Following the communist revolutions of the 20th century all "means of production" became the property of the state as representative of "the masses". Private property ceased to exist. While moral rights of the creator were recognized and economic rights acknowledged with a one-time cash award, all subsequent rights reverted to the state.
With the transformation of many communist countries to a market system most of them have now introduced laws establishing markets in intellectual property rights. Still the high rate of piracy reflects a certain lack of legal tradition.
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With the development of modern computing, starting in the 1940s, the substitution of human abilities with technology obtained a new dimension. The focus shifted from the replacement of pure physical power to the substitution of mental faculties. Following the early 1980s personal computers started to attain widespread use in offices and quickly became indispensable tools for office workers. The development of powerful computers combined with progresses in
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Supposedly the most famous British atrocity story concerning the Germans during World War I was the "Corpse-Conversion Factory"-rumor; it was said the Germans produced soap out of corpses. A story, which got so well believed that it was repeated for years - without a clear evidence of reality at that time. (
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One of the most important advances in the development of computer hardware in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the invention of the
Another type of computer developed at the time was the minicomputer. It profited from the progresses in microelectronics and was considerably smaller than the standard mainframe, but, for instance, powerful enough to control the instruments of an entire scientific laboratory. Furthermore
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During the Kosovo Crisis and during the war that followed, and probably also after it, all sides of the conflict were manipulating their people and others as well, whenever they could. Some of the propaganda shown on TV was as primitive as in World War II, others were subtler. This propaganda started by telling the history of the geographic point of discussion from the own point of view, it went on with the interpretation of the motives of the enemy and finally came to censorship, manipulation of the number of victims ( for more information see:
Many journalists and scientists are still working to detect more propaganda and disinformation stories.
An interesting detail about this war was that more people than ever before took their information about the war out of the internet. In part this had to do with the biased TV-reports on all sides. All parties put their ideas and perspectives in the net, so one could get an overview of the different thoughts and types of disinformation.
One of the big lies of
The Serbs were not better than Western governments and media, which worked together closely. Serb TV showed the bombed targets and compared persons like
More:
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Political and economic agendas change. People leave, get exchanged. Whereas one of the things that never seem to change is disinformation. Watching different kinds of cultures and regimes throughout history you will always find disinformation.
Its use is variable just like its tools. First of all it does not necessarily need words. It is possible to disinform in any kind of language (sounds, symbols, letters or with the help of the body). As it seems to have come into existence together with human communication, we need not even hope that it will disappear once in a while.
One could rather say: disinformation has always been there.
Instead of hoping to stop it we need to learn to live with it, detect it, restore it to consciousness. Even this will not be any insurance for not walking into the trap. It is an attempt, nothing else.
For detecting disinformation one needs to know what types of disinformation are possible and how they work. This site gives you some ideas about the history, tendencies and different types of disinformation, with the restriction that it will mostly be about the Western types of disinformation, as it is still harder to understand the media of disinformation in other cultures; and anyhow, many methods and tools run parallel in different cultures.
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Cartoons' technique is simplicity.
Images are easier to remember than texts.
Frequently they show jokes about politicians, friendly or against the person shown. In the first decades of this century, cartoons were also used for propaganda against artists; remember the famous cartoons of
As a tool in politics it had fatal consequences by determining stereotypes, which never again could be erased even if detected as pure disinformation. Most famous got the cartoons about Jews, which were not only distributed by Germans and Austrians but all over Europe; and already in the tens and twenties of our century. Most horrifying is the fact that many of those old, fascist and racist cartoons are coming back now, in slightly different design only.
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As stated before the sense of cryptography is a properly designed cryptosystem making it essentially impossible to recover encrypted data without any knowledge of the used key. The issue of lost keys and the being-locked-out from one's own data as a consequence favors key recovery systems. On the other hand the counter argument is confidentiality: as soon as a possibility to recover a key is provided, the chances for abuses grow.
Finally it is the state that does not want to provide too much secrecy. On the contrary. During the last 20 years endless discussions about the state's necessity and right to restrict private cryptography have taken place, as the governments rarely care for the benefit of private users if they believe in catching essential informations about any kind of enemy, hence looking for unrestricted access to all keys.
