Advertising and the Media System

Media systems (especially broadcasting) can be classified in two different types:

Public Media Systems: Government control over broadcasting through ownership, regulation, and partial funding of public broadcasting services.

Private Media System: Ownership and control lies in the hands of private companies and shareholders.

Both systems can exist in various forms, according to the degree of control by governments and private companies, with mixed systems (public and private) as the third main kind.

Whereas public media systems are usually at least partially funded by governments, private broadcasting solely relies on advertising revenue. Still also public media systems cannot exclude advertising as a source of revenue. Therefore both types are to a certain degree dependent on money coming in by advertisers.

And this implies consequences on the content provided by the media. As the attraction of advertisers becomes critically important, interests of the advertising industry frequently play a dominant role concerning the structure of content and the creation of environments favorable for advertising goods and services within the media becomes more and more common.

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Iris recognition

Iris recognition relies upon the fact that every individuals retina has a unique structure. The iris landscape is composed of a corona, crypts, filaments, freckles, pits radial furrows and striatations. Iris scanning is considered a particularly accurate identification technology because the characteristics of the iris do not change during a persons lifetime, and because there are several hundred variables in an iris which can be measured. In addition, iris scanning is fast: it does not take longer than one or two seconds.

These are characteristics which have made iris scanning an attractive technology for high-security applications such as prison surveillance. Iris technology is also used for online identification where it can substitute identification by password. As in other biometric technologies, the use of iris scanning for the protection of privacy is a two-edged sword. The prevention of identity theft applies horizontally but not vertically, i.e. in so far as the data retrieval that accompanies identification and the data body which is created in the process has nothing to do with identity theft.

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Palm recognition

In palm recognition a 3-dimensional image of the hand is collected and compared to the stored sample. Palm recognition devices are cumbersome artefacts (unlike fingerprint and iris recognition devices) but can absorb perform a great amount of identification acts in a short time. They are therefore preferably installed in situations where a large number of people is identified, as in airports.

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It is always the others

Disinformation is supposed to be something evil, something ethically not correct. And therefore we prefer to connect it to the past or to other political systems than the ones in the Western hemisphere. It is always the others who work with disinformation. The same is true for propaganda.
Even better, if we can refer it to the past: Adolf Hitler, supposedly one of the world's greatest and most horrible propagandists (together with his Reichsminister für Propaganda Josef Goebbels) did not invent modern propaganda either. It was the British example during World War I, the invention of modern propaganda, where he took his knowledge from. And it was Hitler's Reich, where (racist) propaganda and disinformation were developed to a perfect manipulation-tool in a way that the consequences are still working today.
A war loses support of the people, if it is getting lost. Therefore it is extremely important to launch a feeling of winning the war. Never give up emotions of victory. Governments know this and work hard on keeping the mood up. The Germans did a very hard job on that in the last months of World War II.
But the in the 1990s disinformation- and propaganda-business came back to life (if it ever had gone out of sight) through Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the reactions by democratic states. After the war, reports made visible that not much had happened the way we had been told it had happened. Regarded like this the Gulf War was the end of the New World Order, a better and geographically broader democratic order, that had just pretended to having begun.

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What is the Internet?

Each definition of the Internet is a simplified statement and runs the risk of being outdated within a short time. What is usually referred to as the Internet is a network of thousands of computer networks (so called autonomous systems) run by governmental authorities, companies, and universities, etc. Generally speaking, every time a user connects to a computer networks, a new Internet is created. Technically speaking, the Internet is a wide area network (WAN) that may be connected to local area networks (LANs).

What constitutes the Internet is constantly changing. Certainly the state of the future Net will be different to the present one. Some years ago the Internet could still be described as a network of computer networks using a common communication protocol, the so-called IP protocol. Today, however, networks using other communication protocols are also connected to other networks via gateways.

Also, the Internet is not solely constituted by computers connected to other computers, because there are also point-of-sale terminals, cameras, robots, telescopes, cellular phones, TV sets and and an assortment of other hardware components that are connected to the Internet.

At the core of the Internet are so-called Internet exchanges, national backbone networks, regional networks, and local networks.

Since these networks are often privately owned, any description of the Internet as a public network is not an accurate. It is easier to say what the Internet is not than to say what it is. On 24 October, 1995 the U.S. Federal Networking Council made the following resolution concerning the definition of the term "Internet": "Internet" refers to the global information system that (i) is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons; (ii) is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols; and (iii) provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein." (http://www.fnc.gov/Internet_res.html)

What is generally and in a simplyfiying manner called the Internet, may be better referred to as the Matrix, a term introduced by science fiction writer William Gibson, as John S. Quarterman and Smoot Carl-Mitchell have proposed. The Matrix consists of all computer systems worldwide capable of exchanging E-Mail: of the USENET, corporate networks and proprietary networks owned by telecommunication and cable TV companies.

