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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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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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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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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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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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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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 Enigma Encryption Machine was famous for its insecurities as for the security that it gave to German ciphers. It was broken, first by the Poles in the 1930s, then by the British in World War II.
A BBS (bulletin board system) is a computer that can be reached by computer modem dialing (you need to know the phone number) or, in some cases, by
Bulletin board systems originated and generally operate independently of the Internet.
Source: Whatis.com
Microsoft Network is the online service from
http://www.msn.com
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
The Internet Engineering Task Force contributes to the evolution of the architecture, the protocols and technologies of the Net by developing new Internet standard specifications. The directors of its functional areas form the
Internet Society: