What’s up with wikileaks? Updated: the ‘09 F9 effect’ strikes again…!

What’s going on with wikileaks? It had some interesting stuff, including a satellite computation thingy that you could use to figure out where all the US military satellites are, their foot prints, etc. , and then it went…poof?

UPDATE:

Well courtesy of slashdot, now we know what’s going on:

DragonFire1024 writes “Wikinews.org — The Wikileaks website, which publishes sensitive and censored material submitted by anonymous contributors, has experienced unprecedented levels of Internet traffic today through public interest. This interest has caused the website’s servers to be unable to meet the enormous demand of over 164 gigabytes of download traffic within twenty-four hours, leading the site to be temporarily inaccessible.”

We should thank Bank Julius Baer for their efforts in greatly increasing the visibility and readership of wikileaks. The have contributed greatly to wikileaks!

Reminds me of one of the contributors to wikipedia, Patrick Ross.

Two other links, for further reading…

hmmm…looks like this could be interesting, about data visualization:
http://infosthetics.com/
Dani Rodrik’s weblog, a Harvard economist, who is also a sceptic re: globalization:
http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/

What we can do about Tibet, your closet clutter, your unemployed neighbor, and Global Warming

Certainly, the situation described in Anne Applebaum’s recent article in the Washington Post rings true, but what can we do, here sitting in America, to effect change in Tibet?

Yes, we can protest in front of the Chinese embassy, and we should do that. But what if you don’t happen to live in DC?

We can do a lot to help Tibet. China depends on it’s trade with the United States, and Walmart is a the primary vehicle that trade with China uses to get to USA.

From a report at EPI:

Last year, the retail giant Wal-Mart imported $26.7 billion of Chinese goods into the United States. The cost of those goods to Americans went far beyond the sticker prices, however. Wal-Mart’s reliance on Chinese goods cost the United States over 308,000 jobs in 2006 – or about 77 jobs for every Wal-Mart store in the United States.

…

Wal-Mart was responsible for 9.3 percent of. U.S. China imports…

So a very simple action–boycotting Walmart–would quickly turn into an issue inside China. Just don’t buy all those Chinese bicycles/DVD’s etc, etc. Pretty soon Walmart will stop buying from China. China needs markets more than they need an empire. (Just ask Russia about that.)

It would be easy–all that the US public has to do is decide to confront wrongdoing, by not buying stuff from Walmart. It would also be good to do without so much stuff, that we really don’t need, do we? It would do something good for the planet, too.

Just do it.

(note: some edits, including link to EPI study were added 30 March 200

Referrers and blogroll additions

To be added to blogroll:

First, a couple of site which have been directing traffic to e_f, in addition to global guerillas (already on blog roll):

Airminded Airpower and British Society 1908-1941

Dark Roasted Blend Lots of interesting and bizarre stuff…

And added:

H-zone unrestricted information about hacking and website defacements

http://www.fermath.info/ An interesting resources for cryptography.

The eeePC is irrelevant…and it can disappear (into my briefcase)

Now there’s so much competition that even if the eeePC were withdrawn, or if Asus lost their lawsuit against IBM, the momentum of this new market segment would continue without it. Let’s all do remember too that it was the OLPC that started it all. A whole new market segment initiated by a not-for-profit. Part of the trend of the expansion of the not for profit sector.

Of course, the incumbents are trying to shut the barn door long after the horse has left. Here’s one Sony exec.:

“If [Asus' Eee PC] starts to do well, we are all in trouble,” Mike Abary, a senior VP with Sony US’ IT products operation, told Cnet. That’s just a race to the bottom… if mainstream buyers buy it then whoa…” (Found here)

“IF???” Yeah, right Mike, so what planet do you live on? The eeePC has sold more than 400,000 units, and it can’t be kept on shelves. So I don’t see any justification for the “if”. No wonder Sony is in the pickle it’s in.

Sounds like a game console…but not one that Sony makes. Like the wii, the eeePC is priced below the competition, it is cool, and it fits into the man maximum/machine minimum trend that’s been going on for the last few years. The eeePC does this by being small and unobtrusive. I can throw it in my briefcase and hardly even know it’s there. Try that with a laptop. Less is more.

This form factor is also inherently much more sustainable than a large format laptop–it uses less power, less materials and is going to be easier to recycle. Of course, each manufacturer needs to do the right thing and get their components from green suppliers, using lead free circuit boards and batteries that don’t contain mercury. But being green is always easier when you’re not so big.

But, look at all the great competition there is! What a glorious race to the bottom!

(They are in the order of e_f’s perception of coolness…)

The Future CIA: You

From an old, old draft I’d started here is Eblen Moglen is giving a talk at Google and he mentions, as almost an aside, the implications of free and open source methodologies for national security, and it’s not a random or an insignificant point. (This point is made near the end of the show…but it’s a good show anyway.)

All Dressed Up and No Place to Go By Eben Moglen 27 March 2007

What does he mean? Is he crazy? No, he understands some essential processes. And now I’ve got two links that explain this further, so I don’t have to finish the post I’d started. The benefits of procrastination!

Interface—gone!

This reminds me of a design problem described by my first year design studio instructor–which was to design a bottle opener. The best design: Someone brought in a can with a pull tab. Think Schumpeter and creative destruction!

