Code of America Government 1.0 -- in binary

Boing2

The Code for America project is celebrating July 4 in style, with a set of posters quoting the founders of the USA Government 1.0 in handy binary form. Print and display with pride! Some Fourth of July Decorations

Permanently Delete Your Account on Popular Websites

Your computer is a tool, do not become the tool of your computer.

Smashing - Take back your life... delete them all.
  • You can find more information on deleting your Twitter account here.
  • Official instructions for deleting your myspace account can be found here.
  • As far as social networking sites go, LinkedIn probably has the most straight-forward account closure process found here.
  • Full details on deleting your Google account can be found on the Google's Help page "Deleting: Your Google Account".
  • Closing your Windows Live account is actually surprisingly easy.
You just got 30 hours a week of your life back... your welcome ;-)

Why Engineers Don't Like Twitter

Because most engineers are smart ;-)
/."A recent EE Times survey of engineers found that 85% don't use Twitter.
More than half indicated that the statement 'I don't really care what you had for breakfast' best sums up their feelings about it.
cathyo-cathyo-on-twitter-stupid-site.png
... authors analyzed the content of tweets during a recent World Cup game, finding 76% of them to be useless.
 "Out of 1,000 tweets with the #worldcup hashtag during the game, only 16 percent were legitimate news and 7.6 percent were deemed 'legitimate conversation' — which leaves 6 percent spam, 24 percent self-promotion, about 17 percent re-tweets,
and a whopping 29 percent of useless observation (like this ;-).
Read more at /.

Home Computers Equal Lower Test Scores

/. "Politicians and education activists have long sought to eliminate the 'digital divide' by guaranteeing universal access to home computers, and in some cases to high-speed Internet service. But a Duke University study finds these efforts would actually widen the achievement gap in math and reading scores. Students in grades five through eight, particularly those from disadvantaged families, tend to post lower scores once these technologies arrive in their homes."

Internet 'kill switch' proposed for US

CNET A new US Senate Bill would grant the President far-reaching emergency powers to seize control of, or even shut down, portions of the internet.
The legislation says that companies such as broadband providers, search engines or software firms that the US Government selects "shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed" by the Department of Homeland Security. Anyone failing to comply would be fined.

That emergency authority would allow the Federal Government to "preserve those networks and assets and our country and protect our people," Joe Lieberman, the primary sponsor of the measure and the chairman of the Homeland Security committee, told reporters on Thursday. Lieberman is an independent senator from Connecticut who meets with the Democrats.

Due to there being few limits on the US President's emergency power, which can be renewed indefinitely, the densely worded 197-page Bill (PDF) is likely to encounter stiff opposition.

TechAmerica, probably the largest US technology lobby group, said it was concerned about "unintended consequences that would result from the legislation's regulatory approach" and "the potential for absolute power". And the Center for Democracy and Technology publicly worried that the Lieberman Bill's emergency powers "include authority to shut down or limit internet traffic on private systems."

The idea of an internet "kill switch" that the President could flip is not new. A draft Senate proposal that ZDNet Australia's sister site CNET obtained in August allowed the White House to "declare a cybersecurity emergency", and another from Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) would have explicitly given the government the power to "order the disconnection" of certain networks or websites.

A new cybersecurity bureaucracy

Lieberman's proposal would form a powerful and extensive new Homeland Security bureaucracy around the NCCC, including "no less" than two deputy directors, and liaison officers to the Defense Department, Justice Department, Commerce Department, and the Director of National Intelligence. (How much the NCCC director's duties would overlap with those of the existing assistant secretary for infrastructure protection is not clear.)
The NCCC also would be granted the power to monitor the "security status" of private sector websites, broadband providers and other internet components. Lieberman's legislation requires the NCCC to provide "situational awareness of the security status" of the portions of the internet that are inside the United States — and also those portions in other countries that, if disrupted, could cause significant harm.

Read full at CNET

Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price

NY Times Thinks the gadgets are dumbing em down... you are correct.
...the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family. His wife, Brenda, complains, "It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment." 

This is your brain on computers. 

Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this barrage puts on the brain. The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.
"Throughout evolutionary history, a big surprise would get everyone's brain thinking," said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford. "But we've got a large and growing group of people who think the slightest hint that something interesting might be going on is like catnip. They can't ignore it."

...researchers were unsure whether the muddied multitaskers were simply prone to distraction and would have had trouble focusing in any era. But she added that the idea that information overload causes distraction was supported by more and more research.

...multitaskers took longer than non-multitaskers to switch among tasks, like differentiating vowels from consonants and then odd from even numbers. The multitaskers were shown to be less efficient at juggling problems.

Other tests at Stanford, an important center for research in this fast-growing field, showed multitaskers tended to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work.

The results also illustrate an age-old conflict in the brain, one that technology may be intensifying. A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated.

Read on at NY Times

NOTE 2 SuperTechs:
research shows some people can more easily juggle multiple information streams. These "supertaskers" represent less than 3 percent of the population, according to scientists.

Anonymous proxy server who is running it? And why?

FYI newbies-  Many technologies that amateur anonymity fetishists are attracted to are actually designed to harvest information.
HTML clipboard 20090530newbie.jpg
If you wanted a concentrated haul of the most interesting information what would you do?
You would establish a honeypot: a service (free or paid) that purported to provide an anonymous web browsing/email capability. Who knows what people might get up to if they thought nobody was looking? That, of course, is the idea with honeypots.

