing you anything. They may not even have to give the company a search warrant."

...He sees a creeping problem: "I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute. The US government may try to encourage people to place their data where the US government can seize it without showing them a search warrant, rather than in their own property. However, as long as enough of us continue keeping our data under our own control, we can still do so. And we had better do so, or the option may disappear."

"I'd say the problem is in the nature of the job ChromeOS is designed to do. Namely, encourage you to keep your data elsewhere, and do your computing elsewhere, instead of doing it in your own computer."

Please read full at Guardian

2 Reasons to get Internet Explorer 9

Steve Wozniak: 'We've lost a lot of control'

CNN -  "All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control," he said. "We can't turn off our internet; we can't turn off our smartphones; we can't turn off our computers."

"You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it's not God," he quipped.

Earlier that day, Wozniak said the biggest obstacle with the growing prevalence of technology is that our personal devices are unreliable.

"Little things that work one day; they don't work the next day," he said enthusiastically, waving his hands. "I think it's much harder today than ever before to basically know that something you have ... is going to work tomorrow."

Reciting an all-too-common living-room frustration, Wozniak told a story about the countless hours he spent trying to troubleshoot his media player, called Slingbox.

"There is no solution," Wozniak said of tech troubles. "Everything has a computer in it nowadays; everything with a computer is going to fail. The solution is: kill the people who invented these things," he said with a smile.

NPR on the future of the Internet, 1993

VIA boing2

17 years ago, Internet radio pioneer (and future rogue archivist) Carl Malamud and search engine inventor (and future Internet Archive founder) Brewster Kahle appeared on an historic segment of NPR's Science Friday to talk with Ira Flatow about the amazing future of the Internet.
Scientists from Xerox PARC helped them put this broadcast onto the Internet, and they even received call-ins from people on powerful Unix workstations at academic institutions with blazing-fast ISDN connections (which no doubt sent their sysadmins into a panic as the traffic across the campus routers spiked). Call-in guests asked how we'd manage the glut of information, how we'd figure out what was true, what you could do with your overstuffed email inbox, and, of course, how copyright would fare. Good times!

Science Friday, 1993: The Future of the Internet

Internet 2020

World’s Fastest Supercomputer… Is Now In China

Nvidia- Tianhe-1A, a new supercomputer designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops, making it the fastest system in the world today.

GOOD - how much data are we generating?

The World of Data We're Creating on the Internet

The Evolution of the Geek

The Evolution of the Geek by Flowtown (larger version)

[via Nerdist]

I, Product

I tweet, therefore I am...

You may think of yourself as a user of Google, Facebook or Amazon, but you are actually their product.

Forget 1984 and Brave New World. The men who wrote those books were dangerously naïve and not as prescient as we once believed. Instead of Big Brother looking after us, we're immersed in a dizzily delightful system that cares so much about us that it anticipates our every pleasure, like a giant planetary-class Vegas, an immense, inexhaustible Disney World. All we have to do is to preserve the illusion that we, "the users," have the power: in that ignorance, we can live happily ever after.

Sure, Google will provide you with search results, but they are not in the search business; they are in the advertising business. Their profits come from marketing firms that buy your behavior.

Similarly, Amazon is not in the book business, although they will send you the books you've ordered. They are in the personal information business.

The assets of modern web-based companies are the intimate profiles of those who "use" them, like you and me. Time to forget the nice pronouncements like "Do no evil" that accompany the wholesale destruction of privacy now taking place on the web, or rather within the walled gardens that companies like Facebook, Google and Apple are erecting around us on the web. Compared to them, the Chinese censors re-inventing their Great Wall are a bunch of sissies.

Well, who cares? Look at what we've gained: We now have access to unprecedented new riches. Movies and songs by the thousands; new "friends" by the hundreds; timely pieces of data by the millions. Our lives have become richer, more intelligent, more interesting.

The world moves on. You may have had privacy rights as a customer or a user but what makes you think you should retain those rights now that you're just a product?

Read More at the Boing2

No leads and no clue ;-)

"There is a War going on for Your Mind".

Whatever happens in Vegas

Dreaming of working tech support ...

Much love xkcd

The tech with that...

Wiretapping the Internet - To tech with IT all!

SCHNEIER On Monday, The New York Times reported that President Obama will seek sweeping laws enabling law enforcement to more easily eavesdrop on the internet. Technologies are changing, the administration argues, and modern digital systems aren't as easy to monitor as traditional telephones.

