Strange Aeons

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Simon Wells
Simon Wells

Simon Wells is an academic researching Argumentation Theory, Automated Reasoning, Intelligent Agents (IA) and MultiAgent Systems (MAS) all approached through a ludic lens.

He is particularly interested in how these tools can be usefully applied to critical literacy, security, gamification, and complex systems.

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2011 (12)
2010 (27)
2009 (3)
 

NYC Odyssey Day 3

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I spent all day today sat in Simon Parson's office at Brookyn College working up notes for possible collaboration based upon the last couple of days discussions. Simon was busy with the summer school so I managed to catch him every now and then. Basically the day was productive but essentially I travelled about 5000 miles to sit in a basement office in Brooklyn coming up with ideas that didn't necessarily depend upon the circumstances. That said, once I clocked off (which is a rare occurrence for people working in academia), I grabbed a shower before taking the Q to Coney Island. I had dinner at Nathans again and spent some time looking at the bikes of the biker club who appeared to have me there. I then sauntered along Surf Avenue to the sideshow where I had a few beers before heading into tonight's "Burleseque at the Beach" titled "Sealo's British Invasion" show which was hosted by Mat Fraser. I have seen Mat on British TV many times and was really pleased to meet him person and have the opportunity to shake his hand and chat to him for a while. The blurb for his show is as follows:
Mat Fraser presents: Sealo's British Invasion Salute the Queen and wear your Union Jack with pride, it time for the all British night of classy, brassy, and arsey girls and boys to reclaim the America’s, stiff upper tits, and tally hoe, what? Starring a bawdy bevvy of all British Burlesque Beauties, hosted by your favourite British Freak, the sealboy himself, Mr Mat Fraser!
Basically we had a show filled with lovelies enacting typical British stereotypes in the typical Burlesque form, which was funny and sexy and better than almost any other entertainment form. On one level I think that I like Burlesque for exactly the same reason that I read speculative fiction. This is because they break the rules. The shows are not as polished as something from Hollywood. The audience has the opportunity to interact with (and in this case get sprayed with liquid (which I hope was sparkling wine)) the artists. At the Coney Island Sideshow you get to see, and interact with,  the stars of the show at the bar, drinking the same beer as yourself, and in Mat's case, clearing his bar tab from earlier that night. Basically Burlesque doesn't obey the rules of "what is cool right now" but acknowledges that the classic shows actually had entertainment value and that sometimes a corny, or old, or even bad joke is still funny if delivered in the right way... ... with nipple tassles. I plan to head to the Slipper Room to see Julie Atlas Muz tomorrow night. She was in tonight"s show where her British accent made Dick Van Dyke sound like Olivier ;) More information once there is something to talk about. Either way she is one of the best Burlesque artists, or even just one of the best performance artists, to see.  So if you get the chance, see one of her shows.
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Julie Atlas Muz Photograph Source: http://www.leahmeyerhoff.com/

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If Wishes Was Fishes

I might have been (marginally) premature in my suggestions for ways around the proposed government e-fishing expeditions. Others with far more experience than I are pointing out the absurdities of Andy Burnham's proposals, to particularly comic effect in places:
Unfortunately, Mr Burnham doesn’t know anything about the Internet and seems to be arguing by analogy, and with a childlike hope that merely wishing for something will make it come true.
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Avoiding the Drag Net

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Our government is currently mooting proposals to track all of us via logging of our electronic communications. Much has been written about this recently and the main response seems to be along the lines of legal action at either national level or EU level. I however feel it is my patriotic duty as a subject of perfidious albion to come up with good ways to avoid and work around this new system.  The first step is of course encryption. This is a no-brainer but requires learning on the part of users to adopt it securely. Encryption should be a default aspect of email. Setting up a public-private key-pair should be a part of setting up an email account and we need tools to make it easy to manage and share these keys. I know there are drawbacks to this but I think that for too many years we have been concentrating on creating maximal security at the expense of ease of use and the result has been minimal uptake of email security. I think though that at this stage just changing the playing field from the default of plain text communication to encrypted communication so that plain text stands out from the network traffic like a sore thumb rather than the current situation where cypher text is the exception. Encryption has to become a default aspect of setting up an online email account, and online vendors must push this to their users, not necessarily enforce its use, but ensure that their users know that they are sending insecure messages. Secure messaging is also required as a default rather than an option. At the very least there needs to be session based encryption between users so that no plain text message is ever available at the intermediate servers. At the moment I have little idea about tactics for increasing privacy of web browsing other than suggesting onion routers and Tor networks. Whist their are weaknesses to these systems they are still better than what we have currently. I don't expect a wholesale move from traditional browsing to secure browsing. It is likely that an interim alternative might be adopted that poisons the data well. Basically to make the amount of browsing data collected by the government so huge, unwieldy, and confused that extracting anything useful becomes a difficult problem. This could be achieved by standalone apps or browser plugins which browse to random URLs, or explore links in the background. An important aspect of this is of course to ensure that the browsing patterns from these tools are similar to those of a real user to make it even more difficult to determine what was real browsing and what was automated. A possible project might be to create a peer to peer app that shares real browsing data between users so that a real users suitably anonymised browsing is replicated in the background of peers elsewhere in the swarm. In this way real browsing patterns of remote users would be intertwined with those of local users making it difficult to discern the actual browsing pattern for that user. I can see a legal attack on this making a user responsible for all browsing that actually or apparently originates from a given machine but that would make me wonder how far down the road of neutering internet communication the government would wish to go down. A problem with this is that it will increase the burden on servers if traffic increases because of the addition of chaff. This does not strike me as a good thing, and feels to be an inadequate and inelegant tactic. Whilst these measures will not be entirely secure they at least raise the bar. If you wish to take away our privacy then 
  1. You will have to fight us for it, and even if you win,
  2. We won't make it easy for you!
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Cory Doctorow - Little Brother

I finally got around to reading this recently and must say that I enjoyed it immensely. Unfortunately, by now I have been out of my teens for rather longer than I was in them, but I still class myself as a young adult on occasion if the mood takes me. By turns the book is both exhilarating and annoying. Exhilarating because you get carried along by the excitement of some of the more fast-paced sections, and annoying because it depicts a world that isn't exactly orthogonal to the one we live in. I don't think that it would take that great an incident to set Britain down the path depicted in this book with even worse consequences as most of the infrastructure is already in place and we do not have a powerful local government to combat an overreaching central government, so the kind of denouement depicted in Little Brother might be only a dream for the plucky Brits.

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Sabina Guzzanti

"First of all, what I was speaking about were the politics of the Pope. It's not as if I'd shot off my mouth on theological issues. It is the Pope who should have respect for our political institutions. At the point at which he gets involved in politics I have every right to criticise him for his political activity. Second, I am not even in agreement with the general principle. I believe that in a democracy there is no right not to be offended. I think that anyone ought to be free to say whatever he or she likes at any moment. If someone says things that are offensive, gratuitous and stupid, one has to assume there will be others able to demonstrate that what you said was offensive, gratuitous and stupid." - Sabina Guzzanti
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Posterous theme by Cory Watilo.
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