Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I'm ready to do that. Please post URLs here. CDT had a URL for posting 
filings about the Broadcast Flag, which I filled out last week.
  

    
Dave and Howard, have you seen the NIST report on wireless security? It's
online at
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-48/NIST_SP_800-48.pdf

It's primarily concerned with use of 802.11 and other wireless services by
government agencies, but I wonder if there's some broader implications.
  

    
Can you summarize, John?
  

    
Long study. I know Les Owens,one of the authors.

It essentially lays out in great detail all the security risks in 802.11
and Blue Tooth. A GREAT number of them being caused by users and
administrators not taking steps to make their wireless networks secure.
  

    
It also recommends that government agencies not use wireless without
security measures in place. Which may mean, "don't use it at all" The
implication is that hacking wireless access can be Yet Another terrorist
tool.
  

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 17:57>
  

    
No need to apologize. It fits.
  

    
I don't know how I get into these things, but I am now being asked by
Sherpas how best to wirelessly link the 18,000 foot base camp, to
the Internet, so that trekkers and climbers during the 50th anniversary
of Edmund Hillary's reaching Mt. Everest can check their email from
10 computers... What kind of 'community' is that supposed to be.

(P.S. I think I got em the right radios)
  

    
What would the right radios be there, Dave?
  

    
Cisco 350 Bridge as Access Point, Cisco 350 Workplace Bridge for client,
one directional, one omni, antenna.
  

    
> What kind of 'community' is that supposed to be.

A chilly one!?
  

    
Just spent a fascinating 4 hours, after Gordon Cook in NJ talked Voice
Over IP to sherpa Tsering in Namche (Nepal) - one of the last habitiation on
the trail to the base of Everest. Then Gordon able to talk me through
the marvelous pictures he took from an airplane of the base camp area
beneath the great ice fall, and across the glacier, to the side of
the mountain where the VSAT will be, linked to the wireless link to
the base camp at 18,000 feet. Putting on my old Army grunt hat, I
have an absolutely clear picture of how to position the radios and
what must be done. he posted the pictures in response number 142 and
following in Item 6 in the Fall Conference on Caucus. And he had
marked them up.

Now we have a plan, coordinated by VOIP, email, graphical conferencing.
It will be an unbelievable event, with over 50 climbing groups, over
three months, sitting down before 10 computers in a 'cyber cafe' he calls
it, at the base camp, checking their email and babbling away about
the experience. For a time, at least, a unique community, connected
from one of the most inhospitable places on earth, to the rest of the
world...
  

    
I'm thinking that birders and sportsfans will be the first affinities to 
take to moblogging. 
  

    
How would that work for birders, for example? "Quick, there's a Long-eared 
owl hunting over here"?
  

    

Out at Plum Island in Massachusetts, where my in-laws are birders, that's
what they do now with their cell phones.  These are home-spun technophobes
that had no use for cell phones until all the birders figured out that they
were the best way to alert each other about rare snowy owl sightings.
  

    
Wi-Fi access and smart mobbing in sports stadiums...that sounds like a
natural. Fans could invent and practice new cheers.

Of course climbers have been posting messages from Mt. Everest and
other base camps via VSAT for a couple of years (see
www.mountainzone.com for current examples), but setting up a LAN at 17K
feet would be quite a first. Hopefully, all those people will pick up
all the litter left on the mountain over the years.
  

    
And carry out the new litter when its time has passed. I'm with you,
Cliff.
  

    
It was kinda comical to watch the cellphone action at the Other Ones
shows last week. Plotting strategy while waiting in line. Announcing
seat locations to arriving friends.

Didn't actually see people making calls during the shows, but my mind
was on other things.
  

    
I saw a lot of people calling during shows, both at the Kaiser and
back east.  One guy behind me at Pittsburgh called out at all the
song transitions to share the moment with someone.
  

    

You know in the spirit of this topic I fired up my cybiko xtreme and
downloaded the WAP browser.  These things are really cool - they remind me
of the apple II for some reason - maybe it's the cybasic.

Anyway, this semester is coming to a close and I have a huge block of time
to work on some programming projects.  Boy do I have a cool smart mob
application I've been working on.
  

    
Hi Reid! I wrote about the Cybiko in the book. Do you connect with a 
community of other Cybiko users?

A review of Smart Mobs has been slashdotted:
<http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/12/1535210>

Many of the usual know-nothings frothing about things the book isn't 
about. And of course the usual stuff about how the Well really wasn't the 
first online community -- a claim I never made.

If anyone wants to raise the level of discourse there by posting something 
actually related to the subject at hand, I'd be much obliged.
  

    

There are hundreds of cybikos being sold on ebay!  Check this out:
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?cgiurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.com%2Fws
 %2F&krd=1&from=R8&MfcISAPICommand=GetResult&ht=1&SortProperty=MetaEndSort&quer
y=cybiko

I've read that the usb they use is proprietary, and I wonder how much drain
a webcam would apply to the cybiko battery, but, could a roaming eyeball be
made with a cybiko and a cheapo webcam?

http://www.cybiko.com
  

    
One of the questions that keeps nagging at me, which is whether extending
net connections into very traditional 'communities' has the effect over
time of destroying that culture, or strengthening it.

My current involvement in two project, and learning the details of a
third from Frank Odasz brings the question back.

1. One reason I worked hard to bring broadband to rural Wales is so
that the rather poor, somewhat isolated, and very Welsh-rooted
communities can use the net to increase their incomes and general
welfare (such as medical advice). But will making it so easy to
'leave town' electronically, especially for the young, simply accelerate
the loss of the old culture.

