Tag: internet

Creepers

Woah, that’s intense, in a really bad way. I wonder what hitchcock would do with a premise like this. The term you got owned is taking on new connotations, and is getting closer and closer to the meaning used by the creeps, which call their victims slaves.

One poster had already archived 200GB of webcam material from his slaves. “Mostly I pick up the best bits (funny parts, the ‘good’ sexual stuff) and categorize them (name, address, passwords etc.), just for funs’ sake,” he wrote. “For me I don’t have the feeling of doing something perverted, it’s more or less a game, cat and mouse game, with all the bonuses included. The weirdest thing is, when I see the person you’ve been spying on in real life, I’ve had that a couple of times, it just makes me giggle, especially if it’s someone with an uber-weird-nasty habit.”

A glut of Ninjas

i had no idea unemployment was so bad. social media maven is what someone calls himself when they are between jobs.

As a public service, I like to periodically check in on the number of self-proclaimed social media “gurus,” “ninjas,” “masters” and “mavens” on Twitter. Why? Well, it seems like an important metric, an indicator of something.

Whatever it means, this is one indicator that is most definitely on the rise. In January 2013, the number of Twitter users with “social media” as part of their bio has grown to epic proportions. The list now tops 181K – up from a mere 16K when we first started tracking them in 2009

NYC Internet Rescue

Rescueing NYC’s drowned Internet. copper being replaced with fiber optics.

km of copper is ruined not only in the cable vault at Broad Street, but also at 20 or so manholes around the area. Even worse, paper insulation in the copper wiring sucks water through the cabling from capillary action, destroying cabling even in dry areas. It’s “far too tedious, time consuming, and not effective of a process to try and put this infrastructure back together,” so Verizon’s taking the opportunity to rewire with fiber optics instead. Service has been restored to FiOS customers for over a week — unlike copper, fiber optics aren’t damaged by the water. As part of this process, crews have already pulled fiber up the major corridors — including Water, Broad, and Pearl Streets — to ultimately connect the fiber network to buildings.

Is information or ignorance stronger?

In the Web 2.0 age, when many see 100s of articles every day, are we more informed than previous generations were?

this is fascinating. i especially liked this tidbit about how high culture used to be disseminated:

In cigar-making factories in New York City, lectors sat on high stools reading Shakespeare, Marx, Engels, Darwin, Hugo, Balzac, and Tolstoy as cigar rollers performed their work.

Moving past legacy “colleges”

we graduated over 23000 students from 190 countries. Peter and I taught more students AI than all AI professors in the world combined. This one class had more educational impact than my entire career. I won’t be able to teach 200 students again, in a conventional classroom setting.

education getting disrupted while it is distracted with nonsense like building sports temples. excellent news.