Category: Group A

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In class on Monday, we talked about the amount of our data that is stored by private companies on private company servers. Numerous private organizations have all kind of data on numerous elements such as our gender, shopping habits, internet history, and even in many cases our private messages. This array of your personal information is a goldmine to marketers, sales people, and many others across the globe, hence why companies like Facebook and Google build such complex, articulate products and let us use them, in most cases, totally free of charge.

Thinking about our personal data and its importance, I was reminded of the Equifax hack that was reported earlier this week. Equifax is a major credit reporting bureau whose database was comprised over the summer and reported in the news earlier this week. 143 million people’s social security numbers and dates of birth were leaked. The severity of this hack cannot be understated.

As you can see in the graphic, this hack is one of the largest recent ones, but certainly not as bad as Yahoo. However, the nature of this breach of security is particularly severe because of the type of personal data being stolen. Your social security number and birth date aren’t just passwords that can be changed when compromised, they follow you for life. Hackers can just sit on the information until the protection runs out, before putting your data to work. Also, numerous bloggers/writers have expressed concern that Equifax will attempt to get subscribers to pay up for more credit protection in a year’s time in spite of the looming presence of this threat.

This breach of private security on a massive scale should have us all thinking about the privacy and security of our data. While it’s nice to get great targeted articles from Facebook and awesome access our bank accounts on the go, we must remember that these companies must be held to a high standard when keeping our data secure. Particularly as we enter an age where participation in the hyper-digitalization of personal data becomes more and more compulsory.

Sources:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-equifax-hack-bad-for-them-worse-for-us/

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-equifax-compares-to-biggest-hacks-of-all-time-chart-2017-9

Posted from My blog by Will H.

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Roy Rosenzweig in Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors and Hackers, mentions how very little is really known to the public, about the effects and the role ARPA played in the Vietnam war.

Rosenzweig mentions Igloo White but yet what was it? Igloo White was formed by yet another secret group of 45 scientists, named the Jasons or The Jason Division all under the pay-roll and influence of ARPA. Apparently, the Jasons were very arrogant and egotistic, yet anti-war and “peaceniks” as Lukasik (deputy director and later director of ARPA), himself, characterises them.

However, they were still the ones who created the idea of Igloo White and who therefore caused all the ‘super-excessive’ bombings on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia. The Jasons thinking was that by bombing every truck that would pass through the trail, they would lessen the supply of the Viet Con and therefore enable them to fight. However, the bombings continued with no results whatsoever and the Jasons came up with the idea of Igloo White, the invisible wall, built with sensors.

All the sensors that Rosenzweig writes about in his article, were thrown out of airplanes one by one by soldiers, as can be seen below.

What makes this more bone-chilling is the fact that whatever these sensors could do was controlled by computers and monitors from the US command center in Thailand, basically giving the US soldiers their first video-game-like war toy.

This idea of an invisible fence that could control, sense and also attack any movement, motion, etc. was extremely interesting and innovative, especially for its time. Of course, as in any other case, it slowly evolved from badly made sensors, that would need Nickel batteries to operate and most likely break right on landing, to a better, newer and more expensive version, that would even come with a vegetation camouflage version.

Where the Jasons and everyone else went very wrong, was that any type of technology, especially when used for war, can completely sidetrack. Igloo White was the first of its kind to show the world how powerful warfare (and the US) can be. However, the US had spent $1 billion per year, for an operation that in the end did not show any actual results, and the Air Force definitely did not want to admit its defeat. The monitors didn’t categorise vehicles, which meant that any type of movement sensed or vehicle that passed through the trail, whether that was an animal or an actual war truck would be blown up to pieces. According to the Air Fore, they managed to destroy 75,000 enemy trucks, yet what they didn’t know was that the CIA had estimated that there were only about 6,000 enemy trucks in all of North Vietnam, so what were all the rest 69,000 “vehicles”? And those sensors, now mines, that were left in the ground have killed thousands of people throughout the years since they were planted. This is another example of how man-made technology can turn against the human kind.

 

Bibliography 

Novak, Matt. “How the Vietnam War Brought High-Tech Border Surveillance to America.” Paleofuture, Paleofuture.gizmodo.com, 24 Sept. 2015, paleofuture.gizmodo.com/how-the-vietnam-war-brought-high-tech-border-surveillan-1694647526.

“War by Any Means: The Story of DARPA.” New Scientist, www.newscientist.com/article/2125337-war-by-any-means-the-story-of-darpa/.

