Google, Power & The Networked Society

[reggie]

This presentation begins slowly, but it is well worth watching it through to the end. It's great to finally see an academic sticking his neck out like this by accurately criticising the Technological Society currently being built. While I doubt we'll see anyone in US academia joining in, perhaps more representing non-US academia will speak-up.

"It does not require enormous skill or political
acumen to realize that if you have to fight against
a force that is invisible, untraceable, ubiquitous,
and total, you will be powerless and roundly
defeated."

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social

[reggie]

Re: Google, Power & The Networked Society

Google, Power and Networked Society

[shiny!]

Re: Google, Power & The Networked Society

I stopped using Google a long time ago. I also have a hosts file that blocks Google and about 60,000 other privacy-invading, tracking, malicious domains from connecting to my machine. As a result, I rarely ever see a banner ad. If one shows up, I add it to my hosts file.

For search I use Startpage:

Startpage offers you Web search results from Google in complete privacy!
When you search with Startpage, we remove all identifying information from your query and submit it anonymously to Google ourselves. We get the results and return them to you in total privacy.
Your IP address is never recorded, your visit is not logged, and no tracking cookies are placed on your browser. When it comes to protecting your privacy, Startpage runs the tightest ship on the Internet. Our outstanding privacy policy and thoughtful engineering give you great search results in total anonymity. Here are some of our key features:

• Free proxy surfing available.
• Praised by privacy experts worldwide.
• Twelve-year company track record.
• Third-party certified.

• No IP address recorded.
• No record is made of your searches.
• No identifying or tracking cookies used.
• Powerful SSL encryption available.

To learn more, check out our privacy page and read our privacy policy.

[Adeptus]

Re: Google, Power & The Networked Society

Awesome. Thanks for sharing Shiny. Going to start using "startpage.com" and test out that hosts file. I should probably also take the presenter's tip and try firefox with the trackmenot plugin. Now if there was only a decent alternative to 'spybook' that my friends would join.

[shiny!]

Re: Google, Power & The Networked Society

Awesome. Thanks for sharing Shiny. Going to start using "startpage.com" and test out that hosts file. I should probably also take the presenter's tip and try firefox with the trackmenot plugin. Now if there was only a decent alternative to 'spybook' that my friends would join.

The hosts file works fine in Linux, not sure how it works with various versions of Windows. You'll have to read their instructions. I like a hosts file better than NoScript or AdBlocker because it doesn't bog things down or use any resources. If it blocks a domain that I want to access, I put a # in front of that line in the file. I'm going to try that trackmenot plugin, too.

[don]

Re: Google, Power & The Networked Society

Great info - thanks 'tulipers!

[Adeptus]

Re: Google, Power & The Networked Society

Yep, that hosts file was nasty in Windows. When I first copied it over to the drivers/etc folder, the browser took almost one minute to open up, and was very slow to open random pages. Although reopening them a second time afterwards seemed ok. After a reboot, somehow my local ISP's DNS address was blocked, so my internet was not available. This caused some problems with some programs that start-up automatically after each reboot and require internet access (check for updates etc), and thus my reboot was excrutiatingly slow. Soo slow that after a few minutes I thought something was hung and forced a hard cold boot. This as it turns out was a very bad idea as it partially corrupted my main RAID-1 volume, and so upon another very long reboot (this time I waited), the RAID volume is self-correcting/resynching and the rebuilding should *only* take about 20 hours or so :-/

Bottom line, the no internet access due to DNS blocking was the show stopper for me, had to remove it after. I've heard Firefox has a plugin to block ads that is also based on a black-list of IPs that is frequently updated. Perhaps moving the 'ACLs' up from the IP stack layer to layer 7 (application) level, will be less intrusive to windows and still accomplish the main goal.

[shiny!]

Re: Google, Power & The Networked Society

Yep, that hosts file was nasty in Windows. When I first copied it over to the drivers/etc folder, the browser took almost one minute to open up, and was very slow to open random pages. Although reopening them a second time afterwards seemed ok. After a reboot, somehow my local ISP's DNS address was blocked, so my internet was not available. This caused some problems with some programs that start-up automatically after each reboot and require internet access (check for updates etc), and thus my reboot was excrutiatingly slow. Soo slow that after a few minutes I thought something was hung and forced a hard cold boot. This as it turns out was a very bad idea as it partially corrupted my main RAID-1 volume, and so upon another very long reboot (this time I waited), the RAID volume is self-correcting/resynching and the rebuilding should *only* take about 20 hours or so :-/


Bottom line, the no internet access due to DNS blocking was the show stopper for me, had to remove it after. I've heard Firefox has a plugin to block ads that is also based on a black-list of IPs that is frequently updated. Perhaps moving the 'ACLs' up from the IP stack layer to layer 7 (application) level, will be less intrusive to windows and still accomplish the main goal.

