Okay Geek Farm
Entries from August 23, 2009 - August 29, 2009
Brandon DavenportMIT defines your Internet Persona
Aaron Zinman, who is of MIT's Media Lab, with the help of a few others, have created this project titled: Personas.
What's an Internet Persona?
In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.
And how does this site gather your info to determine your online persona?
Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.
All that make sense? In simple terms it looks up your name, the more unique your name, the better, and it searches the context around sites or articles that somehow contain your name within them. If you have a generic name then you're going to get a mix of mostly other people's work and activity. The activity is then represented within categories, each color coded.
(Kind of hard to see but that green section in my persona bar says "illegal". Woah, wonder what I've been doing?!)
Find out your digital persona: HERE
[Via TechCrunch]
RIAA Thinks file sharing is worse than murder and 6 other crimes
File sharing is worse than murder. I am not lying. This is what we have not realized, that the penalty for file sharing is at least 2X greater than murder. This is seriously screwed up. Why is file sharing any different than stealing a cd, in fact it should be less than stealing a cd.
If you steal, you are taking the product. If you file share, you are making a copy, and leaving the original there; plus you aren't stealing the case, cover art, and disc. Just copying harmless files, to see if you like it, then buy the CD /DVD if you like it. That's what I do and that's what Jammie Thomas tried to do, who was fined $2 million for downloading 24 songs. WTF!
Instead, try another crime, because plenty of them have far lighter penalties than your sister downloading "Jonas brothers top 10" on Limewire. Who the hell would want that anyway...
1. Child abduction: the fine is only $25000
2. Stealing the actual CD: the fine is $2,500
3. Rob your neighbor: the fine is $375,000
4. Burn a house down: The fine is just over $375,000
5. Stalk someone: The fine is $175,000
6. Start a dog-fighting ring: the fine is $50,000
7. Murder someone: The maximum penalty is only $25,000 and 15 years in jail, and depending on your yearly salary, would probably be far slighter a penalty that $2 million for downloading 24 songs.
All Content & Design by Okay Geek © 2011-2012 · Unless noted otherwise
