Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts
Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts
[caption id="attachment_1968" align="alignnone" width="497"]
The recently revealed Prism program has civil rights advocates up in arms, and conspiracy wingnuts hunkering in their tinfoil hats. Click image to enlarge.[/caption]
The United States' National Security Agency, tasked with gathering, and assessing signal intelligence from, well, everywhere on Earth, is once again looking all Big brother-y, with revelations about a massive, ongoing domestic surveillance program, targeting cell phone users. by the millions. the unofficial Czar of all US counter-terrorism activities, since 9-11, Nicola Machiavelli, has been unavailable for comment. However, he has previously been quoted thus:
The US, intelligence apparatus doesn't bother too much with friendlies, and un-friendlies -- every other country is a competitor, and economics is war by a different name -- Canada too follows this model. Don't ask how Canada is involved in Prism; history suggests we'll be both a signal intelligence target, and collection asset. Where Canada is concerned (Woof!), the US doesn't respect -- it expects.
Privacy and civil right groups see Prism as more erosion of the American citizen's rights; the FBI will see it as more erosion of their rights -- they are the agency officially constituted to deal with crimes on US soil, but, the 9-11 terrorists toppled their rep also.
I think people protest too much. The Hoi Polloi, is givin' away what the NSA is supposedly taking. The Social Media business model is all but built on privacy violation.
And, how many of the cell phone conversations, particularly those containing embarrassingly personal information, will have been yelled out in public places -- people don't mind if everyone in a two-kilometre radius hears their side of a painful argument -- but it's a violation of their privacy if it make that extra effort, and reaches Langley, Virginia, and the NSA.
The recently revealed Prism program has civil rights advocates up in arms, and conspiracy wingnuts hunkering in their tinfoil hats. Click image to enlarge.[/caption]The United States' National Security Agency, tasked with gathering, and assessing signal intelligence from, well, everywhere on Earth, is once again looking all Big brother-y, with revelations about a massive, ongoing domestic surveillance program, targeting cell phone users. by the millions. the unofficial Czar of all US counter-terrorism activities, since 9-11, Nicola Machiavelli, has been unavailable for comment. However, he has previously been quoted thus:
"In actions of all men, especially princes, where there is no recourse to justice, the end is all that counts. A prince should only be concerned with conquering or maintaining a state, for the means will always be judged to be honourable and praiseworthy by each and every person, because the masses always follow appearances and the outcomes of affairs, and the world is nothing other than the masses. The few do not find a place wherever the masses are supported." ►
The US, intelligence apparatus doesn't bother too much with friendlies, and un-friendlies -- every other country is a competitor, and economics is war by a different name -- Canada too follows this model. Don't ask how Canada is involved in Prism; history suggests we'll be both a signal intelligence target, and collection asset. Where Canada is concerned (Woof!), the US doesn't respect -- it expects.
Privacy and civil right groups see Prism as more erosion of the American citizen's rights; the FBI will see it as more erosion of their rights -- they are the agency officially constituted to deal with crimes on US soil, but, the 9-11 terrorists toppled their rep also.
I think people protest too much. The Hoi Polloi, is givin' away what the NSA is supposedly taking. The Social Media business model is all but built on privacy violation.
And, how many of the cell phone conversations, particularly those containing embarrassingly personal information, will have been yelled out in public places -- people don't mind if everyone in a two-kilometre radius hears their side of a painful argument -- but it's a violation of their privacy if it make that extra effort, and reaches Langley, Virginia, and the NSA.
I could've just used this wallpaper as illustration, but that's cheating. ►
A comment by xian to my post about MS FrontPage gelled a quasi-idea for a post about one of the precursors to modern blog sites.[caption id="attachment_527" align="alignnone" width="497"]
A tasteful example of an old GeoCities homepage.[/caption]GeoCities.com was a real watershed phenomenon. It was an American Internet Service Provider which came into being with the Web, in late 1994, and gave people Internet access, and their own personal Web sites. When Yahoo, who'd owned it since 1999, shut the U.S. part down, there were at least 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities. (■) Compare that with the leading modern free blog site: As of 2012, it was estimated that about half of the world-wide total of 72.4 million wordpress sites were hosted on wordpress.com. (■) That's 36.2 million. GeoCities success is still staggering, and it arguably led directly to Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere.
What follows will be a bit of a history lesson for some. A lot of it was part of my life.
Who knows why ordinary people wanted to access computer networks from the comfort of their own home? A similar impulse probably led to the invention of Haggis.
The "when" is pinned down as Feb 16, 1978, according to Wired magazine, when Ward Christensen and Randy Suess launched the first public dial-up bulletin board system. They announced it in the November 1978 issue of Byte magazine, titled "The Sky's the Limit," available at Internet Archives.
Little blog cabins everywhere
BBSs thrived until the mid-1990s, and the World Wide Web. They were often hosted on ordinary PCs with very limited ability to handle concurrent users. A BBS was roughly analogous to a modern Website: files to download, and moderated discussions. They were usually labours of love, dedicated to a special interest.
All connections were dial-up over the phone system; slow and noisy, and long distance charges applied. Most BBSs were little more than one-room shacks. Worse still, the mainstream typified BBSs-as-a-whole, as a sort of bad neighbourhood, populated by hackers and pirates -- not a family-friendy destination.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)