Wikileaks Cablegate!

The Guardian and the New York Times started publishing the details of the documents leaked by Wikileaks. The documents show a entangled world of corruption, spying and traffic of influences. The way world leaders and nations are treated shows the lack of character of the men that reached power in the main countries of the world. People without  formation other that the seek for more power and control.

Curiously, just before newspapers started publishing the stories, Wikileaks announced that their servers were under a severe DDoS attack. Obviously this makes this leak even more necessary as it shows that globally the world is ruled by corrupt and power thirsty politicians in some cases highly connected with criminal organizations. People need to open their eyes! urgently.

Travelling – The days of the world

After 9/11 the most important thing the Developed World had to do was to respond in a Developed World Way: Add / develop more technology to help security, and make this technology invisible to the user.

Instead the Bush years went the other way and made the pressure on the passenger. Why? Because that served Bush right wing ideas (I was almost writing values, as if he had some). The world went on a security paranoid schizophrenia and it’s now almost impossible to travel by plane without it being a molesting experience at the airports.

Everywhere you go on the internet you read news about how wrongly TSA is behaving or the harassment people are being put through, just because they want to flight from A to B. In 9 years we managed to make mobility a severe pain and each travel arrangement is now considered with great attention just to avoid unnecessary trips.

This paranoia and fear is something we did to ourselves. Don’t blame terrorists for it. We’ve been giving up our freedom for security and In the end we lost both. Instead of greater technologies to help up in security, our policy makers opted for the easy way: treat people as sheep. Under the correct amount of fear, we will do anything they ask us to do, wont we?

Publicidade nos rivers do Twitter

Parece que o twitter está a preparar-se para colocar publicidade nos rivers dos utilizadores. Para já em modo experimental, mas com um problema gravíssimo. Vai provocar ruído e pode ser o fim do twitter. Veja-se o caso do digg que começou a fazer a mesma coisa, colocando “promoted stories” na listagem de histórias submetidas. O número de utilizadores cessou de aumentar e apesar de ter 200 Milhões de hits por mês, o Digg é já considerado passado e muitos utilizadores estão a visitar outros sites. A ver se o Twitter não acaba da mesma forma.

Citadyne – Videos of Conferences

The videos of several interesting researchers very interested in Complex Systems and the multi-disciplinary approach of complexity, networks and geosimulations are presented online viewing or for download.

Found the solution of using a double box to track the keynote speaker and the slides a bit weak as you end up losing readability in the slides pane and the movement of the speaker distracts constantly.

The option of allowing the videos to be downloaded as podcasts from iTunes is also interesting.