A message in a bottle delivered to a Confederate general during the American Civil War has been deciphered, 147 years after it was written.

BBC News - Coded American Civil War message in bottle deciphered

In 2000 the information sector employed 3.6 million workers.* By 2007, just before the recession started, the number was down to 3 million, and in 2009, the information sector had shrunk to 2.8 million. That’s a 23% decline in 9 years.

The information technology industry has shed one in four jobs in the past decade.

The information technology job contraction...

What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a particularly irksome blogger or other organization was “too risky”? What if they decided — one by one — to shut down financial access to a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their operations? This decision should not be left solely up to business-as-usual among the banks.

NYT's Christmas Day editorial concerns the financial industry disconnection of wikileaks sans due process. I think there is more to say that what was said here, but at least they said something...

Banks and WikiLeaks - NYTimes.com

Christian soldiers, marching as to war in the pitched battle for the meaning of Christmas, worry that Santa is a tool of the vast Satanic conspiracy. To be sure, the similarity of their names, identical but for one transposed letter, is provocative.

I think I somehow failed to post this last year... I'm dreaming of a red x-mas...

Mark Dery on The vast Santanic conspiracy

Jaron Lanier's recent lengthy essay about Wikileaks... misses the central lesson of this affair: the increasing control of (relatively) unaccountable corporations and states over the key components of the Internet, and their increased willingness to use this control in politicized ways to impose a "dissent tax" on content they find objectionable. Ability to disseminate one's ideas on the Internet is now a sine qua non of inclusion in the global public sphere. However, the Internet is not a true public sphere; it is a public sphere erected on private property, what I have dubbed a "quasi-public sphere," where the property owners can sideline and constrain dissent.

I have to say that I agree with this. As I've said, the primary consequence of Wikileaks will be the tools, process, and laws that will be used in the future to suppress other leaks. The tool that seems to have emerged is deactivation of service by corporations in response to unofficial "requests" for cooperation made by senior politicians. That result is a worst case scenario for people who are concerned about due process of law and safeguarding fundamental rights. It means that any disfavored content can simply be removed forthwith. The "digiratti" ought to be focused on that problem, which is a real issue, rather that dithering about unrealistic cypherpunk fantasies about the collapse of states, which would only matter if things were drawn out to an extreme that they are very unlikely to reach in reality. I think the state's own recent aversion to the rule of law is a greater threat to its long term existence than the fact that secrets can be leaked on the Internet.

Tufekci presents her views on Wikileaks more comprehensively in this blog post which is definitely worth reading.

This kind of information only matters if it gets out to a wider public and even then only if it is presented within a particular context. If newspapers don’t print stories based on leaked information, if the very act of obtaining the information is can be portrayed to be criminal and treasonous, then the mere fact that the information is technically available to anyone who wants it will have no discernible consequence.

Wikileaks Exposes Internet's Dissent Tax, not Nerd Supremacy - Zeynep Tufekci - Technology - The Atlantic

Merry Christmas!

xkcd: Incident

The Internet as it is, which supports the abilities of Anonymous and Wikileaks, is an outgrowth of a particular design history which was influenced in equal degrees by 1960s romanticism and cold war paranoia. It aligned the two poles of the bit to these two archetypal dramas. But the poles of the bit can be aligned with other things.  The Internet can and must be redesigned to reflect a more moderate and realistically human-centered philosophy.

I haven't read this whole thing yet but I looks interesting.

The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks - Jaron Lanier - Technology - The Atlantic

Bruce Sterling on the Wikileaks drama - he rambles and errors but nevertheless manages to make some useful observations that haven't been made elsewhere:

As a novelist, I never think of Monica Lewinsky, that once-everyday young woman, without a sense of dread at the freakish, occult fate that overtook her. Imagine what it must be like, to wake up being her, to face the inevitability of being That Woman. Monica, too, transgressed in apparent safety and then she had the utter foolishness to brag to a lethal enemy, a trusted confidante who ran a tape machine and who brought her a mediated circus of hells. The titillation of that massive, shattering scandal has faded now. But think of the quotidian daily horror of being Monica Lewinsky, and that should take a bite from the soul.

Bradley Manning now shares that exciting, oh my God, Monica Lewinsky, tortured media-freak condition. This mild little nobody has become super-famous, and in his lonely military brig, screenless and without a computer, he’s strictly confined and, no doubt, he’s horribly bored. I don’t want to condone or condemn the acts of Bradley Manning. Because legions of people are gonna do that for me, until we’re all good and sick of it, and then some. I don’t have the heart to make this transgressor into some hockey-puck for an ideological struggle. I sit here and I gloomily contemplate his all-too-modern situation with a sense of Sartrean nausea.

Many of the comments are interesting too.

The Blast Shack

It seems the prospect of gigabytes of e-mail and other documents from financial institutions can be viewed one of two ways: as a treasure trove for regulators to scrutinize — or as an embarrassment for the United States government, which has spent millions of dollars investigating Wall Street in the last two years without a scalp to show for it.

Don't have probable cause? Steal the data and send it to Julian Assange - we leaked it becomes admissible in court! Problem solved!

Wikileaks as a 4th amendment loophole

I’d love to see a million social bookmarking sites bloom, both as new public services and self-hosted sites for friends.

Let a million bookmarks bloom – 0xDECAFBAD