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Security experts said they believe that government spies bypassed Google and Yahoo and targeted the fiber-optic cables that connect their data centers.

#internet #flaws #NSA #surveillance

The analysis of phone call and e-mail logs for foreign intelligence purposes adds to the growing body of knowledge about the agency’s access to private information, prompting concern from lawmakers.

#NSA #social media #surveillance #New York Times

TechCrunch recently reported that Facebook is in talks to acquire Titan Aerospace, a drone-production company with a view to flying 11,000 of them over Africa.

Technology giants like Google and Facebook are expanding efforts to control more of the world's Internet backbone, raising tensions with telecom companies over who runs the Web

#google #control #internet infrastructure

Like a creepy digital tap on the shoulder

#surveillance #armour #spalder #James Bridle

These slides contain excerpts from an April 2013 National Security Agency presentation detailing signal surveillance techniques and successes. They reveal that the NSA and its British counterpart, Global Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), use a Google-specific tracking cookie to pinpoint targets for hacking.

How the NSA piggybacks onto the tracking behaviors of commercial companies to enable exploitation and surveillance.

#NSA #cookies

Meritocracy and entrepreneurialism reinforce a closed system of privilege. It also reveals the threadbare nature of digital exceptionalism, which incorporates social consciousness and intellectual discussion and positions tech as a solution to an array of difficult problems.

#silicon valley #entrepreneurship #feminism #digital elitism

#surveillance #private company #cosumer data

"Human life is defined by its social character, while a society's structural and superstructural elements specify the uses to be made of an environment, population densities to be maintained, and the like. Since material conditions are, therefore, always culturally mediated, Marxists reject integrationist theories that focus on such things as population pressure and subsistence stress.

Joseph Tainter (34)

#joseph tainter #the collapse of complex societies #readings

Complexities is generally understood to refer to such things as the size of a society, the number and distinctiveness of its parts, the variety of specialized social roles that it incorporates, the number of distinct social personalities present, and the variety of mechanisms for organization these into a coherent, functioning whole.

Joseph Tainter (23)

#joseph tainter #the collapse of complex societies #readings

A society has collapsed when it displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.

Joseph Tainter (4)

#joseph tainter #the collapse of complex societies #readings

"Human history as a whole has been characterized by a seemingly inexorable trend towards higher levels of complexity, specialization, and sociopolitical control, processing of greater quantities of energy and information, formation of ever larger settlements, and development of more complex and capable technologies."

Joseph Tainter - (3 The Collapse of Complex Societies)

#joseph tainter #the collapse of complex societies #readings

Salvador has experienced a surge in violent crime, chaotic traffic, and the metamorphosis of once-elegant seaside districts into crime-ridden areas.

'Anthropological place' is formed by individual identities, through complicities of language, local references, the unformulated rules of living know-how; non-place creates the shared identity of passengers, customers of Sunday drivers.

Marc Augé (101)

#places to non-places #marc augé #readings

"The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of 'places of memory', and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position."

Marc Augé (78)

#places to non-places #marc augé #readings

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