Did you hear the one about McCain, your wife, and the blackberry?

In his lust for power, Presidential candidate John McCain explains to the press how he likes to carry a first generation mobile phone around with him to prepare himself for when he gets the “Presidential Football” that will allow him to nuke the world

Being a world leader in technology, American politicians have constantly championed research and development in this area not only for business purposes, but also for matters of national security. Some of these politicians go as far as to take credit for inventions that shouldn’t really be credited to them. For instance, many allege that former Presidential candidate Al Gore claimed to invent the internet. This has led to cottage industry of jokes, especially in the online world. Common sense would suggest that in the future, political figures would hesitate to exaggerate their roles in technological development.

John McCain doesn’t live by those rules. Yesterday, John McCain’s economic advisor credited the candidate with the invention of the . From Wired.com:

Asked by campaign trail reporters what McCain’s experience as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee does to help him to understand the economy and lead the country through its current turmoil, Douglas Holtz-Eakin waved his BlackBerry in the air, according to The Politico.

“Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committe,” Holtz-Eakin said. “So you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

Holtz-Eakin has been mocked by the blogosphere since he uttered those words.

But there is a political dimension at play here which few realize. McCain’s reintroduction of the “culture wars” in this election through his choice of Sarah Palin as his Vice-Presidential candidate leaves McCain in a bit of a dilemma: his invention is playing havoc with the stability of the family! Professionals Choosing Blackberry Over Spouse:

How much do tech-addicted workers love their PDAs? Let’s count the ways.

A new survey found that about 35 percent of professionals would pick their PDAs over their spouses if they had to choose.

Senator McCain, your invention is destroying the family.

How the Internet looked back in the olden days

This is an actual image from the McDonald’s corporate website back in 1996

I find it quite odd talking to teenagers today since the are truly the internet generation. So much is it a part of our daily routine that it’s difficult to think back to BI – Before Internet.

I first “surfed” the internet back in 1994 during my university days. I was already familiar with computers and programs such as Word Perfect, but the internet was something new. The terminals at my school library were hooked up to the internet, but it was still text-based meaning no images, and a lot of tabbing and hitting “enter” since the mouse wasn’t all that useful. Most time in those days was spent on Usenet.

The following year our computers got an upgrade and the world wide web came alive. Images flashed on our screens, and always very slowly…..waiting for objects to load was par for the course. The search engine of choice was AltaVista (yes, this was pre-Google) and your website options were quite limited.

Here is a presentation of what the internet looked like in 1996. You’ll notice how primitive sites were and how aesthetically unappealing they could be. It’s a great collection courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

Digital Disinformation – a growing threat to us all

Disinformation, whether intentional or unintentional quickly spreads across the internet

The threat of tiny black holes slowly swallowing up Earth as the Large Hadron Collider was switched on last week led to many jokes across the internet involving dumb eggheads with a death wish. Not everyone was laughing. The man credited with inventing the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has expressed concern at how his creation allows for the lightning fast dissemination of disinformation across the globe. He particularly highlighted how the notion that our world is in jeopardy from the LHC spread so quickly through the media yet was demonstrated to be false.

In response to the danger of false information finding a safe home on the internet, Berners-Lee is launching a foundation:

The Foundation will brand sites that it has found to be trustworthy and reliable sources of information.

For those of us familiar with the internet and its ways, the elasticity of truth and its blurred lines with falsehood is no great surprise. To counter disinformation, companies like Reputation Hawk have sprung up, promising to fix your online reputation whether you’re a business or an individual:

If you or your company is getting bashed on the net – they can evidently ‘fix’ it. But they don’t contact the owners of the offending web sites which is what we immediately assumed, instead they focus on pushing the negative information off of the first few pages in Google. This new field is known as internet reputation management or online reputation management.

The free flow of information heralded by the internet age has had its drawbacks as we’ve noted already. Both Berners-Lee and Reputation Hawk consider vigilance to be the key to countering damaging information or disinfo that finds a very fertile atmosphere in the virtual world.

Hello, my name is ******* and I’m an internet addict

Why is this page taking sooooo long to f*****g load?!!!!!!

If you’re like me your hours spent in front of the television are pretty much down to zero….but that’s because you’re spending hours in front of the computer on the internet. With the days of dial-up internet and slow loading pages consigned to the electronic dustbin of history, easy access to entertainment, mass communication, and learning thanks to high speed broadband has left us addicted. Source for news? The internet. Source for music? The internet. Source for finding where that new flick is playing? Why, the internet of course!

Very cheap and very accessible, the internet has come to dominate our lives in a way simply not possible to understand two decades ago. Think back to university when researching and being forced to dig through moldy stacks of books for sources on an essay about the French Revolution. Think back to booking a vacation by visiting a travel agent and putting your trip in their hands. Think back about combing through the yellow pages to make a dinner reservation at a restaurant. The internet has made so many things so much easier by placing information at the tips of our worn fingers attached to our carpal-tunneled hands.

