future of ~the internet~

oh thx good to know

Liked it up until the pointless Steve Jobs idolatry, at which I vomited on my shoes.

true

the nearly universal tone of the comments is WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PARENTS which kind of surprised me?

but then i'm a guy who regularly posts on future of ~the internet~

An international group of online hackers is warning a Mexican drug cartel to release one of its members, kidnapped from a street protest, or it will publish the identities and addresses of the syndicate's associates, from corrupt police to taxi drivers, as well as reveal the syndicates' businesses.

The vow is a bizarre cyber twist to Mexico's ongoing drug war, as a group that has no guns is squaring off against the Zetas, a cartel blamed for thousands of deaths as well as introducing beheadings and other frightening brutality.

"You made a huge mistake by taking one of us. Release him," says a masked man in a video posted online on behalf of the group, Anonymous.

"It won't be difficult; we all know who they are and where they are located," says the man, who underlines the group's international ties by speaking Spanish with the accent of a Spaniard while using Mexican slang.

"We demand his release," says the Anonymous spokesman, who is wearing a mask like the one worn by the shadowy revolutionary character in the movie V for Vendetta, which came out in 2006. "If anything happens to him, you sons of (expletive) will always remember this upcoming November 5."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJORGO1Q2VY

whoah

They're going to shut down their Facebooks accounts too?!?!

"It won't be difficult; we all know who they are and where they are located," says the man, who underlines the group's international ties by speaking Spanish with the accent of a Spaniard while using Mexican slang.

need to watch the vid again but i'm pretty sure it's text-to-speech, sounds to me no more high-minded than 'mexican hacker using tts voice w/default spanish accent.'

p sure the only thing this guarantees is that kidnapped anon is now headless anon.

anon veracruz fb page is saying none of their people have been kidnapped, the guy who orig posted the video says 'opcartel' is going forward, sanctioned or not.

u do realize though that if a list of names comes out, no matter who puts it out, all those people have targets on their backs from the many, many people gunning for the zeta's top spot, right? xp

like if this goes forward its gonna mean a lotta z connected ppl gonna wind up dead and vcruz is gonna get even messier as the cycle of reprisal intensifies.

and yeah prob broader reprisals by z against net activists in general, can easily see them putting their victims in anon masks to make the point.

well yeah it could be some almighty bloodbath, but I don't see how threats like this are going to make the kidnappers 'see sense'. could look worse for them to back down to some vague anon threats. nb i don't know much about this situation in general so zeta thinking is beyond me.

idk about 'seeing sense,' sounds like all anon wants is their mans released

but yeah i mean this is a no-win for the z's imo

https://squareup.com/cardcase/tabs

https://www.dwolla.com/

if you're mentioning that, I'm gonna rep for the local payment up-and-comer

rad

When the kidnapped activist was freed on Nov. 4 with a note from her captors threatening to kill 10 people for every name released, OpCartel was quickly called off. “We blackmailed them,” says Barrett Brown, an informal spokesman for Anonymous, noting that the Zetas don’t often release victims alive. “And they blackmailed us.”

Raul Castro’s daughter and a dissident Cuban blogger have engaged in a prickly back-and-forth on Twitter.

Mariela Castro’s debut on the social media service began smoothly enough when she sent her first tweets Tuesday talking about a visit to the Netherlands and her work as the country’s leading gay rights activist. Then dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez fired the first salvo.

“They tell me Mariela Castro opened a Twitter account,” Sanchez wrote. “A question for her, ‘When will we Cubans be able to come out of other closets?’”

Two more tweets directed at the first daughter quickly followed: “Welcome to the plurality of Twitter ... here nobody can shut me up, deny me permission to travel or impede entrance,” and “How can one ask for acceptance only in one area? Is tolerance total or not?”

Castro, who is the head the National Sex Education Center, shot back at Sanchez by name, saying, “Your approach to tolerance reproduces the old mechanisms of power. To improve your ‘services’ you should study.”

Later, she grumbled about “despicable parasites” criticizing her on Twitter: “Were you ordered by your employers to respond to me in unison and with the same predetermined script? Be creative.”

Cuba accuses dissidents like Sanchez of being mercenaries in the hire of Washington.

On Wednesday Sanchez tweeted, “I would love it if everyone on the (Communist Party’s) Central Committee got on Twitter. We would tell them in the virtual world what they don’t let us in the real one.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/raul-castros-daughter-opens-twitter-account-gets-into-war-of-words-with-dissident/2011/11/09/gIQAXPML5M_story.html

Can someone parse this "update"?
http://leaksource.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/anonymous-mexico-opcorrupcion/

Finally read the Lanier. Think much of the crit was handled way upthread, but <3 for reminding me that there was a time when we hoped that everything wouldn't be slathered in advertising and that there might be some alternative ways of funding things.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_b7lQNiW2GI8/R6MWRH3q8UI/AAAAAAAAAA8/k1-0Jw0YXRM/s320/wired.gif

But one name stands out, maybe because it was designed to. And for the moment it's sticking: zippies. It stands for Zen-inspired professional pagans, according to 50-year-old Fraser Clark, shamanic zippie spokesperson, club manager and editor of Encyclopedia Psychedelica (EPi), the magazine that first identified the "hippies with zip." According to EPi, a zippie is "someone who has balanced their hemispheres to achieve a fusion of the technological and the spiritual. The techno-person understands that rationality, organization, long-term planning, consistency and single-mindedness are necessary to achieve anything solid on the material level. The hippie understands that vision, individuality, spontaneity, flexibility and open-mindedness are crucial to realize anything on the spiritual scale."

