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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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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In parallel to the deregulation of markets, there has been a trend towards large-scale mergers which ridicules dreams of increased competition.
Recent mega-mergers and acquisitions include
SBC Communications - Ameritech, $ 72,3 bn
Bell Atlantic - GTE, $ 71,3
AT&T - Media One, $ 63,1
AOL - Time Warner, $ 165 bn
MCI Worldcom - Spring, $ 129 bn
The total value of all major mergers since the beginnings of the 1990s has been 20 trillion Dollars, 2,5 times the size of the USA's GIP.
The AOL- Time Warner reflects a trend which can be observed everywhere: the convergence of the ICT and the content industries. This represents the ultimate advance in complete market domination, and a alarming threat to independent content.
"Is TIME going to write something negative about AOL? Will AOL be able to offer anything other than CNN sources? Is the Net becoming as silly and unbearable as television?"
(Detlev Borchers, journalist)
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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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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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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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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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Protecting speech on the global data networks attracts an increasing attention. The efforts and the corresponding abilities of governmental authorities, corporations and copyright enforcement agencies are countered by similar efforts and abilities of researchers and engineers to provide means for anonymous and uncensored communication, as Freenet, Free Haven and Publius. All three of them show a similar design. Content is split up and spread on several servers. When a file is requested, the pieces are reassembled. This design makes it difficult to censor content. All of these systems are not commercial products.
The most advanced system seems to be Publius. Because of being designed by researchers and engineers at the prestigious
For more information on Publius, see John Schwartz, Online and Unidentifiable? in: The Washington Post, June 30, 2000,
Freenet web site:
Free Haven web site:
Publius web site:
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The secret behind all this is the conception that nothing bad could ever be referred to the own nation. All the bad words belong to the enemy, whereas the "we" is the good one, the one who never is the aggressor but always defender, the savior - not only for ones own sake but also for the others, even if they never asked for it, like the German population during World War I and II.
The spiritualization of such thinking leads to the point that it gets nearly impossible to believe that this could be un-true, a fake. To imagine injustice committed by the own nation gets more and more difficult, the longer the tactic of this kind of propaganda goes on. U.S.-Americans voluntarily believe in its politics, believing also the USA works as the police of the world, defending the morally good against those who just do not have reached the same level of civilization until today.
To keep up this image, the enemy must be portrayed ugly and bad, like in fairy-tales, black-and-white-pictures. Any connection between oneself and the enemy must be erased and made impossible. In the case of
All of this is no invention of several politicians. Huge think tanks and different governmental organizations are standing behind that. Part of their work is to hide their own work, or to deny it.
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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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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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Other biometric technologies not specified here include ear recognition, signature dynamics, key stroke dynamics, vein pattern recognition, retinal scan, body odour recognition, and DNA recognition. These are technologies which are either in early stages of development or used in highly specialised and limited contexts.
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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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This is the largest area of application of biometric technologies, and the most direct lineage to the feudal gate keeping system. Initially mainly used in military and other "high security" territories, physical access control by biometric technology is spreading into a much wider field of application. Biometric access control technologies are already being used in schools, supermarkets, hospitals and commercial centres, where the are used to manage the flow of personnel.
Biometric technologies are also used to control access to political territory, as in immigration (airports, Mexico-USA border crossing). In this case, they can be coupled with camera surveillance systems and artificial intelligence in order to identify potential suspects at unmanned border crossings. Examples of such uses in remote video inspection systems can be found at
A gate keeping system for airports relying on digital fingerprint and hand geometry is described at
An electronic reconstruction of feudal gate keeping capable of singling out high-risk travellers from the rest is already applied at various border crossing points in the USA. "All enrolees are compared against national lookout databases on a daily basis to ensure that individuals remain low risk". As a side benefit, the economy of time generated by the inspection system has meant that "drug seizures ... have increased since Inspectors are able to spend more time evaluating higher risk vehicles".
However, biometric access control can not only prevent people from gaining access on to a territory or building, they can also prevent them from getting out of buildings, as in the
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In order to be able to recognize a person, one commonly looks at this persons face, for it is there where the visual features which distinguish one person from another are concentrated. Eyes in particular seem to tell a story not only about who somebody is, but also about how that persons feel, where his / her attention is directed, etc. People who do not want to show who they are or what is going on inside of them must mask themselves. Consequently, face recognition is a kind of electronic unmasking.
"Real" face-to-face communication is a two-way process. Looking at somebody's face means exposing ones own face and allowing the other to look at oneself. It is a mutual process which is only suspended in extraordinary and voyeuristic situations. Looking at somebody without being looked at places the person who is visually exposed in a vulnerable position vis-à-vis the watcher.