Strictly speaking, the Matrix is not a medium; it is a platform for resources: for media and services. The Matrix is mainly a very powerful means for making information easily accessible worldwide, for sending and receiving messages, videos, texts and audio files, for transferring funds and trading securities, for sharing resources, for collecting weather condition data, for trailing the movements of elephants, for playing games online, for video conferencing, for distance learning, for virtual exhibitions, for jamming with other musicians, for long distance ordering, for auctions, for tracking packaged goods, for doing business, for chatting, and for remote access of computers and devices as telescopes and robots remotely, e. g. The Internet is a wonderful tool for exchanging, retrieving, and storing data and sharing equipment over long distances and eventually real-time, if telecommunication infrastructure is reliable and of high quality.

For a comprehensive view of uses of the Matrix, especially the World Wide Web, see ""24 Hours in Cyberspace"

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Timeline BC

~ 1900 BC: Egyptian writers use non-standard Hieroglyphs in inscriptions of a royal tomb; supposedly this is not the first but the first documented example of written cryptography

1500 an enciphered formula for the production of pottery is done in Mesopotamia

parts of the Hebrew writing of Jeremiah's words are written down in "atbash", which is nothing else than a reverse alphabet and one of the first famous methods of enciphering

4th century Aeneas Tacticus invents a form of beacons, by introducing a sort of water-clock

487 the Spartans introduce the so called "skytale" for sending short secret messages to and from the battle field

170 Polybius develops a system to convert letters into numerical characters, an invention called the Polybius Chequerboard.

50-60 Julius Caesar develops an enciphering method, later called the Caesar Cipher, shifting each letter of the alphabet an amount which is fixed before. Like atbash this is a monoalphabetic substitution.

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Legal Protection: TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights)

Another important multilateral treaty concerned with intellectual property rights is the TRIPS agreement, which was devised at the inauguration of the Uruguay Round negotiations of the WTO in January 1995. It sets minimum standards for the national protection of intellectual property rights and procedures as well as remedies for their enforcement (enforcement measures include the potential for trade sanctions against non-complying WTO members). The TRIPS agreement has been widely criticized for its stipulation that biological organisms be subject to intellectual property protection. In 1999, 44 nations considered it appropriate to treat plant varieties as intellectual property.

The complete TRIPS agreement can be found on: http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/t_agm1_e.htm

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Beautiful bodies

However, artificial beings need not be invisible or look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Terminator". "My dream would be to create an artificial man that does not look like a robot but like a beautiful, graceful human being. The artificial man should be beautiful". Nadia Thalman's hopes for beautiful robots may become reality in the work of MIRALab, a research laboratory attached to the University of Geneva dedicated to realistic modelling of human functionalities. The laboratory has produced an artificial Marylyn Monroe showing just how beautiful artificial creatures can be, and there is a biography featuring details of her career and her - however virtual - love life. Yet beautiful creatures have been made before, at leas on the movie screen. Frank-N-furter, the protagonist of the Rocky Horror picture show ("I've been making a man / with blond hair and a tan / and he is good for relieving my /tension) did set remakrable esthetic standards.

While in Hindu mythology, avatars are bodies chosen by gods for their representation on earth, often animals such as swans or horses, the avatars populating cyberspace have a different function. The cyber bodies of real people, often 3 dimensional images of creatures whose aesthetics reflects both the tastes prevalent in the entertainment and advertising industries as the state of art in visual representation.

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1980s: Artificial Intelligence (AI) - From Lab to Life

Following the commercial success of expert systems, which started in the 1970s, also other AI technologies began to make their way into the marketplace. In 1986, U.S. sales of AI-related hardware and software rose to U.S.$ 425 million. Especially expert systems, because of their efficiency, were still in demand. Yet also other fields of AI turned out to be successful in the corporate world.

Machine vision systems for example were used for the cameras and computers on assembly lines to perform quality control. By 1985 over a hundred companies offered machine vision systems in the U.S., and sales totaled U.S.$ 80 million. Although there was a breakdown in the market for AI-systems in 1986 - 1987, which led to a cut back in funding, the industry slowly recovered.

New technologies were being invented in Japan. Fuzzy logic pioneered in the U.S. and also neural networks were being reconsidered for achieving artificial intelligence. The probably most important development of the 1980s was, that it showed that AI technology had real life uses. AI applications like voice and character recognition systems or steadying camcorders using fuzzy logic were not only made available to business and industry, but also to the average customer.

