This Is the Most Detailed Picture of the Internet Ever
iggy mogo
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Twenty years of a free, open web!
Twenty years today, the code required to run a web server was made freely available without any royalties. This marked the start of the World Wide Web, which was named by Tim Berners-Lee back in 1989, as a method of sharing and disseminating information between physicists around the world!
You can find out more about the creation of the World Wide Web here.
If you’re feeling particularly nostalgic, you can also visit the first website ever, with a snapshot restored from 1992 (earlier ones have not been found!): http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html(via guerrillatech)
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See that one dot? No, not that one. The one above Austin. No, the other one above Austin.
That’s me.
(via wineslacker)
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Charles Ramsey Is an Internet Hero for All the Wrong Reasons No one is saying that Charles Ramsey isn’t worthy of the “hero” mantle. He helped save three women who were held captive — brutally — in his Cleveland neighborhood for over a decade. But the Internet’s instant meme-ification of this man — a lower-income black man talking about a horrible crime, played on repeat at the expense of stereotypes and with the blinders fully up about the truth — it’s all a little gross, no?
Ramsey’s interview with ABC’s Cleveland affiliate is already a thing of Internet legend, not a day after it aired live on television. “You got to have some big testicles to pull this off, bro, because we see this dude every day. I mean every day,” Ramsey told a WEWS reporter at the scene Monday night. “I barbecue with this dude. We eat ribs and what not and listen to salsa music. Know where I’m coming from?” Our Adam Clark Estes predicted it: “This man’s going to be an Internet meme for sure,” he wrote.
And Internet meme he is. A second interview, with the local Fox affiliate, is making the rounds today. The name Charles Ramsey has been trending on Twitter all day. There are Vines of his expressive face being passed around. There are thumbs-up GIFs. And, of course, there are so many awful autotune mixes of the first interview already, because some people still find that funny.
Already Bradley is drawing a lot of comparisons on the Internet, and all over Twitter and Facebook, to Antoine Dodson, the Bed Intruder guy who was auto-tuned the world over, but who also happened to be a guy who was talking about the alleged rape of his sister at an Alabama housing project. Indeed, both Ramsey and Dodson are black American men who gained instant fame by way of local television interviews in which, well, neither really seemed like he’d be on television before. Those are their only similarities, but those also may, unfortunately, be the only reasons why these two men have entered the consciousness of so many white American people with a Twitter account or a couple hundred Facebook friends. That they were both connected with horror goes eerily unmentioned. “Perhaps it’s time for the world’s meme artists to stop assuming that any black dude getting interviewed on local news about a crime he helped to foil can be reduced to some catch phrase or in-joke” Miles Klee writes over at Blackbook. “It’s just baffling that we’re trying to find a way to laugh about what is, in itself, a harrowing turn of events,” Klee adds.
The Internet seems to lose sight of two very important distinctions sometimes. Charles Ramsey is a hero because he called the police and helped them save three women from reportedly being raped and impregnated in a basement for a decade. But he’s a meme because he’s black and on TV, and because so many choose to ignore the horrible realities of the crime. And, sure, pretty entertaining for a couple minutes, but we’d like to add our support to Klee’s proposal: “Just this once let’s celebrate the man himself—without using .gifs or Photoshop,” he writes. Even though we know that isn’t happening.
(via peaceshannon)
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oh my god someone hacked associated press’ twitter and made a fake tweet and the dow took a nose dive until everyone realised it was fake
the internet is beautiful and terrifying.
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The Internet ‘Narcissism Epidemic’ : Don’t let popularity set your standard.
By Bill Davidow
We are in the midst of a “narcissism epidemic,” concluded psychologists Jean M. Twnege and W. Keith Campbell in their 2009 book. One study they describe showed that among a group of 37,000 college students, narcissistic personality traits rose just as quickly as obesity from the 1980s to the present. Fortunately for narcissists, the continued explosion of social networking has provided them with productivity tools to continually expand their reach — the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Foursquare, and occasionally Google Plus.
Evidence for the rise in narcissism continues to come up in research and news. A study by psychologist Dr. Nathan DeWall and his team found “a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music” since the 1980s. Shawn Bergman, an assistant professor of organizational psychology at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina notes that “narcissism levels among millennials are higher than previous generations.”
