Computers, Society, and Nature

Schoolhouse rock marketing?

Get Perpendicular

As was mentioned in slashdot a few days ago, the maker of wordpress (the blogging software used for this blog) was hosting link spam, designed to artificially raise the ranking of websites in search engines by having hidden links to websites that regular users don’t see, but search engine crawlers do. Such practices contribute to the irritating occurance of clicking on links from Google that lead to ‘index’ pages that exist only to link to advertising and pop-up ads (which sadly have begun making an appearance in Firefox again). WordPress is an open source project, and the default configurations have links back to the wordpress.org website (the bottom of this page has it for example). Now all of those links pointing towards wordpress.org give wordpress more authority, which is then used for these somewhat nefarious purposes.

The general consensus was that it was a poor move, which has caused WordPress to be removed from Google’s, Yahoo’s, and MSN’s indices, and no doubt the maker of WordPress feels sufficiently bad about it that he will think twice before doing it again.

The question is, at what point must we examine our usage of tools, based on their source? In this case, the questionable behavior was quickly rectified. But what if the department of defence (or… Microsoft!) released open source tools. Should people have ethical qualms about using that code based on its source? What if it is released and then used for generally evil purposes? Or for a more general example, what about contributing to projects that are generally used to further causes I personally do not agree with? I generally try to buy non-evil products, should it be ok to use ‘free’ projects with evil associations?

In one of the Philip K. Dick short stories I read, the premise was that the sci-fi writers are in fact predicting the future, without even knowing it, and people from the future who had a problem, decided to travel back in time, to get the person from the past, to write more of the story, to determine the solution to the problem they were having, that the author had already correctly predicted.

It was kind of a funny idea, and the story is somewhat amusing. As we discussed today even if we discount the idea that people are actually seeing into the future, it may be that science fiction is inspiring people to try to create what they read or see in novels and on tv or in movies.

However, the most interesting futurist on the internet has to be John Titor. Someone sent me his site a few years ago, which details how he is a time traveler from the future, who has come back to our times to apparently make an internet site detailing the world’s demise over the next few years. Not to the credit of my friend who sent it to me, they seemed quite convinced. I have long since lost the initial website, but here is a summary page and the Wikipedia entry.

The internet can create some interesting myths, which would probably otherwise have a lot more difficulty spreading. Beyond John Titor, another category of links people send me ‘secretly’ are posts about the oil peak, which predicts massive oil shortages very soon, due to various factors.

When things develop enough, sometimes these websites create enough momentum they begin to look like legitimate information, and people start to buy it. I wonder how long it will be before we see a religion with its primary texts written electronically? If it could gain a foothold, it would certainly have the potential to spread very rapidly.

We have already mentioned the Gomery inquiry in class a little bit. Well now it seems that an unassuming American blogger has triggered a political crisis in Canada by publishing testimony from the inquiry that was subject to a publication ban.

Here is a story from the Globe about this.

I won’t link to the actual blog in question for fear of us getting sued!

This is truly bizarre. John Donoghue, a professor of neuroscience at Brown University in RI has developed a brain chip that reads brain signals and allow those who are paralysed the ability to control everyday objects by thought alone. That means one can think a t.v. on or off, alter volume, and even move a computer cursor just with the brain. The chip is inserted into the motor cortex and wires are fed into a computer which analyses the brain signals, the signals are then transformed into cursor movements, which gives the user the ability to control computers just by their mind. What about those who have a really active mind? Will they be able to control their impulses? It is one thing to think of something bad, and something quite different to actually DO something bad. But with this technology, perhaps there will be a thinner line here…

Talk about funny acronyms, the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) directive which makes electronic manufacturers responsible for the recycling and disposal of goods, was going to become a law in the UK in August; however it has been pushed back to 2006. Read the BBC Newsarticle that highlights the story. Apparently the legislation is complicated, because, as the UK WEEE program manager notes, “When you look at the detail, it is complex. It requires interaction with people we don’t usually interact with.” And I thought ICT would make processes faster…government organization is still a slow process. In some ways this is good, in other ways, like with the urgency of environmental hazards, it is bad.

This is funny! I think it might be an inside joke or something…

http://www.google.com/googlegulp/

The editors of Scientific America have decided to give up on the evolution debate:

In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.