1960s - 1970s: Increased Research in Artificial Intelligence (AI)

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 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) granted the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) U.S.$ 2.2 million for research in machine-aided cognition (artificial intelligence). The major effect of the project was an increase in the pace of AI research and a continuation of funding.

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 machine vision by David Marr, Marvin Minsky's frame theory, the PROLOGUE language (1972) and the development of expert systems.

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It is always the others

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: Adolf Hitler, supposedly one of the world's greatest and most horrible propagandists (together with his Reichsminister für Propaganda Josef Goebbels) did not invent modern propaganda either. It was the British example during World War I, the invention of modern propaganda, where he took his knowledge from. And it was Hitler's Reich, where (racist) propaganda and disinformation were developed to a perfect manipulation-tool in a way that the consequences are still working today.
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 New World Order, a better and geographically broader democratic order, that had just pretended to having begun.

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Late 1960s - Early 1970s: Third Generation Computers

One of the most important advances in the development of computer hardware in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the invention of the integrated circuit, a solid-state device containing hundreds of transistors, diodes, and resistors on a tiny silicon chip. It made possible the production of large-scale computers (mainframes) of higher operating speeds, capacity, and reliability at significantly lower costs.

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 operating systems, that allowed machines to run many different programs at once with a central program that monitored and coordinated the computer's memory, attained widespread use.

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Beautiful bodies

However, artificial beings need not be invisible or look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Terminator". "My dream would be to create an artificial man that does not look like a robot but like a beautiful, graceful human being. The artificial man should be beautiful". Nadia Thalman's hopes for beautiful robots may become reality in the work of MIRALab, a research laboratory attached to the University of Geneva dedicated to realistic modelling of human functionalities. The laboratory has produced an artificial Marylyn Monroe showing just how beautiful artificial creatures can be, and there is a biography featuring details of her career and her - however virtual - love life. Yet beautiful creatures have been made before, at leas on the movie screen. Frank-N-furter, the protagonist of the Rocky Horror picture show ("I've been making a man / with blond hair and a tan / and he is good for relieving my /tension) did set remakrable esthetic standards.

While in Hindu mythology, avatars are bodies chosen by gods for their representation on earth, often animals such as swans or horses, the avatars populating cyberspace have a different function. The cyber bodies of real people, often 3 dimensional images of creatures whose aesthetics reflects both the tastes prevalent in the entertainment and advertising industries as the state of art in visual representation.

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The North against the South?

"Faced with this process of globalization, most governments appear to lack the tools required for facing up to the pressure from important media changes. The new global order is viewed as a daunting challenge, and it most often results in reactions of introversion, withdrawal and narrow assertions of national identity. At the same time, many developing countries seize the opportunity represented by globalization to assert themselves as serious players in the global communications market."
(UNESCO, World Communication Report)

The big hope of the South is that the Internet will close the education gap and economic gap, by making education easier to achieve. But in reality the gap is impossible to close, because the North is not keeping still, but developing itself further and further all the time; inventing new technologies that produce another gap each. The farmer's boy sitting in the dessert and using a cellular telephone and a computer at the same time is a sarcastic picture - nothing else.

Still, the so called developing countries regard modern communication technologies as a tremendous chance - and actually: which other choice is there left?

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Changes

Still, disinformation and propaganda are nothing magic. They can change things, but supposedly only if those things/meanings/opinions are not fixed completely. Galileo Galilee was not capable of changing people's opinion about the world being flat until some persons got suspicious that this long-believed-in truth was a mistake. The propaganda of his experiments which made him famous was not enough. On the other hand later all the propaganda of his enemies could not turn back the wheel of enlightenment, as people thought it was more logic to believe in a round world than in a flat one.
It is never just a single idea that changes. Society is following the changes.

Thinking about disinformation brings us to the word truth, of course, and to the doubt that there is no definite truth. And truth can easily be manipulated to another truth. Just present some facts that seem to be logic and there you've got a new truth. And if the facts can supposedly be proved by empirical studies then the quality of the truth definitely rises.
That's what ideologies do all the time. And the media like to do the same thing - as a game with power or mere presentation of power?

But of course there also exist bits of disinformation which are more amusing than evil or dangerous:
- the theory of the celestro-centric world/"Hohlwelttheorie"
- the story of the German philosopher who invented an Italian philosopher, wrote books about him, even reprinted "his" texts, which had gone lost pretendedly 100 years ago - and finally lost his job and all his career when other scientists found out that everything had been made up.

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Biometric technologies

In what follows there is a brief description of the principal biometric technologies, whose respective proponents - producers, research laboratories, think tanks - mostly tend to claim superiority over the others. A frequently used definition of "biometric" is that of a "unique, measurable characteristic or trait of a human being for automatically recognizing or verifying identity" (http://www.icsa.net/services/consortia/cbdc/bg/introduction.shtml); biometrics is the study and application of such measurable characteristics. In IT environments, biometrics are categorised as "security" technologies meant to limit access to information, places and other resources to a specific group of people.

