It sounds like something out of Hollywood, but as of today, mass interception systems, built by Western intelligence contractors, including for ’political opponents’ are a reality. Today WikiLeaks began releasing a database of hundreds of documents from as many as 160 intelligence contractors in the mass surveillance industry.

But the WikiLeaks Spy Files are more than just about ’good Western countries’ exporting to ’bad developing world countries’. Western companies are also selling a vast range of mass surveillance equipment to Western intelligence agencies. In traditional spy stories, intelligence agencies like MI5 bug the phone of one or two people of interest. In the last ten years systems for indiscriminate, mass surveillance have become the norm. Intelligence companies such as VASTech secretly sell equipment to permanently record the phone calls of entire nations. Others record the location of every mobile phone in a city, down to 50 meters. Systems to infect every Facebook user, or smart-phone owner of an entire population group are on the intelligence market.

http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html

Spotify Becomes a Music Platform

A kid coding away in a basement, anywhere in the world, should be able to build apps within the most popular music subscription service in the world. Want to play your friends’ Facebook preferences? Create a party playlist automatically based on the people attending? Tag songs to locations so that others can stumble across them? They’re working on it.

Read full story @ http://evolver.fm

Brilliant analysis by Horace Dediu

Revolutionary User Interfaces

… the smart money should be focusing on the next shift. From the time frame in the diagram above, it’s clear that the cycle time between “Revolutionary User Interfaces” is shrinking. It’s been five years since multi-touch. Is the next “RUI” already here? Is Siri the next RUI? … 

My disruptive hypothesis for Siri is that it shifts the competition from platforms positioned on a device to a “coupled” super-platform deponent on broadband and infrastructural computing.

Just after collecting enough data and observing patterns in it that give us clarity, It looks like things are about to change all over again.

Read full post by Horace Dediu @ asymco.com 

Looks like Congress has declared war on the internet

That might make for the kind of internet that media and entertainment conglomerates would prefer, but it would clearly be a much diminished version of the internet we take for granted. 

Creating a firewall around the internet, just like China According to Techdirt, which has been a vocal critic of the bill and its predecessors, the new legislation would create a “Great Firewall of America,” similar to the firewall that the Chinese government uses to keep its citizens from accessing certain websites and servers that it deems to be illegal… 

The bottom line is that if it passes and becomes law, the new act would give the government and copyright holders a giant stick — if not an automatic weapon — with which to pursue websites and services they believe are infringing on their content. With little or no requirement for a court hearing, they could remove websites from the internet and shut down their ability to be found by search engines or to process payments from users. DMCA takedown notices would effectively be replaced by this nuclear option, and innocent websites would have to fight to prove that they deserved to be restored to the internet — a reversal of the traditional American judicial approach of being assumed innocent until proven guilty — at which point any business they had would be destroyed.

Read full story @gigaom.com

Technological innovation is the engine
that driving human social evolution

This framing of history has a long established pedigree.

In this interview Carlota Perez put some serious meat on the bones of this historical framework. She zooms in on the inevitable boom, bubble, bust economic cycles that are endemically linked to all paradigm-shifting technological innovation cycles, examining the risk-reward investment psychology that makes these synchronous boom-bust cycles inevitable.

Carlota makes the McLuhanesque point that the old guard, status-quo, business / government leaders will need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the ground frame of a new network driven less-is-more political economy.

Less-is-more obviously doesn’t cut it when you are the dominant kingpins overseeing a production / leverage based profit era.

Fred asks what business and government must do to move forward?
Carlota responses by framing the problem as: 

• an appalling lack of leadership
• the political delusion of returning to business as usual
• how to incentivize the financial industry out of the leveraging-casino and back into making legitimate capital allocation in the real economy via tax law behaviour shaping
• the need to regulate and incentivize a green shift
• the need for a global financial regulatory framework

Fred wilson asks who will provide the gateway leadership required to transition into this new way of living organizing consuming?
Carlota respondes with:
We need the new IT industrialists to take a political stand and push back against the business and political dinosaurs.

Don’t get me wrong I thing this is a brilliant historical framework and the long term gravity well of history is on her side.