 

Posted from DIG101 by Danae

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Since the introduction of the battlefield radio in WWI coordinating artillery strikes to drone strikes on the modern battlefield, war has changed substantially over the past 100 years thanks to rapid military innovation. Air warfare has been utilized since the first planes were developed and, even though the amount of firepower they can deliver has changed, the use of airpower has remained constant through today. With the development of computers and their installation in the military, airstrikes have become incredibly accurate and deadly. In the world today, the United States utilizes computers and technology to coordinate troop movements, dial airstrikes, gather intelligence and a wide array of other things to gain an edge in war.

Drones are remotely controlled, unmanned aircraft that survey a target gathering information about a possible enemy target. The information collected by the drone is interpreted by military officials and then used to decide if the target should be destroyed by an airstrike or surgically by a ground team. More specifically, military drones which have been in use since the CIA introduced them in 2000 for strictly surveillance purposes but the military began to attach missiles to them after the September 11th attacks. The first drone strike used for a kill mission rather than a surveillance mission was February 2002 in an attempt to eliminate high-ranking Taliban members. None of this would be possible without computer involvement in the piloting of the drone, collecting information, analyzing video data and then using guided weapons to destroy an enemy target. Computers in the military have increased the quality of information collected, improved weaponry and are continuing to advance every aspect of military technology.

Sources:

• Photo sources are linked to the pictures themselves.
• “A Brief History of Drones” by John Sifton. The article is linked here.

Posted from My blog by Charlie

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Rosenweig’s article “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet” clearly mapped the transition from the internet being a government funded technology used primarily for military purposes to a popularized medium to foster communication. I was particularly intrigued by the internet’s transition from a tool for bureaucrats to a part of everyday culture because I feel like this process has been reversed in modern times as exemplified by social media.

Sixdegrees.com emerged in 1997 and is considered the first form of social media. The website allowed members to list any connections (family, friends, colleagues, etc.) in order see and communicate with people from around the world that they were separated from by six degrees of freedom or less. This website and those that followed gave rise to blogging and many new forms of social media. Six Degrees or more modern examples such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were originally created for the general population but have become an integral part of bureaucratic processes. Not only is it nearly impossible to log onto social media sites without being informed of your friend’s political opinions, these platforms have become a tool for bureaucrats themselves.

Barack Obama was the first President to ever issue a tweet. His successor, Donald Trump has taken it a step further as his time in the White House has been coined as the “Twitter Presidency.” Not only was Twitter a key component to his strategy during the election, it continues to be a way that he communicates with the public. Twitter and other forms of social media have changed strategies of political campaigns and what it means for a President to go public. This is just one example of how social media’s purpose has been expanded into the bureaucratic world.

Posted from Intro to Digital Studies by Kat

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Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Posted from DIG 101 by Ellis C

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In The Forgotten Kaleidoscope Craze in Victorian England, Farman mentions how technologies go through this journey of “early adoption to mass adoption to domestication”. And in many ways, that is what we see happening every day around us. However, Farman also mentions a few other inventions that followed the kaleidoscope, and one of them being the phenakistiscope.

 

The phenakistoscope showed similarities with the kaleidoscope, not in terms of outcome, material and production, but in the sense of how it was a creation of “new technology” that combined a variety of creations, ideas, theories and previous inventions.

In 1832, Joseph Plateau and his sons launched to the public, what is seen above, the phenakistiscope. This was the very first device that portrayed an illusion of a continues flow of motion. Similarly to any of today’s technological advancements, when one gadget inspires the next, Plateau was able to combine the works of scientists and inventions that were created before his. He was influenced and helped by the primary works of Greek mathematician Euclid on the motion principle, Newton’s work that followed after that and Michael Faraday’s  Wheel, which basically gave him the idea behind the construct of his invention, seen below.

The Phenakistisope was consisted of two disks basically aligned one on top of the other or on the same surface. The first disk one saw, was normally blank or as it later appeared with smaller decorations on it, had cuts or slots around its perimeter, and the second disk had small drawings in continuous action (imagine a short film made out of consecutive photos) drawn around the surface each in its own “designated” area. When one would hold the phenakistiscope in the mirror (as is seen in the first picture), he or she would look through the cuts of the first disk, the drawing of the second disc would create an illusion of movement.

Finally, like with the Kaleidoscope, the phenakistiscope became a great success and gained popularity in the market. But of course, like with any other invention and technological advancement, the phenakistiscope was shortly replaced with a newer, better version of it known as the Zoetrope created by William George Horner.

 

 

 

Bibliography

Phenakistoscope, courses.ncssm.edu/gallery/collections/toys/html/exhibit07.htm.Cotterill,

Chris. “Animation Geek.” Early Pioneer: Joseph Plateau, 1 Jan. 1970, animationgeek.blogspot.com/2011/01/early-pioneer-joseph-plateau.html.

“Phenakistiscope.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Sept. 2017, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenakistiscope.

 

 

Posted from DIG101 by Danae