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The Privatization of Censorship

According to a still widely held conviction, the global data networks constitute the long desired arena for uncensorable expression. This much is true: Because of the Net it has become increasingly difficult to sustain cultural and legal standards. Geographical proximity and territorial boundaries prove to be less relevant, when it does not affect a document's availability if it is stored on your desktop or on a host some thousand kilometers away. There is no international agreement on non-prohibited contents, so human rights organizations and nazi groups alike can bypass restrictions. No single authority or organization can impose its rules and standards on all others. This is why the Net is public space, a political arena where free expression is possible.

This freedom is conditioned by the design of the Net. But the Net's design is not a given, as Lawrence Lessig reminds us. Originally the design of the Net allowed a relatively high degree of privacy and communication was not controlled directly. But now this design is changing and this invisible agora in electronic space is endangered. Governments - even elected ones - and corporations introduce new technologies that allow us to be identified, monitored and tracked, that identify and block content, and that can allow our behaviour to be efficiently controlled.

When the World Wide Web was introduced, soon small independent media and human rights organizations began to use this platform for drawing worldwide attention to their publications and causes. It seemed to be the dawning of a new era with authoritarian regimes and multinational media corporations on the looser side. But now the Net's design is changing according to their needs.

"In every context that it can, the entertaining industry is trying to force the Internet into its own business model: the perfect control of content. From music (fighting MP3) and film (fighting the portability of DVD) to television, the industry is resisting the Net's original design. It was about the free flow of content; Hollywood wants perfect control instead" (Lawrence Lessig, Cyberspace Prosecutor, in: The Industry Standard, February 2000).

In the United States, Hollywood and AT&T, after its merger with MediaOne becoming the biggest US cable service provider, return to their prior positions in the Seventies: the control of content and infrastructure. If most people will access the Net via set up boxes connected to a TV set, it will become a kind of television, at least in the USA.

For small independent media it will become very hard to be heard, especially for those offering streaming video and music. Increasingly faster data transmissions just apply to download capacities; upload capacities are much - on the average about eight times - lower than download capacities. As an AT&T executive said in response to criticism: "We haven't built a 56 billion dollar cable network to have the blood sucked from our veins" (Lawrence Lessig, The Law in the Code: How the Net is Regulated, Lecture at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, May 29th, 2000).

Consumers, not producers are preferred.

For corporations what remains to be done to control the Net is mainly to cope with the fact that because of the Net it has become increasingly difficult to sustain cultural and legal standards. On Nov 11, 1995 the German prosecuting attorney's office searched Compuserve Germany, the branch of an international Internet service provider, because the company was suspected of having offered access to child pornography. Consequently Compuserve blocked access to more than 200 newsgroups, all containing "sex" or "gay" in their names, for all its customers. But a few days later, an instruction for access to these blocked newsgroups via Compuserve came into circulation. On February 26, 1997, Felix Somm, the Chief Executive Officer of Compuserve Germany, was accused of complicity with the distribution of child and animal pornography in newsgroups. In May 1998 he received a prison sentence for two years. This sentence was suspended against a bail of about 51.000 Euro. The sentence was justified by pointing to the fact that Compuserve Germany offered access to its US parent company's servers hosting child pornography. Felix Somm was held responsible for access to forbidden content he could not know of. (For further information (in German) click here.)

Also in 1995, as an attack on US Vice-President Al Gore's intention to supply all public schools with Internet access, Republican Senator Charles Grassley warned of the lurking dangers for children on the Net. By referring to a Time magazine cover story by Philip Elmer-Dewitt from July 3 on pornography on the Net, he pointed out that 83,5% of all images online are pornographic. But Elmer-Dewitt was wrong. Obviously unaware of the difference between Bulletin Board Systems and the Net, he referred misleadingly to Marty Rimm's article Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway, published in the prestigious Georgetown Law Journal (vol. 83, June 1995, pp. 1849-1935). Rimm knew of this difference, of course, and stated it clearly. (For further information see Hoffman & Novak, The Cyberporn debate, http://ecommerce.vanderbilt.edu/cyberporn.debate.html and Franz Wegener, Cyberpornographie: Chronologie einer Hexenjagd; http://www.intro-online.de/c6.html)

Almost inevitably anxieties accompany the introduction of new technologies. In the 19th century it was said that traveling by train is bad for health. The debate produced by Time magazine's cover story and Senator Grassley's attack caused the impression that the Net has multiplied possible dangers for children. The global communication networks seem to be a inexhaustible source of mushrooming child pornography. Later would-be bomb recipes found on the Net added to already prevailing anxieties. As even in industrialized countries most people still have little or no first-hand experience with the Net, anxieties about child pornography or terrorist attacks can be stirred up and employed easily.

A similar and related debate is going on about the glorification of violence and erotic depictions in media. Pointing to a "toxic popular culture" shaped by media that "distort children's view of reality and even undermine their character growth", US right-wing social welfare organizations and think tanks call for strong media censorship. (See An Appeal to Hollywood, http://www.media-appeal.org/appeal.htm) Media, especially films and videos, are already censored and rated, so it is more censorship that is wanted.

