Amercicans for Mitt!

Conservatism will make you stupid!

Need simple incontrovertible proof?

Willard’s attempt at a viral WEB campaign.

Oosp: Romney’s New App Misspells ‘America’

There are typos, and then there are typos, and then there’s the gift Mitt Romney just handed his online detractors. Romney’s campaign just launched an app that was supposed to let people show their support by taking pictures, overlaying stirring messages on them, like “American Greatness” or “I’m a Mom for Mitt,” and then sharing them on social media with the message, “I’m With Mitt,” Mashable explains. The problem? One of the banners reads, “A BETTER AMERCIA.”

Yeah, there was no chance this wouldn’t instantly become a meme. People who we suspect are not Romney supporters have been feverishly snapping shots of dictionaries, spelling bee participants, toilets, and more, with the “AMERCIA” banner over them, and a Tumblr has cropped up to show off the best of them. Twitter is abuzz with mockery like, “Will Mitt Romney apologize for Amercia?” and “AMERCIA TEH BUETIFLU.” The campaign tells the Washington Post that it’s submitted a fix for the app to Apple.

There is even a Tubmlr that has been started on the gaffe.

BTx3′s favs?

More Bad News For Internet Explorer Users…

I have a live traffic feed on the right hand bar of my site, which shows me where my various visitors come from. I did a quick check earlier today, and about 50% of the folks visiting the site were using IE – the vast majority of which were suing 8.0 or 9.0…

But there were still a couple of Internet Explorer 6.0 users!

I don’t imagine AptiQuant, the company which did this study, will be doing any business with Microsoft anytime soon…

According to the company -

Those still running Internet Explorer 6 have an average IQ just above 80, while Firefox and Chrome users are up at around 110 and Opera and Camino users above 120.

Is Internet Explorer For The Dumb? A New Study Suggests Exactly That.

A Vancouver based Psychometric Consulting company, AptiQuant, has released a report on a trial it conducted to measure the effects of cognitive ability on the choice of web browser. AptiQuant offered free online IQ tests to over a 100,000 people and then plotted the average IQ scores based on the browser on which the test was taken. And the results are really not that surprising. With just a look at the graphs in the report, it comes out pretty clear that Internet Explorer users scored lower than average on the IQ tests. Chrome, Firefox and Safari users had just a teeny bit higher than average IQ scores. And users of Camino, Opera and IE with Chrome Frame had exceptionally higher IQ levels.

Internet Explorer has traditionally been considered a pain in the back for web developers. Any IT company involved in web development will acknowledge the fact that millions of man hours are wasted each year to make otherwise perfectly functional websites work in Internet Explorer, because of its lack of compatibility with web standards. The continuous use of older versions of IE by millions of people around the world has often haunted web developers. This trend not only makes their job tougher, but has also pulled back innovation by at least a decade. But with the results of this study, IT companies worldwide will start to take a new look on the time and money they spend on supporting older browsers.

Obama and the Internets

This one is kinda fun. Very few non-techies really understand what the Internet is – and how it actually works.

President Obama in his “Twitter Town Hall” yesterday said this -

To which right wingers, searching for ANYTHING with which to criticize President Obama came up with this screed:

Obama Refers To The Internet As “The Internets”

When President Bush made the same mistake during his campaign for President in 2000, he was roundly criticized as unintelligent.

“We do have to make sure that there are computers in a computer age inside classrooms and that they work and that there’s internets that are actually — there are Internet connections that actually function. And I think that those states that are going to do well and those countries that do well are the ones that are going to continue to be committed to making education a priority.”

The problem?

What Bush actually said was this -

“I hear there’s rumors on the Internets that we’re going to have a draft.”

—second presidential debate, St. Louis, Mo., Oct. 8, 2004 (Listen to audio clip)

Which was one of a long, long list of misstatements by Bush.  Of which my favorite is -

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” —Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004 (Watch video clip; listen to audio clip)

And he, and his misbegotten Administration did indeed  ”harm our country”.