Researchers at Western Illinois University measured two socially disruptive aspects of narcissistic personalities — grandiose exhibitionism and entitlement/exploitativeness.
read more at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/03/the-internet-narcissism-epidemic/274336/
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Online Harassment & Cyber Mobs — Anita Sarkeesian at TEDxWomen
I was excited to participate in this year’s TEDxWomen in Washington, DC, an annual event organized by the Paley Center for Media. I presented a 10 minute talk about sexist online harassment, cyber mobs and both the destructive and uplifting power of online communities. In this talk, I use the analogy of an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) to explain how these types of large scale harassment campaigns operate.
After my Kickstarter project began to attract a huge amount of media attention this summer, I made the strategic decision to try and use that as an opportunity to highlight the larger problem of online harassment faced by many women in gaming spaces and on the internet more generally. To that end, over the past several months I’ve devoted a substantial amount of time and energy giving talks (like this one) and doing dozens of media interviews as well as communicating with a handful of game companies on the topic. There have been many inspirational women speaking out about online and gaming harassment issues for a long time and my hope has been that I can use my personal story to contribute to this important and critical conversation. In some ways this was a difficult decision because it means I’ve become an even bigger target and also because I’ve had to take time away from working on my Tropes vs Women video series (which frankly I’d much rather spend all of my time on). Still, I believe the trade off is ultimately worth it if by sharing my experience it can be a small part of moving us towards systemic change and a more inclusive digital world.
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The most ironic of situations - The Pirate Bay, the world's largest illegal downloading website is now being hosted in North Korea. Delivering free things to people, provided by a country where everyone is controlled.
yeah totally good critique and understanding of the DPRK well done
You have to admit it’s an interesting relationship at the least.
Rumor is that it’s actually in Cambodia more than likely and that this was a joke of some sort. Then again, only one person has suggested this; I don’t speak interwebz so I’m not sure about his reasoning for thinking this. It’s just a really curious situation if it turns out to be true.
press release:
PRESS RELEASE, NEW PROVIDER FOR TPB
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, 3 MARCH 102, 평양 (PYONGYANG).
The Pirate Bay has been hunted in many countries around the world. Not for illegal activities but being persecuted for beliefs of freedom of information. Today, a new chapter is written in the history of the movement, as well as the history of the internets.
A week ago we could reveal that The Pirate Bay was accessed via Norway and Catalonya. The move was to ensure that these countries and regions will get attention to the issues at hand. Today we can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network.
This is truly an ironic situation. We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high. At the same time, companies from that country is chasing a competitor from other countries, bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew. And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information.
We believe that being offered our virtual asylum in Korea is a first step of this country’s changing view of access to information. It’s a country opening up and one thing is sure, they do not care about threats like others do. In that way, TPB and Korea might have a special bond. We will do our best to influence the Korean leaders to also let their own population use our service, and to make sure that we can help improve the situation in any way we can. When someone is reaching out to make things better, it’s also ones duty to grab their hand.
(via ihateteachers)
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American teacher in Japan under fire for lessons on Japan’s history of discrimination:
Miki Dezaki, who first arrived in Japan on a teacher exchange program in 2007, wanted to learn about the nation that his parents had once called home. He taught English, explored the country and affectionately chronicled his cross-cultural adventures on social media, most recently on YouTube, where he gained a small following for videos like “Hitchhiking Okinawa” and the truly cringe-worthy “What Americans think of Japan.” One of them, on the experience of being gay in Japan, attracted 75,000 views and dozens of thoughtful comments.
Dezaki didn’t think the reaction to his latest video was going to be any different, but he was wrong. “If I should have anticipated something, I should have anticipated the netouyu,” he told me, referring to the informal army of young, hyper-nationalist Japanese Web users who tend to descend on any article — or person — they perceive as critical of Japan.
But before the netouyu put Dezaki in their crosshairs, sending him death threats and hounding his employers, previous employers and even the local politicians who oversee his employers, there was just a teacher and his students.
