Category: Internet Culture and Technology

Matt Patey pointed out to me a story in the Economist.com computer section with the title, From factoids to facts, Aug 26th, 2004. The story is about “Ask MSR” (MSR = Microsoft Research) a search engine that tries to answer factual questions using information on web pages through text manipulation.

WHAT is the next stage in the evolution of internet search engines? AltaVista demonstrated that indexing the entire world wide web was feasible. Google’s success stems from its uncanny ability to sort useful web pages from dross. But the real prize will surely go to whoever can use the web to deliver a straight answer to a straight question. And Eric Brill, a researcher at Microsoft, intends that his firm will be the first to do that.

Text analysis in bulk – it just goes to show that the internet and web are really just large concording projects.

Two stories in Wired News A Matter of (Wired News) Style and It’s Just the ‘internet’ Now are about the style guidelines of Wired and changes. Tom Long, the author of both and the Wired News’ copy chief, set standards that have an effect. That the internet and web are now lower case says something about their perception as generic rather than named entities. The e-mail article, however, is more interesting, because Tony talks about the shift in style as the web became commercial, main stream and then dropped. Style reflects attitude and community. This is courtesy of StÈfan Sinclair.
Continue reading Wired Styles

The Budapest Open Access Initiative meeting in 2002 was the start of the open access movement according to Jean Claude Guedon. For something to qualify as open access it has to be licensed to the user in an open fashion and it must be archived. (See the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing or my previous entry on the Berlin Declaration..) The Creative Commons organization founded in 2001 provides language for open access licenses.

Well … getting an account on Friendster was a mistake. It just looks like a fancy dating service. Remind me not to return.

NewMIC Home is the last archived version of the New Media Innovation Centre in the Internet Archive, dated July 15, 2003. In a previous post on RFID: Radio Frequency Indentification I mentioned NewMICs vanishing. The archived site gives no hints as to why this high-profile iniative was closed down – do you know why? Leave me a comment if you do.
Continue reading What Happened to NewMIC?

Site Watch, on RFID is an irregular column by Treanna Szelei of SFU that is part of digest a report on emerging trends in “human-technology interaction and e-lifestyles.” This column has good starting spots on RFID (Radio Frequency Indentification), arguably the most important embedded technology that people don’t know about. RFID has the potential to be a huge surveillance and privacy issue, but the tags are so small and unobtrusive that we don’t know they are there. Not knowing they are there, unlike active badges, means that we don’t worry about them potentially leaving us all wearing active tags that can be tracked.
Continue reading RFID: Radio Frequency Indentification

Black Box Voting: Ballot – Tampering in the 21st Century is a site by Bev Harris and others on the issue of electronic voting. It includes PDFs of Harris’ book Black Box Voting. The site blogs stories and news on the issue.
Continue reading Black Box Voting

LOCKSS is a project from Stanford that has built an open system for archiving digital collections, especially e-journals by caching lots of copies. Besides a great name, they have an idea that is timely as governments look for ways to archive digital data without creating huge new units. It seems to me we need some variants on this that are aimed less at a library model and more for individual peer-to-peer archiving for artists/writers. (See the specs for the Beacon idea at grockwel: Research Notes: Freenet Project.)
Continue reading LOCKSS: Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe

The Globe and Mail has a story on how the Music industry takes hit in court. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that ISPs are just conduits and therefore cannot be monitor or pay for music downloading by individuals.
A quote from the Globe article on page A1,

"The capacity of the Internet to disseminate works of the arts and intellect is one of the great innovations of the information age," Mr. Justice Ian Binnie said for the majority.

Continue reading Supreme Court rules on online music

The issue of how we can block porn on the Internet, especially child porn, is heating up here in Canada as the programmer, Briere, who kidnapped and killed a 12 year old girl, Holly, confessed that, "I don’t know how it is for other people, but for myself, I would say that, yes, viewing the material does motivate you to do other things … the more I saw it, the more I longed for it in my heart.". (See CJAD 800 : News.) Conservative leader Steven Harper has now made it an election issue accusing Martin of being soft on child porn.
Like the question of whether violent games encourage violent action, we are seeing a debate about the relationship between pornography and abuse. See, for example, Rosie Dimanno’s response in the Toronto Star, TheStar.com – The abomination of Briere’s excuses.
The difficulty is in how to respond, and respond we must if there is evidence that child porn encourages violence against children. If one legislates representations then there is the risk that artistic representations with nude children will be deemed pornography. The alternative is to legislate intent, but how do you tell intent? Can one look at systems of production and distribution to distinguish art from porn? Is it any less porn if displayed in an art gallery?
Continue reading Child Porn and the Internet