Now – as to the Internet/Internets thing – the Internet is actually made up of hundreds of interconnected networks belonging to and operated by different companies or governments, or “Internets”. And there are a number of Internets with varying, or no level of connectivity to the public Internet for any number of reasons, including security. There have even been proposals to build physically separate Internets for different audiences and purposes due to the damage caused by hackers and electronic terrorists on the public network.

And there is the fact that President Obama is smart enough to have “corrected” his language midstream.

Courage…

This took a bucketfull of courage. This is Asmaa Mahfouz, one of the many Egyptian folks who took a stand in Egypt on her vlog back on January 18th…

From Tracy Chapman -

Egypt Shuts Down It’s Internet

There have been several bills before the US Congress to allow this to be done in the US.

This is the first time a country has shut down their entire public access Internet communications system, although other repressive governments such as Iran and China have sought to limit Internet access. There are 5 major Internet carriers in Egypt, which has about 58 million cell phones riding the 4 Cell Carriers – the primary connectivity methodology in third world countries. Apparently, Noor – the carrier on which most government traffic, and the Egyptian Stock Exchange is carried is still active.

Egypt Shuts Down Internet As Protests Intensify

As civil unrest continues to spread and intensify across Egypt, authorities within the country have taken a drastic and apparently unprecedented step: they’ve shut down the entire Internet.

The blackout began at about 12:30 a.m. local time, when four of the Egypt’s major service providers abruptly shut down. Calling the nationwide outage “an action unprecedented in Internet history,” the U.S.-based Internet analysis firm Renesys found that the simultaneous shutdown rendered virtually every Egyptian site inaccessible, from anywhere in the world. The country’s four major ISPs (Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, and Etisalat Misr) have all suspended network services, with Noor Group standing as the lone exception. (The country’s stock exchange, perhaps not coincidentally, is still active at a Noor address.) According to statistics from BGPmon, a full 88-percent of the “Egyptian Internet” has been completely wiped out.

Looks like the Egyptian Government is getting ready to get “down and dirty”, and wants to cut the ability of the outside world to know about it. Today’s protests may well be running into something a bit more lethal than tear gas, and protest leaders could be looking at being “disappeared”.

The shutdown also is heavily impacting mobile phones, knocking out text messaging, email, and the ability to send images. IP based carriers would be down entirely, and (especially outbound)  communication with the outside world would be largely shut down, although inbound calls might still be possible.

Don’t Touch My Internet “Junk”, Either!

“Don’t touch my junk, Bro!”

Seems even a former Playboy Bunny, now confined to a wheelchair, can’t wear little enough to get through airport security without a patdown!

The woman who wore only her bra and panties while going through security at Will Rogers World Airport is speaking out about why she did it.

Video of Tammy Banovac sitting in a wheelchair in just her underwear has made international news. She said after a bad experience with a Transportation Security Administration pat-down, she decided to strip down to her lingerie so security screeners could clearly see she was not a threat.

“The less of me that they had to pat down and check, the less invasive a search would be. And wearing a bra and panties was just about as minimal as I could get,” Banovac said.

Banovac said because of injuries she suffered, she must use a wheelchair. She said she’s been subjected to uncomfortable pat-downs because she cannot go through metal detectors.

In other news – similar to “Do Not Call” registries, Do Not Cookie may soon become a reality on the Internet…

FTC pitches do-not-track system to let consumers opt out of Web data collection

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday recommended creating a do-not-track system that would prevent Web sites from collecting unauthorized consumer data, part of a widely anticipated agency report on improving Internet privacy.

The FTC report, aimed at helping policymakers and lawmakers craft privacy rules, also calls for Web sites to disclose more about the information they gather on users, including what has been collected, how it is used and how long it is stored. It also recommended that companies offer users more choices for opting out of data collection schemes.

Regulators and lawmakers are focusing more closely on online privacy after a spate of high-profile data breaches, including Google’s recent admission that it collected personal data from Wi-Fi networks in several countries.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a news conference Wednesday that the current, largely unregulated approach to Internet privacy has fallen short. That approach is favored by advertisers, social-network operators and Web search companies.