Infidelity in the Digital Age

Does internet porn qualify as cheating?

A running theme at Vodka/Soda Magazine is how technology has been trumpeted as an inherent good but always turns out differently than first imagined by the creators and standard bearers of that technology.

The internet was created as a form of communication that would be safe from foreign ears and it then morphed into things such as the world wide web, e-commerce, and web 2.0. The internet has also changed how we communicate. It has allowed us to communicate faster, better, and in many new forms from uploading videos to YouTube to chatting on MSN Messenger. It has changed the dynamic of our personal communications as emails have largely replaced “snail mail” and especially in how virtual worlds have been created with virtual communities of people who have never physically met in person.

With this shift in the paradigm of communications, new problems arise. For instance, is a harmless flirtation with someone you’ve met in a chatroom sincerely harmless? The two people may never have been in the same room and may never have actually spoken to one another, but nevertheless it does affect the integrity of their real life relationships should they have a significant other.

This new form of communication begs the question: how real are virtual worlds online? The virtual world is more real than the imagination, but less real than what is termed “the meatspace”. Imagining sexual dalliances is not considered cheating by anyone but the most rigid of moralists but sexual innuendo online or “cybersex” certainly does cross a line. The real question therefore must be: Is pornography adultery? Ross Douthat tries to answer that question in this month’s The Atlantic Monthly. Here’s an excerpt:

A second perspective treats porn as a kind of gateway drug—a vice that paves the way for more-serious betrayals. A 2004 study found that married individuals who cheated on their spouses were three times as likely to have used Internet pornography as married people who hadn’t committed adultery. In Tom Perrotta’s bestselling Little Children, the female protagonist’s husband—who is himself being cuckolded—progresses from obsessing over an online porn star named “Slutty Kay” to sending away for her panties to joining a club of fans who pay to vacation with her in person. Brink ley’s husband may have followed a similar trajectory, along with many of the other porn-happy celebrity spouses who’ve featured in the gossip pages and divorce courts lately.

click here to read the article in its entirety

Trends in the Next Decade of Technology

Future technology in a scene from “Minority Report”

Technological process is quickening from century to century, decade to decade, and year to year. In the previous millenium, some argued that technological advances would create a utopia for humanity. Some of the excesses of the past century showed this argument to be patently false. Technology is for the most part neutral and depends on how and why it is used and by whom it is used.

The speed with which our world is undergoing technological transformation is plain to see. The popular futurist Raymond Kurzweil tells us that we are approaching technological singularity: a point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence. That sounds frightening, as it should. However Kurzweil’s singularity is still some time away, should it actually ever happen.

In the meantime Nature.com has asked several leading technological experts to predict the trends in technology over the next decade. Words like haptics and phrases like semantic web will be more commonplace. Here’s an excerpt from this excellent article:

Leo Kärkkäinen – Chief visionary, Nokia Research Center, Espoo, Finland

PRODUCTS WITH MEMORIES

Ordinary products are going to have memories that store their entire history from cradle to grave, and that consumers can easily access.

Radio-frequency identification tags are a good option because they are already widely used to track inventory and to control theft. They are cheap and can be powered by an outside power source, such as the radio signal from the device being used to read them. But there may be another enabling technology that wins out.

Near-field communication systems already allow a phone to be used like a smart card for a travel pass or as an electronic wallet to pay for goods. If that technology can talk to the things you buy, as well as the systems through which you pay for them, it will enable consumers to choose not to buy goods that are unhealthy, allergenic, have used environmentally unfriendly methods or employed child labour.

As with many technologies, it could potentially be used for bad purposes; we have to ensure that privacy functions are built in to the system to put the consumer in control of whether they want to be tracked.

click this link to read the article in its entirety

Google Earth Finds an Almost 40 Year Old Tribute to Lenin

Lenin is 100!

Only a decade ago, google was simply an internet search engine. Now thanks to its web applications such as the recently released Google Chrome, the company is well on its way to owning every aspect of your online life. Not that I mind, especially considering the fun one has with webapps like Google Earth which continually throw up surprises.

The UK Telegraph has posted a story about how Google Earth has uncovered a tribute to Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin made from Siberian trees that were strategically cut to leave the message “Lenin is 100”.

The message, which translates as “Lenin is 100”, was cut into a forest in a remote region of Siberia. Each letter is around 80 metres high, and the entire message stretches for 600 metres.

It was created by Russian woodcutters in 1970 to mark the centenary of the Communist leader’s birth, according to EnglishRussia, the blog which spotted the image.

Despite the passing of 38 years it has kept its coherent shape, and is now clearly visible on Google Maps and Earth, the internet giant’s satellite mapping services.

The blog says that the reasons for the large scale topiary are unclear, but that it could have been intended as a tongue-in-cheek message of national pride to be picked up by American spy satellites.

The tribute was cut into a forest close to the town of Zverinogolovskoye in the south west of Siberia, near the border with Kazakhstan.

