-1994
Viacom multimedia and industrial corporation takes control of Paramount Communications for US$ 9.6 billion, as well as Blockbuster Entertainment, a huge video store chain, for US$ 8.4. billion.
1995
Entertainment giant Disney buys Capital Cities-ABC for US$ 19 billion.
The industrial and broadcasting company Westinghouse Corp. buys out CBS for US$ 5.4 billion.
In a US$ 7.2 billion deal, Time Warner acquires Turner Communications, owner of prime cable TV channels CNN, TBS and TNT and a major classic American film library.
1996
Westinghouse/CBS buys Infinity Broadcasting's large group of radio stations.
Murdoch and News Corp. acquire ten more TV stations and TV production studios with the US$ 2.5 billion purchase of New World Communications Group.
Viacom buys half of UPN-TV network, adding that to its other holdings, which include eleven TV stations, along with MTV, VH-1, and other cable TV channels and Paramount movie studios.
1997
Radio Groups Chancellor Media and Evergreen merge and are linked by ownership with Capstar Broadcasting; they also buy ten radio stations from Viacom. By mid-1997 Chancellor/Capstar controls no fewer than 325 radio stations around the United States.
Chancellor/Capstar's controlling ownership group, Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, buys the seventh largest radio group, SFX, adding another seventy-two radio stations, making a total of nearly four hundred stations controlled by this one source.
Westinghouse-CBS buys out American Radio Systems, the fourth largest radio chain in total audience, which gives Westinghouse-CBS over 170 radio stations with a total audience nearly equal to that of the Chancellor/Capstar group.
Giant European-based print and electronic publishing and data base corporations Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer merge.
1998
Bertelsmann buys the Random House-Alfred A. Knopf-Crown Publishing group of book publishers from Newhouse/Advance Publications, adding to its Bantam-Doubleday-Dell publishing group and giving Bertelsmann by far the largest English-language publishing operations.
1999
AOL, the worlds leading Internet service provider and Time Warner, the worlds leading classical media company merge in a US$ 243.3 billion deal.
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Double bind messages are extremely effective.
For example in Nicaragua the
By the end of the 1980s the USA even paid Nicaraguans for voting other parties than the Sandinistas.
El Salvador was a similar case. Again the guerrilla got demonized. The difference was the involvement of the Catholic Church, which was highly fought against by the ruling parties of El Salvador - and those again were financially and organizationally supported by the USA. The elections in the 1980s were more or less paid by the USA.
U.S.-politicians were afraid El Salvador could end up being a second Cuba or Nicaragua. Every means was correct to fight this tendency, no matter what it cost.
On the 21st of September 1996, the
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The new U.S. regulations are based on the Wassenaar Arrangement Revision of 1998, where exports without license of 56 bit
For more information see:
Seven states stay excluded from the new freedom. These are states like Libya, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Cuba, altogether states seen as terrorist supporting. No encryption tools may be exported into those countries.
This is, what happened in the USA, whereas in Germany the issue of a cryptography-law is still on the agenda. Until now, in Germany, everyone can decide by her-/himself, whether she/he wants to encrypt electronic messages or not. Some organizations fear that this could get changed soon. Therefore an urgent action was organized in February 2000 to demonstrate the government that people want the freedom to decide on their own. One governmental argument is that only very few people actually use cryptography. Therefore the urgent action is organized as a campaign for using it more frequently.
For more information on this see:
Other European countries have more liberate laws on cryptography, like France. Austria doesn't have any restrictions at all, probably because of a governmental lack of interest more than accepting freedom.
The (former) restrictions in the bigger countries influenced and hindered developments for safer key-systems, e.g. the key-length was held down extraordinarily.
"Due to the suspicious nature of crypto users I have a feeling DES will be with us forever, we will just keep adding keys and cycles (...). There is a parallel between designing electronic commerce infrastructure today that uses weak cryptography (i.e. 40 or 56 bit keys) and, say, designing air traffic control systems in the '60s using two digit year fields. (...) Just because you can retire before it all blows up doesn't make it any less irresponsible."
(Arnold G. Reinhold)
The Chinese State Encryption Management Commission (SEMC) announced in March 2000 that only strong encryption tools will have to be registered in the future. Which sounds so nice on first sight, does not mean a lot in reality: any kind of useful encryption technique, like the
The restrictions and prohibitions for cryptography are part of the states' wish to acquire more control - in the name of the battle against criminality, probably?
Due to the emerging organized criminality the governments want to obtain more freedom of control over citizens. Organizations like the NSA appear as the leaders of such demands.
What about civil rights or Human Rights?
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Although the traditional media companies first steps into the digital sphere were fairly clumsy, they have quickly learned from their mistakes and continued to enlarge their Internet presence.
During the last years many of the smaller players in the field of digital media have been driven out of competition by the huge media conglomerates. This mainly is a result of the advantages that the commercial media giants have over their less powerful counterparts:
- As engagement in online activities mostly does not lead to quick profits, investors must be able to take losses, which only powerful companies are able to.
- Traditional media outlets usually have huge stocks of digital programming, which they can easily plug into the Internet at little extra cost.
- To generate audience, the big media conglomerates constantly promote their Websites and other digital media products on their traditional media holdings.
