|
|
The Haywire Blog  Haywire is an opinionated IT column that tries to interpret the Information Age. Below is a selection of articles and cartoons published in The Sunday Independent. Check out a selction of cartoons .
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Sunday, 03 June 2007 |
 In the beginning, when the World Wide Web was without form and void you could buy an island in it for a song, without having to concern yourself with hostile natives.
Some early colonists bought out what amounted to whole continents of real estate.
In 1994, Gary Kremen registered sex.com. Stephen M. Cohen stole it through devious means. After developing it, it was reported that he was raking in up to $500 000 a month. A lengthy court battle ensued, with Kremen lodging lawsuits against Network solutions (now Verisign) and Cohen. Kremen eventually profited handsomely from the saga. Judgements in his favour total about $85 million.
Kremen's fight for domain restitution is the subject of a recently-published book by Kieren McCarthy, called, simply, sex.com.
Today, sex.com is a sad little porn site (it couldn't be anything else really) and all the good names are taken.
Of the world's ten most popular websites (as ranked by alexa.com), half have silly names – Yahoo! (at number one with more than 412 million unique users) is lifted from Gulliver's Travels. It is Swift's name for a rude and unsophisticated person. Google (3) is a misspelling of googol, 10 to the power of 100 and Orkut, ranked eighth, is named after Google employee and creator, Turkish software engineer, Orkut Büyükkökten. Baidu (7), a Chinese search engine, derives its name from a Song Dynasty poem written by Xin Qiji in the 12th century. At number ten is qq.com (also known as tencent), the most popular free instant messaging computer program in Asia, originally known as OICQ (Oh, I seek you).
|
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Sunday, 27 May 2007 |
 In one of many horribly memorable scenes in the cult movie Trainspotting, a heroin addict called Tommy dies from toxoplasmosis, a disease which he contracts from sharing close and unhygienic quarters with a kitten. Because his immune system is compromised by HIV, the ordinarily minor illness overcomes him.
Hayes Reed describes his friend Tyson Smith's sorry state in an article discussing online game addiction: "At 24, he had seemingly given up. No job. No girlfriend. Filthy apartment. Ugliness." Smith, once Reed had managed to track him down after three months of self-imposed sequestration, confessed that he seldom ate and had infrequent bowel movements. ("I’m what you call a 'weekly poo-er.') His space, like Tommy's, was dominated by the stench of cat faeces and urine. Reed called it a "Den of Cat Ass and Murdered Time".
Reed's article, The Surreal World, is cited as the source of a slang name for game addiction: catassing.
Catassing (also known as poopsocking, a reference to the desperate measures taken by gamers to stay in the game) is the most extreme form of computer game behaviour, where players shun all normal day-to-day activity to participate in a MMOG (a massively multiplayer online game). Addicts have also been known, like compulsive gamblers, to resort to wearing adult nappies.
|
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Sunday, 20 May 2007 |
 When I told my 11 year-old son that there were over six billion people populating Planet Earth he replied: "Is that all?"
According to worldometers.info, the figure is hurtling towards 7 billion at a rate of around 50 000 a day (net estimate). Projections tell us it will reach this milestone by 2012. Only last year (Saturday, February 25, at 7:16 p.m. Eastern Standard Time) it hit the 6.5 billion mark.
Just under a thousandth of these souls have chosen to take up residence in another world. The population of Second Life, an Internet-based virtual world, stands at 6 million, about twice the world population a thousand years ago. It has doubled since January this year. According to a dotcom blog called secondliferesearch it will have 25 million registered users by March 2008, although there is duplication since some Residents have more than one account.
The appeal of Second Life (and other similar software-enabled virtual worlds) is obvious. Second Life allows you to grow wings, an outsize penis and a healthy bank balance of Linden dollars, used to trade goods and services. In real life you may be a penniless pimpled nobody. In Second Life you can be Calico Fran, an amazonian scantily-clad redhead who hobnobs with Alienhearts, a DJ with brilliant green eyes, the ears of a cat and a live stoat draped around his neck. Your avatar (a Sanskrit word meaning the incarnation of a deity) is responsible for playing out your fantastic life.
|
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Sunday, 13 May 2007 |
 Although the new and improved user-driven internet known as Web 2.0 has been with us for a while now, South Africans have been a little slow on the uptake.
Participation in this virtual revolution, which has advertisers worldwide scrambling for online real estate is often hard to gauge. A web tool called a blog aggregator drives traffic to blogs by providing links to these and also shows which ones are most popular.
