A new era of digital disruption is dawning (Photo: Getty)
How many people does it take to topple VISA’s website – a company that can process 10,000 transactions per second? A million? Surely hundreds of thousands, at least?
Just 2,000. That’s how many were needed to overwhelm VISA.com. The actual damage was relatively minimal since credit card transactions take place on a separate system, but for ”Anonymous’’, the online collective that co-ordinated the attack, and those on PayPal and Mastercard, it was an unparalleled propaganda coup – and as word spread, with curious internet users trying to visit visa.com, the company’s servers were only strained further.
While Anonymous has been breathlessly described as a group of expert hackers, this kind of ”distributed denial of service attack’’ (DDoS), in which thousands of computers repeatedly visit the target website is a relatively simple operation – it just requires volunteers to download and run a piece of software that does all the work. Other activists are using Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps, and weblogs – similarly simple technologies – to organise protests and flashmobs in the real world, whether they’re against tuition fees, government spending cuts, Philip Green’s Topshop, or The X-Factor’s hegemony over the music charts.
With more and more of our lives spent online, virtual protests like those by Anonymous – who were carrying out “revenge” attacks on companies that had withdrawn support for WikiLeaks – make a correspondingly bigger impact. In the past, even a large protest by tens of thousands might struggle to make a few headlines for a single day, but now a small number of online activists can block websites and organisations used by hundreds of millions of people globally. The activists’ anonymity certainly helps, given that DDoS attacks are illegal in many countries including the UK, and that targets like the Church of Scientology are well known for their swift litigation.
But would people still protest if they weren’t anonymous? Perhaps not quite with the same confidence or disregard for the law, but the recent protests against tax avoidance and tuition fees were all organised out in the open using Facebook and Twitter, with activists using their real names and profiles. Even members of Anonymous were willing to put themselves on the line when they organised protests in the real world against Scientology, with most not wearing masks.
Anonymity isn’t necessary or even desirable when it comes to the new wave of direct-action protests. What distinguishes them from the past is their speed and decentralisation, made possible by the widespread uptake of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. It’s almost as if millions of people were holding their breath, waiting for the opportunity to pursue their pet cause, when the tax avoidance protests and Wikileaks showed that you don’t need to set up an office or appoint directors to create a movement – you just need a Facebook page, a Twitter hashtag, and a free blog.
These new online tools have traditionally served two purposes; first, to make money for their Silicon Valley creators, and second, to disintermediate a wide range of otherwise time-consuming and tricky processes, from setting up social groups (Facebook) to publishing (Twitter and blogs) and receiving payments (PayPal). That they are being used to organise highly effective direct-action protests and movements is not particularly surprising to anyone who’s read a William Gibson novel, but their sheer speed and effectiveness has shocked even the most die-hard futurists.
Anti-Scientology activists use social media to mobilise
The importance of these tools, not just to online activists but to everyone, explains why people get so upset when they don’t work in the supposedly neutral way expected of them. The anger of The X-Factor audience, who suspected that their votes were being tampered with, might strike most people as being unbelievably trivial, but it speaks to the betrayal of the trust we place in organisations and institutions that purport to represent our interests.
So imagine the fury when Facebook and Twitter – darlings of the internet, both of them – removed Anonymous’ profiles, and Amazon and PayPal ditched Wikileaks. People had thought that these companies shared their ideal of the internet as being a place for unfettered free speech and commerce, whereas in fact these internet giants were only interested in free speech insofar as it didn’t interfere with commerce (of course, Anonymous created replacement profiles only a few minutes later). Yesterday, we had the bizarre spectacle of Anonymous debating whether or not to attack Twitter, hardly a company associated with evil; eventually, Anonymous decided that Twitter was too important as a medium of mass communication to disrupt.
Many citizens stopped believing long ago that their elected representatives actually represented them, but they expected better from their new internet leaders. Now it appears that there is no one they can trust, and so disparate groups of activists are learning from each other about how to use social networks and DDoS tools to pool their individual resources, and taking matters into their own hands. You can only imagine the bind that Twitter and Facebook are in – they need the goodwill of their users, but they don’t want to upset governments, or even worse, advertisers.
Is this development good or bad? Are we about to see a revitalised citizenry exposing corruption and improving the world, or will bands of anonymous activists start shutting down critical parts of the web? It’s worth noting how internet users see it themselves. A popular notion amongst them, taken from role-playing games, is that the world can be classified into moral and ethical ”alignments’’. This system combines a moral continuum (from good to neutral to bad) with an ethical continuum (from lawful to neutral to chaotic) to create nine alignments, such as ‘Lawful Good’ and ”Neutral Evil’’.
