Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Backchanneled

This was fun: while leading yesterday's emerging technologies workshop, where all content appeared in a wiki, a fine instructional technologist live-blogged the day.  And people not physically attending the event added comments along the way.  Excellent.

And it was good to see attendees (er, those physically present, at least!) editing the wiki.  Thank you, friends.

Taking back the coin story

The US Department of Defense has issued yet another statement about the terrific Canadian wireless spy coin story.  It's, ah, not true, despite their previously saying it was.

Nosferatu on YouTube

Nosferatu (1922) is now on YouTube.

(thanks to Sara!)

Edited to add a better link, also thanks to Saramin

Rumsfeld on information operations: declassified doc

Just found this declassified doc on information operations, authored by Donald Rumsfeld.  I'm not sure if there are many surprises, but it's a very useful document for information warfare.

(Thanks to Charles Cameron for pointing this to me, who received it from the Raelians.  Yes, my friend the reflective game designer caught this American information warfare treatise from a meta-human UFO religion.  I've been waiting all month to write something like that.)

Another slice of Second Life

Warren Ellis' Second Life columns continue to be excellent.  Ellis is occupying a very, very thin space, the middle ground not occupied by SL militants or full-on critics.  This current one is a good example, mixing lyrical appreciation with gentle embarrassment, comparing how to introduce people to SL with how badly the world sometimes welcomes newbies.  And about the surrealism, which some of insist is a key part of SL:

On Help Island, a naked man is performing a slightly horrifying bump-and-grind in the middle of the landing site, and he won’t stop screaming into the chat channel. “Help me! Someone stole all my clothes and now I can’t stop dancing! I’ve only been here twenty minutes!”

I return to Integral Bay to discover yet another Giant Penis Of Welcome on the frontage next to the Elvis flag.

Death to the Energizer Bunny!

CNN reports on a thwarted school shooting, organized in cyberspace... or maybe not.  The story is from Sequatchie High, in central Tennessee, and begins with the discovery of a list of names, somehow associated with the word "kill:"

"In general terms, it was like, 'Let's kill these people,' " Dunlap Police Chief Clint Huth said. He declined to provide the specific wording on the posting, which has been removed.

Also on the list: "Tom Cruise, Oprah Winfrey and the Energizer Bunny."  General terms indeed.  In fact,

There was no evidence that the girls had weapons or that an attack had been imminent, Huth said.

Nevertheless, the girls were arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy.  They spent two nights in jail, then were released.  The US Secret Service was brought in, since one of the names in those lists of hundreds was apparently that of the president (in which case the girls have finally joined a popular group, those who hate Bush).

Meanwhile, sympathetic or inspired graffitti in the county's middle school has won local media attention.

Don't miss the Columbine angle of jock hatred - one student

stayed home Thursday after learning that student-athletes were on the list.

Yes, like the Energizer Bunny, the fearsome internet meme just keeps going.  Subcategory: MySpace horror. Remember that this meme, students using cyberspace to plot evil, is the flip side of the innocent children victimized by internets one.

(via BoingBoing)

Best Tablet PC comment this year

As I was returning my tablet PC to my backpack in an American airport's security zone, one TSA worker looked hard at the Gateway in fold-flat mode and asked: "Did you do that to your computer on purpose?"

Steve Jobs meets Hammer Horror

Hilarious horror humor riff on the iPhone, from MadTV:

Two video pranks

Two stories about nifty broadcast tv hacks.  The first is from Chicago tv in the 1980s, where a guy dressed as Max Headroom interrupted a news show and a Doctor Who repeat.  Damn Interesting has a story, and YouTube offers a couple of clips: the Who hack itself, and Dan Rather's news story about it.

The second and more interesting one claims to have transpired in Wyoming, where this odd clip supposedly appeared on local tv:

I can't find any confirmation of it, though, so it could be a hoax of a prank.

The accompanying text feels like a short story, like a mix of Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983) and numbers radio:

...A hacker managed to  ... all » interrupt broadcasts from a local programming channel (believed to serve several smaller communities in the county of Niobrara) and aired his/her own video. The video contained numerous clips of disembodied, human heads showing various emotions and "poses". The camera position changed often (usually every ten-to-fifteen seconds) and the video was often interrupted by a "SPECIAL PRESENTATION" announcement. This clip is taken from one of these intervals. ...

If it's not true, even better - a hoax about a prank.  The ARG antecedent tradition lives on. The clip itself is odd, consistly mostly of chunky, retro titles.  I can't tell if the whole effect is creepy or soothing.

(via MetaFilter)

China takes new aim at the evil internet

The Chinese political leadership made noises about purifying that filthy, filthy internet.

"Maintain the initiative in opinion on the Internet and raise the level of guidance online," [general secretary Hu Jintao] said. "We must promote civilized running and use of the Internet and purify the Internet environment."

There isn't a lot of text to go on (and I'd love to see more, anyone?), but we can still see some useful traits.  First, there's the general moral language.  Second, the appeal to nationalism ("our country's Internet culture").

(via BoingBoing)