In face recognition this extraordinary situation is normal. Looking at the machine, you only see yourself looking at the machine. Face biometrics are extracted anonymously and painlessly by a mask without a face.
Therefore the resistance against the mass appropriation of biometrical data through surveillance cameras is confronted with particular difficulties. The surveillance structure is largely invisible, it is not evident what the function of a particular camera is, nor whether it is connected to a face recognition system.
In a protest action against the face recognition specialist
According to
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2000
Digital technologies are used to combine previously separated communication and media systems such as telephony, audiovisual technologies and computing to new services and technologies, thus forming extensions of existing communication systems and resulting in fundamentally new communication systems. This is what is meant by today's new buzzwords "multimedia" and "convergence".
Classical dichotomies as the one of computing and telephony and traditional categorizations no longer apply, because these new services no longer fit traditional categories.
Convergence and Regulatory Institutions
Digital technology permits the integration of telecommunications with computing and audiovisual technologies. New services that extend existing communication systems emerge. The convergence of communication and media systems corresponds to a convergence of corporations. Recently,
For further information on this issue see Natascha Just and Michael Latzer, The European Policy Response to Convergence with Special Consideration of Competition Policy and Market Power Control, http://www.soe.oeaw.ac.at/workpap.htm or
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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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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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Traditional copyright and the practice of paying
Yet again new technologies have altered the way of how (copyrighted) works are produced, copied, made obtainable and distributed. The emergence of global electronic networks and the increased availability of digitalized intellectual property confront existing copyright with a variety of questions and challenges. Although the combination of several types of works within one larger work or on one data carrier, and the digital format (although this may be a recent development it has been the object of detailed legal scrutiny), as well as networking (telephone and cable networks have been in use for a long time, although they do not permit interactivity) are nothing really new, the circumstance that recent technologies allow the presentation and storage of text, sound and visual information in digital form indeed is a novel fact. Like that the entire information can be generated, altered and used by and on one and the same device, irrespective of whether it is provided online or offline.
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During the 1940s and 1950s two major developments enabled the design of modern
Numerical control was invented during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is a method of controlling machine tool axes by means of numbers that have been coded on media. The first numerical control machine was presented in 1952 at the
First teleoperators were developed in the early 1940s. Teleoperators are mechanical manipulators which are controlled by a human from a remote location. In its typical application a human moves a mechanical arm and hand with its moves being duplicated at another location.
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With the rise of networks and the corresponding decline of mainframe services computers have become communication devices instead of being solely computational or typewriter-like devices. Corporate networks become increasingly important and often use the Internet as a public service network to interconnect. Sometimes they are
Software companies, consulting agencies, and journalists serving their interests make some further differences by splitting up the easily understandable term
Cable TV networks and online services as
Especially for financial transactions, secure proprietary networks become increasingly important. When you transfer funds from your banking account to an account in another country, it is done through the SWIFT network, the network of the
Electronic Communications Networks as
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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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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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"Freedom of anonymous speech is an essential component of free speech."
Ian Goldberg/David Wagner,
Someone wants to hide one's identity, to remain anonymous, if s/he fears to be holding accountable for something, say, a publication, that is considered to be prohibited. Anonymous publishing has a long tradition in European history. Writers of erotic literature or pamphlets, e. g., preferred to use pseudonyms or publish anonymously. During the Enlightenment books as d'Alembert's and Diderot's famous Encyclopaedia were printed and distributed secretly. Today
The original design of the Net, as far as it is preserved, offers a relatively high degree of privacy, because due to the client-server model all what is known about you is a report of the machine from which information was, respectively is requested. But this design of the Net interferes with the wish of corporations to know you, even to know more about you than you want them to know. What is euphemistically called customer relationship management systems means the collection, compilation and analysis of personal information about you by others.
In 1997 America Online member Timothy McVeigh, a Navy employee, made his homosexuality publicly known in a short autobiographical sketch. Another Navy employee reading this sketch informed the Navy. America Online revealed McVeigh's identity to the Navy, who discharged McVeigh. As the consequence of a court ruling on that case, Timothy McVeigh was allowed to return to the Navy. Sometimes anonymity really matters.
On the Net you still have several possibilities to remain anonymous. You may visit web sites via an
In Germany, in 1515, printers had to swear not to print or distribute any publication bypassing the councilmen. Today repressive regimes, such as
Anonymity might be used for abuses, that is true, but "the burden of proof rests with those who would seek to limit it. (Rob Kling, Ya-ching Lee, Al Teich, Mark S. Frankel, Assessing Anonymous Communication on the Internet: Policy Deliberations, in: The Information Society, 1999).
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Art has always contributed a lot to disinformation.
Many modern tools for disinformation are used in art/photography.
Trillions of photographs have been taken in the 20th century. Too many to look at, too many to control them and their use. A paradise for manipulation.
We have to keep in mind: There is the world, and there exist pictures of the world, which does not mean that both are the same thing. Photographs are not objective, because the photographer selects the part of the world which is becoming a picture. The rest is left out.
Some tools for manipulation of photography are:
morphing (71)
wet operation (73)
neutralizing (74)
masks (75)
damnatio memoriae (78)
Some of those are digital ways of manipulation, which helps to change pictures in many ways without showing the manipulation.
Pictures taken from the internet could be anything and come from anywhere. To proof the source is nearly impossible. Therefore scientists created on watermarks for pictures, which make it impossible to "steal" or manipulate a picture out of the net.
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Never before propaganda had been as important as in the 2nd World War. From now on education was one more field of propaganda: its purpose was to teach how to think, while pure propaganda was supposed to show what to think.
Every nation founded at least one ministry of propaganda - of course without calling it that way. For example the British called it the Ministry of Information (= MOI), the U.S. distinguished between the Office of Strategic Services (= OSS) and the Office of War Information (= OWI), the Germans created a Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment (= RMVP) and the Japanese called their disinformation and propaganda campaign the "Thought War".
British censorship was so strict that the text of an ordinary propaganda leaflet, that had been dropped from planes several million times, was not given to a journalist who asked for it.
Atrocity stories were no longer used the same way as in the 1st World War. Instead,
German war propaganda had started long before the war. In the middle of the 1930s
Some of the pictures of fear, hatred and intolerance still exist in people's heads. Considering this propaganda did a good job, unfortunately it was the anti-national-socialist propaganda that failed at that time.
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Telnet allows you to login remotely on a computer connected to the Internet.
Slobodan Milosevic (* 1941) is a Serbian political leader.
As a young man S. Milosevic joined the Communist Party, in 1984 the banker became head of the local Communist Party of Belgrade, in 1987 head of the Serb CP. Since 1989 he has been president of Serbia (since 1997 president of the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). During his reign the Yugoslav Republic broke up, bringing about the independence of Slovenia and Croatia and the war in Bosnia. In 1998 the Kosovo Crisis started.
Though Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) made only seven films in his entire career, he was the USSR's most important movie-conductor in the 1920s and 1930s. His typical style, putting mountains of metaphors and symbols into his films, is called the "intellectual montage" and was not always understood or even liked by the audience. Still, he succeeded in mixing ideological and abstract ideas with real stories. His most famous work was The Battleship Potemkin (1923).
A cookie is an information package assigned to a client program (mostly a Web browser) by a server. The cookie is saved on your hard disk and is sent back each time this server is accessed. The cookie can contain various information: preferences for site access, identifying authorized users, or tracking visits.
In online advertising, cookies serve the purpose of changing advertising banners between visits, or identifying a particular
Advertising banners can be permanently eliminated from the screen by filtering software as offered by
Cookies are usually stored in a separate file of the browser, and can be erased or permanently deactivated, although many web sites require cookies to be active.
KMI is the leading source for information on fiber-optics markets. It offers market research, strategic analysis and product planning services to the opto-electronics and communications industries. KMI tracks the worldwide fiber-optic cable system and sells the findings to the industry. KMI says that every fiber-optics corporation with a need for strategic market planning is a subscriber to their services.
Electronic messages are transmitted and received by computers through a network. By E-Mail texts, images, sounds and videos can be sent to single users or simultaneously to a group of users. Now texts can be sent and read without having them printed.
E-Mail is one of the most popular and important services on the Internet.
Official name Church Of Scientology, religio-scientific movement developed in the United States in the 1950s by the author L. Ron Hubbard (1911-86). The Church of Scientology was formally established in the United States in 1954 and was later incorporated in Great Britain and other countries. The scientific basis claimed by the church for its diagnostic and therapeutic practice is disputed, and the church has been criticized for the financial demands that it makes on its followers. From the 1960s the church and various of its officials or former officials faced government prosecutions as well as private lawsuits on charges of fraud, tax evasion, financial mismanagement, and conspiring to steal government documents, while the church on the other hand claimed it was being persecuted by government agencies and by established medical organizations. Some former Scientology officials have charged that Hubbard used the tax-exempt status of the church to build a profitable business empire.
CNN is a U.S.-TV-enterprise, probably the world's most famous one. Its name has become the symbol for the mass-media, but also the symbol of a power that can decide which news are important for the world and which are not worth talking about. Every message that is published on CNN goes around the world. The Gulf War has been the best example for this until now, when a CNN-reporter was the one person to do the countdown to a war. The moments when he stood on the roof of a hotel in Baghdad and green flashes surrounded him, went around the world.
An international organization designed to supervise and liberalize world trade. The WTO (World Trade Organization) is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was created in 1947 and liberalized the world's trade over the next five decades. The WTO came into being on Jan. 1, 1995, with 104 countries as its founding members. The WTO is charged with policing member countries' adherence to all prior GATT agreements, including those of the last major GATT trade conference, the Uruguay Round (1986-94), at whose conclusion GATT had formally gone out of existence. The WTO is also responsible for negotiating and implementing new trade agreements. The WTO is governed by a Ministerial Conference, which meets every two years; a General Council, which implements the conference's policy decisions and is responsible for day-to-day administration; and a director-general, who is appointed by the Ministerial Conference. The WTO's headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland.
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
An Extranet is an Intranet with limited and controlled access by authenticated outside users, a business-to-business Intranet, e.g.
The ICPC aims at reducing the number of incidents of damages to submarine telecommunications cables by hazards.
The Committee also serves as a forum for the exchange of technical and legal information pertaining to submarine cable protection methods and programs and funds projects and programs, which are beneficial for the protection of submarine cables.
Membership is restricted to authorities (governmental administrations or commercial companies) owning or operating submarine telecommunications cables. As of May 1999, 67 members representing 38 nations were members.
http://www.iscpc.org
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.
The retouch is the simplest way to change a picture. Small corrections can be made through this way.
A well-known example is the correction of a picture from a Bill Clinton-visit in Germany. In the background of the photograph stood some people, holding a sign with critical comments. In some newspapers the picture was printed like this, in others a retouch had erased the sign.
Another example happened in Austria in 1999:
The right wing party FPÖ had a poster for the Parliamentarian elections which said: 1999 reasons to vote for Haider. Others answered by producing a retouch saying: 1938 reasons to not vote for Haider (pointing to the year 1939, when the vast majority of the Austrians voted for the "Anschluss" to Germany).
The Internet Societal Task Force is an organization under the umbrella of the Internet Society dedicated to assure that the Internet is for everyone by identifying and characterizing social and economic issues associated with the growth and use of Internet. It supplements the technical tasks of the
Topics under discussion are social, economic, regulatory, physical barriers to the use of the Net, privacy, interdependencies of Internet penetration rates and economic conditions, regulation and taxation.
Instinet, a wholly owned subsidiary of
GE is a major American corporation and one of the largest and most diversified corporations in the world. Its products include electrical and electronic equipment, plastics, aircraft engines, medical imaging equipment, and financial services. The company was incorporated in 1892, and in 1986 GE purchased the RCA Corporation including the RCA-owned television network, the National Broadcasting Company, Inc. In 1987, however, GE sold RCA's consumer electronics division to Thomson SA, a state-owned French firm, and purchased Thomson's medical technology division. In 1989 GE agreed to combine its European business interests in appliances, medical systems, electrical distribution, and power systems with the unrelated British corporation General Electric Company. Headquarters are in Fairfield, Conn., U.S.
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.
Java applets are small programs that can be sent along with a Web page to a user. Java applets can perform interactive animations, immediate calculations, or other simple tasks without having to send a user request back to the server. They are written in Java, a platform-independent computer language, which was invented by
Source: Whatis.com
Based at the University of California's San Diego Supercomputer Center, CAIDA supports cooperative efforts among the commercial, government and research communities aimed at promoting a scalable, robust Internet infrastructure. It is sponsored by the
The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington on 4 April 1949, creating NATO (= North Atlantic Treaty Organization). It was an alliance of 12 independent nations, originally committed to each other's defense. Between 1952 and 1982 four more members were welcomed and in 1999, the first ex-members of
Microsoft Network is the online service from
http://www.msn.com
Every computer using
IP numbers are divided into three classes. Class A is restricted for big-sized organizations, Class B to medium-sized ones as universities, and Class C is dedicated to small networks.
Because of the increasing number of networks worldwide, networks belonging together, as
The Internet Software Consortium (ISC) is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to the production of high-quality reference implementations of Internet standards that meet production standards. Its goal is to ensure that those reference implementations are properly supported and made freely available to the Internet community.
http://www.isc.org
With the assassination of President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), not quite 43, became the youngest President in the Nation's history. Roosevelt's youth differed sharply from that of the log cabin Presidents. He was born in New York City in 1858 into a wealthy family. Roosevelt steered the United States more actively into world politics. He liked to quote a favorite proverb, "Speak softly and carry a big stick. . . . "
He won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War.
for more information see the official website:
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
Agostino Ramelli designed a "reading wheel" which allowed browsing through a large number of documents without moving from one spot.
