Tuesday, March 29. 2011
Via GOOD
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by Alex Goldmark
Sure, it seems like there's an app for everything. But we're not quite there yet. There are still many practical problems with seemingly simple solutions that have yet to materialize, like this:
I wish someone would use the foursquare API to build a cab-sharing app to help you split a ride home at the end of the night.
Or this:
I wish there was a website where non-profits could ask for what they need and people could work for them from home.
Meet the Internet Wishlist, a "suggestion box for the future of technology." Composed of hopeful tweets from people around the world, the site ends up reading like a mini-blog of requests for mobile apps, basic grand dreaming, and tech-focused humor posts. All kidding aside, though, creator Amrit Richmond hopes the list will ultimately lead to a bit of demand-driven design.
To contribute, people post an idea on Twitter and include #theiwl in their tweet. Richmond then collects the most "forward thinking" onto the Wishlist website. (Full disclosure, she's a former Art Editor here at GOOD and now a creative strategist for nonprofits and start-ups.)
"I hope the project inspires entrepreneurs, developers and designers to innovate and build the products and features that people want," Richmond says. "I see so many startups try and solve problems that don't need solving. ... I wanted to uncover and show what kinds of day-to-day problems people have that they want technology to solve for them."
The list already has an active community of posters, who are quick to point out when there's already an app or website fulfilling a poster's wish. For instance, several commenters pointed out that people can already connect with nonprofits and do micro-volunteering from home through Sparked.
To see the full wishlist or subscribe, go here.
What would you ask for?
Monday, January 31. 2011
Via BLDGBLOG
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by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
[Image: Courtesy of Terremark, via the Atlantic].
Andrew Blum has a short piece up at the Atlantic today about the geography of "internet choke points," and the threat of a "kill switch" that would allow countries (like Egypt) to turn off the internet on a national scale.
After all, Blum writes, "it's worth remembering that the Internet is a physical network," with physical vulnerabilities. "It matters who controls the nodes." Indeed, he adds, "what's often forgotten is that those networks actually have to physically connect—one router to another—often through something as simple and tangible as a yellow-jacketed fiber-optic cable. It's safe to suspect a network engineer in Egypt had a few of them dangling in his hands last night.
Blum specifically refers to a high-security building in Miami owned by Terremark; it is "the physical meeting point for more than 160 networks from around the world," and thus just one example of what Blum calls an internet "choke point." These international networks "meet there because of the building's excellent security, its redundant power systems, and its thick concrete walls, designed to survive a category 5 hurricane. But above all, they meet there because the building is 'carrier-neutral.' It's a Switzerland of the Internet, an unallied territory where competing networks can connect to each other."
But, as he points out, this neutrality is by no means guaranteed—and is even now subject to change.
Wednesday, December 22. 2010
Via MIT Technology Review
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A router that runs the Tor software prevents Web tracking.
By Tom Simonite
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Credit: Technology Review |
Many political activists, nonprofits, and businesses use an anonymity system called Tor to encrypt and obscure what they do on the Internet. Now the U.S.-based nonprofit that distributes Tor is developing a low-cost home router with the same privacy protection built in.
The Tor software masks Web traffic by encrypting network messages and passing them through a series of relays (each Tor client can also become a relay for other users' messages). But using Tor has typically meant installing the software on a computer and then tweaking its operating system to ensure that all traffic is routed correctly through the program.
"We want to make anonymity something that can happen everywhere, all the time," says Jacob Appelbaum, a Tor project developer. "When you are connected to a router with Tor inside, all your traffic goes through Tor without you changing your system at all. It makes it simple to use."
Appelbaum says volunteers are already testing a small number of modified routers with Tor installed. The prototypes were made by installing new software onto a popular low-cost wireless router made by Buffalo Technology. The software was developed by Appelbaum and colleagues at Tor and is based on the work of the OpenWrt project, which offers open source code for networking equipment. The finished routers can be configured to pass all traffic through Tor, or only some kinds of communications. "You might want to run your VOIP device through Tor but not your other traffic," Appelbaum explains. They will also be capable of simultaneously offering Tor-protected and conventional wireless networks.
"If we find that these routers are useful [in the trials]," he says, "we could partner with OpenWrt and Buffalo to offer a version for sale that helps support the Tor and OpenWrt projects." The software will also be made available for people to install on routers they have bought themselves, Appelbaum says.
