ecopolis

In January, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg declared the age of privacy to be over. A month earlier, Google Chief Eric Schmidt expressed a similar sentiment. Add Scott McNealy’s and Larry Ellison’s comments from a few years earlier, and you’ve got a whole lot of tech CEOs proclaiming the death of privacy — especially when it comes to young people.

It’s just not true. People, including the younger generation, still care about privacy. Yes, they’re far more public on the Internet than their parents: writing personal details on Facebook, posting embarrassing photos on Flickr and having intimate conversations on Twitter. But they take steps to protect their privacy and vociferously complain when they feel it violated. They’re not technically sophisticated about privacy and make mistakes all the time, but that’s mostly the fault of companies and Web sites that try to manipulate them for financial gain.

To the older generation, privacy is about secrecy. And, as the Supreme Court said, once something is no longer secret, it’s no longer private. But that’s not how privacy works, and it’s not how the younger generation thinks about it. Privacy is about control. When your health records are sold to a pharmaceutical company without your permission; when a social-networking site changes your privacy settings to make what used to be visible only to your friends visible to everyone; when the NSA eavesdrops on everyone’s e-mail conversations — your loss of control over that information is the issue. We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure.

via CRYPTO-GRAM

Il Museo dell’Informatica Funzionante a Palazzolo Acreide e’ una struttura che, nonostante la mancanza totale di supporto o aiuto da parte delle Amministrazioni Locali, ospita una esposizione permanente interattiva di computer storici, che i visitatori possono non solo osservare, ma anche provare ed utilizzare, “mettendoci le mani sopra”, utilizzando i loro sistemi operativi, il loro software o consultando i manuali originali.

Allo stato attuale, il Museo manca di una sede adeguata, quindi non ci è possibile allestire una vera e propria esposizione; questo sito nasce come un primo catalogo del nostro materiale espositivo e come centro di raccolta per la documentazione relativa al funzionamento dei sistemi.

“Who lives longer? the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast
beef, water and potatoes ’till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater
are lived only in time.”
Aldous Huxley (1954)

“One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods.”
This much I know, Fay Weldon, The Observer Magazine, (30 August 2009)

Hard disks get too old, keyboards lose their keys, modems break, disk drives run too slow, VHS don’t have a proper recorder anymore, wires get no plugs, screens fall apart. They are all abandoned somewhere, apparently useless.
What happens to these products when they are no used anymore and get trashed?
What is the best way to keep using these products anyway?
How can we exploit their potentials, their hidden qualities and unknown properties?

The answer is RECYCLING.

If we really want to use technologies to their best, we need to preserve and save as much as we can.
FloppyTrip is the new frontier in recycling. This brand new smart drug satisfies everyone, from the youngster who never saw a floppy disc before, to aged nerds nostalgic of the ’80s design. Not mentioning those who work into recycling, those who need a new drug to stop feeling hungry, scientific researchers interested in new hallucinations.

FloppyTrip is for everyone.
FloppyTrip is easy to prepare.
FloppyTrip is cheap.
More importantly, FloppyTrip is legal.

How to make your own FloppyTrip

Ingredients:
-1 Floppy Disc
- 2 tbsp cane sugar
- Water
- Dry Gin

Instructions:
Remove the metal cover from the inner memory disc in the floppy, use a knife if needed. Cut the
plastic part through the frontal surface. Put slight pressure on the plastic part and let the inside
memory disc get out of the floppy.
Fill a sourcepan with water and bring to a boil. Dip the memory disc in the water. Let it boil for a
few minutes, until the water is completely dark. Turn off the fire, then strain in a jug, making sure
the disc is removed from the liquid. Add two tablespoons cane sugar and top up with a small
amount of gin. Stir with a spoon and serve hot.

Project by Io Cose.

Untitled from Fjb on Vimeo.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Blogging by teenagers and young adults has dropped by half over the past three years as they turn instead to texting and social networking sites such as Facebook, a new study shows.

The study released this week by the Pew Internet and American Life project also found that fewer than one in 10 teens were using Twitter, a surprising finding given overall popularity of the micro-blogging site.

According to the report, only 14 percent of teenagers who use the Internet say they kept an online journal or blog, compared with a peak of 28 percent in 2006 — and only 8 percent were using Twitter.

“It was a little bit surprising, although there are definitely explanations given the state of the technological landscape,” Pew researcher Aaron Smith told Reuters.

Smith said the report’s authors attributed the decline in blogging to the explosion of social networking sites such as Facebook, which emphasize short status updates over personal journals.

According to the study, 73 percent of teens who were online used social networking sites.

He also cited the ubiquity of cell phones. Much of the communication between young people now takes place on mobile devices, which don’t lend themselves to long-form writing.

via Reuters

Failure as a Strategy – Observations from Nicolas Nova from Jonathan Marks on Vimeo.