Langdon Winner is a political theorist who focuses upon social and political issues that surround modern technological change. He is the author of Autonomous Technology, a study of the idea of “technology-out-of-control” in modern social thought, The Whale and The Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, and editor of Democracy in a Technological Society. Mr. Winner is past president of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, and his views on social, political and environmental issues appear regularly in Tech Knowledge Revue, published in the on-line journal “NetFuture”.

Praised by The Wall Street Journal as “The leading academic on the politics of technology”, Mr. Winner was born and raised in San Luis Obispo, California. He received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. He is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He has also taught at The New School for Social Research, M.I.T., College of the Atlantic, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and has lectured widely throughout the United States and Europe. In 1991-1992 he was visiting research fellow at the Center for Technology and Culture at the University of Oslo, Norway.  During the spring semester of 2001, he will be Hixon-Riggs Visting Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California.

A sometime rock critic, he was contributing editor at Rolling Stone in the late 1960s and early 1970s and has contributed articles on rock and roll to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The Encylopaedia Britannica. At present he is doing research and writing on a book about the politics of design in the contexts of engineering, architecture and political theory. Another book, a collection of essays on technology and human experience, is also underway.

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From Charli Carpenter, Lawyers, Guns, and Money

I hope most of you following the Wikileaks story read Aaron Bady’s essay at zunguzungu last week, in which he examines two early essays attributed to Julian Assange and provides his explanation of Assange’s broader theory. It’s a sophisticated read with at last glance 567 comments – the sort of blog post political theorists will (or should) assign to their graduate classes.

I also think Bady makes some mistakes in his interpretation of Assange’s essays – or at least glosses over some of the more disturbing implications in his zeal to paint Assange as smarter and less objectionable than might be assumed by those not familiar with his writings.

Let’s begin with what Robert Baird at 3QD argues is the central insight of Bady’s essay: “the recognition that Assange’s strategy stands at significant remove from a philosophy it might easily be confused for: the blend of technological triumphalism and anarcho-libertarian utopianism that takes ‘information wants to be free’ as its gospel and Silicon Valley as its spiritual homeland.”

In Bady’s words:

According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets.

To Read More…

From n+1,

With any luck, the public will soon have access to 250,000 leaked diplomatic cables: these, out of an estimated 2.8 million to be released. It almost seems superfluous to say that the historical impact of past, present and future document dumps will take forever to be understood. (It also remains to be seen how much WikiLeaks will be able to release of even its current stash, given the ongoing attacks from governments.) But the political effects happen, as do all things these days, instantly. The issue now becomes who controls the danger. The people who usually do—the very secret-keeping elites that WikiLeaks is targeting—are attempting to neutralize and chill public discussion, going so far as to say that the public has no place in the discussion. The debate over the politics of WikiLeaks is principally being held among professional journalists, who have shifted momentarily from a position of lugubrious self-pity to lauding themselves as mediators of information, and among threatened diplomats (their lucubrations published by those same journalists), whose panegyrics to the secret handshakes, butt-slaps, and air-kisses of State Department dealmaking are among the more grotesque products of the current discourse on transparency. Missing entirely from the talk is the public, whom diplomacy and the wars principally affect; whose now exposed government this continues to be; whose ability to change matters remains undiminished and has perhaps been enhanced.

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Today is December 17, 2010, 107 years after  Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first flight at the beaches of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Needless to say, a lot has happened since then. Just 65 years after that first flight, which saw Orville at the controls of the 1903 Wright Flyer, the maiden sortie could have been accomplished in the span of the wings of the Boeing 747-100.

The Wright Flyer, or at least the nearest replica to the aircraft, is enshrined at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum here in Washington, DC. The aircraft, in fact, did not arrive at the museum until December 1948, at the conclusion of a decades-long feud between the Wrights and the Smithsonian surrounding the brothers’ claim of being the true inventors of the airplane.

Aviation is an afterthought for most in the industrialized world, we transit seamlessly from one distant point to another thinking only of the destination or origin. The duration of our journeys are slashed by days, weeks, months, perhaps even years from their original attempt. Today, we are nagged by airport security, bad food, tight economy seats and what we perceive to be long waits. I’ll allow comedian Louis CK to put it all in context.

Happy Birthday, Aviation, you don’t look a day over 100.

Aviation is an afterthought for most in the industrialized world, we transit seamlessly from one distant point to another thinking only of the destination or origin. The duration of our journeys are slashed by days, weeks, months, perhaps even years from their original attempt. Today, we are nagged by airport security, bad food, tight economy seats and what we perceive to be long waits. I’ll allow comedian Louis CK to put it all in context.

Happy Birthday, Aviation, you don’t look a day over 100.

For more…

Last week, Microsoft announced that it would build something called “Tracking Protection” into the next edition of its Internet Explorer Web browser (IE9). Although Microsoft’s proposal got a lot of coverage, including a favorable comment from Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Liebowitz, the new feature is a step in the wrong direction for privacy on the World Wide Web.

IE’s Tracking Protection is technically flawed—it can’t stop websites from tracking you—and its existence will give corporate interests a powerful tool for arguing against government regulations that might actually resolve the problem of pervasive Internet tracking.

Microsoft’s announcement comes amid mounting concern over the ability of advertisers to track people across the Web. The Federal Trade Commission recently endorsed the idea that users should be able to opt out of having their online activity tracked. But the technological and legal frameworks that would make it possible to opt out remain far from clear.