Besides serving as Tor clients, the new routers will help anonymize the traffic of other Tor users. This means that they could help boost the performance the Tor network.
When a person uses Tor to bring up a Web page, the request is encrypted and sent along a random path through other Tor computers that act as relays. This obscures the originating IP (Internet protocol) address—a unique code that can be used to track down a Web user, to filter access to certain sites or services, or to build up a profile of a person's Web use.
Generally, the process results in lag and restricts bandwidth, which deters some people from using Tor, says Chris Palmer, technology director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The primary way to address that problem is to have more Tor relays in more places, connected to high-bandwidth, low-latency lines," he explains. "Wireless routers may fit the bill well, if they can be built with the computational resources necessary to run a Tor relay of decent capacity." Although consumer-grade routers are necessarily relatively low-powered, their capabilities have grown markedly in recent years, Palmer notes.
Tor routers could also make the entire Tor system better able to resist government attempts to block its use. An individual installation of Tor software hooks into the network by referring to a list of relays in a directory maintained by the Tor project. It is possible to block Tor by checking the same directory and preventing connections to the servers listed—a tactic apparently used by the Chinese authorities. It is possible to get around such a block, however, by configuring the Tor software to act as a "bridge," or a private relay, that can only be discovered by word of mouth. A Tor router can also act as a bridge, and Appelbaum is considering making that a default setting.
During the protests in Iran that followed the 2009 election, the EFF campaigned for more people to act as Tor bridges to keep the government from blocking the tool, and Palmer says increasing the supply of bridges remains important. "It makes the adversary's job more difficult when there are more possible bridges to advertise and use," he says.
Appelbaum says, "If you have 10,000 people using these little routers, then China would have a lot more difficulty blocking Tor."
Copyright Technology Review 2010.
Wednesday, November 10. 2010
By fabric | ch
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One month and a half ago, we were presenting a new work during the 2010 01SJ Biennial in South Hall, San Jose -- an amazingly big air conditioned (and sort of inflated) hall in the downtown area -- (in San Jose, San Francisco Bay Area, CA), under the exhibition main title "Build Your Own World".
This artificial interior landscape cut from natural light was the ideal place to set up I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, a new work from fabric | ch that uses I-Weather, the open source artificial climate based on human metabolism, circadian rythms and on medical knowledge about light therapy and chronotherapy.
The main purpose of the installation, as mentioned earlier on this blog, was to "propose a critical use of I-Weather as a model for a metabolic public lighting source, distributed and synchronized through an imaginary Deep Space Internet into the confined and conditioned environments of space exploration vehicles or into speculative public spaces of “distant colonies”".
What could a public space offer in 2010? How could public lighting --an old technology... that still defines most part of the public space at night-- evolve? What is the nature of space in Outer Space, is it public, private? If it is a public space -- by now, space exploration has been mostly supported by public fundings... --, could we light it up with a public and open source artificial climate, distributed through a new type of Internet? These were some of the ideas we tried to adress through this piece.
And here are (finally!) some follow-up pictures of the installation.
Yellow-Orange time ("night"):
According to the lighting and color rules of I-Weather, yellow-orange light (above) doesn't affect your body clock, it is therefore similar to a night situation, but where you can still undertake calm activities. At some periods (just below), I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting presented the full color spectrum of I-Weather, a gradient that vary from blue to orange (day to night) and that could also therefore be read as a "time rainbow". Below, in blue, is the day time (blue light blocks the secretion of melatonin into the body).
Gradient time ("time rainbow", all times at the same time):
Blue time (day):
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I-Weather has been produced with the support of Swissnex San Francisco and Pro Helvetia.
Monday, October 04. 2010
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A Web startup demos a "predictive" search engine.
By Tom Simonite
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Eye candy: This visualization shows the connections between different places, companies, and people, following a search using Recorded Future.
Credit: Recorded Future |
A startup called Recorded Future has developed a tool that scrapes real-time data from the Internet to find hints of what will happen in the future. The company's search tool spits out results on a timeline that stretches into the future as well as the past.
The 18-month-old company gained attention earlier this year after receiving money from the venture capital arms of both Google and the CIA. Now the company has offered a glimpse of how its technology works.
Conventional search engines like Google use links to rank and connect different Web pages. Recorded Future's software goes a level deeper by analyzing the content of pages to track the "invisible" connections between people, places, and events described online.
