Shopping for drones in Paris | The Verge →
theverge.com
World’s largest air show with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) along the outskirts.
June 2013
48 posts
Has U.S. started an Internet war? →
cnn.com
by Bruce Schneier at CNN.com
Today, the United States is conducting offensive cyberwar actions around the world. More than passively eavesdropping, we’re penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We’re creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pre-targeted and ready to be “fired” against some piece of another country’s electronic infrastructure on a moment’s notice.
Very interesting and thought provoking article.
Cities Shouldn’t Sell Traffic Data - Bloomberg →
bloomberg.com
Seems like someone should pay me to know my driving habits, reading choices, whereabouts, retail and grocery purchases … I’ve heard mention of an article suggesting micro payments for our individual bits of data.
“If the Universe were a year old, humanity has existed for about 20 seconds.”
—Fire in the Sky | Dark Energy Detectives
“A present overwhelmed by the not-always-intended effects of the technological world we’d created.”
—
Andrew Blum, ‘Children of the Drone’ (2013)
Very similar to this:
Late modernity is a period of social change prompted by the need to cope with the risks generated by modernity itself.
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization
Or in this case, the postnormal is a period of social re-equilibration instigated by the chaotic risks posed by the postmodern.
We are catching with postnormal hands what the machinery of control pitched in the postmodern, like drones.
When they start flinging postnormal inventions at us — like autonomous battle robots, or semi-intelligent buildings grown from nano slime, or genetically engineered yogurt yeasts that make us more nationalistic — then we will be all the way into the postnormal, and past the fringes where we are today.
(via stoweboyd)
Digging that last paragraph on the “postnormal” inventions. What was a normal invention anyway? Just spent the day reading time travel stories by Ray Bradbury. The inventions that really matter all were postnormal at some point. This reminds me that I should re-read Bruce Sterling’s Shaper-Mechanist stories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaper/Mechanist_universe
(via notational)
Obama Is Checking Your Email →
obamaischeckingyouremail.tumblr.com
It’s on Tumblr and it made me laugh!
“The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (as either side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time.”
—Howard Zinn (via azspot)
“
23. Twenty Recognitions (continued)
6. Anything is happening.
7. Rules change.
8. Change rules.
9. Everything is something other than what it seems to be.
10. Everything is real.
11. The world is incomplete.
12. Seeing is conceiving.
(To be continued.)
” —Appearances: a Novel In 354 Fragments by Tom Beckett
via PEEP/SHOW: ……………
“
Commentators often attempt to refute the nothing-to-hide argument by pointing to things people want to hide. But the problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is the underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things. By accepting this assumption, we concede far too much ground and invite an unproductive discussion about information that people would very likely want to hide. As the computer-security specialist Schneier aptly notes, the nothing-to-hide argument stems from a faulty “premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong.” Surveillance, for example, can inhibit such lawful activities as free speech, free association, and other First Amendment rights essential for democracy.
The deeper problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of secrecy. In contrast, understanding privacy as a plurality of related issues demonstrates that the disclosure of bad things is just one among many difficulties caused by government security measures. To return to my discussion of literary metaphors, the problems are not just Orwellian but Kafkaesque. Government information-gathering programs are problematic even if no information that people want to hide is uncovered. In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited behavior but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system’s use of personal data and its denial to the protagonist of any knowledge of or participation in the process. The harms are bureaucratic ones—indifference, error, abuse, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability.
” —Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’ (via ayjay)
“Our attitude to technology, particularly in literary circles, has for far too long been exclusionary and oppositional, envisioning some kind of battle between the “natural” world of human expression and the “unnatural” chattering of the machines. There have been excellent attempts to breach this divide, in the imaginings of science fiction; the coruscating; spam-filled prose of Stewart Home; Kenneth Goldsmith’s “Uncreative Writing”; the spasming code of Kenji Siratori; and many more. But the true literatures of the network will emerge when we abandon notions of the single-authored work, when we abandon authority entirely, when we write in machine argots and programmatic codes, when we listen to the bots and collaborate with them, when we truly begin to understand, and describe, the technologically-saturated culture we are already living in.”
—James Bridle, Hacking the word (via tamises)