The list of "key recovery," "key escrow," and "trusted third-party" as encryption requirements, suggested by governmental agencies, covers all the latest developments and inventions in digital technology.
At the same time the NSA, one of the world's most advanced and most secret enterprises for cryptography, worked hard in getting laws through to forbid the private use of strong encryption in one way or the other. Still, it is also organizations like this one that have to admit that key recovery systems are not without any weaknesses, as the U.S. Escrowed Encryption Standard, the basis for the famous and controversially discussed Clipper Chip, showed. The reason for those weaknesses is the high complexity of those systems.
Another aspect is that key recovery systems are more expensive and certainly much less secure than other systems. So, why should anyone use them?
In that context, one has to understand the legal framework for the use of cryptography, a strict framework in fact, being in high contradiction to the globalised flow of communication.
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Following the invention of the first
Also, ensuing the introduction of the minicomputer in the mid 1970s by the early 1980s a market for personal computers (PC) was established. As computers had become easier to use and cheaper they were no longer mainly utilized in offices and manufacturing, but also by the average consumer. Therefore the number of personal computers in use more than doubled from 2 million in 1981 to 5.5 million in 1982. Ten years later, 65 million PCs were being used.
Further developments included the creation of mobile computers (laptops and palmtops) and especially networking technology. While mainframes shared time with many terminals for many applications, networking allowed individual computers to form electronic co-operations.
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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
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,
In the United States, Hollywood and
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" (
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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." (
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
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Movies produced in Hollywood in 1918/19 were mainly anti-German. They had some influence but the bigger effect was reached in World War II-movies.
The first propaganda movie of World War II was British.
At that time all films had to pass censoring. Most beloved were entertaining movies with propaganda messages. The enemy was shown as a beast, an animal-like creature, a brutal person without soul and as an idiot. Whereas the own people were the heroes. That was the new form of atrocity.
U.S.-President
In the late twenties, movies got more and more important, in the USSR, too, like
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The fact that an individual's identity is expressed not only by the way he/she looks or sounds, but also by the manner of walking is a relatively new discovery of in biometrics.
Unlike the more fully developed biometric technologies whose scrutiny is directed at stationary parts of the body, gait recognition has the added difficulty of having to sample and identify movement. Scientists at the University of Southampton, UK (
Another model considers the shape and length of legs as well as the velocity of joint movements. The objective is to combine both models into one, which would make gait recognition a fully applicable biometric technology.
Given that gait recognition is applied to "moving preambulatory subjects" it is a particularly interesting technology for surveillance. People can no longer hide their identity by covering themselves or moving. Female shop lifters who pretend pregnancy will be detected because they walk differently than those who are really pregnant. Potential wrongdoers might resort walking techniques as developed in Monty Pythons legendary "Ministry of Silly Walks" (
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"Faced with this process of globalization, most governments appear to lack the tools required for facing up to the pressure from important media changes. The new global order is viewed as a daunting challenge, and it most often results in reactions of introversion, withdrawal and narrow assertions of national identity. At the same time, many developing countries seize the opportunity represented by globalization to assert themselves as serious players in the global communications market."
(UNESCO, World Communication Report)
The big hope of the South is that the Internet will close the education gap and economic gap, by making education easier to achieve. But in reality the gap is impossible to close, because the North is not keeping still, but developing itself further and further all the time; inventing new technologies that produce another gap each. The farmer's boy sitting in the dessert and using a cellular telephone and a computer at the same time is a sarcastic picture - nothing else.
Still, the so called developing countries regard modern communication technologies as a tremendous chance - and actually: which other choice is there left?
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After World War II the importance of propaganda still increased, on the commercial level as well as on a political level, in the era of the Cold War. The propaganda institutions of the different countries wanted their people to think the right way, which meant, the national way. In the USA the McCarthy-era started, a totalitarian system in struggle against communism.
Cold War brought the era of spies with it, which was the perfect tool of disinformation. But the topic as a movie-genre seems still popular today, as the unchanged success of James Bond-movies show.
A huge net of propaganda was built up for threatening with the nuclear bomb: pretending that the enemy was even more dangerous than the effect of such a bomb.
And later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, disinformation found other fields of work, like the wars of the 1990s showed us.
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Still, disinformation and propaganda are nothing magic. They can change things, but supposedly only if those things/meanings/opinions are not fixed completely.
