Technology is usually associated with scientists, but now that artsy academics have tasted the power of digital media, the digital humanities are going full tilt. Featuring everything from best-selling Kindle authors to sociologists of Twitter, this week-long on-ramp takes tweed-jacketed academics from 0 to 60 onto the information superhighway.
Sep 252011
Demonstrating the power of many-to-many image- and sound-making, artist Aaron Koblin and his collaborators stitch compelling interfaces from huge data sets. Watch Koblin transform airline flight data into global travel patterns, frame-by-frame drawings into an animated tribute to Johnny Cash, and Google Street View into an Arcade Fire video personalized for each listener.
The Bieber Shaver is only one of the works by the artist-hackers of F.A.T. Lab, which also include a fake Google Street Views car and the QR Stenciler mentioned previously on NMDnet.
As new laws force ISPs to become copyright cops, the ramifications of intellectual property in the digital age just get more and more absurd.
Anti-Piracy Lawyers Accuse Blind Man of Downloading Films
“As the mass-lawsuits against BitTorrent users in the United States drag on, detail on the collateral damage this extortion-like scheme is costing becomes clear. It is likely that thousands of people have been wrongfully accused of sharing copyrighted material, yet they see no other option than to pay up. One of the cases that stands out is that of a California man who’s incapable of watching the adult film he is accused of sharing because he is legally blind.”
Maybe he just liked the music?
Can a Monkey Get a Copyright & Issue a Takedown?“Last week, the Daily Mail published a story about some monkeys in Indonesia who happened upon a camera and took some photos of themselves. The photos are quite cute. However, Techdirt noticed that the photos had copyright notices on them, and started a discussion over who actually held the copyright in question, noting that, if anyone did, the monkeys had the best claim, and certainly not the photographer. Yet, the news agency who claimed copyright issued a takedown to Techdirt! When presented with the point that it’s unlikely the news agency could hold a legitimate copyright, the agency told Techdirt it didn’t matter. Techdirt claims that using the photos for such a discussion is a clear case of fair use, an argument which has so far been ignored.”
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/07/13/0033214/Can-a-Monkey-Get-a-Copyright-amp-Issue-a-Takedown
“Dice Age,” sounds like…?
Dice Age — Indie Gaming Project vs. Hollywood“Dice Age, a independent game project that raised nearly $35K through Kickstarter, is apparently facing some scrutiny from a certain movie studio that has produced movies with a similar name. From the latest project update: ‘As if the Ice Age was exclusively the name of a movie, or if Dice Age was a movie itself, the 20th century fox has just asked for an extent of time (till 10-26-2011) to oppose to the registering of our beloved Dice Age game name. My point of view, as a scientist, is the Ice age is a geological era before it is a movie.”"
Wendy Seltzer is an ace cyberlawyer who’s worked with Still Water to craft more enlightened forms of intellectual property law.
ISPs Will Now Be Copyright Cops“Wendy Seltzer, Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, talks about the new plan by ISPs and content providers to ‘crack down on what users can do with their internet connections’ using a 6-step warning system to curb online copyright infringement.”
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/08/06/235206/ISPs-Will-Now-Be-Copyright-Cops
Looks like six is the new three:
“American Internet users, get ready for three strikes^W^W ‘six strikes.’ Major US Internet providers — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable — have just signed on to a voluntary agreement with the movie and music businesses to crack down on online copyright infringers. But they will protect subscriber privacy and they won’t filter or monitor their own networks for infringement. And after the sixth ‘strike,’ you won’t necessarily be ‘out.’” It’s not suspicious at all that most of the ISPs signing on for this are owned by or own media companies.
On the pro-sharing front:
A federal judge ruled Monday that publishing an entire article without the rights holder’s authorization was a fair use of the work, in yet another blow to newspaper copyright troll Righthaven. It’s not often that republishing an entire work without permission is deemed fair use.
A federal judge backed the music storage-locker business model Monday while ruling that companies may develop services that store their customers’ songs in the cloud. The closely watched case brought by EMI against MP3tunes comes as Amazon and Google recently launched similar services without the music labels’ consent. Apple is expected to launch a cloud-storage service… http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/XGIJztQaOPw/
Who knew? Maybe the Pirate Bay should start an ecommerce site called Arrrrmazon.com.
