Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Hacked porn jpegs poisoning cyberspace

The language of the cyberspace Gothic is well established by now. Listen the constellation of discourses in the BBC's account of hacked jpgs, or "Poison porn pics":

Microsoft played down the threat from the images. In a statement it said few people were likely to fall victim because of the series of steps they had to go through to get infected.

Illness, victimization, danger, and a faint whiff of iconoclasm!

Wireless Poe paranoia in the city

Inspired by Poe's great 1840 story of urban weirdness, you can follow a strange with a friend, and coordinate your movements by wireless technology, in the New York City Following The Man of the Crowd project.

It was now nearly daybreak; but a number of wretched inebriates still pressed in and out of the flaunting entrance. With a half shriek of joy the old man forced a passage within, resumed at once his original bearing, and stalked backward and forward, without apparent object, among the throng. He had not been thus long occupied, however, before a rush to the doors gave token that the host was closing them for the night. It was something even more intense than despair that I then observed upon the countenance of the singular being whom I had watched so pertinaciously.

From Spectropolis 2004.
(via Smartmobs)

Glass Bead Game Doublequotes

Charles Cameron has a blog for some of his beadgaming now, called DoubleQuotes, focusing on his provocative pairing of concepts. These are deep, thought-provoking, and surprising:

This one is interesting for information warfare reasons.

Copyright cutting across party lines

This is a good example of how copyright policies cut across party lines:

That's the American Conservative Union, criticizing the Induce Act. At the same time a very Republican governor signed a bill requiring his state's citizens to identify themselves for most filesharing.

The inapplicability of the left-right political spectrum to copyright policy is not well understood.

(via Dan Gillmor)

Doppelarchie or Archie Gothic

Jesse points me to yet another doppelganger, my favorite of the week. Note the nice descriptive text. The evil twin is marked by colors (a Stendahlian red and black), along with the customary lethal/emasculating drive to replace the protagonist. He's also from space: science fiction versus the domestic 1950s (a teen version would be a sci-fi juvie). Not to mention the symmetry of the eyebrows.

Web game as political argument: September 12th

Aaron Delwiche notes September 12th, a Web-based game simulating concretely the concept of responding to terrorists within a civilian population.

The restrictions on play make an argument, much as those in Gulf War 2 or Newsgaming's earlier Madrid bombing victims tribute game.  I'm also reminding of the impending Kerry in Vietnam game.   As Gee points out, games teach.

Call for WIPO to change its IP ways

International IP struggles continue: Jamie Love is hosting a Declaration that the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) alter its drive to globalize western intellectual property systems. The declaration urges the group to

take a more balanced and realistic view of the social benefits and costs of intellectual property rights as a tool, but not the only tool, for supporting creativity intellectual activity

Iran blog protest today

Iranian bloggers are protesting the recent arrests of their fellows. Today, some are changing their sites' names to those of the persecuted: . Also in the protest plan is reposting content from the arrested bloggers' sites.

del.icio.us, a first look

del.icio.us covers new ground in social software, as it focuses primarily on sharing bookmarks. Anyone can search the quickly-loading website to get a very live scan of what webpages people are noting. If you register for the web application (free, quick, easy to do), you can do some interesting things:

• Stash and publish the URLs of Websites you find interesting for whatever reason. You can also mark up each bookmark with descriptive text. del.icio.us also lets you generate categories, or tags, which appear with URLs, and are presented in addition to your sites.
  
• Subscribe to others' delicious sites, RSS-style. This automatically creates an aggregated URL feed, or inbox. You can let other subscribe to you, too, of course. (Here's mine)
  
• Friend of a friend URL searching. When you read through the lists of websites, either on the deli front page or in your inbox, each listing includes the name of which delicious user(s) posted it there. This lets you check out who's posting an interesting site, in case they have others interests like yours. Following their tags and inbox may lead, FOAF-style, to other people pursuing such topics, and so on. (It'd be fun to see how often this happens, and how far it goes)
  

I can imagine some educational and knowledge management applications for this tool. An expert maintains a bookmark list this way, for example, as a way of sharing their current resources and interests. Students in a class could create and subscribe to each others' feeds in order to grow a research project's web resources. A firm could see which tags emerge over a period of time, in order to generate or adjust an internal ontology.

More, delicious is a treat to use. The site is clean and fast-loading. Somehow it manages to be fun, too, which isn't what "shared bookmarks" suggests. But it's fun to see what others are looking at around the world, and to explore these other people and their thinking. This partakes of the exploratory pleasures we once found in social applications like Friendster and Orkut, and succeeds by being so limited (compare with Flickr).

Bonus: the site encourages hacks and implementations, like the tag visualization tool we noted last week:

Keep in mind this is a site in development. Some issues I'd love to see addressed:

• URLs appear in a bloglike structure of reverse chronological order. Good for news and updates, but not for other organizational frameworks. This is alleviated by easy search and tagging, but that doesn't solve this presentational problem. There should be a way to present one's links in other orders (please comment if you can do this). For example, I've found it useful to maintain an HTML bookmarks list in categories arranged in alphabetical order. Could we push tags to the left?
  
• Can multiple people author one feed, as a group site?
  

Librarians vs Patriot Act

Jessamyn West is the heroine of a Wired article about librarians resisting the PATRIOT Act: