Still, disinformation and propaganda are nothing magic. They can change things, but supposedly only if those things/meanings/opinions are not fixed completely.
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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Thinking of propaganda some politicians' names are at once remembered, like
The history of propaganda has to tell then merely mentioning those names:
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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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"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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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 invention of the first
Also, ensuing the introduction of the minicomputer in the mid 1970s by the early 1980s a market for personal computers (PC) was established. As computers had become easier to use and cheaper they were no longer mainly utilized in offices and manufacturing, but also by the average consumer. Therefore the number of personal computers in use more than doubled from 2 million in 1981 to 5.5 million in 1982. Ten years later, 65 million PCs were being used.
Further developments included the creation of mobile computers (laptops and palmtops) and especially networking technology. While mainframes shared time with many terminals for many applications, networking allowed individual computers to form electronic co-operations.
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As stated before the sense of cryptography is a properly designed cryptosystem making it essentially impossible to recover encrypted data without any knowledge of the used key. The issue of lost keys and the being-locked-out from one's own data as a consequence favors key recovery systems. On the other hand the counter argument is confidentiality: as soon as a possibility to recover a key is provided, the chances for abuses grow.
Finally it is the state that does not want to provide too much secrecy. On the contrary. During the last 20 years endless discussions about the state's necessity and right to restrict private cryptography have taken place, as the governments rarely care for the benefit of private users if they believe in catching essential informations about any kind of enemy, hence looking for unrestricted access to all keys.
The list of "key recovery," "key escrow," and "trusted third-party" as encryption requirements, suggested by governmental agencies, covers all the latest developments and inventions in digital technology.
At the same time the NSA, one of the world's most advanced and most secret enterprises for cryptography, worked hard in getting laws through to forbid the private use of strong encryption in one way or the other. Still, it is also organizations like this one that have to admit that key recovery systems are not without any weaknesses, as the U.S. Escrowed Encryption Standard, the basis for the famous and controversially discussed Clipper Chip, showed. The reason for those weaknesses is the high complexity of those systems.
Another aspect is that key recovery systems are more expensive and certainly much less secure than other systems. So, why should anyone use them?
In that context, one has to understand the legal framework for the use of cryptography, a strict framework in fact, being in high contradiction to the globalised flow of communication.
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Following the commercial success of
New technologies were being invented in Japan.
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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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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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~ 1900 BC: Egyptian writers use non-standard
1500 an enciphered formula for the production of pottery is done in Mesopotamia
parts of the Hebrew writing of Jeremiah's words are written down in "
4th century
487 the Spartans introduce the so called "
170
50-60
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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" (
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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One of the largest and foremost communications and media conglomerates in the
world. Founded in 1971, the present form of the corporation dates from 1994 when Viacom Inc., which owned radio and television stations and cable television programming services and systems, acquired the entertainment and publishing giant Paramount Communications Inc. and then merged with the video and music retailer Blockbuster Entertainment Corp. Headquarters are in New York City.
IRC is a text-based chat system used for live discussions of groups.
For a history of IRC see Charles A. Gimon, IRC: The Net in Realtime,
The economic rights (besides
Automation is concerned with the application of machines to tasks once performed by humans or, increasingly, to tasks that would otherwise be impossible. Although the term mechanization is often used to refer to the simple replacement of human labor by machines,
Certain elements of two or more photographs can be put together, mixed, and the outcome is a new picture. Like this, people can appear in the same picture, even "sit at the same table" though they have never met in reality.
The blue box-system works with a special blue colored background. The person in front can act as if he/she was filmed anywhere, also in the middle of a war.
