The APC is a global federation of 24 non-profit Internet providers serving over 50,000 NGOs in 133 countries. Since 1990, APC has been supporting people and organizations worldwide, working together online for social, environmental and economic justice. The APC's network of members and partners spans the globe, with significant presence in Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.
History
Between 1982 and 1987 several independent, national, non-profit computer networks emerged as viable information and communication resources for activists and NGOs. The networks were founded to make new communication techniques available to movements working for social change.
In 1987, people at GreenNet in England began collaborating with their counterparts at the Institute for Global Communications (IGC) in the United States. These two networks started sharing electronic conference material and demonstrated that transnational electronic communications could serve international as well as domestic communities working for peace, human rights and the environment.
This innovation proved so successful that by late 1989, networks in Sweden, Canada, Brazil, Nicaragua and Australia were exchanging information with each other and with IGC and GreenNet. In the spring of 1990, these seven organizations founded the Association for Progressive communications to co-ordinate the operation and development of this emerging global network of networks.
Strategies and Policies
The APC defends and promotes non-commercial, productive online space for NGOs and collaborates with like-minded organizations to ensure that the information and communication needs of civil society are considered in telecommunications, donor and investment policy. The APC is committed to freedom of expression and exchange of information on the Internet.
The APC helps to build capacity between existing and emerging communication service providers.
The APC Women's Networking Support Program promotes gender-aware Internet design, implementation and use.
Through its African members, the APC is trying to strengthen indigenous information sharing and independent networking capacity on the continent.
Members of APC develop Internet products, resources and tools to meet the advocacy, collaboration and information publishing and management needs of civil society. Recent APC initiatives have included the APC Toolkit Project: Online Publishing and Collaboration for Activists and the Mission-Driven Business Planning Toolkit.
The APC also runs special projects like the Beijing+5, which shall enable non-governmental organizations to actively participate in the review of the Beijing Platform for Action.
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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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Advertising as referred to in most economic books is part of the marketing mix. Therefore advertising usually is closely associated with the aim of selling products and services. Still, developments like "branding" show a tendency towards the marketing of not only products and services, but of ideas and values. While advertising activities are also pursued by political parties, politicians and governmental as well as non-governmental organizations, most of the money flowing into the advertising industry comes from corporations. Although these clients come from such diverse fields, their intentions hardly differ. Attempting to influence the public, their main goal is to sell: Products, services, ideas, values and (political) ideology.
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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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As soon as governments found out that newspapers were a fantastic and very often unsuspicious medium for supporting propaganda they tried to pull them to their side.
Two ways existed:
a) to have one's own newspaper, which implies that mostly friends of the government read it. Nothing is regarded as something neutral.
b) to keep a good relationship to the most powerful/most frequently read newspapers and then try to make one's opinion theirs.
Today mostly elected is b), trying to set up alliances.
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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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the study of breaking others' codes to transform a message back into a legible form without knowing the key from the beginning
Bruce Schneier is president of Counterpane Systems in Minneapolis. This consulting enterprise specialized in cryptography and computer security. He is the author of the book Applied Cryptography and inventor of the Blowfish and Twofish encryption algorithms.
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 original, legible text
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.
Artificial Intelligence is concerned with the simulation of human thinking and emotions in information technology. AI develops "intelligent systems" capable, for example, of learning and logical deduction. AI systems are used for creatively handling large amounts of data (as in data mining), as well as in natural speech processing and image recognition. AI is also used as to support
Yahoo AI sites:
MIT AI lab:
The ongoing World Wide Web History Project was established to record and publish the history of the World Wide Web and its roots in hypermedia and networking. As primary research methods are used archival research and the analysis of interviews and talks with pioneers of the
http://www.webhistory.org/home.html
The Center for Democracy and Technology works to promote democratic values and constitutional liberties in the digital age. With expertise in law, technology, and policy, the Center seeks practical solutions to enhance free expression and privacy in global communications technologies. The Center is dedicated to building consensus among all parties interested in the future of the Internet and other new communications media.
http://www.cdt.org
The News Corporation Ltd., a global media holding company, which governed News Limited (Australia), News International (U.K.), and News America Holdings Inc. (U.S.) was founded by the Australian-born newspaper publisher and media entrepreneur, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch's corporate interests center on newspaper, magazine, book, and electronic publishing; television broadcasting; and film and video production, principally in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.