"That makes it possible for me to look for specific patterns, like product releases expected from Apple in the near future, or to identify when a company plans to invest or expand into India," says Christopher Ahlberg, founder of the Boston-based firm.
A search for information about drug company Merck, for example, generates a timeline showing not only recent news on earnings but also when various drug trials registered with the website clinicaltrials.gov will end in coming years. Another search revealed when various news outlets predict that Facebook will make its initial public offering.
That is done using a constantly updated index of what Ahlberg calls "streaming data," including news articles, filings with government regulators, Twitter updates, and transcripts from earnings calls or political and economic speeches. Recorded Future uses linguistic algorithms to identify specific types of events, such as product releases, mergers, or natural disasters, the date when those events will happen, and related entities such as people, companies, and countries. The tool can also track the sentiment of news coverage about companies, classifying it as either good or bad.
Recorded Future's customer base is currently "sub-100," says Ahlberg. It includes a mix of financial firms, government analysts, and media analysts, who pay a monthly fee to access the online tools. "Government analysts are interested in tracking people and places, while financial services may want to reveal events coming up around particular companies," says Ahlberg.
As well as providing a slick online interface to perform searches that spit out timelines showing the results (see video), Recorded Future offers free e-mail newsletters that tip users off to predictions in specific areas. It also makes it possible for customers to write software that draws on the tool's data and analysis through application programming interfaces, or APIS.
In time, this may lead to the development of apps targeted at consumers, says Ahlberg. "If I'm about to buy an iPhone, I might want to know if I am going to look stupid because they'll launch a new one next week, or how long it usually takes for competitors to launch competing products after a new Apple launch." Financial analysts are already using the company's APIs to overlay or even integrate Recorded Future's data into their own models, he says.
"We have proven out that our data can make strong predictions," says Ahlberg, citing studies that compared Recorded Future's output with changes in the volume of activity around particular financial stocks. "We found that our momentum metric, which indicates the strength of activity around an event or entity, and our future events correlate with the volume of market activity," says Ahlberg.
His company's tools can also be used to work out which sources of information give the best clues as to future events. A recent analysis showed that the posts on one of the Financial Times's blogs were better than other news sources at predicting the performance of companies on the S&P 500 share index. Negative posts about a company correlated with below-market performance a week later, while positive ones correlated with above-market performance.
"What they're really doing here is identifying and collating statements that have been made about the future," says Steven Skiena at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Skiena developed similar technology used by another startup, General Sentiment, to mine material from news and blogs. "An analyst can use those to inform their own predictions, less risky than Recorded Future actually making predictions themselves."
Various tools are capable of extracting events, people, and companies from text, but aligning that information in time is a trickier task, says Panagiotis Ipeirotis, at New York University's Leonard Stern School of Business. Ipeirotis researches how economically important data can be mined from online news sources and social media. "Analysis of sequences of events is very interesting, and underexploited in the research literature," he says. "Even getting decently timed data of news articles in order to properly generate event sequences is a hard problem."
This focus on the timeline sets Recorded Future apart from other firms trying to gain insights by mining news and other data, says Ipeirotis. "I'm curious to see when other text analytics firms will jump into the trend."
Recorded Future is about to expand its service to cover Arabic and Chinese sources. Making its indexes bigger is a major priority. "I'd like to be able to get in front of every piece of streaming data on the planet," says Ahlberg.
As the databases covered by Recorded Future, General Sentiment, and others grow, more powerful types of analysis will become possible, says Skiena. "I'm currently working with social scientists on models to predict what the probability is that a person that gets few mentions today suddenly becomes very famous in the future, by looking back at years of past data," he says.
Copyright Technology Review 2010.
Personal comment:
This has to be related to this sentence by Google CEO, Eric Schmidt: "I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." (taken from this article/post by William Gibson fro the New York Times).
Oh, really?
Friday, September 03. 2010
By fabric | ch
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fabric | ch will present a new work entitled I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting during the 2010 01SJ Biennial in San Jose (San Francisco Bay Area, CA, September 4-19, 2010).
Curated by Steve Dietz and assistant curator Jaime Austin, the 2010 01SJ Biennial will develop a full range of radical exhibitions in the Bay Area around this year's biennial theme, Build you own world. Our installation will be part of San Jose / South Hall exhibit: Out of the Garage into the World, which title takes its inspiration from the nearly mythological times of the early California's Silicon Valley, when young scientists supposedly started their future world scale business in their home's garage or backyard.
