Link dump

hey guys (well ok guy)

here are a couple of links that I think people should read firstly:

911.wikileaks.org - transcript of 500million (I think) pager messages sent in the 24 hours surrounding 9/11 from the DC and NY areas

As a follow up to one of my earliest posts there is this report in the Guardian with the full report here.

Finally another follow up (of sorts) to this: there is a list here of "8 awesome cases of vigilantism".

The first I think was one of the most poignant things I have read in years and I'll say no more about it. I want to put up a blog posting as to my thoughts on it but at the moment im too tired and they're too conflicted so it'll happen another day - maybe.

The second was mainly for historic purposes and that it interests me.

The last is the one (surprise surprise ) that is most worrying. Aside from the standard "anonymous did it" fallacy (seriously guys the hint is in the name they're not organised they're anarchists even if they don't know it) it is a little worrying the pure psychological terror that the internet can aim at someone. Yes the people in this piece at least deserved something; but not the ire of 4chan.

Having watched the swell of a 4chan mob against someone its a sight to wonder at as well as flee from.

I wonder how many more people will find this out the bad way?

the FUD is coming! the FUD....

This is a quick post. I don't want it to be but currently I can't quite form up a good post about it (needs some work me thinks)

So until I get round to writing a post on it here's an interesting link.

Personally I think its FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) but it holds the promise of some interesting impending debates about the internet as well as some big problems if it does go through as written.

Nextgen screens.

I've been recently reading 'Halting state' which is an amazing book by Charles Stross on the what will happen as the Internet becomes more and more ubiquitous. Among the technologies he uses in the plot is continuous Internet as a HUD (heads up display) this sort of HUD would be projected onto what you see from a pair of glasses giving you anything from the best route to your destination (think an iPhone whose screen you see all the time).

Most of this technology already exists (see the sixth sense prototype), iPhones supply constant GPS capabilities, 3G phone systems allow for some degree of Internet access almost anywhere (the newer 4G will improve this massively). Things like the cloud and the grid give constant wifi connections. MMORPGs (Massively-Multiplayer-Online-RolePlaying-Games like World of Warcraft) are becoming mainstream and as they become less esoteric and video games become a common media more MMORPGs will crop up. Urban gaming is already appearing with examples such as geocaching or the more paranoia inducing StreetWars.

In terms of non-existent technology only the ability to create overlays onto the real world are missing and this has moved a lot closer to reality with the creation of a .97" screen by the American company Kopin the big thing about this is that at less than an inch they have created a fully functioning 1280x1024 screen (that's the same resolution as a standard 19" monitor). While an inch screen sounds like the ultimate in eye-strain-o-vision at the distance of a glasses lens it is reasonable to view.

At most much of this technology will happen within the next 10 years or so, the full overlay technology may take a little longer but if nothing else we are now (pretty much) fully capable of hooking a good webcam to a pair of glasses and running the lens as screens. Of course what happens if someone hacks this would be pretty horrible.

UPDATE 1340 03/07/09: this news just broke. The theft was via standard abuse of privileges (something that is not punishable in eve although the subsequent sale of the kredits is) while the value of the theft was ~£3,000 and technically hard to punish legally it will be more and more common and is only a matter of time before someone starts testing this legally.

More joy from YouTube and the Discovery Institute

Two related videos today, both by the same person highlighting what will become an interesting problem online: the use of cease and desist notices to take down and censor content. This is nicely tied to another irritant of mine which is creationism (now going by the name of intelligent design). This is the sort of insidious anti-science that could set us back years if it gets accepted. Firstly ID explicitly relies on a none testable hypothesis: that at some point all of life was designed at a deep level. This can only be tested if they can prove that a biological is irreducible, that is that there is no way in which it could have been produced naturally, this in itself is the definition of supernatural.

