De-Nile Of Service: Can Governments Turn Off The Internet?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on January 28, 2011 by admin in Technology
Friday, January 28th, 2011The simple answer is “yes”, but Egypt’s unprecedented nationwide shutdown of internet access highlights a plethora of issues beyond whether or not Egyptians could watch Keyboard Cat videos on YouTube.
 Want to shut down the internet? There’s an app for that. |
Imagine you woke up one morning and went to check your e-mail, and the internet was down. “Damn”, you think to yourself, “oh well, I’ll check it on my mobile phone and figure out the connection problem later”. Then you find your cell phone won’t get a connection. For many of us, we’d wonder if the world were ending. If you’ve ever left your phone somewhere in the middle of a busy day, you may know that panicked feeling, which you may or may not get over quickly, depending on your communication needs and personal psychology. Well, as you probably know by now, the entire country of Egypt woke up to that problem yesterday. No internet. No phone service. Especially as an outsider, you may think “Big deal. I never call Egypt or browse Egyptian websites anyway”. But it may not have occurred to you that even the US Embassy website was not available. Although it is now, presumably because according to this Netcraft query, they switched ISP’s today. And then of course, there’s commerce. If you know anything at all about modern business, you know that even convenience stores rely on internet connections, to process credit card purchases. Which would probably explain why the only Egyptian ISP that was still operating was NOOR Group, which not only hosts the Egyptian Stock Exchange, but also has some heavyweight global corporate clients. So how was Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak able to just “flick a switch” and shut off all these services? This MSNBC piece explains in plain English that in the case of Egypt, the government owns the ISP’s that provide all the networks that make the internet the internet. So he simply had to issue an order to shut things down. Whether they did it physically, by shutting down equipment, or digitally, by instructing the systems to process traffic differently, is largely irrelevant. They effectively shut down the internet and cellular communications in the country, forcing protesters to use what we might call the “Islamic Sneakernet”. Good old-fashioned person-to-person communication, fairly effectively transmitted via mosques, as this Wired piece suggests. So could the US government do the same thing in times of civil unrest? You bet. And frankly that kind of possibility is why – although I often get flak from friends about it – I KNOW I’m not crazy for constantly ranting about the evils of agency capture and the telecoms in America. Although there was a lot of hubbub last year about Obama being handed an “internet kill switch” with the “cybersecurity act”, this was simply not true. It was flat out, unquestionably bald-face lies, wrapped in the language of the moronic political blogosphere, which even infected tech blogs like the one just linked to. But it hardly matters if Obama were handed an “internet kill switch”; he already had one, as every president has since before the internet even existed, in the form of Title VII of the Communications Act of 1934. The internet needs the telecoms, and in national emergencies, the government controls the telecoms. And it’s worthy of note that even though we don’t specifically have an internet kill switch now, people politicians like Joe Lieberman want one bad. But regardless of all these hypothetical issues, shutting down the internet in reaction to the mass unrest in Egypt has highlighted a plethora of other issues. Economically, it could be catastrophic. US markets already took a plunge Friday, and worse repercussions may be expected on Monday. The events have also highlighted the US government’s awkward stance toward Egypt; they can hardly come down hard diplomatically, when they give Egypt billions in support annually and use Egypt as a favorite location to make prisoners disappear during an extraordinary rendition. And perhaps most importantly, given the American media’s shallow coverage of what’s happening in Egypt, the internet would have been a great way to get more meaningful coverage. By the way, as that article points out, you still can get some better coverage from Al Jazeera. And finally, the fact that a country can shut down its internet like this may provide a huge boost to the satellite internet business. Because although there are other ways to skirt an internet blackout, they require a rather high nerd quotient, as the PC World piece Get Internet Access When Your Government Shuts It Down makes abundantly evident.
Facebook To Demand DNA Sample For Log In
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 5, 2011 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011In addition to the blood of your firstborn, a retinal scan, and other biometric methods. Do you trust Facebook to be the issuer of your “Internet Driver’s License”?
Sometimes I feel like I’m Charlton Heston’s character in Soylent Green
Captcha’d Forever
[ Comments Off ]Posted on September 4, 2010 by admin in Technology
Saturday, September 4th, 2010The best use for those annoying squiggly log-in words called Captcha’s? COMICS!