Whether or not they, or others, see themselves as forces for good in the world, activists act in a rapid, decentralised, and unpredictable way – in other words, they’re Chaotic, not Neutral, and certainly not Lawful. That’s not to say that they go around breaking laws all the time, it’s more that they don’t adhere to any explicit structures or rules of behaviour. Within the student protest movement, nimble grassroots organisations taking direct action, such as the UCL Occupation, have arguably made more of an impact than lumbering entities like the NUS, even as the traditional media erroneously insists on identifying movements with single figureheads.
It’s even more difficult for governments to respond to this level of chaos. The short-term effect of Wikileaks is that US diplomats will circulate markedly less candid cables to fewer people, and use the phone more often; but by doing so, they deny themselves the very technologies that allow online activists to move so quickly.
Nor can Western governments step up monitoring or begin restricting the use of social networking tools without appearing hypocritical (see the West’s criticism of censorship in Iran and China) and generating a massive backlash from internet users, who might even resort to routinely encrypting private communication – a development that security services truly dread. In a way, David Cameron has got the Big Society he wants, a nation of volunteers self-organising for the pursuit of shared interests – it’s just that they aren’t the same as his.
By itself, technology can’t do anything; its creators can’t even predict the full range of uses to which it might be put to. It takes real people to demonstrate applications, and over the past few months, Wikileaks, Anonymous, student protesters, and X-Factor activists have all shown the rest of the world exactly how to use Twitter and Facebook – familiar tools to millions – in a new way. They’ve shown that self-organisation is possible, it’s easy, and for the most part, it goes unpunished.
I found this great post on the Telegraph out of the UK. If you’re a performing musician take note how Pixies are using Social Media to create a fan driven archive of there performances. You can do it too!
The Pixies, the influential American rock band, have begun building an online gigography and uploading recordings of their shows that fans can download for $3.99 each. More than that, however, they’re asking fans to upload photos and video of the shows to create a real archive.
Richard Jones, the band’s manager, tells me: “We’ve got enough for at least two years of regular input of stuff. The band looked for old photographs, old setlists – we’ve got some really fantastic stuff coming up. As technology moves on, we hope to offer even greater things.”
Jones said the Pixies have recordings of every show since they reformed in 2004 and around 25 gigs from the 1980s and 1990s. The band played more than 300 shows between 1986 and 1992 so that’s a drop in the ocean but Jones hopes that fans will fill in the gaps.
“You can post things yourself,” he says. “If people have bootlegs they want to put up then they can.”
The site is a continuation of the innovative thinking the band has shown recently. As I wrote back in July, the Pixies played two London gigs earlier this year that were organised and sold through the band’s mailing list. For those shows, as with the new website, the Pixies worked with Topspin, a music services company.
Seriously, this is good advice (Photo: Createblog)
What do you do when the power goes out? What happens when you can’t surf the web or watch TV, and when even the battery on your mobile phone runs out? After the initial shock dissipates into low-grade frustration, it’s common to feel a strange sense of liberation. When you can’t work or even procrastinate, you end up doing the things you’ve been putting off, whether that’s reading a long-neglected book or having a chat with the neighbours.
There’s a good reason why we sometimes look back on blackouts and blizzards fondly as times when we’re jolted out of our routines, so is it worth pulling the plug deliberately once in a while, and having a modern ’secular Sabbath
The increasing power and affordability of ever-connected phones and computers means that we can now access effectively limitless content at any time, anywhere. For some, this firehose of information is a curse rather than a blessing, largely because they feel that most online content is a useless waste of time (e.g. millions of cat videos).
Clearly this isn’t true. Putting new-fangled multimedia content aside for the moment, hundreds of excellent articles, interviews, essays and blog posts are published every single day on every conceivable topic, each worthy of note and deserving of readers. Even the most hardened luddite will appreciate how the internet gives us access to the world’s stock of newspapers, magazines, blogs, and books – so whether you’re interested in the situation in South Korea, architecture in Pakistan, the impact of low cost space travel, or the history of the Atlantic ocean, you’re bound to find something good.
No, if there’s a real criticism of the internet, it’s not that there’s too little good content – it’s that there’s too much. Blogs like Arts & Letters Daily and The Browser can help us discover good content, but leave them for more than a day and you’ll begin slipping behind, wondering if you’ve missed something great. The same goes for the unremitting stream of Facebook and Twitter status updates and emails that we all receive from friends and colleagues. We’re all cursed by a Sisphean struggle to clear our inboxes, but no sooner than we declare ‘inbox zero’ does it fill again with yet more to be processed.
The fact is, you can’t finish the internet. It’s not like a book or a newspaper where you can reach the final page and pause before beginning something else, you just keep on going, following chains of links to new articles and comments and videos forever. The internet appeals to the ‘love of the new’ that’s characteristic of all humans – we’re all neophiles, always curious to see what’s beyond the hill on the horizon.
