Re: nettime Twitter revolutionaries, unmade in the USA
I think what Morlock is referring to is digital obfuscation: they could have used more/better proxies or the Onion Router, or something of that nature. But I'd rather not blame them. In any case, anyone doing this in the future should use some sort of proxy set-up. Evan On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 5:16 AM, Jaime Magiera ja...@sensoryresearch.net wrote: On Oct 8, 2009, at 3:47 PM, Morlock Elloi wrote: Plain curiosity: did these people never learn the Importance of Not Being Seen, or was their shtick calculated to result in the bust and related press coverage? Gross incompetence or a PR stunt? If latter, I hope someone had a camera rolling. Hello, Well, being that they were using radio scanners in their work, it was necessary to be near the festivities. I'd say hiding out in a motel room is the best one can do with all that gear and the requirement of being within range of the responder communications. Their work was probably quite useful to the cause of the protestors. So again, this reinforces my previous point on the value of these services in organizing. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Has Facebook superseded Nettime?
See also riseup.net's crabgrass: https://we.riseup.net/crabgrass/about Evan On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 2:35 AM, jaromil jaro...@dyne.org wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 re all, On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 10:58:08PM +0200, Florian Cramer wrote: What is the solution? Is something like Facebook needed, but as a decentralized, non-data-minable, user-owned system? it's kind of funny now to report here, when about a year ago i didn't ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime FW: When technology is utilized against us.
I used to work for a company that was trying to turn encryption into a everyday user product. The problem was (and still is, for this company) that protecting internet communication has very little intuitive relation to protecting regular communication. On Get Smart, if any of you remember from late night re-runs, there used to be this device that Maxwell Smart and the chief used to protect their communications. It was two bubbles connected by a little shaft, descending slowly over their heads to block all sound from leaving. If I remember rightly, it hilariously also blocked sound between them. But overall, a (working) device like this is what we picture when we picture privacy. Walls have ears, so we need to make a silencer to keep anything from getting out. On the internet, the main problem is not actually encryption, silencing, it is trust. We can't see each other; we have little tangible physical relationship. Nobody can be sure whether their messages are consistently going to the same place or not. If that problem is not solved, then encryption is just ensuring that no other government agents are intercepting the communication between you and the government agent that, unbeknown to you, you are speaking to, and is in turn speaking to somebody else on your behalf. This is the certificate hell that all internet security has entered into. For the company I worked for, that issue boiled down to everyone trusting the service providing company to sort out the identity of everybody else. And of course, the more completely the problem is solved, the more complete control over everything that one company has, with the limit being just about the same hypothetical vulnerability that everyone else has sending it all in the clear and trusting the ISPs forwarding the packets not to legally or illegally be monitoring packet flow. Which brings me to the second point: anonymity is a very different problem than encryption. The messages being posted from Iran are public, by design. Because all IP records both source and destination address, in the absence of random message delays, all that the Iranian government has to do is monitor packet flow and correlate that with the times when suspicious messages publicly appear. It doesn't actually have to read anything that those packets contain. I have no idea what deep packet analysis is supposed to mean, but I would imagine that the analysis I'm talking about here is all Iran is doing. It seems like probably all they need to do. The real problem is that the two goals of trust and anonymity are mutually exclusive. This is not just an internet problem. But our perceptions of the internet obscure this especially, because in most situations where one would want anonymity (piracy, random one-off posts on bulletin boards, periodic lurking in chat rooms with strangers, twittering from an ad hoc account), one more or less has anonymity. And then in situations where one would want non-anonymity (facebook, sometimes twitter, email, etc), one more or less knows who one is talking to, though this latter is notoriously often broken. We continue to be shocked by reality not matching our expectations, and expect technology to be improved so that it will match them. But it is not a technological problem, nor a problem which can be solved by ditching convenience, but a fundamental problem about our togetherness in communication. All the twitter/facebook stuff which brings the events in Iran out so clearly is an interesting case study about our communication. The parts where the communication here is failing to work in the desired way are small compared with the parts where it's functioning as desired. Why? I certainly don't have a full answer, but I imagine that the internet is really only one piece in the puzzle, whether or not it's a *sine qua non*. Evan Buswell # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto
On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 10:34 AM, Jim Piccarello
jp...@blackbird-studio.org wrote:
AND the operations defined in each system mirror each other.