But still this all seems like a very daunting and fuzzy challenge, much of which seems to fly in the face of mainstream American social and political memes.

Here is the powerpoint version

View more presentations from fredwilson

Sorry about the advertisement!
But I couldn’t find any other video source for this.

The Truthy Project Website

Has an interactive filter tool for looking at tweet patterns
graphically by user,  by @ or by # etc… .

What we are seeing here is the infancy of
Media Ecology - analytic tools for the rest of us.
Tools targeted at empowering organically networked communities to self police truthyness, accountability and reputation with the use of organic visualization tools. It will be interesting to see what visualization techniques surface to become the dominant mass culture memes for visualizing organic community distribution patterns.

- Media Ecology :
All the ways we influence each other through the use of communications technologies all the way up from natural language > smoke signals > radio > TV > internet

Discover Magazine 

Follow the “Truthy” Tweets to Find Twitter’s Political Spammers

Karen and her sister account @HopeMarie_25 are examples of political “astroturf,” fake Twitter accounts that create the illusion of a “grassroots” political movement. In the diagram above, the two accounts are connected by a very thick band, which indicates that Marie constantly re-tweeted everything Karen said. Together they sent out over 20,000 tweets in the last four months promoting the Twitter account and website of Republican congressional leader John Boehner.

Such messages were cataloged and analyzed by Indiana University’s Truthy project, which takes its name from Stephen Colbert’s concept of “ truthiness.” The goal of the project is to seek out propaganda and smear campaigns conducted via false Twitter accounts.

Read full story @ discovermagazine.com

Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views … Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority… . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation … at the hand of an intolerant society.

———— 1995 Supreme Court ruling in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission

Read the full post by Kee Hinckley @ Google+

“On the internet , nobody knows you’re a dog.”

See also - The 3D Web

A significant proportion of the content available on the Internet has a spatial dimension. This may be either explicit or implicit
… .  .

An increasing number of real-time sensor data feeds and an unprecedented amount of unstructured crowdsourced information now complements standard geospatial resources. This evolution is multifaceted, leveraging concepts such as “Internet of sensors,” the “Internet of things” and the geospatial Web.
… .

Despite this added versatility … . .

And, because the core Internet standards lack “native” spatial support, the Web is very limited in its ability to deliver geographical or location-based contextualization of most digital resources available.
… . .

This radical paradigm shift is not simply a technical one; more importantly it is a cognitive one, affecting different social and age groups and it creates the pre-conditions, at societal level, for true spatio-temporal enablement of the Internet.
… . .

the existing stack of Web 2.0 and GI technologies could be reused to interweave a “spatio-temporal fabric” on top of both existing and new Internet resources, to ensure spatio-temporal access, thus creating what we call the “Internet of Places.”

Read the full article @ directionsmag.com

 Read full post @ momentusmedia.com

Any successful Facebook Platform developer knows how you build a successful social app. Cater to 100% of the population. The symmetrical and emotional relationships on Facebook only assume that friends have “emotional glue” connecting each other. Unlike Twitter with “interest glue” or Linkedin with “professional glue”, on Facebook you can only assume people will share content that emotionally resonates with a significant percent of their friends and their friends with only click and re-share content that emotionally resonates with them.

The key here is “emotional resonance”. The only content that can spread far and wide on Facebook is content that resonates with basic human emotions and resonates with an extremely high percentage of the population. That leaves about 99% of content out. This content is often called “boring” or “niche” content. B2B business, niche causes, and niche interests are left out while Coke, puppies, Lady Gaga, and Farmville explode.

How Google changes things?
… …

Read full post @ momentusmedia.com

Still let us not forget
that both Facebook and Google are huge corporate profit machines.

Ultimately they aim to own and control the social graph, that immense Social/Web-Semantic-Database-Mapping that constitutes our societal group brain, the very soul of our emerging collective global consciousness, the long awaited NOOSPHERE!

Both Google and Facebook represent privately owned
NOOSPHERE BLACKHOLE VACUUMS !