Curator Steve Dietz about this year's biennial: "Build Your Own World: The future is not just about what’s next. It’s also about what we can build to ensure that what’s next matters. How can we, as resourceful, innovative, and knowledgeable local and global citizens build and participate in a desirable future in the face of global climate change, economic meltdown, political instability, and cultural divisiveness?"
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I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting:
I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, yellow-orange phase.
I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, cyan-blue phase.
I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, full gradient and time rainbow.
In 2001, architect Philippe Rahm and fabric | ch jointly set up I-Weather, an open source artificial climate based on human metabolism, circadian rhythms and on the medical knowledge of the time about light therapy and chronotherapy. I-Weather.org intended to allow the growing number of de-territorialized locations and people to synchronize their atmosphere and metabolism with this Internet distributed climate: a parallel day of 25 hours, that diffused its colored “daylight” in any physical or digital space connected to the I-Weather’s server.
In 2008, NASA made an announcement about a first successful communication with a 20 million miles distant spacecraft on the Deep Space Internet, the model for a forthcoming interplanetary Internet.
Late in 2009, the team upgraded I-Weather to a new version, as scientific knowledge of biological rhythms has evolved, demonstrating that melatonin regulation is enhanced by using a minimum wavelength of 460nm (blue) and a maximum wavelength of 597nm (orange) rather than between 385nm (deep purple) and 509 nm (green). Actually, blue light suppresses the diffusion of melatonin in the body, while orange light allows performing actions without altering the body clock.
In summer 2010, fabric | ch will set up a project called I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, during the 01SJ Biennial in South Hall. It will propose a critical use of I-Weather as a model for a metabolic public lighting source, distributed and synchronized through an imaginary Deep Space Internet into the confined and conditioned environments of space exploration vehicles or into speculative public spaces of “distant colonies”.
It will be question of public space, public data, public technology and artificial climate.
fabric | ch, May 2010
I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting
fabric | ch
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Exhibition:
Build Your Own World
2010 01SJ Biennial
September 4-19, 2010
San Jose, CA
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Workshop:
I-Weather: open source artificial climate (how to)
Christian Babski, Patrick Keller
2-4 pm, September 16, 2010
San Jose, CA
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Conference:
Deep Space, Public Space, I-Weather as Public Climate & Technology
Patrick Keller
1-2.30 pm, September 19, 2010
San Jose, CA
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Project, conception and programmation: fabric | ch
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Ligths: 3B Lighting
Structure: Stages Unlimited
On site supervision: G. Craig Hobbs
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Curatorship: Steve Dietz, Jaime Austin
Produced by Zer01
I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting has been produced with the support of swissnex San Francisco and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. It is a 2010 01SJ Biennial creation by fabric | ch.
Personal comment:
Like for previous exhibitions, new posts will follow while (and after) we set up the work in San Francisco.
Thursday, August 19. 2010
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Security legend Paul Kocher talks about the attitudes shaping Congress's latest tech misstep.
If the Internet ever does something unfriendly to the national security interests of the United States, what if the president of said Union could pick up a cold war-era style phone - or maybe whip out an iPhone pre-loaded with a custom "kill the internet" app - and order that it be shut down?
That's what activists are saying is one potential outcome of the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. The so-called "Internet Kill Switch" is not actually an outcome of that bill, by the way - some commentators have compared this meme to the "death panels" myth that almost derailed the healthcare bill.
But the fact remains that the president has broad power under the 1934 Telecommunications Act to restrict "wire communications" during a time of war - and that includes the Internet. So even under existing laws, an off switch for the United States' most important information conduit is, in theory at least, only one over-eager lawmaker in chief away from reality.
Paul Kocher, current CEO of Cryptography Research, is a legend in the field of security - one of the engineers behind SSL 3.0 and an innovator in a host of other areas. Recently I interviewed him on the subject; here's what he had to say about the so-called "Internet Kill Switch."
"It's a Rorschach blot."
"On one level it's, absurd, and on others it's impractical and frightening. It's a Rorschach blot.
When you build something that will shut down a massively critical piece of infrastructure that people have tried to make reliable, that's a more frightening prospect than anything that could have inspired such a defense."
"It's a very blunt weapon."
"Networks like internet are critical for a lot of tasks - if you ever flipped a switch on that, you'd cause tremendous amounts of harm. It's unclear you'd get any particular benefit from doing that."
