the roles of art

to accentuate the degree of something beyond any attempt to achieve or attain anything other than experience and through that, information.  If at fails to impart experience, then it is decorative in nature and the intent may be to persuade.  Persuasion is the bending of character perhaps into a place where it may not feel at all familiar, but which inhabits all the same, the shape of events that the story takes you being contrary or in conflict with the moral quality of the plot.  Character is the division between actors.  Actors carry their own sword into the battle that the story plays.

The Media Conglomerate

Monopolies only serve the elite that own them. They reduce choice while increasing unjustified costs to the consumer. As long as they work "within the law" these increasingly global and increasingly bland enterprises reduce the quality of communication and considered action. Morality is given a bad name by all the false moralising, but the constant reminders that a tabloid may invade anyone who dares to rise into the public eye is a powerful reason to fear changing the status quo.

The committee seemed to want to simply ask for an admission that there was executive complicity with law breaking; crime by an individual is the assertion given in the defence of corporate malfeasance, but you only need look at the product of the organisation to realise our emotional responses are what they have become so expert at producing, because there is no other real value in exposing celebrity underwear than inducting a path for the lowest common values we all fear.

When you balance the thousands and thousands of unknown individual affected by privacy intrusion, it is a corporate liability of billions that Murdoch has confirmed is still to be settled. It happened as a result of the organisation's goals and activity. It is not a culture of corruption, that is still a euphemism. It is policy and it must start at the very top as the entire organisation is in the business of emotional manipulation, also known as entertainment.

Pandering to the lowest common denominator is the market. The "bell shaped curve" justifies the policy of producing media that anyone can digest and be drafted into prejudice. It is true that on occasion the product of the lurid investigations conducted explore areas too taboo for the mainstream, breakthroughs in reactionary media tend to be exposure of political corruption by embarrassment or of "criminal masterminds" and pedophiles - using the profane not just for its shock value but its induction of the herding instinct.

The basis of such attacks is to threaten hunger and isolation. It is not seen as a criminal activity due to the inherent popularity of its voices. But when that popularity is the product of what is in essence a pornographic portrayal of celebrity, or mud raking, it is inherent in the structure of the organisation.

See Guardian article

And listen to what Jon Stewart has to say. The Murdoch empire has more impact on US politics with its Murdoch owned Fox News outlet that makes News of the World look less committed to its cause. Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing, but freedom to distort is not.

Hackers revenge

The furore that has erupted since our analysis of media corruption two weeks ago is extraordinary. The demise of the News of the World was a long time coming, the exposés of that tabloid were rarely of any value, more commonly savaging the careers of footballers and the less than deserving. The blow up of the alleged criminality that reaches all the way into No 10 with the Prime Minister defending his hiring of Andy Coulson way past the use by date he should have respected, leaving any apology to the British public limp and soggy.

And as we witness the demise of News International's bid for BskyB, and effective control of more of the political mind set, we appear to be experiencing a political tectonic shift.

And the corrupted appear to have made terrible mistakes in their own security. Lulzsec have infiltrated an old server nobody remembered to switch off, and have gained access to emails from The Sun. The potential time bomb for the Murdoch empire no longer relies upon questionable or corrupted political influences, it is a new definition of democratic power. Lulzsec made it obvious to The Sun that a cloud was moving in front of its big red face by publishing a prank article on the Sun's own servers that Rupert Murdoch was found dead in his garden.

The media and banking empires of today and yesterday will not be able to continue to abuse their position of privilege as the new rules of publication and the new economics of information eradicate their advantage, their voice and their access. As a metaphor, the prank hack article is indeed symbolically accurate. The career destroying tabloid media is a big old dinosaur rotting on the soil.

Will the demise spread to the USA and sink Fox News? One may assume that now entirely possible.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/19/how-lulzsec-hacked-sun-website

British Media

The newspapers are fruit dying in the tree, falling off trunks already crumbling with rot, branches sweep low, drop into the swamp.

The television channels blurt out judgements by the hour as politicians entertain their captains who seem to believe they are creating reality and have therefore some right to listen in to their creations so employ people to collect information turning a blind eye to the methods, legal or illegal, that may have to be employed to arrive at the articles they have published. The failure to question this and for management to be subject to a level of discipline that befits the crime the board would have to have examined this, so instead of putting it right, a news institution is hijacked for dark purposes and then to essentially commit crimes of some magnitude, from which it published salacious details that seemed extraordinarily personal and indeed were the result of wire taps into the private lives of people, thereby subjecting them to criminal intrusion and electing to play puppet master and implicate themselves into police investigation.

