December 10, 2010

MEDIABERKMAN » BLOG ARCHIVE » RADIO BERKMAN 171: WIKILEAKS AND THE INFORMATION WARS

Shared by Daniel Excellent discussion.
December 10, 2010

GLENN GREENWALD ON THE ARREST OF JULIAN ASSANGE AND THE U.S. “WAR ON WIKILEAKS”

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I just want to underscore how alarming everything is that you just described, both in that report and in your earlier one, which is, whatever you think of WikiLeaks, they’ve never been charged with a crime, let alone indicted or convicted. And yet, look at what has happened to them. They’ve been essentially removed from the internet, not just through a denial of service attacks that are very sophisticated, but through political pressure applied to numerous countries. Their funds have been frozen, including funds donated by people around the world for his—for Julian Assange’s defense fund and for WikiLeaks’s defense fund. They’ve had their access to all kinds of accounts cut off. Leading politicians and media figures have called for their assassination, their murder, to be labeled a terrorist organization. What’s really going on here is a war over control of the internet and whether or not the internet can actually serve what a lot of people hoped its ultimate purpose was, which was to allow citizens to band together and democratize the checks on the world’s most powerful factions. That’s what this really is about. It’s why you see Western government, totally lawlessly, waging what can only be described as a war on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange outside the bounds of any constraints, because that’s what really is at stake here. If they want to prosecute them, they should go to court and do it through legal means. But this extralegal persecution ought to be very alarming to every citizen in every one of these countries, because it essentially is pure authoritarianism and is designed to prevent the internet from being used as its ultimate promise, which is providing a check on unconstrained political power.
December 9, 2010

CHINESE HOTPOT RESTAURANT GETS ROBOT WAITERS, MAY SOON BE SERVING DROIDS AS WELL (VIDEO)

Why, it’s another robot-themed hotpot restaurant! This time we’re looking at Jinan — once famous for demolishing a whole stash of illegal arcade machines — up in north China, where a ballsy robotics manufacturer started trialling a robot-themed eatery. While there are still human chefs working back in the kitchen, some near-hundred customers will be served by six robots (about ¥40,000 or $6,000 each to build) that follow a white line to seat diners and deliver dishes. Oh, and don’t expect any slapstick comedy here — these bland-looking droids will only stop if you dare stand in front of them. You’ll have to hurry up, though, as this venue closes in about 16 days; but for those who can’t make it, we’ve got a video right after the break. Continue reading Chinese hotpot restaurant gets robot waiters, may soon be serving droids as well (video) Chinese hotpot restaurant gets robot waiters, may soon be serving droids as well (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Dec 2010 09:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink Dvice | source iQilu, Xinhuanet | Email this | Comments
December 8, 2010

YOUTUBE – SA@TAC THE CONSERVATIVE PURPOSE OF WIKILEAKS

December 8, 2010

ANTI-WIKILEAKS LIES AND PROPAGANDA – FROM TNR, LAUER, FEINSTEIN AND MORE – GLENN GREENWALD – SALON.COM

(1) In The New Republic today, Todd Gitlin writes an entire anti-WikiLeaks column that is based on an absolute factual falsehood. Anyone listening to most media accounts would believe that WikiLeaks has indiscriminately published all 250,000 of the diplomatic cables it possesses, and Gitlin — in the course of denouncing Julian Assange — bolsters this falsehood: “Wikileaks’s huge data dump, including the names of agents and recent diplomatic cables, is indiscriminate” and Assange is “fighting for a world of total transparency.” The reality is the exact opposite — literally — of what Gitlin told TNR readers. WikiLeaks has posted to its website only 960 of the 251,297 diplomatic cables it has. Almost every one of these cables was first published by one of its newspaper partners which are disclosing them (The Guardian, the NYT, El Pais, Le Monde, Der Speigel, etc.). Moreover, the cables posted by WikiLeaks were not only first published by these newspapers, but contain the redactions applied by those papers to protect innocent people and otherwise minimize harm.
December 8, 2010

