One of the easiest tools for disinformation is to exchange the words written below a photograph. The entire meaning of the picture can be varied like this:
- The visit of a school-group at a former international camp can change into a camp, where children are imprisoned (which happened in the Russian city of Petroskoy in 1944).
- Victims of war can change nationality. The picture of the brutal German soldier in World War II that was shown in many newspapers to demonstrate the so-called typical face of a murderer, turned out to be French and a victim in other newspapers.
- In 1976 a picture of children in a day-nursery in the GDR is taken: The children, coming out of the shower, were dressed up in terry cloth suits with stripes. The same year the photograph with the happily laughing boys and girls wins the contest "a beautiful picture". Two years later a small part of the photograph can be seen in a Christian magazine in West-Germany, supposedly showing children from a concentration camp in the USSR. The smiling faces now seem to scream. (source: Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.): Bilder, die lügen. Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung im Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Bonn 1998, p. 79)
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DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)
The debates in the House and Senate preceding the signing into law of the DMCA by U.S. President Clinton in October 1998 indicated that the principal object of the Act is to promote the U.S. economy by establishing an efficient Internet marketplace in copyrighted works. The DMCA implements the two 1996
A full-text version of the DMCA is available from:
The Library of Congress: Thomas (Legislative Information on the Internet):
Moreover the U.S. Copyright Office provides a memorandum, which briefly summarizes each of the five titles of the DMCA (pdf format):
The DMCA has been criticized for not clarifying the range of legal principles on the liability of ISPs and creating exceptions to only some of the provisions; therefore giving copyright owners even more rights.
Among the variety of comments on the DMCA are:
Lutzker, Arnold P.: Primer on the Digital Millennium: What the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Copyright Term Extension Act Mean for the Library Community.
Lutzker & Lutzker law firm and the Association of Research Libraries: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Highlights of New Copyright Provision Establishing Limitation of Liability for Online Service Providers.
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Personal data are collected, appropriated, processed and used for commercial purposes on a global scale. In order for such a global system to operate smoothly, there a server nodes at which the data streams converge. Among the foremost of these are the data bases of credit card companies, whose operation has long depended on global networking.
On top of credit card companies such as Visa, American Express, Master Card, and others. It would be erroneous to believe that the primary purpose of business of these companies is the provision of credit, and the facilitation of credit information for sale transactions. In fact, Information means much more than just credit information. In an advertisement of 1982, American Express described itself in these terms: ""Our product is information ...Information that charges airline tickets, hotel rooms, dining out, the newest fashions ...information that grows money funds buys and sells equities ...information that pays life insurance annuities ...information that schedules entertainment on cable television and electronically guards houses ...information that changes kroners into guilders and figures tax rates in Bermuda ..."
Information has become something like the gospel of the New Economy, a doctrine of salvation - the life blood of society, as Bill Gates expresses it. But behind information there are always data that need to be generated and collected. Because of the critical importance of data to the economy, their possession amounts to power and their loss can cause tremendous damage. The data industry therefore locates its data warehouses behind fortifications that bar physical or electronic access. Such structures are somewhat like a digital reconstruction of the medieval fortress
Large amounts of data are concentrated in fortress-like structures, in data bunkers. As the
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With the development of new transmission, distribution and publishing technologies and the increasing digitalization of information copyright has become the subject of vigorous debate. Among the variety of attitudes towards the future of traditional copyright protection two main tendencies can be identified:
Eliminate Copyright
Anti-copyrightists believe that any
Enlarge Copyright
Realizing the growing economic importance of intellectual property, especially the holders of copyright (in particular the big publishing, distribution and other
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The Net consists of thousands of thousands of governmental and private networks linked together. 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 of ever gaining ultimate control of the Internet. Although each of these networks is operated and controlled by an organization, no single organization operates and controls the Net. Instead of a central authority governing the Net, several bodies assure the operability of the Net by developing and setting technical specifications for the Net and by the control of the technical key functions of the Net as the coordination of the domain name system and the allocation of IP numbers.