“Opening Soon” – The Culinary Tales of Union on Ossington Ave.

Teo Paul Of Union on Ossington Avenue

As Toronto’s Entertainment District is under siege from local government and condo developers who greedily eye the large buildings in the area, and as King West becomes boring, while West Queen West loses its cache, the Ossington strip has become the new hotspot for the bohemian, avant-garde, and the hipster.

One of those making Ossington their home base is chef Teo Paul who will soon be opening the restaurant Union on this strip. He currently has a blog entitled Opening Soon that appears in Toronto Life magazine. He details the struggles of opening his joint and the joys that come with it. It’s worth more than a glance :)

Google enters the Web Browser Market with Chrome

Google released a comic explaining the workings of their new web browser “Chrome”

Microsoft has another reason to be worried.

Late last night, Google announced that they’ll be releasing their own web browser entitled “Chrome” later today in 100 countries. Alongside the announcement is a comic that explains the technology behind the release and does it in a fashion that a layman can understand. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is the web browser king and Google is looking to bite into its market share with this release.

From what I’ve seen, the main benefits touted in this new browser are its better service of web applications, better internet security, and its open source nature plus the fact that it is lightweight compared to its competitors.

Take a look at the comic for a thorough explanation of what is behind Chrome and what it intends to do.

e-mail response time and what it says about you

how do you respond to e-mails?

In an age of instant communication many are accustomed to prompt response when sending a message to others. Unfortunately for some, a prompt response isn’t always a certainty.

How quickly do you respond to e-mails? Dr. Karen Renaud of the University of Glasgow tells us that people break down into three groups when replying to e-mails: relaxed, driven, and stressed.

Women, in particular, felt more pressure to respond quickly to a new email than men, she said.

‘The relaxed group don’t let email exert any pressure on their lives,’ Dr Renaud, an expert in computer science, said.

‘They treat it exactly the way that one would treat the mail: “I’ll fetch it, I’ll deal with it in my own time, but I’m not going to let it upset me”.

‘The second group felt “driven” to keep on top of email, but also felt that they could cope with it. The third group, however, reacted negatively to the pressure of email.

read the rest here

Why the Internet Makes Identity Theft So Easy

Identity theft is much easier than you might imagine

We humans being the most social of animals leads us to constantly talk about ourselves (some more than others, some much, much more) no matter how mundane or trivial the actual subject can be. New technology such as the internet has only facilitated this urge to speak about ourselves even more in the form of social networking sites.

In a previous post here at vodka/soda we discussed some of the dangers of social networking sites on the internet. One of the most costly dangers is identity theft, a theft made much easier by the amount of personal information available about ourselves and made available by ourselves (and websites) on the web.

Herbert H. Thompson, a professor of computer science and a software developer, shows us how easy it is to steal a person’s identity just by mining data on the internet in: How I Stole Someone’s Identity. Here’s a quote from the article:

I asked some of my acquaintances, people I know only casually, if with their permission and under their supervision I could break into their online banking accounts. After a few uncomfortable pauses, some agreed. The goal was simple: get into their online banking account by using information about them, their hobbies, their families and their lives freely available online. To be clear, this isn’t hacking or exploiting vulnerabilities, instead it’s mining the Internet for nuggets of personal data.

The Globalisation of Hip

“Hip” now moves faster and has more “sameness” thanks to globalisation

We can trot out cliches about globalisation like “the world is a global village” all day long, but in my opinion this current trend can be described as the “great leveler”. Globalisation has seen money move to places where the quickest profits can be made only to see it abandon those places once they found a more profitable location elsewhere. In the meantime, the world is becoming more similar from location to location as people consume the same products, are wearing the same clothes, and are exposed to the same culture.

Globalisation is also affecting Hipster culture as trends now move more quickly and with more force than they once did. Previously what was cool in New York wasn’t necessarily cool in Helsinki….but now what’s cool in Paris can be what’s cool in Buenos Aires in a matter of weeks. Tim Walker explores the globalisation of hip in: Meet the Global Scenster. Here’s an excerpt:

“Trends aren’t transmitted hierarchically, as they used to be,” explains Martin Raymond, co-founder of The Future Laboratory, a trend forecasting company. “They’re now transmitted laterally and collaboratively via the internet. You once had a series of gatekeepers in the adoption of a trend: the innovator, the early adopter, the late adopter, the early mainstream, the late mainstream, and finally the conservative. But now it goes straight from the innovator to the mainstream.”

The global scenester stays on top of what’s cool worldwide by reading such urban culture despatches as The Cool Hunter, a blog begun in Sydney four years ago by Bill Tikos, which reports on the hippest fashion, furniture, and design culture. The Cool Hunter has more than 600,000 unique visitors per month, who pore over the contents of its licensed offshoots in the US, UK, Turkey, Italy, China, and Japan. Its global audience allows Tikos to homogenise cool worldwide.