Wow, sorry that happened to you. Now we know that a hosts file doesn't work in Windows. I think the Firefox plugin is called Adblock Plus.

[reggie]

Re: Google, Power & The Networked Society

I think this thread has gone off-track, as while user (ie. Agent) openness (ie Privacy-loss) is certainly a precursor to buidling a successful Networked Society, privacy-loss is merely a single ingredient in a much larger world system.

The primary takeaway from this academic's talk is that we are building a social system where system produced feedback is employed to assimilate all input into a predetermined stable state, whatever that state may be.

Google's search algorthim, web-spam cut-off policies, and their Agent tracking are all merely elements of a much larger pattern of feedback & control, where the public internalizes the operating policies/rules of major system players and contorts to system feedback.

While there are numerous ways to attack such a Networked System, the only failsafe way is for the users (Agents) to transcend the system itself and to see it for what it is.

Hence, the message here is far bigger and more significant than individual "privacy".

[reggie]

Re: Google, Power & The Networked Society

More, from the presenter's slides...

“Subjected to a capitalist megamachine
that produces willing subjects, the latter
have been fully integrated into a living
machine that functions not against their
will, their thoughts, their desire, their
body, etc., but through those.“

Frédéric Vandenberghe„ Deleuzian capitalism“

[reggie]

Re: Google, Power & The Networked Society

I'm double posting the following talk, because it has applicability to both threads that it it's posted in.

In this 30yr-old talke at John Moore University in Manchester, Stafford Beer explains how cybernetics is involved in a democracy. Ultimately, Prof. Stafford explains that society is facing a VARIETY problem (See Ross Asby Law of Requisite Variety), where technology is employed to increase Variety rather than attenuate it, creating social systems that overwhelm individual humans and make them subserviant to the techological system.

Beer's Involvement in Allende's Chile

During the administration of Salvador Allende in Chile, in the early 1970s, Beer was closely involved with a visionary project, Cybersyn, to apply his cybernetic theories in government. The project's ultimate goal was to create a network of computers and communications equipment that would support the management of the state-run sector of Chile's economy; at its core would be an operations room where government managers could view important information about economic processes in real time, formulate plans of action, and transmit advice and directives to managers at plants and enterprises in the field. However, consistent with cybernetic principles and the ideals of the Allende government, its designers aimed to preserve worker and lower-management autonomy instead of implementing a top-down system of centralized control.

The system used a network of about 500 telex machines located at enterprises throughout the country and in government offices in Santiago, some of which were connected to a government-operated mainframe computer that would receive information on production operations, feed that information into economic modeling software, and report on variables (such as raw material supplies) that were outside normal parameters and might require attention. The project, implemented by a multidisciplinary group of both Chileans and foreigners, reached an advanced prototype stage, but was interrupted by the 1973 coup d'état.

Designing Freedom
http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Free.../dp/047195165X



Distinguished cyberneticist Stafford Beer states the case for a new science of systems theory and cybernetics. His essays examine such issues as The Real Threat to All We Hold Most Dear, The Discarded Tools of Modern Man, A Liberty Machine in Prototype, Science in the Service of Man, The Future That Can Be Demanded Now, The Free Man in a Cybernetic World.

Designing Freedom ponders the possibilities of liberty in a cybernetic world.

"Stafford Beer is undoubtedly among the world's most provocative, creative, and profound thinkers on the subject of management, and he records his thinking with a flair that is unmatched. His writing is as much art as it is science. He is the most viable system I know." Dr Russell L Ackoff.

Based on the Massey Lectures, this book examines the reasons why the institutions of our society may well be failing, and opens a discussion as to what could be done. Drawing on the science of effective organization, which is his definition of cybernetics, Stafford Beer explains key cybernetic principles in words and pictures that all can understand. He concludes that our society commits more and more resources to plastering over the cracks in the system which simply reappear, while freedom itself is increasingly eroded. The institutions must be redesigned, and returned to the people, to whom the scientific tools for doing this ought to belong.