Technology impact on human condition

Christopher Greene of AMTV examines the influence of technology on the human condition and
what it means for the future of humanity.

http://www.youtube.com/user/cgreene34

#killswitch

Although 1984 and Brave New World are hardly the only great dystopian novels of
the 20th century (hi there, Margaret Atwood), George Orwell and Aldous Huxley may
well have shaped most English-language readers’ nightmare visions of the future. So
it makes sense to contrast Orwell’s world of constant war and government thought
control with Huxley’s drug- and entertainment-pacified society. You may have done
just that in a high-school paper, but the folks behind the documentary #KillSwitch
have created a graphic that examines the ways in which each author’s predictions
have come true over the past few years.

Just as the invention of the printing press ushered in the Enlightenment that tore
down the tyrannical walls of the dark ages and that ignited democratic revolutions
throughout the world, the internet currently provides the fuel for the revolutions in
the Middle East, threatens to upend autocratic rule on a global scale, and awakens
sleeping democracies. But...what would happen if the democratic Internet as we
know it, was instead controlled by a handful of Oligarchs? What if these same people
had the power and authority to shut the Internet down at their whim and discretion?
Film Director Ali Akbarzadeh explores the real possibilities of this nightmare
scenario in the highly anticipated, full length documentary '#killswitch.'

http://killswitchthefilm.com/



#killswitch the Documentary Trailer from Akorn Entertainment on Vimeo.

Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion incident

.

I got a copy of Max Headroom TV Series to remember old times, and I decided to check wikipedia about it, and I found something really interesting, the

Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion incident

Ohh shit yeahhh, and there is the original video for you

but first... let's see what the Chicago Tribune of November 30, 1987 said about it...

Dr. Who, the galaxy-roaming "Time Lord" of Channel 11-WTTW's series, came up against some real science a week ago Sunday night and lost. Somebody with a rare knack for electronics and a strange sense of humor took over WTTW's signal. For 88 seconds-- it must have seemed much longer --fans of Dr. Who watched Max Headroom, the high-tech TV caricature, gabbling unintelligibly and being spanked on his bare behind with a fly swatter.

Earlier the same joker had interrupted WGN-Channel 9's highlights of the Bears game with the ghost of Max Headroom. Both stations and the Federal Communications Commission are doing all they can to find this invader of the airwaves and correct him or her, not with a fly swatter.

The meeting of Dr. Who and the electronic pirate is a science-fiction fantasy in itself. To his doting fans, Dr. Who seems like a real person; to just about everybody, the video invader seems fictional-- a weirdo who uses amazing technological skill to perpetrate a silly stunt involving a parody of a parody, and now has technicians busily thinking up new ways to prevent such stunts. Scientific progress does seem to be more fun than it used to be.

This is the **Original Upload** - now with an Improved Quality!

During a broadcast of the Dr. Who episode "Horror of Fang Rock" on WTTW Chicago Channel 11, on Sunday November 22nd, 1987, at around 11:15pm, a Video "Pirate" wearing a Max Headroom mask broke into the signal and transmitted one of the weirdest, unauthorized things ever to hit the Chicago airwaves.

Earlier in the evening on the same day, during the Nine O'Clock News on Channel 9 (Yes, a completely different channel) the Max Headroom Pirate also broke in - although it was for a much shorter time and there was no audio.

Needless to say, Dan Rohn (the sports reporter) was a bit flustered.

And no, he was never caught.

My Take: The guy was probably high and/or drunk. Even with the audio distortion, his ramblings don't make much sense. Here's what I am able to make out:

"He's a freaky nerd!"

"This guy's better than Chuck Swirsky." [another WGN sportscaster at the time]

"Oh Jesus!"

"Catch the wave..." [reference to a Coke commercial at the time of which Max Headroom was a spokesperson]

"Your love is fading..."

"I stole CBS."

"Oh, I just made a giant masterpiece printed all over the greatest world newspaper nerds." [??]

"My brother [mother?] is wearing the other one."

"It's dirty..."

"They're coming to get me..."

(Note also that he appears to be wearing a [rude word deleted] on his middle finger.)

For more info you can visit:

http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/TOLMES/tns14
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_broadcast_signal_intrusion_incident
http://winstonengle.tripod.com/chicagowho/maxhead.htm
.

Halting State

.

Charlie Stross's latest novel Halting State starts out as a hilarious post-cyberpunk police procedural, turns into a gripping post-cyberpunk technothriller, and escalates into a Big Ideas book about the future of economics, virtual worlds, the nation state and policing, while managing to crack a string of geeky in-jokes, play off a heaping helping of gripping action scenes, and telling a pretty good love story.

Here's the gimmick: Halting State opens when a virtual bank in a distributed, multiplayer world is robbed by a horde of orcs who march in and clean it out of all its prestige items and other loot, a direct frontal assault on the game-economy's integrity. The losses run to millions, which triggers an insurance audit -- led by Elaine, who's not only a forensic accountant, but also a sword-swinging LARPer who likes her espionage alternate reality games. She contracts with Jack, an extraordinary gamespace hacker who's just been made redundant from his Edinburgh gaming company, to serve as her native guide, and finds herself working alongside of Sue, a lesbian mom detective-sergeant with the Edinburgh Polis who has been called to the scene with a report of a "robbery" and is now duty-bound to pursue the matter in compliance with the tenets set out in the ISO 9000 binder for police-stations.

I've been following Halting State since Charlie and I sat in a coffee shop in the Strand in London about five years ago and talked about a novel about a "multimillion dollar heist in gamespace." It's a sticky idea, and one that a lot of us are going to end up playing with over the years -- but it's also clearly one that Charlie has had an indecent amount of fun playing with. This is his tightest-plotted novel to date, a detective story with a million perfectly meshed moving parts, and a hundred magnificent surprises that had me gasping and shouting YES (to the general alarm of the guy in the next seat on my airplane).

This is the apotheosis of Stross -- a book chock-a-block with great ten-minutes-from-now technology (big hunks of the plot hinge on anonymized digicash, onion-routers, FreeNet crypto, and GNU Radio), RPG humor straight off Phil Foglio's old Dragon Magazine strip, and an impassioned series of valentines to Edinburgh, Charlie's adopted hometown.

Blend an Iain Banks thriller with a copy of Count Zero, throw in the Tokyo Games Show and a Bourne movie (and possibly a Bourne shell) and you've got something approximating Halting State. This is a book that will change the way you see the way the world works.

You can find a copy of this book in #bookz at undernet

.