...Formerly reserved for totalitarian countries, this wholesale surveillance of citizens has moved into the democratic world as well. Governments like Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom are debating or passing laws giving their police new powers of internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell. More are passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain customer data in case they might need to be investigated later.

Obama isn't the first U.S. president to seek expanded digital eavesdropping. The 1994 (CLINTON) CALEA law required phone companies to build ways to better facilitate FBI eavesdropping into their digital phone switches. Since 2001, the National Security Agency has built substantial eavesdropping systems within the United States.

These laws are dangerous, both for citizens of countries like China and citizens of Western democracies. Forcing companies to redesign their communications products and services to facilitate government eavesdropping reduces privacy and liberty; that's obvious. But the laws also make us less safe. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in.

Any surveillance system invites both criminal appropriation and government abuse. Function creep is the most obvious abuse: New police powers, enacted to fight terrorism, are already used in situations of conventional nonterrorist crime. Internet surveillance and control will be no different.

Please read more from the SCHNEIER

Online... I am in the middle

Happy Binary Bday

www.exploringbinary.com/binary-dates-in-2010-and-2011

The Day The Data Died - Long live useless social networking

Wired "Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures."

Newbies attack Microsoft between 7000 and 9000 times per second.

"When hackers crash Windows in the course of developing malware, they'll often accidentally agree to send the virus code straight to Microsoft, according to senior security architect Rocky Heckman. 'It's amazing how much stuff we get.' Heckman also said Microsoft was a common target for people testing their attacks. 'The first thing [script kiddies] do is fire off all these attacks at Microsoft.com. On average we get attacked between 7000 and 9000 times per second.'" Read more at /.

Teens addicted to texting like Heroin

cbs3.com - Teenagers are becoming addicted to texting, according to a new study. In fact experts are saying being hooked on texting can be like being addicted to drugs.

Walking, sitting, it doesn't matter where it happens, teenagers seem to need to text. Statistics show 80 percent of all 15 to 18-year-olds own a cell phone. And the rate of texting has sky rocketed 600 percent in three years. The average teen sends 3,000 texts a month

40 Critical Windows Bugs used to hijack & infect PC's with malware

ComputerWorld About 40 different Windows applications contain a critical flaw that can be used by attackers to hijack PCs and infect them with malware, a security researcher said Wednesday through iTunes bug...

HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7 and creator of the open-source Metasploit penetration-testing toolkit. Moore did not reveal the names of the vulnerable applications or their makers, however. 

"The cat is out of the bag, this issue affects about 40 different apps, including the Windows shell,"

"Solving the flaw requires every affected vendor to produce a patch," he said. "

The bug in Apple in its iTunes... According to Apple, the bug does not affect Mac machines.

Moore confirmed that the flaw "applies to a wide range of Windows applications," and added that he stumbled across it while researching the Windows shortcut vulnerability, a critical bug that Microsoft acknowledged in July and patched on Aug. 2 using one of its rare "out of band" emergency updates.

Moore declined to name the applications that contain the bug or to go into great detail about the vulnerability. But he was willing to share some observations.

"The vector is slightly different between applications, but the end result is an attacker-supplied .dll being loaded after the user opens a 'safe' file type from a network share [either on the local network or the Internet]," Moore said in an e-mail reply to questions. "It is possible to force a user to open a file from the share, either through their Web browser or by abusing other applications, for example, Office documents with embedded content."

Some of what Moore described was reminiscent of the attacks using the Windows shortcut vulnerability. For instance, hackers were able to launch drive-by attacks exploiting the shortcut bug from malicious sites via WebDAV, and could embed their exploits into Office documents, which would presumably be delivered to victims as seemingly innocuous e-mail attachments.

His advice until the vulnerable applications are patched was also taken from Microsoft's shortcut bug playbook.

"Users can block outbound SMB [by blocking TCP ports] 139 and 445, and disable the WebDAV client [in Windows] to prevent these flaws from being exploited from outside of their local network," Moore recommended.

Both work-arounds were among those Microsoft told users they could apply if they were unable to apply the emergency update.

But although Microsoft was able to plug the shortcut hole with a patch for Windows, Moore was pessimistic that the company would be able to do the same with this vulnerability.