Suppressed Report Shows Pirates Are Good Customers“The movie and music industry think pirates are criminals and parasites who cost both industries billions of dollars in lost sales. In order to prove this fact a number of studies have been commissioned to help demonstrate the effect a pirate has on sales of entertainment. GfK Group is one of the largest market research companies in the world and is often used by the movie industry to carry out research and studies into piracy. Talking to a source within GfK who wished to remain anonymous, Telepolis found that a recent study looking at pirates and their purchasing activities found them to be almost the complete opposite of the criminal parasites the entertainment industry want them to be. The study states that it is much more typical for a pirate to download an illegal copy of a movie to try it before purchasing. They are also found to purchase more DVDs than the average consumer, and they visit the movie theater more, especially for opening weekend releases which typically cost more to attend.”
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/07/20/2119232/Suppressed-Report-Shows-Pirates-Are-Good-Customers
Flickr FTW; Facebook WTF.
The Flickr circles you draw on your map are refreshingly intuitive.
Flickr, the granddaddy of online photo sharing, has introduced some refreshingly simple privacy controls designed to limit who can see where your photos were taken. Facebook, please start your photocopiers.
Sadly, Facebook seems to have botched its approach to privacy yet again.
Blogger Dan Tynan was one of the recipients of the new privacy controls that Facebook promised last week. The bad news: They still don’t work, and may even be worse than before. ‘Using Facebook’s new improved privacy controls, you can tag someone else in photo and then keep them from seeing it,’ says Tynan. ‘It’s pretty simple; just change the sharing option so they don’t see what you posted. So if you want to tag a picture of some jerk with your friend’s name on it and make it Public, everyone on Facebook will be able to see it except one — the person whose name is on it.http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/08/29/1644259/Facebooks-New-Privacy-Controls-Still-Broken
Governments and vigilantes are using Facebook and other social media to identify and jail protesters–even if they never left their keyboards.
A Chat With Zavilia, a Tool For Identifying Rioters
“Social media isn’t just great for starting ‘social unrest,’ it’s proving to be quite helpful for quashing it too. Not long after the bricks began to fly in London’s latest kerfuffle, locals angry over raging mobs scrambled to assist the police in their attempt to identify street-fighters and free-for-all hooligans … Now with more than 1,000 people charged over the chaos, a few citizen groups continue to provide web-based rioter identification platforms, in hopes of being good subjects, maintaining the country’s pursuit of order, and keeping their neighborhoods safe.”
http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/08/19/0248220/A-Chat-With-Zavilia-a-Tool-For-Identifying-Rioters
In Britain, a Meeting on Limiting Social Media
Government officials and representatives of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry met to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest.
http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=bc98f459d24fe76a1cb358676020620b
UK Men Get 4 Years For Trying to Incite Riots Via Facebook
“In addition to the 12 arrests from last week, a judge has sentenced 20-year-old Jordan Blackshaw and 22-year-old Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan to four years in prison for their failed attempts to use Facebook to incite riots in the UK. The judge said he hoped the sentences would act as a deterrent. The two men were convicted for using Facebook to encourage violent disorder in their hometowns in northwest England.”
Slashdot / Soulskill nonprofiteer writes “A bunch of vigilantes are organizing a Google Group dedicated to using recently revealed facial recognition tools to identify looters in the London riots. While Vancouver discussed doing something similar after the Stanley Cup riots, the city never actually moved forward on it. Ring of Steel London, though, is far more likely to incorporate FRT into its investigative work.” A related article points out how development of face-recognition technology has been kept under wraps by some organizations, but we’re getting to the point where it’ll soon be ubiquitous.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/08/10/062225/The-London-Riots-and-Facial-Recognition-Technology
When police and vigilantes fail, there’s always PayPal.
PayPal Joins London Police Effort“PayPal has joined a music copyright association and the City of London police department’s bid to financially starve websites deemed ‘illegal.’ When presented with sufficient evidence of unlicensed downloading from a site, the United Kingdom’s PayPal branch ‘will require the retailer to submit proof of licensing for the music offered by the retailer,’ said the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s latest press release.”