Isn't this redundant? Unless of course, the system is defined in
such a way that it places limits on what operations are definable,
which isn't the case with mathematical numbers, nor (theoretically)
digitality. I'm pretty sure that's right, but I'd be interested to
hear otherwise.
First, are we talking about a two-state device that never changes
state? In that case isomorphism isn't redundant, it's irrelevant
I think I said this a bit too quickly and unclearly, sorry :-). What
I meant is this: isn't it the case, barring some arbitrary limit
on the number or kind of definable operations, that if there is a
one-to-one correspondence between the objects in each system, then *it
must follow that* the operations defined in each system mirror each
other, i.e. there is a one-to-one relationship between operations in
one system and operations in another? Intuitively, I say yes (provided
both systems are Turing complete), but my mathematical background is
not quite strong enough to say that definitively.
If we decide to limit the size of number to, say, 8 bits then we
could describe this using modular arithmetic. So 1+1 = 2 but 1+ 255
= 0. Then we would be modeling the numbers {0.1,2,...255} So we
would have addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division mod
256.
Given the widely varying possibilities of the construction of a
machine, the situation is even *more* complicated, but actually less
problematic IMHO with respect to its relationship with algebra (the
natural number system). See this from HAKMEM:
Item 154 (Bill Gosper): The myth that any given programming language
is machine independent is easily exploded by computing the sum of
powers of 2. If the result loops with period = 1 with sign +, you
are on a sign-magnitude machine. If the result loops with period =
1 at -1, you are on a twos-complement machine. If the result loops
with period greater than 1, including the beginning, you are on a
ones-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater
than 1, not including the beginning, your machine isn't binary -
the pattern should tell you the base. If you run out of memory, you
are on a string or bignum system. If arithmetic overflow is a fatal
error, some fascist pig with a read-only mind is trying to enforce
machine independence. But the very ability to trap overflow is
machine dependent. By this strategy, consider the universe, or, more
precisely, algebra: Let X = the sum of many powers of 2 = ...11
(base 2). Now add X to itself: X + X = ...10. Thus, 2X = X - 1,
so X = -1. Therefore algebra is run on a machine (the universe) that
is two's-complement.
Apart from the other things in there relevant to this conversation
(probably undermining the side I seem to have fallen on), I want to
point out that this implies that in algebra addition, subtraction,
etc are actually all addition, subtraction, etc modulo infinity.
Therefore, it is the size of the set, not the nature of the operators
that is at issue.
I guess what I was getting at with the difference between the natural
numbers and a digital system is that the cardinality of an arbitrarily
large but finite set is different than that of a countable set, as
one can create a 1:1 mapping from that finite set to the infinite
set, but not the reverse---though one may question how countable
something actually is given the finite material resources involved in
*any* computation. Now I'm thinking that maybe this was not a very
interesting thing to point out, but anyway...