The intentions for stimulating a debate on child pornography on the Net were manifold: Inter alia, it served the Republican Party to attack Democrat Al Gore's initiative to supply all public schools with Internet access; additionally, the big media corporations realized that because of the Net they might have to face new competitors and rushed to press for content regulation. Taking all these intentions together, we can say that this still ongoing debate constitutes the first and most well known attempt to impose content regulation on the Net. Consequently, at least in Western countries, governments and media corporations refer to child pornography for justifying legal requirement and the implementation of technologies for the surveillance and monitoring of individuals, the filtering, rating and blocking of content, and the prohibition of anonymous publishing on the Net.

In the name of "cleaning" the Net of child pornography, our basic rights are restricted. It is the insistence on unrestricted basic rights that needs to be justified, as it may seem.

Underlying the campaign to control the Net are several assumptions. Inter alia: The Net lacks control and needs to be made safe and secure; we may be exposed inadvertently to pornographic content; this content is harmful to children. Remarkably, racism seems to be not an issue.

The Net, especially the World Wide Web, is not like television (although it is to be feared this is what it might become like within the next years). Say, little Mary types "Barbie" in a search engine. Click here to see what happens. It is true, sometimes you might have the opportunity to see that pornography is just a few mouse clicks away, but it is not likely that you might be exposed to pornographic content unless you make deliberate mouse clicks.

In reaction to these anxieties, but in absence of data how children use the Internet, the US government released the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in 1996. In consequence the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched the famous Blue Ribbon Campaign and, among others, America Online and Microsoft Corporation supported a lawsuit of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against this Act. On June 26, 1997, the US Supreme Court ruled the CDA as unconstitutional under the provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution: The Communications Decency Act violated the basic right to free expression. After a summit with the US government industry leaders announced the using of existing rating and blocking systems and the development of new ones for "inappropriate" online resources.

So, after the failing of the CDA the US government has shifted its responsibility to the industry by inviting corporations to taking on governmental tasks. Bearing in the mind the CompuServe case and its possible consequences, the industry welcomed this decision and was quick to call this newly assumed responsibility "self-regulation". Strictly speaking, "self-regulation" as meant by the industry does not amount to the regulation of the behaviour of corporations by themselves. On the opposite, "self-regulation" is to be understood as the regulation of users' behaviour by the rating, filtering and blocking of Internet content considered being inappropriate. The Internet industry tries to show that technical solutions are more favourable than legislation und wants to be sure, not being held responsible and liable for illegal, offensive or harmful content. A new CompuServe case and a new Communications Decency Act shall be averted.

In the Memorandum Self-regulation of Internet Content released in late 1999 by the Bertelsmann Foundation it is recommended that the Internet industry joins forces with governmental institutions for enforcing codes of conduct and encouraging the implementation of filters and ratings systems. For further details on the Memorandum see the study by the Center for Democracy and Technology, An Analysis of the Bertelsmann Foundation Memorandum on Self-Regulation of Internet Content: Concerns from a User Empowerment Perspective.

In fact, the "self-regulation" of the Internet industry is privatized censorship performed by corporations and right-wing NGOs. Censorship has become a business. "Crucially, the lifting of restrictions on market competition hasn't advanced the cause of freedom of expression at all. On the contrary, the privatisation of cyberspace seems to be taking place alongside the introduction of heavy censorship." (Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology)

While trying to convince us that its technical solutions are appropriate alternatives to government regulation, the Internet industry cannot dispense of governmental backing to enforce the proposed measures. This adds to and enforces the censorship measures already undertaken by governments. We are encouraged to use today's information and communication technologies, while the flow of information is restricted.

According to a report by Reporters Sans Frontières, quoted by Leonard R. Sussman in his essay Censor Dot Gov. The Internet and Press Freedom 2000, the following countries totally or largely control Internet access: Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Libya, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

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1500 - 1700 A.D.

1588
Agostino Ramelli's reading wheel

Agostino Ramelli designed a "reading wheel", which allowed browsing through a large number of documents without moving from one spot to another.

The device presented a large number of books - a small library - laid open on lecterns on a kind of ferry-wheel. It allowed skipping chapters and browsing through pages by turning the wheel to bring lectern after lectern before the eyes. Ramelli's reading wheel thus linked ideas and texts and reminds of today's browsing software used to navigate the World Wide Web.

1597
The first newspaper is printed in Europe.

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Basics: Introduction

Copyright law is a branch of intellectual property law and deals with the rights of intellectual creators in their works. The scope of copyright protection as laid down in Article 2 of the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty "... extends to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such." Copyright law protects the creativity concerning the choice and arrangement of words, colors, musical notes etc. It grants the creators of certain specified works exclusive rights relating to the "copying" and use of their original creation.


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Timeline 1600 - 1900 AD

17th century Cardinal Richelieu invents an encryption-tool called grille, a card with holes for writing messages on paper into the holes of those cards. Afterwards he removes the cards and fills in the blanks, so the message looks like an ordinary letter. The recipient needs to own the same card

- Bishop John Wilkins invents a cryptologic system looking like music notes. In a book he describes several forms of steganographic systems like secrets inks, but also the string cipher. He mentions the so-called Pig Latin, a spoken way of encryption that was already used by the ancient Indians

- the English scientist, magician and astrologer John Dee works on the ancient Enochian alphabet; he also possesses an encrypted writing that could not been broken until today

1605/1623 Sir Francis Bacon (= Francis Tudor = William Shakespeare?) writes several works containing ideas about cryptography. One of his most important advises is to use ciphers in such a way that no-one gets suspicious that the text could be enciphered. For this the steganogram was the best method, very often used in poems. The attempt to decipher Shakespeare's sonnets (in the 20th century) lead to the idea that his works had been written by Francis Bacon originally.

1671 Leibniz invents a calculating machine that uses the binary scale which we still use today, more advanced of course, called the ASCII code

18th century this is the time of the Black Chambers of espionage in Europe, Vienna having one of the most effective ones, called the "Geheime Kabinettskanzlei", headed by Baron Ignaz von Koch. Its task is to read through international diplomatic mail, copy letters and return them to the post-office the same morning. Supposedly about 100 letters are dealt with each day.

1790's Thomas Jefferson and Robert Patterson invent a wheel cipher

1799 the Rosetta Stone is found and makes it possible to decipher the Egyptian Hieroglyphs

1832 or 1838 Sam Morse develops the Morse Code, which actually is no code but an enciphered alphabet of short and long sounds. The first Morse code-message is sent by telegraph in 1844.

1834 the Braille Code for blind people is developed in today's form by Louis Braille

1844 the invention of the telegraph changes cryptography very much, as codes are absolutely necessary by then

1854 the Playfair cipher is invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone

1859 for the first time a tomographic cipher gets described

1861 Friedrich W. Kasiski does a cryptoanalysis of the Vigenère ciphers, which had been supposed to be uncrackable for ages

1891 Major Etienne Bazeries creates a new version of the wheel cipher, which is rejected by the French Army

1895 the invention of the radio changes cryptography-tasks again and makes them even more important

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Biometrics applications: physical access

This is the largest area of application of biometric technologies, and the most direct lineage to the feudal gate keeping system. Initially mainly used in military and other "high security" territories, physical access control by biometric technology is spreading into a much wider field of application. Biometric access control technologies are already being used in schools, supermarkets, hospitals and commercial centres, where the are used to manage the flow of personnel.

Biometric technologies are also used to control access to political territory, as in immigration (airports, Mexico-USA border crossing). In this case, they can be coupled with camera surveillance systems and artificial intelligence in order to identify potential suspects at unmanned border crossings. Examples of such uses in remote video inspection systems can be found at http://www.eds-ms.com/acsd/RVIS.htm

A gate keeping system for airports relying on digital fingerprint and hand geometry is described at http://www.eds-ms.com/acsd/INSPASS.htm. This is another technology which allows separating "low risk" travellers from "other" travellers.

An electronic reconstruction of feudal gate keeping capable of singling out high-risk travellers from the rest is already applied at various border crossing points in the USA. "All enrolees are compared against national lookout databases on a daily basis to ensure that individuals remain low risk". As a side benefit, the economy of time generated by the inspection system has meant that "drug seizures ... have increased since Inspectors are able to spend more time evaluating higher risk vehicles".

However, biometric access control can not only prevent people from gaining access on to a territory or building, they can also prevent them from getting out of buildings, as in the case of prisons.

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Hill & Knowlton

Although it is generally hard to distinguish between public relations and propaganda, Hill & Knowlton, the worlds leading PR agency, represents an extraordinary example for the manipulation of public opinion with public relations activities. Hill & Knowlton did not only lobby for countries, accused of the abuse of human rights, like China, Peru, Israel, Egypt and Indonesia, but also represented the repressive Duvalier regime in Haiti.

It furthermore played a central role in the Gulf War. On behalf of the Kuwaiti government it presented a 15-year-old girl to testify before Congress about human rights violations in a Kuwaiti hospital. The girl, later found out to be the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S., and its testimony then became the centerpiece of a finely tuned PR campaign orchestrated by Hill & Knowlton and co-ordinated with the White House on behalf of the government of Kuwait an the Citizens for a Free Kuwait group. Inflaming public opinion against Iraq and bringing the U.S. Congress in favor of war in the Gulf, this probably was one of the largest and most effective public relations campaigns in history.