"Maybe I'm being cynical, but my read on the rationale [for the Internet Kill Switch] is that it's a fear of technology."
"The idea that people can kill the technology if they wish to makes people feel reassured that the technology won't go rogue in some way. If you had an army of robots walking around you'd like to have switch to turn them off - people still have that concept of the Internet."
"I can guarantee every teenage hacker will try to figure out how to trigger it."
[Ed. It goes without saying that Paul was once one of those teenage hackers, and knows whereof he speaks.]
"If I want my name in the paper, or to have an effect that's bad on the world, it's hard to think of something more perfectly designed for that kind of use."
Attemps to degrade the quality of civilian GPS signals shows that disabling communications networks hurts the good guys more than it hurts the bad guys.
"The whole GPS infrastructure is built with a mechanism where they can degrade the quality of location measurements. It's designed so they could have the military have more accurate GPS units than civilians.
But it turned out the military ended up using civilain GPS receivers because they're cheaper. They ended up disabling the degradation capability because the harm caused to the U.S. military exceeds the benefit to the folks they're fighting."
"Stopping a Denial of Service attack by shutting down the Internet is like trying to stop a small explosion by triggering a much larger one."
"You could conceivably come up with ways to bring down the entire Internet, by playing games with BGP protocol or bringing down the entire DNS archicecture. But you can't stop a pinpointed attack with this.... If you had a kill switch you'd either shut down entire internet or achieve nothing.
"The question this comes down to is, 'Is there some scenario where one would really want to bring the entire internet down?'"
"Everybody working from home: gone. Everybody's [VoIP] phone connection: gone. Everybody's website: gone. That's the only binary choice you can really achieve with this."
For technical as well as political reasons, no bill with anything resembling an "Internet Kill Switch" will ever be signed into law.
"If Congress decrees electrons have positive charge and gravity goes in the other direction, it doesn't mean it's possible to achieve those things.... But the reality is that if something like that came close to passing there would be a tremendous outcry.
"The government has had some misleading experience with this area, with telephone switches where there are requirements that there be backdoors so law enforcement can do wiretaps and eavesdrop on calls. But there's a lot more homogeneity in telephone infrastructure than within the packet-switched internet infrastructure.
Follow Mims on Twitter or contact him via email.
Wednesday, August 18. 2010
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by Patrick James
While reading Wired's recent feature, "The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet," Boing Boing's Rob Beschizza took issue with the following infographic, which illustrates the claim that the web is dead based on the total proportion of internet traffic instead of total overall use.
If you went with total useage, the graph might look like this:
"In fact," Beschizza writes, "between 1995 and 2006, the total amount of web traffic went from about 10 terabytes a month to 1,000,000 terabytes (or 1 exabyte). According to Cisco, the same source Wired used for its projections, total internet traffic rose then from about 1 exabyte to 7 exabytes between 2005 and 2010."
Now, using actual total traffic as the vertical axis, Beschizza reimagines the graph like this:
Does that look like "death" to you?
Personal comment:
Besides the point about web's death (we are speaking here about the "death" of a web of pages, but the increase in the spread of Internet usage) that was made by Wired as an editorial ad. and (apparently rightly) disputed here by Rob Beschizza, it is also interesting to see how far an information graphic can deceive its readers depending on what value you put on which axis...
It's an obvious point, I know... but nonetheless what we do with data and how we visuaklie it are becoming so important nowadays that we have to be really aware of that and don't take any fancy data graph for granted.
Tuesday, June 08. 2010
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by Andrew Price
Yesterday, The New York Times published a piece about how the constant distraction of digital media damages "creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life." It's not a new worry. A few years ago, Nicholas Carr wrote a story for the Atlantic called "Is Google Making You Stupid?" and his new book, The Shallows, expands on that theme, arguing that the internet is eroding our capacity for "solitary, single-minded concentration."
So is the internet actually bad for our brains? A handful of bloggers have reported feeling that it's been bad for theirs. But why not find out for yourself? The Times has two interesting cognitive games you can play online that will test how easily distracted you are and how good you are at switching between tasks.
I'm someone who spends my entire working day being distracted by online content, and then creating new chunks of online content designed to distract others. My results are below.
I scored well on the first test. I'm hard to distract. In fact, I had a perfect score when faced with the most distractions.
On the second test, it was a mixed bag. I didn't make a single mistake, but I was really slow.