It is never just a single idea that changes. Society is following the changes.
Thinking about disinformation brings us to the word truth, of course, and to the doubt that there is no definite truth. And truth can easily be manipulated to another truth. Just present some facts that seem to be logic and there you've got a new truth. And if the facts can supposedly be proved by empirical studies then the quality of the truth definitely rises.
That's what ideologies do all the time. And the media like to do the same thing - as a game with power or mere presentation of power?
But of course there also exist bits of disinformation which are more amusing than evil or dangerous:
- the theory of the celestro-centric world/"Hohlwelttheorie"
- the story of the German philosopher who invented an Italian philosopher, wrote books about him, even reprinted "his" texts, which had gone lost pretendedly 100 years ago - and finally lost his job and all his career when other scientists found out that everything had been made up.
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During the cold war the U.S. tried to ensure that it would stay ahead of the Soviet Union in technological advancements. Therefore in 1963 the
In the 1960s and 1970s a multitude of AI programs were developed, most notably SHRDLU. Headed by Marvin Minsky the MIT's research team showed, that when confined to a small subject matter, computer programs could solve spatial and logic problems. Other progresses in the field of AI at the time were: the proposal of new theories about
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1971 IBM's work on the Lucifer cipher and the work of the NSA lead to the U.S. Data Encryption Standard (=
1976
1977/78 the
1984 Congress passes Comprehensive Crime Control Act
- The Hacker Quarterly is founded
1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is passed in the USA
- Electronic Communications Privacy Act
1987 Chicago prosecutors found Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force
1988 U.S. Secret Service covertly videotapes a hacker convention
1989 NuPrometheus League distributes Apple Computer software
1990 -
- Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard publish their work on Quantum Cryptography
- Martin Luther King Day Crash strikes AT&T long-distance network nationwide
1991
- one of the first conferences for Computers, Freedom and Privacy takes place in San Francisco
- AT&T phone crash; New York City and various airports get affected
1993 the U.S. government announces to introduce the
1994
- the
1990s work on quantum computer and quantum cryptography
- work on biometrics for authentication (finger prints, the iris, smells, etc.)
1996 France liberates its cryptography law: one now can use cryptography if registered
- OECD issues Cryptography Policy Guidelines; a paper calling for encryption exports-standards and unrestricted access to encryption products
1997 April European Commission issues Electronic Commerce Initiative, in favor of strong encryption
1997 June PGP 5.0 Freeware widely available for non-commercial use
1997 June 56-bit DES code cracked by a network of 14,000 computers
1997 August U.S. judge assesses encryption export regulations as violation of the First Amendment
1998 February foundation of Americans for Computer Privacy, a broad coalition in opposition to the U.S. cryptography policy
1998 March
1998 April NSA issues a report about the risks of key recovery systems
1998 July
1998 October Finnish government agrees to unrestricted export of strong encryption
1999 January RSA Data Security, establishes worldwide distribution of encryption product outside the USA
- National Institute of Standards and Technologies announces that 56-bit
- 56-bit DES code is cracked in 22 hours and 15 minutes
1999 May 27 United Kingdom speaks out against key recovery
1999 Sept: the USA announce to stop the restriction of cryptography-exports
2000 as the German government wants to elaborate a cryptography-law, different organizations start a campaign against that law
- computer hackers do no longer only visit websites and change little details there but cause breakdowns of entire systems, producing big economic losses
for further information about the history of cryptography see:
for information about hacker's history see:
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The magic word is credibility.
Disinformation can mean leaving out important informations. Telling lies is not the only method of disinformation. The not telling also creates thoughts and delegates them into certain directions, whereas other models of thinking are left out.
Like this, the deaths on the own side are adjusted downwards whereas the victims of the enemy are counted proudly - as long as they are not civilians. The post-Gulf War period demonstrated how the population reacts if the number of innocent victims is much higher than expected. It was the fact of those numbers that provoked the biggest part of the post-war critique.
The media in democratic states tend to criticize this, which does not mean that they always want to be free of governmental influence. They can choose to help the government in a single case by not writing anything against it or by writing pro-government stories.