Moving away from my loathing of ID the second part that is interesting is the use of law to smash websites; especially hosting sites like youtube. These sites have to comply quickly (I expect they use automated services) as failure to do so makes them liable BUT it does mean there is an easy was to remove content that you don't like.

Luckily the internet does not forgive and it does not forget.

Here are the vids, the first is the vid that was taken down the second is a vid about that act.

oh dear..

This is silly, very silly.

Politics - who needs it?

This made me grin today



source: b3ta (if you've never been there a worthwhile hour).

LOTR Fail

This video is annoying me. I like LOTR but the thought of a kids game of it grates at a fundemental level. A large part of the attraction to LOTR for me is that it has so much depth (the huge mythology woven through, the languages and the sub-plots) and I don't think the games will pick up on this even remotely, the films did well in balancing it and created something beautiful. By the look of it though a cell shaded game aimed at children and their parents probably wont.

Ah well

/fanboy

This would be funny if it weren't so true

This article sums up the onion pretty well. It's funny. It's accurate. And painfully true.

I don't know if it's just my tinfoil hat blocking my ears but when you see stuff like the Simon Singh case the various insanities that are always about (ie creationism and vaccine quackary) it just seems that anti-science is on the rise (ironicly often helped by the 'net).

This is a problem on a number of fronts. Firstly anti-science generally goes hand-in-hand with loss of critical thinking which is not what you want in a democracy - even more so given the current economic and political climate (hello BNP, anyone?) The second reason is that in the increasing technical age that we live in loss of scientific thinking doesn't help anyone. Our current knowledge is close to pushing science far beyond anything we've previously seen: both nanotech and biotech have the potential to fundamentally change how we live beyond even what the internet has done. This will not be helped if half the population are unable to think critically and more importantly unable to get hold of the information that will help with this.

Now more than ever we need GOOD science writers and a GOOD flow of information. Here's hoping it happens

Black Lines

Interesting story here about so called 'black-lines', these are the lines that don't show up on maps and no-one admits to owning. They're the fibre optics of goverenment services and similar.

I wonder if there are any near me to hit with a spade? could be fun....

viva la revolution!

Well ok maybe not revolution but this is a excellent article on the affect that the internet is having upon the world.

More precisly it explores the emerging digital socialism that the internet has helped breed. More and more systems are being developed collaborativly (linux, wikipedia etc) and for free.

I won't go on because right now my brain is hungover and I can't form thoughts properly but to quote my friend

"You're foolin' yourself mate, we're living in an ad-hocracy. Come and see the meritocracy inherent in the system!"

I hope this is a hoax...

This is a wonderful money spinner and a horrible idea.

I'm all for highlighting the general daftness of most religous views but the thought of people paying money into a bank for the express reason of coming back from the dead and claiming the money is just painful.

I dearly hope that they get shut down or DDoS'd.

This (like most woo) just prays on those who are gullible.

Age of obession

This is an idea that I've been bouncing around for a while and still keep coming back to so I'm going to inflict it upon you (who ever you are).

The premise is simple, over the last few hundred years society has changed drastically (in case you've been in hibernation or something). A few hundred years ago we were mainly rural family/village centred, with the industrial revolution we became urban but remained locally focused (either about jobs or just road/church what ever). As last century progressed the focus has changed again from job to friends who may be much more spread out than previous networks. With the advent of the internet this has become global and based much more upon common interests, for example I could go to most major cities of the world and have crash space through friends I've made juggling.

This is the age of obsession, a lot of people now meet via the internet, its no longer taboo to meet someone from online or even date/marry someone met via IRC or WoW. Now more than ever we can group with people not because we have to but because we want to through common interests.

These groups form a double edged sword on the one hand its utterly possible to realise your not freak for liking Bavarian folk music as played by chinchillas on the other hand the same is true for being a fascist or snuff-film enthusiast. Hopefully the internet will still help people account for this and experience the lovely corrective glow of peer pressure.