Dezaki began his final lesson with a 1970 TV documentary, Eye of the Storm, often taught in American schools for its bracingly honest exploration of how good-hearted people — in this case, young children participating in an experiment — can turn to racism. After the video ended, he asked his students to raise their hands if they thought racism existed in Japan. Almost none did. They all thought of it as a uniquely American problem.
Gently, Dezaki showed his students that, yes, there is also racism in Japan. He carefully avoided the most extreme and controversial cases — for example, Japan’s wartime enslavement of Korean and other Asian women for sex, which the country today doesn’t fully acknowledge — pointing instead to such slang terms as “bakachon camera.” The phrase, which translates as “idiot Korean camera,” is meant to refer to disposable cameras so easy to use that even an idiot or a Korean could do it.
He really got his students’ attention when he talked about discrimination between Japanese groups. People from Okinawa, where Dezaki happened to be teaching, are sometimes looked down upon by other Japanese, he pointed out, and in the past have been treated as second-class citizens. Isn’t that discrimination?
“The reaction was so positive,” he recalled. For many of them, the class was a sort of an a-ha moment. “These kids have heard the stories of their parents being discriminated against by the mainland Japanese. They know this stuff. But the funny thing is that they weren’t making the connection that that was discrimination.” From there, it was easier for the students to accept that other popular Japanese attitudes about race or class might be discriminatory.
The vice principal of the school said he wished more Japanese students could hear the lesson. Dezaki didn’t get a single complaint. No one accused him of being an enemy of Japan.
That changed a week ago…
read more at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/02/22/american-teacher-in-japan-under-fire-for-lessons-on-japans-history-of-discrimination/
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“Because if we’re not trying to understand how to shape the Internet so that its good effects outweigh the bad, powerful interests will do all the shaping. The Internet’s design isn’t fixed by natural laws. Its history is a fortuitous accident: an initial lack of commercial interests, governmental benign neglect, military requirements for survivability and resilience, and the natural inclination of computer engineers to build open systems that work simply and easily. This mix of forces that created yesterday’s Internet will not be trusted to create tomorrow’s. Battles over the future of the Internet are going on right now: in legislatures around the world, in international organizations like the International Telecommunications Union and the World Trade Organization, and in Internet standards bodies. The Internet is what we make it, and is constantly being recreated by organizations, companies, and countries with specific interests and agendas. Either we fight for a seat at the table, or the future of the Internet becomes something that is done to us.” -
How Yahoo allowed hackers to hijack my neighbor’s e-mail account:
When my neighbor called early Wednesday morning, she sounded close to tears. Her Yahoo Mail account had been hijacked and used to send spam to addresses in her contact list. Restrictions had then been placed on her account that prevented her from e-mailing her friends to let them know what happened.
In a blog post published hours before my neighbor’s call, researchers from security firm Bitdefender said that the hacking campaign that targeted my neighbor’s account had been active for about a month. Even more remarkable, the researchers said the underlying hack worked because Yahoo’s developer blog runs on a version of the WordPress content management system that contained a vulnerability developers addressed more than eight months ago. My neighbor’s only mistake, it seems, was clicking on a link while logged in to her Yahoo account.
read more at http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/01/how-yahoo-allowed-hackers-to-hijack-my-neighbors-e-mail-account/
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A Short Response from the Founder of KSS
I wanted to take a moment to briefly respond to the small outcry over recent posts on the KSS blog.
Korean Students Speak (KSS) started in 2011 in order to provide students with the opportunity to utilize English in a creative and organic way to express their opinions and thoughts to the world. In keeping with this aim, KSS does not filter students’ messages, rather uploading every picture/message that KSS receives, regardless of content. We want to encourage students to pen messages that reflect their real opinions, not just what they think we want to hear. Therefore, we cannot control the content that comes out of the students’ pens. KSS does not encourage, endorse, nor claim ownership of any of the messages, positive or negative, that appear on the blog. These messages are indicative of the student’s personal viewpoints, not of lesson plans. The sole objective is to give these students a platform to be heard, whatever messages they may have.
Many of the sometimes obtuse messages are often used by teachers as springboards for future lessons that delve deeper into cross-cultural issues such as diversity and education. Some students realize the impacts of their messages after these types of lessons and request to have their messages taken down. In fact, the only way a message will ever be removed after it has been posted to the website is at the student’s request.