If we all had better self-control, this vast array of choice wouldn’t be a problem, but as Barry Schwartz has written in The Paradox of Choice, an abundance of choice can be paralysing, whether for brands of food at a supermarket or for works of art.
Beyond a certain point, we actually get unhappier and more indecisive the more choice there is – we worry whether we’ve made the right choice, and what we might be missing. Online, you’re always missing something.
Armed with this knowledge, though, there is a clear solution - artificially limiting our own choices. It sounds odd, but it works. At Cambridge, a friend was having real problems getting enough work done when he was constantly being distracted by this new-fangled internet we all had in our rooms. After a week of fretting, he landed upon the simple tactic of unplugging his network cable whenever he wanted to finish an essay. I remember laughing at this – didn’t he have enough self-control to just not surf the internet? – but then again, he’s the one who got the First, not me.
The idea of limiting our access to technology and the work or distraction that brings is hardly new; the Sabbath has been observed by Jews for over five thousand years, with similar traditions among Seventh-day Adventists and others. Most people today don’t observe a day of rest, preferring to have the freedom to shop and party and watch TV seven days a week, but when I began learning more about the Sabbath, I struck upon the idea of a ’secular sabbath’ – a day without technology – with my friend Naomi Alderman.
On a particular Friday, I arrived home before sunset and instead of turning everything on, I turned it all off – my laptop, my TV, and after a pang of worry about urgent calls and emails, my iPhone. It felt tremendously liberating – not only had I shut off the firehose of information, but it wasn’t even worth worrying about work or chores because there was absolutely nothing I could do about them for the next 24 hours. Instead, we just talked and read books.
Without the bright lights and loud music of bars, I also realised exactly how tired I was from the week, and I ended up going to bed correspondingly earlier. In the morning, I read a book, went for a walk, and had some friends over to visit for lunch. I’d abandoned the treadmill of emails and constant work and blogs and was taking time to do things that mattered.
In the evening, the sabbath was ending and I turned on my iPhone again. Amazingly, the world was still standing – there were a few emails and Tweets, but nothing urgent. I was recharged and relaxed by the sheer lack of choice I’d imposed on myself for the day.
I don’t intend to have a secular Sabbath every week, but it’s certainly something worth thinking about whenever you feel overwhelmed. In 2011, the pressures and choices and distractions in our lives are only going to increase. Sometimes you just need a day of rest.
Twitter has added more than 100 million users this year. That’s a pretty extraordinary rate of growth for a company that just a year ago was thought to have peaked.
Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO
The growth can be partly attributed to Twitter’s smart focus on mobile. The acquisition of Tweetie, for example, the iPhone app that has since been rebranded as simply Twitter, brought a great version of the Twitter experience to smartphones. Since then Twitter has rolled out apps for Android and BlackBerry users too and mobile use has exploded.
Another significant factor in Twitter’s success this year is its emphasis on Twitter as a passive experience. Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder, has spent most of the year explaining that “you don’t have to tweet to be a great Twitter user”.
It’s a message that’s beginning to get through. Whether you want to follow the activities of celebrities or politicians, if you want to see what fans are saying about the football match you’re watching or if you want to catch news headlines as they break, Twitter has become the place to do it.
Newcomers to Twitter are often puzzled about what it’s for. As we wrote a few weeks ago, even its senior staff aren’t clear about what it does. Twitter’s new CEO, Dick Costolo, said: “I am currently trying to define what Twitter’s purpose is in the long term. We will be able to be more specific on that answer in the near future.”
Believe it or not, that sounds like a good thing to me. Part of the reason for Twitter’s success has been the willingness of its founders to let users guide its development. On one level its purpose is very simple: it’s a communications tool. In that sense asking what Twitter is ‘for’ makes as much sense as asking what the telephone is for.
But it can obviously go far beyond the capabilities of the telephone, which is limited to one-to-one conversations. For tapping in to a group, in real time, Twitter is peerless.
Twitter has come a long way this year though, for some, it will always be a ‘boring’ service, useful for nothing more than finding out what a bunch of strangers had for breakfast. It’s clear now, if it wasn’t before, that those people are doing it wrong. As academic Andrew Dubber says: Twitter isn’t stupid – you just have boring friends.
Just like Windows system restore allows you to restore the state of your computer to a date in the past, Google has added a new feature that lets you restore your list of contacts to previous state.
We’ve added a new feature to Google Contacts that allows you to revert your contact list and undo any mistakes made up to 30 days in the past. Let’s say you accidentally deleted a bunch of contacts or wiped the contact data from your Gmail account by mistake while syncing to another device. Visit Gmail’s Contacts section, select “Restore contacts” in the “More actions” menu, and choose the time you would like to revert to.