Please read full at ComputerWorld

National Park Service Says Tech Is Enabling Stupidity

SlashDot:
"The National Park Service... Last fall, a group of hikers in the Grand Canyon called in rescue helicopters three times by pressing the emergency button on their satellite location device. When rangers arrived the second time, the hikers complained that their water supply tasted salty. 'Because of having that electronic device, people have an expectation that they can do something stupid and be rescued,' said a spokeswoman for Grand Teton National Park. 'Every once in a while we get a call from someone who has gone to the top of a peak, the weather has turned and they are confused about how to get down and they want someone to personally escort them. The answer is that you are up there for the night.'"

History of the Internet (infographic)

Console owners are “most depressed and socially awkward”

The Harm Of Gaming: We Present The Facts
The perennial questions of the harm that games may be causing us and our children are extremely troubling. Every week seems to bring a new survey or study that demonstrates links between gaming and problematic behavior, with renowned psychologists, sociologists and publicists explaining to us what it is we need to be scared of. Over the last fifteen years I have been studying this data and reading these papers, and I am now ready to publish my findings. Below is the result of a decade-and-a-half's research, and I think will once and for all answer the questions every parent, teacher, child and teenager should be asking.

 

Grand Theft Auto Causes Marriages To Break Down

While no one is left in any doubt that playing Grand Theft Auto causes anyone under the age of 17 to become dangerously exposed to murder, the longer-term effects on adults have been less examined. As part of my research I thought to compare the sales of each GTA game with what the orce rate must have been when each came out. As you can see each new GTA game has been directly correlated with an increase in orces. While the graph may give the impression that GTA IV has caused fewer orces than Vice City or San Andreas, this game only came out in 2008, so most of the orces it has induced will still be going through the courts and awaiting completion. Expect to see this number soar in the next twelve months.

 

Owning Consoles More Serious Than Gun Crime

A lot of videogames include the use of guns. While these may not be real guns, but rather recreations made of pixels and polygons, it is obvious to anyone playing one of these "simulations" that it is in no meaningful way different from firing a real gun in a school. But it's far scarier than you might have first thought. Nearly twice as many Americans own gun-displaying consoles than those who own the types of guns that require a license and paperwork to purchase. No such paperwork is necessary when buying an Xbox, and yet still teenagers will kill each other in the streets.

Please read full from RockPaperShootGun
 

Social Media killing intimate relationships...

MSNBC -  ", over the last two decades there has been a three-fold increase in the number of Americans who report having no confidant," they added.

"Such findings suggest that despite increases in technology and globalization that would presumably foster social connections, people are becoming increasingly more socially isolated."

...got to love the irony that social networks and communication devices are creating the most anti-social environment the world has ever witnessed. 

temporal analytics engine

"goes beyond search" by "looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events."

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online "momentum" for any given event.

The "How People Use It" page on Recorded Future's website makes absolutely no attempt to hide The Creepy:

Research a person
Monitor news on public figures to...
Identify future travel plans; spot past travel trends and patterns
Search for communication with other individuals; graph their network
Monitor career history and announced job changes
Find quotations and sound bites in the news and blogs
Discover future and past strategic positioning
Uncover public political ties and family relationships

Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in 'Future' of Web Monitoring (Wired Danger Room blog)

Google Alarm Firefox add-on

Get notified when Google is monitoring your web browsing

Google Alarm shows notifications, plays sound effects and keeps running stats about the % of websites you've visit with Google bugs present. Stay alert – install Google Alarm today.

Try to look away

Google Bends Over for China

Washington Post-Google promised to "obey Chinese law" and avoid linking to material deemed a threat to national security or social stability, said Zhang Feng, director of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's Telecoms Development Department, at a news conference.

China renewed Google's Internet license after it pledged to obey censorship laws and stop automatically switching mainland users to its unfiltered Hong Kong site, an official said Tuesday.

It was Beijing's first public comment on its decision to allow Google to continue operating a China website following a public clash over censorship. The company closed its China search engine in March but still offers music and other services in China.

Looking for a few good IT

"US security officials say the country's cyberdefenses are not up to the challenge. In part, it's due to a severe shortage of computer security specialists and engineers with the skills and knowledge necessary to do battle against would-be adversaries. The protection of US computer systems essentially requires an army of cyberwarriors, but the recruitment of that force is suffering. 'We don't have sufficiently bright people moving into this field to support those national security objectives as we move forward in time,' says James Gosler

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How google works

Germans taking on Facebook and google privacy

SlashDot "Not only are Germany and Facebook not friends, they might end up opponents in a courtroom. Germany has begun legal action over privacy. A German data protection official accuses Facebook of illegally saving personal data of people who don't use the site and haven't given permission to access their private information. Germany, which has also launched an investigation into Google over its Street View mapping program, has some of the strictest privacy laws in the world."