All biometric technologies are made up of the same basic processes:

1. A sample of a biometric is first collected, then transformed into digital information and stored as the "biometric template" of the person in question.

2. At every new identification, a second sample is collected and its identity with the first one is examined.

3. If the two samples are identical, the persons identity is confirmed, i.e. the system knows who the person is.

This means that access to the facility or resource can be granted or denied. It also means that information about the persons behaviour and movements has been collected. The system now knows who passed a certain identification point at which time, at what distance from the previous time, and it can combine these data with others, thereby appropriating an individual's data body.

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fingerprint identification

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 (http://www.ddsi-cpc.com) which translates the characteristics of a fingerprint into a digitised image.

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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Further Tools: Photography

Art has always contributed a lot to disinformation.
Many modern tools for disinformation are used in art/photography.
Harold D. Lasswell once stated that propaganda was cheaper than violence. Today this is no longer true. Technology has created new tools for propaganda and disinformation - and they are expensive. But by now our possibilities to manipulate pictures and stories have gone so far that it can get difficult to tell the difference between the original and a manipulation.

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:



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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The "Corpse-Conversion Factory"-rumor

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. (Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, p.180)

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Proxy Servers

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 IP addresses to request the page from the server out on the Internet. When the page is returned, the proxy server relates it to the original request and forwards it on to the user.

Source: Whatis.com

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Bandwidth

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

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Critical Art Ensemble

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 Flesh Machine.

http://www.critical-art.net

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Polybius Checkerboard


 

1

2

3

4

5

1

A

B

C

D

E

2

F

G

H

I

K

3

L

M

N

O

P

4

Q

R

S

T

U

5

V

W

X

Y

Z



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:
http://www.ftech.net/~monark/crypto/crypt/polybius.htm

http://www.ftech.net/~monark/crypto/crypt/pol...
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Liability of ISPs

ISPs (Internet Service Provider), BBSs (Bulletin Board Service Operators), systems operators and other service providers (in the U.S.) can usually be hold liable for infringing activities that take place through their facilities under three theories: 1) direct liability: to establish direct infringement liability there must be some kind of a direct volitional act, 2) contributory liability: a party may be liable for contributory infringement where "... with knowledge of the infringing activity, [it] induces, causes or materially contributes to the infringing activity of another." Therefore a person must know or have reason to know that the subject matter is copyrighted and that particular uses violated copyright law. There must be a direct infringement of which the contributory infringer has knowledge, and encourages or facilitates for contributory infringement to attach, and 3) vicarious liability: a party may be vicariously liable for the infringing acts of another if it a) has the right and ability to control the infringer's acts and b) receives a direct financial benefit from the infringement. Unlike contributory infringement, knowledge is not an element of vicarious liability.


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DMCA

The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) was signed into law by U.S. President Clinton in 1998 and implements the two 1996 WIPO treaties (WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty and WIPO Copyright Treaty). Besides other issues the DMCA addresses the influence of new technologies on traditional copyright. Of special interest in the context of the digitalization of intellectual property are the titles no. 2, which refers to the limitation on the liability of online service providers for copyright infringement (when certain conditions are met), no. 3, that creates an exemption for making a copy of a computer program in case of maintenance and repair, and no. 4 which is concerned with the status of libraries and webcasting. The DCMA has been widely criticized for giving copyright-holders even more power and damage the rights and freedom of consumers, technological innovation, and the free market for information.

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Sperry

Formerly (1955 - 1979) Sperry Rand Corporation, American corporation that merged with the Burroughs Corporation in 1986 to form Unisys Corporation, a large computer manufacturer.

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Industrial design

Industrial design refers to the ornamental aspect of a useful article which may constitute of two or three-dimensional elements. To be qualified for intellectual property protection the design must be novel or original. Protection can be obtained through registration in a government office and usually is given for 10 to 15 years.

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National Laboratory for Applied Network Research

NLANR, initially a collaboration among supercomputer sites supported by the National Science Foundation, was created in 1995 to provide technical and engineering support and overall coordination of the high-speed connections at these five supercomputer centers.

Today NLANR offers support and services to institutions that are qualified to use high performance network service providers - such as Internet 2 and Next Generation Internet.

http://www.nlanr.net

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cryptoanalysis

the study of breaking others' codes to transform a message back into a legible form without knowing the key from the beginning

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First Monday

An English language peer reviewed media studies journal based in Denmark.

http://firstmonday.dk

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Intranet

As a local area network (LAN), an Intranet is a secured network of computers based on the IP protocol and with restricted access.

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