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Flick Harrison | 1 Feb 01:31
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Re: fast-changing propaganda website archiving tools?


I can understand the hassle & expense of defending a site's bandwidth
allowance from a greedy public. I don't know the solution to that
problem, but John, your suggested grab-bag of Draconian solutions
seems like an infuriated site admin wrote it in the dead of a bad
night.

The attempt to pull a "Tragedy of the Commons" put-down of research-
gathering technology is a little bit of an overreaction. From a
journalistic or academic perspective, it's absolutely imperative that
the public, individuals and organizations can have access to archived
versions of historical documents. The fact that these web documents
are public in the first place makes that argument stronger. And the
fact that not everyone, everywhere can do it all the time without
crashing the web, unfortunately, doesn't automatically make it an
immoral practice.

For my part, I was trying to download the contents of a page that I
was currently looking at. That would actually reduce my bandwidth
usage vs constantly returning to the site and re-loading it. Of
course, the site owner would have the opportunity to change it in
the meantime. That my attempts to archive ended up gathering tons
more data than I wanted is the problem I was trying to solve, not
exacerbate.

PS John - if you're so strongly against "information-gobbling
onanism," why are you reading nettime? ;-)

-Flick
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Geert Lovink | 2 Feb 14:49
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Blues in the American salon: "Digital Nation": What has the Internet done to us?


(Hi, where does this collective tiredness come from? Can someone  
explain this? Is it the winter? Depressed politics? Cold turkey post- 
Xmas feelings? Agreed, the weather is bad. Obama sucks. And the iPad  
is yet another disappointment. The 'I told you so attitude' doesn't  
bring much, I guess. Is it the great influence of Jaron Lanier on the  
American psyche? You tell me. Ciao, Geert)

"Digital Nation": What has the Internet done to us?

We're Googling ourselves stupid. Even tech guru Douglas Rushkoff has  
regrets. PBS investigates our Information Age

By Heather Havrilesky

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/i_like_to_watch/2010/01/30/frontline_digital_nation/index.html

After 15 years of bloviating, looks like we've finally entered the
information age. Back in 1996, when I worked at Suck.com in the
offices of HotWired, the online offshoot of Wired magazine, our
brightly hued warehouse was abuzz with overcaffeinated worker bees
high on the limitless possibilities of the Internets. Every 20-
something in San Francisco went from being unemployed (post-recession)
to dreaming big. Why, we could write stuff about Burning Man and rock
climbing, and people would pay us for it! We could learn HTML or
(gasp) become middle managers!

The "big idea" guys, high on more than the Internets, called big
meetings so they could rhapsodize on creating virtual communities
and breaking down traditional Western phallocentric patriarchies and
(Continue reading)

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John Young | 2 Feb 23:20
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Re: fast-changing propaganda website archiving tools?

Running an open site, not requiring infernal registration with vile
log-in and password, and worst of all, email address for confirmation,
is illuminating.

Visitors are far more diverse than the regulated kind which has almost
become the norm what with the exaggerated claims of hackery generated
by the cybersecurity cartel.

This has been our bot experience since 1996, nut-shelled:

The earliest bots were governmental, NSA in fact, before we knew what
a bot was until a wizard described the varmint. It was open in that
its origination was exactly an NSA server domain: 144.51. (It stopped
after a year or so or went behind a spoofed address) Most of the TLAs
followed suit openly, then went under cover.

This was before the truly world-class villainous search engines
(excluding the one and only Archive.org) began their drive to
commercial bot hegemon.  Site traffic increased as the search engines
spread their infectious file mongering.

As search engine technology spun of hundreds, maybe thousands, of bot
programs empowered individuals, institutions, governments,
competitors, thieves, good hearts and idiot savants to rake in files
without restraint.  They came to average 25-30% of bandwidth usage
despite use of robot.txt and htaccess.

The more powerful bots would take over the site until it was completly
drained. When it hosted a few hundred files, that was brief, but
50,000 files many of them hundreds of KB images, take a while.
(Continue reading)

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michael gurstein | 2 Feb 15:53
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Re: Blues in the American salon: "Digital Nation": What has the Internet done to us?

Hi Geert,

Hmmm... Its a fun piece but...well... at least from where I'm sitting at the
moment...