At the same time every democracy has undemocratic parts in it - which is already part of democracy itself. There are situations when a democratic government may find it essential to put pressure on the media to inform the population in a certain way; and also censorship is nothing that can only be connected to dictatorship; just think of the Falkland War, the Gulf-War or the Kosovo-War.
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The following selection does not claim to present an exhaustive listing, but rather picks some of the company's most important assets. Due to the rapid developments in the world of media giants the list is also subject to changes.
Broadcasting
ABC TV Network with 223 affiliated TV stations covering the entire U.S.
ABC Radio Network, with 2,900 affiliated stations throughout the U.S.
Owner of 9 VHF TV stations
Owner of 11 AM and 10 FM stations
Cable TV Systems and Channels/Networks
80 % of ESPN cable TV channel and ESPN International
50 % of Lifetime cable TV channel
Internet/Interactive
Disney Interactive - entertainment and educational computer software and video games, plus development of content for on-line services.
Partnership with 3 phone companies to provide video programming and interactive services.
ABC Online
TV Production, Movies, Video, Music
Disney Television Production studios and Walt Disney Pictures movie studio
Buena Vista Television production company
Buena Vista Home Video
Miramax and Touchstone movie production companies
Buena Vista Pictures Distribution and Buena Vista International, distributors for Disney and Touchstone movies
Walt Disney Records, and Hollywood Records
Publishing
6 daily newspapers
About 40 weekly magazines, including: Discover, Women's Wear Daily, Los Angeles and Institutional Investor.
Chilton Publications
Guilford Publishing Co.
Hitchcock Publishing Co.
Theme Parks, Resorts, and Travel
Disneyland
Disney World and Disney World Resort
Part owner of Disneyland-Paris and Tokyo Disneyland
12 resort hotels
Disney Vacation Club
Cruise Lines
International TV, Film, and Broadcasting
50 % owner of Tele-München Fernseh GmbH & Co.
50 % owner of RTL Disney Fernseh GmbH & Co.
23 % owner of RTL 2 Fernseh GmbH & Co.
37,5 % owner of TM3 Fernseh GmbH & Co.
20-33 % stake in Eurosport network, Spanish Tesauro SA TV company, and Scandinavian Broadcasting System SA
20 % owner of TVA
Other
Over 500 Disney Stores, and licensing of Disney products
The Mighty Ducks professional hockey team
25 % ownership of California Angels major league baseball team
Business Connections with Other Media Companies
Joint ventures, equity interests, or major arrangements with
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Probably the most important contributor concerning the theoretical basis for the digital computers that were developed in the 1940s was
The onset of the Second World War led to an increased funding for computer projects, which hastened technical progress, as governments sought to develop computers to exploit their potential strategic importance.
By 1941 the German engineer Konrad Zuse had developed a computer, the Z3, to design airplanes and missiles. Two years later the British completed a secret code-breaking computer called Colossus to
Also spurred by the war the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), a general-purpose computer, was produced by a partnership between the U.S. government and the University of Pennsylvania (1943). Consisting of 18.000
Concepts in computer design that remained central to computer engineering for the next 40 years were developed by the Hungarian-American mathematician
Characteristic for first generation computers was the fact, that instructions were made-to-order for the specific task for which the computer was to be used. Each computer had a different
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Disinformation's tools emerged from science and art.
And furthermore: disinformation can happen in politics of course, but also in science:
for example by launching ideas which have not been proven exactly until the moment of publication. e.g. the thought that time runs backwards in parts of the universe:
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Although fingerprinting smacks of police techniques used long before the dawn of the information age, its digital successor finger scanning is the most widely used biometric technology. It relies on the fact that a fingerprint's uniqueness can be defined by analysing the so-called "minutiae" in somebody's fingerprint. Minutae include sweat pores, distance between ridges, bifurcations, etc. It is estimated that the likelihood of two individuals having the same fingerprint is less than one in a billion.
As an access control device, fingerprint scanning is particularly popular with military institutions, including the Pentagon, and military research facilities. Banks are also among the principal users of this technology, and there are efforts of major credit card companies such as Visa and MasterCard to incorporate this finger print recognition into the bank card environment.
Problems of inaccuracy resulting from oily, soiled or cracked skins, a major impediment in fingerprint technology, have recently been tackled by the development a contactless capturing device (
As in other biometric technologies, fingerprint recognition is an area where the "criminal justice" market meets the "security market", yet another indication of civilian spheres becomes indistinguishable from the military. The utopia of a prisonless society seems to come within the reach of a technology capable of undermining freedom by an upward spiral driven by identification needs and identification technologies.
