Welcome to the Internet - if you've missed the past 17 years
Bwo of a totally anonymous 'source' ... Re: () ascii ribbon campaign /\ support plain text e-mail Hi, time traveller! Welcome to the future! I'm sure you're excited and eager to discover what has changed over the past 17 years. You probably find today's Internet a confusing place, much different from the one you left behind. From your e-mail, I deduct that you are completely puzzled by the current top-down approach to Internet governance and find yourself wishing to return to the grass-root pseudo-anarchy of yesteryear with which you're familiar. The evolution of the Internet may seem puzzling to you at first. Regulated, accountable, available universally and provided in some countries to all citizens as a basic human right, this always-on global network became an integral part of the world's economy. It is relied upon by billions for both personal and professional use, communication and entertainment, commerce and dating. To ease your transition, here are a few highlights of what has taken place in the time you skipped: CPU speeds have grown by a factor of x50; while your desktop is quite likely powered by an AMD K6-2 CPU running at 266Mhz, by 2003 a desktop CPU model ran at speeds of up to 2400Mhz, and today, it would not be uncommon to own a desktop CPU which runs at upwards of 3000Mhz and offers up to 4 computation cores, such as Intel's 6th generation i7 CPU. For simplicity, you can think of it as a 12000Mhz CPU available in both desktops and laptops (you may know them as "notebooks"). If you stop by an electronics retailer and pick up a new computer, however, you're probably going to find yourself somewhat disappointed. It will not feel considerably faster than the one you've left behind. This is because we've also increased the amount of abstraction on which we rely quite considerably. We no longer write any assembly, and rarely write C or C++. Instead, we rely on interpreted computer languages, or languages which are just-in-time bytecode compiled to be executed by a virtual machine. This may sound a little wasteful, but you'll learn to love it. It also makes optimization someone else's problem, and *everyone* loves that! You'll be happy to hear that this computational excess unleashed a flurry of new programming languages which made programming easier than ever. Programming no longer requires any understanding of the underlying hardware architecture on which the program will be executed, and more people are writing software now than ever before! By the way, you remember JavaScript? You may have used it to play a sound or make an image move when a mouse was hovered over a specific section of that GeoCities homepage you've built with Netscape Navigator Gold? It's grown quite a bit in popularity, and today it's used to write most software, large and small. From demanding and scalable server software to games, there's hardly a problem node.js isn't an ideal tool for solving! Storage costs have decreased and capacity has increased by more than x1000 as well! You probably own a 6.4GB drive for which you've paid about 330$. Today, that kind of money would buy you a 6TB drive, easily! You'll still be constantly running out of space, though. High definition video became commonplace, photography has been replaced with digital photography and stills are now taken with digital camera sensors capable of capturing tens of millions of pixels. Internet connectivity speeds have really boomed, increasing by as much as x2000! While you're probably used to a 56Kbps dial-up modem, today, for the same money you paid for your dial-up account, you can get 100Mbps+ service on DOCSIS 3.0 over a coaxial cable plant operated by a cable TV provider. Cable TV, by the way, isn't so hot any more. Now, all of these exciting changes bring us back to the subject of Internet governance. The RIPE NCC of your days operated not much different than, say, a wedding gift registry. It was a convenient arrangement that helped you avoid embarrassing yourself by showing up to the party with the exact same waffle iron someone else has already bought for the lucky couple. Adding and removing things to and from the registry was quite easy, and generally, everyone was quite happy if the registry was consulted at all. As the number of people and devices connected to the Internet increased, and most of these people and devices remained connected all the time, it became apparent that IPv4 addresses will soon run out. Initially, the reaction was that of total disbelief. Surely, 4 billion is a very large number that's almost indistinguishable from infinity? This layman argument resulted in the Internet community spending about a decade between 2000 and 2010 pretending that the problem does not, in fact, exist. In the meanwhile, a few people worked to introduce a new protocol known as IPv6, which aimed to both solve a wide range of problems and expand the number of addresses available. They spent about a decade
Mobile Justice app
Apps to Record Police Put Power in the Public’s Hands: http://tinyurl.com/p9r348t "Get the ACLU’s Mobile Justice app at and keep justice within reach." Where is this going? JH # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