Finally read the Lanier. Think much of the crit was handled way upthread, but <3 for reminding me that there was a time when we hoped that everything wouldn't be slathered in advertising and that there might be some alternative ways of funding things.

― stet, Monday, January 23, 2012 12:51 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

tru

so this is a long lecture, 45ish minutes when you cut out the intro, and like a lot of dense lectures its kinda better to watch-with-the-slides than just listen to it, but god i fucking love this guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMxz7rzwee8

still trying to steel myself for a 45 minute video. what has the internet done to my mind

every time I hover over the link I think "maybe if I wait another day someone will summarise the key point inside ~ marks"

he gave a talk at PDF 12 yesterday, shorter and uses the sopa/pipa fight as a case study to touch on some of his larger themes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LNP9f8geCWA#!

son of a bitch

well there it is, regardless

he starts at 1:20

and here's lanier who i think is kind of a old-ass man with old-ass man ideas but i like having him in the tent pissing out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxRSv5Vrqxo&feature=relmfu

http://fiber.google.com/plans/residential/ this seems an amazing deal for US internauts

damn yo!

Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4923208

Yhippa 17 hours ago | link

So this guy has been able to find a common schema across several different domains and add rules to it to churn out content. I like the concept. I watched the video in the article and could see how this could be used for instruction in the case where the resources like trained teachers are scarce.

I've had a feeling for a long time that due to the predictability of humans and our processes that it this is inevitable. I think it's great that he can do this for things like instruction but if this were to get "smart" enough that would put a lot of people out of work.

jacobr 4 hours ago | link

Libraries in Sweden, and probably in other countries as well, have their own "algorithms" to decide what to purchase - at a university it could be everything related to a particular topic, for instance. This means that these computer-generated books are in stock in many libraries (at the taxpayer's expense).

Dove 16 hours ago | link

I wonder if he'll ever collide with this guy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4906456 (Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon)

And the UK goes from 'a nation of shopkeepers' to 'a nation a botfeeders'...

thats an old story, i think, or that guy has been active a while

i wrote a piece that included that guy and some similar things

http://gawker.com/5901842

what do we think about ~fb search~

garbage in garbage out

I still don't get why anyone 'likes' any product etc

Graph search is some powerful shit; will be way more useful when it's open to the world and not just locked inside FB

it does not seem like powerful shit to me tho I hope it is because anything that cuts into google's revenues can't be bad

I guess in order to do a decent 'future of the internet' prediction one would have to take a look at the start of the internet and compare it to now and extrapolate from there. So, less about the public sector and more about private companies, advertising, data mining. Less about experts and more about everyone's opinion is valid. Less about content and more about presentation. Less about sitting at a terminal and more integrated into every day life. Less anonymity and more whoring yourself out.

Maybe instead of fb search and google ads in the future there will be some kind of monster googlish service everyone uses that simply straight up puts a dollar value on you that fluctuates from day to day, so that if you check in to Starbucks and like this movie and blah blah every time you endorse a product your value goes up, you get higher grade ads, maybe you get a higher quality internet experience too. The more friends that like your stuff the more your value goes up too, so socialization becomes more and more important. The amount of your popularity isn't just some silly hangup leftover from high school it actually has real market value.

I could keep going but i'm going to cut it off there, where it's already incredibly terrifying to me.

Maybe instead of fb search and google ads in the future there will be some kind of monster googlish service everyone uses that simply straight up puts a dollar value on you that fluctuates from day to day, so that if you check in to Starbucks and like this movie and blah blah every time you endorse a product your value goes up, you get higher grade ads, maybe you get a higher quality internet experience too. The more friends that like your stuff the more your value goes up too, so socialization becomes more and more important. The amount of your popularity isn't just some silly hangup leftover from high school it actually has real market value.

the important part is that you can opt out of the whole personal $ value thing. however, opting in gives you a 10% discount off of all products, access to special sales, and faster internet service.

see I am waiting for that part until I start liking 'pepsi' etc on fb

where is my free shit

The reason graph search is so powerful is that the relationship between things is explicit, not just inferred, and so you can query against relationship. Off the top of my head, how about a search something like "create me a playlist of new music from artists mentioned in tweets or blog posts written by posters on ILM who have super compatibility with me".

Which would be a nightmare of APIs to create as a one-off thing, but is actually pretty trivial if the sites involved do some pretty trivial semantic tagging.

Pragmatically speaking, however, that sort of encoding is totally against the way things are trending right now, though, and permissioning gets beyond tricky if people want to prevent advertisers also using the same data.

see I just don't see very many reasons why I would need to do that search

and even if those complex searches were useful they are not things that you'd be doing 50 times a day