kismetism

5 Reasons Humanity Is Terrible at Democracy →

Now take a look at this study, which compared a person’s average political knowledge with their primary source of news. The results were surprising: The most knowledgeable groups were viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Hot on their heels? Fans of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.

Never mind the fact that it’s a pretty bad sign when the most politically educated people in the country are relying on either comedy shows or political pundits for their news. The key is that these outlets are primarily about ruthlessly mocking and dismissing the other side. Yet they attract more knowledgeable voters, not less.

Ugh.

Palin hacker sentenced to one year in prison →

Threat Level broke the story in September 2008 that someone using the name “Rubico” had obtained access to Palin’s personal Yahoo e-mail account. Palin was then running for vice president on the Republican ticket. Kernell got into the account by using publicly available information—such as Palin’s birthdate and postal ZIP code—to reset the password to “popcorn” and gain control of her account.

…

Kernell, a University of Tennessee economics student at the time, had targeted Palin, he wrote in comments online, because he’d hoped to find information that would help derail her campaign and prevent her from being elected.

Although Kernell never found information in the account that was damaging to her campaign, the hack did show that Palin used her personal e-mail account to conduct official Alaska state business. Critics had accused the Alaska governor and her staff of using personal e-mail accounts to avoid public oversight.

The country’s 24-hour politico–pundit’ perpetual panic “conflictinator” did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen. Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire, and then perhaps host a week of shows on the “dangerous, unexpected flaming-ants epidemic!” If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.

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Jon Stewart, Moment of Sincerity during the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

I think Jon Stewart is my favorite celebrity ever. He’s so smart.

I saw Sy’s weblog with the banners and thought, this is what I get for not following Daily Show / Colbert in a long time. So I had to look it up. Just among many reasons why they’re so awesome.

A link to Colbert’s announcement, but mostly it’s Stewart’s episode that covers the necessities.

No free lunch →

Thanks, Quad, though not sure how many of us are left to benefit from it. qq.

Lewis Black cracks me up all the time.

Did a soldier waterboard his daughter? An Army sergeant allegedly used the torture technique to make his daughter learn the alphabet →

w.

t.

f.

::GIGGLE::

tic:

High-quality photo from the event:

Stop. ENHANCE:

And in case you can’t read that, it says:

Energy
Budget cuts
Tax
Lift American
spirits

You can’t make this shit up.

It's a small 'net after all →

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Uncharitably I wondered if Google’s decision had anything to do with its failure to acquire baidu.com, but that fell through so long ago that I can’t really connect the two events together.

I ended up doing some further research on China and internet in China on a whim and ended up finding more than I really wanted to. It’s hard to imagine that Google and Wikipedia would not reign supreme all over the world, but China has their own number one search engine and Wikipedia equivalent and naturally both are carefully pruned for “malefic” content.

This is an interesting, if somewhat disturbing, read about the history of Internet in China. The summation of it is that the government in China has been permitting the internet to grow only as quickly as they can develop the technology to monitor it and keep their vise-grip on what shows up to the citizens. Primarily the problem is in that the Chinese people have zero ability to maintain their anonymity when trawling the web.

For years, China’s Internet users have been required to register with local police, and the regime hasn’t hesitated to arrest and detain anyone who is found to have accessed or distributed banned material. New laws come along quite quickly when the regime concludes they’re needed. For example, many chat room participants log on using the Internet bars and cafes that are proliferating throughout China. A spate of regulations announced in January 1999 require the owners of Internet bars and cafes to register with local police, prevent customers from engaging in activities harmful to state security and monitor their users’ on-line usage; they will be held personally responsible for infractions originating from their premises (Ribao 1999).

This is on top of China’s tendency to disrupt service to US-hosted resources when convenient to them, which makes Chinese users think the website is unreliable and huge drops in usage end up occurring.

• Blocking of Wikipedia by the People’s Republic of China
• List of websites blocked in the People’s Republic of China

According to the latter article, though I guess it needs some updating… apparently China has once in the past (or perhaps still; I can’t really check) blocked both icanhascheezburger and cuteoverload. Really, guys? Really?

On the plus side, should there be one, porn is considered to be “banned material”, as well as inflammatory material (mostly about the government, but also racial or ethnic hatred). Does that mean the Chinese internet is actually squeaky clean and relatively troll-free? >_>