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“Imagine for a moment that you know a man who beats his wife.”

Sorry to go to “all WikiLeaks, all the time” lately but this story really interests me for all the implications it has in a number of areas – from world politics to freedom of speech to corporate power to the overarching impact of the Internet in each of those realms.

Here’s another editorial which I think is spot-on.  People who are against WikiLeaks’ actions by saying “those were SECRETS!” or “This now puts lives in DANGER!” are buying the government’s line way too easily in my opinion.  I’m no huge conspiracy theorist but I do think that governments can often act in ways that would be illegal if done by a private citizen and that corporations often abuse their own power as well.

For example, for all the pundits calling “TERRORISM!!!” because Anonymous went after Visa/Mastercard/PayPal, did anyone stop to think that those companies wouldn’t have been attacked if they hadn’t knee-jerked to pull services for WikiLeaks under government pressure?  I’d give a similar answer for those who say Anonymous only defends freedom of speech when it’s a cause they believe in and those companies have a right to set their own policies and act on them (eg. their own right to some corporate version of “free speech”.)

Finally, there’s also a whole “David v. Goliath” element to the reaction of the online community that I’m very sympathetic to.  I mean, it turned out to be a 16-year old Dutch kid (and 2000 or so of his “friends”) who brought down Visa’s web site.

(I won’t even start speculating on how the use of the Internet may change the belief system of future generations.  In many ways, the idealistic boomers became the thing they hated as they easily moved from the protest lines to the halls of power.  Could the Internet prevent the same thing from happening to the upcoming generation?)

Posted 12 December 2010 § Technology ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

Saturday Snap – A Religious Bird?

A Religious Bird, originally uploaded by headtale.

I don’t normally make a habit of taking photos of strangers without their permission (honest!) but I thought this one was pretty funn.

A woman sitting across from me on the bus the other day was reading her daily devotions while cross-referencing the Bible. Meanwhile, I was reading my first ever Kindle for iPhone purchase, “The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas” so the impression she was flipping me the bird was unavoidable.

And since the iPhone was in my hands and pointed right at her, I quickly snapped this shot.

(Side note:
Dearest distant relatives and long-lost friends: If you must forward me a message about putting “Christ” back into Christmas, please do the bare minimum of research. For example, It is *extremely* unlikely that Jesus was born on December 25. Early Christians probably chose that date to help with the conversion of pagans who celebrated various mid-winter festivals around the end of December (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas#Date_of_celebration). Thanks!)

Posted 12 December 2010 § SaturdaySnap § Technology § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , ,

Friday Fun Link – A View From Your Desk

“A View From Your Desk” is a Tumblr site where librarians can submit photos of their cats.  Nah, just kidding – it’s what it says it is.

Posted 10 December 2010 § Library ‡ Comments (0) °

Web War I: The War to End All Warz?

On Sunday, I did a post about the WikiLeaks situation where I mentioned the possibility of the world’s first true “cyber-war” as one likely outcome, citing the denial service of attacks on the WikiLeaks site as the first salvo and mentioning the plans of the hactivist group, Anonymous , to retaliate.

That indeed came to pass on Tuesday when there were coordinated DDOS (distributed denial service attacks) against the web sites of Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, the Swedish law firm prosecuting WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange on rape charges, Sarah Palin’s web site (she called Assange’s actions “treasonous”, perhaps not realising treason only applies to citizens of a country acting against their own government) and others.

(What’s a DDOS?  Well, if you happened to hear Visa’s site was down, surfed to Visa.com to see if this was true, found that it was and hit “reload” just to be sure – congrats, you’ve become part of the “distributed” part of that attack!)

Of the sites I listed, I think only PayPal didn’t have their site go down for at least a brief period of time (to be clear – or at least more clear than my local evening news last night – this was an attack on the credit card companies’ web servers (eg. their corporate home pages), not their processing servers (eg. where the real money magic happens.) With that said, Anonymous has claimed to have breeched these defenses too although obviously the credit card companies deny this.

Even if the processing servers weren’t reached, it will only take one IT employee at any of the listed companies (or elsewhere) to cause real damage.  And since many people who work in IT/programming/networking share that same “hacker ethic” which is anti-corporation, anti-authority and pro-information sharing, this may be more likely to happen than not.

“Real” war scares me but honestly, this one scares me almost as much.  Although there’s a lot less risk of loss of life in a cyber-war (at least so far – imagine if an airline declined to fly Assange somewhere and the hackers turned their attention that direction), even the fact that so much of our lives are virtual these days – from our shopping habits to our surfing to our social lives to our banking – the potential for escalation and damage should be obvious.

It will be interesting to see how this continues to develop.

Finally, on a slightly lighter note, from the war’s propaganda department, Amazon’s UK site started selling the Wikileaks cables as an e-book today – even though Amazon.com kicked WikiLeaks off their servers and even though the cables were released for free via the web and torrents.  This was quickly revealed as a hoax from a reseller using Amazon but was pretty funny/embarrassing while it lasted.

Bonus link: Why is the WikiLeaks story important?

Bonus link #2: CablegateRoulette

Posted 09 December 2010 § Technology ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

Wisdom Wednesday – “Another Look at Bill C32 and the Access Copyright Tariff”

Dr. Sam Trosow holds a pretty special place in my FIMS experience as both the first and last professor I had classes with.  Thinking about my first class is pretty funny in retrospect but at the time quite stressful since I mis-read my schedule as my first night class happening at 7pm when in reality, it was 6:00pm.  Luckily, I double-checked at about, oh, 5:50pm, and made it to class after making what was normally a leisurely ten minute walk as a five-minute sprint.

