REDDIT CO-FOUNDER AARON SWARTZ’S SUICIDE AND LONG-RUNNING BATTLE WITH COPYRIGHT
Posted January 14, 2013 at 5:15pm |
IS IT TIME TO HIDE FROM THE QUEEN ON THE INTERNET?
When I found out about Tor and the deep web, I immediately got excited. Not only was I free from the prying gaze of the authorities, there was also a whole new world of uncensored web for me to discover. However, instead of some Situationist Northwest Passage, what I actually found was a bunch of crappy blogs on conspiracy theories, an anonymous market called the Silk Road (largely used for drugs) and a whooole load of links to child porn that I did not want to go anywhere the fuck near. Also, most of the website addresses – even the halfway legal ones – look like this: 923289sdf71497102sd49723.onion (no joke). Which I found distracting.
I decided that I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, because after 12 years online, I’m still a mainstream internet n00b. So, I called up Andrew Lewman, who works at the Tor project, to talk about the deep web and what all the evil government meddling might mean.
Read the full article here
Posted May 10, 2012 at 12:56pm |
The vast majority of North Korean surfers have never actually seen the Web. At libraries and educational facilities, they log on to something called Kwangmyong (roughly translated as “bright”). It’s been around since the early 2000s and it’s a completely closed intranet system, operating via fiber optic cable. It most likely has no more than a few dozen sites, most of them for education or propaganda.
Read the full article here
Posted May 1, 2012 at 3:01pm |
TALKING TO THE FUTURE HUMANS - AMBER CASE
Amber Case is like the Socrates of digital natives. She calls herself a cyborg anthropologist, which in human talk means she studies the relationship between man and machine.
Most of us walk around with small computers in our pockets where we’re able to access emails, talk to friends and make with the mega-lulz whenever we wish. Because of this, Case considers us low-tech cyborgs, emotionally tied to our technology and digital networks whether we like to think so or not.
Read the rest of the article here.
Posted March 23, 2012 at 3:43pm |
BARCRAFT IS WHAT COMPUTER NERDS DO IN PUBS
This weekend, the first London Barcraft of 2012 took place at the Assembly House pub in Kentish Town. If you’ve never heard of the Barcraft phenomenon, it basically involves a group of people sitting in a pub watching some other people thousands of miles away play computer games on a big screen. Surprisingly, most of the people I met at the pub yesterday were men. To up the ante somewhat, the guys who are actually taking part (most of the time they’re South Korean) compete for big cash prizes, and as such sometimes they cry when they lose.
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Posted February 28, 2012 at 10:24am |
Eugh. People are the fucking worst. Last week, I was sent a press release for an iPhone/ Android app called HoboHunt. It was described by the PR as a “controversial photo sharing app” that has “been rejected three times by Apple for being too outrageously offensive”.
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Posted February 22, 2012 at 5:41pm |
DRUNK BADGER-BAITING FOR NERDS IS AMAZING
At first sight it looks like badger-baiting, but with nerds: a cluster of slightly overweight men and mysterious women, shuffling around in a courtyard just off of Brick Lane, parrying and thrusting with things that resemble those neon-tipped sticks you guide airplanes onto the runway with. The sticks are actually PlayStation Move controllers, however, while the courtyard is the setting for Wild Rumpus, an evening celebrating the best in indie game development. And, tonight, the reason we’re all standing here, freezing cold and getting drunk, is because of a strange new(ish) game called Johann Sebastian Joust.
Johann Sebastian Joust comes up whenever you ask anybody involved with development whether there’s ever been a good game built around motion controls (I imagine that this is something the majority you do often). Since the arrival of the Wii, motion controls have been a big deal, after all. Nintendo kicked things off with Playmobil versions of tennis and bowling, and now Microsoft’s Xbox 360 has a dinky little camera called Kinect that sometimes comes heroically close to working properly. Then there’s PlayStation’s Move, a kind of glowing, fetishised ice-cream cone packed with accelerometers and magnets. All these peripherals take slightly different approaches, but they have one crucial thing in common: most of their games are so bad that you’ll think their developers are being dicks on purpose. Joust isn’t like that
Read the full article here
Posted February 9, 2012 at 12:49pm |
