okAn FCC hearing schedule for Thursday at Stanford University will focus on whether ISPs can shape, filter and even block content that travels over their networks. (The public —more than 1.5 million of whom have spoken out against such violations — has a rare opportunity to testify before the commission during the hearing.)http://savetheinternet.com/=stanford 

ScienceFriday.com’s version

Chances are you’ve heard of the ‘small world’ idea of six degrees of separation. But is it correct?

The idea traces back to an experiment begun in 1967 by Stanley Milgram, in which he tried to trace how many acquaintances it would take to pass a letter between two randomly selected people. The result that entered the public consciousness was that in general it took six steps or fewer to bridge the gap between any two people. But is that result accurate? Judith Kleinfeld,

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200801256

tags, 6 degrees, Kevin Bacon Effect, six degrees, Milgram,

Spook Country (Putnam)
What’s happened to William Gibson? Along with the most sophisticated future-predictions, speculations about the sociology of cities, and adventures in virtual post-realities, he has finally learned how to get his characters from one room to another. We explore this accomplishment (in which he takes a good deal of pride)

–
Edward Hasbrouck
<edward@hasbrouck.org>
<http://hasbrouck.org>

The deadline for public comments on the USA Transportation Security
Administration’s proposed rules to make would-be travellers obtain
individualized prior permission for all journeys by air to, from,
overflying, or even *within* the USA is this Monday, 22 October 2007.

If you have a chance before 5 p.m. Washington time on Monday, I urge
you to go to http://www.regulations.gov and tell the TSA what you
think of their scheme. You don’t have to be a citizen of the USA to
submit comments, and you can even do so anonymously. The docket
number is TSA-2007-28572, and there are more details at:

http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001286.html

The broadband company’s audacious scheme to interrupt your data proves why network neutrality rules are crucial.

By Farhad Manjoo

Oct. 19, 2007 |

Bless the Associated Press for unearthing, through careful and diligent investigation, Comcast’s shameful, hidden Internet traffic-management scheme.

Comcast, the AP determined, actively manages data on its network by using software to essentially masquerade as its subscribers’ machines. When non-Comcast Internet subscribers request files from your Comcast-connected machine — as happens in peer-to-peer file-sharing applications — Comcast’s technology steps in and tells the non-Comcast subscriber you’re not available.

This is a difficult story to explain, but it’s quite important. For years, consumer advocates have been demanding that Congress and/or the Federal Communications Commission impose “network neutrality” regulations that would force broadband providers (like Comcast) to treat all data on a network equally. Lawmakers have so far failed to do so.

Broadband providers, meanwhile, insist that they do treat all traffic equally, but they reserve the right to use certain technologies to “manage” data on their network. The Comcast plan suggests that broadband providers mean something very broad by “traffic management” — including, it appears, purposefully stepping into your network sessions to shut them down.

To understand why this whole process is so egregious, let’s look at it in FAQ format.

What is Comcast doing, and why?

ok from

Iran labels CIA ‘terrorist organization’

By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press WriterSat Sep 29, 6:09 PM ET

Iran’s parliament voted Saturday to designate the CIA and the U.S. Army as “terrorist organizations,” a largely symbolic response to a U.S. Senate resolution seeking a similar designation for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

The parliament said the Army and the CIA were terrorists because of the atomic bombing of Japan; the use of depleted uranium munitions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq; support of the killings of Palestinians by Israel; the bombing and killing Iraqi civilians and the torture of imprisoned terror suspects.

The Perp! above ^

eDavis:

So when Burners invoked specifically legalistic categories like “arson” and “reckless endangerment”—and I did it too at times—they were not just rationally debating Addis’ fate. They were actively deflating the productive legal ambiguity of Black Rock City as a self-governing political and territorial space by capitulating, too quickly and without consciousness, to the reality tunnel of the State and, particularly, to its conception of property.

and

Look, for example, at the constricted lives of so many kids today, with their helmets and knee pads and car-seats, their time managed, their piss checked, their movements tracked by cell phones and prohibitions against aimless wandering. What has been killed in the process of making them less likely to be killed? Perhaps, in our fearful genuflection before safety, we are deadening our taste for the raw and nervy exultation of cognitive and physical liberty—a liberty which most certainly should include the freedom to attend dangerous and wayward festivals where, if your aren’t careful or even lucky, large burning things might fall on your head.

Burning Men
Part One: Chaosmos

image

x.

Joseph Nechvatal
Mid-September 2007, Marrakech
http://www.nechvatal.net

from

http://transition.turbulence.org/blog/2007/09/28/review-of-digital-contagions/trackback/

Though no J. G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs, Jussi Parikka nevertheless sucks us into a fantastic black tour-de-force narrative of virulence and the cultural history of computer viruses (*), followed by innumerable inquisitive innuendoes

We may wish to recall here that for Deleuze and Guattari, media ecologies are machinic operations (the term machinic here refers to the production of consistencies between heterogeneous elements) based in particular

To begin this caliginous expedition, Digital Contagions plunges us into a haunting, shifting and dislocating array of source material that thrills. Parikka launches his degenerate seduction by drawing from, and intertwining in a non-linear fashion, the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (for whom my unending love is verging on obsession), Friedrich Kittler, Eugene Thacker, Tiziana Terranova, N. Katherine Hayles, Lynn Margulis, Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi, Bruno Latour, Charlie Gere, Sherry Turkle, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Deborah Lupton, and Paul Virilio. These thinkers are then linked with ripe examples from prankster net art, stealth biopolitics, immunological incubations, the disassembly significance of noise, ribald sexual

Jussi Parikka

Jussi Parikka studied Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland, and is currently Visiting Lecturer and Research Scholar in Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin. His Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses is published by Peter Lang, New York, in the Digital Formations series (2007). In addition, two co-edited books are forthcoming: The Spam Book: On Viruses, Spam, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture and Media Archaeologies. Parikka’s homepage is <http://users.utu.fi/juspar>.

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