Then, one year later and after all my classes were completed, I took the opportunity to sit in on the presentations done by a few students in one of Dr. Trosow’s doctoral classes which was a great experience and also provided some nice closure for my FIMS experience (but didn’t inspire me onto PhD studies!)

I have to admit I haven’t watched this whole video but I look forward to doing so to bring back some memories of library school!

Posted 08 December 2010 § Library § MemoryLane § Video § Wisdom ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

In the Country of Anythink

The Anythink Library system in Adams County Colorado made waves after a major shift over the last decade where pretty much every aspect of the library – from classification (no Dewey) to fines (they have none) to job titles (Wouldn’t you rather be a “wrangler” than a clerk?) was changed.

As someone who’s very interested in the tech world, the comparisons to the creation of a start-up culture in a public library setting are something I find particularly intriguing.

Human Resources director Dobbs spent most of her career in “pre-IPO high-tech companies” and likens Anythink “very much to a start-up,” with a lean staff working long hours, fueled by passion.

Although I don’t particularly agree with the idea of asking a “lean staff to work long hours” ;-), I do think inspiring people’s passion and creating a strong, vibrant corporate culture (which Anythink has in spades) is the recipe for success.

Library Journal has a profile of this ground-breaking system.

http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/887538-264/in_the_country_of_anythink.html.csp
Posted 07 December 2010 § Library ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Music Monday – “Seems like everywhere I go/The more I see, the less I know”

It’s always good to have a song that makes you want to dance around the room and this song has the coveted “most played” top spot in my “Pace Dancing Tunes” playlist.

Posted 06 December 2010 § MusicMonday § Video ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

WikiLeaks: Free Speech, Cyberwar 1.0 and Corporate Control of the Cloud

WikiLeaks (which is down as I write this for reasons I’ll get to) is a site that’s been around since 2006 and first got a mention on this blog just over a year ago for a library-related story.

Since then, the site has released two fairly large dumps of information obtained from a single army intelligence officer – one released in July 2010 containing ~90 000 documents relating to combat operations in Afghanistan called the “Afghan War Diary” and one released at the end of November containing ~260 000 diplomatic cables from US diplomats back to the US State Department which is being called “CableGate” and which contains all manner of intelligence, speculation and observation about a variety of other countries.

These leaks have obviously been received with great alarm by government officials in the US who accuse the site and its operators of endangering lives (a fairly rich claim I must say, especially considering how much of the information in the Afghan war diary but also in the diplomatic cables is stuff that has already led to the deaths of innocent civilians and/or could lead to deaths in the future.)

Some other random thoughts…

– perhaps the scariest aspect of this development is that the US government has seemed relatively powerless to stop these leaks (at least so far) but powerful Internet corporations including Amazon and Paypal have been able to close down site hosting and donations for Wikileaks respectively.  A DNS registar blocked access to the main Wikileaks site due to a “Terms of Service” violation as well. (The fact that a bookseller is censoring a web site they host is another rich irony in this story which brings up many issues around the subject of free speech and the First Amendment.  And WikiLeaks have gone so far as to thumb their nose at Amazon, saying they planned to host with them just to show the hypocrisy of the site with regards to their commitment to freedom of speech and access to information – a charge that seems justified since Wikileaks was only shut down on a “Terms of Service” violation – those are convenient, eh?  Too bad nobody ever reads them! – after Sen Joe Lieberman’s office came poking around – even though Amazon claims otherwise.)

– some have called this the first “cyberwar” with the main WikiLeaks site facing Denial of Service attacks from an unknown source (hmm, maybe the US Government isn’t so powerless in this situation as I thought?) with the intention of preventing anyone from accessing the site though WikiLeaks is now being mirrored on 280 servers worldwide with an open invitation to others to join in.)  The Internet, especially via the very Net savvy activists at 4Chan and elsewhere who go by the collective name of Anonymous are plotting reprisals.

– the Library of Congress (which is a US Government agency) has banned access to the WikiLeaks site in its reading rooms drawing an extremely strong condemnation from the Progressive Librarians Guild (h/t to DH on Facebook for the tip)  Gotta say that’s the one detail in this whole mess that actually makes me sick to my stomach.  Even if they really have no choice as a government agency but to do this, you would hope that a library would be more principled (or at least intelligent – guess what?  The genie’s out of the bottle – you’re not helping and you just look dumb by doing this.)

– beyond WikiLeaks, this story has many implications for online censorship in general.

– politicos from Sarah Palin to Stephen Harper-advisor Tom Flanagan to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell are calling WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange a “terrorist” with Flanagan going so far as to jokingly call for Assange’s assassination on national TV.  Unbelievable.

– Julian Assange – Time Person of the Year?  I hope so.

– tons more at MetaFilter and Reddit

Posted 05 December 2010 § Library § Politics § Technology ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , , , , ,

Saturday Snap – Resting Before Christmas Party #2 of the Weekend

Resting before Christmas party, originally uploaded by headtale.

The busiest time of the year – Christmas party last night, friends over tonight, RPL Kids Christmas party tomorrow afternoon. It really takes it out of a guy!

Posted 04 December 2010 § Family § SaturdaySnap § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Friday Fun Link – 20 Years of Ness Creek Festival

I went to the Ness Creek Festival a few times in the late 1990’s.  It’s got many similarities to the more typical folk music festivals you’re probably most familiar with but there’s something about this festival – its origins as a tree planters’ festival in a remote location probably being its most distinguishing feature – make it one of the most intimate, enjoyable musical experiences I’ve ever had.

That’s crazy that it’s already had its 20th anniversary – we’ll have to take Pace some year as I think he’d love it!

(h/t to MG on Facebook for the link)

Posted 03 December 2010 § FridayFunLink § MemoryLane § Video ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,