Internet speeds and our frustration

When the internet was first created in 1958 it was designed to be a tool that the military would use. Since that time it has grown into an industry and something we use several times a day. It has also become the subject of controversy. Originally there was controversy about the safety of people but more recently the controversy has related to the speed of the internet. Now I will say that I "know nothing" about this subject matter, but can I ask a serious question, why the hell does it matter if broadband is only 100MBs rather than say the international standard of 0.1 seconds. What does it matter if a page takes 10 seconds to load? In the grand scheme of things that doesn't really matter. It sure beats the dial up speed of a minute, but even so does that really matter???

I'm a fan of the internet, don't get me wrong, I spend several hours a day surfing sites and checking my email but I don't care if it takes 10 seconds for a page to load. I don't download illegally, in fact I very rarely download full stop because I simply can't be bothered. that is not because of the speed at all. It's just that there's nothing I really want to download. Has anybody thought that maybe the speeds are being restricted because people are downloading illegally and has anyone thought that maybe having a "slow" speed is an attempt to try and curb this?!?!?!?!?!

Sure, we may not be up to the international standard but do we really want to be? To my knowledge China has 110,000 Internet cafés. Do we really want to end up like them? Do we really want to end up a nation of people who sit at computers and have limited social skills (offline)????

Maybe its a good thing that we aren't up to the international standard and we just need to be looking at this from a completely different angle, coz from my angle I don't see a problem.

YouTube - the online Mecca for the "proteurs"

Along with the large increase in the accessibility of the Internet, the rapid growth of on-line communities and internet-related technologies has provided a new platform for the public to “self-produce”. With a bit of technical skills, people in this day can actually broadcast or distribute their own media texts through the Internet without putting tons of money. The public is no longer the passive audience of mass-media but has become a part of mass-media as “proteurs” who can instantaneously affect the real world, and YouTube is there for everyone. The online video file sharing in YouTube enables the web users to interact and enjoy together. I personally leant how to read guitar tabs from YouTube. I even watch some of my favorite foreign weekly TV programs on YouTube. But what’s more amazing with YouTube is that its high buffering speed with versatility works as a tool for the web users in a way of expressing their desires or talents in audio-visual texts. Since my purchase of a digital cam, I have started to upload my personal videos that I make with a video-editing tool called Sony Vegas on YouTube to share good memories with my friends and other YouTubers. Further more, it seems that YouTube has already established a new cultural trend, which can act so fast and strong among a vast number of people. Its social impact is so huge that the popularity of YouTube has led to create many internet celebrities such as Bree the “lonely girl” (although later revealed the video series were all fictional). The band OK GO has hugely benefited from You Tube for their 2007 Grammy Award winning music video “Here It Goes Again” which was highly praised for its innovative use of ‘running-machines’ as prop.
There are still many issues are going on about YouTube including its copyright infringements, and, as far as I am concerned, it is true the works done by proteurs may lower the quality of online media text and could result in false reality. However, one could say that YouTube has already gained its status of a new sub-genre of media itself allowing many proteurs to be formed.

Wireless woop woop

Im no broadband/dial up genius., however i do no one thing, i am so glad that the issues i had with even getting onto the internet are now a thing of the past in my household. It's been about a couple of months now that we have had wireless internet in our house. Before i had to worry about starting up my laptop, just to have it freeze on me, then connect it to a giant cable to use the internet, which stretched to the other side of the house and downstairs... however now i can sit anywere.. yup anywere and just go! its fabulous. I find myself on the computer so much more now though, i don't know if its healthy! i find myself myspacing my boyfriend on plans for later in the day, rather than just picking up the good old telephone.

The internet seems to be a neccesity these days, for example i rang up a government organisation the other day and they told me to fill out a form on their website first. Even if i wanted to cut down my internet usage its really not that possible.

On a somewhat different note, i must agree with some that yes, when i did have dial up, it was slow, and became quite frustrating and by the time it connected to the internet i had forgottan what it was i had to do on there. However, back then i didn't have anything to compare it to, ie countries with faster broadband, i just took it as it came to me. I thought the internet = SLOW! Although my life does not revolve around the internet (however i do get slight panic attacks if i havn't checked my myspace every hour on the hour!) wireless does make things alot easier!!

RE: Many Internet Blogs...

After reading through numerous blogs and comments about the internet in New Zealand, I wanted to give my 10 cents worth...

I read a reply from a certain individual who claimed they were sick of hearing people complain about the state of our internet. I am sick of hearing people whine about topics like that when they have no idea what they’re talking about!