Things 2dolist - Crack the "Cyber Command" logo

From da Boing2

The U.S. Military's new "Cyber Command" logo contains a hidden code. Noah Shachtman at Wired News says, "Help us crack it!"

Related reading today: Bruce Schneier says "The Threat of Cyberwar Has Been Grossly Exaggerated."

As usual I have to agree with Bruce...

AI - paradoxical mix of intelligence and stupidity

Boing2: While strong AI still lies safely beyond the Maes-Garreau horizon (a vanishing point, perpetually fifty years ahead) a host of important new developments in weak AI are poised to be commercialized in the next few years. But because these developments are a paradoxical mix of intelligence and stupidity, they defy simple forecasts, they resist hype. They are not unambiguously better, cheaper, or faster. They are something new. What are the implications of a car that adjusts its speed to avoid collisions … but occasionally mistakes the guardrail along a sharp curve as an oncoming obstacle and slams on the brakes? What will it mean when our computers know everything — every single fact, the entirety of human knowledge — but can only reason at the level of a cockroach?

I mention these specific examples — smart cars and massive knowledge-bases — because they came up repeatedly in my recent conversations with AI researchers. These experts expressed little doubt that both technologies will reach the market far sooner, and penetrate it more pervasively, than most people realize.

But confidence to the point of arrogance is practically a degree requirement for computer scientists. Which, actually, is another reason why these particular developments caught my interest: for all their confidence about the technologies per se, every researcher I spoke to admitted they had no clue - but were intensely curious - how these developments will affect society. - "new developments in AI"

Prince Says Internet Is Over

SlashDot - "According to the artist currently known as Prince, 'The internet's completely over.' At least that what he says in an interview with the British newspaper Mirror. Quoting Prince: 'The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you."

Google has only indexed .004% of internet?

\

MAC - the truth hurts

Code of America Government 1.0 -- in binary

Boing2

The Code for America project is celebrating July 4 in style, with a set of posters quoting the founders of the USA Government 1.0 in handy binary form. Print and display with pride! Some Fourth of July Decorations

Permanently Delete Your Account on Popular Websites

Your computer is a tool, do not become the tool of your computer.

Smashing - Take back your life... delete them all.

• You can find more information on deleting your Twitter account here.
• Official instructions for deleting your myspace account can be found here.
• As far as social networking sites go, LinkedIn probably has the most straight-forward account closure process found here.
• Full details on deleting your Google account can be found on the Google's Help page "Deleting: Your Google Account".
• Closing your Windows Live account is actually surprisingly easy.

You just got 30 hours a week of your life back... your welcome ;-)

Why Engineers Don't Like Twitter

Because most engineers are smart ;-)
/."A recent EE Times survey of engineers found that 85% don't use Twitter.
More than half indicated that the statement 'I don't really care what you had for breakfast' best sums up their feelings about it.

... authors analyzed the content of tweets during a recent World Cup game, finding 76% of them to be useless.
 "Out of 1,000 tweets with the #worldcup hashtag during the game, only 16 percent were legitimate news and 7.6 percent were deemed 'legitimate conversation' — which leaves 6 percent spam, 24 percent self-promotion, about 17 percent re-tweets,
and a whopping 29 percent of useless observation (like this ;-).
Read more at /.

Home Computers Equal Lower Test Scores

/. "Politicians and education activists have long sought to eliminate the 'digital divide' by guaranteeing universal access to home computers, and in some cases to high-speed Internet service. But a Duke University study finds these efforts would actually widen the achievement gap in math and reading scores. Students in grades five through eight, particularly those from disadvantaged families, tend to post lower scores once these technologies arrive in their homes."

Internet 'kill switch' proposed for US

CNET A new US Senate Bill would grant the President far-reaching emergency powers to seize control of, or even shut down, portions of the internet.
The legislation says that companies such as broadband providers, search engines or software firms that the US Government selects "shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed" by the Department of Homeland Security. Anyone failing to comply would be fined.

That emergency authority would allow the Federal Government to "preserve those networks and assets and our country and protect our people," Joe Lieberman, the primary sponsor of the measure and the chairman of the Homeland Security committee, told reporters on Thursday. Lieberman is an independent senator from Connecticut who meets with the Democrats.

