Since December of last year, I have been part of a small group of concerned citizens engaged in a series of actions against Cambridge Analytica (CA) and its parent corporation, SCL Group. I am writing this post in the hopes of gathering support (that is, funds) we need to continue this action. You can support […]
Although it didn’t break the major media until last week, around June 2 researchers led by Adam Kramer of Facebook published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) entitled “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks.” The publication has triggered an flood of complaints and concerns: is Facebook […]
A colleague asked if I had any links to writings about Google Glass, so I dug around in my files and found quite a few things. I thought they might come in handy for others doing research on the topic. I have even more, but this is overwhelming enough as it is. The final pair […]
One of the most dangerous canards of the digital revolution is the one according to which distribution, decentralization, and democratization are the characteristic hallmarks of contemporary mass computerization. To writers of earlier ages (Huxley, Orwell, Lem, Weizenbaum, Wiener, Mumford, Ellul, Roszak, just to name a few), such sentiments would seem shocking, because what they understood […]
“Game of Drones,” aka, “Gameful, or Shameful?,” aka “Presto Change-O World Peace, from the Same Team That Brings You Permanent War” Paper delivered at SLSA 2012 Annual Conference, Milwaukee, WI, September 2012. Full paper: “Game of Drones” Abstract The recent widespread deployment by the US in particular of Unmanned Combat Vehicles (UCVs), especially Unmanned Aerial […]
We were first alerted to the existence of the Stuxnet worm in 2010, due to some interesting security breaches and reporting in the New York Times making it clear that a nation-state–by direct implication and what may have been deliberate misdirection at that time, Israel–must have been behind the worm. Soon after we were alerted […]
In case you were wondering whether all these sites are under heavy and constant surveillance? All these sites are under heavy and constant surveillance. In fact, as a working hypothesis and algorithm for daily activity, presume the surveillance is much more extensive, especially when it comes to information that right now seems trivial (it is […]
It’s not just creepy. It’s part of the evil that Google is now chartered to do. See, when they put that thing together, they may have forgotten how evil is almost always done in the US: under cover of saying what’s being done is not evil. We have an entire political party/movement based around it […]
So if he says it will you believe it? i may have asked this question before, rhetorically. (No sign so far of him discussing how this tracks with his own promotion of the Facebook philosophy; see below.) http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/05/03/wikileaks-founder-assange-blasts-facebook-appalling-spying-machine/ WikiLeaks Founder Assange Blasts Facebook as ‘Most Appalling Spying Machine’ “Here we have the world’s most comprehensive […]
<rant name=”my real thoughts about wikileaks” sentiment=”please don’t hate me” causeofdelay=”trying not to get into flame war” >In recent interviews (e.g., with Time, Forbes, and The New Yorker), Julian Assange demonstrates repeatedly how little he knows about world politics, about the open-source information already available regarding the topics he claims to be “revealing,” or even […]