- As possessors of the hottest "brands" commercial media companies often get premier locations from browser software makers, Internet service providers, search engines and portals.
- Having the financial resources at their disposition the big media firms are aggressive investors in start-up Internet media companies.
Commercial media companies have close and long ties to advertisers, which enables them to seize most of these revenues.
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Concerning their human and financial resources commercial media and independent content provider are an extremely unequal pair. While the 1998 revenues of the world's leading media conglomerates (AOL Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom and the News Corporation) amounted to US$ 91,144,000,000 provider of independent content usually act on a non-profit basis and to a considerable extent depend on donations and contributions.
Also the human resources they have at their disposal quite differ. Viacom for example employs 112,000 people. Alternative media conversely are mostly run by a small group of activists, most of them volunteers. Moreover the majority of the commercial media giants has a multitude of subsidiaries (Bertelsmann for instance has operations in 53 countries), while independent content provider in some cases do not even have proper office spaces. Asked about their offices number of square meters Frank Guerrero from RTMark comments "We have no square meters at all, because we are only on the web. I guess if you add up all of our servers and computers we would take up about one or two square meters."
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The fusion of flesh and machine is trend which, although inscribed in the history of modern technology from its beginnings, has reached a unprecedented momentum in recent years as a result of crucial advances in information technology, biology, and the development of global networks. Consequently, doubts are emerging concerning the viability of a distinct and definable human nature. Historical and social theories and concepts are being unhinged by the spread hybrids and by new forms of artificial life which are likely to trigger social changes escaping the grip of calculation. Attempts to defend an essential human nature against technical hybridisation, rather than strengthening the human subject, may have further blurred the question of historical subjectivity. Large amounts of money are invested into research and development of artifical biology, making some of the predictions of AI and robotics experts about radical and far reaching changes a matter of time.
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The devices often considered the first "computers" in our understanding were rather
In 1642
Further improvements in the field of early computing devices were made by Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, a Frenchmen. His arithometer could not only add and multiply, but perform the four basic arithmetic functions and was widely used up until the First World War.
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Starting in the mid 1990s today most traditional media can also be found online. The overwhelming majority of bigger newspapers and periodicals, but also radio and TV stations now complement their classic media formats with digital programming. For the most part they transform existing analogue information in digital form, with some additional features.
Especially the big media conglomerates, having realized the economic potential of the Internet, have started to get into the business of digital content. Not surprisingly their engagement in the virtual sphere has not brought much new concerning their programming. They offer entertainment, music, sports and some news channels. One of the reasons for this development might be, that the big commercial media companies are able to re-use already existing programming from their other ventures. Examples are
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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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Roberto D'Aubuisson is another Salvadorian graduate of the
Certain
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.
Latitude: 50.9087, Longitude: -4.55264
The
Born 1891 in Vienna, Bernays was one of the founders of modern public relations. An enigmatic character, he was a master of mise en scène with far-reaching contacts in the world of business and politics. The nephew of Sigmund Freund and related with Heinrich Heine, he was also among the first to pursue PR for governments and to produce pseudo-events. Bernays considered the manipulation of public opinion as an important element of mass democracies and was of the opinion that only through PR a society's order can be kept.
American automotive company first incorporated in 1925 and reorganized and newly incorporated in 1986. It has long been the third largest automaker in the United States (after General Motors and the Ford Motor Company). Founded by Walter P. Chrysler, it took over the business and properties of Maxwell Motor Company, Inc. (first formed in 1913). Today its major subsidiaries include Chrysler Automotive Operations, Inc., which manufactures Plymouth, Dodge, and Chrysler passenger cars, Dodge trucks, and auto parts and accessories; and the Chrysler Financial Corporation. Headquarters are in Highland Park, Mich., U.S.
The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) was signed into law by U.S. President Clinton in 1998 and implements the two 1996
The U.S.-Army School of Americas (= SOA) is based in Fort Benning (Georgia); it trains Latin American and U.S. soldiers in the working-field of counter-insurgency. Some of the nearly 60.000 SOA-Graduates have been responsible for many of the worst human rights abuses and crimes in Latin America. The list of famous dictators and murderers who went through the education of that institution is tremendous. In 1996 the U.S.-Government that always tried to deny the tasks of SOA, had to admit its work - but never closed it.
For more information see the website of
In 1948 the former alliance of USA, UK, Canada, Australia an New Zealand established in World War II was formalized into the UKUSA Signals and Intelligence agreement to aim primarily together against the former USSR, although readers of the agreement say, that it is definitely only signed by the United States and Britain. A number of other countries' SIGINT agencies also participate in the UKUSA community, including those of Germany, Japan, Norway, South Korea, and Turkey. These countries are sometimes described as "Third Party" members of the agreement. In addition, some countries, such as China, host UKUSA SIGINT stations or share SIGINT on a more limited basis.
b. July 30, 1863, Wayne County, Michigan, U.S.
d. April 7, 1947, Dearborn, Michigan, U.S.
American industrialist who revolutionized factory production with his
The Sandinistas overthrew the right wing Somoza regime of corruption that had support from the U.S.-government, in 1979. The followers of Somoza, who was killed in 1980, formed the Contras and began a guerrilla warfare against the government. Many of them were trained in the School of the Americas (=