On amatomu (amatomu.com), a brand new South African blog aggregator, you can view statistics on who's blogging who, what and why. An interesting three-dimensional pie chart in the Trends section shows that South Africans blog most about life, technology and media and marketing. However, when it comes to page impressions, requests for specific subjects, life takes second place to sport.
Amatomu, which means 'reins' in isiZulu lists keo.co.za as South Africa's most-read blog. Since its name provides no clue to its content, I had a look, expecting to find a community of propellor heads extolling the virtues of citizen journalism. Instead I found a website with a banner featuring a manic-looking white male in dire need of an eyebrow wax.
|
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Sunday, 06 May 2007 |
 The first Friday in May is No Pants Day. If you did not celebrate on Friday by donning boxers, bloomers or briefs, diarise the date for 2008.
No Pants Day, like International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19), Blame Someone Else Day (first Friday the 13th of the year) and other unofficial observances, is intended to put a joyful spin on our otherwise serious lives.
No Pants Day has nothing whatever to to do with my intended topic, I just thought I would introduce a spot of levity to help you cope with reality. How else can one deal with the apocryphal problems that are besieging our planet?
Surprisingly, the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are not all doom and gloom. All we have to do is to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by between 50 and 85 percent by 2050. The IPCC claims that it won't even cost that much: keeping the temperature rise within 2 degrees Celsius would cost just 0.12 percent of annual gross domestic product.
|
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Saturday, 28 April 2007 |
 When I was little, my mother would perform particularly deft surgeries at the supper table to encourage us to eat the recommended daily ration of each food group. My younger siblings refused to eat their meat unless it was carved into bite-sized pieces. The rest – the three veg – had to be squashed with the tines of a fork until it resembled baby food; a formless, lumpless green-grey mass of potato, broccoli and pumpkin.
My mother created mashups.
In Jamaica, mashup means to obliterate, to destroy. In the case of dinner, my mother succeeded in vanquishing any memory of the source of those vegetabley tastes. On the web, mashups are at the core of what people call Web 2.0 or the recombinant web. Mashups on the web are created by people who seize the opportunity to do something new with information and applications that are available online, for free.
For many, Web 2.0 is a sort of global operating system that innovative programmers are becoming adept at manipulating.
|
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Saturday, 21 April 2007 |
|
 Next time you log on to Google Earth, pay a visit to the village of Dalia, Sudan. If you paid attention during primary school geography lessons, you will expect to see a harsh desert landscape dotted with some very hardy scrub. What you might not anticipate is a real-time view of how much more impossible life has become in this already hostile world. Dalia is deserted. All that remains are the pockmarks of burnt out gottia, the traditional dwellings of the people who once lived there, clustered desperately on the red banks of a dry river bed.
See all this and more on Google Earth's Global Awareness layer.
The story has an absurd twist. Ogleearth.com reports that Google Earth, due to US export controls and economic sanctions, has prevented Google Earth from being downloaded in Sudan. The rest of the world can see the destruction from the air, but if you're Sudanese, you must be content with living in it, bearing the brunt of a genocidal regime that is no doubt thankful for the embargo on information.
|
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Sunday, 08 April 2007 |
 True to form, Google pulled off not just one, but two hoaxes last Sunday on April Fool’s Day. One involved a wireless broadband service which would operate via sewerage lines and could be accessed by flushing a fibre optic cable down the loo. The other promised an upgrade on their famous email product Gmail, called Gmail Paper. Users could add their emails to a Paper Archive which would print out their emails on “96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum” and then send them by traditional post.
One of Google’s sales lines for Gmail Paper reads: “Everyone loves Gmail. But not everyone loves email, or the digital era. What ever happened to stamps, filing cabinets, and the mailman?”
|
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Saturday, 07 April 2007 |
 There are some jobs that are obviously hazardous to your health. If you're a commercial fisherman, a logger, a trucker, a construction worker or a miner you have a much greater risk of losing your life on the job than if you work in an office. If you're employed as one of the former you could fall out of tree, drown, be blown up or run over. Extreme jobs carry extreme risks.
But now there is a new kind of extreme employment. A study conducted by the Centre for Work-Life Policy reports that high-level, high-impact workers are pushing themselves to the limit, clocking 70-hour workweeks instead of the traditional 40-hour one. The study asks: "Is the American Dream on Steroids?"
