As scientists are working hard on a quantum computer and also on quantum cryptography one can imagine that another revolution in the study of encryption has to be expected within the next years. By then today's hardware and software tools will look extraordinary dull. At the moment it is impossible to foresee the effects on cryptography and democratic developments by those means; the best and the worst can be expected at the same time. A certain ration of pessimism and prosecution mania are probably the right mixture of emotions about those tendencies, as the idea of big brother has come into existence long ago.
At the same time it will - in part - be a decision of the people to let science work against them or not. Acceleration of data-transmission calls for an acceleration of encryption-methods. And this again falls back on us, on an acceleration of daily life, blurring the private and the public for another time.
We live in an intersection, job and private life growing together. Cryptography cannot help us in that case. The privacy in our mind, the virtuality of all private and public lies in the field of democracy, or at least what is - by connection to the Human Rights - regarded as democracy.
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One of the most critical trends in the western culture what might be called the "fusion of flesh and machine". Increasingly, technological artifacts such as computers, rather than being used as tools by people, are functioning as parts of the human organism. On the other hand, human functionalities such as intelligence, emotion, adaptability or reproductivity are integrated into technological artifacts: the days when computers where only able to count apples and pears and their intelligence was not even matching an insect's are rapidly becoming history. Today, the boundaries between organisms and technology are losing their significance.
As new technologies are no longer mere instruments, or "extensions" of the organism, they acquire the capability of modifying the human organism - body and mind - from within according to certain pre-established principles. The history of the evolution of the human species is hastily being re-written as artificial beings begin to mock the categories of evolution and seem to work their way towards historical subjectivity. The German philosopher Günther Anders has extensively reflected on the changes of the human condition provoked by the development of modern technology speaks of an "antiquatedness of history" at a time when technology itself becomes a historical subject and men are becoming co-historical.
However, the softening of the biological definition of the human race is a theme which has accompanied western thinking ever since its origins. Beings half man-half animal crowd the tales of classical mythology and transcend the boundary between the human from below, while divine creatures, temporarily occupying humanoid bodies, relativise humanness form "above". What exactly "being human" meant and who "human beings" could be "defined" is a question with a long history. "Der Mensch ist das nicht festgestellte Thier" as Nietzsche commented.
Just as the boundaries between human and non-human are being crossed by technological development, so also the boundaries between the classical episteme are becoming permeable. Psychology is occupying itself with the emotions of machines, while physics and cybernetics is applied to the human mind and body. The "nicht festgestellte "character of humanness has meant that imagination has become just as relevant a factor in understanding humanness as science. Science fiction as a literary genre is no longer merely a depository of phantasies about a technisised world our of control. As the human monopoly on history seems to dissolve, the baroque narratives of science fiction have also become a resource for understanding history.
However, it is evident that the potentials of the new technologies gives rise not only to wild hopes and dreams and to bizarre stories; they also harbour some real ambiguities of a political and ethical nature. Not only does the merging of previously distinct realities - the human and the non-human worlds - unhinge theories and institutions based upon a clear distinction and separation of the two, it also is placing political practice on a different footing. Will artificial life have rights? Will artificial entities have political power? How will social relationships change?
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The devices often considered the first "computers" in our understanding were rather
In 1642
Further improvements in the field of early computing devices were made by Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, a Frenchmen. His arithometer could not only add and multiply, but perform the four basic arithmetic functions and was widely used up until the First World War.
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Critical Art Ensemble is a collective of five artists of various specializations dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics, and critical theory. CAE have published a number of books and carried out innovative art projects containing insightful and ironic theoretical contributions to media art. Projects include Addictionmania, Useless Technology, The Therapeutic State, Diseases of Consciousness, Machineworld, As Above So Below, and
http://www.critical-art.net
Caching is a mechanism that attempts to decrease the time it takes to retrieve data by storing a copy at a closer location.
The WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is a specification for a set of communication protocols to standardize the way that wireless devices, such as cellular telephones and radio transceivers, can be used for Internet access, including
While Internet access has been possible in the past, different manufacturers have used different technologies. In the future, devices and service systems that use WAP will be able to interoperate.
Source: Whatis.com
An English language peer reviewed media studies journal based in Denmark.
http://firstmonday.dk
Fiber-optic cable networks may become the dominant method for high-speed Internet connections. Since the first fiber-optic cable was laid across the Atlantic in 1988, the demand for faster Internet connections is growing, fuelled by the growing network traffic, partly due to increasing implementation of corporate networks spanning the globe and to the use of graphics-heavy contents on the
Fiber-optic cables have not much more in common with copper wires than the capacity to transmit information. As copper wires, they can be terrestrial and submarine connections, but they allow much higher transmission rates. Copper wires allow 32 telephone calls at the same time, but fiber-optic cable can carry 40,000 calls at the same time. A capacity,
Copper wires will not come out of use in the foreseeable future because of technologies as
For technical information from the Encyclopaedia Britannica on telecommunication cables, click
An entertaining report of the laying of the FLAG submarine cable, up to now the longest fiber-optic cable on earth, including detailed background information on the cable industry and its history, Neal Stephenson has written for Wired: Mother Earth Mother Board. Click
Susan Dumett has written a short history of undersea cables for Pretext magazine, Evolution of a Wired World. Click
A timeline history of submarine cables and a detailed list of seemingly all submarine cables of the world, operational, planned and out of service, can be found on the Web site of the
For maps of fiber-optic cable networks see the website of