How I became a soldier in the Georgia-Russia cyberwar. - By Evgeny Morozov - Slate Magazine

How I became a soldier in the Georgia-Russia cyberwar. - By Evgeny Morozov - Slate Magazine:

"Not knowing exactly how to sign up for a cyberwar, I started with an extensive survey of the Russian blogosphere. My first anonymous mentor, as I learned from this blog post, became frustrated with the complexity of other cyberwarfare techniques used in this campaign and developed a simpler and lighter 'for dummies' alternative. All I needed to do was to save a copy of a certain Web page to my hard drive and then open it in my browser. I was warned that the page wouldn't work with Internet Explorer but did well with Firefox and Opera. (Get with the program, Microsoft!) Once accessed, the page would load thumbnailed versions of a dozen key Georgian Web sites in a single window. All I had to do was set the page to automatically update every three to five seconds. Voil�: My browser was now sending thousands of queries to the most important Georgian sites, helping to overload them, and it had taken me only two to three minutes to set up."

ThinkProgress � Koch Industries Employs PR Firm To Airbrush Wikipedia, Gets Banned For Unethical ‘Sock Puppets’

ThinkProgress � Koch Industries Employs PR Firm To Airbrush Wikipedia, Gets Banned For Unethical ‘Sock Puppets’:

"Last year, Koch Industries began employing New Media Strategies (NMS), an Internet PR firm that specializes in “word-of-mouth marketing” for major corporations including Coca-Cola, Burger King, AT&T, Dodge and Ford. It appears that, ever since the NMS contract was inked with Koch, an NMS employee began editing the Wikipedia page for “Charles Koch,” “David Koch,” “Political activities of the Koch family,” and “The Science of Success” (a book written by Charles). Under the moniker of “MBMAdmirer,” NMS employees edited Wikipedia articles to distance the Koch family from the Tea Party movement, to provide baseless comparisons between Koch and conspiracy theories surrounding George Soros, and to generally delete citations to liberal news outlets. After administrators flagged the MBMAdmirer account as a “sock puppet” — one of many fake accounts used to manipulate new media sites — a subsequent sock puppet investigation found that MBMAdmirer is connected to a number of dummy accounts and ones owned by NMS employees like Jeff Taylor."

March 24 Class

You are on your own today.

Blog the class. In real time. Starting now.

There are different ways to do this--everyone; a couple of scribes, a couple of scribe-watchers; reporters, editors, critics; proclaimers and responders; pros and cons--what dynamic makes sense? Maybe folks with cameras want to post video blogs. Maybe different layers or versions--initial responses and immediate conversation, then compilation, design, synthesis, rethink.

What to post? Tell me who's there, who's missing, what you're feeling or thinking. Describe your process (how are you figuring out what to do since I'm not in the room)? There's a lot to do, can you get organized quickly? How? What are you doing to make this work? 

Is blogging while trying to discuss this stuff helpful or harmful? Why? If it's harmful, what should you do to meet the requirement that you blog the class and at the same time actually discuss something and put together something informative and creative?

It can't be all form, though. You need content. 

Use the class time to discuss what Andrejevic has to say about iWar and iPolitics. Your blogs (live from today's class, in real time) need to report what you are getting from the reading. What is he saying that matters? Do you agree? Why or why not? What do others think? Is there consensus? Division? Confusion? How are you dealing with this?

I think it makes sense to identify key insights and then raise questions. I also think it makes sense to highlight details, concepts, claims, and arguments.*

But you might have something else in mind--what? Is it worth going with? Then do that. 

Can you present the material, the ideas, the questions, the stuff that matters in a compelling way (are lists actually pretty good ways to summarize and transmit information)? Images? Video? Dialogues? Cartoons? What can you do/make that you'll be proud of in the limited time you have?

LocationS11: Heads up!! Change in syllabus!!

LocationS11: Heads up!! Change in syllabus!!:

"Heads up!! Change in syllabus!!

I've made a couple of changes in the syllabus for after spring break. Here are the changes. Please make sure that you note them on your syllabus and are prepared for the changes.

3/22 Marc Andrejevic, iSpy, chapters 1-2

3/24 Marc Andrejevic, iSpy, chapter 6-7

3/29 'Google's Revolution Factory' --Alliance of Youth Movements
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23283

look through and analyze this website: http://www.movements.org/.

'Diverting the Radicalization Track'

Be sure to read the summit reports (links available at both sites).

What is this group? What does it do? How do you know? Are these good guys?
Why or why not?"

Mapping Election Fraud with an SMS Reporting System - Haiti Rewired

(a number of the people mentioned in this article are affiliated with AYM)

Mapping Election Fraud with an SMS Reporting System - Haiti Rewired:

"Inside a dark, mildly air-conditioned room at the Jeune Ayiti Centre de Projets in downtown PetionVille, 12 people sporting “Obsevate” t-shirts sat around the table with their laptops and smartphones. It was March 20, Election Day in Haiti. A small TV off to the side played an England soccer game, but attention was mainly focused front and center to a projection screen displaying a Google Map of Haiti. The map was covered in green house icons with a few red flags scattered around the countryside, testaments to incidents of voting fraud or irregularities that polling station supervisors had reported via an SMS text message.

They were updating the Mwen Konte voting map, a Google map generated from a database of SMS text message reports of irregularities and fraud in the voting process. Cell phones are the communications backbone in Haiti, and they figured prominently in the little-noticed effort to provide transparency in the electoral process, which is typically riddled with fraud and corruption. Sunday's election was the second round of voting after the initial Nov election unraveled amid allegations of fraud. The two candidates that remain are Mirlande Manigat, a seasoned politician and former First Lady, and Michel Martelly, a charismatic show-boater who rose to fame from a career as a pop star."

Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience

Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience:

"Mystery is that second layer of attributes that are present but undefined explicitly, yet somehow created with just enough context to consume mental resources in subtle and compelling ways. At its most basic level, experiencing mystery in what we interact with makes you ask the question, “Why did they do that?”. What we mean here is, “Why did they do that? – A good thing, not “What were they thinking? – A bad thing. If you think carefully about the experiences you have in the ebb and flow of life, you realize that the most compelling are those that force you to think long and hard about why a given thing is the way it is. For example, why did Frank Gehry create the Guggenheim Museum Bilboa using the shapes he did? The famous architect could have created any shape concept, but why did he choose those shapes? It’s a mystery – we do not know and probably neither does he. What we do know is that his creation is cited as one of the most important works of contemporary architecture. In the same way that a building can captivate millions of sightseers, the element of mystery (conceptual depth) can help sell a few million copies of a simple interactive game."