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In the summer of 1999 between 1.200 and 2.000 Muslim rebels from Chechnya fell into Dagestan. Rumors say that Russian soldiers closed their eyes pretending not to see anything. During the fightings that started soon, many persons got killed. The hole issue was blamed on Chechnya.
At that time there were rumors that there would be heavy bombing in Moscow in September. And there was. Those two things together brought back the hatred against the Chechnya rebels. The 2nd War between Russia and the Muslim country began. While the first war was lost at home, because the Russians, especially mothers, did not understand why their sons should fight against Chechnya, this time the atmosphere was completely different. In the cities 85% and all over Russia 65% of the Russian population agreed with the war. This time the war was a national issue, a legitimate defense.
The media emphasized this.
Alexander Zilin, a journalist, found out that the truth was far from the one presented in the media: First of all there was no evidence that the Moscow-bombings were organized by Chechnyans. On the contrary it is more than probable that the crimes were organized by a governmental institution for national security. The disinformation was part of the strategy to make the population support another war with Chechnya. The media were part of the story, maybe without knowing. They kept on the government's and army's side, showing only special and patriotic parts of the war. For example the number of dead Russian soldiers was held back.
The U.S.-behavior on this:
The USA would like to intervene but they are afraid of ruining the weak relation to Russia. For years the main topic of U.S.-politics has been the struggle against terrorism. Now Russia pretends to be fighting terrorism. How could it be criticized for that?
The reason for this war is rather cynical: it worked as a public relations-campaign for
At the same time a propaganda-campaign against his rival Y. Primakov (98), formerly the most popular candidate, was spreading lies and bad rumors. Opinion-polls showed very fast that he had lost the elections because of this black propaganda, even before the elections took place.
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ZNet provides forum facilities for online discussion and chatting on various topics ranging from culture and ecology to international relations and economics. ZNet also publishes daily commentaries and maintains a Web-zine, which addresses current news and events as well as many other topics, trying to be provocative, informative and inspiring to its readers.
Strategies and Policies
Daily Commentaries: Znet's commentaries address current news and events, cultural happenings, and organizing efforts, providing context, critique, vision, and analysis, but also references to or reviews of broader ideas, new books, activism, the Internet, and other topics that strike the diverse participating authors as worthy of attention.
Forum System: Znet provides a private (and soon also a public) forum system. The fora are among others concerned with topics such as: activism, cultural, community/race/religion/ethnicity, ecology, economics/class, gender/kinship/sexuality, government/polity, international relations, ParEcon, vision/strategy and popular culture. Each forum has a set of threaded discussions, also the fora hosted by commentary writers like Chomsky, Ehrenreich, Cagan, Peters and Wise.
ZNet Daily WebZine: ZNet Daily WebZine offers commentaries in web format.
Z Education Online (planned): The Z Education Online site will provide instructionals and courses of diverse types as well as other university-like, education-aimed features.
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First of all disinformation can be explained as something that has to do with fears: it frightens us by taking away our individuality, as disinformation is not done for one single person. It is a manipulation; a manipulation the influenced persons did not ask for.
Disinformation is never the launching of one single information/message. Several - and in most cases many - different pieces make up a puzzle of deception. One single message can be called true or false, but only the combination of several and more informations makes up a system that has the power to influence opinions.
The purpose is what produces the disinformation, whereas a wrong information (even as a number of wrong informations) happening by accident represents simply a false information.
The person or group presenting a disinformation knows very well what he/it is doing. The aim is that the person who receives the disinformation gets influenced into a certain and well-planned direction. Therefore the wrong information has to reach the unconscious part of the mind, has to be integrated into personal thoughts.
A good way to reach that goal is to use a commonly known information, something familiar to reach the confidence of the recipient. The best is to use a quasi neutral message. Afterwards the real disinformation is woven into that other information. The mixture between truth, half-truth and lie is the most adequate method to get a disinformation into people's minds.
The knowledge about how to use material and how to slightly change it until the statement turns against someone or some idea, is a type of art to cope with words.