They are corporate interlopers here to lay claim to the mother of all legacies, the historic sum total of all human effort and knowledge, the thousands of years of cumulative human social capital that rightfully belongs to the global human community as a whole.

Even worse they plan to shackle that mother of all legacies, that cumulative human social capital, as a beast of burden simple to fuel profits for their advertising platforms.

Why Software code is the crucial component of everything in the 21st century and needs to be free and open (Video) - Eben Moglen

Software is what the 21st century is made of

What steel was to the economy of the 20 th century
What steel was to the power of the 20 th century
What steel was to the politics of the 20 th century
Software is now
It is the curial building block
the component out of which everything else is made

and when I speak of everything - I mean of course:
FREEDOM
as well as Tyranny 
as well as Business as usual
as well as Spying on Everyone for free all the time

In other words the very composition of social life

The way it works or doesn’t work
For US
The way it works or doesn’t work
For those that Own
The way it works or doesn’t work
For those who Oppress  

All now depends on software!

 - Eben Moglen

For better or worse - from here on in
We are all living inside a giant organic SOFTWARE MATRIX

We citizens must either

Seize the software control panel
and demand Democratically Distributed Control

OR 

Preside over the collapse of democracy in the information age

More Eben Moglen on You Tube

Google finally nails Social

Meet the new Facebook

Google+

I think Facebook is in big trouble! 

It’s all about the interface

Facebook has had years to clean up their lame, hacked, excuse for an interface. Google, also known for it’s ghastly lame interface design skills, has finally got religion. The User interface religion that is!

Andy Hertzfeld one of Apple’s original designers was given free reign over Google’s new interface, which has lead to its Apple-esq appearance.

This is the missing ingredient, the magic sauce Google has been missing up until now! Google need to let this guy loose on everything Google does.

-

Still let us not forget
that both Facebook and Google are huge corporate profit machines.

Ultimately they aim to own and control the social graph, that immense Social/Web-Semantic-Database-Mapping that constitutes our societal group brain, the very soul of our emerging collective global consciousness, the long awaited NOOSPHERE!

Both Google and Facebook represent privately owned
NOOSPHERE BLACKHOLE VACUUMS !

They are corporate interlopers here to lay claim to the mother of all legacies, the historic sum total of all human effort and knowledge, the thousands of years of cumulative human social capital that rightfully belongs to the global human community as a whole.

Even worse they plan to shackle that mother of all legacies, that cumulative human social capital, as a beast of burden simple to fuel profits for their advertising platforms.

Why Software code is the crucial component of everything in the 21st century and needs to be free and open (Video) - Eben Moglen

Google’s quest to organize the world’s information will no longer include one of society’s most important and sensitive sources of data: our health records. The company announced this afternoon that Google Health will be closed forever and deleted in 18 months

Read the full post @ readwriteweb

Making medical records more transparent for patients as well as for basic health research needs is not particularly advantageous to the healthcare industry. It would cost money and expose all kinds of fraud, waste, corruption and medical mistakes that presently fly under the radar. Standardized heath record data is just one big liability and comes with extensive overhead for the whole industry.

Imagine hiring consultants to support any other life and death business process and receiving little or no detailed accounting of the processes, costs and outcomes executed on your behave and at your expense.

I understand the aversion to having the government playing a role, but seriously, this needs a government mandate. The government need to mandate some basic health data accounting rule on behave of patients. Customers, even the lowly patient has a basic right to see some proper accounting of what was performed, what was charged, and what were the outcomes. Not to mention all the lost research data that will, in the long run, cost many patients their lives and the healthcare system vast sums of money that society can ill afford.

We have basic accounting standards around financial accounting! (laughs and nickers abound)

It seem to me that the healthcare industry should have a fiduciary duty to provide effective health data accounting to patients. This seems at least as fundamental as having government mandated financial accounting rules in place. Proper health data accounting rules, after all, can effect the very survival of each and every citizen.

This is an ongoing divide and conquer strategy that the healthcare industry has long applied to all it’s customers. As individual patients we have little power to seize control over our own health data. 

We need government mandated accounting standards for all healthcare data!

Sadly even the great Google could not muster the toure de force required to take on this twisted industry!