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Russian authorities and major telecom operators are preparing to disconnect the country from the world wide web as part of an exercise to prepare for future cyber attacks, Russian news agency RosBiznesKonsalting (RBK) reported last week.

The purpose of the exercise is to develop a threat analysis and provide feedback to a proposed law introduced in the Russian Parliament last December.

The draft law, called the Digital Economy National Program, requires Russian internet service providers (ISP) to guarantee the independence of the Russian Internet (Runet) in the event of a foreign attack to sever the country’s internet from the world wide web.

Telecom operators (MegaFon, VimpelCom (Beeline brand), MTS, Rostelecom and others) will have to introduce the “technical means” to re-route all Russian internet traffic to exchange points approved by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor), Russia’s federal executive body responsible for censorship in media and telecommunications.

Roskomnazor will observe all internet traffic and make sure data between Russian users stays within the country’s borders, and is not re-routed abroad.

The exercise is expected to occur before April 1, as Russian authorities have not given exact dates.

The measures described in the law include Russia constructing its internet system, known as Domain Name System (DNS), so it can operate independently from the rest of the world.

Across the world, 12 companies oversee the root servers for DNS and none are located in Russia. However, there are copies of Russia’s core internet address book inside the country suggesting its internet could keep operating if the US cut it off.

Ultimately, the Russian government will require all domestic traffic to pass through government-controlled routing points. These hubs will filter traffic so that data sent between Russians internet users work seamlessly, but any data to foreign computers would be rejected.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Here’s China’s massive plan to retool the web

November 4, 2018

Here’s China’s massive plan to retool the web

The most ambitious project of mass control is the country’s “social credit” system. All Chinese citizens will receive a numerical score reflecting their “trustworthiness.”

A”clap for Xi Jingping.”

CNBC Screenshot

The following is adapted from LikeWar by P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, a book by two defense experts—one of which is the founder of the Eastern Arsenal blog at Popular Science —about how the Internet has become a new kind of battleground, following a new set of rules that we all need to learn.

“Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world.”

So read the first email ever sent from the People’s Republic of China, zipping 4,500 miles from Beijing to Berlin. The year was 1987. Chinese scientists celebrated as their ancient nation officially joined the new global internet.  As the Internet evolved from a place for scientists to a place for all netizens, its use in China gradually grew—then exploded. In 1996, there were just 40,000 people online in China; by 1999, there were 4 million. In 2008, China passed the United States in number of active internet users: 253 million. Today, that figure has tripled again to nearly 800 million (over a quarter of all the world’s people online).

It was also clear from the beginning that for the citizens of the People’s Republic of China, the internet would not be—could not be —the freewheeling, crypto-libertarian paradise pitched by its American inventors. The country’s modern history is defined by two critical periods: a century’s worth of embarrassment, invasion, and exploitation by outside nations, and a subsequent series of revolutions that unleashed a blend of communism and Chinese nationalism.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Demise of Dissent: Why the Web Is Becoming Homogenized

November 17, 2017

The Demise of Dissent: Why the Web Is Becoming Homogenized

In other words, we’ll be left with officially generated and sanctioned fake news and “approved” dissent.

We’ve all heard that the problem with the web is fake news, i.e. unsubstantiated or erroneous content that’s designed to mislead or sow confusion.

The problem isn’t just fake news–it’s the homogenization of the web, that is, the elimination or marginalization of independent voices of skepticism and dissent.

There are four drivers of this homogenization:

1. The suppression of dissent under the guise of ridding the web of propaganda and fake news–in other words, dissent is labeled fake news as a cover for silencing critics and skeptics.

2. The sharp decline of advertising revenues flowing to web publishers, both major outlets and small independent publishers like Of Two Minds.

3. The majority of advert revenues now flow into the coffers of the quasi-monopolies Facebook and Google.

4. Publishers are increasingly dependent on these quasi-monopolies for readers and visibility: any publisher who runs afoul of Facebook and Google and is sent to Digital Siberia effectively vanishes.

The reason why publishers’ advert incomes are plummeting are four-fold:

1. Most of the advert revenues in the digital market are being skimmed by Facebook and Google, as the chart below illustrates.

2. Ad blockers have become ubiquitous.

3. Few people click on the display ads that are the standard in desktop web publishing; in other words, these ads simply don’t work very well, and much of the revenue being generated is click-fraud, i.e. bots not real people clicking on adverts because they’re interested in the product/service. As a result, advertisers are pulling away from these type of ads as they search for advert models that aren’t so vulnerable to click-fraud.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Seneca Cliff for the Web as we know it?

November 1, 2017

A Seneca Cliff for the Web as we know it?

We can’t ignore the evidence any longer. The “Web”, intended as a constellation of independent information providers is dying. It is going through a Seneca Cliff of its own, being replaced by a “Trinet”, controlled by the three giant companies, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

I have been noticing it with the stats for “Cassandra’s Legacy”. You can see how the decline in the number of contacts has been steady over the past year. Here are the stats:

We don’t yet see a Seneca Cliff, that is a rapid drop in the audience (don’t look at the drop at the end of the graph; it is just because the data are for the current month). I think it is mainly because I have been trying to contrast the decline by publishing more posts, but that has not been sufficient to change the trend. Here are the data for another blog of mine, “Chimeras”

In this case, the blog used to be visited by students looking for text to cut and paste for their term papers on mythology. They are not coming anymore; evidently, they found other sources of information. Or maybe the search engines don’t lead them to my blog anymore. Hard to say, but it is a fact.

