Category Archives: Pop Culture

Just try to stop it

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Three weeks ago, when the story first broke that Google would be cooperating with the Chinese government to help it censor searches, Mr. Snitch predicted that this, too, would pass:

Not that some serious stuff isn’t missing from China’s Google. Tibet can’t be Googled anywhere in the country. But this is the Internet, where things change fast. Whatever Google can’t offer the world’s largest nation is going to be seen as an opportunity for some stealthy ‘net entrepreneur out there.

Has his finger on the pulse, does Mr. Snitch. This Monday’s Wall Street Journal featured a front page article (subscription required) on the growing number of workarounds that are enabling Chinese citizens to access forbidden content, courtesy of a new class of netizen, the Hacktivist:

Bennett Haselton, a security consultant and former Microsoft programmer, has developed a system called the Circumventor. It connects volunteers around the world with Web users in China and the Middle East so they can use their hosts’ personal computers to read forbidden sites.

Susan Stevens, a Las Vegas graphic designer, belongs to an “adopt a blog” program. She has adopted a Chinese blogger by using her own server in the U.S. to broadcast his very personal musings on religion to the world. She has never left the U.S., but “this is where technology excels,” she says. “We don’t have to have anything in common. We barely have to speak the same language.”

In Boston, computer scientist Roger Dingledine tends to Tor, a modified version of a U.S. Naval Research Laboratory project, which disguises the identities of Chinese Web surfers by sending messages through several layers of hosts to obscure their path. In addition to the Department of Defense, Mr. Dingledine had also received funding from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports free speech online.

The article says that the promising of these may be Freegate, a software program that connects computers inside China to servers in the U.S.

As the product of ethnically Chinese programmers, [Freegate] uses the language and fits the culture. It is a simple and small program, whose file size of just 137 kilobytes helps make it easy to store in an email program and pass along on a portable memory drive.

The software’s creator, Bill Xia, estimates that about 100,000 people a day use Freegate or one of the other censorship workarounds he helped develop.

I like that, a lot :-)

Advertising on your mind?

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Marco Iacoboni, at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, used brain imaging to figure out which Super Bowl ads fired up the areas of the brain concerned with “reward and empathy.”

Iacoboni is the scientist who discovered “mirror neurons.” I blogged about him once before, here, speculating wildly that he’s discovered the biological basis for the metaphysician’s “one mind.”

(I emailed him after putting up that first post but he didn’t email back. Maybe I should send him a box of heart-shaped truffles?)

Born 1945. Died . . . 2945?

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Why not?

Aubrey de Grey says that

radical increases in human life expectancy will be possible within the next twenty to thirty years. “As medicine becomes more powerful”, he says, “we will inevitably be able to address ageing just as effectively as we address many diseases today. I think the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.”

Much more in this piece by Paul Miller and James Wilsdon in openDemocracy.

(P.S. If you pooh pooh this idea, you’re a “deathist.” lol — who knew?)

No more books?

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On the one hand, argues Jeanette Winterson in the London Times, there are, currently, too many “throwaway books” that are more suited to being produced on electronic media.

But what if, as she also suggests, we are on a trajectory that will return us to mass illiteracy? And what if, as a result, we become more easily manipulated by “censorship and the rewriting of history”?

Chew chew chew

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In a survey of the state of the newspaper business for American Journalism Review, Paul Fahri writes:

Reporting is a labor-intensive enterprise . . .

Particularly labor-intensive are investigative and enterprise reporting, which dig beneath the surface and often turn up the stories that are most valuable for readers.

The question is, if newspapers, online or on paper, don’t provide the resources to report on their communities in depth, who will?

So far, the answer appears to be almost no one.

What about bloggers, you ask?

Bloggers — one of the Internet’s most important info-innovations — don’t offer much hope. Bloggers mainly chew over facts that others have collected — in essence repeating, not reporting. In a survey of the 100 most popular news-related blogs in 2004 — 59 responded — University of South Carolina doctoral students Bryan Murley and Kim Smith found half the bloggers said they got most of their news and information from newspapers. Another 19 percent got most of their information from other bloggers, who in turn were likely to have gotten it from a newspaper or some other mainstream outlet.

2004?

A lot has happened since 2004. A lot.

This guy is writing about blogging without taking 10 minutes on Google to fact-check his aaa. . . ssertion. Someone really ought to show him the door to the other universe.

Speaking of acting like a rock star

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Publisher’s Marketplace offered up this little gem in today’s e-newsletter, about a new LA Times story on James Frey:

The LAT primarily rehashes basic Frey facts, though they do note with amusement that at one point Frey had a “class Hollywood fit” when a screenwriter hired by Warner Bros. wanted to change some of the events in the adaptation of A Million Little Pieces. “Frey said they didn’t have the right to alter the facts in the book, the observer recalled this week. ‘How could they do this? This was his life! How could they change the facts of his life?’ Eventually, Frey fired his agency.”

I love it!!! Who needs sit coms when reality dishes up juicy bits like this???

Frickin’ flares

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It looks like Gap may be dropping their girls’ classic cut jeans. They can’t be found in their stores, at least in my city’s malls, and the online stock is pretty picked over.

I must be the only mother on the planet who thinks flare leg jeans for pre-teen girls is a travesty against nature.

Yes, I’m square. Too bad. To my eye, the flare leg look is almost impossible to pull off without coming across as frumpy and careless. So teenagers & used-to-be-teenagers want to take that chance — that’s their business. My daughter isn’t a teenager, yet, and deserves better.

If it’s silly, they will laugh

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The Du Bist Deutschland tale: another example of how the old rules of media just don’t work any more:

The idea seemed like a good one: an ad campaign to buck up the German spirit and remind the depressive citizens of Europe’s largest (but struggling) economy that things really aren’t all that bad. Ad agencies, newspapers and a number of celebrities donated some 30 million-worth of advertising space to the nonprofit Du Bist Deutschland campaign launched last September.

It didn’t work.

The ads have spawned so much criticism and satire that a Google search doesn’t even bring up the campaign’s Web site on its first page.

This skeptical reception was spurred, in part, when a very grumpy email from the head of the agency that spearheaded the campaign was leaked to the blogosphere. Karma, perhaps?

The last telegram. Stop.

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Western Union shut down its telegram business on January 27. From the article linked:

The first telegram was sent on May 24, 1844, by Samuel Morse. His message: ‘What hath God wrought,’ was sent from Washington to Baltimore.

I wonder what the message was on the last telegram sent?

I admit it, I’m jealous

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Four Australians are auctioning themselves off as “a weekend with four blokes.”

I’m not jealous of whoever wins the auction btw. I’m jealous of these kids for being able to do it! No innuendos made, and, more than likely, none given:

Couldn’t be bothered making the effort finding new friends at the pub? Don’t have friends who are up for a couple of beers, a few snags and a hell of a good time? Or just bored with your current friends and their obsession with nerd stuff? What you need is a weekend with 4 fun blokes in inner Sydney. We won’t fly you here. Heck, we won’t even pay for your bus fare. What we WILL do is guarantee you some beers, some snags, some good conversation and a hell of a lot of laughs. You just supply yourself and a willingness to have some beers, some snags, some good conversation and a hell of a lot of laughs. Why are we auctioning this offer off? Because this sort of thing is hard to come by. We’ll be your best mates – instantly! You won’t have to try and impress us. We don’t even care who you are.

Now that’s just cute, don’t you think?