The Horror, The Horror:

Owner: Take this object, but beware it carries a terrible curse!

Homer: [worried] Ooooh, that's bad.

Owner: But it comes with a free Frogurt!

Homer: [relieved] That's good.

Owner: The Frogurt is also cursed.

Christopher Drew and John Markoff:

Lockheed Martin, the nation's largest military contractor, has battled disruptions in its computer networks this week that might be tied to a hacking attack on a vendor that supplies coded security tokens to millions of users, security officials said on Friday.

Lockheed sells cybersecurity services to military and intelligence agencies, and some experts said its failure to take greater precautions with its own systems could be embarrassing.

Art Coviello, in March:

Our investigation has led us to believe that the attack is in the category of an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT).

From the Loose Tokens Boil Oceans department:

What in the world is going on? Oh, it's a hacker causing all of this chaos.

Undersecretary of Commerce Mark Foulon:

It has become clear that Internet access in itself is a vulnerability that we cannot mitigate. We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Jack Kerouac:

"You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?" We didn't understand his question, and it was a damned good question.

SecurID Breach Suggested in Hacking Attempt at Lockheed

Neil Postman:

The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront -- spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the computer for this? Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine.

Jonathan Franzen:

Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn't throw terrible scenes when it's replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that's indifferent to our wishes -- a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance -- with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.

The fundamental fact about all of us is that we're alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there's a very real danger that you might love some of them.

And who knows what might happen to you then?

David Foster Wallace:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Technology Provides an Alternative to Love

Cory Doctorow:

Pariser is concerned that invisible "smart" customization of your Internet experience can make you parochial, exploiting your cognitive blind-spots to make you overestimate the importance or prevalence of certain ideas, products and philosophies and underestimate others.

Decius:

This is an important discussion.

Aren't "filters" inherent and inevitable? The filters on the Internet might be different from those on earlier technologies, but we've always had filters and always will. Aren't "smart filters" the founding principle of MemeStreams?

If the filters are more "personal" today, overall there is much more information, and more diversity, than in an era when the entire population shared just a handful of major sources, namely the four broadcast television channels.

In some ways "The Filter Bubble" seems like a media technology-focused variation on the theme of Bowling Alone. Is there really anything here that McLuhan wasn't saying 40-50 years ago? Consider:

Each new form of media, according to the analysis of McLuhan, shapes messages differently thereby requiring new filters to be engaged in the experience of viewing and listening to those messages.

And then:

In social media circles, there has been much discussion about a (dare I say it) paradigm shift in the way messages are processed in today's digital culture. The focus of this discussion is in the nature of publishing and filtering; specifically, the shift from filter --> publish (mass media) to publish --> filter (social media). I'm still chewing on this, but I think our old friend Marshall McLuhan can help here...

The self-reinforcement effect of "filters" has forever been a characteristic feature of American society, and there is no particular dependence on high technology; see Tocqueville:

The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

I met with several kinds of associations in America of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have often admired the extreme sk... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

The Fallacy of the 'The Filter Bubble'

Decius:

Is our curse the endless pursuit of a happiness which can never be attained?

Ed Tom Bell:

You can say it's my job to fight it but I don't know what it is anymore.

More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, okay, I'll be part of this world.

Julian Schnabel:

Being in the water alone sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are.

Maria Bustillos:

It's high time people stopped kvetching about Wikipedia, which has long been the best encyclopedia available in English, and started figuring out what it portends instead.

It's not perfect, of course, but neither is any other human-derived resource, including, as if it were necessary to say so, printed encyclopedias or books. It bears mentioning that if Wikipedia is a valuable resource, that is because a lot of people -- untold thousands, in fact -- are busting tail to make it that way.

Marshall McLuhan's insights, though they are being lived by millions every day, will take a long time to become fully manifest. But it's already clear that Wikipedia, along with other crowd-sourced resources, is wreaking a certain amount of McLuhanesque havoc on conventional notions of "authority," "authorship," and even "knowledge."

A lot of things have changed since 2006, but Jaron Lanier's mind is not among them. Seriously, reading his stuff is like watching a guy lose his shirt at the roulette wheel and still he keeps on grimly putting everything on the same number.

Events have long ago overtaken the small matter of "the independent author." The question that counts now is: the line between author and reader is blurring, whether we like it or not. How can we use that incontrovertible fact to all our benefit?

Maybe disagreement doesn't have to be a battle to be fought to the death; it can be embraced, even savored.

Chris Jones:

The lights come back on. Roger Ebert stays in his chair, savoring, surrounded by his notes.

Bustillos:

"The sadness of our age is characterized by the shackles of individualism," Bob Stein said. But are we throwing off those shackles, even as we speak?

James Reston, as quoted in Understanding Media:

A health director ... reported this week that a small mouse, which presumably had been watching television, attacked a little girl and her full-grown cat ... Both mouse and cat survived, and the incident is recorded here as a reminder that things seem to be changing.

Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert

Justice Robert H. Jackson:

Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government.

David K. Shipler:

If we cannot mobilize sufficient concern about what we cannot see, then the invisible surveillance will continue undermining the Fourth Amendment without the resistance required to preserve our rights.

Publishers Weekly:

The wars on crime and terrorism have turned into a war on privacy and freedom ... In this first of two volumes, Pulitzer-winning journalist Shipler focuses on the Fourth Amendment's guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure, and finds violations that remind him of his days covering the Soviet Union.

Dan Carden:

Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.

In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer's entry.

Jerry Weinberger:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Rebecca Brock:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties

Joseph C. Massino:

You never talk in a club, you never talk in a car, you never talk on a cellphone, you never talk on a phone, you never talk in your house.

Sandy Pentland:

Phones can know.

Nick Bilton:

Technology also has a way of advancing far ahead of the law.

Sandra Silva, on her cybercoyote:

It's like a guide through the desert.

Rebecca Brock, in 2004:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

Decius, in 2006:

Al Qaeda is not an organization. It is a scene.

David Kilcillen, in 2006:

People don't get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in 2006:

The best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style.

One frustrated counterterrorism official, in 2006:

There's nobody in the United States government whose job it is to find Osama bin Laden! Nobody!

Malcom Gladwell, in 2007:

Osama bin Laden's whereabouts are a puzzle. We can't find him because we don't have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.

Thomas W. Gillespie, John A. Agnew, Erika Mariano, Scott Mossler, Nolan Jones, Matt Braughton, and Jorge Gonzalez, in 2009:

One of the most important political questions of our time is: Where is Osama bin Laden?

Peter Baker, Helene Cooper, and Mark Mazzetti, today:

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the most devastating attack on American soil in modern times and the most hunted man in the world, was killed in a firefight with United States forces in Pakistan on Sunday, President Obama announced.

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Let the what-does-it-all-mean metareporting begin.

Bin Laden Is Dead

Teun Lucassen and Jan Maarten Schraagen:

Because of the open character of Wikipedia readers should always be aware of the possibility of false information. WikiTrust aims at helping readers to judge the trustworthiness of articles by coloring the background of less trustworthy words in a shade of orange. In this study we look into the effects of such coloring on reading behavior and trust evaluation by means of an eye-tracking experiment. The results show that readers had more difficulties reading the articles with coloring than without coloring. Trust in heavily colored articles was lower. The main concern is that the participants in our experiment rated usefulness of WikiTrust low.

WikiTrust seems to be slightly more useful when only small parts are colored, but even then usefulness is limited. Participants in our experiment were not sure what to do with the information on the age of words in the text. Further development of WikiTrust could benefit from knowledge about the (heuristic) strategies of Wikipedia users when assessing trustworthiness.

WikiTrust is a promising support tool and in fact the only one that made it to the stage where it is actually available to the Wikipedia public. This study has shown that the decision to present trust information by a separate tab was right since reading behavior is affected by its coloring. However, more effort should be put into the usability of the system. This study showed that users are having problems to see how they can benefit from it, even though a clear explanation was provided and the participants were highly educated Master's students.

Virgil Griffith:

They've hit on the fundamentally Darwinian nature of Wikipedia.

Decius:

We believe that Wikipedia can be a useful resource if it is used properly and read with a critical eye.

Luca de Alfaro:

We are happy to announce that WikiTrust works on the English Wikipedia!

Evaluating WikiTrust: A trust support tool for Wikipedia

Joseph L. Hoffman and Nancy J. King:

The never-ending stream of futile petitions suggests that habeas corpus is a wasteful nuisance. We need a new approach.

Jon Lee Anderson:

The air stinks heavily of raw sewage, but no one seems to notice.

Jerry Weinberger:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Justice Scalia in 2009:

"This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

Have you seen Conviction?

Justice, Too Much and Too Expensive

NIST:

Unfortunately, on the Internet as in life, not everyone is looking out for our interests.

Howard Schmidt, from last June:

What has emerged is a blueprint to reduce cybersecurity vulnerabilities and improve online privacy protections through the use of trusted digital identities.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

NIST, today:

The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) envisions a cyber world -- the Identity Ecosystem -- that improves upon the passwords currently used to log-in online.

The identity ecosystem is voluntary.

Mark A. Marshall, President of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, on Facebook:

If you're not dealing with it, you better deal with it.

Nick Bilton:

The Internet never forgets.

Bruce Schneier:

Will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good?

Steven Bellovin

People often suggest that adding strong identification to the Internet will solve many security problems. Strong, useful identification isn't possible and wouldn't solve the security issue; trying to have it will create privacy problems.

National Strategy on Trusted Identities in Cyberspace