Cheers,
Evan Buswell
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# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
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Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto
AND the operations defined in each system mirror each other. Isn't this redundant? Unless of course, the system is defined in such a way that it places limits on what operations are definable, which isn't the case with mathematical numbers, nor (theoretically) digitality. I'm pretty sure that's right, but I'd be interested to hear otherwise. Also: dichotomous (digital) states are not isomorphic with the natural numbers, they are isomorphic with binary numbers, i.e. the set [0, 1], not the set [0, 1, 2 ...]. To get the latter, you need to construct a system of mapping an arbitrary number to a *set* of digital states, of which many such systems exist and compete---see, e.g., endianness. To actually be isomorphic with the natural numbers, you would need an infinitely large set of states, effectively canceling the digital nature of the supposed device, as each state would be infinitely close to (in practice, indistinguishable from) another state. But then, when we actually deal with the natural numbers, as a whole, we deal more with natural numberness than with each discrete number. This is something a digital system is perfectly capable of representing. I guess it's less that (countable) numbers are isomorphic to digital states than (countable) numberness is isomorphic with digitality. But this is getting into pretty ill-defined territory. Evan Buswell # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Digital Humanities Manifesto
In definitions, we always must ask: why? We use the words usefully already, why (politically) make the definition include or exclude something? I certainly don't have a clear answer to this question, which makes me hesitant to contribute; nevertheless, I feel I have a few things that might build on the discussion. For me, digital means linguistic or grammatical or any other of the problematic and non-neutral words that try to encapsulate language. Digitization is a system that functions through absolute difference (or differance, if you prefer), the ability to separate the phenomena of 1 from that of 0 (or any other symbols, e.g. a from b from c). As someone has mentioned, the size of the symbol set must be finite. It is precisely through making the infinite finite that we create absolute difference. This has nothing to do with numbers. Rather, numbers have to do with it, numbers are representable with digital content and entangled with the idea of digitality somehow. The convention of turning A into 0x41 or 0011 is just a convention. We could just as well interpret the series of voltages in a byte as representing a letter. Then to represent numbers, we could assign a number to each symbol, thus reversing the primacy of one symbol set versus another. Text is a digital medium. Speech is not, film is not---as has been said, there is here both an absolute distinction and a continuum in which distinctions cannot be made. However, I'm generally uncomfortable with describing a medium as digital, at least in these conversations where we're trying to be as precise as possible. All media have both digital and analog characteristics; even with a painting there is some amount of communication that takes place through the absolute separation of the framed object from its surroundings (or this is being actively fought and subverted...). It is our interpretation of the content, not the medium, which is digital or otherwise. Part of the theme of this thread has been to try and emphasize the materiality of digital information. I think there's something to be preserved here; however, it is precisely what is non-material that separates the digital from the analog. Clay is no more a digital medium than anything else. When you pick letters into it, digital content is created. But the minute an anthropologist wants to find out what kind of wood your stylus used, the information ceases to be digital (until they answer their question, that is...). Similarly, if I wanted to model a computer, I have a choice between analog and digital representations (i.e. emulation on another machine or reproduction of a voltage model of its circuits). The machine itself has nothing to do with analog and digital, our interpretation of 3.5 volts as 1 and 0 volts as 0 is what makes computers digital. Of course, this is complicated because computers are not a representation of anything other than computing. That is, the digital representation is a representation of digitization itself, and only accidentally is applied to analog-converted objects (you'll notice all the mathematicians hate it when this happens). Hence the prevalence of the textual/symbolic in every aspect of computing---but let's not go there right now. Regarding one more theme which has come up: computability. So far as has been understood, there is nothing necessarily computable about a digital representation. A digital representation can always be represented in computation, but that does not necessarily mean that this computation will finish, or even know where to begin. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chompsky_hierarchy for more on this. (And note it is not an accident that this work was done first in linguistics). To take this a little out of the rabbit hole, I think it's important to emphasize that digital material can never be divorced from the actual, material representation: that the abstraction is itself not a reality, dependent on a material reality of power plants, technicians, asphalt saws, and fiber optics for its existence. But at the same time we need to be careful not to imagine *actual* 1s and 0s floating around in our machines. That is our interpretation; there are none until each time we put them there. Evan Buswell On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 3:24 AM, Felix Stalder fe...@openflows.com wrote: On Thursday, 29. January 2009, Lloyd Dunn wrote: I must correct a technical error that has crept into these discussions at least twice. Analog film frames are not digital. The case in point is simply this: you can take the letters of the Bible and re-arrange them to produce, for example, War and Peace. But you cannot take the frames of, for example, The Birth of a Nation and use them to produce, say, Psycho. The point is that a text is assembled from a finite set of fixed, conventional, symbols called letters. The number of texts that can be created from the same finite set of letters is infinite Absolutely. This also fits
