Category: Information Operations (IO)

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Eagle: Mozilla plans ‘$25 smartphone’ tool for emerging markets

IO Tools
300 Million Talons...
300 Million Talons…

Mozilla plans ‘$25 smartphone' for emerging markets

Mozilla has shown off a prototype for a $25 (£15) smartphone that is aimed at the developing world.

The company, which is famed mostly for its Firefox browser, has partnered with Chinese low-cost chip maker Spreadtrum.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

While not as powerful as more expensive models, the device will run apps and make use of mobile internet.

It would appeal to the sorts of people who currently buy cheap “feature” phones, analysts said.

Feature phones are highly popular in the developing world as a halfway point between “dumb” phones – just voice calls and other basic functions – and fully-fledged smartphones.

Mozilla hopes that it will capture an early lead in a market that is now being targeted by mobile device manufacturers who see the developing world as the remaining area for massive growth.

Read full article.

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Jean Lievens: Can the Internet Democratize Capitalism?

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Money
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Can the Internet Democratize Capitalism?

Yanis Varoufakis

International Policy Digest, February 22, 2014

Technological fixes to time-honoured problems are all the rage these days.

Bitcoin is meant to fix money, social media are seen as an antidote to Rupert Murdoch and assorted tyrants, networked robots are to help countries like Japan deal with demographic declines etc. Perhaps the largest claim is that the Internet has helped (or is about to help) democratize capitalism. Ten years ago that claim struck me as both fascinating and dubious. So, I sat down and wrote an article about it (circa 2004). Its gist: The Internet is a wonderful leveller.

But democracy requires a great deal more than mere ‘levelling.’ Primarily, it requires political institutions that enable the economically weak to have a decisive say on policy against the interests of the rich and powerful. Ten years later, I am re-visiting this question, under the shadow of a global crisis that made it even harder to convert an e’Demos into genuine e’Democracy. What follows is an updated version of the original paper.

The Internet’s toughest assignment: To put Demos back into Democracy

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: Can the Internet Democratize Capitalism?”

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Bruce Schneier: It’s Time to Break Up NSA — Outline of Necessary Intelligence Reforms by Robert Steele

Advanced Cyber/IO, Ethics, Government
Bruce Schneier
Bruce Schneier

It's Time to Break Up NSA

Bruce Schneier

CNN, 20 February 2014

Editor's note: Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust Society Needs to Thrive.

(CNN) — The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission — protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies — has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era.

Putting the U.S. Cyber Command, the military's cyberwar wing, in the same location and under the same commander, expanded the NSA's power. The result is an agency that prioritizes intelligence gathering over security, and that's increasingly putting us all at risk. It's time we thought about breaking up the National Security Agency.

Broadly speaking, three types of NSA surveillance programs were exposed by the documents released by Edward Snowden. And while the media tends to lump them together, understanding their differences is critical to understanding how to divide up the NSA's missions.

Continue reading “Bruce Schneier: It's Time to Break Up NSA — Outline of Necessary Intelligence Reforms by Robert Steele”

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Berto Jongman: Foreign Affairs on the Shrinking of Foreign News and the Death of Television Coverage

Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency, Media, Peace Intelligence
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

The Shrinking of Foreign News: From Broadcast to Narrowcast

Garrick Utley

Foreign Affairs, March/April 1997

EXTRACT

What is being lost, or at least weakened, has long been forecast: the role of a few television network news organizations as a unifying central nervous system of information for the nation, and the communal benefits associated with that. Some may mourn the loss, especially those who grew up with network news. (More than half the audience for the evening network news programs is 50 or older.) Viewers and social critics may debate whether the gains accompanying the growing diversity and flexibility of news and information delivery outweigh the losses. But quite aside from the fact that nothing can be done to stop the technological advances, the benefits in choice and content are clear.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Foreign Affairs on the Shrinking of Foreign News and the Death of Television Coverage”

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Berto Jongman: Post-Snowden NSA-Proof Phone?

Advanced Cyber/IO, Commerce, Ethics, IO Secrets, IO Tools, Liberation Technology
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

In the post-Snowden world is it time to switch to NSA-proof phone?

Millions of us share our most personal feelings and most potentially damaging data through our smartphones. But isn’t it time to lock them down after last June’s revelations that the NSA collects data from phone calls, texts and emails of people all over the world? The developers of Blackphone, a new privacy-focused smartphone, say ‘yes.’

Toby Weir-Jones, the general manager of Blackphone, says the NSA’s digital surveillance has created a new demand for privacy, Newsweek reports. However, he says, “the wider market was not equipped to look for a solution.” Apple and Android phones, says Weir-Jones, are caught up in a battle over larger screen sizes, higher resolution and faster operating systems, while Blackphone is offering privacy.

Theoretically, experts say, the new device could provide considerable security for users trying to protect themselves from corporate spying and the countries with lesser surveillance programs than the US. Blackphone, which goes on presale February 24,can do texting, video, calling, searching, browsing, file storage and sharing — all shielded from the prying eyes of governments and hackers.

Read full article.

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Stephen E. Arnold: Mining [Big] Visual Content [Data]

Advanced Cyber/IO
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Mining Visual Content

Data-mining of social media is moving beyond natural-language processing of Tweets and Posts and into a whole new realm of visual content interfacing to analyze the data available on the heavily-visual social network Tumblr.

Cierra Buck posted “Introducing Tumblr Firehose data on the Pulsar Platform and a whole new interface for mining visual content” on the Pulsar Platform Blog. In the post, Buck notes that Pulsar integrated Tumblr not just as a blogging site, but as a social networking site. But because over 80% of Tumblr content is visual, integration required an entirely new way of presenting data to Pulsar platform users:

“This allows Pulsar to display the actual image and video content rather than a preview end enabling endless scrolling rather than organising the content in pages. This allows for easy browsing of rich media social content which, coupled with advanced filtering using all the metadata we generate, is going to give you a powerful mining tool to uncover visual patterns and trends in your dataset.”

Buck’s post gives a good visual tutorial of how the interface will work and the kinds of data it will analyze from Tumblr. Do the kids on Tumblr realize that everything they post is being mined?

Laura Abrahamsen, February 23, 2014

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Robin Good: Web Page Capture & Archive Tool

IO Tools
Robin Good
Robin Good

Capture, Permanently Archive and Download Any Web Page for Free with Archive.is

Archive.is is a free web service which allows you to capture, store and archive permanently any web page you submit.  Archive.is permanently stores a double copy of your selected web site: one that is an image snapshot of the page, and another which contains the full text of it. Archive.is also provides a download link that contains a zipped copy of all the files making up your selected page, and which can be opened offline in any web browser.  Archive.is can save most any type of web page including Facebook pages and it allows you to easily search and see all of the pages already saved for a certain domain.

There is no registration or login required and you don't need to install anything.  A free dedicated bookmarklet makes it easy to capture and archive any web page you happen to be on. If you are looking for a free, simple and easy to use service to archive any web page permanently, I recommend Archive.is.
Free to use. Try it out now: http://archive.is/ Useful info on blog page: http://blog.archive.is/

Added to Permanent Web Page Archiving Tools section of the Content Curation Tools Directory

 

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