http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://monoskop.org/log/?p=4169 To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new media cultures, he traces a resistance to the heritage of motion studies, ergonomics, and efficiency, showing how creativity is stirred within the networks of digital culture. ]]> Wed, 23 May 2012 09:46:17 -0700 http://monoskop.org/log/?p=4169 http://engadget.com/default/article.do?artUrl=http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/24/google-explains-how-it-searches-the-internet-in-under-half-a-sec/&category=classic&postPage=1 Ever wonder how Google manages to search the entire web and return results in half a second? Well, RobertvH from Munich did, and Mountain View’s head of web-spam, Matt Cutts, talks you through it in the above YouTube video. The short answer? Lots of backend firepower and, you know, a few years in the search game. If you remember the Google dance, Cutts explains what caused that, before going on to give a good idea about how today’s version of the site does what it does. If you’re thinking this all sounds a bit too much like SEO 101, you’d… ]]> Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:49:39 -0700 http://engadget.com/default/article.do?artUrl=http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/24/google-explains-how-it-searches-the-internet-in-under-half-a-sec/&category=classic&postPage=1 http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/04/-emergence-of-the-human-superbrain-75000-years-ago-differences-between-humans-and-computers-could-bl.html "Humans obviously evolved a much wider range of communication tools to express their thoughts, the most important being language," said Hoffecker, a fellow at CU's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "Individual human brains within social groups became integrated into a neurologic Internet of sorts, giving birth to the mind." ]]> Sun, 22 Apr 2012 16:15:46 -0700 http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/04/-emergence-of-the-human-superbrain-75000-years-ago-differences-between-humans-and-computers-could-bl.html http://bit.ly/JoYn3H They constructed their networks in a simple way: if one board position can lead to another, they are connected. Using a dataset of about 1,000 professional games and 4,000 amateur games, they began to construct these networks. Of course, the Go board is very large and so you can’t compare entire board layouts. Instead, they decided to make it much more tractable and look at the board composition surrounding a newly placed piece (a move in Go consists of putting a stone on an intersection of the grid lines of the board). In this case, they looked at the pieces… ]]> Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:29:50 -0700 http://bit.ly/JoYn3H http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/roar-so-wildly-spam-technology-and-language This is the raw text output of a chat session with a bot I modified to act as an interlocutor. I use our conversation, which revolves around the history of spam, particularly algorithmic filtering, litspam, and the theories of Wiener and Turing, as a way of putting forward the outlines of new, machine-driven forms of language for which spam was the testing ground. ]]> Thu, 16 Feb 2012 06:20:28 -0700 http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/roar-so-wildly-spam-technology-and-language http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/112854 Artist and film-maker, Hito Steyerl, asks us to stand shoulder to shoulder with our digital equivalents. Digital images are Things (like you and me) - a plethora of compressed, corrupted representations pushed and pulled through increasingly policed and capitalised information networks. If 80% of all internet traffic^* is SPAM - a liberated excess withdrawn^** from accepted channels of communication - perhaps it is in The Poor Image we find our closest kin? ]]> Thu, 16 Feb 2012 06:13:43 -0700 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/112854 http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27379 Evidence has emerged that the brain's capacity to absorb information is limiting the amount of data humanity can produce ]]> Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:35:04 -0700 http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27379 http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/2005/P2626.pdf/on-distributed-communications-networks Paul Baran (1962) ]]> Sun, 23 Oct 2011 15:08:44 -0700 http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/2005/P2626.pdf/on-distributed-communications-networks http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-cyberspace-real Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio) justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations, unconstrained by any symbolic Law or by any impossibility of some Real? If not, how are we to detect in cyberspace the contours of the other two dimensions of the Lacanian triad ISR, the Symbolic and the Real? As to the symbolic dimension, the solution seems easy — it suffices to focus on the notion of authorship that fits the emerging domain of cyberspace narratives, that of the "procedural authorship":… ]]> Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:33:41 -0700 http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-cyberspace-real http://nedrossiter.org/?p=286 For many years, philosophers have been casting doubt on the common identification with meaning and signification as the primary human response mechanisms to the world. If we wish to understand anything about how our complex technical society is made up, we must pay attention to the underlying structures that surround us, from industry norms to building regulations, software icons and internet protocols. Yet our ordinary understanding of the world resists this very idea. If we call for another society, with more equality and style, it is not enough to think differently; the very framework of that thinking must be negated… ]]> Sat, 24 Sep 2011 16:36:53 -0700 http://nedrossiter.org/?p=286 http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/all/1 On June 17, 2010, Sergey Ulasen was in his office in Belarus sifting through e-mail when a report caught his eye. A computer belonging to a customer in Iran was caught in a reboot loop — shutting down and restarting repeatedly despite efforts by operators to take control of it. It appeared the machine was infected with a virus.
Ulasen heads an antivirus division of a small computer security firm in Minsk called VirusBlokAda. Once a specialized offshoot of computer science, computer security has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry over the last decade keeping pace with an explosion in… ]]> Wed, 13 Jul 2011 03:09:47 -0700 http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/all/1 http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/frohmann/Documents/ICIE%20IV%20Foucault%20Deleuze.pdf Information ethics has become a scholarly growth industry in recent years, especially through the work of Rafael Capurro, the  founder of the International Center forInformation Ethics (ICIE). The maturity of the debate is reflected in the leading question of the International ICIE Symposium 2004 in Karlsruhe, Germany: how isembodied human life possible within local cultural traditions and the horizon of a global digital environment? The Symposium  explores ethical ramifications of thisquestion by encouraging research and reflection on effects of the Internet and postInternet developments of digital networks on a wide range of phenomena, includingcommunity, democracy, customs, language, media, economic development,… ]]> Sat, 11 Jun 2011 02:32:11 -0700 http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/frohmann/Documents/ICIE%20IV%20Foucault%20Deleuze.pdf http://blog.fortinet.com/40th-anniversary-of-the-computer-virus/ This year marks the 40th anniversary of Creeper, the world’s first computer virus. From Creeper to Stuxnet, the last four decades saw the number of malware instances boom from 1,300 in 1990, to 50,000 in 2000, to over 200 million in 2010. Besides sheer quantity, viruses, which were originally used as academic proof of concepts, quickly turned into geek pranks, then evolved into cybercriminal tools. By 2005, the virus scene had been monetized, and virtually all viruses were developed with the sole purpose of making money via more or less complex business models.