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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
Leonard M. Adleman was one of three persons in a team to invent the
FTP enables the transfer of files (text, image, video, sound) to and from other remote computers connected to the Internet.
Blowfish is a symmetric key block cipher that can vary its length.
The idea behind is a simple design to make the system faster than others.
Edward S. Herman is Professor Emeritus in Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Author of several books like The Myth of the Liberal Media: An Edward Herman Reader or Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (he wrote that book - and others - together with
An operating system is software that controls the many different operations of a computer and directs and coordinates its processing of programs. It is a remarkably complex set of instructions that schedules the series of jobs (user applications) to be performed by the computer and allocates them to the computer's various hardware systems, such as the
The telephone was not invented by Alexander Graham Bell, as is widely held to be true, but by Philipp Reiss, a German teacher. When he demonstrated his invention to important German professors in 1861, it was not enthusiastically greeted. Because of this dismissal, no financial support for further development was provided to him.
And here Bell comes in: In 1876 he successfully filed a patent for the telephone. Soon afterwards he established the first telephone company.
Being itself under the umbrella of the
Certain
IDEA is another symmetric-key system. It is a block cipher, operating on 64-bit plaintext blocks, having a key-length of 128 bits.
A mark (trademark or service mark) is "... a sign, or a combination of signs, capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one undertaking from those of other undertakings. The sign may particularly consist of one or more distinctive words, letters, numbers, drawings or pictures, emblems, colors or combinations of colors, or may be three-dimensional..." (
The bandwidth of a transmitted communications signal is a measure of the range of frequencies the signal occupies. The term is also used in reference to the frequency-response characteristics of a communications receiving system. All transmitted signals, whether analog or digital, have a certain bandwidth. The same is true of receiving systems.
Generally speaking, bandwidth is directly proportional to the amount of data transmitted or received per unit time. In a qualitative sense, bandwidth is proportional to the complexity of the data for a given level of system performance. For example, it takes more bandwidth to download a photograph in one second than it takes to download a page of text in one second. Large sound files, computer programs, and animated videos require still more bandwidth for acceptable system performance. Virtual reality (VR) and full-length three-dimensional audio/visual presentations require the most bandwidth of all.
In digital systems, bandwidth is data speed in bits per second (bps).
Source: Whatis.com
Oscar Flingal O'Flahertie Wills (1854-1900) is one of the best and most famous poets and novelists of England of his time. His satirical and amusing texts exposed the false moral of the Bourgeoisie publicly. Besides, his life as a dandy made him the leader of aesthetics in England, until he was sent to prison because of homosexuality. Afterwards he lived in Paris where he died lonely and nearly forgotten in a hotel in 1900. His poems, fairy tales, novels and dramas survived.
Among privacy campaigners, the company's name has become almost synonymous with aggressive online direct marketing practices as well as user profiling and tracking. Amazon and has been involved in
Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) is a standard reference model for communication between two end users in a network. It is used in developing products and understanding networks.
Source: Whatis.com
Supposedly his real name was Aeneas of Stymphalus. He was a Greek military scientist and cryptographer. He invented an optical system for communication similar to a telegraph: the
Themistocles, a Greek politician and general, conquered the Persians in the battle of Salamis, in 480 BC. The Persians, under their King
For further details see:
David Kahn can be considered one of the most important historians on cryptography. His book The Codebreakers. The comprehensive history of secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet, written in 1996 is supposed to be the most important work on the history of cryptography.
The water-clocks are an early long-distance-communication-system. Every communicating party had exactly the same jar, with a same-size-hole that was closed and the same amount of water in it. In the jar was a stick with different messages written on. When one party wanted to tell something to the other it made a fire-sign. When the other answered, both of them opened the hole at the same time. And with the help of another fire-sign closed it again at the same time, too. In the end the water covered the stick until the point of the wanted message.
Certain elements of two or more photographs can be put together, mixed, and the outcome is a new picture. Like this, people can appear in the same picture, even "sit at the same table" though they have never met in reality.
