Video Assignment

So this is my 2 minute video. I took the video blog approach because I've never made a video and after a little experimentation I realised it was the simplest route. The subject I chose was Facebook - pros & cons. Two minutes turned out to be a lot shorter than I originally thought so I didn't get as much content in as I would have liked but there isn't much I can do about that now so enjoy!
http://youtu.be/KNtLJPUoIaI

Week 6: Political Participation.

Sign an e-petition.
http://www.wwf.org.au/what_you_can_do/do_it/sign_our_antarctic_petition/

Respond to a professional blogger at a major news site.


What is Barak Obama up to today? Can you send him a message about the importance of freedom on the internet?
http://twitter.com/BarackObama
http://www.facebook.com/barackobama
You can supposedly contact the White House here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact


What are the Australian Government's plans to censor the internet (the so-called "Clean Feed")?
http://nocleanfeed.com/ 

What place does censorship have in a democracy?
Censorship is a word with a lot of negative connotations attached to it, as soon as it's mentioned people start yelling out "FREE SPEECH!" and generally just getting their blood up. However is it still called censorship if it's used to stop the distribution of and access to child pornography on the internet? Surely that's just the law? I think in general censorship should not have a place in a democracy but I think at times the lines around what censorship is can get a little blurry and that needs to be addressed.

When will the NBN get to your place? What are the benefits?
According to the NBN Rollout map (http://www.nbnco.com.au/rollout/rollout-map.html?icid=pub:hme:rollout:hro:img) work to install the NBN will begin in my suburb in approximately 3 years and from there it should take around 12 months for the services to be available for use.  To learn about the benefits watch the video below.

 

Find out who your local, state and federal representatives are. Send one a message.


Look up the Queensland or Australian Hansard to find the last time your local member spoke in parliament.

Let your local member know what you think about their last speech.

Week 6: White Hat Hackers.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The term "White Hat" is a name given to hackers that use their skills to benefit companies and organizations by letting them know where they are vulnerable to their not-so-helpful hacker brethren. When I think of hackers I think of the movie Die Hard 4.0, Timothy Olyphant plays a hacker that partially succeeds in taking down the USA with his scary hacking skills (before Bruce Willis gets in the way), I believe in the film Olyphants character used to a White Hat or something similar before he was disgraced and turned to the dark side. Because organizations may not have the resources capable of testing their security systems themselves it makes more sense to hire outside their organization and this is where White Hats come in. For obvious reasons a White Hat has to be completely trustworthy because the organization is paying them find their weaknesses and not to take advantage of them. The idea of White Hats makes sense because in other areas of our lives we try to account for the worst, we test the safety of cars in crash simulations, not because we plan on crashing but because we know it's a possibility and if it does happen we want as little damage as possible to occur.

Palmer, C.C 2001, Ethical Hacking, IBM Sytems Journal, Vol. 40, No. 3.

Week 5: Social media.

This is my take on a few social media sites...

I believe I've expressed in an earlier post that I am not much of a Facebook fan. Anytime I do a quick roll through the feed I find myself wondering why I still have a Facebook account when I am not actually friends with most of my Facebook "friends" and I don't care at all about what they're having for lunch or that they are in the process of drinking a whole bottle of Jagermeister.

I only just realized that Last.Fm is a social media, up until this point I've just considered it a a starting point for the occasional Youtube spiral as I look for more bands "similar" to the one before and the next thing you know I'm listening to a Norwegian hardcore band and wondering why I've just wasted 3 hours of my life.

YouTube is probably the social media site I use the most. I've never posted a video or a comment but I do watch a lot of videos. I once spent 2 hours watching a guy doing drum covers of songs that I like, I watch funny/cute animal videos, recordings of live music, the occasional rant video and some really random things that friends have suggested. That's not to say I don't have my problems with YouTube, of late I've found myself having to continuously shoo away advertisements during my viewings, but I guess that's what you get from anything Google related. There are always other video sharing websites but I can't see myself ridding my life of YouTube to avoid clicking away a few ads.
Here's an oldie but goodie:

Week 4: Cyberpunk.

For the week 4 task I was instructed to make a timeline outlining some key moments in the history of Cyberpunk. For this timeline I used the website TimeToast and overall it was a pretty straightforward exercise. I wasn't entirely sure how to embed the timeline into my blog so I watched a brief tutorial online, here's a link if anyone else is having trouble: http://www.beedocs.com/timeline3D/movies/EmbeddingTimelines.php

These are the results:

Week 5: Social Media Survey.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Week 4: Bladerunner.

This week I had the task of watching Ridley Scott's 1982 film Bladerunner for the first time. This movie is considered a classic of the cyberpunk genre and encompasses all the elements cyberpunk is about. Bladerunner is set in a world on the brink of failure, technology is advanced but in many ways it's cost the world its humanity. Humans have invented humanoid robots called Replicants, they are virtually indistinguishable from real humans but are lacking human emotions. These Replicants are essentially used as slaves, carrying out the dangerous, dirty jobs that humans deem below them, and after 4 years they are disposed of like rubbish. This idea brings up the discussion of the ethical responsibilities in the fields of technology and science. In this film they  created a race of faux-humans, superior in strength, gave them memories to make them feel human and then told them they didn't have the same rights as real humans. Obviously this was never going to end well. This movie of course is technically fiction but in the real world there is already considerable work that has been done in brain-machine interfaces, mixing the human body with technology. So far the progress made has generally been for therapeutic purposes, to help blind people see and amputees regain limbs but when these have been mastered will enhancement of the human body and its capabilities be the next agenda? If we start using technology to give certain people advantages over others it could easily take a turn for the dangerous. If the military could give their troops a physical advantage over other countries this would lead to retaliation through even more advancements. In summary the development of brain-machine interfaces without extensive ethical consideration is an incredibly risky path to take, and if left in the hands of a half-mad megalomaniac we could be left with a bit of a Bladerunner situation on our hands.

Peterson, Gregory 2005, Imaging God: Cyborgs, Brain-Machine Interfaces, and a More Human Future, A Journal of Theology Dialogue, Volume 44, Issue 4, p 337-346.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net