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/07/22/2345217/PayPal-Joins-London-Police-Effort
Meanwhile, Egyptian activists are getting in trouble for what they post on Facebook.
Egyptian Charged For Threatening Facebook Post“The Egyptian Military Prosecution has charged 26-year-old activist and blogger Asmaa Mahfouz for allegedly defaming the country’s ruling generals and calling for armed operations against the military and the judiciary. Mahfouz, a prominent activist, was accused of using Facebook to call for the assassinations of Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) members and certain judges.”
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/08/15/0156222/Egyptian-Charged-For-Threatening-Facebook-Post
Some Web hosting services discourage or prohibit the practice known as “scraping,” whereby a custom-built bot crawls the Web looking for particular content to repurpose. While scraping can be used for questionable purposes like generating spam text or manipulating search engines, in this case a student is looking for a host for a legitimate project based on tracking political candidates for the 2012 election.
Is it cheating to appropriate Google Street View images as photojournalism?
The Google Street View car is like the ultimate street photographer, a robo Cartier-Bresson methodically scouring the streets and documenting what it sees. But most people use GSV for practical purposes, and they view any drama or comedy captured by the roving 360-degree camera as accidents.
A few photographers are now looking for these ‘accidents’ intentionally. Instead of walking out on the street to find interesting scenes and people, they are simply curating the pre-documented streets from the comfort of their desk at home.
Michael Wolf, for example, uses a camera to photograph scenes from Google Street View open on his computer’s browser. In February, his honorable mention in the Contemporary Issues category at the World Press Photo Awards for A Series of Unfortunate Events ignited a storm of debate. Some balked at the idea that Wolf’s project was photojournalism, while others embraced the decision and called for more conceptual leaps and redefinitions of photojournalism in the digital age.
Meanwhile two women in Cincinnati are testing privacy ethics by selling reproductions of 1955 police mug shots.
http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=78417df2d428dc4bffb906cc42a4bc53
On another mobile front: For those who prefer their art fresh rather than refried, tablet drawing is getting more sophisticated, as on this recent release by the same company that created AutoCAD:
SketchBook Pro, essentially a digital canvas and brush set, allows you to use both your fingers and aftermarket styluses to create illustrations and designs. Included are over 60 different brush tools, the ability to create up to six different layers for one file, as well as the ability to export files to Photoshop.The app was previously available on iPhone, iPad and Android phone devices, as well as in an expanded desktop version. This is the first version of the app that will run on Android’s tablet-optimized software, a.k.a. Honeycomb.
Of course, just because you drew it on an iPad doesn’t mean you won’t be a kitschy derivative of other works–as demonstrated by a recent exhibition that showed off the iPad’s artsy side:
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/aX5h2ZGYt9E/
What would Leonardo do?
A decade ago, Sun founder Bill Joy prophesied a future without fixed prices, where bots would negotiate our most quotidian economic transactions. His future is about to become our present.
TaskRabbit is like eBay for real-world labor….It was a wintry night in February 2008, when [ Leah ] Busque, a 28-year-old engineer at IBM in Cambridge, Massachusetts, realized that she needed dog food for her yellow lab, Kobe. She wanted nothing more than to get someone else to trudge outside in the snow. “I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if there were a place online you could go,” she says. “A site where you could name the price you were willing to pay for any task. There had to be someone in my neighborhood who was willing to get that dog food for what I was willing to pay.”
Got parking?
A new iPhone app has created a marketplace for public parking, connecting those vacating a space with those searching for one — for a fee.Parking Auction launched earlier this week on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The matchmaking service is beta-testing, and the folks behind it hope to expand worldwide, creating communities of relaxed, smartphone-armed parkers.
“If I’m parked on the street and wouldn’t mind moving my car to a spot half a mile away that isn’t residential, I may be happy to give it up to my neighbor that just got home from East Hampton on a Sunday night with two kids in a car she has to unload,” said founder Brian Rosetti. “We think that’s quite a neighborly and valuable service.”
Why write a bot that spams people with Viagra ads when you can write a bot that just wrings coins directly out of their computer chip?
