Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
Circle of Blue
CNN : Education
Common Dreams
Daily Bell
Democracy Now!
Protests Grow in Solidarity with California Prisoners as Hunger Strikes Enter Third Week
Discovery
Dawn Now Orbits Asteroid Vesta. Or Does It?
We'll have to wait to find out whether the NASA spacecraft was successfully captured by Vesta's gravity.
Guardian
UN mission accuses Sudan of shelling and torturing civilians in Nuba war
Khartoum is keeping UN peacekeepers in the dark as it wages a violent campaign against its African border people, say confidential reports to...
Mother Jones
New Scientist
NPR : All Things Considered
Open Secrets
PECAN Group
Pesticide Action Network
Psychology Today
Rescuing the Frog
Reuters
Science Daily
Scientific American
Ten Percent
This Week in Science
War Room
The secret war in Somalia
Who the U.S. is fighting in the Horn of Africa, and why
Google Reader
A look at what's new The latest messages from the Google Reader team via Official Google Reader Blog by Brian Shih on 2/16/11 Today we’re excited to announce some updates to the official Google Reader app for Android. Over the last couple of months, we’ve added some of your most-requested features: - Unread count widget - choose any feed, label, person, or “all items” ... See more » Transparency Wars Continue: Some Untold Effects of WikiLeaks and more...It’s been a productive month. First finishing a major novel(!), then flying off to give speeches and consultations to industrial clients (about the technological future), then keeping busy with journalism about our civilization’s struggle with ongoing change. Which brings us to our top link...  The Silicon Valley Metronews features my article “World Cyberwar And the Inevitability of Radical Transparency.” The topic is both ongoing and ever-new. I discuss how WikiLeaks ignited the first international cyber war -- and how pro-business laws enacted to promote the growth of Silicon Valley's digital media and technology companies inadvertently nurtured transformation activists shaking up and toppling governments around the world.With this fresh look at the cyber wars. I zero especially on several main examples... e.g the surprising ways that Julian Assange helped U.S. foreign policy far more than he harmed it... plus the ongoing battle between police and citizens armed with cameras... and much more. Never before have so many people been empowered with practical tools of transparency. Beyond access to instantly searchable information from around the world, nearly all of us now carry in our pockets a device that can take and transmit images anywhere. Will the growing power of elites to peer down at us --surveillance-- ultimately be trumped by the rapidly growing power of sousveillance? === One-sided Transparency === H.P. and Cisco Systems Inc. will help China build a massive surveillance network in the city of Chongqing -- aimed at crime prevention. The technological part of it is impressive, as it will "cover a half-million intersections, neighborhoods and parks over nearly 400 square miles, an area more than 25% larger than New York City." This extensive surveillance system may potentially implement as many as 500,000 cameras, far more even than the 8,000 to 10,000 surveillance cameras currently estimated to exist in cities like New York. Yet -- note that few of those New York cameras report to a centralized system. The anti-crime benefits of such systems might be achievable without tyranny -- if citizens were equally empowered to look back at the mighty, via “sousveillance.” But such reciprocality is not likely in the near Chinese future. Human rights activists worry that such extensive surveillance will inevitably be used for other purposes -- to target political protests. Are companies responsible for how their products are used? In a recent Wall Street Journal poll, over half responded that U.S. companies should be allowed to sell high-tech surveillance tech to China. Meanwhile, H.P. executive Todd Bradley dodged the issue, commenting that “It’s not my job to really understand thewhat they’re going to use it for.”  Meanwhile, in New York City, there are 238 license plate readers. Many of these are mobile devices, mounted on the back of patrol cars. Others are set up at fixed posts at bridges, tunnels and highways across the city. These license plate readers have helped in the tracking down of major crimes suspects; they have provided also clues in homicide cases and other serious crimes. But they have been used in lesser offenses, such as identifying and locating stolen cars. But there are concerns. The police have established an extensive database tracking citizens' driving patterns. How long is this data maintained and who can access the information? Cracked gives us six legit ways cops can screw us over... including the fact Asset Forfeiture is factored into their budget. Or in other words, if cops weren't allowed to seize our stuff and sell it, even without proof of a crime, they'd suffer budget shortfalls. ====Looking toward the Far Future==== Popout NASA's Hundred Year Starship and the Yucca Mountain nuclear depository are two examples of "deep time" thinking -- casting our eyes over the next horizon, anticipating the needs of our descendants. While top priority must go to freedom, progress, full brains for all kids and saving the planet -- some ambitious, forward-looking innovation and commitment to our grandchildren must be on the agenda. In June I keynoted the annual Managers’ Conference at PayPal and Qualcomm's Innovation Network (QUIN) "Venture Fest." Many thanks to Alex Tosheff and Ricardo dos Santos, my hosts for those events, which showcased some marvelous talent in among the world’s best and most inventive technology companies. "The World Transformed" is an audio interview series by Fast Forward Radio. They interviewed me, along with P.J. Manney, Thomas McCabe and other visionaries, discussing some of the difficulties and prizes that await us in the years and decades ahead. =====More News==== Japanese scientists announced that massive deposits of the 17 elements used to produce hybrid cars, laptops, smartphones and other high-tech devices can be extracted from nodules on the floor of the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. Nodules were first touted as setting off a sub-sea boom in sci fi stories way back in the 1950s. I certainly spoke of this in more detail... in EARTH (1989). But will it be economic to retrieve these resources? For real? (Someone dig for verification?) Israel will be using new technology to get oil from oil shale in the Shfela Basin. There's an estimated 250 billion barrels vs the Saudi's 260 billion barrels. This article is clearly biased and somewhat polemically exaggerated - and conveniently ignores Rupert Murdoch’s deep bed-buddyness with certain pretro princes. Still, if it is even half true.... The Educational Value of Creative Disobedience: Read this article in Scientific American by Andrea Kuszewski about teaching children how to solve problems creatively, instead of flooding them with memorized information. It really is worth your time. Comparison of the universe: moons, planets, galaxies, and clusters: Play this at full-screen. Enjoy the beauty and majesty of it all. Are the Japanese making human clones? Actually, just putting your face on a robot! ====On the Fiction front======  Continuing the trend of excellent fiction being turned into an audiobook in the form of a weekly podcast. This one I highly highly recommend! A wonderful variation on the Harry Potter universe that I consider vastly better than the original, as well as more interesting and fun. A cool comparison of today’s tech to Star Trek. Even crude and half-finished, this “trailer” for a movie based on my uplift universe has a lot of fun and thrilling elements. Be sure and view it all the way through, for various versions. Meanwhile, io9 - the fascinating site for all things marvelous, ran a piece about Famous Sci Fi Dolphins... and featured my Uplift Universe. I wonder why? Nor have I any monopoly on producing cool stuff! My Sci Fi author colleague and sometime collaborator Jeff Carlson has penned a way fun essay about the kinds of kooks and weirdos who wrote in to him about his novel. Gee whiz, why are my own fans so staid and reasonable! See this about global warming. Oy! . . ...a collaborative contrarian product of David Brin, Enlightenment Civilization, obstinate human nature... and http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ (site feed URL: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/atom.xml)  they come out differentPeople arrested in the jasmine related purge earlier this year are trickling out of detention somewhat changed. Many of the lawyers and activists have been illegally detained and held for excessive periods in violation of Chinese laws. In some instances, people have been abducted off the streets, with a black hood thrown over their heads by non-uniformed security officers.Black hooding isn’t new; it goes all the way back to Inquisition witchfinding manuals, at least in Europe. What I suspect is going on in China is some combination of sensory disorientation, sleep deprivation, verbal and physical humiliation, and possibly sexual assault and forced drug administration: what the Soviets used to call “the conveyor belt” and which is now euphemized as enhanced interrogation. It occurred to me that what Chinese dissidents seem to need right now is a SERE course, the counter-interrogation programme originally created after the Korean war after experience of Chinese interrogation techniques. Post 9/11, SERE procedures were mined in the Bush Administration’s drive to reintroduce torture. And curiously enough, DSD personnel were invited to Guantanamo to help interrogate Uighur suspects swept up in the hopper after the US invasion of Afghanistan, thus being re-introduced to their own time-honoured techniques, or perhaos reassured that these tehcniques now enjoyed international endorsement. In fact I can imagine DSD operatives reading this and thinking: what’s the problem: we’re not throwing these people in cells filled with tubercular cases and inviting them to cough all over our victim, like we did with Han Dongfang. This is modern! It meets international standards! |
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment