This would be funny if it wasn’t so fucking terrible:
A “human error” carried out by the police resulted in thousands of websites being completely blocked at the DNS level yesterday. Danish visitors to around 8,000 sites including Google and Facebook were informed that the sites were being blocked by the country’s High Tech Crime Unit due to them offering child pornography, a situation which persisted for several hours.
/via Claus Dahl
Some employers, however, are now attempting to flip the “off” switch. Companies from Atos, the French information technology services giant, to Deutsche Telekom to Google have recently adopted measures that force workers toward a better work-life balance, with scheduled breaks from the Internet and constant connectivity. Just last month, Volkswagen, Europe’s biggest automaker, pledged to deactivate emails on German staff BlackBerries during non-office hours. In a bid to combat employee burnout, staff at Volkswagen will be limited to only receiving emails on their devices from half an hour before they start work until half an hour after they leave for the day, and will be in blackout mode the rest of the time.
/via
♺ — #atos #detsche telekom #downtime #email #google #internet #life #volkswagen #work
Yesterday, at their developer conference f8 Facebook unveiled the next iteration of their strategy for getting people connected to each other, products they like and whatever advertisers would like them to care about.
There are inherently good and bad things about the changes, and remember that whatever I write here, I write for myself, not my current employer.
I really like the new profile design. It’s strikingly clear that Nicholas Felton has had a huge impact on this, and I think the big, bold images, the large typography and somewhat tile-based view looks amazing:
I find it refreshing to see Facebook taking such a content-centric view and actually use the data they have about me to create a (somewhat) coherent story. They have data about me from the past 4 years, and I found myself smiling as I scrolled back in time and saw photos from Roskilde Festival, my semester abroad and a whole range of great experiences I’ve had with friends and family.
#ben elowitz #circles #distributed #f8 #facebook #google plus #internet #last.fm #linkedin #lists #news feed #open graph #roskilde festival #scrobbling #social layer #technological determinism #ticker #timeline #wetpaint
Nikola Tesla, in 1926:
When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
The whole interview is fantastic.
/via A Brief History of The Internet of Things.
#future #internet #mobile #nikola tesla #prediction #telephone #wifi #wireless
Every zombie war is a war of attrition. It’s always a numbers game. And it’s more repetitive than complex. In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork, or following Twitter gossip out of obligation, or performing tedious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche. The principle downside to any zombie attack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principle downside to life is that you will be never be finished with whatever it is you do.
Remember: Be Pavlov. Not the dog.
(by NYTimes, via Kevin Slavin.)
Without us, the transport medium — the Internet — is a hyperlinked collection of inert bits. We are the medium.
Which makes McLuhan’s aphorism more true than ever. In tweeting about the video, I am also tweeting about myself: “This is the sort of thing I find funny. Don’t I have a great sense of humor? And I was clever enough to find it. And I care enough about you — and about my reputation — to send it out to you.” That’s 51 characters over the the Twitter limit, but it’s clearly embedded in my tweet.
(via David Weinberger.)
Imagine listening to a cassette tape. The audio is a narrated commentary about the technology of magnetic recording and future of the cassette tape industry itself. After listening, you rewind the tape and listen to it again. And again. Then you make your own cassette tape, recording your own thoughts about the vibrant world of high fidelity audio on polyester plastic film.
Let’s drop the metaphor and change mediums: many people get sucked into using the Internet in the same way. My thesis is that the Internet, like cassette tapes, ought to follow a purpose instead of becoming one.
We need to treat the internet as a pervasive technology, and we need to do that fast.
(And yes, this also a fantastic example of failing the cassette tape test as I have just named this.)
