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Alex Lederer, Blog #4

Copyright law in the US is pretty medieval, but the original ideas leading to their creations should be represented somehow.  For people with the access to the technology, the act of reusing and remixing media has become commonplace, and even if it does fringe legality, the legacy of such remixed works have affected the mainstream consciousness in regards to remixes, covers and samples. Since we consume media so quickly, the year limit for a private work to become public needs to be addressed.  In my opinion, everything made up to the 70s should be in the public domain by now, considering how important these pieces of media are in understanding the context and history of cultures.  Copyright laws are almost forcing people to act illegally in order to find information and media that is expected of individuals to be common  knowledge.

For historians, I assume information under copyright talked about by historians would go against copyright law in some cases, which is a shame because western culture is increasingly influenced through mediums that would be under copyright law. I can only imagine the trials and  tribulations of an outside organization trying to add a critical peice of media owned by Disney into something.  The Fair Use policies help this somewhat, but when looking into specific examples you can really see how barbaric these policies are, and how nuanced they need to become.

Copyright Criminals is a funny video that really made me think about the ownership and intellectual property of music.  Sample based music has always been wrapped in controversy, but on the internet it just gets too hard to follow.  Samples are used so often, and remix artists come and go so frequently because the technology to get ideas to mp3 format is so easy these days.  Music on the internet, with special regards to rap music, is so incredibly self referential that it’s hard to put a finger on the exact copy that the artist is copying.

 

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Alex Lederer, Judging Wikipeda Articles

I decided to look up a popular  hacker, “Captain Crunch”, or John Draper,  famous for creating machines that emit  2600 hertz frequencies used to hack AT&T Phone lines.  The article first started getting attention in June, 2006, with the last update in July 2011.

The talk page is pretty straight forward, as a “hacker icon” people want to add his personal stories and exploits, as well as his character traits that are “out of the ordinary.”  The fact that he lives out of his car, and his strong moral codes for hacking and phreaking, are left out because they don’t meet the quality standards of Wikipedia.  One guy is pretty upset about that.  People vandalize the page by changing his name from John draper to  John Derper from time to time. Most of the discussion and edits are  about rumors or affairs he was in that people think are important but are removed, like if he is currently dating a supermodel named Karin who did a podcast with him.

The given links are the most interesting points, many of them are from outdated hacker forums and databases.  The first two are pretty good, from a TLC documentary on Hackers (that Wikipedia has for download, which is really cool) and books written by other apple employees who were into hacking and phone phreaking.  The hacker material that this page sources, I can;t vouch for the authority of them.  They seem like a really personal, closely knit group, and it;s hard to say if these sources are accurate or made to increase the celebrity of the people they highlight.

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Alex Lederer, Blog #3

These articles were all about authenticity and accuracy, with the most interesting being Photography as a Weapon.  I never really understood how many things could be altered in order to mislead people for a variety of reasons. I mean, I kind of knew about them separately, but the article illuminates how  easy it could be to intentionally deceive people with little to no effort, as well as the troubles we have doing accurate authentication, since the forgeries can be forged so easily and so well.

The Wikipedia video about the additions to the Heavy Metal Umlaut was great.  The article itself is such a “pop culture” focused article that I don’t know how people would fact check it, and it seemed like half of it was people adding and removing interesting, yet trivial, information.  The most interesting part f the video was how many times he went through revisions and there were large chunks of vandalized text.  Not just misinformation, but vandalization for the sake of ruining the article.  By now, everyone knows that Wikipedia is an amazing platform to start looking at a topic, as long as you follow the links to more scholarly and specific articles or journals, but this video shows how much effort it can take to create a clean, accurate article on the internet.  It also shows how this work needs to be constantly checked on to prevent people from ruining the article, which is a new dimension for historians who work with the internet.  Wikipedia might be a special case,since it’s open to contributors, but with electronic documents instead of physical ones, the possibility of someone tampering with historical documents could become a real possibility.

This brings together two different problems historians can face when authenticating.  Of course, photography in our time is not constant, and pictures are fabricated all the time, but we have come to see this as a possibility and we become skeptics  much easier when seeing things on a computer screen.  Physical copies command some sort of authority, but interpreting those images or documents is a real possibility, and having a skilled forger make a fake physical copy of something, like the fake Hitler ledgers, can fool people for years with no one in place with the authority to correct it.  There is a huge, famous incident where this happened in physical anthropology, motivated to spread misinformation and promote racist ideas too, it’s the perfect example.  In the early 1900s, British scientists were trying to find the ancestors of humans, but no one was looking in Africa or Asia because they assumed that, because whites were so dominant in their times, the human ancestor would have to have come from Europe since they were  so well off.  After about 20 years of digging up random spots in England, they decided to alter a chimpanzee skull and claim it was from a place called Piltdown in East Sussex.  It was pretty clearly a forgery, but anthropologists are so inclusive and scholarly that the Piltdown Man, the fake skull they created, was never questioned until 1953,  which was like 40 years after the nationalist and racist misinformation about human evolution spread all through out western civilization.  So, while people are extra skeptical about information found online, it is a good idea to check the non digitized versions as well.

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Alex Lederer, Historical Databases

The ProQuest historical newspapers are amazing.  There are so many articles on an early hacker activity, “Phone Phreaking,” which is basically the exploit in pay phones that allowed early hackers to bypass the phone companies by making the right noise into the phone, allowing them to do bypass call operators and communicate with the computers that controlled the phones directly.  There are many articles that explain “what are phone phreakers?” as well as how they are seen as an annoyance by the phone companies, but these articles also talk about the proficiency and “strong moral codes” of these phreakers, which is making my “Hackers” banner in my blog really appropriate.  A large focus on the newspaper articles in the 1970s about phone  phreaking actually praise these hackers for being “ingenious” and “creative.” The articles are also very surprisingly technical, talking about the exact instruments used by hackers without giving away too much back information.  For instance, “The Blue Box is basically a system of electronic oscillators that emit precise double tones that exactly simulate the tones used to activate the worldwide telephone switching system.”  These early newspapers are great.

Phone Phreaks Hold a Convention: Phone Phreaks Convene

 

Unfortunately, the Flickr Commons database doesn’t have much from the late 1980s or early 1990s, which was when the hacker influence really became popular because of the low level of hacker protection in many systems, the introduction of the world wide web through phone companies, and the increased abilities of computers. When looking through the databases, I tried to look up large umbrella terms, like “internet” or “hacker,” hoping to find the old newsletters or group pictures of university clubs who worked on engineering or computers. Has to settle with an early picture of a computer designed by NASA.

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Alex Lederer, Blog Post #2

After seeing all the technological aspects of the web, as opposed to the social elements I usually focus on, I want to do my research on something with quantitative, linear evidence. I was leaning towards public perception of Hacker culture in the early years if the web, but I want to change that to “Ways in Which Hacker Technology has Influenced the Web” or something. I want to look at, specifically, hackers when they got jobs for tech companies, creating more efficient securities based on their experience, or other programs for public use on “hacker ideals.” Many companies today have hired former hackers to work on their software, so I want to see the influence and development of new technologies.

Our history becoming digitized, as explained in Cohen & Rosenzweig’s “Becoming Digital” made me think of the changes in recording history. The most interesting thing I found was the loss of specifics when digitizing information. Music and audio is directly effected, since there is an undeniable loss of quality over time with a lot of media formats, but text and images could also suffer a loss of information. “Should a digitized text capture just the letters and words or also information about paragraphs, headings, centering, spacing, indentations, and pagination? What about handwritten notes?” stuck with me, because I didn’t think about the secondary characteristics of recorded documents and how digitizing would take this out. Becoming digital requires a certain degree of mediation which would alter the secondary characteristics of reading and experiencing history, which could alter the context and intent of the work. If anything, it definitely becomes an added element that must be accounted for.

I’m pretty well versed in going through the historical newspaper databases, I still think the mason archives are not very intuitive and it requires memorization and specifics to find anything. If you can’t remember exact titles or if you are browsing through, it’s hard to find specific, relevant information.

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Alex Lederer, HTML Exercise

Alex Lederer, HTML Exercise

HTML can help you navigate less popular chatting programs

Hey professor are you reading Animal Man and Swamp thing by Marvel Comics?

They are pretty good, way better then the batman arc that I read, whoo boy

Many online forums use the same type of structure as HTML, especially for embedding items like video or altering texts.

I should really talk about Animal Man. Not even sure what it’s about really, the comic book medium does not allow for a lot of nuanced story telling, it’s mostly about paring visuals with text.
Animal Man is p good, visuals are p crazy. Even though the whole thing is basically them running from one place to another, trying to escape “the rot,” it’s mad decent. I don’t really like comic books but I do like when people let me read them on their iPads.

  • item1
  • item2
  • item3

  1. item1
  2. item2
  3. item3

This is bold and italics I guess. This is also bold and italics I guess.

 

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Alex Lederer, Assignment 1

The “History of the Internet” was something I know, but still the medium and message sent across still resonate with me for a variety of reasons.  The way in which it is presented has become such a common way to teach on the internet, with the snappy background music and use of visual aids.  It was very reminiscent of Michael Wesch’s “Web 2.0, The Machine is Us/ing Us,” and as I re-watch that video it is just as technical.

I don’t know why exactly this medium is so interesting for teaching, and I’m pretty surprised both have a fair number of views, so there is some novelty that this video medium provides that is conductive to education and also entertainment.

The thing that interested me most about the video was the fact that I never realized how lucky we were that the phone companies decided to use their servers to give universal access through the same servers.  It’s interesting to think that the internet might not have become  commercial or as wide spread without the phone companies to step in first to stop all these different networks from being incompatible.  The internet, even with the Arab Spring and descent groups meeting over the internet in China, is still a very western product that caters to the minds and needs of people in western cultures, especially since the creation of web 2.0.  It is not yet a truly universal system, and this is in part due to the origins and user base of the internet.  It could have been a very real possibility that different servers would only link inside their own countries or cultures, and the WWW as we know it today would have never existed.

 

 

My potential historical topics I plan to research this semester are-

1. Digital Anthropology and looking for web based communities or “tribes”

2. Early hacker culture in the 90s.

3. How communications have changed through new technologies (mediated)

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