While often labeled a bad thing peer pressure is vital, it acts as a normaliser, I'm all for weird but when it is considered normal your get into trouble. This is where peer pressure comes in, those dirty little habits you have don't get worse because of peer pressure - unfortunately it is also through peer pressure that shame for normal things can occur - for example enjoying that most dirty of acts - sex. It still amazes me that people are more worried about sex than seemingly any other act that humans perform on one another.

Anyway I would be very interested to ear whether people think that this new 'Age of the obsessive' will be good bad or indifferent. Personally I think it will be for the better as it will allow people passion that has until recently been frowned upon, I'm sick of hearing "you have too much time on your hands - how else do you do all this fun stuff?" most of the time the answer is simple - I'd rather be messing about learning to program than watching 99% of whats on TV.

Roll on the age of the geek where passion for the strange is respected!

4chan iz in ur mainstream, corruptin ur yoof!

This made me smile this morning. 4chan (for those of you sane enough to avoid it) is the internet cess-pit. All those mind searing images? those terrifying memes? They come from 4chan (and a few similar sites).

I've been wondering how long before it was mentioned by name in the main stream news for a while. Whats interesting is that obliquely 4chan and its ilk are mentioned often - normally confused with the 'terrorist group' anonymous. This is explicitly wrong. Anonymous is not a group - it is the outward affect of the anarchy of 4chan and co. These are the places that have no rules and upon which anything goes.

The reason anonymous isn't a terrorist group is that it is not organised, Project Chanology was a meme. Lots of people thought it would be fun or interesting or agreed - so it happened.

This is the new face of protest: flash memes that spread across the internet in a matter of days and then die or explode. Two other good examples are the circle line pub crawl last year (spread via facebook) and the G20 protests this year (spread via facebook and twitter). These are the early sightings of the net truly showing its power - not just breaking news faster and better but impacting upon the world.

The original version of these phenomena were flash mobs - these were light hearted displays of surreality. They have changed and become a method of demonstration as well as a method of anarchy. Which is the only way to describe a lot of the internet.

Stories like the one on the bbc today are just a way of showing how powerful peoples urges and mob mentality can be and online a mob can be huge (4chan's /b section has several million hits a day and managed to get its founder posted as the Time magazine's number one person in the top 100 as a prank as well as a proper interview).

It's things like this that make it easy to see why so many people want to control the internet. It also makes it pretty clear why they will fail. The music industry tried to stop napster and got winMX and so on - these got shut down and we got bittorrents if these die more dark nets will occur (invite only networks for p2p file sharing). The same is happening more generally with content. A lot of the reactions to this story on the bbc page were "why doesn't every youtube video get checked" and "how can this be allowed to happen". This kind of thinking doesn't work online. The responsibility is for the person to stop things to moderate themselves.

Big brother may be watching you online but can't really stop anything - only the people online can change the internet. This doesn't mean that 4chan will be stopped - but it does mean that people need to take things into their own hands and moderate, mark down and report.

oh and supervise their kids online if they don't want them to see porn.

worth reading

Charles Stross is a dude - near future sci-fi is a) VERY interesting and b) not often done well. He pulls it off - if your interested I highly recommend accelerando.

Either way this is his keynote speech from a recent MMO conference - which doesn't have too much to do with MMO's but a lot to do with the future of the internet and computing in general.

The concept that I think is most interesting and already semi-visible within current high-end gadgets (ie the iphone) is the dissolution of the net-space/meat-space boundary (ie internet becoming part of the real world rather than something on the other-side of a screen). This is something that will be most likely the next paradigm shift (the advent of the 'net was the last one). Moving to a society that treats information and the access of it as a basic human right. Currently its only the hard-core netizens (ie me) that get annoyed when they are cut off from internet access but this is rapidly changing.

The business and academic worlds have accepted email as the standard method of communication, Twitter and its blogging brethren are becoming the accepted methods of breaking news (see swine flu and the Mumbai bombings). While much of the populous consider the internet a hobby or something to use to send the odd email it is rapidly (for people under 30) becoming the only method of communication and research.