Your contacts will be restored to exactly the same state they were in at that time — any contacts that didn’t exist then will be deleted and any that have since been added will be deleted. Don’t worry, you can always undo this change by restoring again if you didn’t get the time right.
Ever wish you could make yourself invisible when your teenager takes your new car out for a spin so you could ride along to see how he or she handles the responsibility? Well, now you can.
Track Teenage DriversNew tracking devices that allow parents to spy on the driving habits of their teens are on the market.
Similar to the data recorders used in airplanes, these little black boxes record just about every move a young driver makes. So much for the newfound freedom of a driver’s license.
I’m testing out a free iPhone application with my friend Dr. Spencer Burling called “Jawbone Thoughts”.
It’s a voice version of texting! Instead of trading strings of text bad abbreviations, you trade voice recordings that are as long as 1 minute! No I’m not swapping sexy talk with Spencer, but we both immediately realized the potential. It puts a whole new kind of fun on spontaneous “what are you wearing” inquiries with your partner!
Like texting, each post is arranged on a timeline which makes up the conversation you’re having.
We think it’s cool and really like hearing the other persons voice and everything it can convey that plain text can’t!
Hearing your friends laughing rather than reading LOL and having to imagine the laugh is waaaaaaayyyyy more fun.
Features:
Group conversations
Send thoughts to anyone in your contacts
Convert recordings to text, this requires credits that you buy but you get 10 free credits to try it.
Another Use:
Use for this app for arguments. Most peoples arguments don’t accomplish much because they lose control and things escalate in the heat of the battle. Instead of paying for mediation, get away from eachother and use this app. It’ll slow things down and make it more likely to understand each other. Posts are limited to 1 minute so you have to consider your words carefully and you can’t be interrupted. Of course you have to agree to wait for the others response rather than just pummeling each other with rapid fire one minute ranting! I’m going to try it next argument I have with Patty. Let me know how it works for you.
This is an excellent overview from TechRepublic of Samsung’s Windows 7 phone, .
We got our hands on the first great Windows Phone 7 smartphone — or, at least the first one that’s widely available. See why we liked the Samsung Focus a lot more than we expected, and as always, we’ll also tell you the caveats.
Who is it for?
For professionals and companies that are already invested in Microsoft business technologies — especially Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office, and SharePoint — they will find Windows Phone 7 devices such as the Samsung Focus now offer the best way to access those systems. That makes perfect sense since all of the systems are built by Microsoft, but it’s important to remember that Microsoft is a huge company and these technologies are made by different groups that often act like separate businesses. Microsoft deserves kudos for the integration.
What problems does it solve?
Microsoft has cut bait on Windows Mobile and replaced it with a completely new platform in Windows Phone 7, which offers a modern multi-touch experience that can legitimately compete with iPhone, Android, and webOS in terms of ease-of-use. Windows Phone 7 has the same multi-vendor, multi-telecom strategy as Android, but offers a little bit more coherent experience with less fragmentation and less manipulation its partners. It remains to be seen whether that will be enough to stem Android’s momentum
Do you love you iPhone 4? I do and I’ve been waiting for this Iphone mount for 5 months because I wanted the perfect mount for the perfect mobile device.
Elegant design
Super high quality aluminum construction.
Form and function like the iPhone itself.
It’s a few dollars more than a cheap plastic model from other makers, but if you prefer quality tools and tech this is worth every penny at $49.95
Mine arrives this week!
H5, an aluminum car mount holder designed for connecting people on the go with flexible and versatile rotation and viewing angles. Connect with people by using FaceTime of iPhone4 within easy reach. One of the most user-friendly car mount holder, H5 allows you to dial or access data easily.
The technology industry is full of once-great companies that held on to an idea, a product, or a platform too long and ended up eventually falling hopelessly behind their competitors and going out of business or being acquired because of it. Think of DEC, Sun, and Palm.
However, the yin to that yang is when a company doesn’t give a new initiative enough time to run its course and pulls the plug too soon. Google has been guilty of this in 2010. The culprit is not a technology or a platform in this case. Instead, it is Google’s multi-faceted strategy for transforming the US wireless industry. This ambitious scheme — which few companies other than Google would have the influence or resources to pursue — has been aimed at helping US mobile users. It has now been utterly abandoned.
The final indication that Google has given up on this altruistic idea is the Google Nexus S smartphone, which CEO Eric Schmidt essentially confirmed the existence of last week during his interview at the Web 2.0 Summit.
A new era of digital disruption is dawning (Photo: Getty)
Anti-Scientology activists use social media to mobilise
Seriously, this is good advice (Photo: Createblog)
Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO
