According to a BBC Monitoring story brim-full of buzz-words and vague rhetoric – Digital media ’empowering users’:
All posts filed under “External Control”
‘Techno world has MPs beat’ – Guardian
Particularly in reference to the ID card issue, but relevant also to the creeping pervasion of deleterious architectures of control and their sanction by governments, a nice quote from a Guardian article:
Technology designed to serve others
Bruce Schneier, in a Wired story, ‘Everyone Wants to ‘Own’ Your PC’, classifies DRM along with worms and viruses as all being specifically intended to remove control of a computer from the user/owner. This is a particularly succinct quote: “When technology serves its owners, it […]
New Scientist : Crowds silenced by delayed echoes
Via Boing Boing – ‘Hooligan chants silenced by delayed echoes’, a New Scientist story looking at the work of Dutch researchers who are using out-of-sync replayed sound to disrupt synchronised chanting at football matches. “Soccer hooligans could be silenced by a new sound system that […]
Another possible avenue for the Mosquito
Hot on the heels of the news that Cooper-Menvier/Fulleon is to take on global manufacture and distribution of the Mosquito, my server logs show that someone found this site through looking for mosquito download mobile phone free high frequency. Now, he or she might simply […]
Changing norms
Via Steve Portigal’s All this ChittahChattah, a short but succinct article by John King, from the San Francisco Chronicle noting just how quietly certain features have started to become embedded in our environment, most notably (from this blog’s point of view), anti-skateboarding measures, traffic calming […]
High frequency ringtone download
High frequencies being tested in the urban badlands: see, no teenagers here! A lot of people find this site through searching for something along the lines of ‘Mosquito high frequency anti-teenager ringtone’, and are presumably disappointed when they find that there is no such ringtone […]
ZDNet: DRM train wrecks
ZDNet’s David Berlind has started to compile a Del.icio.us list of examples of ‘DRM train wrecks’, i.e. situations where the use of DRM has a distasteful corollary for consumers unaware of what they’re getting themselves into. “Most people don’t realize how much they’re giving up […]
High frequency wave files back up again
They’re back up (well, the wave files anyway), thanks to the Internet Archive.
Is design political?
Over at Core77, the Design Council’s Jennie Winhall has written a thought-provoking essay, “Is design political?”, looking at the links between design and politics, and how design can be used to shape behaviour for political ends:
Self-erasing mp3 player: Don’t give ’em ideas!
In a comment on a Boing Boing post about RFID ‘viruses’, Ben Giddings makes an interesting aside: