I had to disable comments.

This blog has been drowning in a deluge of comment spam these past few months despite my catchaing effrorts. Recently Google marked it as a dangerous site. Horrifying.

One of the downsides of deciding to script my own site (as opposed to using a WordPress or Blogger kind of service) is that now I actually have to figure out authentication or something in order to fix commenting...which I don't have time to do. SO comments disabled for the time being.

My apologies to anyone who left an actual comment recently. It wasn't feasible to sift through the 3000 or though spam posts to look for legitimate ones.

Now that I'm not instantly depressed by spam when I go to write something here, we'll see a resurrection!

Last week the Berkman Center released the report "Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites." It's the product of a project I was privileged to have been a small part of this past summer, alongside Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, Jillian York, and John Palfrey.

The gist: The Internet provides an amazing forum for expression that has dramatically changed the ways in which ordinary people can produce, consume, and communicate information. Sometimes those who wish to suppress certain opinions--for example, those of human rights advocates under oppressive regimes--do so through the use of denial of service attacks. The effects of such methods, which seek to disrupt access to certain websites by overloading them in some way, range from a slowing of traffic to a total loss of data and/or extended downtime (permanent in rare instances). The report addresses historical, technical, and political aspects to these attacks, examining their nature, incidence, and efficacy, giving many examples and attempting to provide recommendations for recourse, preparation, and prevention to sites who might fall victim.

Who knew such a topic would garner such mainstream media interest? It's been mentioned by Slashdot, PC Magazine, Computer World, New Scientist, the BBC, Al Jazeera (Qatar), PC Pro, IT Pro, UPI, the Inquirer, Washington Post, Information Week, Sol (Portugal), Christian Science Monitor, Irrawaddy (Burma), Boston Globe, and IT News.

Released on 2010.12.20, it was, of course, quite timely given the WikiLeaks "cablegate" debacle, with pro- and anti-WikiLeaks groups utilizing denial of service attacks on high-profile targets. So timely, in fact, that many of the comments on Slashdot implied the report was coming to the rescue of the big corporations who were being attacked for actions taken against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. (In which case this would be an impressively speedy 66 pages).

Now the 29th, I'm coming to this conversation fairly late. I'd just like to link to a few relevant bits by the authors ...

Ethan posted a valuable follow-up to the report on his blog. It's particularly important in that it points out how recent events actually provide cause for reconsidering one of the report's recommendations (that you might be safer being hosted by an internet giant like Google....or Amazon).

More on the research and its relationship to the WikiLeaks happenings can be found in: Hal's post, Ethan's Q&A with CJR's Laura Kirchner, and John Palfrey's blog.

Phew. First semester of my first year in the CRDM program at NCSU has come to an end.

Overall I'm pretty happy, despite having to now pick up the pieces of my life that have fallen into disarray over the last month.

I got to do a bit more work with Wikipedia, which I remain obsessed with and manage to relate to a surprisingly broad range of academic conversations--to the point that it, along with my undying love for Google, may have constructed a good chunk of my classroom persona (which is ok with me). Most interestingly I did a rhetorical analysis of its community's ethos, which I hope to develop over the next months. Taking a course in rhetoric has served to, more than anything, highlight the vast landscape of things I don't know about rhetoric. Writing about it through this now only 70% opaque lens has caused me a little bit of discomfort about my treatment of the term in the last paper I wrote on Wikipedia. There, though I intended the article mostly for the new media/media studies/sociology/cultural studies crowds and made no pretense of providing a sound rhetorical perspective, I committed a newbie mistake of using "rhetoric" to simply mean something like "propaganda" or "demagoguery," which is really only one aspect of the discipline--and one of the less interesting ones at that. Thankfully I don't think it takes away from the meat of the old paper--only discrediting my knowledge of rhetoric to rhetoricians by the very invocation of the term.

The other big project I took on traced the history of artificial memory over the last 2600 years and all of its mental, mechanical, mystical, and ultimately digital manifestations. For the amount of research I did, starting with Frances Yates's Art of Memory and working outward into computers, psychology, encyclopedias, the occult, universal languages, utopias, mind uploading.....it could have been dissertation length. I'll probably have to chop it up and focus on a particular angle a bit more, but I hope to put it out there at some point because it really is very interesting stuff.