The application of the law by police who have accepted bribes to not investigate serious breaches of personal integrity and basic law by a commercial organisation that intends to control a much larger slice of things than anyone should, thus weakening democratic intelligent examination of truth by certifying salacious lies and exposures of illegally obtained information they had no legal right to obtain let alone promulgate and which they did with no regard to the actual harm they may have caused to potential legal positions.

And the discussion is not of what to do about things but how to appear to the voters.

Technical directions

Facebook announces integration with Skype.

What is next? Twitter integrated with Wikipedia?

The obvious problem with this is that Skype is a utility and FB is a platform that has morphed from being a list of your true friends into a promotional tool of connectivity and a platform for ap development - like iphone and andriod.

So instead of making better distinct products, the software giant are combining essentially into homogenised communications platforms that are remarkably similar in effect (how we use them). They all essentially want to be our phone company?

Meantime, Google fights its war on six fronts.

Strangely, that opens up opportunities for innovation.

The Rise of the Smartphone

Handheld terminal devices have been around for years. But to make it a useful object more technology was required to connect data with the very business of living. The radio is an increasingly strange medium until they caught on to publically available channels. The creation of interesting content is not a technology, it is an art. So the established institutions had a head start, if only they could get a handle on the technology. The artist invariably benefits as the technology becomes a commodity but in the early days of Psion organisers and electronic diaries. That the organiser supported a decent programming language that programmed input that could then be loaded into the central server only existed locally. No wireless. The Psion organiser carved a little market out from the otherwise dull landscape of personal organisers because it had a logical language.

What is so interesting about obsolete technology that was not network aware and the current ap revolution in the mobile sphere?

It is that a certain set of logical evolutions are supported: interoperability, online access and video capability as well as voice means along with communication there is a plethora of useful goodies that could be downloaded and used for free or near free.

So what is next? What makes a mobile ap useful and how to make money from it? How to build a business with mobile aps.

Consider this: Your company gives you a smart phone. You can work on it at any time, entering data on a blue

Security and Big Companies

Big companies that hold personal information of their client base have an inherent duty to protect this information properly. It is utter nonsense to claim that this is not possible - it is entirely possible. But when constructing a huge edifice of systems it is very hard to see potential bugs and entry points.

But an intrusion of this nature reveals a company is an emperor with no clothes. It is an absence of infrastructure methods and good practise as well as planning for intrusions. So many big companies executive boards do not understand how technology can protect them or where their risks lie.

"No system is infallible" followed by challenges to prove everyone wrong is not the solution to this huge problem. Sequestered validation services and heavy encryption of personal details is.

The opaque and ridiculously complex terms and conditions you sign AFTER purchase to protect such companies from their own failures is highlighted by this and similar incidences. The worst is obviously what we do not know and hiding behind lawyers is simply the wrong security policy.

Sony Playstation Hack

Who is at fault, and why?

Millions of Sony users will blame the company for inadequate protection of personal data. A class action suit is most likely impossible as a remedy, it achieves very little. That is why we have extensive terms and conditions, to protect corporate interests from predatory attacks.

Sony will blame the hackers for stealing their assets. 80 million online paying customers can expect a marketing onslaught. Using this data for criminal purposes is too obvious, short term and risky.

Legally and obviously the people at fault here is you and me. We must act to say no to unreasonable terms for software use. The law should protect you. It can not. Neither can many of the monolithic companies that sell stuff online. It is traditionally an anarchistic arrangement - you feel secure because nearly everyone on the web is equally at some risk so it is normally bad luck if you get hit with a virus. But the systematic theft of a user base is the fault of the law.

The law must keep up with the environment in which it operates. How? By regulating the big companies so they can not escape change due to the nature of their contracts with their consumers they so carelessly betray. The law must enforce certain checks and measures - the banking industry has learned the value of iron bound security, and now the globalised business needs to invest in the minds of clever security designers to foil attempts to steal their IP and their customers.

Instead of encouraging the politicians to talk about practical measures, the media tend to highlight the horror of credit card theft. They are just bits of plastic with numbers on them and the banks could be regulated into instantly replacing all Sony users with new numbers for their accounts.

So many applications rely on email as a valid point of contact. Until Google is raided at least gmail is pretty much that. Unless you type in the wrong address, you can still be fairly certain of a private channel without much effort.

Sony really should have protected their user information with better security design.