Originally, the Net was a research project funded and maintained by the US Government and developed in collaboration by scientists and engineers. As the standards developed for ensuring operability ensued from technical functionality, technical coordination gradually grew out of necessity and was restricted to a minimum and performed by volunteers.
Later, in the 1980s, those occupied with the development of technical specifications organized themselves under the umbrella of the Internet Society in virtual organizations as the Internet Engineering Task Force, which were neither officially established nor being based on other structures than mailing lists and commitment, but nonetheless still serve as task forces for the development of standards ensuring the interoperability on the Net.
Since the late 80s and the early 90s, with the enormous growth of the Net - which was promoted by the invention of
Since the year 2000, a new model for technical coordination has been emerging: Formerly performed by several bodies, technical coordination is transferred to a single non-governmental organization: the Internet Coordination of Assigned Numbers and Names.
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The Internet can be used in in different ways: for distributing and retrieving information, for one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many communication, and for the access services. Accordingly, there are different services on offer. The most important of these are listed below.
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The advertising industry has always relied on media to transport their messages and disseminate them to the public. Depending on the product or service advertised and the audience targeted different media are used. Besides cinema and outdoor advertising (posters etc.) the huge majority of ads is placed within the classical media landscape, which includes TV, newspapers, magazines and radio.
Whereas in most cases only a relatively small fraction of advertising budgets is spent on cinema, outdoor and radio advertising, newspapers, magazines and TV account for more than two thirds of the money spent on ads. Still with the growing popularity of new media advertisers and marketers have recently also discovered digital networks and especially the Internet for their purposes.
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The plastic card invasion.
The tendency of modern data-driven economies is to structure economic activity in such a way that an increasing amount of data is generated. For example, the fact that only a few years ago few people in continental Europe used a credit card, and that now almost everybody who has a bank account also has a credit card, shows that payment by credit card is preferred to anonymous cash transaction. If somebody pays by credit card, there are computers that register the transaction. They record who paid what amount where, and for what purpose. This is valuable information. It allows businesses to "better know their customers". Credit card companies today belong to the largest data repositories anywhere. However, credit card companies have tried to introduce cash cards, or "electronic purses", plastic cards which can be used in lieu of cash in shops - a type of payment, that is not really catching on. In the small town of
Credit cards may be the most common, but certainly not the only way in which an economic activity produces a data surplus. In the end, the data surplus generated by a credit card is limited to just a few indicators. The tendency of the data body industry is to collect as much data as possible from each single transaction. Therefore, a range of new plastic card applications is emerging.
Most big retailers or service industries, offer customer cards which reward customers with certain discounts or gifts when used frequently. However, the cost of these discounts is easily set off by the value consumer data that is generated each time a card is pulled through the magnetic reading device. Frequent-flyer cards are among the most common plastic data-collecting devices. Often such frequent-flyer cards are also credit cards, in which case travel and consumption data are already combined at the point of sale, creating further rationalisation of the process.
Electronic networks have created a general tendency to move to move marketing decisions to the point of sale, rather than locating them in central locations. This way, the marketing process becomes cheaper and more efficient for the company.
The ideal situation for the data body industry and for government bureaucracy would be a complete centralised storage and management of people's data, and a collection process the pass unnoticed and ensures that the data in question are always current. Many efforts in this direction have been undertaken. One of the most recent such projects is called the
The Irish town of Ennis, although striving to become "one of the technologically most advanced towns in the world" may have frustrated the expectations of the plastic card industry. Yet this is only a minute, if embarrassing, setback on the path towards global rationalisation of data collection. The economic benefits which the plastic card data collection technologies promises for retailers, E-commerce, marketing and bureaucracies all over the world have given rise to a wealth of research programmes, field tests, projects and government policies, all aimed at promoting the data body economy and adopting it as the business model of the future.