In my case more and more of my 'luxury' purchases (ie DVDs) come from online and using google maps on my phone has saved me several times (can't wait to get my iPhone once i can afford it). With things like the sixth-sense in development and pushing more of the internet into the real world.

Going back to the speech I think one of the most interesting aspects of this is that it is predicted within the next 20 years - with e-readers and similar already hitting the market as well as the iPhone considered the bench mark for next-gen mobiles I wonder if a lot of this won't be here sooner. It's also interesting to see how the rate at which we lose the ability to predict the future is lessening. In the 1900's people thought they could see clearly to about now. Now people are un-willing to bet beyond the next 5-years let alone several decades.

Weighing in (feather weight stylee) on Simon Singh..

For those of you haven't heard of this story click here otherwise keep reading (a copy of Simon's piece can be found here).

This is going to be pretty quick as I expect what I'm about to say has been said before by people much better at it that myself but here is my take.

Firstly Simon did say something a bit dumb.

You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact they still possess some quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything. And even the more moderate chiropractors have ideas above their station. The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

That is not a statement to win friends. Equally though it doesn't deserve to be labeled libel. The piece is clearly comment/opinion to begin with and within the realms of comment/opinion the claim that there "is not a jot of evidence" should be reasonably permissible - the argument should be clearly that within the author's opinion there is no reputable evidence that supports the BCA's claims.

This isn't how the court has seen it.

In fact the court didn't even hear the case as the judge read a pre-written judgment as soon as the parties had said their piece.

This judgment was impressive in taking the case far beyond what was expected (even I expect by the BCA) in that by using the word "bogus" Simon supposedly meant that BCA made its claims with fore-knowledge that they were harmful (some of them are but I don't think many chiropractors believe this). That the BCA practices maliciously is clearly far more than Simon meant through the use of the word "bogus" (in fact I've never known it to have the connotation that something was maliciously false just false).

This case is terrible on two fronts - firstly it highlights some of the problems with libel rules, secondly it shows just how important good scientific reporting is and how hard it is to produce.

In terms of libel like a lot of the grayer areas of law its a very difficult thing to balance - too much on the side of the plaintiff and it becomes to write anything without either filling it with 'apparently's and 'maybe's or being sued. Too far the other way and you can say what you want with impunity.

Whats interesting about this in terms of the law though is it highlights the problem of online blogging. If Simon had initially published his piece as a blog would the reaction have been the same? whats going to happen when blogs start getting picked up and published by papers? Will it be libel in the country posted from? from the country its hosted? In the US blogs are protected speech and cannot be sued for libel. As more of our journalism is done from the net these sorts of problems will arise.

Moving on from the legal aspects (which I can only question as my law knowledge is pretty poor) the journalism aspect is even more interesting. This sort of case is a huge problem for scientific reporting. The bottom line is that this case represents a large group suing someone for being critical of their methods.

Scientifically Simon is reasonably well supported - there isn't much good evidence that chiropractic treats much other than bad backs. Saying that shouldn't get you sued. Even in a national paper - if there is a genuine scientific basis for a statement saying so shouldn't land you in trouble.

If we're being fair so long as you set it as opinion you should be allowed to say pretty much what you want. It doesn't work but it might encourage people to be a little more critical in their assessment of claims made by people. Libel laws are their to protect people from unfounded claims - unfortunately a lot of organisations know how to avoid them and a lot of individuals don't.

awesome parable

This is a very nice little story that highlights the difference between a lot of faith based thinking and scientific thinking.

Unless your willing to change your mind (which a good scientist should be) your doomed to failure.

words cannot describe how cool this is

Its been a few days since I saw something blog worthy (also been RL busy with exams, revision and friends) but this is amazing. Takes a few min to get to the mind blowing stuff but its all good to watch and worth the wait.

