Sources:

http://www.darkreading.com/security/app-security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221601252&cid=ref-true

http://techdirt.com/articles/20091114/1839216938.shtml

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081109/0144342776.shtml

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090714/microsofts-bing-problem-google-is-just-fine/

http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/06/26/the-biggest-problem-facing-bing-loyalty-to-google/

One: code is law
In the way that this book is not written so much for the tech-savvy but for more of a less technologically inclined. It begins with a similar story detailing different states and constitutions being forced on other emerging nations with no real idea why a constitution works for the US. In particular is the case of Russia, the loss of Communism and the emergence of a kind of libertarianism. “Power didn’t disappear – it shifted from the state to the Mafiosi, themselves often created by the state.” Lessig then leaves the metaphor to continue with a brief talk of cyberspace. Often seen as a more extreme version of a freedom from control (gov’t, anarchy, decentralized power etc.). One difference is that this cyber society was “built from the bottom-up” and self-ordering. So then, is the overarching question put forth: “Why was cyberspace incapable of regulation?” In a 1984-esqe way, the word itself denotes a “perfect control” while many celebrate its “perfect freedom.” The unique perspective of the author as a lawyer allows him to look at cyberspace and wonder if it can have its own control. As far as a constitution is a framework for the workings of a government, there is a constitution being laid down with guidance from commerce and gov’t, which will make cyberspace control easy. As the lengthy chapter ends, it delves into a look at understanding how the code that regulates is not laws and legal means but rather through the hardware and software that the Internet is built on.

Two: four puzzles from cyberspace.
This chapter picks up with examples from a game, in which it is suggested that some people, mainly from an older generation, see the Internet as only a source of information and not as having a life of its own. It is tough for someone who doesn’t know what they are missing to realize what they are missing, so this book serves as a good bridge between the printed word and virtual reality. “Second Life” is a game that is very literal for the readers, it functions as essentially a small part of the Internet Cosmos but is a place where its inhabitants have a second life digitally. The first story is about destroying the assumptions that we make in real life, that things have definite and persistent qualities. Things created in virtual reality can have different qualities attached to them. A book can fly (so can people too in Second Life), and death isn’t really death in our real world sense. Other things are the same, people communicate through typed words and speak to each other, get mad and work together. It also shows how code can change rules, like changing code so that a product is only usable by the person who purchases the product/service. Story two is largely about the idea that things do not exist locally in one place. A website about Indiana may be located on servers in Denmark. It begins to show how typical thinking fails to account for this property, especially in regards to the legal system. If a US citizen steals from someone is Europe on a trip, the person is subject to Europe’s laws. In other words, the states’ sovereignty is a fundamental concept that does not exist fully in cyberspace. The third story is about privacy, something we take for granted in most real life cases; it can be destroyed by a clever Internet detective when a person posts in an online community. Because of the way the site is coded, it was not hard in the example to figure out the person’s identity that was posting the stories. The last story is about the reach of a government’s hands into the lives of those on the Internet. We enjoy many freedoms in the US; that if someone from law enforcement searches your house, they need a warrant. On the Internet, a computer can be searched without most users ever knowing and left undamaged afterword. Is it okay for this kind of search to happen without any suspicion? These all serve to open up the readers mind to how the Internet can work. It also parallels ideas that some might not understand, that we work towards nebulous goals in real life too that we cannot touch, just as people in cyberspace. “Is freedom inversely related to the efficiency of the available means of surveillance?”

Three: is-ism: is the way it is the way it must be
Much of our vocabulary doesn’t apply directly to language found in our laws: “nature, essence, innate.” One of the main points is that right now “there is certainly a way that cyberspace is.” There is no single thing that defines what the Internet it. Many architectures exist within the Internet but the Internet could be made up of many more in the future. The Internet is reflexive and it can mirror the values of the people that are its inhabitants. So if the people that are using a certain network need a high level of control to make sure people aren’t illegally using the Internet, that sort of network would need a fair bit of authentication so that the network operator will know and track everything a user does on the network. Likewise if the network administrator feels that the Internet is not a place that should be regulated, then that network would probably have a lot less authentication. This is inherent to the bias of the design of a network. We use a control to get to the Internet everyday: TCP/IP. It is a set of agreed upon rules that all computers accessing the network will abide. At another level, the protocols require very little authentication, I can still be on the Internet posing as a middle-aged man or as a girl and be neither. This is very different from the real world where we enjoy a different sort of authentication. When I go the bank to cash a check and it is filled out with a woman’s name, and I am clearly male, the teller would naturally ask for ID. The ID is a multi-level authentication, my name would match their records and my picture would match, and most likely in most states, would also have a signature. Put succinctly “…there is no simple way to know who someone is, where they are from, and what they’re doing.”