WIKILEAKS AND THE END OF THE OPEN INTERNET | IAN WELSH

Let’s just state the obvious here: we’re seeing the end of the open internet with what is being done to Wikileaks. It’s one thing for Amazon to toss them, it’s another thing entirely to refuse to propagate their domain information. This has been coming for quite some time, and Wikileaks is not the first domain to be shut down in the US, it is merely the highest profile. Combined with the attempt to make NetFlix pay a surcharge or lose access to customers, this spells the end of the free internet. The absurdity, the sheer Orwellian stupidity of this is epitomized by the State Department telling students at elite colleges not to read the leaks, or they won’t get jobs at State. As if anyone who isn’t curious to read what is in the leaks, who doesn’t want to know how diplomacy actually works, is anyone State should hire. In a sane world, the reaction would be the opposite: no one who hadn’t read them would be hired. This is reminiscent of the way the old Soviet Union worked, with everyone being forced to pretend they don’t know what they absolutely do know, and blind conformity prized over ability
December 8, 2010

THE REACTION OF GOVERNMENTS TO WIKILEAKS SHOULD SCARE THE HELL OUT OF YOU

December 8, 2010

DINOSAUR COMICS – DECEMBER 6TH, 2010 – AWESOME FUN TIMES!

Shared by Daniel h/t ben j sexy exciting dinosaur comics that you will love, I PROMISE
December 7, 2010

THE LIST

I have decided to maintain a list of corporations, organizations, and politicans who have pulled support for Wikileaks, or have otherwise bowed to political pressure against Wikileaks, and those who have openly supported Wikileaks. I haven’t found a comprehensive list online, but there is so much noise right now that it is hard to find good info. There are questionable accusations being thrown at Twitter and Facebook (for blocking all links to torrent sites), and I’d like some clean, well-sourced data. I see a lot of references to “Amazon, PayPal, and the like” without listing the organizations that are actively suppressing Wikileaks. I think it is important for us to track who is one what side of this debate, since the lines being drawn over Wikileaks are the same lines that divide the larger debate over the future of the internet. I don’t care if there are legitimate reasons for pulling support, if the decision was independently made with no political pressure, or if it is some massive conspiracy to destroy the internet. I just want to take stock and provide sources for who falls on what side of this issue. Here we go. If anyone can add to this list as things develop I’ll try to maintain it. Wikileaks Mirrors Pulled support or spoke out against: – Amazon – EveryDNS – PayPal – Visa – MasterCard – Sen. Lieberman – Tableau Software Publicly supported: – Glenn Greenwald – Ron Paul – XipWire – Anonymous/Operation Payback – The Pirate Bay – DataCell Hedged bets: – Facebook – Twitter – OVH
December 5, 2010

RAZORFISH PORTS DAVINCI INTERFACE TO KINECT, MAKES PHYSICS COOL (VIDEO)

Razorfish ports DaVinci interface to Kinect, makes physics cool (video) Razorfish is a little marketing company that has done some impressive things on Microsoft’s Surface, things you may or may not have seen because that particular brand of pedestal hasn’t exactly become a threat to the global dumbtable market. One of Razorfish’s cool things is a so-called Surface Physics Illustrator called DaVinci, which lets a user doodle on the screen and turn those doodles into balls, boxes, levers, and fulcrums. Now that code has effectively ported that code over to Kinect, as you can see in the video below, letting you do the same sort of things but with thine own two hands floating in mid-air. You can cause shapes to levitate, create gravity between them, make things orbit, even enable magnetism that alternately pulls and hurls your little doodles across the screen. The company is said to be continuing to refine the experience and maybe, if you all ask nice, they’ll even release the app when they’re through so you can try it for yourself. [Thanks, Luke] Continue reading Razorfish ports DaVinci interface to Kinect, makes physics cool (video) Razorfish ports DaVinci interface to Kinect, makes physics cool (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Dec 2010 11:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | sourceRazorfish | Email this | Comments
December 4, 2010

