The series of infographics titled “The Iranian Internet” [this-is-maral.com] by master student Maral Pourkazemi combines an aesthetic sense of (greyscale) infographics with the serious topic of international politics.

Maral designed six different content panels that each explain a distinct theme, such as Iran’s general Internet usage, their concept of a “Halal” or “national” Internet, how Iranian users can escape this “Halal” Internet, which Iranian blogs are filtered, how the cyber repression operates, and how this is initiated by the paradox system of government.

To see more…

In late April, I sat down with the independent security researcher, hacker, and privacy advocate Jacob Appelbaum, who knows a thing or two about the surveillance state. Appelbaum is one of the key members of the Tor project, which relies on a worldwide volunteer network of servers to reroute Internet traffic across a set of encrypted relays. Doing so conceals a user’s location, and protects her from a common form of networking surveillance known as traffic analysis, used to infer who is talking to whom over a public network. Tor is both free (as in freedom) and free of charge. Appelbaum is also the only known American member of the international not-for-profit WikiLeaks.

Resnick: The recent article in Wired describes where and how the NSA plans to store its share of collected data. But as the article explains, the Utah facility will have another important function: cryptanalysis, or code-breaking, as much of the data cycling through will be heavily encrypted. It also suggests that the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), expected to remain durable for at least another decade, may be cracked by the NSA in a much shorter time if they’ve built a secret computer that is considerably faster than any of the machines we know about. But more to the point—is encryption safe?

Appelbaum: Some of it is as safe as we think it can be, and some of it is not safe at all. The number one rule of “signals intelligence” is to look for plain text, or signaling information—who is talking to whom. For instance, you and I have been emailing, and that information, that metadata, isn’t encrypted, even if the contents of our messages are. This “social graph” information is worth more than the content. So, if you use SSL-encryption to talk to the OWS server for example, great, they don’t know what you’re saying. Maybe. Let’s assume the crypto is perfect. They see that you’re in a discussion on the site, they see that Bob is in a discussion, and they see that Emma is in a discussion. So what happens? They see an archive of the website, maybe they see that there were messages posted, and they see that the timing of the messages correlates to the time you were all browsing there. They don’t need to know to break a crypto to know what was said and who said it. More…

In 1989, as communism was beginning to crumble across Eastern Europe, just a few months before protesters started pecking away at the Berlin Wall, the Japanese game-making giant Nintendo reached across the world to unleash upon America its own version of freedom. The new product was the Game Boy — a hand-held, battery-powered plastic slab that promised to set gamers loose, after all those decades of sweaty bondage, from the tyranny of rec rooms and pizza parlors and arcades.

The unit came bundled with a single cartridge: Tetris, a simple but addictive puzzle game whose goal was to rotate falling blocks — over and over and over and over and over and over and over — in order to build the most efficient possible walls. (Well, it was complicated. You were both building walls and not building walls; if you built them right, the walls disappeared, thereby ceasing to be walls.) This turned out to be a perfect symbiosis of game and platform. Tetris’s graphics were simple enough to work on the Game Boy’s small gray-scale screen; its motion was slow enough not to blur; its action was a repetitive, storyless puzzle that could be picked up, with no loss of potency, at any moment, in any situation. The pairing went on to sell more than 70 million copies, spreading the freedom of compulsive wall-building into every breakfast nook and bank line in the country. More…

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of a fast internet connection must be in want of some porn.

While it’s difficult domain to penetrate — hard numbers are few and far between — we know for a fact that porn sites are some of the most trafficked parts of the internet. According to Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner, which tracks users across the web with a cookie, dozens of adult destinations populate the top 500 websites. Xvideos, the largest porn site on the web with 4.4 billion page views per month, is three times the size of CNN or ESPN, and twice the size of Reddit. LiveJasmin isn’t much smaller. YouPorn, Tube8, and Pornhub — they’re all vast, vast sites that dwarf almost everything except the Googles and Facebooks of the internet.

While page views are a fine starting point, they only tell you that X porn site is more popular than Y non-porn site. Four billion page views sure sounds like a lot, but it’s only when you factor in what those porn surfers are actually doing that the size and scale of adult websites truly comes into focus. More…

Image via ExtremeTech.com

21% of Americans have read an e-book. The increasing availability of e-content is prompting some to read more than in the past and to prefer buying books to borrowing them.

Summary of findings

One-fifth of American adults (21%) report that they have read an e-book in the past year, and this number increased following a gift-giving season that saw a spike in the ownership of both tablet computers and e-book reading devices such as the original Kindles and Nooks. In mid-December 2011, 17% of American adults had reported they read an e-book in the previous year; by February, 2012, the share increased to 21%.