***SPAM*** Re: Welcome to the Internet - if you've missed the past
IPv4 is here to stay. The first consumer that gets IPv6-only line from ISP will find out that he/she cannot visit sites that did not convert to IPv6, and that would be the end of business for that ISP. This means that all servers that this consumer needs will have to convert *first* to IPv6, and there is little incentive for them to do so - there are more than enough IPv4 addresses for server colocations. Just got few hundred with no questions asked. After they have, in despair, removed most of these features and made IPv6 look and work almost exactly like IPv4, the same Internet community that previously told them that IPv6 changed too many things began complaining that the IPv6 protocol is insufficiently revolutionary and does not address some of the core challenges which would justify the large expense of a transition. Unfortunately, by that time IPv4 addresses largely ran out and a transition was necessary anyway. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Deft Critique of Laurie Anderson's Habeas Corpus
[1]http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/10/the-guantanamo-saga-in-laurie-andersons- habeas-corpus/#.VikgCNbQVD7 The Guantánamo Saga in Laurie Andersons Habeas Corpus [2]Jeremy Varon [3]October 22, 2015 On a brilliantly sunny, fall afternoon, a dozen members of Witness Against Torture a grassroots group long dedicated to closing the prison camp at Guantánamo broke from our marathon strategy meeting to see the GTMO-themed installation of the renowned performance artist Laurie Anderson. Titled Habeas Corpus, the groundbreaking exhibit was up for just three days, from October 2-4, in New York City. Invited to attend by Guantánamo attorneys who had collaborated with Anderson, we were eager to see what a gifted artist would make of subjects in which we had become reluctant, amateur experts. The trek uptown felt like traversing both social worlds and centuries. Our starting point was the dilapidated auditorium of Maryhouse, the fabled East Village headquarters of the radical nun and founder of the Catholic Worker movement Dorothy Day. Commended by Pope Francis in his address to the US Congress, Day enjoys newfound fame. Yet Maryhouse stands as a defiant holdout of a disappearing New York. Frayed posters from generations of political struggles hang from its walls, while stacks of the Catholic Worker newspaper, still sold at the Depression-era price of a penny, dot the floor plan. Our destination was the resplendent Park Avenue Armory in an achingly posh stretch of the Upper East Side. Converted with the aid of seven-figure gifts into a state-of-the-art exhibit space, it seemed an incongruous vessel for a topic so grim as torture at a dusty island gulag. Entering the exhibit was to be transported again. A huge disco ball hung suspended in the dark, cavernous hall dark. Amidst the undulating dollops of its reflected light, one had the sensation of floating in outer space. The thrum of expertly toned guitar feedback, engineered by Lou Reed collaborator Stewart Hurwood, enveloped the room. Live musicians drifted about to create impromptu accompaniment. One heard singing evocative of a muezzins call to prayer, classical strings, something like a North African bagpipe, and Andersons own work on the electric violin. The space was ethereal, eerie, and absolutely beautiful. My immediate comparison was to Dream House, the sublime sound-and-light installation currently on view at Manhattans Dia:Chelsea. (Combining minimalism and psychedelia, and with its shag carpet floor, it feels equal parts gallery, cathedral, and retro stoner den.) As my senses melted into trippy pleasure, my discomfort with Habeas Corpus stiffened. The precise risk the exhibit courted was aestheticizing or even falsifying something wicked. With terrible irony, the sensory deprivation of enhanced interrogation converts into sensory delight. Confinement yields to expansiveness. Nothing about the prison in Guantánamo, my political mind protested, should inspire this kind of art, dreamily enjoyed by connoisseurs of the urban avant-garde. Any chance of extended reverie or confidence in the fairness of this criticism, however, was disrupted by the exhibits focal point: the massive, three-dimensional image of Mohammed el Gharani. Originally from Chad, el Gharani was sent to Guantánamo in 2002 at age 14. He was freed seven years later after being tortured in various settings. Filmed at an undisclosed location in West Africa, el Gharani was beamed in real time into the Armory, where he sat still on a sculpted chair. El Gharani himself could observe the spectators observing his image. Those released from Guantánamo are forbidden from entering the United States. By means of Andersons hi-tech wizardry, el Gharani thus achieved what no former detainee has been able to do: to appear in the United States in an immediate, near-corporeal way. While el Gharani took scheduled breaks from his hours of sitting, pre-recorded audio testimony about his ordeal played over his empty chair. El Gharani was present, absent, and never really there. With this haunting effect, Habeas Corpuscomplicates its own message, while opening up multiple readings of its aesthetic. Hopeful but muddled, Habeas Corpus mirrors the irresolution of the reality it seeks to represent. You Shall Have the Body Much of the exhibits substance owes to its interplay with its title, Habeas Corpus. Habeas corpus has a special place in American law and in the legal and moral landscape of the war on terror. The term translates, as the exhibit materials explain, into you shall have the body. Formally originating in the Magna Carta, it was regarded by the United States founders as an essential bulwark against tyranny. No authority, habeas dictates, can throw