YOUTUBE – FLYING LOTUS – KILL YOUR CO-WORKERS

https://youtu.be/zPLNK3mn7zE
December 3, 2010

GETROBO BLOG ENGLISH: AUTONOMOUS CAR MASTERMINDS CONVERGE AT GOOGLE

Stanford University Professor Sebastian Thrun led the team that built Stanley which won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. Two years later, Christopher Urmson of Carnegie Mellon University was the team leader of the group that made Boss that won…
February 2, 2009

PRINT IS DEAD

– Egon, “Ghostbusters” I recently wrote up a very long comment in response to this post on LiteraryGulag. It screwed up the formatting of my comment, so I am reproducing it here for posterity. Let’s see if we can’t get Sheets to show up and respond! I find the recent lamenting over the death of traditional newspapers to be a curious phenomenon. I suppose people wailed and moaned over the death of radio, and I vaguely remember similar chicken little articles as cable (and particularly cable news) began to steal viewers from network television. Newspapers enjoyed a monopoly over the kitchen table during these media transitions for a few basic reasons: the news was reliable, portable, and incredibly user friendly. More than any other alternative, the newspaper allowed readers to extract the information they wanted, and to skim or ignore the rest. The internet radically increases the portability and user-friendliness of media, and of news media in particular. I scan RSS feeds on my phone on the bus ride to work, and my girlfriend is infatuated with aggregator services like Newser and The Daily Beast that can digest and colsolidate massive amounts of information from all over the net into easily assimiliated bites. There may be some sacrifice of depth in favor of a breadth of knowledge, though articles of interest will get singled out and saved for more in depth review at a more convienent time. This behavior in particular is sorely absent from your attempt to villainize the internet and hold it responsible for the death of journalism. The moral you draw from studies about apparent “changes” in reader behavior are terribly misleading in this regard. Exploring the web is precisely a process of filtering and sorting, of determining what is important and worth paying attention to, what […]
February 11, 2009

YOU DON’T HAVE A RIGHT

This is sort of interesting: New Kindle Audio Feature causes a stir (WSJ) Kindle 2 is smaller than the first version of the product.The new device also features a five-way navigation element, faster wireless service for downloading books and the ability to wirelessly sync between Kindles and cellphones. Some publishers and agents expressed concern over a new, experimental feature that reads text aloud with a computer-generated voice. “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.” An Amazon spokesman noted the text-reading feature depends on text-to-speech technology, and that listeners won’t confuse it with the audiobook experience. Amazon owns Audible, a leading audiobook provider. Is reading a book a derivative work? How can we even make sense of ‘derivative works’ when dealing with digital technologies?
February 18, 2009

BEST ROBOTS OF 2008

From Singularity Hub (thx Lally)
February 25, 2009

PEOPLE DO NOT UNDERSTAND TECHNOLOGY

or the brain, for that matter. In this case, the sensible, anti-pseudoscience guy has the wrong position, for the same reason, as the other wrong person. 5 points extra credit for listing each scientific, theoretical, conceptual, or practical confusion the motivates this discussion.
February 26, 2009