As the founder of KSS, I acknowledge that the content of some students’ messages are offensive and I sincerely regret that these messages have disgusted some visitors to the KSS tumblr. The small outcry to recent posts has illustrated the gaps in the available information about the project’s background and the lack of of context for the KSS platform. KSS is keeping these responses in mind as we work to improve the tumblr and the project.
KSS is currently in the process of creating resources that address the questions and concerns of its audience. KSS will accomplish this in two ways: first, by providing a framework for the project, both as a tool in the classroom and as a project online, and second, by providing cultural context to many of the reoccurring themes found in students’ messages. KSS will cross post expansions to the “About” page as text posts on the tumblr itself as changes are made.
Please direct any questions or concerns to the KSS email: koreanstudentsspeak@gmail.com.
do you guys have some sort of submission guidelines for these students? and also i hope something anything for their parents or guardians as well?
hmm … an opportunity to utilize english in a creative and organic way and to encourage students to pen messages that reflect their real opinions… or is that it? or is this online school project all just organic too and not very well thought out?
why don’t you guys teach or help the students realize the impact of some of their messages beforehand, before posting before pimping them out?
you guys do realize this is the internet, don’t you? and you guys know that once you post something here and try to take it down of course at the request of a student that it really never goes away? and you guys do also realize these are just students? kids, grade school and middle school students, right? or are you guys really that naive and obtuse?
your response and objective is just utter crap. stop blackening out and take your responsibility as teachers, and protect your students first. and start doing your jobs too because from the looks of it you guys aren’t doing it.
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“ People don’t need to be told that Facebook is a juddering behemoth that probably knows where you live, your food and music preferences and the weight and idiosyncracies of your genitals – and has the right to sell that information to any third party it deems worthy. People don’t need to be told that every single dirty or idiotic thing they searched for on Google three years ago is recorded on a giant corporate server somewhere in the American Midwest. We already know or suspect all of those things and more and we may not be happy to be a part of it, but the vast majority of us have chosen to join the crowd rather than be cut off from social influence, because that’s what people do.
This is how totalitarianism works. It’s not just the threat of violence, in the cypherpunks’ words – it’s also the threat of exclusion.
” -
![This Is Your Brain on the Internet:
Recent studies have validated the condition known as Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD). Those with IAD can suffer tremors, shivers, nausea and anxiety. Try breaking a gamer from their screen mid-level and you’ll immediately get a sense of the hold that this medium has on its addicts. Other negative effects include lack of sleep and shortened attention spans. Studies have shown that the average number of sleep hours per night is inversely proportionate to the average number of hours per day spent online.
However living in this connected, media-filled world isn’t all bad. According to Shlain, we’re in the process of building a global brain, one that will allow for increased ingenuity and learning. Shlain compares the development of an infant’s brain with this idea of the global brain. The more parts of the brain you connect in a child’s mind, the more creativity and insights that child will experience. According to Shlain, the same holds true for our collective conscious. The online space allows for millions of unique and imaginative minds to share their interests and skills in various communities and niches. These creative clusters hold the potential to harness creativity and mobilize an army of creative minds into action. […]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_memonutqm61rhbabjo1_1280.jpg)
This Is Your Brain on the Internet:
Recent studies have validated the condition known as Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD). Those with IAD can suffer tremors, shivers, nausea and anxiety. Try breaking a gamer from their screen mid-level and you’ll immediately get a sense of the hold that this medium has on its addicts. Other negative effects include lack of sleep and shortened attention spans. Studies have shown that the average number of sleep hours per night is inversely proportionate to the average number of hours per day spent online.
However living in this connected, media-filled world isn’t all bad. According to Shlain, we’re in the process of building a global brain, one that will allow for increased ingenuity and learning. Shlain compares the development of an infant’s brain with this idea of the global brain. The more parts of the brain you connect in a child’s mind, the more creativity and insights that child will experience. According to Shlain, the same holds true for our collective conscious. The online space allows for millions of unique and imaginative minds to share their interests and skills in various communities and niches. These creative clusters hold the potential to harness creativity and mobilize an army of creative minds into action. […]
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only for good…
(via upwithtrees)