 In the following story,… ]]> Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:50:04 -0700 http://blog.fortinet.com/40th-anniversary-of-the-computer-virus/ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/science/15scibks_excerpt.html?_r=1 Imagine it: a flower blossoming inside the brain, nanometer stalks splitting away from a micrometer stem. Expanding into every available capillary, touching every cubic millimeter of the brain, collecting terabytes of data in every second. By the same token, it could send in terabytes of data every second. It would be the most intimate interface ever invented. If you connected one person’s wired brain to another person’s, you could literally connect them together; they would have a real corpus callosum joining them (albeit with links of radio waves rather than wires.) And if you connected a number of people to… ]]> Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:40:27 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/science/15scibks_excerpt.html?_r=1 http://hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about "islands in the net" we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of "free enclave" is not only possible in our time but also existent. All my research and speculation has crystallized around the concept of the TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE (hereafter abbreviated TAZ). Despite its synthesizing force for my own thinking, however, I don't intend the TAZ to be taken as more than an essay ("attempt"), a suggestion, almost a poetic fancy. Despite the occasional Ranterish enthusiasm of my language I am not trying to construct political… ]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 06:43:13 -0700 http://hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html (Michel Foucault, 1967)

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermaldynamics- The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of… ]]> Wed, 19 Jan 2011 05:32:41 -0700 http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html http://darc.imv.au.dk/publicinterfaces/?p=150 Although the analysis of geek community as a recursive public sharing social imaginary of openness, and a moral order of freedom, is a valid frame to understand geek culture through a sociological point of view, adopting a dialectical perspective in the analysis of network dynamics might open an opportunity to question the notion of artistic intervention itself. This thread connects multiple identities projects and hacker practices of the last decade with business strategies of today, reflecting on the role of activists and artists in social media. Their interventions are thought as a challenge to generate a critical understanding of contemporary… ]]> Mon, 10 Jan 2011 04:22:02 -0700 http://darc.imv.au.dk/publicinterfaces/?p=150 http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.5/gordon.php Our fascination with ants has led to engaging stories about them, from the Iliad’s Myrmidons to Antz’s Z, as well as a growing body of research by biologists. Though the ant colonies of fable and film often are invested with the hierarchical... ]]> Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:09:39 -0700 http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.5/gordon.php http://www.altx.com/EBR/reviews/rev8/r8young.htm A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is one the most intelligent, stimulating, and rewarding books I have read in a long time - it even surpasses De Landa's previous War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (which says a lot); and it is fully capable of surviving the advances from free-floating New Agers as well as the equally inevitable rebuffs from academic Old Agers. De Landa's greatest strength, no doubt, is his ability to synthesize - to create a self-sustaining system of theories that are merged, as it were, into an intellectual meshwork. Here, however, a final irony emerges: in… ]]> Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:25:00 -0700 http://www.altx.com/EBR/reviews/rev8/r8young.htm http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/provisional.htm By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a "logical two dimensional picture." A "logical picture" differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two dimensional analogy or metaphor - A is Z.

The Non-Site (an indoor earthwork)* is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (The Pine Barrens Plains). It is by this dimensional metaphor that one… ]]> Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:53:00 -0700 http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/provisional.htm