Due to there being few limits on the US President's emergency power, which can be renewed indefinitely, the densely worded 197-page Bill (PDF) is likely to encounter stiff opposition.

TechAmerica, probably the largest US technology lobby group, said it was concerned about "unintended consequences that would result from the legislation's regulatory approach" and "the potential for absolute power". And the Center for Democracy and Technology publicly worried that the Lieberman Bill's emergency powers "include authority to shut down or limit internet traffic on private systems."

The idea of an internet "kill switch" that the President could flip is not new. A draft Senate proposal that ZDNet Australia's sister site CNET obtained in August allowed the White House to "declare a cybersecurity emergency", and another from Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) would have explicitly given the government the power to "order the disconnection" of certain networks or websites.

A new cybersecurity bureaucracy

Lieberman's proposal would form a powerful and extensive new Homeland Security bureaucracy around the NCCC, including "no less" than two deputy directors, and liaison officers to the Defense Department, Justice Department, Commerce Department, and the Director of National Intelligence. (How much the NCCC director's duties would overlap with those of the existing assistant secretary for infrastructure protection is not clear.)
The NCCC also would be granted the power to monitor the "security status" of private sector websites, broadband providers and other internet components. Lieberman's legislation requires the NCCC to provide "situational awareness of the security status" of the portions of the internet that are inside the United States — and also those portions in other countries that, if disrupted, could cause significant harm.

Read full at CNET

Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price

NY Times Thinks the gadgets are dumbing em down... you are correct.

...the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family. His wife, Brenda, complains, "It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment." 

This is your brain on computers. 

Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this barrage puts on the brain. The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.

"Throughout evolutionary history, a big surprise would get everyone's brain thinking," said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford. "But we've got a large and growing group of people who think the slightest hint that something interesting might be going on is like catnip. They can't ignore it."

...researchers were unsure whether the muddied multitaskers were simply prone to distraction and would have had trouble focusing in any era. But she added that the idea that information overload causes distraction was supported by more and more research.

...multitaskers took longer than non-multitaskers to switch among tasks, like differentiating vowels from consonants and then odd from even numbers. The multitaskers were shown to be less efficient at juggling problems.

Other tests at Stanford, an important center for research in this fast-growing field, showed multitaskers tended to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work.

The results also illustrate an age-old conflict in the brain, one that technology may be intensifying. A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated.

Read on at NY Times

NOTE 2 SuperTechs: research shows some people can more easily juggle multiple information streams. These "supertaskers" represent less than 3 percent of the population, according to scientists.

Anonymous proxy server who is running it? And why?

FYI newbies-  Many technologies that amateur anonymity fetishists are attracted to are actually designed to harvest information.

If you wanted a concentrated haul of the most interesting information what would you do?
You would establish a honeypot: a service (free or paid) that purported to provide an anonymous web browsing/email capability. Who knows what people might get up to if they thought nobody was looking? That, of course, is the idea with honeypots.

Cryptogon - Nerds with too much time on their hands get up to all kinds nonsense.
Do they set up anonymous proxy servers and open base stations just to see what people do with them? Yes.
Do criminals do it to find out personal information about you? Yes.

So even if the proxy or base station you're on isn't run by the NSA, who is running it? And why?

High-Traffic Colluding Tor Routers in Washington, D.C., and the Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity It's an old essay, but it has held up remarkably well.

Wired WikiLeaks, the controversial whistleblowing site that exposes secrets of governments and corporations, bootstrapped itself with a cache of documents obtained through an internet eavesdropping operation by one of its activists, according to a new profile of the organization's founder.

The activist siphoned more than a million documents ... supposedly stolen by Chinese hackers or spies who were using the Tor network to transmit the data, were the basis for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's assertion in 2006 that his organization had already "received over one million documents from 13 countries" before his site was launched, according to the article in The New Yorker.

Only a small portion of those intercepted documents were ever posted on WikiLeaks, but the new report is the first indication that some of the data and documents on WikiLeaks did not come from sources who intended for the documents to be seen or posted. It also explains an enduring mystery of WikiLeaks' launch: how the organization was able to amass a collection of secret documents before its website was open for business.

Tor is a sophisticated privacy tool endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistleblowers and human rights workers to communicate with journalists, among other uses. In its search for government and corporate secrets traveling through the Tor network, it's conceivable that WikiLeaks may have also vacuumed up sensitive information from human rights workers who did not want their data seen by outsiders.

The interception may have legal implications, depending on what country the activist was based in.
In the United States, the surreptitious interception of electronic communication is generally a violation of federal law..." Read more from Wired

Wonder why nothing is getting done? Just checking...

Life of a "real hacker" - not fot TV

Canada Spending $1B on Security for G8/G20 Summit in June

From the Bruce - Think of all the actual security you can buy for that money. 

The Canadian government disclosed Tuesday that the total price tag to police the elite Group of Eight meeting in Muskoka, as well as the bigger-tent Group of 20 summit starting a day later in downtown Toronto, has already climbed to more than $833-million. It said it’s preparing to spend up to $930-million for the three days of meetings that start June 25.

That price tag is more than 20 times the total reported cost for the April, 2009, G20 summit in Britain, with the government estimating a cost of $30-million, and seems much higher than security costs at previous summits ­ the Gleneagles G8 summit in Scotland, 2005, was reported to have spent $110-million on security, while the estimate for the 2008 G8 gathering in Japan was $381-million.

These numbers are crazy. There simply isn't any justification for this kind of spending.

Amazing...

Google phasing out Windows

Digital Disconnect Causing Dramatic Drop In Empathy

"Several news sources report that today's college students show a precipitous drop in empathy (here's MSNBC's take). The study shows that students since the year 2000 had 40% less empathy than those 20 and 30 years before them. The article lays out a laundry list of culprits, from child-rearing practices and the self-help movement, to video games and social media, to a free-market economy and income inequality. There's also a link so you can test your very own level of narcissism. Let's hope the Slashdot crowd doesn't break the empathy counter on the downside."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Is "generation me" all about me?

"Many people see the current group of college students — sometimes called 'Generation Me ' — as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history," said Konrath, 

Are today's young people really more self-centered?

Konrath's colleague graduate student Edward O'Brien added, "It's not surprising that this growing emphasis on the self is accompanied by a corresponding devaluation of others.”

The role of media Even so, Konrath and O'Brien suggest several reasons for the lower empathy they found, including the ever-increasing exposure to media in the current generation.

"Compared to 30 years ago, the average American now is exposed to three times as much nonwork-related information," Konrath said. "

The rise in social media could also play a role.

"The ease of having 'friends' online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don't feel like responding to others' problems, a behavior that could carry over offline," O'Brien said.

"I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening," said one person in the study.  "I feel like most people these days are in a similar situation, for between having a Blackberry, a laptop, a television, and an iPod, people have become unable to shed their media skin."

In the new study... students wrote more than 110,000 words: in aggregate, about the same number of words as a 400-page novel.

"We were surprised by how many students admitted that they were 'incredibly addicted' to media," "But we noticed that what they wrote at length about was how they hated losing their personal connections. Going without media meant, in their world, going without their friends and family." 

Building upon that observation, an alternative explanation is that the students may have identified the "media" as what they were craving, but were actually missing the social connections afforded by the media. In other words, the students were "addicted" to the social ties — friendships and relationships — with others.

"The students did complain about how boring it was go anywhere and do anything without being plugged into music on their MP3 players," said Moeller.

"And many commented that it was almost impossible to avoid the TVs on in the background at all times in their friends' rooms. But what they spoke about in the strongest terms was how their lack of access to text messaging, phone calling, instant messaging, e-mail and Facebook, meant that they couldn't connect with friends who lived close by, much less those far away."

"Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. 

"When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life.

Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable." 

Very few students in the study reported that they regularly watched news on television or read a local or national newspaper... They also didn't mention checking mainstream media news sites or listening to radio news while commuting in their cars. Yet student after student demonstrated knowledge of specific news stories.

How did they get the information? 

In a disaggregated way, and not typically from the news outlet that broke or committed resources to a story... "Students expressed tremendous anxiety about being cut-off from information,”

"But most of all they care about being cut off from that instantaneous flow of information that comes from all sides and does not seem tied to any single device or application or news outlet."

That's the real takeaway of this study for journalists: students showed no significant loyalty to a news program, news personality or even news platform. Students have only a casual relationship to the originators of news, and in fact rarely distinguished between news and more general information. 

...often by following the story via "unconventional" outlets, such as through text messages, their e-mail accounts, Facebook and Twitter.

Please read full here