wwwetNetworks

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

A wall of lava lamps in a San Francisco office currently helps keep about 10% of the Internet’s traffic secure. Internet security company Cloudflare uses a video feed of the lava lamps as one of the inputs to the algorithms they use to generate large random numbers for encryption. The concept dates back to a 1996 patent for a product called LavaRand. The idea is that using a chaotic, unpredictable source as a seed for random number generators makes it much harder for an adversary to crack your encryption. 

With lava lamps, a lot of that chaos comes from the fluid dynamics involved – without perfect knowledge of thousands of variables, it would be impossible to simulate the lava lamp wall and get the same outcome as the real one – but there’s also randomness that comes from the measurement. People walking by, shifts in lighting, and random fluctuations of individual pixels all help make the video feed unpredictable. For those interested in the details of how Cloudflare uses their lava lamps, the company explains things for both technical and non-technical readers. You can also check out Tom Scott’s video for a good overview. (Image and video credit: T. Scott; submitted by Jean H.)

[prostheticknowledge]

Die With Me

Social Messaging app by Dries Depoorter and David Surprenant only lets you communicate when your smartphone battery is at 5%:

The chat app you can only use when you have less than  5% battery.

Die together in a chatroom on your way to offline peace.

Official website can be found here

[notational]

Students are often surprised (and even angered) to learn the degree to which they are digitally redlined, surveilled, and profiled on the web and to find out that educational systems are looking to replicate many of those worst practices in the name of “efficiency,” “engagement,” or “improved outcomes.” Students don’t know any other web—or, for that matter, have any notion of a web that would be different from the one we have now. Many teachers have at least heard about a web that didn’t spy on users, a web that was (theoretically at least) about connecting not through platforms but through interfaces where individuals had a significant amount of choice in saying how the web looked and what was shared. A big part of the teaching that I do is to tell students: “It’s not supposed to be like this” or “It doesn’t have to be like this.” The web is fraught with recommender engines and analytics. Colleges and universities buy information on prospective students, and institutions profile students through social media accounts.7 Prospective employers do the same. When students find out about microtargeting, social media “filter bubbles,” surveillance capitalism, facial recognition, and black-box algorithms making decisions about their future—and learn that because so much targeting is based on economics and race, it will disproportionately affect them—their concept of what the web is changes.

Pedagogy and the Logic of Platforms | EDUCAUSE

This essay by Chris Gilliard is so good!

(via notational)

[notational]

Is the internet dead? This is not a metaphorical question. It does not suggest that the internet is dysfunctional, useless or out of fashion. It asks what happened to the internet after it stopped being a possibility. The question is very literally whether it is dead, how it died and whether anyone killed it.

Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead? - Journal #49 November 2013 - e-flux

Some students involved in the theatre department have been reading this essay. Seems pertinent to my recent feelings in terms of Tumblr, Vimeo, and a great many other internet facets that used to thrill me……but now, somehow feel drained of almost any vitality. So much of the “possibility” has turned into advertising and updates of what used to be referred to as YouTube poop.

(via notational)

[millennial-review-deactivated20]

[iamdanw]

He types “do blacks…” into Google. “Look at that. I haven’t even hit a button and it’s automatically populated the page with answers to the query: ‘Do blacks commit more crimes?’ And look, I could have been going to ask all sorts of questions. ‘Do blacks excel at sports’, or anything. And it’s only given me two choices and these aren’t simply search-based or the most searched terms right now. Google used to use that but now they use an algorithm that looks at other things. Now, let me look at Bing and Yahoo. I’m on Yahoo and I have 10 suggestions, not one of which is ‘Do black people commit more crime?’ “And people don’t question this. Google isn’t just offering a suggestion. This is a negative suggestion and we know that negative suggestions depending on lots of things can draw between five and 15 more clicks. And this all programmed. And it could be programmed differently.”

Google, democracy and the truth about internet search (via iamdanw)

[thenewinquiry]

“Whenever we interact with software/websites/businesses built using machine learning systems, we provide data that trains and/or improves those systems. The frequently quoted line that “if you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer–you’re the product being sold” should be amended: you’re no longer just the product, you’re also the unpaid laborer. If we understand work as any human activity that generates wealth, and our interactions with machine learning systems as incremental contributions to the means by which companies make money, then we are in effect laboring without compensation nearly every time we use the Internet. Machine learning systems are factories of production, and we are always working on improving the factory.”

The Networked Assembly Line 

[bobvanvliet]

In India, you can get a Facebook-only data plan for $2.50 a year (the cheapest full data plans cost about $10 a year.) In the Philippines, Facebook-only plans cost a fifth as much as data plans.

Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet (via bobvanvliet)

[strangebiology]

Prices of human remains found for sale on Facebook. Graphic by Monica Serrano for National Geographic’s article “Human Skulls Are Being Sold Online, But is it Legal?”

[wwwetnetworks]

[wwwetnetworks]

Why I Am Teaching a Course Called “Wasting Time on the Internet” - The New Yorker

The vast amount of the Web’s language is perfect raw material for literature.

[skygenders]

Looking up Pokemon Go news is fucking wild 

Sources in order: (X) (X) (X) (X) (X) (X) (X) (X) (X)

[theslaybymic]

There’s finally a photo filtering app that won’t whitewash people of color

When Alesha Randolph wants to post a selfie on Instagram, she knows there’s only one filter that is flattering to her skin tone: Sierra. Yes, Instagram filters can work against people of color.  But Randolph, a senior designer at Vox, and her fellow designers and engineers were tired of accepting it as a given. So they developed Tonr, a photo-editing desktop app built to enhance and affirm nonwhite skin tones.

Follow @this-is-life-actually

[sourcedumal]

@mo-agx lookit!

[marykayultra]

Bless

[failedprojects]

Downloading is essential to almost any kind of engagement with the www, whether code is sent into a browser window or files are delivered to a desktop. To download is to take from the network and to navigate the choreography of circulation itself; when we download, we extend the file’s narrative—its time-stamped presence spanning any number of geo-located servers—into the intimate space of the hard drive. The download is a prerequisite to more local activities, like scanning, printing, dispersing, and archiving. Downloading can transform a public post into private property; to download may be political.

Rhizome (via failedprojects)

[notational]

One might query any contemporary artist and, as a kind of litmus test, ask the following series of questions: Do you think of yourself as primarily working “on” the digital or primarily “within” it? Is the computer incidental to your work, a tool like any other? Or is the computer at the heart of what you do? Shall art orient itself toward the digital? Or shall art merely live inside the digital, while concerning itself with other topics entirely? Digital aesthetics can refer to the “medium” of the digital, that is, all the tools and technologies that populate contemporary life. At the same time, digital aesthetics can refer to context, that is, a “digital context” or a “net condition”—the latter being the title of an influential 1999 net art exhibition at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. Artists have their own particular ideas about digital aesthetics, of course, as do computer scientists. Sometimes these ideas overlap and sometimes they don’t. Can digitality be beautiful? How hopeless a question to pursue: it depends on so many complicated things, not least of them the definitions of digitality and beauty.

Jodi’s Infrastructure | e-flux (via notational)

[jacobwren]

Yes, absolutely. Today’s memory theatre is the internet. I deliberately avoid broaching the question of the internet in Memory Theatre, but it’s what the whole thing is about. The difference — and it is crucial — between the internet and the memory theatre is the difference between Gedächtnis and Erinnerung, between an external, mechanized memory and an internal, living recollection. What has happened — largely without anyone noticing it — is that we have outsourced memory onto the internet. Everything is there, googleable, but not in our heads. Is this a good thing? I don’t know. It is certainly an odd thing, given that for several thousand years all education has ever meant has been the cultivation of a trained memory. We have somehow abandoned that in the name of forgetfulness. So, yes, we have chosen to drink the waters of Lethe and enter our private Hades. Literature can at the least remind us of that choice.

Simon Critchley (via jacobwren)

[whatshouldwecallme]

How I spend my free time after work