Running campaigns against abortion for the Catholic Church and representing the Church of Scientology, large PR firms like Hill & Knowlton, scarcely hesitate to manipulate public and congressional opinion and government policy through media campaigns, congressional hearings, and lobbying, when necessary. Also co-operation with intelligence agencies seems to be not unknown to Hill & Knowlton.

Accused of pursuing potentially illegal proxy spying operation for intelligence agencies, Richard Cheney, head of Hill & Knowltons New York office, denied this allegations, but said that "... in such a large organization you never know if there's not some sneak operation going on." On the other hand former CIA official Robert T. Crowley acknowledged, that "Hill & Knowlton's overseas offices were perfect 'cover` for the ever-expanding CIA. Unlike other cover jobs, being a public relations specialist did not require technical training for CIA officers." Furthermore the CIA, Crowley admitted, used its Hill & Knowlton connections to "... put out press releases and make media contacts to further its positions. ... Hill & Knowlton employees at the small Washington office and elsewhere distributed this material through CIA assets working in the United States news media."

(Source: Carlisle, Johan: Public Relationships: Hill & Knowlton, Robert Gray, and the CIA. http://mediafilter.org/caq/)

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Virtual cartels; mergers

In parallel to the deregulation of markets, there has been a trend towards large-scale mergers which ridicules dreams of increased competition.

Recent mega-mergers and acquisitions include

SBC Communications - Ameritech, $ 72,3 bn

Bell Atlantic - GTE, $ 71,3

AT&T - Media One, $ 63,1

AOL - Time Warner, $ 165 bn

MCI Worldcom - Spring, $ 129 bn

The total value of all major mergers since the beginnings of the 1990s has been 20 trillion Dollars, 2,5 times the size of the USA's GIP.

The AOL- Time Warner reflects a trend which can be observed everywhere: the convergence of the ICT and the content industries. This represents the ultimate advance in complete market domination, and a alarming threat to independent content.

"Is TIME going to write something negative about AOL? Will AOL be able to offer anything other than CNN sources? Is the Net becoming as silly and unbearable as television?"

(Detlev Borchers, journalist)

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Who owns the Internet and who is in charge?

The Internet/Matrix still depends heavily on public infrastructure and there is no dedicated owner of the whole Internet/Matrix, but the networks it consists of are run and owned by corporations and institutions. Access to the Internet is usually provided by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for a monthly fee. Each network is owned by someone and has a network operation center from where it is centrally controlled, but the Internet/Matrix is not owned by any single authority and has no network operation center of its own. No legal authority determines how and where networks can be connected together, this is something the managers of networks have to agree about. So there is no way to ever gain ultimate control of the Matrix/Internet.
The in some respects decentralized Matrix/Internet architecture and administration do not imply that there are no authorities for oversight and common standards for sustaining basic operations, for administration: There are authorities for IP number and domain name registrations, e.g.
Ever since the organizational structures for Internet administration have changed according to the needs to be addressed. Up to now, administration of the Internet is a collaborative undertaking of several loose cooperative bodies with no strict hierarchy of authority. These bodies make decisions on common guidelines, as communication protocols, e.g., cooperatively, so that compatibility of software is guaranteed. But they have no binding legal authority, nor can they enforce the standards they have agreed upon, nor are they wholly representative for the community of Internet users. The Internet has no official governing body or organization; most parts are still administered by volunteers.
Amazingly, there seems to be an unspoken and uncodified consent of what is allowed and what is forbidden on the Internet that is widely accepted. Codifications, as the so-called Netiquette, are due to individual efforts and mostly just expressively stating the prevailing consent. Violations of accepted standards are fiercely rejected, as reactions to misbehavior in mailing lists and newsgroups prove daily.
Sometimes violations not already subject to law become part of governmental regulations, as it was the case with spamming, the unsolicited sending of advertising mail messages. But engineers proved to be quicker and developed software against spamming. So, in some respects, the Internet is self-regulating, indeed.
For a detailed report on Internet governance, click here.

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Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

b. July 1, 1646, Leipzig
d. November 14, 1716, Hannover, Hanover

German philosopher, mathematician, and political adviser, important both as a metaphysician and as a logician and distinguished also for his independent invention of the differential and integral calculus. 1661, he entered the University of Leipzig as a law student; there he came into contact with the thought of men who had revolutionized science and philosophy--men such as Galileo, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes. In 1666 he wrote De Arte Combinatoria ("On the Art of Combination"), in which he formulated a model that is the theoretical ancestor of some modern computers.

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McCarthy

Born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy graduated from Marquette in 1935. In 1939, he won election as a circuit court judge. During World War II, he enlisted in the Marines and served in the Pacific. In 1944, he campaigned for senator but lost in the Republican primary. In 1946, he ran for Wisconsin's other senate seat.