The internet in New Zealand is extremely slow. We do not compare with any of the other OECD countries one bit! It is because of the monopoly Telecom still effectively holds, despite all the unbundling talk. Telecom owns the lines in New Zealand, therefore other companies such as Vodafone have to use Telecoms lines. Therefore Vodafone cannot do any better than Telecom, as they are effectively customers of Telecom too. Telecom chooses not to upgrade their lines as it would not be in their best interest, as other global telecommunications companies would destroy them!

Someone claimed that there were too many hills and mountains in New Zealand preventing internet access. This in itself is a load of bollocks. How many other countries have heaps of hills and mountains yet still have internet speeds nearly 100 times faster. We are being ripped off down here. Just go onto the OECD website or the NZ government statistics website and you will see the facts. Even have a search in Google.

I did a blog earlier about mobile phones in New Zealand. The internet problem has a direct relationship with this. We are receiving very poor service from Telecom. Our internet is not what it should be at all. Something needs to change.

Any investors out there do not buy shares in Telecom. I would personally like to see them one day be taken over by the global companies, so that we are provided with the best mobile phone and internet access possible.

One another note...Go the Warriors, one more game until the playoffs, Saturday night at 9.30.

Luke Versalko
www.myspace.com/luke_versalko

Dynamic Image Resizing.

Here we have a tech demo where the guys from Adobe demonstrate some truely impressive tech that's going into the next generation of Photoshop.

Initially I was thinking it was primarily an interesting leap forward, but then my inner conspiracy theorist came to the conclusion that this kind of technology could be used to make Winston Smith's job a great deal easier.

Disappear inconvenient people/objects from photographs with even greater convenience.

Of course, I'm a nasty suspicious person on that score.

What do we think?

- Kevin.

Guarding the Internets - Human Rights

I subscribe to an RSS news feed, that renews itself everyone few minutes or so. This morning, I turned on my computer to find a particular article in which it Yahoo! is being sued by Human Rights Organizations in the US for violating those rights, when the Chinese branch of Yahoo! handed over its internet logs on particular journalists who have posted "information" that went against the government.

The full article is here. Couple with the past atrocities committed in China, one would wonder how this affects us in such a technological age. I've included a video below to give a hint of what it's like to be in China, for those who've never known.

The big question is that of: how do we differ between different laws from different states? Because the internet is such a multi-national object, by deferring to particular laws in one country might be breaching the laws of another. Yahoo! is based in the US, so technically they should uphold US laws as the bar, yet in this case they've had to release privy information to the Chinese state, which is unlawful in US. I see it as Yahoo! as being capitalist bastards, who are more willing to sacrifice certain people, or positions, so they can have a higher monetary gain. The internet is a massive market in China, and Yahoo! wants a piece of it. If they didn't give the information, they might loose it, so they have the information away.

That's possibly just being harsh, but the country is rife with corruption, and from what we can tell, the uneveness of how this great economic revolution's benefits to various populations and sectors within Chinese society are creating a lot of unrest. Numerous officials and military officers at the top level of the Chinese government have absolutely no problem with killing/torturing "dissendents", as well as their own people. They are killers with no meaningful legal apparatus to prevent them from doing anything they please. So-called dusty piles of 'constitutions' never produces and impediment to the exercise of raw power, or means of redress when the full scope of that damage that power has done is revealed.

I'm not saying the West is perfect either, as there is also corruption, violations both subtle and flagrant to the constitutions of the "free" countries. Wealthy oligarchs and aristocrats can wield an unhealthy amount of influence, but somehow, the people still hold an enormous amount of power, and can still upset even the most entrenched political groups.

Of course, there is no perfect country/political system. Yet, what I cannot accept is the fact that these global dominating companies such as Yahoo! should have to defer to a monopolistic state when they have been formed and grown up under a system of freedom, of human rights, and defend their co-operation with laws which we find both immoral and of utter distaste in the idiotic rationalization of "we're just following orders".

What say you?

It's never that simple when "I" meets "T"

Two videos commenting on the Yahoo!/Xtra "Bubble" launch fiasco, where Xtra customers were unable to access email and other services for over 48 hours two weeks ago.

First, a satirical video from the TVOne series Facelift:


Second, a segment from Campbell Live interviewing a Telecom spokesperson about the debacle:


In other news, Barack Obama is winning the battle of the social networking sites, and the iPhone has been untethered from AT&T, allowing complete interoperability with any other network, even those outside the Continental US.

