This is about a great project to make an open source, universal sensing instrument. The name was popularized in a science fiction series – Star Trek I believe it was – where they were never without one when visiting a new planet or some unfamiliar environment.
While this one starts out very modestly, it has the potential to become a real powerhouse of personal sensor, better than anything we have today.
“The Tricorder X-Prize aims to bring a diverse array of inexpensive sensors together in an accessible, easy to use, handheld design. On Jan 12, 2012, the contest was officially opened at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.”
“Dr. Jansen’s Mark 2 runs on Linux. The hardware includes an ARM Atmel microcontroller squeezed into a clam-shell with two OLED touchscreens. Schematics, board layouts, and the firmware is all available free and includes the initial proof-of-concept device.”
There is also a blog about how it's made, by the guy behind the project…
Internet access has become a vital public interest. Cutting it off is almost like cutting off our air. I can't imagine mankind transcending all of the challenges we're facing without the internet. It's gone beyond being a luxury to being an absolute necessity for positive social transformation.
Underwater data cables linking East Africa to the Middle East and Europe have been severed, bringing transfer rates to their knees in nine countries.
In a bizarre coincidence, a ship allegedly dropped anchor off the coast of Kenya on Saturday in a restricted area, cutting The East African Marine Systems (TEAMS) cable – shortly after three other cables were chopped in the Red Sea between Djibouti and the Middle East, the Wall Street Journalreported.
TEAMS was already stuffed with the traffic from the other three cables, the Europe India Gateway (EIG), the South East Asia Middle East Western Europe-3 (SMW-3) and the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSY), which were severed ten days before.
“It's a very unusual situation,” Chris Wood, chief executive of West Indian Ocean Cable, the largest shareholder of the EASSY, and a major owner of data-capacity rights on the two other Red Sea cables. “I believe these were accidental incidents, although more will be known when we bring the cables up from the sea bed.”
Naturally, the number of cables ruined in a short timeframe has sparked suspicions of sabotage. A source from African carrier Airtel told Ugandan independent newspaper the Daily Monitor that the cables had been sliced on purpose.
“The EASSY and TEAMS cables were cut by malicious people at the weekend and this is causing connection problems. All internet providers, particularly Orange and Airtel have been affected because they all depend on these cables for service provision,” he said.
Wood told the WSJ that the cables in the Red Sea had all been severed at the same time, around 650 feet below the Red Sea, but he said that a passing ship could have done the damage because the sea is so shallow.
Phi Beta Iota: The vulnerability of secessionist movements, and the vulnerability of the rising poor using the Internet to by-pass government corruption and corporate predation, are illuminated here. The Autonomous Internet and Open Source Everything are the imperative if humanity is to create a prosperous world at peace that works for all.
Code Across America ATX: A Civic Innovation Hackathon
Google-funded Code for America was in Austin Saturday for a codeathon using data accessible via the city’s data portal. I dropped by the geek chic coworking facility Conjunctured, where the codeathon was happening, and hung out long enough to get a sense of the projects the ~40 coders were tackling. Those included a Bike Accident and Route Safety app, an app for finding miscellaneous stuff around town, and a “garden dating” app (to help people who want a community garden find a space). What was missing? For at least one project (Find It), there were fewer sources of data than the developers would’ve liked. I realized that it’s not enough to bring coders together to create apps – we should also be cultivating data sources. A project to build databases and facilitate citizen input would be a logical complement to the various codeathons.
Phi Beta Iota: Google is much more predatory than people realize. Any serious long-term endeavor must be completely open source and avoid Google like the plague–it comes with harm built in. The most exciting initiatives, generally lacking even the most basic funding, seek to combine Open Data Access, Open Source Hardware, Open Source Software, and Open Spectrum. That will lead to an Autonomous Internet and to holistic public intelligence with integrity.
With the decline of state capitalism, capitalist governments and corporations now dream of the internet as the tool for corporate growth through ontological colonialism, free to expand within the mind and the planet, exploiting everyone alike.
