Mark Bult Design: San Francisco, CA, Established 1988
Web design and development for small and large business, e-commerce, b2b, b2c, SAAS, and community websites. User experience design and usability testing.
Kevin Rose interviews Al Gore for Digg Dialogg Gore takes questions from the Digg users on subjects ranging from marijuana legalization/regulation to Net Neutrality whether he would accept a position in the Obama cabinet or heading the EPA.
Posted by espd at 8:52 PM |
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Monday, August 18, 2008
Free the Airwaves
Remember on old TVs how, when you used to switch from channel 5 to 7 (for example), there might be static on channel 6? Those unused spaces on the analog broadcast spectrum are called “white spaces.”
Currently more than half of the spectrum is unused. When TV broadcasters go fully digital-spectrum next year and discontinue their analog broadcasts altogether, there will be a lot more. A coalition including Google, Microsoft, Dell, and others, is asking the U.S. government to turn over white spaces to public use (broadcast spectrum is, after all, a legally recognized public resource). It could be used for better public access to wifi, Internet telephony, and many other things.
I predict this fight will get nasty when many other companies realize they stand to lose a lot too. Expect the traditional and cellular phone companies, for example, to form a similar coalition on the other side, lobbying Congress for strict licensing and fees which would effectively lock out public access the same way licensing has kept citizens from broadcasting their own TV or radio stations.
For more information, and to sign a petition, visit Free the Airwaves.
Posted by espd at 2:26 PM |
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Saturday, August 16, 2008
Is Google making us stupid?
Nicholas Carr poses questions about what the Internet is doing to the way we think, in the July/August issue of The Atlantic. Here’s an excerpt:
As we use...our “intellectual technologies” — the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities — we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies...
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
Read the full article: Is Google making us stupid? And try to ignore the irony in reading a long article online about how the Internet is making us unable to read long articles anymore.
Regardless of the potential for copyright abuses by P2P, BitTorrent and digital advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) make the valid point that Comcast, as the nation's second-largest internet service provider, has a duopoly on bandwidth and therefore a stranglehold on a public utility that shouldn't be subject to the whims of a single corporation.
This is core to the recent concerns raised about so-called "net neutrality," and SF Weekly's piece is a good primer. The EFF also has some additional information on Comcast's abuses of their subscribers.
Room 641A: AT&T's complicity in Bush's Orwellian America
I pass this windowless, metal-clad behemoth of a building every day. It's practically across the street from my office downtown. It's an AT&T building, but I never understood why it would have absolutely no windows. I always wondered what was inside.
A whistleblower who used to be a technician working for AT&T in this building revealed that it contains a room which is only accessible to National Security Agency (NSA) personnel, into which all communications traffic — internet and telephone — flows and is copied.
"My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard-wired to the secret room," said whistleblower Mark Klein. "And effectively, the splitter copied the entire data stream of those internet cables into the secret room — and we're talking about phone conversations, email web browsing, everything that goes across the internet."
In January 2006 the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the NSA in a massive, illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications.
The traffic routed through these secret rooms is not limited to AT&T customers, and AT&T is not the only telecom company complicit in the government's conspiracy to surveil the entirety of American civil communications. The EFF has filed briefs seeking information on similar locked rooms in facilities owned by Verizon, MCI, and others.
Posted by espd at 9:09 PM |
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Thursday, September 13, 2007
Thursday top 5
Flight of the Conchords, "Jenny" This one's for Ynnej since I missed her birthday by a couple days last month. These two Kiwis are hilarious. There are a whole bunch of good vids of them on YouTube.
Family Guy Star Wars A preview of an upcoming hour-long episode in which the cast of "Family Guy" does the entire first Star Wars movie. www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGyGlp8sEHo
For font geeks and/or Nippophiles Shuetsu Sato is a railway employee who makes intricate, creative, hand-made signs and maps out of colored tape. www.pinktentacle.com
Internet People If you recognize more than half of these people, you're spending too much time in front of your computer. Like me. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pPCkhYMQgY
Worst. Day. At. Work. Ever.
Aaron
Alexis
Anne
Anya
April & Matt
Ari
Bo
Brian
Bryan
Chris
Cousin Carol
Dave & Terri
Dave H.
Debby
Drue
Fibu
Four Waters
Fwegan (aka Ynnej)
Gary
Holly
Hilary
Internet Rockstar
James & Eric
Jason
Jen
Jesse
Jessica
Joey
Kansinee
Karl
Kelly
Laura
Leah
Marc
Martin
Matt
Mike
Morgan
OkayDave
Olya
Paco
Peter
Rick
Rocky
Ryan
Stellah
Tatum 
Trent
Velma
Veronica
Whiskey Media
Yuliya
Yu-Po