So Doug Rushkoff feels a wee bit overwhelmed and PBS uses television as a
megaphone to announce this, well frankly that rather underwhelms me
(although I have some respect for Rushkoff as a cultural observer/canary...

The folks in Long Lamai (a Penan village a couple of hours by longboat up a
nameless river in the Borneo Highlands
(http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/bringing-the-internet-to-pandora/)
or in Bario (a fly-in community using the Internet to become a
communications and technology hub for "The Heart of Borneo"
http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/e-bario-the-impact-of-a-telecentre-
and-the-creation-of-a-technology-hub-in-the-highlands-of-borneo/, or even
the really severely disabled kids I just saw very happily learning how to
name colours with a piece of software somebody downloaded off the net in
Alor Gajah Malacca, would probably think his comments (and those of PBS) as
being rather of the Paris Hilton does Steinbeck variety... The laments of
the rich and bored...

My application to PBS for equal time is in the mail ;-)

Mike Gurstein

Michael Gurstein, Ph.D.
Director: Centre for Community Informatics Research, Development and
Training
Vancouver, CANADA
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carl guderian | 3 Feb 00:27

Re: Blues in the American salon: "Digital Nation": What has the Internet done to us?

Okay, I'll bite. I don't think I'll get around to watching the PBS  
Frontline show cited, so Ms. Havrilesky's commentary will have to do.

It's a bit lazy even allowing for the winter blues. Sure, it's  
Groundhog Day, which gets you six more weeks of winter, gopher shadow  
or no. Maybe Australian media commentators crank stuff like this out  
in bleakest July.  But a lot this stuff was said about television in  
the 1960s. (Some of it's still true; check out Harlan Ellison's "The  
Glass Teat / The Other Glass Teat," a collection of his columns about  
the boob tube from 1968 to 1970). People reading less, check.  
Attention spans dropping, double check. Bloviating about the  
Information Age, checkity-check. Okay, the great highschool reunion  
is new, and it's true, for now at least. It'll be something else next  
year. And it won't be the internet that brings the grim meathook  
future comes to those who never expected it.

On 2-feb-2010, at 14:49, Geert Lovink wrote:

> (Hi, where does this collective tiredness come from? Can someone
> explain this? Is it the winter? Depressed politics? Cold turkey post-
> Xmas feelings? Agreed, the weather is bad. Obama sucks. And the iPad
> is yet another disappointment. The 'I told you so attitude' doesn't
> bring much, I guess. Is it the great influence of Jaron Lanier on the
> American psyche? You tell me. Ciao, Geert)
 <...>
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David Mandl | 3 Feb 11:56
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Re: Blues in the American salon: "Digital Nation": What has the Internet done to us?


On Feb 2, 2010, at 8:49 AM, Geert Lovink wrote:

> (Hi, where does this collective tiredness come from? Can someone
> explain this? Is it the winter? Depressed politics? Cold turkey
> post- Xmas feelings? Agreed, the weather is bad. Obama sucks. And
> the iPad is yet another disappointment. The 'I told you so attitude'
> doesn't bring much, I guess. Is it the great influence of Jaron
> Lanier on the American psyche? You tell me. Ciao, Geert)
>
> "Digital Nation": What has the Internet done to us?
>
> We're Googling ourselves stupid. Even tech guru Douglas Rushkoff has
> regrets. PBS investigates our Information Age
>
> By Heather Havrilesky

Hi Geert--

I don't see anything that new here. I'm actually surprised to see that
this is such a recent piece (and that was in Salon, which usually has
pretty decent writing) because it's so cliche-filled. As Nettimers
know well, there were people who were always much too enthusiastic
about the net and technoculture (a la the original Wired magazine),
and after grossly overhyping all of this on the way up, they're now
being drama queens *again* on the way down. So they get two big waves
of stories where there was barely one to begin with.

> we could write stuff about Burning Man and rock climbing, and people
> would pay us for it! We could learn HTML or (gasp) become middle
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jaromil | 3 Feb 15:14
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Re: Spook Schools


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 08:21:28AM +0100, Rob van Kranenburg wrote:

> That is explained by Edgar Allen Poe in 'The Purloined Letter':

[...]

