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permalink #151 of 280: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Sun 8 Dec 02 14:25
permalink #151 of 280: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Sun 8 Dec 02 14:25
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.
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permalink #152 of 280: John Ross (johnross) Sun 8 Dec 02 16:33
permalink #152 of 280: John Ross (johnross) Sun 8 Dec 02 16:33
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.
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permalink #153 of 280: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Sun 8 Dec 02 17:48
permalink #153 of 280: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Sun 8 Dec 02 17:48
Can you summarize, John?
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permalink #154 of 280: Dave Hughes (dave) Sun 8 Dec 02 20:55
permalink #154 of 280: Dave Hughes (dave) Sun 8 Dec 02 20:55
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.
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permalink #155 of 280: John Ross (johnross) Sun 8 Dec 02 22:03
permalink #155 of 280: John Ross (johnross) Sun 8 Dec 02 22:03
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.
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permalink #156 of 280: Thomas Armagost (silly) Sun 8 Dec 02 22:28
permalink #156 of 280: Thomas Armagost (silly) Sun 8 Dec 02 22:28
<scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 17:57>
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permalink #157 of 280: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Mon 9 Dec 02 15:26
permalink #157 of 280: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Mon 9 Dec 02 15:26
No need to apologize. It fits.
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permalink #158 of 280: Dave Hughes (dave) Tue 10 Dec 02 16:03
permalink #158 of 280: Dave Hughes (dave) Tue 10 Dec 02 16:03
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)
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permalink #159 of 280: Gail Williams (gail) Tue 10 Dec 02 16:38
permalink #159 of 280: Gail Williams (gail) Tue 10 Dec 02 16:38
What would the right radios be there, Dave?
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permalink #160 of 280: Dave Hughes (dave) Tue 10 Dec 02 16:42
permalink #160 of 280: Dave Hughes (dave) Tue 10 Dec 02 16:42
Cisco 350 Bridge as Access Point, Cisco 350 Workplace Bridge for client, one directional, one omni, antenna.
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permalink #161 of 280: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Tue 10 Dec 02 21:58
permalink #161 of 280: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Tue 10 Dec 02 21:58
> What kind of 'community' is that supposed to be. A chilly one!?
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permalink #162 of 280: Dave Hughes (dave) Tue 10 Dec 02 22:26
permalink #162 of 280: Dave Hughes (dave) Tue 10 Dec 02 22:26
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...
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permalink #163 of 280: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Tue 10 Dec 02 23:05
permalink #163 of 280: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Tue 10 Dec 02 23:05
I'm thinking that birders and sportsfans will be the first affinities to take to moblogging.
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permalink #164 of 280: Gail Williams (gail) Tue 10 Dec 02 23:33
permalink #164 of 280: Gail Williams (gail) Tue 10 Dec 02 23:33
How would that work for birders, for example? "Quick, there's a Long-eared owl hunting over here"?
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permalink #165 of 280: Dan Levy (danlevy) Wed 11 Dec 02 04:50
permalink #165 of 280: Dan Levy (danlevy) Wed 11 Dec 02 04:50
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.
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permalink #166 of 280: Cliff Figallo (fig) Wed 11 Dec 02 08:05
permalink #166 of 280: Cliff Figallo (fig) Wed 11 Dec 02 08:05
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.
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permalink #167 of 280: Gail Williams (gail) Wed 11 Dec 02 09:52
permalink #167 of 280: Gail Williams (gail) Wed 11 Dec 02 09:52
And carry out the new litter when its time has passed. I'm with you, Cliff.
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permalink #168 of 280: Mary Eisenhart (marye) Wed 11 Dec 02 11:14
permalink #168 of 280: Mary Eisenhart (marye) Wed 11 Dec 02 11:14
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.
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permalink #169 of 280: Jeff Loomis (jal) Thu 12 Dec 02 00:45
permalink #169 of 280: Jeff Loomis (jal) Thu 12 Dec 02 00:45
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.
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permalink #170 of 280: Reid Harward (reid) Thu 12 Dec 02 09:59
permalink #170 of 280: Reid Harward (reid) Thu 12 Dec 02 09:59
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.
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permalink #171 of 280: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Thu 12 Dec 02 10:14
permalink #171 of 280: Howard Rheingold (hlr) Thu 12 Dec 02 10:14
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.
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permalink #172 of 280: Reid Harward (reid) Thu 12 Dec 02 10:20
permalink #172 of 280: Reid Harward (reid) Thu 12 Dec 02 10:20
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
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permalink #173 of 280: Dave Hughes (dave) Mon 16 Dec 02 20:32
permalink #173 of 280: Dave Hughes (dave) Mon 16 Dec 02 20:32
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?
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permalink #174 of 280: John Ross (johnross) Mon 16 Dec 02 21:15
permalink #174 of 280: John Ross (johnross) Mon 16 Dec 02 21:15
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.
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permalink #175 of 280: Willard Uncapher (willard) Tue 17 Dec 02 03:02
permalink #175 of 280: Willard Uncapher (willard) Tue 17 Dec 02 03:02
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 Daves and John Ross exchange, cultures must in some way reproduce themselves- there must be a sort of substrate that even if it doesnt 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 Marxs 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 dont 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 Powells 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?]
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