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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With the dissemination of their content commercial media are among other things also able to transport values and ideologies. Usually their programming reflects society's dominant social, political, ethical, cultural and economical values. A critical view of the prevalent ideologies often is sacrificed so as not to offend the existing political elites and corporate powers, but rather satisfy shareholders and advertisers.
With most of the worlds content produced by a few commercial media conglomerates, with the overwhelming majority of companies (in terms of revenue generation) concentrated in Europe, the U.S., Japan and Australia there is also a strong flow of content from the 'North-West' to the 'South-East'. Popular culture developed in the world's dominant commercial centers and Western values and ideologies are so disseminated into the most distant corners of the earth with far less coming back.
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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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In what follows there is a brief description of the principal biometric technologies, whose respective proponents - producers, research laboratories, think tanks - mostly tend to claim superiority over the others. A frequently used definition of "biometric" is that of a "unique, measurable characteristic or trait of a human being for automatically recognizing or verifying identity" (
All biometric technologies are made up of the same basic processes:
1. A sample of a biometric is first collected, then transformed into digital information and stored as the "biometric template" of the person in question.
2. At every new identification, a second sample is collected and its identity with the first one is examined.
3. If the two samples are identical, the persons identity is confirmed, i.e. the system knows who the person is.
This means that access to the facility or resource can be granted or denied. It also means that information about the persons behaviour and movements has been collected. The system now knows who passed a certain identification point at which time, at what distance from the previous time, and it can combine these data with others, thereby appropriating an individual's data body.
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In the space of flows constituted by today's global data networks the space of places is transcended. Visualizations of these global data flows show arches bridging seas and continents, thereby linking the world's centres of research and development, economics and politics. In the global "Network Society" (Manuel Castells) the traditional centres of power and domination are not discarded, in the opposite, they are strengthened and reinforced by the use of information and communication technologies. Political, economical and symbolical power becomes increasingly linked to the use of modern information and communication technologies. The most sensitive and advanced centres of information and communication technologies are the stock markets. Excluded from the network constituted by modern information and communication technologies, large parts of Africa, Asia and South America, but also the poor of industrialized countries, are ranking increasingly marginal to the world economy.
Cities are centres of communications, trade and power. The higher the percentage of urban population, the more it is likely that the telecommunications infrastructure is generally good to excellent. This goes hand in hand with lower telecommunications costs. Those parts of the world with the poorest infrastructure are also the world's poorhouse. In Bangladesh for most parts of the population a personal computer is as expensive as a limousine in European one-month's salary in Europe, they have to pay eight annual salaries. Therefore telecommunications infrastructure is concentrated on the highly industrialized world: Most telephone mainlines, mobile telephones, computers, Internet accounts and Internet hosts (computers connected to the global data networks) can be found here. The same applies to media: the daily circulation of newspapers and the use of TV sets and radios. - Telecommunication and media services affordable to most parts of the population are mostly restricted to industrialized countries.
This situation will not change in the foreseeable future: Most expenditure for telecommunications infrastructure will be restricted to the richest countries in the world. In 1998, the world's richest countries consumed 75% of all cables and wires.
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The dream of a conflict-free capitalism appeals to a diverse audience. No politician can win elections without eulogising the benefits of the information society and promising universal wealth through informatisation. "Europe must not lose track and should be able to make the step into the new knowledge and information society in the 21st century", said Tony Blair.
The US government has declared the construction of a fast information infrastructure network the centerpiece of its economic policies
In Lisbon the EU heads of state agreed to accelerate the informatisation of the European economies
The German Chancellor Schröder has requested the industry to create 20,000 new informatics jobs.
The World Bank understands information as the principal tool for third world development
Electronic classrooms and on-line learning schemes are seen as the ultimate advance in education by politicians and industry leaders alike.
But in the informatised economies, traditional exploitative practices are obscured by the glamour of new technologies. And the nearly universal acceptance of the ICT message has prepared the ground for a revival of 19th century "adapt-or-perish" ideology.
"There is nothing more relentlessly ideological than the apparently anti-ideological rhetoric of information technology"
(Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, media theorists)
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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:
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
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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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The internet can be regarded as a mirror of the variety of interests, attitudes and needs of human kind. Propaganda and disinformation in that way have to be part of it, whether they struggle for something good or evil. But the classifications do no longer function.
During the last years the internet opened up a new source for racism as it can be difficult to find the person who gave a certain message into the net. The anarchy of the internet provides racists with a lot of possibilities to reach people which they do not possess in other media, for legal and other reasons.
In the 1980s racist groups used mailboxes to communicate on an international level; the first ones to do so were supposedly the
A complete network of anti-racist organizations, including a high number of websites are fighting against racism. For example:
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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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A transistor is a solid-state device for amplifying, controlling, and generating electrical signals. Transistors are used in a wide array of electronic equipment, ranging from pocket
Caching is a mechanism that attempts to decrease the time it takes to retrieve data by storing a copy at a closer location.
American corporation that became the best-known purveyor of child and adult entertainment in the 20th century. Its headquarters are in Burbank, Calif. The company was founded in 1929 and produced animated motion-picture cartoons.
In 1955 the company opened the Disneyland amusement park, one of the world's most famous. Under a new management, in the 1980s, Disney's motion-picture and animated-film production units became among the most successful in the United States. In 1996 the Disney corporation acquired Capital Cities/ABC Inc., which owned the ABC television network. The Disney Company also operates the Disney Channel, a pay television programming service.
The International
Napoleon I. (1769-1821) was French King from 1804-1815.
He is regarded as the master of propaganda and disinformation of his time. Not only did he play his game with his own people but also with all European nations. And it worked as long as he managed to keep up his propaganda and the image of the winner.
Part of his already nearly commercial ads was that his name's "N" was painted everywhere.
Napoleon understood the fact that people believe what they want to believe - and he gave them images and stories to believe. He was extraordinary good in black propaganda.
Censorship was an element of his politics, accompanied by a tremendous amount of positive images about himself.
But his enemies - like the British - used him as a negative image, the reincarnation of the evil (a strategy still very popular in the Gulf-War and the Kosovo-War) (see
b. June 23, 1912, London, England
d. June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire
English mathematician and logician who pioneered in the field of computer theory and who contributed important logical analyses of computer processes. Many mathematicians in the first decades of the 20th century had attempted to eliminate all possible error from mathematics by establishing a formal, or purely algorithmic, procedure for establishing truth. The mathematician Kurt Gödel threw up an obstacle to this effort with his incompleteness theorem. Turing was motivated by Gödel's work to seek an algorithmic method of determining whether any given propositions were undecidable, with the ultimate goal of eliminating them from mathematics. Instead, he proved in his seminal paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem [Decision Problem]" (1936) that there cannot exist any such universal method of determination and, hence, that mathematics will always contain undecidable propositions. During World War II he served with the Government Code and Cypher School, at Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, where he played a significant role in breaking the codes of the German "
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.
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
An Extranet is an Intranet with limited and controlled access by authenticated outside users, a business-to-business Intranet, e.g.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (~4 BC - 65 AD), originally coming from Spain, was a Roman philosopher, statesman, orator and playwright with a lot of influence on the Roman cultural life of his days. Involved into politics, his pupil
Adi Shamir was one of three persons in a team to invent the
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
For more information on early communication networks see