So, what’s happening? As always, things change and, in our times, tend to change fast. Many of us can remember the “age of mass media,” now obsolete as steam engines and mechanical calculators. It looks incredible that there existed a time when everyone was exposed to the same information, provided under strict control by the government. In the Soviet Union, it was under control of the Communist Party.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“It’s Over For Me” Matt Drudge Warns Public “You’re A Pawn In The ‘Ghetto-isation'” Of The Web

October 10, 2015

“It’s Over For Me” Matt Drudge Warns Public “You’re A Pawn In The ‘Ghetto-isation'” Of The Web

The very foundation of the free Internet is under severe threat from copyright laws that could ban independent media outlets, according to Matt Drudge. “I had a Supreme Court Justice tell me it’s over for me,” said Drudge, warning web users that they were being pushed “pawn-like” into the cyber “ghettos” of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

“Reclusive” Drudge says he has not had a photo taken in 8 years

As DCClothesline.com reports,

During an appearance on the Alex Jones Show, Drudge asserted that copyright laws which prevent websites from even linking to news stories were being advanced.

“I had a Supreme Court Justice tell me it’s over for me,” said Drudge. “They’ve got the votes now to enforce copyright law, you’re out of there. They’re going to make it so you can’t even use headlines.”

“To have a Supreme Court Justice say to me it’s over, they’ve got the votes, which means time is limited,” he added, noting that a day was coming when simply operating an independent website could be outlawed.

“That will end (it) for me – fine – I’ve had a hell of a run,” said Drudge, adding that web users were being pushed into the cyber “ghettos” of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

“This is ghetto, this is corporate, they’re taking your energy and you’re getting nothing in return – nothing!”

Watch the full interview below…

Drudge warned that social media giants like Twitter and Facebook were swallowing up content and strangling the organic growth of independent Internet news platforms. Automated news aggregators like Google News also came under fire.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cecil the lion: understanding the secret of a supermeme (and its relevance to climate change ommunication)

August 3, 2015

Cecil the lion: understanding the secret of a supermeme (and its relevance to climate change communication)

A “meme” is a unit of knowledge in the communication space. Memes tend to go viral and diffuse rapidly; some are so fast that they can be defined as “supermemes”. Above, you can see the result of a Google Trends search where the meme “Cecil the Lion” shows an incredibly rapid growth, overtaking the number of searches of a well known political term, such as “Hillary”. And it keeps growing! It is a true “supermeme”.

Communication, nowadays, is mostly based on the ability to make certain concepts “go viral”, that is to diffuse by itself over the Web, generating “memes,” entities able to self- reproduce in the communication space. So, for years, scientists and policy makers have tried to create memes telling people about the danger of climate change. On the whole, it has been an abject failure, despite heroic efforts. The idea that climate change is real, it is human made, and it is dangerous just doesn’t seem to stick in most people’s mind. In other words, it doesn’t generate memes.

So, what causes a concept to go viral? We can learn something on this point by studying a recent meme, the one relative to the killing of Cecil the Lion. Using Google Trends to measure the number of the relative Internet searches, we see that this meme grew so rapidly that it can rightly be defined as a “supermeme,” comparable in intensity to searches relative to political and sporting events, that usually dominate the search space.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Web: Destroyer or Savior of Culture, Pay and Employment?

March 22, 2015

The Web: Destroyer or Savior of Culture, Pay and Employment?

The cost of creating and distributing content has fallen to near-zero, and that is not going away.

Last month I explored the contentious question, Is the Web Destroying the Cultural Economy? In my recent video discussion with analyst Gordon T. Long, we expanded this question to pay (earned income) and jobs, i.e. is the Web eroding pay and jobs?

I also discussed these issues with Mike Swanson of Wall Street Window in a podcast Is The Web Destroying the Cultural Economy? An historian by training, Mike is well-placed to put these issues in a larger context.

There are several key dynamics at work.One is the democratization of expression and journalism unleashed by the Web has eroded the industrial meritocracy of gatekeepers and vertically integrated content-media corporations: music labels, publishers, newspapers, etc.

The web has enabled virtually anyone with Internet access to create a nearly-free global distribution network–what I have termed 800 Million Channels of Me (February 21, 2011). This blog is obviously one of those millions of globally distributed channels.

Critics of this democratization feel that this has unleashed an avalanche of mediocrity that is judged on “likes” and pages views–a process in which talent is “lost in a sea of garbage.”

The other side of the debate sees the demise of the gatekeepers, who could enforce their own view of what was valuable culturally and economically, as freeing all those who could never get past the gatekeepers. This explosion of creativity and expression is an unalloyed good thing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is the Web Destroying the Cultural Economy?

February 22, 2015

Is the Web Destroying the Cultural Economy?

Are we entering a cultural Dark Age, where the talented cannot earn a living creating culture?

Longtime correspondent G.F.B. recently sent me this 13-minute Interview with Andrew Keen. This is my first exposure to Keen, and his view that the democratization of the Web is great for politics but a disaster for what he calls the Cultural Economy— the relatively small but important slice of the economy that pays creators and artists to make culture: music, literature, art and serious journalism.

The title of Keen’s 2007 book encapsulates his dire perspective: The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values.

(His 2012 book had a similar theme: Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us)

(Author Scott Timberg makes some of the same points in his new book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (via Cheryl A.)

Keen touches on a great many ideas and themes in this brief interview, but his core point is this: by enabling everyone to express themselves on an essentially equal footing, the Web has undermined legitimate journalism and buried the talented few in an avalanche of mediocrity–in his words, talent is “lost in a sea of garbage.”

By eliminating the middleman who added value by sorting the wheat from the chaff–the film studio, the music labels, the publishers–the Web has created a cultural landscape where “soft, ordinary” content such as cute cat videos garner the most “likes” and clicks–the digital world’s metric for popularity and thus value in the marketplace.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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