My own subjective feeling is that the internet has shortened my attention span. If I sit down to read a book at night, it sometimes takes an alarmingly long time for my brain to settle into it. And I have to fight the urge to screw around on my phone on the commute home. Jonah Lehrer, contra Carr, argues that the neuroscientific evidence to back this up is thin.
How did you do on those tests? Have your internet habits affected your mind?
Friday, May 14. 2010
[The global network of submarine cables as it existed in 1901.]
Editors Note: File under Feedback: Architecture’s New Territories, an InfraNet Lab seminar at Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design / University of Toronto. Guest post and images are by Ali Fard.
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With an estimated 1,733,993,741 users and a global growth rate of 380% since 2000 , it is easy to think of the internet as a free-flowing cloud of information accessible by all. However, unlike popular belief, our connection to the internet is not mediated by an uber high-tech network of satellites (or any of the other usual suspects). In fact, satellite links account for only 1% of all internet connections. Automatically, and incorrectly, thought of as a complex metaphysical network of information, the Internet consists of a highly physical network of lines and nodes; a simple system with inherent complexities.
Simply put, it is a network of submarine communication cables laid across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and other water bodies that connect us to information databases in other continents. Although the technology has changed significantly, the network itself does not differ greatly from the network of submarine telegraph lines which existed as early as 1901. Much like long umbilical cords, these cables are the not-so-visible proof of our dependence on concentrated sources of information. These very real and physical “communication highways” establish links between information super hubs, while controlling internet’s dissemination of information. These lines, coupled with the terrestrial network of land lines and data centers, are the medium of the internet.
[The existing global network of submarine communication cables.]
The lines and nodes of the internet, much like any other physical infrastructure, are prone to an array of politico-economic issues. Closely related to the politico-economic reading of the hierarchical structure of the world, much of this understanding of internet has to do with its very physical backbone. Areas with the least number of users get the best connections and others, like most of Africa, get nothing. We can clearly make out the users from producers. The redundancies of the submarine lines to North America and Europe have caused internet prices to plummet, which in turn has encouraged not only higher usage of internet but an active participation in the information world. Meanwhile, you can count the number of lines feeding Africa on one hand. As a result, prices are so high that even the lines that are already in place become meaningless, because of lack of use.
[Submarine cable system, from left to right: Cable + Repeaters + Landing Points + Termination Stations.]
[Submarine communication cable: 1. Polyethylene cover; 2. & 4. Stranded steel armor wires; 3. & 5. Tar-soaked nylon yarn; 6. Polycarbonate insulator; 7. Copper sheath; 8. Protective core; 9. Optical fibers.]
[Cable-laying ship.]
[A submarine cable arriving on land in Bangladesh, April 10, 2009. REUTERS/Gina Din Corporate Communications/Japheth Kagondu/Handout.]
The Internet can be read as a dynamic network, but a network which is far from equally distributed. This unequal distribution is not because of lack of potential, but lack of means. It is clear that in today’s information heavy economy, to compete means to be connected. So, areas with little or no internet connection, which are already among the most economically unstable, get left behind and cannot compete. It is clear that the current state of the network privileges the most developed countries. This outcome is merely due to economic factors and not necessarily based on efficiencies and strengths of the network. So, how can this unequally distributed network be rewired to be able to function efficiently? How is this network affected with regards to the recent crisis in the economic structure of the world? How can a more logical rewiring of the network help African countries or other poorly connected areas of the world, while improving the system as a whole?
[A current map of the global internet connection.]
[A possible re-wiring scenario in which Africa becomes an internet hub, taking advantage of its geographic location.]
One possible rewiring scenario has to do with the strategic geographic location of Africa. With cheap land, availability of natural resources and proximity to Asia, Europe and South America, Africa can provide fertile grounds for international data center activity. Big Internet companies such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, whose data center activity is mostly concentrated in North America and Europe, can start investing in the internet infrastructure of African countries by providing better connections, and in return can be allowed to establish data centers in areas with little economic activity. These companies can take on an active role in shaping the information economy of Africa by not only providing internet connections, but also by providing jobs and training. All this cannot be achieved by corporate colonization, but through an active and dedicated participation in the growth of the information economy of the region.
Although great imagination may be required in visualizing such proposition, and a great deal of analysis is required in understanding the ups and downs of such a mammoth initiative, it is in no way farfetched. It is in fact such a proposal that can bring much needed attention to how information is distributed throughout the world and provide grounds for discussion of possible new futures of the network.
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