Also called microcircuit, the integrated circuit is an assembly of electronic components, fabricated as a single unit, in which active semiconductor devices (
Formerly (1955 - 1979) Sperry Rand Corporation, American corporation that merged with the Burroughs Corporation in 1986 to form Unisys Corporation, a large computer manufacturer.
also called "the study of code". It includes both, cryptography and cryptoanalysis
Saddam Hussein joined the revolutionary Baath party when he was a university student. In 1958 he had the head of Iraq, Abdul-Karim Qassim, killed. Since 1979 he has been President of Iraq. Under his reign Iraq fought a decade-long war with Iran. Because of his steady enmity with extreme Islamic leaders the West supported him first of all, until his army invaded Kuwait in August 1990, an incident that the USA led to the Gulf War. Since then many rumors about a coup d'état have been launched, but Saddam Hussein is still in unrestricted power.
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:
As laid down in the proposed EU Directive on copyright and related
IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) manufactures and develops cumputer hardware equipment, application and sysem software, and related equipment.
IBM produced the first PC (Personal Computer), and its decision to make Microsoft DOS the standard operating system initiated Microsoft's rise to global dominance in PC software.
Business indicators:
1999 Sales: $ 86,548 (+ 7,2 % from 1998)
Market capitalization: $ 181 bn
Employees: approx. 291,000
Corporate website:
Those encompass the industries that create copyrighted works as their primary product. These industries include the motion picture industry (television, theatrical, and home video), the recording industry (records, tapes and CDs), the music publishing industry, the book, journal and newspaper publishing industry, and the computer software industry (including data processing, business applications and interactive entertainment software on all platforms), legitimate theater, advertising, and the radio, television and cable broadcasting industries.
The firm began in Germany in 1835, when Carl Bertelsmann founded a religious print shop and publishing establishment in the Westphalian town of Gütersloh. The house remained family-owned and grew steadily for the next century, gradually adding literature, popular fiction, and theology to its title list. Bertelsmann was shut down by the Nazis in 1943, and its physical plant was virtually destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945. The quick growth of the Bertelsmann empire after World War II was fueled by the establishment of global networks of book clubs (from 1950) and music circles (1958). By 1998 Bertelsmann AG comprised more than 300 companies concentrated on various aspects of media. During fiscal year 1997-98, Bertelsmann earned more than US$15 billion in revenue and employed 58.000 people, of whom 24.000 worked in Germany.
Founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen and headquartered in Redmond, USA, Microsoft Corporation is today's world-leading developer of personal-computer software systems and applications. As MS-DOS, the first operating system released by Microsoft, before, Windows, its successor, has become the de-facto standard operating system for personal computer. According to critics and following a recent court ruling this is due to unfair competition.
For more detailed information see the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Polybius was one of the greatest historians of the ancient Greek. he lived from 200-118 BC. see:
A research and development program funded by the US government. Goal is the development of advanced networking technologies and applications requiring advanced networking with capabilities that are 100 to 1,000 times faster end-to-end than today's Internet.
http://www.ngi.gov
Founded in 1992, the Internet Society is an umbrella organization of several mostly self-organized organizations dedicated to address the social, political, and technical issues, which arise as a result of the evolution and the growth of the Net. Its most important subsidiary organizations are the
Its members comprise companies, government agencies, foundations, corporations and individuals. The Internet Society is governed by elected trustees.
Being an organization established in the name of the US government, the Federal Networking Council (FNC) acts as a forum for networking collaborations among Federal agencies to meet their research, education, and operational mission goals and to bridge the gap between the advanced networking technologies being developed by research FNC agencies and the ultimate acquisition of mature version of these technologies from the commercial sector.
Its members are representatives of agencies as the National Security Agency, the Department of Energy, the
http://www.fnc.gov
Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian Augustus (63 BC - 14 AD) was adopted by
Ross Perot, founder of
Official website:
Unofficial website:
Device used by the German military command to encode strategic messages before and during World War II. The Enigma code was broken by a British intelligence system known as Ultra.
Friedman is considered the father of U.S.-American cryptoanalysis - he also was the one to start using this term.
Josef Goebbels (1897-1945) was Hitler's Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. He had unlimited influence on the press, the radio, movies and all kind of literary work in the whole Reich. In 1944 he received all power over the Total War. At the same time he was one of the most faithful followers of Hitler - and he followed him into death in 1945.
Framing is the practice of creating a frame or window within a web page where the content of a different web page can be display. Usually when a link is clicked on, the new web page is presented with the reminders of the originating page.
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