The agency’s recommendations – passed unanimously by the five-member commission – seek to balance the concerns of Web advertisers, media companies and retailers that have devised business models around tailored advertisements based on profiles of users. The agency is taking comments on its report until Jan. 31.

“The FTC wants to help ensure that the growing, changing, thriving information marketplace is built on a framework that promotes privacy, transparency, business innovation and consumer choice,” Leibowitz said. “We believe that’s what most Americans want as well.”

A Faster Internet?

I see MIT has finally caught up with some of the work being done in the late 90′s on Flow Switching, a technology variant of optical switching.  These are not “routers” as described in the article, neither can the be made to operate utilizing the current TCP/IP variants in the Internet today as anything except “passengers” within the core structure.

I don’t believe PC speed drives this. The reason is the software overhead of bloated functions is the principal consumer of processor power in consumer PCs – not network functions. Nor does file size drive the need. What drives it is the evolution of personal and home “cloud” type computing wherein you have clusters of smart, and not smart devices performing various functions in the home and business which interact with each other and data sources on the internet. Instead of 1 or 2 computing devices per person, you evolve to 10 or 12.

Fascinating though…

MIT Researchers Promise an Internet That’s 100x Faster and Cheaper

MIT researchers have developed technology that they say not only will make the Internet 100 to 1,000 times faster, but also could make high-speed data access a lot cheaper.

The trick to such dramatic performance gains lies within routers that direct traffic on the Internet, according toVincent Chan , an electrical engineering and computer science professor at MIT, who led the research team. Chan told Computerworld that replacing electrical signals inside the routers with faster optical signals would make the Internet 100, if not 1,000 times faster, while also reducing the amount of energy it consumes.

What would the Internet be like if it ran that much faster?

Today, a user who has a hard time downloading a 100MB file would be able to easily send a 10GB file, with the Internet running 100 times faster, according to Chan.

“We’re looking to the future when computer processors are much more powerful and we have much bigger downloads and applications,” Chan said. “When we get more powerful processors, people will be clamoring for more speed. The question is, can these new processors and their powerful applications be supported over the Internet? Everyone will be using more high-rate applications, like 3D, interactive games, high-speed financial trading.”

And when that happens, Chan said users of those large applications will run intochoke points on the Internet. And that could happen as soon as 16-core processorshit the market, if not sooner. “I think the Internet will not be fast enough within three to five years,” he added.

The answer, he said, is optical fibers, which carry light pulses.

Optical fibers are used widely on the Internet, spanning great distances and even continents. While they transmit information more efficiently than electrical signals, optical signals are complicated to deal with. A router, for instance, has problems handling optical signals coming from different directions at the same time. To get around that problem, routers on the Internet generally take in optical signals and convert them to electrical signals so they can be stored in memory until they can be processed, said MIT’s report. After that, the electrical signals are converted back to optical signals so they can be sent back out.

That process eats up chunks of time and energy. Chan and his team have developed technology that would eliminate the need for such conversions.

Chan’s architecture, which is called “flow switching,” establishes a dedicated path across the network between locations that exchange large volumes of data — from Silicon Valley to Boston, for instance. MIT explained that routers along that path would only accept signals coming from one direction and send them off in only one direction. Since the optical signals aren’t coming from different directions, there’s no need to convert them to electrical signals for storage in memory.

“If this can truly jack up Internet data speeds by 100 times, that would have a huge impact on the usability of the Net,” said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc. “We’d see the era of 3D computing and fully immersive Internet experiences come much sooner…. If this turns out to be practical, it could be a very big step forward.”

Dealing with network bottlenecks would be a huge accomplishment, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group.

“Right now, the network is the bottleneck for hosted computing. This change could transform the industry as we know it,” said Enderle. “We are going to need a faster Internet. We need it now. Currently, we only have about 20% [of available bandwidth] in many places.”

Japan’s Sado-Sexual Video Games Spread on the Internet

It would seem that a lot of Japanese porn centers around forced sex, typically with a young school aged girl. That “illicit sex” fantasy created` the world of Hentai – Japanese animated porn video games and movies. There is a new genre out there, where rape is played as a game. With the Internet, many of these games make it online, where they can be downloaded anywhere on the Internet, anywhere in the world for free.