For the uninitiated, Bitcoins are a digital currency that can be minted from excess CPU cycles of a computer and used in a variety of Internet contexts. More on Bitcoins:
http://www.nmdnet.org/2011/06/12/is-bitcoin-the-future-of-money/
So the money being “stolen” is not existing cash that is somehow withdrawn from your bank account or charged to your credit card, but is new money “printed” when your computer is hijacked by the malware.
This is kind of like breaking into an alchemist’s shop and making gold from his leftover iron.
GPGPU Bitcoin Mining Trojan
“Security researchers have unearthed a piece of malware that mints a digital currency known as Bitcoins by harnessing the immense power of an infected machine’s graphical processing units. According to new research from antivirus provider Symantec, Trojan.Badminer uses GPUs to generate virtual coins through a practice known as minting. That’s the term for solving difficult cryptographic proof-of-work problems and being rewarded with 50 Bitcoins for each per correct block.”
Give linguists 140 characters and they’ll predict whether you’re a guy or girl two times out of three.
“Remember when the Gay Girl in Damascus revealed himself as a middle-aged man from Georgia? On a platform like Twitter, which doesn’t ask for much biographical information, it’s easy (and fun!) to take on a fake persona but now linguistic researchers have developed an algorithm that can predict the gender of a tweeter based solely on the 140 characters they choose to tweet. The research is based on the idea that women use language differently than men. ‘The mere fact of a tweet containing an exclamation mark or a smiley face meant that odds were a woman was tweeting, for instance,’ reports David Zax. Other research corroborates these findings, finding that women tend to use emoticons, abbreviations, repeated letters and expressions of affection more than men and linguists have also developed a list of gender-skewed words used more often by women including love, ha-ha, cute, omg, yay, hahaha, happy, girl, hair, lol, hubby, and chocolate. Remarkably, even when only provided with one tweet, the program could correctly identify gender 65.9% of the time. (PDF). Depending on how successful the program is proven to be, it could be used for ad-targeting, or for socio-linguistic research.”
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/07/28/2244236/Linguists-Out-Men-Impersonating-Women-On-Twitter
This result follows a recent spate of articles in the mainstream media arguing that language reflects how you think. While emphasizing cultural rather than gender divergences, some of this research suggests profoundly different worldviews. For example, the Pormpuraaw people of aboriginal Australia speak of “my southwest foot” instead of “my left foot.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html
Two days after Aaron Swartz is accused of downloading a huge swath of academic journal articles from the paywalled site JSTOR, another activist has posted a similar trove to the notorious Web site Pirate Bay. What happens when academics espouse plagiarism?
Save the Date and Call for Submissions PechaKucha Night Bangor Vol. 2 Friday, August 19th Brick Church, 126 Union Street, Bangor
PechaKucha Night Bangor Vol. 2 is slated for Friday night, August 19th. George Kinghorn, Director and Curator of the University of Maine Museum of Art, will emcee the event. A cash bar and munchies will be provided. 8 people will surprise the audience with presentations about their creative work and ideas.
SUBMISSIONS: Please send a 1-paragraph bio, title and description of your presentation, 3 to 5 sample images and your phone and email contact info to pechakucha [DOT] bangor [AT] gmail [DOT] com. Submissions are due July 22nd .
People of all creative expressions, designers, writers, architects, artists, sculptors, dancers, photographers, academics, athletes, farmers, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, and more are encouraged to submit their work to present at PechaKucha Night Vol. 2. More information about the submission process is available at http://www.pecha-kucha.org/night/bangor-meand by emailing pechakucha [DOT] bangor [AT] gmail [DOT] com.
PechaKucha Night Bangor is a presentation event for creative people to showcase their work, accomplishments and ideas to the community. PechaKucha Night started in 2003 in Japan and has spread to hundreds of cities around the world. The event concept is to keep presentations concise, interest up and ideas flowing. The 20×20 PechaKucha format allows each presenter to narrate a slideshow of 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds. Each event has 8 presenters representing a wide array of creative disciplines.
Jun 182011
JavaScript’s seemingly inexorable march toward becoming the universal language of new media recently opened a new beachhead on the Web server. With an effusion of excitement about, and profusion of frameworks for, using JavaScript for such server-side tasks as accessing databases, the homely script that started out as a love child of Netscape and Internet Explorer could end up displacing such respected languages as PHP, Python, and Ruby.
