Archive for the ‘net’ Category
Techniques of rhetoric
Mark Kaplan, 18 months ago, presented the ultimate blog argument. Titled “Notes on Rhetoric” it was a list of the phrases and techniques used in dodgy comment thread debate. It’s hilarious and very much to the point. I’ll give you a couple of excerpts:
A priori – your apriori supposition is that: “I operate by the [...]
Carnival of the Liberals
Carnival of the Liberals has bulldozed my little shanty town and set up its tents on my metaphorical village green. Some Bloodthirsty Vegetarians even took time out from a glass of Shiraz and an attempt to discover which science fiction crew they belonged to (Firefly, of course!) to put a shout out on their podcast.
There [...]
Is big brother watching?
TheWaz recently posted an article giving the link to the Wired magazine leaking of the documents involved in the AT&T NSA wiretap case brought by EFF. It boils down to the idea that if your internet traffic goes through any of the big US backbones then it is being reconstructed and monitored by the NSA [...]
IP and abundance
Some things have always been abundant, and some things have been abundant from time to time. Think about fresh air and water, or grazing land in the early part of white settlement of North America. Economics, however, can be defined in terms of managing scarcity.
Abundance makes economists nervous. There’s a feeling that people might lose [...]
AT+T and wiretap of whole internet
Wired describes how AT&T may be attempting to conceal documents relating to a case EFF is bringing against it for funnelling it’s internet backbone into the NSA for monitoring.
Not that it comes as any surprise really that NSA would monitor the internet in detail. Get yourself a copy of PGP.
Evade China’s firewall
Anonymizer have produced a tool to allow Chinese web surfers to circumvent the national firewall, by encrypting communication and routing it through one of a number of IP addresses. Google.com should be accessible by this means.
The current site from where the software can be downloaded is here, but this will be changed from time to [...]
Steal Claire’s Poem
From
Steal this Poem by Claire Fauset:
Think about it,
I can’t tell you anything new.
In all these millenia of human existence
there can only be a few new ideas to be thought through.
So do we treat them like rare commodities?
Because intellectual property is theft
and piracy is our only defence against the thought police.
The revolution
will be plagiarised!
In a [...]
Rumsfeld and the Propaganda War
Donald Rumsfeld, in a recent speech made some extremely provocative comments about the new media and public relations:
Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today’s media age, but for the most part we, our country, our government, has not adapted. Consider that the violent extremists have established media relations committees – these are [...]
No privacy for search histories
Search engines, including Google, AOL, MSN and Yahoo, keep records of each search performed and
and can associate each one with an IP address and possibly also a cookie. It appears that the search
engine companies can be compelled to provide this information to the US government when it may be
pertinent to a prosecution, [...]
Censorship, Google, and China
Reporters Without Borders (on 25 January) accused the Internet’s biggest search-engine, Google, of “hypocrisy” for its plan to launch a censured version of its product in China, meaning that the country’s Internet users would only be able to look up material approved of by the government and nothing about Tibet or democracy and human [...]
Echelon and Espionage
Recent Events
Echelon is a NSA communications intercept system which has hit the news again recently, in spite of the US being very coy about admitting to its existence. The main difference between it and other electronic signals intelligence systems is its automation  it works by using voice recognition of key words and phrases, then [...]