The rise of e-books in American culture is part of a larger story about a shift from printed to digital material. Using a broader definition of e-content in a survey ending in December 2011, some 43% of Americans age 16 and older say they have either read an e-book in the past year or have read other long-form content such as magazines, journals, and news articles in digital format on an e-book reader, tablet computer, regular computer, or cell phone. More…

Image via PewInternet.org

Conrad Wolfram is the founder and managing director of Wolfram Research Europe, which he founded in 1991. He also serves as the strategic director of US-based Wolfram Research, which is run by his older brother Stephen Wolfram. As such, Conrad is intimately involved in developing the company’s flagship product, Mathematica, as well as other Wolfram technologies, like CDF Player and webMathematica, the web framework that underlies Wolfram|Alpha. In an interview for HPCwire, conducted by Daniel Araya of the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (I-CHASS), Conrad describes his thoughts on the evolving knowledge economy, math and science education, and the application of computational science to the arts and humanities.

Daniel Araya: As the founder and managing director of Wolfram Research Europe, and strategic and international director of Wolfram Research, how would you describe your overall research interests?

Conrad Wolfram: Short answer: applying computation everywhere. That’s why we’ve taken to describing Wolfram as the company where “computation meets knowledge,” which I think encapsulates these objectives of pushing the envelope of doing, deploying and democratizing computation, including applying it to knowledge. Inventing new levels of automation and usability is as critical part of achieving those aims as is continuing to step up raw computational power. Computation is such a powerful concept and unleashing it with modern high-performance computing multiplies that power. It’s particularly exciting to see at the moment how broadly applicable our technology has become.

Araya: You’ve been a particularly strong proponent of math education reform through greater use of technology. What kinds of new affordances do you think technology makes possible for learning and education?

Wolfram: Clearly technology introduces new modalities of learning for all subjects — be they video, interactivity or geographical independence. Though it’s only just begun, individualized learning that enables students to discover at their own pace and at least to some extent set their own learning paths is clearly crucial too. More…

Photo © Megan Bearder

Jesse Drew’s work as a media artist, educator and writer seeks to challenge the complacent relationship between the public and new technologies. His research is centered on the theory and practice of alternative and community media and their impact on democratic societies. Viral media, blogging, Low-Power FM Radio, social computer networking, cable/satellite television, peer-to-peer computing, and on-line activism, coupled with an increasingly atomized civil society, have propelled these formerly marginal communications into positions of high importance. It is within this field that his work and research has been based over the last 30 years. His media work has been exhibited internationally and his writings have appeared in numerous publications and journals as well as several anthologies, such as Resisting the Virtual Life (City Lights Press), Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture (City Lights Press), At a Distance (MIT Press) and Collectivism After Modernism (University of Minnesota). He is currently associate professor of Cinema and Technocultural Studies at UC Davis. Before coming to UC Davis he headed the Center for Digital Media and was Associate Dean at the San Francisco Art Institute.

To read more about our conference and its themes, please visit our website.

On 4 April, Google[x] started Project Glass – a headset that has all of the capabilities of your wireless phone without the need to actually handle a phone. Voice command links to GPS navigation, calendars, texting abilities and more.

The project is only in its early stage but has already received a lot of buzz.

View the video:

Kiva Systems robots at a warehouse

Last week Amazon, the online retailer, announced it was buying a robot maker called Kiva Systems for $775 million in cash. Before you get excited that Amazon may offer a robot that can tuck you into bed at night and read Kindle books to you, this isn’t that kind of robot company. Instead, Kiva Systems’ orange robots are designed to move around warehouses and stock shelves.

Or, as the company says on its Web site, using “hundreds of autonomous mobile robots,” Kiva Systems “enables extremely fast cycle times with reduced labor requirements.”

In other words, these robots will most likely replace human workers in Amazon’s warehouses.

Is this one more step, a quickening step, toward the day when robots put many of us out of work? Most roboticists don’t see the coming robot invasion that way. More…

Image: Beth Hall/Bloomberg News via Bits

George Dyson

Introduction

In June of 1998, Edge published two pieces in an attempt to get at the big issues behind the news in the technology world: the then current Microsoft-Justice Department litigation. “Code“ was a conversation between science historian and third culture thinker George Dyson and myself. Dyson argued that “turning this into a political issue-Government versus Microsoft-is diverting attention from something much more significant: the growth of multi-cellular forms of organization on the Net. … The development of multi-cellular operating systems is a separate issue from the question of whether what Microsoft does is fair or legal in a business sense”.

“The analogy with biological organisms is highly tenuous—as Edge readers will be flooding your inbox to point out. It’s just the beginnings of something, in a faintly metazoan sense. The operating system used to be the system that operated a computer. Now it is becoming something else.”

“Now, there are moves afoot to get the same code-Windows, or Windows CE, or Windows NT or whatever, not to mention underlying protocols-running everywhere. Running on your desktop, running on your network, running in your car, running in your toaster, running on the credit card you have in your wallet-it’s all going to run this same code. And if it’s not Windows it’ll be something else. The thing is, it’s happening. Which is very much what’s gone on in the world of biology. In biology there is one operating system, and it’s the one we’re stuck with-the DNA/RNA operating system. All living organisms, with very rare exceptions, run that same system. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but …” More…