I’ve often joked that the web is an excellent reflection of humanity and the human psyche. This is reflected in the fact that most internet traffic is generated by sex, trying to meet someone who likes you, or getting the free stuff you think you deserve. In the broader view – as often happens in the real world – the evolution of the web went something like this: some smart clever people create something cool, less smart people come along and join in, everybody has fun for a while, and then their stupider, greedier, eviler friends show up and eff it all up. This pattern is probably why a lot of humanity’s energy seems to be devoted to protecting itself. Like building thousands of nuclear bombs to make sure no-one uses them, or destroying your freedom to protect it. On the web, this behavior is why we have so many tools for proving you’re human, i.e., the many variations of the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart). You know, those squiggly words you can’t read with your blurred vision and splitting headache the morning after a hard night of partying, when you’re trying to check your finances online to see if you burned your bank account in the last few hours of the night, the ones you don’t remember after buying the entire strip bar a round to prove to your favorite lap dancer that you’re loaded. It’s amusing that with Captchas we’re just protecting all the “good” web applications (useful web services) we write from “bad” web applications (spambots) we write. Typical human acts of futility. In any case, in spite of their assumed usefulness, Captchas have been cracked in a number of ways. Or have they? Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com points out some interesting fallacies in this article, and claims he has a 99% bot-blocking rate with what he calls a “naive captcha”, which is simply a well-designed captcha image that never changes! If you don’t think conventional Captchas are good enough, there a some alternative methods like this math-based Captcha, which will not only keep out spambots, but probably everyone but Stephen Hawking or Richard Feynman as well. Other versions include solving a tic-tac-toe puzzle, or this one, based on pictures of cats and dogs, or this one, which requires you to solve hieroglyphics. And then of course, companies like Google or Microsoft will try to figure out ways to make or save money with them. Microsoft’s idea is to make you look at ads; Google uses Captchas to make you read the words their scanning technology can’t. Yup. Your obstacle to the content you want is Google’s free labor force. Probably the best use of Captchas I’ve run across though is using them for making comics. This Something Awful forum may have started it, but there are amusing collections here and here. Some images may be NSFW. My quick stab at it is below. Read the rest of this entry »
Is Throwing Puppies In The River Bad?
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on August 30, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Monday, August 30th, 2010I think I may finally go fully vegetarian.
Be warned. The following includes some pretty grisly content. You may have seen or heard about the video of a girl taking a bucket of puppies and throwing them one-by-one into a river. Yes. A bucket of puppies. Unlike car accidents, which I’m pretty good at NOT stopping to gawk at, I had the misfortune made the mistake of watching this video (also below). It was incredibly upsetting. I was mesmerized by the tragic failure of humanity I witnessed. I really just felt sickened, and experienced a brief hopelessness that if a young girl could do this and video the whole thing and post it on the internet, what else are we capable of as humans? It seemed more horrible by an incredible magnitude than the woman in England who put the kitten in the wastebin recently. I’m not the only one to get upset; much like the vigilantism that took place with the kitty abusing biddy, users at 4chan have already initiated the hunt. But this raises two issues for me. First of all, sometimes these Human Flesh Search Engines end up going after the wrong person. And in the case of the girl and the puppies? As dementedly cruel as it seems, is it any more cruel than how the food industry treats the male chicks that we don’t want because they won’t provide eggs or enough meat? Or any of the other cruel acts against animals featured in movies like Food, Inc.
ADD & Digital Indignation – Frontline’s Digital Nation & Web Video
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 31, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Sunday, January 31st, 2010I don’t know why I wrote this piece, you’ll only read 28% of it. And Frontline’s cool new show “Digital Nation” debuts against “Lost” on Tuesday, so you probably won’t watch it.
Digital Nation Debuts Tuesday On PBS |
Given the fact that according to this article you’re only going to read at most 28% of this page, I wonder if I should write less so you’ll read the whole thing? That sounds like an attempt at a humorous paradox, but it’s actually not; the fact is that according to this chart from the same article, users spend only 4.4 seconds more on a web page for each additional 100 words. So I better get to the point. This week PBS is airing a special edition of Frontline called Digital Nation, which explores how the Internet, texting, blogging, social networking, and other aspects of the “digital lifestyle” are impacting our lives. This is a topic that’s been very much on my attention-deficient mind for a few years. Although there are few solid scientific studies on the topic, I believe that as well as whatever benefits we derive from the technologies in which we’ve immersed our lives, these same tools have also caused perceptible changes in attention span, basic courtesy, and memory for many people. You almost certainly have noticed that more and more often, you and your friends can recall a film or book, but can’t recall the director, actor, author, or a major character. And who hasn’t found themselves sitting in a group of people that seem more intent on proving they have to “be somewhere else” digitally by texting, phoning, or checking a web account of some kind. Given the word count of what I’m writing, I lost you 140 words ago, but if you find this topic of interest, you might also find this TechCrunch article about what we watch and how we watch it interesting. It highlights things like how in the early 50′s, 30% of American households watched NBC during prime time, and how today that number has dropped to 5%, with other networks fairing about the same. Most of the remaining video content consumed is watched on the web, and in ways that may surprise you. This fact will almost certainly be relevant to the long-term viewership of Digital Nation; it debuts Tuesday directly opposite the season premiere of “Lost”. Read the rest of this entry »