I’d also note the decreasing levels of abstraction in the software I use: Revit, where you work in a space that is WYSIWYG (when looking at a sheet) and when looking at the model, you see it in 3D, vs. Autocrap, where, until a recent version, line-weight was keyed into line color for the 2D views, (Yuck!) & and 3D was basically unworkable. I am convinced the next interface for architects will be a pen that you can draw with on a screen that is also your monitor, and it will be about 50″ diag., at a resolution of something like 10,000 x 6,000. It will look like a desk, and to use it, you will have to keep it clear of papers!

Coming Soon: Nothing Between You and Your Machine

IT has been more than two decades since Scotty tried to use a computer mouse as a microphone to control a Macintosh in “Star Trek IV.”
Since then, personal computer users have continued to live under the tyranny of the mice, windows, icons and pull-down menus originally invented at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s and popularized by Apple and Microsoft in the next decade.
Last year, however, the arrival of the Nintendo Wii and the Apple iPhone began to break down the logjam in technological innovation for the way humans interact with computers

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Three Good Articles over at Project Syndicate

Here are several important articles from one of my favorite sites, Project Syndicate. Note that most articles there are available in seven languages, although it’s very Euro-centric, with Chinese being the only non-European language. I don’t understand why they keep giving Bjorn Lomborg, with his mixed up ideas on global warming, such coverage, though.

These are not random articles, as each describes an inflection point in the process it discusses, and each process is under-reported in the media. Each is also an example of something that the dominate neo-liberal laissez-faire economics has not provided an answer to, and therefore calls for robust actions of the appropriate government agencies.  In particular I like DeLong’s concept of adding to Friedman’s thought rather than throwing it out, and the emphaisis he places on interconnections.  All emphasis is by e_f.

Rumours of the death of the newspaper have been greatly exaggerated–UPDATED–

Over at TLF, Adam Theirer is bemoaning the fact that corporations can’t buy up the remaining newspapers.

If we were to believe the rhetoric of some in Washington and various pro-regulatory groups like Free Press, you’d think we still lived in the 1800s and that a handful of newspaper barons like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer still dominated our media landscape. Just today, in fact, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) introduced a “Resolution of Disapproval”—largely at the urging of Free Press and other regulatory advocates like Parents Television Council—that would overturn a half-hearted media liberalization effort undertaken by the Federal Communications Commission last December.

That FCC effort dealt with just one of the myriad regulations governing media structures in this country: the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule. The newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule, which has been in effect since 1975, prohibits a newspaper owner from owning a radio or television station in the same media market. “No changes to the other media-ownership rules [are] currently under review,” FCC Chairman Martin noted at the time, leaving many TV and radio broadcasters wondering when they will ever get regulatory relief.

He has chart after chart after chart, showing the decline in the absolute number of newspapers, the decline in their revenue, the decline in the newspaper readership by age group (kind of silly really, as the reading of newspapers is declining across all age groups) The problem is of course that all of these metrics are wholly irrelevant to the importance of the role that a free press plays in our society, which can not be reduced to mere profitability of the newspaper sector. Further more, by changing the ownership rules, Adam presents no evidence that the newspapers themselves would become more profitable, just that if Walt Disney or General Electric bought them they could probably absorb the loses.

Why shouldn’t we tolerate just a little repression?

OR WHY NET-NEUTRALITY IS ACTUALLY IMPORTANT

Lest anyone have doubts that corporate-controlled media will censor speech if given the opportunity, here’s this news about mysterious ‘black-outs” in the local affiliates of national networks in Alabama:

WHNT’s Technical Glitches
The New York Times | Editorial
Wednesday 27 February 2008

In 1955, when WLBT-TV, the NBC affiliate in Jackson, Miss., did not want to run a network report about racial desegregation, it famously hung up the sign: “Sorry, Cable Trouble.” Audiences in northern Alabama might have suspected the same tactics when WHNT-TV, the CBS affiliate, went dark Sunday evening during a “60 minutes” segment that strongly suggested that Don Siegelman, Alabama’s former Democratic governor, was wrongly convicted of corruption last year.

The report presented new evidence that the charges against Mr. Siegelman may have been concocted by politically motivated Republican prosecutors - and orchestrated by Karl Rove. Unfortunately, WHNT had “technical problems” that prevented it from broadcasting a segment (the problems were resolved in time for the next part of the show) that many residents of Alabama would no doubt have found quite interesting.

After initially blaming the glitch on CBS in New York, the affiliate said it learned “upon investigation,” and following a rebuke from the network, that “the problem was on our end.” It re-broadcast the segment at 10 p.m., pitting it against the Academy Awards on rival ABC, before Daniel Day-Lewis won the best actor Oscar. As public criticism grew, it ran it again at 6 p.m. on Monday.

Stan Pylant, WHNT’s president and general manager, assured viewers that “there was no intent whatsoever to keep anyone from seeing the broadcast.”

WHNT is owned by Oak Hill Capital Partners, a private equity firm whose lead investor is one of the Bass brothers of Texas. The brothers are former business partners of George W. Bush and generous contributors to Republican causes.

Of course, this has been exposed, but if, as is the case in much of the country, there’s only one high speed internet provider, what’s the chance of these little corporate censorship efforts undertaken by a high speed internet provider being uncovered always? And it’s really not that rare: here’s a list of a dozen or so examples of corporations censoring political speech, by violating net neutrality.

So it has been a problem. Is there such a thing as just a small violation of freedom of speech? Why should we tolerate just a little repression? MLK said: “A threat to Freedom anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Let’s not forget those words. Net neutrality deserves to be on the agenda in 2008, and the only way it will get there is by the electorate telling those running that net neutrality is important.