Links to plastic card trade associations:
Links to plastic card research programmes:
Links to publications:
Links to EU research programmes
Producers
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An important change in the development of computers occurred in 1948 with the invention of the
Stretch by
Throughout the early 1960s there were a number of commercially successful computers (for example the IBM 1401) used in business, universities, and government and by 1965 most large firms routinely processed financial information by using computers. Decisive for the success of computers in business was the stored program concept and the development of sophisticated high-level
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To bandwagon is a form of persuasion by telling that one should do something as the others are doing the same thing.
for more informations see:
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With the increased ease of the reproduction and transmission of unauthorized copies of digital works over electronic networks concerns among the copyright holder community have arisen. They fear a further growth of copyright piracy and demand adequate protection of their works. A development, which started in the mid 1990s and considers the copyright owner's apprehensions, is the creation of
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It has become a commonplace observation that the history of modernity has been accompanied by what one might call a general weakening of identity, both as a theoretical concept and as a social and cultural reality. This blurring of identity has come to full fruition in the 20th century. As a theoretical concept, identity has lost its metaphysical foundation of "full correspondence" following the destruction of metaphysics by thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Witgenstein or Davidson. Nietzsche's "dead god", his often-quoted metaphor for the demise of metaphysics, has left western cultures not only with the problem of having to learn how to think without permanent foundations; it has left them with both the liberty of constructing identities, and the structural obligation to do so. The dilemmas arising out of this ambivalent situation have given rise to the comment that "god is dead, and men is not doing so well himself". The new promise of freedom is accompanied by the threat of enslavement. Modern, technologically saturated cultures survive and propagate and emancipate themselves by acting as the gatekeepers of their own technological prisons.
On the social and cultural levels, traditional clear-cut identities have become weakened as traditional cultural belonging has been undermined or supplanted by modern socio-technological structures. The question as to "who one is" has become increasingly difficult to answer: hybrid identities are spreading, identities are multiple, temporary, fleeting rather than reflecting an inherited sense of belonging. The war cry of modern culture industry "be yourself" demands the impossible and offers a myriad of tools all outcompeting each other in their promise to fulfil the impossible.
For many, identity has become a matter of choice rather than of cultural or biological heritage, although being able to chose may not have been the result of a choice. A large superstructure of purchasable identification objects caters for an audience finding itself propelled into an ever accelerating and vertiginous spiral of identification and estrangement. In the supermarket of identities, what is useful and cool today is the waste of tomorrow. What is offered as the latest advance in helping you to "be yourself" is as ephemeral as your identification with it; it is trash in embryonic form.
Identity has become both problematic and trivial, causing modern subjects a sense of thrownness and uprootedness as well as granting them the opportunity of overcoming established authoritarian structures. In modern, technologically saturated societies, the general weakening of identities is a prerequisite for emancipation. The return to "strong" clear-cut "real" identities is the way of new fundamentalism demanding a rehabilitation of "traditional values" and protected zones for metaphysical thought, both of which are to be had only at the price of suppression and violence.
It has become difficult to know "who one is", but this difficulty is not merely a private problem. It is also a problem for the exercise of power, for the state and other power institutions also need to know "who you are". With the spread of weak identities, power is exercised in a different manner. Power cannot be exercised without being clear who it addresses; note the dual significance of "subject". A weakened, hybrid undefined subject (in the philosophical sense) cannot be a "good" subject (in the political sense), it is not easy to sub-ject. Without identification, power cannot be exercised. And while identification is itself not a sufficient precondition for authoritarianism, it is certainly a necessary one.
Identities are therefore reconstructed using technologies of identification in order to keep the weakened and hence evasive subjects "sub-jected". States have traditionally employed bureaucratic identification techniques and sanctioned those who trying to evade the grip of administration. Carrying several passports has been the privilege of spies and of dubious outlaws, and not possessing an "ID" at all is the fate of millions of refugees fleeing violence or economic destitution. Lack of identification is structurally sanctioned by placelessness.
