Category Archives: informationalism
Castells on Environmentalism and Ecology
From The Power of Identity (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume II), pp 112-113: By environmentalism I refer to all forms of collective behavior that, in their discourse and in their practice, aim at correcting destructive forms of relationship between human action and its natural environment, in opposition to the prevailing structural and [...]
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The Public/Private Database Industry
On multiple fronts, the U.S. government is pumping up the database industry with large sums of public money. The notion that “public” government-surveillance and “private” corporate-surveillance are some how different is a useless distinction – they’re two sides of the same state-surveillance coin. First, from The Hill: This week, without much fanfare, the House is [...]
Also posted in governance, surveillance Tagged Database Industry, DMCA, DOJ, GAO, PACER, Yahoo 2 Comments
Securing Cyberspace in 60 Minutes
This past Sunday, 60 Minutes did a segment on cybersecurity titled “Cyberwar: Sabotaging the System.” The segment mostly focused on the “new” national security issues that cyberspace presents, while barely discussing how many of these “new” cybersecurity issues are — at least in part — caused by traditional social engineering. One example being 60 Minutes’ [...]
Also posted in governance, quotes, security Tagged CENTCOM, CSIS, cyberdominance, cyberwar Leave a comment
News Corp is the user – You are the producer
It’s Rupert Murdoch’s Internet, you just live in it – or so Murdoch argues in his World Media Summit speech. PaidContent.org has posted a transcript of the speech Murdoch delivered in Beijing on 10/09/09. It’s a three part speech with one message: if you use the Internet, whether you’re the People’s Republic of China or [...]
Also posted in commodification, property, work Tagged aggregators, China, content, Murdoch, News Corp, plagiarists, producers, users Leave a comment
Google the Gate Keeper
A reminder that Google doesn’t really search “the web,” just a relatively narrow slice of it. From Threat Level: The homepage of Pirate Bay disappeared from Google’s search results Friday, after Google allegedly received a DMCA takedown notice targeting the site. The move is unexpected because, while the Pirate Bay is rife with pirated material, [...]
Also posted in censorship, governance, methodology Tagged DMCA, Google, Pirate Bay, semantic web Leave a comment
The Eco-governmentality of Surveillance
The NY Times reports on China’s new surveillance policy requiring citizens to log into news sites with their “real identities” before posting comments. After pointing out that the comments posted to these news sites were already heavily censored and traceable via a commenter’s IP address, the article notes the fallibility of this new layer of [...]
Also posted in governance, identity, privacy, security, surveillance Tagged China, ecogovernmentality, governmentality Leave a comment
Grinch Alert: Rupert Murdoch
According to Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corp: We intend to charge for our news websites. The Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ.com is the world’s most successful paid news site and we will be using our profitable experience there and the resulting unique skills throughout News Corp to increase our revenues from all our [...]
Amazon gets Orwellian with Orwell
On 07.17.09 Amazon got a bit Orwellian by remotely deleting copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from people’s Kindles — copies that were legitimately purchased from Amazon (the original purchase was credited to people’s accounts). The Kindle is a small, portable and proprietary e-book reader — in many ways, Kindle is an iPod [...]
Escobar on the Political Ecology of Technonature