> In  the  days  of  the  network  the  best way  to  hide  is  to  be
> hyperobtrusive,

what else to do when you can perceive the invisible,

 stripped naked in daily searches inside your very home/brain ?

  maybe it's really because we like each other so much?

   or it's just a leak of attention what we want ?

    what if  one can hook  up to anything  searched by anyone  else at
    anytime? just pick up a curiosity, an opinion, a click.
    now try to say  i'm a terrorist
     - is it true that i scare you so, my friend !?

          "The biggest lies of our time are hidden in plain view."

      the biggest memes of our time are hidden among memes
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Morlock Elloi | 3 Feb 23:40
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Re: fast-changing propaganda website archiving tools?

There is a more general issue here: the concept of aggregating spidering
(one entity spiders and then serves the wider paudience, public or not.  As
competition develops, there will be more and more of these - Bing of course
won't trust Google, NSA won't trust CIA and Intel won't trust AMD's
espionage facility. To push it all the way to the boundary case, why would
I or anyone else trust any of the above for spidering services?

This is a purely technological problem: initially it was on the aggregating
side (only Google and Yahoo could afford industrial-strength spidering),
but that changed and now many can afford it; soon everyone will be able to
afford it - my search patterns can be serviced from my own computers 
- I know what I am looking for, and can create custom spider that will do
  better job than google, for me.  This is on the aggregating side.

On the source side it will be harder to solve, as "interesting sites"
without commercial backing cannot afford to service all these private and
public spiders. This is a classical publishing problem, and the solution
(on the source side) will have to somehow involve money or equivalent
barrier. No pay, no spider access. Which is, of course, Google's nightmare.
Paying for content. 

> As search engine technology spun of hundreds, maybe thousands, of bot
> programs empowered individuals, institutions, governments, competitors,
> thieves, good hearts and idiot savants to rake in files without
> restraint. They came to average 25-30% of bandwidth usage despite use of
> robot.txt and htaccess.
> 
> The more powerful bots would take over the site until it was completly
> drained. When it hosted a few hundred files, that was
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Alan Sondheim | 6 Feb 22:03
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sondheimogram x7 [gala, disconnect, archive, wryting, bones, requiem, new frontier]

               [digested @ nettime --mod (tb)]

Alan Sondheim <sondheim@...>

     gala production of the theater of death and the lie of buddhism   
     Radical Disconnectivity   
     Archive Index Text   
     Wryting and 
     Bones     
     requiem of zero, love and slaughter  
     We become a new frontier (for Tom Zummer, who always asks us)     

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:07:05 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@...>
Subject: gala production of the theater of death and the lie of buddhism   

gala production of the theater of death
and the lie of buddhism

bodies grind against bodies, nothing is produced.
what could come of slaughter and yidam.
what could possibly come of this. no one wants it to come
of this.
no one wants it to come to this, it's flesh that's ground,
there's nothing more, tendrils of fat, skeins of muscle,
legarms flailing.
it's nothing, not even an image.
(Continue reading)

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Jon Lebkowsky | 9 Feb 20:13
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Re: Blues in the American salon: "Digital Nation": What has the Internet done to us?

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 4:56 AM, David Mandl <dmandl@...> wrote:

> Shocking! And very hip--now that the mainstream has more or less
> accepted the techno-fetishism these people were selling, the coolest
> possible thing to do is say, "Yawn, how terribly boring all this is."

Boredom is, inherently, boring.

Personally, I'm fascinated with, often elated by, the transformation of
media from mass to personal and the rich social experiences this brings me
every single day. Are we in a mess? Well, sure, we were *always* in a mess -
we're more aware of it, now, because there's a new unavoidable transparency.

I'm sure Heather encountered many technophiliacs who were obsessed with
shiny objects in her voyages among the digerati, but I don't think she
rejected them, and I'm finding it hard to believe she's looking all that
hard for the exit from the mall.

--

-- 
Jon Lebkowsky
internet guy
+1 512.762-6547
jon.lebkowsky@...

website: http://weblogsky.com
plutopia: http://plutopiaproductions.com
twitter: http://twitter.com/jonl
facebook: http://facebook.com/jonlebkowsky
gtalk: jon.lebkowsky@...
aim: jonlzebub
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Gmane