In a 1950 speech, McCarthy entered the public spotlight by claiming that communists had "infested" the State Department, dramatically waving a sheet of paper which purportedly contained the traitors' names. A special Senate committee investigated the charges and found them groundless. Unfazed, McCarthy used his position to wage a relentless anti-communist crusade, denouncing numerous public figures and holding a series of highly confrontational hearings, ruining the careers of many people.

He died at the age of 49 of complications related to alcoholism.

http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/bios/31.html

http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/bios/31.ht...
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The Flesh Machine

This is the tile of a book by the Critical Art Ensemble which puts the development of artifical life into a critical historical and political context, defining the power vectors which act as the driving force behind this development. The book is available in a print version (New York, Autonomedia 1998) and in an online version at http://www.critical-art.net/fles/book/index.html

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Nadia Thalman

Nadia Thalman is director of MIRAlab at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Thalmann has become known as the creator of "virtual Marylyn", an installation which allowed visitors to literally to slip into Marylyn's shoes. Thalman's work is located at interface between science and art. It is about modelling human bodies for science and creative purposes, e.g. as virtual actors in movies. Thalman insists that artificial beings must be beautiful, in addition to being useful, as we will be living with them at close quarters.

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Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky (* 1928) works as a U.S.-linguist, writer, political activist and journalist. He is teaching at the MIT (= Massachusetts Institute of Technology) as a professor of linguistics, specializing on structural grammar and the change of language through technology and economy - and the social results of that. When he stood up against the Vietnam War he became famous as a "radical leftist". Since then he has been one of the most famous critics of his country.

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Punch card, 1801

Invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard, an engineer and architect in Lyon, France, the punch cards laid the ground for automatic information processing. For the first time information was stored in binary format on perforated cardboard cards. In 1890 Hermann Hollerith used Joseph-Marie Jacquard's punch card technology for processing statistical data retrieved from the US census in 1890, thus speeding up data analysis from eight to three years. His application of Jacquard's invention was also used for programming computers and data processing until electronic data processing was introduced in the 1960's. - As with writing and calculating, administrative purposes account for the beginning of modern automatic data processing.

Paper tapes are a medium similar to Jacquard's punch cards. In 1857 Sir Charles Wheatstone applied them as a medium for the preparation, storage, and transmission of data for the first time. By their means, telegraph messages could be prepared off-line, sent ten times quicker (up to 400 words per minute), and stored. Later similar paper tapes were used for programming computers.

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Above.net

Headquartered in San Jose, USA, AboveNet Communications is a backbone service provider. Through its extensive peering relationships, the company has built a network with the largest aggregated bandwidth in the world.

http://www.above.net

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Braille

Universally accepted system of writing used by and for blind persons and consisting of a code of 63 characters, each made up of one to six raised dots arranged in a six-position matrix or cell. These Braille characters are embossed in lines on paper and read by passing the fingers lightly over the manuscript. Louis Braille, who was blinded at the age of three, invented the system in 1824 while a student at the Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles (National Institute for Blind Children), Paris.

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Avatar

Traditionally, an avatar is a mythical figure half man half god. In Hindu mythology, avatars are the form that deities assume when they descend on earth. Greek and Roman mythologies also contain avatars in animal form or half animal, half man. In virtual space, the word avatar refers to a "virtual identity" that a user can construct for him / herself, e.g. in a chat-room. Avatars have also been a preferred object of media art.

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Enigma Machine

The Enigma Encryption Machine was famous for its insecurities as for the security that it gave to German ciphers. It was broken, first by the Poles in the 1930s, then by the British in World War II.

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DES

The U.S. Data Encryption Standard (= DES) is the most widely used encryption algorithm, especially used for protection of financial transactions. It was developed by IBM in 1971. It is a symmetric-key cryptosystem. The DES algorithm uses a 56-bit encryption key, meaning that there are 72,057,594,037,927,936 possible keys.

for more information see:
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/3/0,5716,117763+5,00.html
http://www.cryptography.com/des/

http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/3/0...
http://www.cryptography.com/des/
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Virtual Marylin Monroe

This is the story of the virtual Marylyn Monroe created by MRALab in Switzerland. The biography features her personal and professional stories. This being the biography of a virtual being, it does not end with the present and includes, instead, a chapter on her destiny.

http://www.miralab.unige.ch/MARILYN/VIRTUAL/virtual.html

http://www.miralab.unige.ch/MARILYN/VIRTUAL/v...
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Cisco, Inc.