Cryptogon - Nerds with too much time on their hands get up to all kinds nonsense.
Do they set up anonymous proxy servers and open base stations just to see what people do with them? Yes.
Do criminals do it to find out personal information about you? Yes.

So even if the proxy or base station you're on isn't run by the NSA, who is running it? And why?

High-Traffic Colluding Tor Routers in Washington, D.C., and the Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity It's an old essay, but it has held up remarkably well.

Wired WikiLeaks, the controversial whistleblowing site that exposes secrets of governments and corporations, bootstrapped itself with a cache of documents obtained through an internet eavesdropping operation by one of its activists, according to a new profile of the organization's founder.

The activist siphoned more than a million documents ... supposedly stolen by Chinese hackers or spies who were using the Tor network to transmit the data, were the basis for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's assertion in 2006 that his organization had already "received over one million documents from 13 countries" before his site was launched, according to the article in The New Yorker.

Only a small portion of those intercepted documents were ever posted on WikiLeaks, but the new report is the first indication that some of the data and documents on WikiLeaks did not come from sources who intended for the documents to be seen or posted. It also explains an enduring mystery of WikiLeaks' launch: how the organization was able to amass a collection of secret documents before its website was open for business.

Tor is a sophisticated privacy tool endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistleblowers and human rights workers to communicate with journalists, among other uses. In its search for government and corporate secrets traveling through the Tor network, it's conceivable that WikiLeaks may have also vacuumed up sensitive information from human rights workers who did not want their data seen by outsiders.

The interception may have legal implications, depending on what country the activist was based in.
In the United States, the surreptitious interception of electronic communication is generally a violation of federal law..." Read more from
Wired

Wonder why nothing is getting done? Just checking...

Life of a "real hacker" - not fot TV

Canada Spending $1B on Security for G8/G20 Summit in June

The Canadian government disclosed Tuesday that the total price tag to police the elite Group of Eight meeting in Muskoka, as well as the bigger-tent Group of 20 summit starting a day later in downtown Toronto, has already climbed to more than $833-million. It said it’s preparing to spend up to $930-million for the three days of meetings that start June 25.
That price tag is more than 20 times the total reported cost for the April, 2009, G20 summit in Britain, with the government estimating a cost of $30-million, and seems much higher than security costs at previous summits ­ the Gleneagles G8 summit in Scotland, 2005, was reported to have spent $110-million on security, while the estimate for the 2008 G8 gathering in Japan was $381-million.

These numbers are crazy. There simply isn't any justification for this kind of spending.

Google phasing out Windows

Digital Disconnect Causing Dramatic Drop In Empathy

"Several news sources report that today's college students show a precipitous drop in empathy (here's MSNBC's take). The study shows that students since the year 2000 had 40% less empathy than those 20 and 30 years before them. The article lays out a laundry list of culprits, from child-rearing practices and the self-help movement, to video games and social media, to a free-market economy and income inequality. There's also a link so you can test your very own level of narcissism. Let's hope the Slashdot crowd doesn't break the empathy counter on the downside."



Is "generation me" all about me?
"Many people see the current group of college students — sometimes called 'Generation Me ' — as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history," said Konrath, 
Konrath's colleague graduate student Edward O'Brien added, "It's not surprising that this growing emphasis on the self is accompanied by a corresponding devaluation of others.”
The role of media Even so, Konrath and O'Brien suggest several reasons for the lower empathy they found, including the ever-increasing exposure to media in the current generation.
"Compared to 30 years ago, the average American now is exposed to three times as much nonwork-related information," Konrath said. "
The rise in social media could also play a role.
"The ease of having 'friends' online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don't feel like responding to others' problems, a behavior that could carry over offline," O'Brien said.
"I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening," said one person in the study.  "I feel like most people these days are in a similar situation, for between having a Blackberry, a laptop, a television, and an iPod, people have become unable to shed their media skin."
In the new study... students wrote more than 110,000 words: in aggregate, about the same number of words as a 400-page novel.
"We were surprised by how many students admitted that they were 'incredibly addicted' to media," "But we noticed that what they wrote at length about was how they hated losing their personal connections. Going without media meant, in their world, going without their friends and family." 
Building upon that observation, an alternative explanation is that the students may have identified the "media" as what they were craving, but were actually missing the social connections afforded by the media. In other words, the students were "addicted" to the social ties — friendships and relationships — with others.
"The students did complain about how boring it was go anywhere and do anything without being plugged into music on their MP3 players," said Moeller.
"And many commented that it was almost impossible to avoid the TVs on in the background at all times in their friends' rooms. But what they spoke about in the strongest terms was how their lack of access to text messaging, phone calling, instant messaging, e-mail and Facebook, meant that they couldn't connect with friends who lived close by, much less those far away."
"Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. 
"When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life.
Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable." 
Very few students in the study reported that they regularly watched news on television or read a local or national newspaper... They also didn't mention checking mainstream media news sites or listening to radio news while commuting in their cars. Yet student after student demonstrated knowledge of specific news stories.
How did they get the information? 
In a disaggregated way, and not typically from the news outlet that broke or committed resources to a story... "Students expressed tremendous anxiety about being cut-off from information,”
"But most of all they care about being cut off from that instantaneous flow of information that comes from all sides and does not seem tied to any single device or application or news outlet."
That's the real takeaway of this study for journalists: students showed no significant loyalty to a news program, news personality or even news platform. Students have only a casual relationship to the originators of news, and in fact rarely distinguished between news and more general information. 
...often by following the story via "unconventional" outlets, such as through text messages, their e-mail accounts, Facebook and Twitter.