Category: IO Impotency

Cloud Computing as Enclosure

Republished from David Bollier:

“As more and more computing moves off our PCs and into “the Cloud,” Internet users are gaining access to a wealth of new software-based services that can exploit vast computing capacity and memory storage. That’s wonderful. But what about our freedom to create and share things as we wish, free from corporate or government surveillance or over-reaching copyright enforcement? The real danger of the Cloud is its potential to limit how we may create and share what we want, on our terms.

There are already signs that large corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter and all the rest will quietly warp the design architecture of the Internet to serve their business interests first. A terrific overview of the troubling issues raised by the Cloud can be found in the essay, “The Cloud: Boundless Digital Potential or Enclosure 3.0,” by David Lametti, a law professor at McGill University, and published by the Virginia Journal of Law & Technology. An earlier version is available at the SSRN website.

Lametti states his thesis simply: “I argue that the Cloud, unless monitored and possibly directed, has the potential to go beyond undermining copyright and the public domain – Enclosure 2.0 – and to go beyond weakening privacy. This round, which I call “Enclosure 3.0”, has the potential to disempower Internet users and conversely empower a very small group of gatekeepers. Put bluntly, it has the potential to relegate Internet users to the status of digital sheep.”

Continue reading “Michel Bauwens: Cloud Computing as Virtual Prison”

Clinton says 50% since ban expired. Wrong. Try 20%.

Bill Clinton’s over-the-top ‘fact’ on mass shootings

Glenn Kessler at 06:02 AM ET, 01/11/2013

“Half of all mass killings in the United States have occurred since the assault weapons ban expired in 2005, half of all of them in the history of the country.”

— Former president Bill Clinton, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Jan. 9, 2013

A colleague spotted this eye-popping statistic by the former president and wondered if it was correct.

President Clinton signed the assault weapons ban into law in 1994, but it expired after 10 years and was not renewed. Even supporters have said it was riddled with loopholes, limiting its effectiveness. But the rash of mass shootings in recent years, including the Newtown tragedy, have provided new impetus for a renewed ban.

So let’s dig into the data and see what we find.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Mongoose: BIll Clinton Wrong on Mass Shootings”

SOME OBSERVATIONS ALONG THE ROAD TO “NATIONAL INFORMATION POWER”

WILLIAM GRAVELL*

I. INTRODUCTION

When examining the technologies associated with information in its many forms, America has truly been blessed—or cursed, depending on your point of view—with an abundance of energy and inventiveness. Through the genius of Bell and Edison, and more recently, the products of RCA, Bell Laboratories, Microsoft, Intel and others, America has consistently held the lead in the invention and application of information technology. The practical advantages of this position have been frequent, numerous and profound. At present, American-designed and manufactured microprocessors, the subatomic particles of computer technology, dominate the global market, at a time when virtually every aspect of life on Earth is hurtling headlong toward expression in informational form. Beyond that, the operating systems and software applications—the rules that cause things to actually happen inside computers—are also totally dominated not just by the ubiquitous Microsoft Corporation,1 but by America as a whole.

Read PDF 26 Pages Online

Phi Beta Iota: Down the rabbit hole.

See Also:

21st Century Intelligence Core References 2.9