The hoohah about cloud computing, Big Data, and other “innovations” continues. Who needs Oracle when one has Hadoop? Why license SPSS or some other Fancy Dan analytics system when there are open choice analytics systems a mouse click away? Search? Lots of open source choices.
We have entered the Gilded Age of information and data analysis. Do I have that right?
The marketers and young MBAs chasing venture funding instead of building revenue shout, “Yes, break out the top hats and cigars. We are riding a hockey stick type curve.”
Where are Web sites hosted? The average user has no idea how to harness the right tools to locate where a server is located, but there might be a common solution. Makeuseof.com, gotta love that Web site, wrote the article, “Find Out Where A Web Site’s Server Is Located With FlagFox And Flag For Chrome.” Made for two open source OS, the Flag and FlagFox plugins are rather simple. Whenever you visit a Web site, the URL bar displays its server’s country of origin. Judging by the plugin’s name you can tell it displays the flag.
Pretty neat, huh? It is also pretty useful:
“This little flag isn’t just cool to show off, but it can also serve some interesting purposes, for example it can let you know which country a server is located in (especially when the server location doesn’t match the top-level domain like .co.uk, .de, etc.), help you troubleshoot why a certain connection may be acting slow, or help you identify when you’ve accidentally landed on a phishing Web site. Say you try to visit your bank’s website which usually shows your country’s flag, but suddenly you see a completely different flag. The chances that you’ve landed on a phishing site are very high. The flag shown by the extension also serves as a reminder of where our data goes — you practically visit the world through your browsing habits!”
It does more than show colorful flags too. Clicking on the flag displays technical data about the server: postal code, Web hosting provider, location, IP Address, and ISP. It also has the Web of Trust rating and embed other techy features. That is just for the Firefox version, the Google plug-in has a few more features that are specific to Google.
For the common users, use this tool as a way to prevent identity theft and catch phishing Web sites. Another simple tool to keep your Internet experience safe.
Activism: In a series of articles here at Falkvinge on Infopolicy, I’ll be giving examples of talking back to the most disturbingly false bullshit repeated by pro-copyright-monopoly pundits. The reason for this is that I see tons of this kind of bullshit in discussion threads, and it stands unchallenged, which is dangerous. As I describe in Swarmwise, it is of immense importance for our long-term liberties that false assertions are countered immediately and in numbers whenever they appear.
Today, we’re going to discuss the assertion that “copying is stealing”, that amazingly still lives on. It should be dead and buried at least fifteen years ago, but isn’t. Here are three examples how to counter it. Adapt to your own language and use when discussions threads like this one on Reddit pop up.
Most readers of this list should be familiar with the name, if not the ideas, of the late American strategist Col John R. Boyd (USAF ret). Boyd was my mentor and closest friend, and I am deeply indebted to him for the knowledge he so generously bestowed on me. While no short essay can capture the entirety of Boyd's thinking, attached below is an excellent introduction to what some might call John Boyd's art of war. It is written by my friend and colleague Bill Lind, a leading contributor to the Military Reform Movement in the 1980s. Of particular importance is Bill's concluding point about ‘open systems.' But you need to understand Boyd's work to understand the centrality of this point in strategy and grand strategy.
Lind's essay is very timely, given that Republicans and Democrats alike have driven America into a grand-strategic cul de sac that is weakening our position abroad, while wrecking our democracy at home. IMO, this grand-strategic trap is a self-inflicted wound and is well summarized by Lind. (Boyd's criteria for a sensible grand strategy can be found here.) Hopefully, Lind's essay will tweak your interest in Boyd's important work.
Exiting America's grand strategic mess will not be easy because the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex and its wholly owned subsidiaries in academia, the thinktanks, the pol-mil apparat, and the mass media have a vested interest in continuing down what has become a clearly a self-destructive evolutionary pathway. A parasitical “faction” is now exploiting the interplay of chance and necessity to benefit itself at the expense of the “whole.” Boyd's ideas — particularly those relating to his moral design for grand strategy — offer a way to begin thinking about how to get off this pathway and return to one where the interplay of chance of necessity leads more naturally to salutary growth at home and abroad.
If you are not familiar with Boyd and his ideas, my advice is to start with Robert Coram's superb biography, (about 100,000 sold and still in print). It is by far the best general introduction to the man and his work. Those interested in heavier lifting can dive into James Fallows', Chet Richards,' and Franz Ozinga's analyses of Boyd's strategic thought. For the truly masochistic, a complete compendium of Boyd's briefings slides can be downloaded from this link. But beware, these briefings are long, albeit highlycondensed, idiosyncratic, and a bit didactical. Nevertheless, determined readers will find their study to be infinitely rewarding, because like the writing of Sun Tzu, their essence is one of ever expanding timelessness.
Chuck Spinney
Cannes, France
John Boyd’s Art of War
Why our greatest military theorist only made colonel.
Description:State sponsored history, the version touted in public schools, and preached over the mainstream media is the mythology of the state, and it is as essential to its existence as creation stories are to any religion.
This article may seem somewhat over the top but as I keep checking it appears to be a pretty good representation of a disaster that is getting worse and worse. In a couple of year's time we're going to truly discover the impact this is going to have on the U.S. West Coast, but things are already beginning to wash up. No one has any idea what the impact on the marine ecosystem is going to be. The effect on Japan is o! nly beginning to be understood, but its true scale is still unknown.
As if that weren't enough the American nuclear site at Hanford also has leaking tanks, and there are more sites as well. We are going to see more and more of this as the aging nuclear infrastructure breaks down. The quicker nuclear plants are closed the better. Fukushima and Chernobyl stand as warnings we must heed.
I got an email this morning from a reader who told me about a police break-in near her home which she witnessed that she described as “a dawn assault by Nazis.” One of the unintended consequences of the insane wars of Dick Cheney and the Neocons, is the dispersal of vast quantities of military supplies to American police departments so that more and more they resemble not law-enforcement but special ops. The tendency ha! s always been present. People become police because they like being armed and in authority. The positive is being a person respected for being of service to their community. But lurking beneath that, in some, is something darker. And the militarization of the police feeds that. This is a major trend in the U.S., and not a happy one.
Here is a reasonable approach to reversing the trend of militarizing the police. Can we muster sufficient political will amongst citizens to demand it? We'll see.
