Check out this stunning animation by Ryan Woodward:
I was delighted to see this, because it takes to a perfect, polished conclusion a visual style I messed about with briefly, a few years ago:
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not claim that my sketches had any influence on Ryan! ‘Construction’ type sketches are a common enough aesthetic, and I’m not even sure that it was an original style when I created my own animation.
Rather, I just say that there is a certain pleasure in seeing such an idea realised. When I was messing about with tracing paper, I knew I did not have the artistic training, nor the resources, nor the talent, to actually realise what I saw in my head – a depressing realisation one learns to accept. But watching Woodward’s piece, I see he has incorporated everything I would wish, especially a sense of the transient, the fleeting, and the whiff of faeries.
See also: Fifty Nine Productions animations for Jónsi.
Month: December 2010 (Page 1 of 2)
The popular Gawker/Lifehacker network was hacked this week, compromising tens of thousands of passwords. This news provides an excuse for a couple of paragraphs of boastful geekery in the fascinating area of password management.
I spend a lot of my day roaming the Internet and the various services it has to offer, both for work and personal matters. In many cases, I operate an organisational and personal account (for example, @englishpen and @robertsharp59 on Twitter). Logging in and out of the various accounts can be a drag, but I’ve recently started using the Sxipper password management tool for Firefox. Browsers already have the capacity to remember your passwrods of course, but usually only one-per-site. Sxipper stores all the possible options and let’s me choose. A Godsend.
This transition has allowed me to become a little more rigourous in managing personal privacy. Prompted by this salutary tale from Cory Doctorow, I decided that I would create unique passwords for new websites I sign-up for.
I carefully tapped in my password, clicked the login button, and then felt my stomach do a slow flip-flop as I saw the URL that my browser was contacting with the login info: http://twitter.scamsite.com … And that’s when I realized that I’d been phished. And it was bad. Because I’d signed up for Twitter years ago, when Ev Williams, Twitter’s co-founder sent me an invite to the initial beta. I’d used a password that I used for all kinds of sites, back before I started strictly using long, random strings that I couldn’t remember for passwords. … What’s more, Twitter isn’t the only place where I used my “low-security” password that has turned into a high-security context, which means that hijackers could conceivably break into lots of interesting places with that information.
The recent Gawker breach only reinforces Cory’s advice to use a different password for each site. Back in the day, before my laptop was stolen, I would use the same password for all websites, as (I guess) most people continue to do. It was only after the theft that I began to diversify, and only in recent months I have gone the whole random hog and started to use opaque strings. To do this with ease, I have bookmarked PC Tools Random Password Generator.
JR Rapael at the PC World blog has an interesting article on all this: Gawker Hack Exposes Ridiculous Password Habits. Apparently “12345” is the most common password, followed closely by “password”, obviously. If those combinations feel a little too close to home, it would be wise to make some changes to your own online life, ASAP.
This blog has been saturated with Wikileaks commentary recently (one, two, three, four in a row). Allow me one more on the basis that it adds a dash of caution to the Kool-Aid.
Reading various commentaries about the Wikileaks and its #Cablegate releases, I think a balanced consensus is emerging around the publication of Government information. Everyone agrees that the near-mythical “launch codes” should be kept secret (although how one would actually go about launching a nuclear weapon if one did have the codes is never explained). Back in the realm of the possible, examples such as the identities of Iraqi and Afghan translators working for Nato forces are obvious no-nos. The risk of harm is obvious and the possible chain of events that might lead to someone coming to harm is quite direct. But when government policies, attitudes and diplomacy is concerned, there seems to be a feeling that The People’s Right To Know outweighs any tangental negative effects it might have on the governing class. Administration embarrassment is not a genuine national security issue. For the most part, Wikileaks seems to be adhering to similar principles, and many of the leaked cables are indeed gossip and opinion. Not facts that can be turned into weapons. It seems the journalists covering the publication for Wikileaks media partners (for example, the Guardian) have taken care to self-censor when National Security is genuinely at stake.
One example from a few days ago stands out, that of the list of facilities crucial to US National security. It lists pipelines, chemical labs and undersea fibre-optic stations that, if attacked, would cause major problems for the US economy and wellbeing of its citizens.
The cable is listed as secret, but a defender of freedom of information might point out that the information it contains is available elsewhere. It does not take a Pentagon analyst to work out that the major pipelines are critical pieces of infrastructure, as are cable landing points. Anyone with a basic knowledge of the economics and history of medicine would already know that a facilities that manufactures insulin and vaccines are important establishment for all humanity.
However, let us remind ourselves of a blogpost at Minority Report on the subject of anonymity (which I enjoy referring to from time to time):
Its when computers talk to other computers that liberty disappears. Because a computer can correlate countless bits of data and create new records that would take many humans exponentially longer to do. And that gap, or grace period, is actually where anonymity lies, or did.
I think this same thought could apply to the secrecy of government information, too. Sure, any old terrorist cell, given Google and a couple of live minds, could come up with a similar list of mission-critical targets for attack. If they stumbled accross Neal Stephenson’s masterful long-form report on the FLAG-project, they would know exactly where to find fibre-optic landing stations on any continent – Stephenson, ever the geek, includes precise GPS locations as his chapter headings! But crucially, these searches will take a little time. You do need to do some thinking and some searching, which takes a lot of man-hours. And (to paraphrase David, above) in that gap, that grace-period, may be where our national security lies.
This is, for me, the strongest argument I can think of against the Free Information Fundamentalism preached by Wikileaks. But even then, this only counsels against the disclosure of some very specific types of information, not the wholesale immorality of the project.
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Congratulations to Lui Xiaobo, Chinese dissident, winner in absentia of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. PEN American Centre have asked their members to republish Xiaobo’s voice and writings on their own sites and in their own Twitter feeds, so that he may be heard even though he is incarcerated by the panicked Chinese regime.
Here is Liu Xia (Lui Xiaobo’s wife) and Victoria Redel reading his “Greed’s Prisoner” in Beijing:
Elsehwere, you can hear Lui Xia describe the Chinese authorities confiscating Xiaobo’s papers, and Lui Xiaobo himself discussing free expression (or the lack of it) in China. PEN American Centre has a lot more multimedia on their site. Please disseminate widely.
We live in interesting times. As I write there are protesters kettled by police on Westminster Bridge, and burning portaloos in Parliament Square. The army are deployed in Edinburgh, clearing the effects of the worst snow for 40 years. Meanwhile, an ‘info war’ is being waged on the largest financial services companies in the world by a disparate group of hacktivists. Digital technology allows us to watch all these crises unfold in realtime.
In my twitter stream all these stories are spliced together. This makes them seem like different scenes in a single master-narrative.
All these events are compelling because they show just how tenuous our human systems are. Visa and MasterCard should be reliable to the point of invisibility – instead we are reminded that they can turn off our credit on a political whim. The food supply into our cities should be consistent and unbroken, not severed by a bit of snow. And our shopping districts should not erupt into blazing vandalism in an instant.
These confusions expose the thin seams of our society. I do not think they will break, for tonight at least. But the strain is obvious.