Four: architecture of control
The original design wasn’t done with control in mind. So people could be anonymous because it wasn’t important to regulate the internet. Part of the problem too, is that most objects in life can be replicated. The same holds true for credentials, I can forge headers in email and make the receiver think they are from the government. I can make my computers IP address appear to be the same as any users (almost). To this end, we have credentials, drivers licenses and passports both give  “…a relatively high level of confidence about the facts asserted…”  that the information is about you. It is true that everyone would benefit from better authentication to prove who a user is on the Internet. We could better control our bank accounts and more efficient business. The problem is that these enable some to exert more control if the architectures are designed in a particular way.  Essentially the Internet was designed to be the way it is today the “network philosophy pushes complexity to the edge of the network – to the applications that run on the network, rather than they network’s core.” This keeps the Internet efficient and free to route traffic versus having to code new versions of the Internet to build things in like IM capability and new media features. It is easy to forget that many different computers are handling our data as it moves end-to-end and thus, can be seen by many eyes. With business looking to capitalize more and more on the Internet, industries like marketing want to link behavior and identity to specific people. There is also growing concern of not just privacy but of how information about users is stored. It would be catastrophic if someone managed to download a list of unencrypted users and passwords from Amazon.com. But the data needs to be in a database (or many) to make it easy for the user to not have to re-type all their purchasing data when shopping. One easy solution to some of the problems is encryption except that it makes things harder to regulate while keeping more inaccessible to prying eyes.

Five: regulating code
Technological advances in regards to Internet commerce have also helped the government with their regulation. One way to help agencies like law enforcement is the CALEA to design one type of network that can be more easily monitored by the government. In this indirect way, the code is being regulated because of the law passed. Another avenue being pursued is through encryption with a twist, a backdoor that the government can use to look at the data being sent. They can regulate encryption systems and indirectly regulate the information people are sending. This is purely because of the way the Internet is designed. No system is perfect but through some laws with limited scope, the bad behaviors and crimes can be better weeded out though these actions. Also introduced by the government is digital ID’s that provide a sort of personal database where only the needed information is provided to a website. Along with this idea is also a visual of the citizen to better facilitate traceability. Then the chapter moves to a sort of summary of how these codes differ, the code of law and the code of the Internet. The problems lie in that we have dealt with security on the web for a drop in the bucket compared to private property, Internet code has about 200 years of catching up to do. The chapter moves on to Z-theory that the terror will incite change, just like the patriot act after 9/11 the increase in incidents involving viruses and security will spurn radical change. As these changes are put in place though, so does the ability to subvert the good intentions. Thus, “we must ask of every exercise of power: Why?” Ideally this works, but as we all have had some exposure to political lobbyists and special interest groups, sometimes people ask question’s a lot later after acting.

Creating and organizing a movie is a complex process. As Marcie Begleiter demonstrates, storyboarding is an essential process to the visualization of media and new media. She works at getting the audience more involved than I expected from a lecturer. She has fine art, liberal arts, film, storyboarding, and communication background. She also talks a bit about how she had her fortunes turn from painting sets to storyboarding and film training early in her career. Opportunity met need with her basic skill set.

Her experience with multidiscipline helped her many times in her career, including her current job in developing an art design school curriculum. Its simple, the story telling that comes from boards has its roots in drawing, spoken word, and songs. She delves into forcing students to describe a movie with no sound and describe what you are seeing in filmic language. She also points out that light travels faster than sound, and we are in part, firstly driven by the image.

Her slides start with the history of storyboards. It was hard to discover because most studios track the costs of a movie and not the art direction of the film from storyboards. They even begin to show the beginnings of mise-en-scene of how the director is going to create the feel of the movie. These early storyboards also served as early location scouting to find the proper places to shoot. Some do quick sketches of highlight, shadow, and mid-tone to show the shots of the film. Others draw more of a “visual metaphor.” The pictures are even less detailed in some but are showing what is to be emphasized in the frame with the objects scaled. The scene in Mildred Pierce shows how the camera is directing the focus in the frame from the ocean to Mildred. It is also a nonverbal queue that happens so fast in transition but greatly aids in storytelling. This is something that can be pre-planned so the direction can be maintained and not lost when in actual production.