The News Corporation Ltd., a global media holding company, which governed News Limited (Australia), News International (U.K.), and News America Holdings Inc. (U.S.) was founded by the Australian-born newspaper publisher and media entrepreneur, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch's corporate interests center on newspaper, magazine, book, and electronic publishing; television broadcasting; and film and video production, principally in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
Probably the most significant Internet service, the World Wide Web is not the essence of the Internet, but a subset of it. It is constituted by documents that are linked together in a way you can switch from one document to another by simply clicking on the link connecting these documents. This is made possible by the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the authoring language used in creating World Wide Web-based documents. These so-called hypertexts can combine text documents, graphics, videos, sounds, and
Especially on the World Wide Web, documents are often retrieved by entering keywords into so-called search engines, sets of programs that fetch documents from as many
Among other things that is the reason why the World Wide Web is not simply a very huge database, as is sometimes said, because it lacks consistency. There is virtually almost infinite storage capacity on the Internet, that is true, a capacity, which might become an almost everlasting too, a prospect, which is sometimes
According to the Internet domain survey of the
Founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen and headquartered in Redmond, USA, Microsoft Corporation is today's world-leading developer of personal-computer software systems and applications. As MS-DOS, the first operating system released by Microsoft, before, Windows, its successor, has become the de-facto standard operating system for personal computer. According to critics and following a recent court ruling this is due to unfair competition.
For more detailed information see the Encyclopaedia Britannica:
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.
Robot relates to any automatically operated machine that replaces human effort, though it may not resemble human beings in appearance or perform functions in a humanlike manner. The term is derived from the Czech word robota, meaning "forced labor." Modern use of the term stems from the play R.U.R., written in 1920 by the Czech author Karel Capek, which depicts society as having become dependent on mechanical workers called robots that are capable of doing any kind of mental or physical work. Modern robot devices descend through two distinct lines of development--the early
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the independent research branch of the U.S. Department of Defense that, among its other accomplishments, funded a project that in time was to lead to the creation of the Internet. Originally called ARPA (the "D" was added to its name later), DARPA came into being in 1958 as a reaction to the success of Sputnik, Russia's first manned satellite. DARPA's explicit mission was (and still is) to think independently of the rest of the military and to respond quickly and innovatively to national defense challenges.
In the late 1960s, DARPA provided funds and oversight for a project aimed at interconnecting computers at four university research sites. By 1972, this initial network, now called the
http://www.darpa.mil
Napoleon I. (1769-1821) was French King from 1804-1815.
He is regarded as the master of propaganda and disinformation of his time. Not only did he play his game with his own people but also with all European nations. And it worked as long as he managed to keep up his propaganda and the image of the winner.
Part of his already nearly commercial ads was that his name's "N" was painted everywhere.
Napoleon understood the fact that people believe what they want to believe - and he gave them images and stories to believe. He was extraordinary good in black propaganda.
Censorship was an element of his politics, accompanied by a tremendous amount of positive images about himself.
But his enemies - like the British - used him as a negative image, the reincarnation of the evil (a strategy still very popular in the Gulf-War and the Kosovo-War) (see
Galileo Galilee (1564-1642), the Italian Mathematician and Physicist is called the father of Enlightenment. He proofed the laws of the free fall, improved the technique for the telescope and so on. Galilee is still famous for his fights against the Catholic Church. He published his writings in Italian instead of writing in Latin. Like this, everybody could understand him, which made him popular. As he did not stop talking about the world as a ball (the Heliocentric World System) instead of a disk, the Inquisition put him on trial twice and forbid him to go on working on his experiments.
American corporation that became the best-known purveyor of child and adult entertainment in the 20th century. Its headquarters are in Burbank, Calif. The company was founded in 1929 and produced animated motion-picture cartoons.
In 1955 the company opened the Disneyland amusement park, one of the world's most famous. Under a new management, in the 1980s, Disney's motion-picture and animated-film production units became among the most successful in the United States. In 1996 the Disney corporation acquired Capital Cities/ABC Inc., which owned the ABC television network. The Disney Company also operates the Disney Channel, a pay television programming service.
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.
Nero's full name was Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (37-68 AD). Nero was Roman Emperor from 54-68 AD; during the first years in power he stood under the influence of his teacher
Those encompass the industries that create copyrighted works as their primary product. These industries include the motion picture industry (television, theatrical, and home video), the recording industry (records, tapes and CDs), the music publishing industry, the book, journal and newspaper publishing industry, and the computer software industry (including data processing, business applications and interactive entertainment software on all platforms), legitimate theater, advertising, and the radio, television and cable broadcasting industries.