Microsoft Vice President Julie Larson-Green didn’t help matters during a demo of Windows 8, when she called HTML5 / JavaScript “our new developer platform“–freaking out legions of developers who’ve diligently learned Microsoft-only platforms from Visual Basic to C#. Will Microsoft say nyet to .NET?
The press release for the exhibition Not Here begins, “The Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University is very pleased to announce that we will not be presenting the augmented reality artwork of the art collective, MANIFEST.AR from June 4 through November 27, 2011.” It turns out MANIFEST.AR isn’t featured in the Venice Biennale either. Even more of a coincidence: the same works not featured in the Biennale are not featured in the Samek show, during the exact same period!
If you’re confused, blame Augmented Reality: software that allows enterprising artists to overlay virtual versions of their works in real spaces, at least on AR-enabled smartphones. What’s not (here) to like?
Jun 122011
Imagine a future in which a single worldwide currency is distributed among peers rather than centralized in a handful of wealthy banks. Freed from the intrusions of national governments and the manipulation of Wall Street fat cats, these virtual coins could be “mined” and spent by individual citizens anywhere on the Internet. Based on an open-source standard and difficult to trace, these immaterial coins would quickly become the ideal payment option for privacy advocates, political dissidents, and narcotics dealers.
This future is already here, and it’s called Bitcoin.
The New York Times reports on the increasingly frequent–but still very controversial–practice of incorporating Twitter and other “backchannel” communication networks into the classroom. Do such conversations make classes more inclusive or more distracting?
Why buy your own car/CDs/power tools, when your neighbors already have loads of them?
Rachel Botsman makes the case:
http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_botsman_the_case_for_collaborative_consumption.html
NeighborGoods is already up to 2.0:
http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/03/neighborgoods-kickstarter/ (Via Bruce Sterling).http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mickipedia/neighbors-helping-neighborgoods
Thanks to you, NeighborGoods has quickly become the leading online community for local resource sharing. Now, we’re reaching out directly to our members to help us take NeighborGoods to the next level.
We’re gearing up to launch NeighborGoods 2.0, which focuses on creating sharing communities for organizations, companies and and groups of all sizes.
Smartphones help:
People will ditch their cars and embrace mass transit if they have the tools to manage their commutes. Enter the smartphone … http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/iPSyBkh6X_g/ Xatori unveils a free iPhone app that enables drivers to punch in their destinations and locate outlet owners who are willing to share. http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=fa66fe847e6ccd56e61dde5770c4ffbfNow, to Find a Parking Spot, Drivers Look on Their Phones http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d9838be80c3361a169de04e52c21ba99
And Zipcar’s IPO is meteoric:
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/vQEd37Mmv0A/ via BylineZipcar raises $174 million and sees its stock price soar a whopping 60 percent in its first day as a public company. The decade-old car sharing company, maybe the most disruptive entrant in the automobile rental space since Rent-A-Wreck, is now a billion-dollar operation.
The raid is liveblogged when one of Bin Laden’s neighbors complains about the noisy helicopters on Twitter, while Bin Laden’s compound gets 3 of 5 stars on Google Maps. Also in the news: weaponized dogs and a tale of two seals.
The Pirate Party of Canada has threatened to unleash its anti-surveillance software on its own government, promising to let Canadian citizens browse safely under a Virtual Private Network.
“The Pirate Party of Canada has announced that it will extend a VPN originally set up to allow people in Tunisia to browse freely while internet censorship was imposed there. Canada may soon be added to that list since the ruling Conservative Party has vowed to introduce a bill that would provide unprecedented systematic interception and monitoring of Canadians’ personal communications. So the Pirate Party of Canada has announced it will extend that service to Canadians.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Meanwhile, back in north Africa…
“A team led by a Libyan-American telecom executive has helped rebels hijack Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s cellphone network and re-establish their own communications. The new network, first plotted on an airplane napkin and assembled with the help of oil-rich Arab nations, is giving more than two million Libyans their first connections to each other and the outside world after Col. Gadhafi cut off their telephone and Internet service about a month ago.”