She also shows more of a keyframe versus a storyboard, a very detailed shot with a lot of depth and feeling versus a thumbnail sketch. She explains how the eyes are led through the frame. She describes also, Alfred Hitchcock, and the simplicity that show a more logistical point of view. The frames are largely devoid of small details and show more movement in frame which was key to Hitchcock’s success as the characters act in the frames but the viewers also feel they are in the movie themselves. She points out a wider shot of a man hanging at the Statue of Liberty and it shows that attention of negative space; it sucks in the viewers to also feeling like they are less of a character and more of an actor. She really helps to show how varied storyboard are because they are a reflection of the director, less of a 2D representation of frames and more of a capturing of 4D ideas.

This is where uTP comes in. uTP is a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol which is designed to be network friendly. The current implementation often causes interference with other applications, which is the main reason why ISPs try to slow it down, or even stop it altogether. uTP aims to solve this problem.

While I somehow think that an unstated reason to disallow bittorrent traffic on ISP is a failure to monetize the traffic, bittorrent is the most efficient way to spread files among peers. This newer protocol aims to reduce congestion, one of the main complaints among ISP’s in relation to bittorrent. This is a great step in the right direction. Imagine how easy it would be to have a boxtop DVR provided by the cable provider and it would take a user’s season passes and steadily download content among peers. Only in this case the peers are the cable network subscribers. It would be an efficient way to spread content out and it would be a lot cheaper for the user than buying box sets of tv series or movies in stores.

This scalable resource pool would be accessed by wireless monitors, most likely paired with wireless power as well, which would give users the option of detaching the monitors to become tablet computers with full desktop-like access to the hubs resources. Kids could be given more of the graphics pool to play their games; adults could have more of the Storage pool to keep the families videos safe and those files tagged to keep them very redundant within the Envi locally and perhaps also stored online and all managed by the Envi’s interface. It would replace the current OS layer as the new low level layer between the hardware, with virtual OS instances that can be run on the monitors. There will probably also be some wireless USB (since it seems like it will last forever) variant built into the monitors that will control an input device. In terms of protocols, there could also be monitor connectivity to the home Envi through a cloud environment so in effect the monitor is the new laptop of today which would drop a lot of weight, especially if the user is near a wireless power source. For times when offline access is needed there can be a peripheral that is a base, with a cpu, storage, and battery.

This future from today forward is many lines that will intersect in some form.  It is happening today with technology like Intel’s Larrabee GPGPU’s that use chips rather than graphics cards to render graphics. There is also a startup that just released a product called Power Mat, a type of wireless power that requires a very close proximity between the pad and gadgets.

So the future will have users back at dummy terminals, only with smarter brains behind them expanding with our growing digital environmental needs.

It’s the modern version of the timesharing model from the 1960s, which was eventually killed by the rise of the personal computer.

In the way that much comes full circle, so does computing for the very trustful. Storing all your data on the web requires a fairly high level of trust. While a hacker, fire, or flood can destroy one’s data at home, adding a new level of security, personnel, and legalities to storing all one’s data online is overshadowed by the hype surround Cloud Computing. In the end it will come down to convenience vs. security. As systems mature perhaps more levels of encryption will exist between the user and the cloud.

One more recent example of the pitfalls of Cloud Computing was created by Danger, Inc. a company owned by Microsoft. It is behind the scenes of T-Mobile’s Sidekick data. On October 1, 2009 there was an outage for all Sidekick users. The problem, all user data wasn’t stored on the phones themselves but on Dangers’ servers. At first it was stated that all user data was lost forever, but to date some user data has been restored with the promise that most will be restored.

We are mapping the last unchartered territory—the last mile—between the front door and where you are going. We are building the foundation for an indoor location-based services market.

Their market model is to make money off of people that want to add “premium content” such as detailed conference information added to a hotel location. This can lead to a real-time immersion for the user, especially when paired with other technology like an iPhone and Google Maps. While this is great for people who love to push the boundaries of technology and people who don’t love to get lost, there is one glaring drawback: The assumption that everyone who uses this technology will use it to get from point A to B. In the case of terrorism and theft, a technology that cases a location would prove invaluable and would save the less savory elements of society from capture.