Presenting a large number of books, a small library, laid open on lecterns on a kind of ferry-wheel, allowing us to skip chapters and to browse through pages by turning the wheel to bring lectern after lectern before our eyes, thus linking ideas and texts together, Ramelli's reading wheel reminds of today's browsing software used to navigate the
Looking for ways to create intelligent machines, the field of
The Roman smoke signals network consisted of towers within visible range of each other and had a total length of about 4500 kilometers. It was used for military signaling.
For a similar telegraph network in ancient Greece see
b. July 13, 1527, London, England
d. December 1608, Mortlake, Surrey
English alchemist, astrologer, and mathematician who contributed greatly to the revival of interest in mathematics in England. After lecturing and studying on the European continent between 1547 and 1550, Dee returned to England in 1551 and was granted a pension by the government. He became astrologer to the queen, Mary Tudor, and shortly thereafter was imprisoned for being a magician but was released in 1555. Dee later toured Poland and Bohemia (1583-89), giving exhibitions of magic at the courts of various princes. He became warden of Manchester College in 1595.
A Wide Area Network is a wide area proprietary network or a network of local area networks. Usually consisting of computers, it may consist of cellular phones, too.
John W. Hill opened the doors of his first public relations office in 1927 in Cleveland, Ohio. His early clients were banks, steel manufacturers, and other industrial companies in the Midwest. Hill managed the firm until 1962, and remained active in it until shortly before his death in New York City in 1977. In 1952, Hill and Knowlton became the first American public relations consultancy to recognize the business communication implications engendered by formation of the European Economic Community. Hill and Knowlton established a network of affiliates across Europe and by the middle of the decade had become the first American public relations firm to have wholly-owned offices in Europe. Hill and Knowlton, a member of the WPP Group integrated communications services family, has extensive resources and geographic coverage with its 59 offices in 34 countries. Hill and Knowlton is known for its hard-hitting tactics and said to have connections with intelligence services.
Since the end of June in France anonymous publishing - on the World Wide Web, in newsgroups, mailing lists or chat rooms - is prohibited. The use of pseudonyms, so popular in chat rooms, e.g., is not restricted, but the true identities of those who "publish" on the Net must be known to the users' Internet service and Internet content providers. Additionally, Internet providers are obliged to point out the possibility of blocking access to material to their customers and to offer them appropriate technology for blocking access.
Loi sur la communication audiovisuelle, http://www.legalis.net/jnet/2000/loi-audio/projetloi-fin.htm
Source: Florian Rötzer, Frankreich hat mit der Anonymität im internet Schluss gemacht, in:
A CPU is the principal part of any digital computer system, generally composed of the main memory, control unit, and arithmetic-logic unit. It constitutes the physical heart of the entire computer system; to it is linked various peripheral equipment, including input/output devices and auxiliary storage units...
Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian Augustus (63 BC - 14 AD) was adopted by
The first of the great medieval universities was established at Bologna. At the beginning, universities predominantly offered a kind of do-it-yourself publishing service.
Books still had to be copied by hand and were so rare that a copy of a widely desired book qualified for being invited to a university. Holding a lecture equaled to reading a book aloud, like a priest read from the Bible during services. Attending a lecture equaled to copy a lecture word by word, so you had your own copy of a book, thus enabling you to hold a lecture, too.
For further details see History of the Idea of a University,
A proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary between a workstation user and the Internet so that security, administrative control, and caching service can be ensured.
A proxy server receives a request for an Internet service (such as a Web page request) from a user. If it passes filtering requirements, the proxy server, assuming it is also a cache server, looks in its local cache of previously downloaded Web pages. If it finds the page, it returns it to the user without needing to forward the request to the Internet. If the page is not in the cache, the proxy server, acting as a client on behalf of the user, uses one of its own
Source: Whatis.com
Visa International's over 21,000 member financial institutions have made VISA one of the world's leading full-service payment network. Visa's products and services include Visa Classic card, Visa Gold card, Visa debit cards, Visa commercial cards and the Visa Global ATM Network. VISA operates in 300 countries and territories and also provides a large consumer payments processing system.
DSL connections are high-speed data connections over copper wire telephone lines. As with cable connections, with DSL you can look up information on the Internet and make a phone call at the same time but you do not need to have a new or additional cable or line installed. One of the most prominent DSL services is ISDN (integrated services digital network, for more information click here (