My TA and RA also went well. I helped with Relational Communication, teaching one class of it, and have been researching the rhetoric of the War on Terror, which has been educational, fascinating, sobering, and, unfortunately, renewed a certain vitriol that led me to write off politics in 2004. Maybe that's a good thing?

Next semester's classes: Communication in a Networked Society, Intro to Cognitive Science, and Quantitative Methods. I'm excited. I'm also teaching a class: Intro to Public Speaking, which I haven't taught before. I think it's an easier load, but not easy by any stretch of the imagination. Life as a doctoral student is so far one of the best and most horrible things I've attempted :)

I'm a softy for pixel art. Needless to say, this collection is really exciting.

PIXEL CITYSCAPES

I love the range of styles he exhibits: dark, cold, and corporate; decaying; majestic reverence for grand structures; plastic and depthless; abstract; hot and antagonistic; claustrophobic; mysterious light shows...

The one thing markedly missing from every single image is any trace at all of humanity. While there are implications of space, these are clearly not places. They may be inspirational, but not interactive.

I want to be able to imagine what it would be like to inhabit these cities, but I just can't. Because these are fingerprints independent of identities (simulacra).

...Which isn't necessarily a bad thing! I'm not at all denigrating the power and importance of aesthetics/image. I just found it interesting that I was so taken with these cities not as attractive representations of actual cities but as exquisite celebrations of urban archetypes.

[I'll abstain from referencing Warhol or Baudrillard here because I don't hate the people who are kind enough to visit my blog].

If you're into pixel, video, or net art I'd also recommend perusing the artist's many other Flickr collections.

Computers and the Internet have made many facets of my life easier. Getting hopelessly lost in an unfamiliar city is a thing of the past. I rarely have to count cash. If I want to get a message out to the world, I can do so instantaneously. I can shop for the best pizza deals and coupon codes in my area, customize a pizza, and pay for it in a minute or two, then watch it progress through its prep, baking, and delivery phases until it gets to my door. I CAN FIND THE ANSWER TO ANY PIECE OF TRIVIA ANY TIME, ANY PLACE.

But one area these advances have not helped me is in the realm of basic around-the-house handiwork. I'm not even talking about plumbing or building a deck. I have unthinkable amounts of information at my fingertips at all times and am very good at navigating what's out there, but I can't seem to manage cutting strips of cork such that they properly fit the cabinet shelves they're supposed to line. (Even after I got the size about right, it was all poofy).

Some years ago I bought some wood, nails, screws...I don't remember what exactly, but I was intent on building a bookcase. I didn't want anything special, just something that would hold books. Maybe some DVDs, too.

Utter.
Failure.

Whether or not society is moving forward from gender roles such as "the man does the fixing stuff," the inability to do so is still totally emasculating. And we won't even talk about car repair.

There are many, many how-to websites that attempt to address the problems I encounter. Lots of them are written by freelancers who don't actually know what they're doing. The others just don't seem to help me most of the time. They just never appear to address my situation.

I don't think that I'm clumsy, uncoordinated, or lacking in fine motor skills. I can make more than one chess move per second, am pretty good at racquetball, can cook a few things, and so on. The scary thing is: maybe my technological abilities have left lacking the skills necessary to focus on unforgiving mundane tasks. If you discount subjective successes and failures when it comes to social interactions, there aren't a whole lot of activities I partake in that don't allow me to tweak/redo/proof. When you screw up cutting cork or build a shoddy bookcase, that's it. There's (generally) no fixing it.

Bruno LaTour has a term, "deskilling," that refers to how technology makes things easier for us and thus inevitably removes the need for us to know how to accomplish those same tasks the old way. To the same end Marshall McLuhan more graphically describes technology as "extending man" as well as "amputating." Perhaps the easiest example of this is phone numbers. How many phone numbers do you remember since you first got a cell phone?

Deskilling generally takes time and is linked to social evolution, but on a micro scale, if I'm busy accomplishing things that didn't exist to be accomplished 20 years ago, what am I losing out on that I would've known back then? The ability to cut cork, perhaps? Will handiwork go the way of farming--a realm of specialists far removed from our minds as well as where we live, and almost mysterious from average urban perspectives?