Nicolas Mendoza is a scholar, artist and researcher in global media from The University of Melbourne.
Al Jazeera, 15 February 2012
Click on Image to Enlarge
Chiang Mai, Thailand – “OH $%#@!”, reads the caption under the image depicting a group of protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks and holding both humorous and denunciatory signs, “The internet is here”. The caption not only conveys the sentiment that drove US congressmen to drop their support of the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) bills, but can also be said to summarise the analysis of the January 18 blackout by several of the most prominent media experts and scholars.
Larry Downes eloquently describes the January 18 events as “the dramatic introduction of bitroots politics”. In case the leaks, springs and occupations of 2011 left any room for doubt, the recognition of the internet as a political force in itself has moved from academic theoretical discussion to hard tangible reality. Lawrence Lessig portrays this sense of general underlying bewilderment by using the haunting metaphor of “a giant” when describing the web as a political force:
For the first time ever, the internet had taken on Hollywood extremists and won. And not just in a close fight: the power demonstrated by internet activists was wildly greater than the power Hollywood lobbyists could muster. They had awoken a giant. They had no clue about just how angry that giant could be.
However, the “January 18 blackout” victory guarantees “the internet” nothing. As Clay Shirky explained a few days before the blackout, rather than the end of this struggle, the SOPA/PIPA incident is just one chapter in the greater project of crippling the internet to eliminate its autonomy:
The hard thing is this: get ready, because more is coming. SOPA is simply a reversion of COICA [Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act], which was proposed last year, which did not pass. And all of this goes back to the failure of the DMCA [Digital Millenium Copyright Act] to disallow sharing as a technical means. And the DMCA goes back to the Audio Home Recording Act, which horrified those industries. (…) PIPA and SOPA are not oddities, they're not anomalies, they're not events. They're the next turn of this particular screw, which has been going on 20 years now. And if we defeat these, as I hope we do, more is coming.
There has been a veritable explosion of peer-to-peer projects. A complete and current listing is essentially impossible. This list is a best-effort attempt at high-profile projects and some pointers to some decent meta-sites that contain links to lesser known projects.
I’m sick of hearing about how we need to cave into repressive governments and throttle back Google, Twitter, Facebook, and other information services and accept Web censorship and limits on free expression. Get the hell off my cloud.
“I’ve written a number of times about jewelery nets and sponge nets. These could do the trick. With very short-range communication directly between tiny devices that each of us wears just like jewellery, a sponge network can be built that provides zillions of paths from A to B, hopping from device to device till it gets there.
No ISPs needed
“Each device is autonomous. Each shares data with its immediate neighbors, and route dynamically according to a range of algorithms available to them. They can route data from A to B so that every packet goes by a different route of need be. Even without any encryption, only A and B can see the full message.
“The capability to make these kinds of devices is almost here. If some government officials don’t like it, well, so what? Right now, I don’t have a lot of respect for government.”
Right on. Anybody out there developing these nets? Let’s hear from you!
After the world economy crashes there's bound to be a lot of cvil unrest. Obviously the internet can be used to organize civil unrest, which will make authorities want to control it, perhaps even eliminate it.
But after the crash, the most pressing problem will be organizing the basic necessities of life, like water, food, shelter, clothing, energy for power, and a means of exchanging all these things.
After the global economy crashes, the system of organization that once provided us with the necessities of life—the global aggregate of national economies—will be at a standstill. But the internet will be available, at least in the beginning, to replace it. Even so, it will take a while before it becomes an efficient replacement.
If citizens become more interested in organizing unrest than they are in organizing the basic necessities of life, then authorities will see the internet as a threat. So if citizens want to keep the internet after the crash, they better immediately start using it for organizing the basic necessities of life rather than organizing unrest and they better start creating what some call the Autonomous Internet. Otherwise the one system that might save them will be under attack from the government. And I doubt humankind can survive being thrown back into the stone age like that during an economic collapse that will be unprecedented in every respect and along every dimension.