2. I have mentioned that I am helping a visionary Sherpa named
Tsering, connect up their remote villages high in the Himalayas. Since
almost half the 90,000 living Sherpas live away from Nepal, Tsering
wants the 'net' to be able to bring them back. Will it just accelerate
the drain?

3. Frank Odasz, whom I mentored years ago in getting Big Sky Telegraph
in Montana off the ground (mid 80s), now is in demand helping
'communities' from Jamacian to Alaskan get online, trained, and productive.
His latest one being in McGrath, Alaska, with natives being connected
wirelessly to a Tachyon satellite link to the net. 70% of the households
are connected in the village of 600+. What will that do to the
local culture, the influence of the elders of the tribes, the aspirations
of the young?
  

    
Dave, with regard to No. 1, it's possible that the same ease in
communication will contribute to saving the old culture, but not necessarily
among the local residents.

Consider the way southern mountain string band music in the US has evolved
over the last 30 years. The current carriers of that tradition are mostly
not from the places where the music originated, but who are still part of
the same oral tradition--they initially heard recordings, or visited the
old-timers and learned at their feet. Now they're sharing and teaching the
same music and techniques in other places.

It's entirely possible that something simialr will happen with your friends
in Wales. They'll use the Welsh cultural sites online as a way to learn and
share the culture, even if it has been dormant in their own families for
many generations. (The "they" in that last sentence are people who don't
live within the traditional Welsh communities). Still others will become
attracted to it without any family connection (like the Japanese-Americans
who are regulars at the Swedish dances in Seattle).

All of which is to say that the cultural impact of net connections will
probably work both ways--it will allow some people to "escape", but it will
also bring others in.
  

    
Mobs, Communities, and Cultures.  These seem like different phases in
a sort of continuum, looked at one way, like taking stock of H(2)O at
very different temperatures.  A key to these changing characteristics
of 'water' is order itself.

Mobs seem even less organized that complexity's swarms. Mob theory
probably got its start with French sociologist's Gustav Le Bon's book,
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1885). His ideas had great
impact in that unsettled time, and that text was translated into 19
languages a year after its publication. Swarms seem to invoke at least
a sense of on-the-fly self-organization, while communities depend some
a degree of commitment, an expectation of involvement on a variety of
levels and contexts. Next, to take up Dave’s and John Ross’ exchange,
cultures must in some way reproduce themselves- there must be a sort of
substrate that even if it doesn’t exactly stay the same, still serves
to link past to present to future, like in a blur of temporal traffic
lights.  That continuity can be communicated through the teaching of
practices across generations – say in the sort of Oral Cultures that
Dutch oral ‘literature’ scholar [and art theorist] Jan Vansina talks
about.  Or we might see the links being made in part through the media
of audio/visual recordings.  Southern Mountain String Band Music can
become the basis of new communities, both a medium connecting to the
cultural pasts, and the medium by which people create and sustain their
meetings with each other.  

But following up on this phrasing, this linking of communities and
order, I will have to re-iterate what I have said at other times, that
communication by itself- whether in virtual communities or in any
community of shared locale or interest- does not link directly to
systems and hierarchies of organization.  We might think of cybernetics
as involving not simply communication, but also control- not simply
control in a top-down fashion, but perhaps control in the sense of
efficacy, self-worth, and self-apprehension.  Cybernetics of course is
to link together communication with control and vice versa- it is more
than simply first order systems theory. 

I think one of the dis-empowering shift in virtual community movements
had to do with this concern- that communication by itself need not
actually simplify the world, nor necessarily translate into a return of
power to the grassroots [Indeed, this has been a long-standing issue –
look at Karl Marx’s critique with what he called ‘utopian socialism’
back in the 1840s.  Neither the speed-up of communitarian
communication, he thought, nor even a return to simpler economic models
of quasi-agrarian techno-communities would necessarily engage and
re-direct the larger scale socio-economic systems in which that smaller
‘community’ were to be involved and embedded.  How the ‘community’ can
engage and exist in larger communities is a complex issue, and one to
which I think needs a lot more thought. What are some of those larger
forces, and how do they tie into mob/swarms, communities, and cultures?

Unlike some here, I do see a strong bias towards cultural
fragmentation and segmentation gaining ground in the general culture. 
It is something that the serendipity of cross-communication, and the
presence of a few of us who specialize in deranging our mental modals
cannot defeat just now.   While I can imagine my clothes talking to
your clothes, as it were, I don’t want my clothes taking up too much of
my time these days. Yes, it might save me time in some things, but I
will need to negotiate and adjust to the new information. Without clear
moral rules about how to create a sort of conversational closure, and
without trust, things can go very wrong, and become quite time
consuming. 

Teaching in Boulder just now, I would have loved to have gone over to
hear Powell’s speech, especially if Cursor Cowboy Dave were on hand,
and he knows of my long standing interest in wireless.  I had already
taken note of that forum- but then I am tossed around by many other
communities and their commitments – digital arts, social theory,
family, the recent move here from California, designing and evaluating
course, and piles of manuscripts. My clothes might want to interrupt
me, along with many other message devices [are my pants trying to spam
me – or is this call for real], but I must follow through in how I have
set my path, or sometimes just lean and loafe at my ease, observing a
spear of summer grass. Useful organization is not easy to achieve, and
in a way that is what culture does – creates a meaningful repertoire of
possibilities linked in ways to sustain those possibilities. Ideally,
useful organization is conserved because of its improbability, and its
complex links to the unexpected. Meaning which is a critical
contribution of communities, will be involve something more than the
‘technological’ –  and in a sense the greater challenge will be how to
find time again to do the things that either take time, or that never
yet had their time. 

[Sorry about going on so long - for those of you who didn't skip on to
the next post, ever in a hurry, eh?]