Category: Internet Culture and Technology

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

The Stoa is a site/blog by Ross Scaife. The Stoa project has been reviewing and publishing online works especially works about classical subjects like our Trajan’s Column Project. Ross has changed the interface of the home page to a blog. I wonder if this will become a trend – that people use blogs for the entry points as they allow easy updating of news and ideas?

The Berlin Declaration is a manifesto for creators of digital knowledge who believe in open access. This came to me from stoa.org.
Continue reading Open Access: Berlin Declaration

BlackBerry fuels nasty campaign brush fire is a front page story in today’s Globe and Mail (Campbell Clark, Steven Chase, and Jane Taber, Friday, May 28, 2004, Page A1). This is the second time this meme has surfaced in the Globe – it was embedded in an earlier story by Taber (see below) so I can’t help thinking the Globe was planning this technology angle and waiting for an event hook to get it onto the front page.
That said, it is interesting that BlackBerrys have surfaced as the new technology to watch and that they have become mainstream news. This may be due to the fact the RIM is a Canadian company. It could be that we have a critical mass of people doing instant e-mail. It could be that we are beginning to think of the cultural effects of instant messaging and portable Internet enabled technologies. Elections make great turning points with which to date and explain change.

So powerful is the use of digital technology in the election that single comments can spread like wildfire along broadband lines and satellite signals, from war rooms in Ottawa to campaign buses rolling along distant highways in the Maritimes.The wireless war of 2004 erupted Wednesday night when the NDP Leader went, as political operatives like to say, off message.

Remember Carter and how his election win of 1984 was reported to have been helped by the use of e-mail. Likewise we saw
Howard Dean get attention this year for his web enabled campaign. Technology news and elections make interesting combinations.
Continue reading Blackberry Politics