New technology is largely to blame for this trend. Teamed with globalisation, handsome remuneration and an addiction to the adrenaline rush, work tools like cellphones, laptops and PDAs compound the problem by following workaholics everywhere they go.
|
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Sunday, 01 April 2007 |
 On April 1, 2004, Google made two announcements. One was a job-listing recruiting engineers for a “Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering (GCHEESE)” lunar outpost. The other was the launch of a new email product which it called Gmail. Given the date, no one took either seriously.
Like the increase in the price of SA petrol, Gmail was for real.
The online environment is a perfect platform for Google's tradition of benign hoaxing, because we have come to expect dramatic and unusual changes in technology.
Much of what they conjure up to spice up our April Fool's Day has a ring of truth.
|
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Sunday, 25 March 2007 |
 Ray Kurzweil believes that immortality is attainable. Until he can find a solution to the problem of death, he sticks to a strict daily regimen of alkaline water, green tea and an assortment of 250 supplements. Kurzweil, an American inventor who has been called Edison's rightful heir, believes that nanobots, artificial intelligence at a molecular level, can be used to police our cells for disease and irregularities and improve and extend our lifespan.
His relationship with technology is intimate and intense, an embodiment of his core belief in a future where we will no longer merely cohabit with machines. In what he calls Singularity, human and machine become one, biological and artificial intelligence are fused together and humanity, in a "rupture of human history" transcends biology.
|
|
|
Written by Administrator
|
|
Saturday, 06 January 2007 |
|
Yesterday, an official-looking email arrived in my inbox. If it had been a letter, it would have come in a postage paid window envelope. The email came from
This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
. Its subject: "Account Suspension Warning #ID611". Because I do not have a Paypal account I was suspicious, but what really exposed the sender's intentions was bad grammar. The first line read: "It has come to our attention that your billing information are out of order. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and update your personal records..." It went on about how I would have my non-existent service suspended if I did not divulge all my personal details immediately (either for the purposes of identity theft or so that my computer could be abducted and used as a zombie phishing machine).
As a rule, spammers do not pay too much attention to the finer points of grammar, syntax and spelling.
Hackers are even less refined.
|
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Sunday, 03 September 2006 |
|
Serendipity is such a perfect word for what it defines that it may have been serendipity itself that inspired Horace Walpole to coin it. The word comes from the original name for Sri Lanka, Serendip, the setting for the Three Princes of Serendip, a fable of three nobles who make discoveries by accident. Through their sagacity they deduce, for instance, by the kind of abductive reasoning used by Sherlock Holmes, that the road that they have been travelling on, because the grass has been grazed on one side only, must have been shared by a mule blind in one eye.
|
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Sunday, 06 August 2006 |
 Nicholas Negroponte, in his 1995 book Being Digital, claimed that computers would be much, much smaller if we could only overcome the embarrassment of talking to them. In the absence of a keyboard or mouse, the most obvious way to command a computer would be to speak to it. Even though most people can speak much faster than they can type, and the technology for speech recognition has been around since the 1990's, most computer users choose the conventional mouse/keyboard combination to navigate their harddrives.
In one episode of The Osbornes, where the speech-impedimented Ozzy tries to interface with his new automobile's voice recognition system, the car's computer is unable to translate Ozzy's mumbling into a comprehensible command. Although this is an extreme example (few people speak as badly as Ozzy) its clear that computers are unforgiving when it comes to human speech with its endless variety of tone and lilt. The only experience I have ever had with speech recognition software was the source of much hilarity. No matter how clearly one spoke the computer would play back something entirely different from what was said. If the software had indeed been hooked up to the computer's mainframe and turned into action, the commands might well have resulted in a very serious bungle.
|
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Sunday, 30 July 2006 |
 PC users regard their machines as merely machines. Mac (or Macintosh) users derive their identity from their machines. Here are ten good reasons:
|
|
|
Written by Debbie Smit
|
|
Sunday, 23 July 2006 |
 Bush (the first one) once declared it his personal ambition that all American citizens would one day be able to programme their VCRs.
Now that we have CD and DVD to record our memories, store our valuable data and access movies and music, the technology of the Video Cassette Recorder seems to belong to another era and the Bush dynasty can set its sights on world domination instead.
We seldom have to deal with the complex machinations of an uncompromising video machine which may or may not unceremoniously chew up the faithful recording that you made of your child's birth without warning. Dealing with a VCR is always a bit of a gamble. Video tape, like life, has a beginning and an end and anything can go horribly wrong between the two.
|
|
| |
|
Add Comment (1)
Read More