WALL-E AND GENDER

From Pixar’s Gender Problem WALL-E: Robot somehow acquires human gender characteristics, strives to clean up earth, goes on adventure to space. Why does WALL-E need to be male? Why does EVE need to be female? Couldn’t they both be gender ambiguous and still fall in love? That would have been a bold move, but I think it’s safe to say that Pixar is less than bold on the gender front. “Hey, guys, we have this robot with no inherent gender identity. We want to give it an arbitrary gender. Maybe we could make it female. Yeah, no, that would just just be ridiculous.” Female characters: EVE, Mary, maybe some of the dead ex-captains of the Axiom Challenging Gender Stereotypes score: 2/10. EVE is the competent scientist-bot. Still, making something that is inherently genderless male because male=neutral is bullshit.* … I just returned from seeing WALL-E with my 12-year-old sister, and I’d like to revise my comments on it somewhat. The first time, I just watched for enjoyment, but this time, I tried very hard to identify the cues and actions that marked WALL-E’s and EVE’s genders and see if I could imagine them as gender neutral. In truth, it wasn’t too hard. Up until the scene when they introduce themselves by name, it was pretty easy to imagine each of them as either the opposite gender or gender-neutral. There are only a few things that specifically gender WALL-E as male: his name, a single comment from John (“I know that guy.”), and his copying of the male part of the “Hello Dolly” dances. His voice could be interpreted as masculine, but I forced myself to think “gender neutral” and it actually worked pretty well. With just a few tweaks, particularly the name, I think that WALL-E could have been portrayed […]
February 26, 2009

INTERFACES

February 27, 2009

THIS ROBOT USES LANGUAGE

From Chaos filter helps robots make sense of the world The Oxford group’s FabMap software tackles those problems by having a robot assign a visual “vocabulary” of up to a thousand individual “words” for each scene, every two seconds. The “words” describe particular objects in a scene, for example a bicycle seat, and the software learns to link words that occur together into groups that are given words of their own. For example, the word “bicycle seat” is almost always found associated with the words “bicycle wheel” and “bicycle chain”, so they linked together in a so-called “bag of words” – “bicycle”. That means when the robot revisits a scene that now lacks, say, a bicycle, it notes a single change rather than the disappearance of many smaller features. That prevents too much significance being attached to the bike’s disappearance and means the robot is more likely to recognise the scene as familiar, says Newman. Video of this bot posted below the break because its shitty ad autoplays.
March 2, 2009

HISTORY

I had a brief debate on the patio of Jesse’s apartment on Saturday regarding ‘dangers’ of historically blind philosophy. Today, I read the following aside on Peter Smith’s blog : Why should the philosopher be any more especially interested in the history of her subject than the physicist is in the history of hers? If you take a broadly naturalist line, then I think the answer, to a first approximation, is: there is no good reason. The physicist and philosopher alike should start from the hard-won available theoretical options in their best-developed forms. Of course, philosophy is difficult, there’s a danger of foreclosing options too soon, and it is a good to remind ourselves that there may be more theoretical options than the currently most explored ones: the Great Dead Philosophers might provide a useful source we can mine for alternative ideas. So, less approximately, the naturalistic philosopher — being grateful for all the help she can get in her pursuit of truth — might occasionally delve into the history of philosophy for inspiration (and she supposes that she’s more likely to get inspiration from something like the lines of thought actually pursued by her best predecessors than from straw positions created by incompetent exegesis). Still, by my lights, the naturalistic philosopher’s interest in the history of her subject should remain relatively minor and completely instrumental. It perhaps feeds into her thinking about causation or knowledge, or whatever: but it is causation and knowledge that she cares about, and she is interested in Descartes or Hume or Kant only insofar as they offer useful pointers. And as soon as she finds herself at the edge of interpretative swamps — which is in practice rather soon — the naturalistic philosopher will typically lose interest: let the historians amuse themselves, and come […]
March 9, 2009

SEARCH IS SOLVED

Next we solve knowledge. From Wolfram Alpha Computes Answers To Factual Questions. This Is Going To Be Big. There is no risk of Wolfram Alpha becoming too smart, or taking over the world. It’s good at answering factual questions; it’s a computing machine, a tool — not a mind. I predict that this will work rather poorly, but enough to generate interest and to be appealed to a moderate amount of the time. And it will be followed by competitors that do the same thing, only much worse. And then, out of nowhere, using some closely guarded proprietary methods, some tech company will knock this out of the park with the “It just works” feature from day one. And it will be the dawning of a new age.
March 12, 2009

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