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Comment Re:Be careful (Score 5, Insightful) 110

Why do you think the Germans have the 5% rule?

The 5 percent rule is basically a guardrail built after the Weimar failure, where dozens of tiny parties splintered parliament and helped the Nazis rise through chaotic, fractured coalitions. Modern Germany uses the threshold to prevent that kind of fragmentation again and keep extremist fringe groups from getting seats off tiny vote shares.
The Internet

Where Did the Internet Really Come From? (slate.com) 150

Posted by EditorDavid from the carrier-lost dept.
Where did the internet come from? When students are asked that by an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, some mention ARPANET or Silicon Valley — and "no fewer than four students have simply written, 'Bill Gates....'"

But even beyond that, "The best-known histories describe an internet that hasn't existed since 1994..." argues Kevin Driscoll "the intersection of hundreds of regional, national, commercial, and cooperative networks." So in an excerpt from his new book, Driscoll describes exactly how "a mixture of commercial online services, university networks, and local community networks mutated into something bigger, more commercial, and more accessible to the general public..."

And what's often left out is the pre-web "modem world": Whereas ARPANET was created by professional researchers in university and government labs, the modem world was driven by community-oriented amateurs and entrepreneurs — hobby radio groups, computer clubs, software pirates, and activist organizations. Despite their shared interest in computer networking, these were, with rare exception, distinct spheres of social and technical activity. The predominant form of PC networking was the bulletin board system, or BBS.... The ARPANET family of networks ran on a fundamentally different infrastructure from consumer-oriented BBS networks, and relatively few people were expert users of both. BBSs were not so much ignored by institutions of power as they were overlooked....

Between 1994 and 1995, the World Wide Web — and not the BBS — became the public face of cyberspace. On television and in print, journalists touted graphical browsers like NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator as the internet's future. As hype mounted, investment capital flooded the data communications industry. But instead of BBSs, the money and attention flowed to firms linked to the nascent Web. Finally, when a moral panic over "cyberporn" threatened to burst the dot-com bubble, BBSs provided a convenient scapegoat. BBSs were old and dirty; the Web was new, clean, and safe for commerce. To avoid the stigma, enterprising BBS operators quietly rebranded. Seemingly overnight, thousands of dial-up BBSs vanished, replaced by brand-new "internet service providers." In the United States, the term BBS fell out of use.

The people who built the modem world in the 1980s laid the groundwork for millions of others who would bring their lives online in the 1990s and beyond. Along with writing code and running up their phone bills, BBS operators developed novel forms of community moderation, governance, and commercialization. When internet access finally came to the public, former BBS users carried the experience of grassroots networking into the social Web. Over time, countless social media platforms have reproduced the social and technical innovations of the BBS community.

Forgetting has high stakes. As the internet becomes the compulsory infrastructure of everyday life, the stories we tell about its origins are more important than ever. Recovering the history of the modem world helps us to imagine a world beyond — or perhaps after — commercial social media, mass surveillance, and platform monopolies. Endlessly modifiable, each BBS represented an idiosyncratic dream of what cyberspace could be, a glimpse of the future written in code and accessible from your local telephone jack. Immersing ourselves in this period of experimentation and play makes the internet seem strange again. By changing how we remember the internet's past, we can change our expectations for its future.

Comment Re:New technology not available or mature is a jok (Score 1) 199

by EABinGA (#60522966) Attached to: 'At This Point, 5G is a Bad Joke'

Yes, but how are you going to get around the laws of physics?

Exactly, the limits are not in the encoding scheme or technology, but in the bandwidth available.As long as 5G runs in the same bandwidth as 4G, don't expect miracles.

See Shannon's Law. Good explanation can be found here: https://www.waveform.com/blogs...

Comment Stop China’s Map Warfare (Score 2) 75

by EABinGA (#59731308) Attached to: Google Redraws the Borders On Maps Depending On Who's Looking
Since 2017, the Chinese government has required all maps printed in China to show China's "official" version of the world map. That includes its false territorial claims over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and India's Arunachal Pradesh.

Worse, the Chinese government is requiring American companies printing maps or manufacturing globes in Chinese factories to use China's "official" map on products that will be exported to the US.

More info here

Change.org petition
Google

Google Engineer Sponsors New Kinect Bounties 96

Posted by Soulskill from the dead-or-alive dept.
ashidosan writes "Hot on the heels of the Adafruit competition, Matt Cutts (a search spam engineer at Google) is sponsoring two more $1,000 bounties for projects using Kinect. 'The first $1,000 prize goes to the person or team that writes the coolest open-source app, demo, or program using the Kinect. The second prize goes to the person or team that does the most to make it easy to write programs that use the Kinect on Linux.'" Relatedly, reader imamac points out a video showing Kinect operating on OS X.

Comment Internet and the power struggle (Score 1) 694

by kwilliams (#9097442) Attached to: Digital Cameras Change War Photo-Journalism
We've all heard it before, but it really is true how the internet, most importantly, and recent technological advancements have taken a lot of the power from corporations and into the hands of the individual.

It's mostly about a power struggle of who controls the information.

Just look at the Monica Lewinsky scandal - it was broken by a poor twenty-something with a modem and a source. This prisoner abuse scandal is another testiment to the power of technology and an individual. Additionally, bloggers have been credited with bringing the Trent Lott racist Strom Thurmond comment to the forefront - they took him down from the Senate Majority Leader position.

On the security end of things, the world changes because of people who would otherwise be insignificant.
In 2000, Ebay, Amazon, Microsoft, and Buy.com were taken down by a 14-year-old in Canada. Most recently, the Sasser worm was written by an 18-year-old nobody in Germany.

The title of "powerful" as been redefined, formerly exclusive to the rich and mighty, but now handed to anyone with the know-how and the will.

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