Parkour (urban free running with gymnastics) with a BMX....



I'm a big fan of watching parkour etc (too unfit to actually do it myself) and this is just awesome... enjoy!

Just a warning - be careful of acrobat reader

Interesting story here about Adobe reader (the thing that opens those wonderful pdf files you get all across the net). Basically there is a critical bug in the software.

Critical bugs in terms of net stuff tends to mean that someone can hack into your computer and do lots of fun stuff. Proof-of-concept code already exists for this vulnerability so its likely that malicious code is already out there. This seems similar to another vulnerability found a while ago.

There are two simple things that you can do to make sure your protected from this. First option is to disable javascripts in adobe (under options i believe. The second option is to download a free adobe alternative.

either way be careful with which ever pdf reader and which pdfs you use.

More government optimism

Well looks like the government is shelving the database of all our communications idea (at last!) in preference of asking Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to log who connects to what and how - ie if you access Facebook from your iphone or similar. This seems to be an extension of the existing laws regarding telephone logs that allow the police and security services to see who called who when.

What strikes me about this is that it is a £2b scheme that will most likely be futile. Just as cheap pay-as-you-go mobiles have made telephone logging pretty obsolete because it becomes very difficult to log who calls who when the phone isn't registered it is very difficult to glean useful information from the internet when you can send stuff via a proxy and have the information of who your talking to disappear especially when systems like The Onion Router (TOR) exist that helpfully cover who your talking to and where without any real effort.

Basically this seems a lot of money on a system that will achieve next to nothing. If people want to organise via the net there are a hundred ways of doing it that make it near impossible to trace who spoke to who, asking the CSPs to log this information doesn't really help at all especially when you don't even have to route most of your stuff via your ISP - open DNS servers in other countries will allow alot of the useful (to the services) information to by-pass the UK utterly.

The anarchistic social experiment that is the internet

There's an interesting story here of a family in America who were very upset to find that photos of their daughter's death were available online. The girl had died in a car crash and some cops had taken photos as a cautionary tale which then escaped online.

I think there are a lot of interesting aspects to this story: firstly the wonderful way that pretty much all censorship attempts online eventually fail (google search for the images they're trying to ban they're still readily available), secondly how pretty much all legal systems fail online and finally how depressing how anarchistic (and deprived) the internet can be.

The first point I think is most simply shown here, a very daft woman on LBC radio said some very poorly thought out things about how taking MMR jab was optional because no one ever got those diseases any more. Ben Goldacre responded by posting the radio debate online as an example of truly poor science and got asked to removed it. Soon after the radio clip was available and talked about on more than 150 other blogs either in bits or as a whole. The internet doesn't like censorship - stop trying it on.

The legal aspect is interesting. Privacy is a right, but online you only have as much privacy as you protect yourself and that's not easy. This is especially true when something like /b/ decides to come after you (I won't link there its easy enough to find). Well I say 'decides'....

This comes down to something that pretty much all governments, people and organisations don't seem to have realised: the internet is anarchy. There is no law in any way, not yet and so sites like /b/ proliferate, not because people are suddenly worse online - just that they can relax and these sites become the ultimate games of dare - you can do what ever you can think of and type. Just every now and then someone is stupid and actually does it. The internet has brought out some truly nasty sides of people; but I hope this will fade.

The internet is still socially very young - people are still adapting to it in a social way and the anarchy is to be expected - sooner or later some form of law will emerge as will more of a social ethos, and no just because Facebook is a social site doesn't mean the internet has a social code or ethic - this will take a while to evolve.

Anyway moral of the story: nothing is private online so think before you upload other people's personal information (I think that the cops involved should face charges).

It's truly terrible what some people have done to the family. Emailing them with pictures from the crash scene is vile but I think their time would be better spent ignoring it.

Hopefully stories like this will be few and far between and hopefully people will learn from them.