People who haven’t been following the controversy regarding Internet tracking often have a hard time understanding just how invasive today’s Internet has become—and why they should care. Much of the press coverage has just confused the situation further by focusing on the role of third-party Web analytics and advertising companies, rather than on the tracking and tabulation done by industry advertising giants like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. A paradoxical but entirely possible outcome of Microsoft’s new browser feature might be to increase the ability of such companies to track and record everything you do online.

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The Internet drama precipitated by WikiLeaks’ release of classified U.S. diplomatic cables has been called the first “global cyberwar.” But at closer look it’s really more of an amateur brawl.

Although big businesses such as Mastercard and Visa were ensnared, the so-called “Hacktivists” didn’t do serious harm. And while one of the “big boys” of the Internet —Amazon.com — was an obvious target after it snubbed WikiLeaks, the hackers held off, fearing Amazon was too difficult to get.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks revealed itself to be less than sophisticated when it came to maintaining an online presence.

The secrets-spreading site was caught flatfooted when attacks and legitimate traffic overwhelmed it on Nov. 28, the day it started releasing the cables.

It reacted by moving the website from a Swedish base to Amazon.com‘s hosting facility. Because Amazon is self-service, WikiLeaks didn’t need any pre-established relationship with the company. Amazon has ample capacity and can withstand hacker attacks.

But there was a major downside: Moving the site to the U.S., where the cables originated, exposed it to political pressure.

Congressional staffers called Amazon.com Inc. on Nov. 30 to ask about its relationship with WikiLeaks. The next day, the company shut down the WikiLeaks site for distributing documents it didn’t own. That sent WikiLeaks scrambling to re-establish its Web presence in Europe.

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Google goes after Microsoft on two fronts, with cloudbook and Android tablet Microsoft denies slow start to sales of WP7 devices

One of the great ironies of this year is that Google and Oracle – now owner of Sun and Java – are locked in legal combat. The irony stems from the fact that, even as they bicker, the concept they did more than anyone else to create is back in the limelight. This is what we used to call the thin client, which then morphed into the netbook and now the cloudbook.

In previous iterations, the vision was stymied by the lack of reliable broadband connectivity everywhere, and effectively hijacked by Microsoft. Will the Windows giant, this time around, lose out to the approach conceived by Sun, Oracle and Google – a stripped-down device with long battery life and minimal local storage or apps, connecting for its data and services to the cloud (which we used to call the server)? Google pitched its latest definition of the thin client, with the launch of Chrome OS and a next generation netbook, just after Microsoft shipped its latest – and probably strongest – attempt at finally gaining a position in the mobile world, where the cloud will increasingly have its heart.

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From Kentaro Toyama, Boston Review

A ten-year-old boy named Dhyaneshwar looked up for approval after carefully typing the word “Alaska” into a PC.

“Bahut acchaa!” I cheered—“very good.”

It was April, 2004, and I was visiting a “telecenter” in the tiny village of Retawadi, three hours from Mumbai. The small, dirt-floored room, lit only by an open aluminum doorway, was bare except for a desk, a chair, a PC, an inverter, and a large tractor battery, which powered the PC when grid electricity was unavailable. Outside, a humped cow chewed on dry stalks, and a goat bleated feebly.

As I encouraged the boy, I wondered about the tradeoff his parents had made in order to pay for a typing tutor. Their son was learning to write words he’d never use, in a language he didn’t speak. According to the telecenter’s owner, Dhyaneshwar’s parents paid a hundred rupees—about $2.20—a month for a couple hours of lessons each week. That may not sound like much, but in Retawadi, it’s twice as much as full-time tuition in a private school.

Such was my introduction to the young field of ICT4D, or Information and Communication Technologies for Development. The goal of ICT4D is to apply the power of recent technologies—particularly the personal computer, the mobile phone, and the Internet—to alleviate the problems of global poverty. ICT4D sprouted from two intersecting trends: the emergence of an international-development community eager for novel solutions to nearly intractable socioeconomic challenges; and the expansion of a brashly successful technology industry into emerging markets and philanthropy.

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From Leiter Reports,

I’ll get into details in a bit, but first I think the basic idea of a conspiracy with unwitting agents can be illustrated in a simple way.  Suppose that you have some information that is valuable – say some inside information about the financial state of a corporation.  If you immediately make that information public without acting on it, it is worth nothing to you.  On the other hand, if you keep it to yourself you may not fully profit from the information.  Ideally, you would like to seek out someone that you could trade the information with, and who you could be sure would keep the information close so that it remained valuable.  Let’s say that I have similar information and that we trade it.  You may trade with other friends and I may do likewise.  In each case we have simply traded information for our own benefit, but we have also built a little network of information traders who, hopefully, are keeping the information relatively close and are giving us something equally valuable in kind.  We may not know the scope of the network and we may not even realize we are part of a network, but we are, and this network constitutes a conspiracy as Assange understands it.  No one sat down and agreed to form a network of inside information traders – the network has simply naturally emerged from our local individual bargains.  We can say that the network is an emergent property of these bargains.

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Massive network attacks and other punitive actions taken against WikiLeaks over the past few days only appear to have made the site and its contents far more resilient to takedown attempts, a security researcher said.

In the 10 days since WikiLeaks began releasing classified cables from the U.S Department of State, wikileaks.org was hit with massive denial of service attacks, the termination of its its domain hosting service, the loss ofAmazon.com as a host, and the loss of PayPal, MasterCard and Visa Europe services.

Yet, in what’s becoming an interesting case study in Internet resilience, WikiLeaks not only continues to serve up its controversial content, it appears to have bolstered its ability to do so, said James Cowie, chief technology officer at Renesys, an Internet monitoring firm.

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