Yearly Archives: 2011

Number station broadcast 15/11

  • Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker’s 1903 lulz : “A century ago, one of the world’s first hackers used Morse code insults to disrupt a public demo of Marconi’s wireless telegraph”
  • The Coming War on General Purpose Computation : “The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.”
  • Hackers plan space satellites to combat censorship : “Computer hackers plan to take the internet beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit.”
  • Conferences raise unanswered questions about fact checking : “Following a November event co-hosted by Jeff Jarvis and Craig Newmark at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, I recently headed to Washington, D.C., to attend another daylong fact-checking roundtable. This one was hosted by the New America Foundation. Two fact-checking events in roughly 30 days? That’s unprecedented for me in the close to a decade I’ve been researching and writing about accuracy and related areas. In fact, prior to these two events I’d attended exactly one fact-checking event. That was more than two years ago in Germany.”
  • The Great Digitization Or The Great Betrayal? : “One of the jewels of the Cambridge University Digital Library is a collection of Newton’s scientific papers. So far, a selection of important mathematical works from the 1660s has been digitized. These date are from well before the first modern copyright act, the 1710 Statute of Anne. So it’s an interesting question — what is the copyright situation of these papers and their digitized images?”

Support “Take This Book”

Melissa Gira Grant, founder of Glass Houses, has written Take This Book about The People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street and is currently looking for funding to complete the project. Check out the funding page and think about contributing a few dollars to help her reach her goal.

This is one story of the People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street, as told to me by many of the librarians behind it: how the library began, what happened after the November 15 raid on Zuccotti Park, and why they’re rebuilding. It’s a story about books, danger, and freedom.

Take This Book is an extended essay — just over 10,000 words — based on the stories of the librarians and the library’s patrons. (Maybe you were one of them.) It can’t be the whole story, because it’s still happening.

Number station broadcast 14/11

  • Disruptions: “The 3-D Printing Free-for-All : Downloading — quite often stealing, in the eyes of the law — music, movies, books and photos is easier than bobbing for apples in a bucket without water. It has kept legions of lawyers employed fighting copyright violations without a whole lot to show for their efforts in the past decade. You think that was bad? Just wait until we can copy physical things.”
  • Occupy the Net! Our Internet is a paradise for consumers but a hell for citizens : “When it comes to pseudonyms, Facebook is more egalitarian than the early Soviet Union. You may be rich or famous or persecuted, but unless you use your real name when you register on the site, you’re asking for trouble—and Facebook will torture you with Kafkaesque gusto.”
  • The Social Graph is Neither : “I first came across the phrase social graph in 2007, in an essay by Brad Fitzpatrick, though I’d be curious to know if it goes back further. The idea of representing relationships between people as networks is old, but this was the first time I had thought about treating the connections between all living people as one big object that you could manipulate with a computer.”
  • Toronto Free Library Grand Opening! : “The library at OccupyToronto will be having a grand opening on Saturday November 19, 2011. We encourage everyone to come and visit. We are also looking for donations to expand the library…The library provides free, open and unrestricted access to our collection of books, magazines, newspapers, and other materials that have been donated, collected, gathered and discovered during the occupation.”
  • Do “Liberation Technologies” Change the Balance of Power Between Repressive Regimes and Civil Society? : “Do new information and communication technologies (ICTs) empower repressive regimes at the expense of civil society, or vice versa? For example, does access to the Internet and mobile phones alter the balance of power between repressive regimes and civil society? These questions are especially pertinent today given the role that ICTs played during this year’s uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond.”
1 2 3 … 14  Scroll to top