Is this Japanese pornographic version of “Grand Theft Auto” removing social inhibitions? What is the message, when in order to “win” the game the player must commit rape? I this yet another training game for violent action, without any regard for consequences? And let’s not even get into the dehumanization of women…

more about “Japan’s Sado-Sexual Video Games Sprea…“, posted with vodpod

Faux News… And the Internet

Read this one from Faux’s Business Report and just about fell out of my chair. The level of technical stupidity in this one is astounding!

First off “the Internet” hasn’t been “the Internet” for a long time – since the mid 90′s since the Government relinquished the control and turned it over to commercial enterprise. The Internet is actually hundreds of networks, owned by different companies and (sometimes) interconnected and supported by several major providers who operate systems that give directions. These are called Tier 1 providers. Most of these companies that are generically called “Carriers”  own and operate their own network (and often multiple networks) – including the optical circuits in the ground going from one city to another, the equipment that turns information into light to travel across those “light pipes”, the equipment which manages the flow of information, and the “access” equipment – which if you are a cell phone provider that also means the towers and radio equipment that makes them work.

Making a call to Grandma in Des Moines may never go over the Internet – even though the technology which makes that call possible, may or may not be the same as that used in the Internet. Ergo, just because I am using a “router”, which is also a common piece of equipment utilized in the Internet to direct traffic flow – doesn’t mean I’m part of the Internet.

Indeed, there are some very good reasons as a carrier having certain types of critical data – I don’t want to connect with the Internet, and may chose to operate an “extranet”.

The New Economy – Getting Back to Basics

One of the reasons the Bushshits tanked the American economy has to do with their love of anti-competition. The Bushits never met a merger or acquisition they couldn’t approve of – no matter how uncompetitive it made the marketplace. The result was a near collapse in the development of new telecommunications technologies, as well as the destruction of an entire generation of companies, some of which might have emerged to be the new Microsofts or Ciscos.

It will take years to recover from the damage wrought in the marketplace by the conservatives – with a loss of American competitiveness for perhaps the next 10-20 years.

This interview with the new Federal Communication Commission Chair lays out the groundwork of getting one of our key industries back on it’s feet. Not surprisingly, the key to that is going to be small business -

Julius Genachowski, President Obama’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, has a soft spot for the little guy.

In his first interview since taking over the federal agency, Genachowski talked about the importance of “edge” Internet and software companies in pushing forward technological advances. He suggested that these companies might play a key role in boosting the economy and in helping the agency meet its mandate to bring high-speed Internet access to all Americans.

Julius Genachowski

“That’s where the greatest innovation is,” he said. “What is interesting to me is to find ways to work with early-stage innovators to build from the edge and work on tomorrow’s ideas.”

Cyber Katrina

President Obama wants to appoint a Cyber Tsar.

There are major issues with the Internet and the proposed build-out of networks to support everything from the Power Grid to the National First Responders (Fire/Police/Rescue). The issue really revolves around the fact that the core communications technology utilized in the Internet was developed at a time where Security wasn’t a driving issue – survivability in the event of nuclear attack was.

As such, the technology is inherently insecure – and the ability to secure it is an ever steeper mountain as the number of users of the technology increases.

Most recently, Chinese Government spies cracked into the Joint Fighter program, and possibly stole the plans to one of our most advanced weapons systems. Personal information on the Internet might as well be public, as even moderately sophisticated hackers are able to defeat many of the “security” systems employed by commercial entities.

As the country moves along the path of interconnecting more and more functionality across the Internet, the risk of Cyber-terrorism rises exponentially. The ability to remotely shut down significant portions of the electric grid. The ability to shut down communications between various Law Enforcement Agencies. The ability to shut down the telephone system. All of these are capabilities gained by Cyber-Terrorists as these systems are migrated onto the Internet infrastructure.

Instead of getting harder to attack systems, when you tie them all to one technology and infrastructure – the bar is lowered.

Significantly lowered.

Be interesting if President Obama picks someone who is going to look at this with a new set of eyes – or someone who will follow the program.