Artist and film-maker, Hito Steyerl, asks us to stand shoulder to shoulder with our digital equivalents. Digital images are Things (like you and me) - a plethora of compressed, corrupted representations pushed and pulled through increasingly policed and capitalised information networks. If 80% of all internet traffic^* is SPAM - a liberated excess withdrawn^** from accepted channels of communication - perhaps it is in The Poor Image we find our closest kin? [more inside]
posted by 0bvious on Feb 16, 2012 - 5 comments

On November 22, 2011, TEDxBrussels held an all day event whose theme was: "A Day in the Deep Future." Speakers were asked to try and contemplate what life will be like for mankind in 50 years. Overview. [more inside]
posted by zarq on Dec 28, 2011 - 29 comments

"Over the next five years more and more things will act on our behalf and encourage us to do things based on our actions. " How the Internet of Things will change the world.
posted by cashman on May 26, 2011 - 57 comments

The Exterminator’s Want-Ad, a short story by Bruce Sterling, is a twisted first-person missive by a former K-Street lobbyist making his way in a post-collapse socialist regime of sharing. It's part of the Shareable Futures series of short stories and speculative essays at Shareable.net. [Via]
posted by homunculus on Jun 24, 2010 - 41 comments

Cybersyn (or Synco, in Spanish) was computer network constructed in 1970 by an English/Chilean team headed by cyberneticist Stafford Beer (his papers). Cybersyn was an electronic nervous system for the Chilean economy, linking together mines, factories and so on, to better manage production and give workers a clear idea of what was in demand and where. The network was destroyed by the army after the 1973 coup. Later that year Stafford Beer drew upon the lessons of Cybersyn to write Fanfare for Effective Freedom, a eulogy for Allende and Cybersyn, and Designing Freedom, a series of six lectures he gave for CBC, outlining his ideas. Besides the first link in this post, the best place to start is this Guardian article from 2003. If you want to go more in-depth, read Eden Medina's Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile. And if nothing else, just take a look at the amazing Cybersyn control room.
posted by Kattullus on Mar 21, 2010 - 32 comments

"the scale-free network modeing paradigm is largely inconsistent with the engineered nature of the Internet..." For a decade it's been conventional wisdom that the Internet has a scale-free topology, in which the number of links emanating from a site obeys a power law. In other words, the Internet has a long tail; compared with a completely random network, its structure is dominated by a few very highly connected nodes, while the rest of the web consists of a gigantic list of sites attached to hardly anything. Among its other effects, this makes the web highly vulnerable to epidemics. The power law on the internet has inspired a vast array of research by computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. According to an article in this month's Notices of the American Math Society, it's all wrong. How could so many scientists make this kind of mistake? Statistician Cosma Shalizi explains how people see power laws when they aren't there: "Abusing linear regression makes the baby Gauss cry."
posted by escabeche on Apr 23, 2009 - 30 comments

Big Brother 101 -- Could your social networks brand you an enemy of the state? (Popular Science Mag) And one staffer finds out it might--due to a connection to the Buffalo Six. Think 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with tapping and surveillance and worse at the other end.
posted by amberglow on Sep 22, 2006 - 15 comments

Visualising Networks is fun. So are Monkey Networks (ppt). Dolphin Networks (pdf). Ant networks can aide network design. Does the Brain Work Like the Internet? Can the Internet Think? The Social Superorganism and its Global Brain? Webog Inequality. A City Is Not a Tree. The I Ching, a network of 384 pathways. The Whole, the Parts, and the Holes. Heterarchy, the secret of Japan, Inc.? Sense/non-sense;hierarchy/heterarchy... Heterachy and Heirarchy: Two Complimenatary categorises of description (pdf). Summary: "Our most significant problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking at which we produced them." (attributed to Einstein)
posted by MetaMonkey on Jan 26, 2006 - 5 comments

NSA gets patent on locating the physical location of web surfers "There are still many advantages to knowing the physical location of a party one is dealing with across electronically switched networks. For example, in the realm of advertising, knowing the geographic distribution of sales or inquires can be used to measure the effectiveness of advertising across geographic regions." Advertising, mmm hmmm.
posted by jeremias on Oct 13, 2005 - 25 comments

WiFi Against Bush is an interesting twist on viral marketing aimed at our neighborhoods and the occassional warchalker — let everyone in within range of your router know what you _really_ think of the President.

Via the venerable Shifted Librarian.
posted by silusGROK on May 12, 2004 - 11 comments

Community Memory : the world's first public computerized bulletin board system, set up in 1972 with an ASR-33 Teletype machine. Also, please welcome Benway, possibly the world's first net personality (beating Miguel and Quonsar by a couple of weeks). More on Benway in Steven Levy's book Hackers.
posted by nylon on Aug 18, 2003 - 7 comments

The US government recently released a draft of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, essentially it advocates ensuring security through consensus, with vendors, government agencies and consumers taking responsibility for the tools they use. That's not enough for Marcus Ranman who in the TISC newsletter advocates passing legislation mandating consumers and ISPs to install firewalls and anti-viral software. At what point does an individuals (corporate or consumer) chosen level of computer security become a concern for the federal government?
posted by cedar on Oct 17, 2002 - 7 comments

Next move - nationalizing the internet infrastructure in Europe ? 300 staff and union officials have blockaded themselves at the network operations centre in Belgium following Dutch telecoms company KPNQwest bankruptcy filing. Stocked up on provisions, taking shifts unpaid to keep the centre fully operational. "If we leave, then in three to five days there will be the largest internet slowdown in European history." From the article - KPNQwest's infrastructure covers 60 cities around Europe, estimated between one third and one half of all European internet traffic.
posted by Voyageman on Jun 7, 2002 - 10 comments

Reed's Law is about how, under certain conditions ("Group Forming Networks") the value created by a network, rather than being quadratic as predicted by Metcalfe's Law, becomes exponential. What's interesting is his discussion of the kind of networks he's talking about (chat rooms, eBay and … MetaFilter?) and what happens in them. Trouble is, I can't quite follow him! Can you?
posted by rodii on Jan 29, 2001 - 1 comment

Lycos Sells Out To Those Dastardly Spaniards; W.R. Hearst Rises From Grave To Stop Takeover. Spanish ISP Terra Networks SA is now the proud owner of Suck, Hotwired, and Jeff Veen. Oh yeah, and a fairly useless portal. Now we just have to wait for the Sucksters to publicly deride their new owners...start your stopwatches.
posted by solistrato on May 16, 2000 - 8 comments