Being the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, Cisco Systems is one of the most prominent companies of the Internet industry.

http://www.cisco.com

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Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology

According to Barbrook and Cameron there is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. In this paper they are calling this orthodoxy the Californian Ideology in honor of the state where it originated. By naturalizing and giving a technological proof to a political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless and - horror of horrors - unfashionable. - This paper argues for an interactive future.

http://www.wmin.ac.uk/media/HRC/ci/calif.html

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Network Information Center (NIC)

Network information centers are organizations responsible for registering and maintaining the domain names on the World Wide Web. Until competition in domain name registration was introduced, they were the only ones responsible. Most countries have their own network information center.

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Chappe's fixed optical network

Claude Chappe built a fixed optical network between Paris and Lille. Covering a distance of about 240kms, it consisted of fifteen towers with semaphores.

Because this communication system was destined to practical military use, the transmitted messages were encoded. The messages were kept such secretly, even those who transmit them from tower to tower did not capture their meaning, they just transmitted codes they did not understand. Depending on weather conditions, messages could be sent at a speed of 2880 kms/hr at best.

Forerunners of Chappe's optical network are the Roman smoke signals network and Aeneas Tacitus' optical communication system.

For more information on early communication networks see Gerard J. Holzmann and Bjoern Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks.

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MIRALab

MIRALab is a research laboratory attached to the University of Geneva. Its motto is "where research meets creativity". MIRAlab's objective is to model human functionalities, such as movement or facial expression, in a realistic way.

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WTO

An international organization designed to supervise and liberalize world trade. The WTO (World Trade Organization) is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was created in 1947 and liberalized the world's trade over the next five decades. The WTO came into being on Jan. 1, 1995, with 104 countries as its founding members. The WTO is charged with policing member countries' adherence to all prior GATT agreements, including those of the last major GATT trade conference, the Uruguay Round (1986-94), at whose conclusion GATT had formally gone out of existence. The WTO is also responsible for negotiating and implementing new trade agreements. The WTO is governed by a Ministerial Conference, which meets every two years; a General Council, which implements the conference's policy decisions and is responsible for day-to-day administration; and a director-general, who is appointed by the Ministerial Conference. The WTO's headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland.



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Louis Braille

b. Jan. 4, 1809, Coupvray, near Paris, France
d. Jan. 6, 1852, Paris, France

Educator who developed a system of printing and writing that is extensively used by the blind and that was named for him. Himself blind Braille became interested in a system of writing, exhibited at the school by Charles Barbier, in which a message coded in dots was embossed on cardboard. When he was 15, he worked out an adaptation, written with a simple instrument, that met the needs of the sightless. He later took this system, which consists of a six-dot code in various combinations, and adapted it to musical notation. He published treatises on his type system in 1829 and 1837.

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Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero

Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero († 1980) was elected archbishop because he was very conservative. But when he saw how more and more priests and definitely innocent people were murdered, he changed his attitudes and became one of the sharpest critics of the government. He gave shelter to those in danger, never stopped talking against violence and his Sunday sermons on the radio where moments to tell the truth to the Salvadorians, also mentioning the names of the disappeared or killed persons. As Romero got extremely popular and dangerous for the population he was killed by death squads, while reading a sermon.

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Alexander Graham Bell

b., March 3, 1847, Edinburgh

d. Aug. 2, 1922, Beinn Bhreagh, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada

American audiologist and inventor wrongly remembered for having invented the telephone in 1876. Although Bell introduced the first commercial application of the telephone, in fact a German teacher called Reiss invented it.

For more detailed information see the Encyclopaedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/1/0,5716,15411+1+15220,00.html

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Netiquette

Although referred to as a single body of rules, there is not just one Netiquette, but there are several, though overlapping largely. Proposing general guidelines for posting messages to newsgroups and mailing lists and using the World Wide Web and FTP, Netiquettes address civility topics (i.e., avoiding hate speech) and comprise technical advises (i.e., using simple and platform-independent file formats).
Well-known Netiquettes are the Request for Comment #1855 and The Net: User Guidelines and Netiquette by Arlene H. Rinaldi.

ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1855.txt
http://www.fau.edu/netiquette/net/index.html
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John Dee

b. July 13, 1527, London, England
d. December 1608, Mortlake, Surrey

English alchemist, astrologer, and mathematician who contributed greatly to the revival of interest in mathematics in England. After lecturing and studying on the European continent between 1547 and 1550, Dee returned to England in 1551 and was granted a pension by the government. He became astrologer to the queen, Mary Tudor, and shortly thereafter was imprisoned for being a magician but was released in 1555. Dee later toured Poland and Bohemia (1583-89), giving exhibitions of magic at the courts of various princes. He became warden of Manchester College in 1595.

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Enochian alphabet

Also "Angelic" language. Archaic language alphabet composed of 21 letters, discovered by John Dee and his partner Edward Kelley. It has its own grammar and syntax, but only a small sample of it has ever been translated to English.

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