Digital aesthetics in photography

With the development of technology of photography, the art of photography is stepping into a new era, an era of digital culture, which means in the digital age, “creativity” is the key word. By saying that photography emerged under the development of technology, such development forced the language of photographic art to undergo a revolution and an innovation. In the same time, it drives the new art form to rise up forward. By bringing Photoshop and other image edit software into the sphere of photographic art, so that this still image art has gone through a revolutionary change. Perhaps, people might have doubts about whether the edited still image belongs to the art of photography, as it betrayed the original intention of “realism”. In old times, the photos were the representation of truth, because people insist that to see is what you to believe. However, in nowadays, by using various editing tools, it is hard to believe what you see from a “hyperrealism” photo. In the practice of photography, people will not refuse the intervention of new technology. Viewing from the classification of subjects, the emergence of one concept is classified and introduced by the educational experts and scholars that based on an existing fact. To the photography itself, because the existence of photography, it gradually developed into the concept of “photography”, and with the emergence of digital technology and computer graphics, this could lead people to rethink the concept of “photography”.

Corporations Sneak Through Cyberspace - Unsuccessfully

It amazes me the degree of gatekeeping currently goes on behind the scenes affecting the content of websites. But after reading this I begin to understand the logic behind it.

Corporate companies ranging from Disney to Pepsi to Wal-Mart have all attempted to alter incriminating facts from the international wikipedia database. But Virgil Griffith has launched an unnofficial wikipedia search tool that sifts out anonymous edits made from propaganda moguls through tracking company IP addresses and matching it to wikipedia.

Wikipedia is meant to be a user-friendly un-academic encyclopedia that anyone can edit. But when corporations start using it as a marketing device it's faults outweigh its benefits. Support for wikipedia to sift out spin should be elevated because this website is a tool for public service to broaden our general knowledge.

To an extent, if companies were to smarten up their wiki-spin it would be as simple as using an IP spoofer. This would allow them to write anonymous edits to their wiki pages or even that of their opposition. This move would prove that the internet is unregulated and unaccountable for its actions which is not ideal. Further research and search tools need to be designed to support the security of millions of people that use the internet.

Finally: *actual* broadband, but at what price?

From the front of today's Sunday Star Times, "$1.4b Telecom upgrade has 111 power cut peril". Telecom is planning on rolling out, over the next five years, significant upgrades to its fixed-line network which will enable us to finally have broadband that is above the third-world levels we currently experience. One of the problems though is that the lines will terminate at the user's end in a device which requires power. What this means is that you won't be able to do anything with your phone line if the power is out -- you won't even be able to make emergency calls. Knowing how unreliable power supply in this country is, Telecom will have a hard time convincing the public that implementing this system won't result in an inability to make a phone call when someone's life depends on it.

Brad Fitzpatrick, The Creator Of LiveJournal, On The Long Road To Open Social Networks

Wired's Compiler blog had an interview piece recently with Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of one of the first popular blog sites LiveJournal, about the future of social networking.

As Fitzpatrick sees it, in order for the social networking movement to develop, it will need to become de-centralised: the information that you submit to one site will be held in a central location and will be accessed by a multitude of different platforms for a variety of reasons. Moreover, he says, sites should begin developing practices of sharing information between one another; information you submit to Facebook about your current employment, for example, could be passed on to a job-hunting website should you decide to change jobs. Ditto internet dating sites, online forums and other forms of online social interaction, such as commenting on YouTube videos. Granted, some of this is already possible with things such as OpenID, but many sites have yet to cotton on to the vast new landscape which could be created by merging and opening up access to all the information that already exists. The problem at the moment is that Facebook and other similar sites function as 'gated' communities -- if you post a link using fb's share applet, only those who you've selected as friends will be able to view it. Want other people to see it too? You'll have to switch to a different place -- a blog, or Twitter, or text messaging -- in order to get the "Hey, check this cool video out!" meessage out there, so to speak.

The obvious retaliation is the privacy claim -- "What if I don't want all those sites seeing my information?!". Well, chances are they already can: Facebook already displays information about you, no matter how stringently you've set your privacy settings. The information's out there, why not just put it all together?

See also "Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up".

Mr. Brown: using the Internet for free speech

Lee Kin Mun, aka "mrbrown", is a Singaporean blogger and satirist. He speaks with 95bFM's Simon Pound about how the Internet has enabled people to speak freely about issues they see as important. Formerly employed as a journalist in Singapore, he was fired for expressing his political views even though he did so satirically. He's currently in New Zealand to speak at the Bananas NZ: Going Global conference and will also be speaking at the Karajoz Great Blend next Saturday. His daily (Mon-Fri) podcast attracts over 20,000 unique listens every day, and his blog has currently become somewhat of a travelogue describing his time here in NZ. Russell Brown interviewed him for The Listener, and in that interview he talks about how the Internet has opened up a world to people who previously would be unable to access alternative views -- most of the media in Singapore is state-controlled.