The technisised acceleration of societies and the weakening of identities make identification a complicated matter. On the one hand, bureaucratic identification techniques can be technologically bypassed. Passports and signatures can be forged; data can be manipulated and played with. On the other hand, traditional bureaucratic methods are slow. The requirements resulting from these constraints are met by biometric technology.
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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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Often public relations are described as the effort to influence the public or relevant parts of it by representing self-interests to reach certain goals. This view of PR is most commonly found, when acting within the economic sphere. On the other hand organizations like the
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With the rapid growth of the Internet and its audience advertisers now have a new medium at their disposal. The placement of the first banner ads in 1994 marks the birth of Internet advertising. Although the advertising industry at first hesitated to adopt the new medium, two facts brushed away their doubts:
Migrating Television Audiences: The increased use of the Internet led people to redistribute their time budget. Whereas some cut down on eating and sleeping, more than a third reduced watching television and instead uses the WWW.
Interesting Internet Demographics: While methodologies and approaches of research organizations studying the demographic composition of the Internet vary, the findings are relatively consistent: Internet users are young, well educated and earn high incomes.
Considering those findings, the Internet in the first place seems to become inevitable to be included in media planning, as part of the audience shifts from TV to the WWW, and secondly, because demographics of the Internet user population are irresistible for marketers.
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Certain
|
It is a system, where letters get converted into numeric characters.
The numbers were not written down and sent but signaled with torches.
for example:
A=1-1
B=1-2
C=1-3
W=5-2
for more information see:
the study of breaking others' codes to transform a message back into a legible form without knowing the key from the beginning
Industrial design refers to the ornamental aspect of a useful article which may constitute of two or three-dimensional elements. To be qualified for
an algorithm for bringing a legible message into an illegible form. There has to exist some sort of code book to encode/decode it.
The largest media and entertainment conglomerate in the world. The corporation resulted from the merger of the publisher Time Inc. and the media conglomerate Warner Communications Inc. in 1989. It acquired the Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS) in 1996. Time Warner Inc.'s products encompass magazines, hardcover books, comic books, recorded music, motion pictures, and broadcast and cable television programming and distribution. The company's headquarters are in New York City. In January 2000 Time Warner merged with AOL (America Online), which owns several online-services like Compuserve, Netscape and Netcenter in a US$ 243,3 billion deal.
Whitfield Diffie is an Engineer at Sun Microsystems and co-author of Privacy on the Line (MIT Press) in 1998 with Susan Landau. In 1976 Diffie and
the original, legible text
Nicolae Ceausescu (1918-1989) was State-Secretary of Romania from 1967 to 1989. He is supposed to have been one of the cruelest dictators of the Eastern Bloc. His power was assured by a huge system of spies called the Securitate. In 1989 when the other Eastern-European countries started liberalizing their politics, he tried to follow the same policy as before; in December he had to flee but was betrayed and ended up being shot together with his wife right after a short and secret trial. Today it seems as if the revolution of those days had been organized by the communists to assure power. In the meantime the situation for the people has not improved at all but rather worsened.
b. June 19, 1623, Clermont-Ferrand, France
d. August 19, 1662, Paris, France
French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and master of prose. He laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities, formulated what came to be known as Pascal's law of pressure, and propagated a religious doctrine that taught the experience of God through the heart rather than through reason. The establishment of his principle of intuitionism had an impact on such later philosophers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henri Bergson and also on the Existentialists.
the enciphered/encoded and primarily illegible text
Authors of copyrighted works (besides
Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) was a Roman Statesman who came to power through a military career and by buying of votes. His army won the civil war, run over Spain, Sicily and Egypt, where he made Cleopatra a Queen. For reaching even more power he increased the number of senators. But he also organized social measures to improve the people's food-situation. In February 44 BC he did not accept the kingship offered by Marc Anthony, which made him even more popular. One month later he was murdered during a senate sitting.