C86 : THE ULTIMATE SERIES (Parts 5 and 6 of 114)
37 minutes ago
Thursday, 8 September 2011
Did the use of psychedelics lead to a computer revolution?
Psychedelics and creativity: 'Any drug experience is determined far less by the drug than by what we bring to it.' Photograph: Fredrik Skold/Alamy
" … in terms of our view of the universe – or my view of the universe – perception can be more powerful than physics can be."You might be excused for thinking these are the words of a philosopher or a stoned Grateful Dead fan, but no. It's from an interview in 2000 with Mike Lynch, the CEO of Autonomy and Britain's first software billionaire, currently in the process of selling his company to Hewlett-Packard for $10bn (£6bn). Lynch, who was talking about the power of the pattern recognition that forms the basis of Autonomy's success, went on to talk about the fascination of dreams, near-death experiences and the accounts of those experimenting scientifically with LSD in the 1960s: all forms of altered perception.
Did psychedelic drugs play a substantive role in the development of personal computing? In 2009, Ryan Grim, as part of publicising his book This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America wrote a piece for the Huffington Post that made public a letter from LSD inventor Albert Hofmann to Apple CEO Steve Jobs in 2007 asking for funding for research into the use of psychedelics to help relieve the anxiety associated with life-threatening illness.
He picked Jobs because, as New York Times reporter John Markoff told the world in his 2005 book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, Jobs believed that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he'd done in his life. That 2001 conversation inspired Markoff to write the book: a history of computing with the drugs kept in.
From 1961 to 1965, the Bay Area-based International Foundation for Advanced Study led more than 350 people through acid trips for research purposes. Some of them were important pioneers in the development of computing, such as Doug Engelbart, the father of the computer mouse, then heading a project to use computers to augment the human mind at nearby SRI. Grim also names the inventors of virtual reality and early Cisco employee Kevin Herbert as examples of experimenters with acid, and calls Burning Man (whose frequent attendees include Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page) the modern equivalent for those seeking mind expansion.
There's a delicious irony in thinking that the same American companies who require their employees to pee in a cup rely on machines that were created by drugged-out hippies. But things aren't so simple. Markoff traces modern computing to two sources. First is the clean-cut, military-style, suit-wearing Big Iron approach of the east coast that, in its IBM incarnation, was so memorably smashed in the 1984 Super Bowl ad for the first Apple Mac.
Second is the eclectic and iconoclastic mix of hackers, hippies, and rebels of the west coast, from whose ranks so many of today's big Silicon Valley names emerged. Markoff, born and bred in the Bay Area and 18 in 1967, argues the idea of the personal computer as a device to empower individuals was a purely west coast idea; the east coast didn't "get" anything but corporate technology.
There's a basic principle to invoke here: coincidence does not imply causality. As early Sun employee John Gilmore, whom Grim calls a "well-known psychonaut", says in that article, it is very difficult to prove that drug use led directly to personal computers. The 1960s were a time of extreme upheaval: the Vietnam war and the draft, the advent of female-controlled contraception, and the campaign for civil rights all contributed to the counterculture. Was it the sex, the drugs or the rock'n'roll – or the science fiction?
In 1998 Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, said in a discussion of his enjoyment of science fiction: "I think it's also made it easier for me to think about things that weren't quite ready yet but I could imagine might just possibly be feasible."
Annie Gottlieb, in Do You Believe in Magic? Bringing the 60s Back Home, recounts the personal exploratory experiences of a variety of interviewees, and comes to this conclusion: "Any drug experience is determined far less by the drug than by what we bring to it." Many people tried acid. Only one became Steve Jobs.
Wendy M. Grossman @'The Guardian'
David Hockney: 'I turned down request to paint Queen'
Artist David Hockney has revealed he turned down a request to paint the Queen because he was "very busy".
The 74-year-old told BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme she would make a "terrific subject" but he prefers to paint people he knows."When I was asked I told them I was very busy painting England actually. Her country," he said.
An exhibition showcasing his landscape work is to be presented at the Royal Academy of Arts in London next year.
Speaking at the London launch of David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, the artist said: "I generally only paint people I know, I'm not a flatterer really.
"I've been requested and it's actually a terrific subject, but I require quite a bit of time."
The Hockney exhibition, which runs from 21 January to 9 April, will be one of the countdown events to the London 2012 Festival, the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad.
With works spanning 50 years, it will explore the artist's fascination with landscape.
Inspired by his native Yorkshire, many of its large-scale paintings will have been created specifically for the exhibition.
The works will be shown alongside related drawings and films.
The artist, who was born in Bradford, said he had returned to paint in Yorkshire because "it is a landscape I know from my childhood and it has meaning.
"I never thought of it as a subject until 10 years ago when I realised that at my age that it is a terrific subject, a marvellous place."I love looking at the world, there is an intense pleasure from my eyes. Enjoyment of the landscape is a thrill."
The exhibit will feature three groups of new work created since 2005, when the artist returned to live in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, which use a variety of media.
A series of films produced using 18 cameras will also be displayed, on multiple screens.
"We filmed on a quiet road and no one never ever stopped us," Hockney said. "It is unique there because there are not many people.
"You can drive along the road in a car and not see anyone. It is a lovely little bit of England that is not spoiled."
The artist has embraced new technology in his recent works, using iPhones and iPads as tools for making art.
A number of his iPad drawings will also be on show at what will be the first major UK exhibition of his landscape work.
@'BBC'
Peter Hitchens: The War On Drugs
The war on drugs is something often talked about, and for the most part we’re lead to believe our Governments and Police force takes quite a serious stance on their tolerance for narcotics. But is the war on drugs all it’s made out to be? Peter Hitchens from the Mail on Sunday would have you believe otherwise – labelling the war on drugs, at least in the United Kingdom, a sham.
(Thanx Chuck!)
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@'ABC'(Thanx Chuck!)
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
John Young (@Cryptomeorg) on the security of disclosure sites
Cybersecurity wizards often repeat that a race is on between cyber defenders against cyber attackers and the attackers are winning due to the greater variety of attacker swarms against Maginot Line defenders.
A Dutch official said today that online security of government websites cannot be assured, that ordinary paper and mail are much superior. That has been Cryptome's advice for several years -- that online security is very poor and security peddlers and product distributors are concealing this deficiency to capitalize on the popularity of the Internet -- among them disclosure sites.
New cyber defenses become outdated instantly due to a continuous onslaught, some by amateurs having fun, some by competitors, most by criminals who sell their produce to a bevy of purchasers, governmental, commercial, individual.
Attacks are increasing geometrically as youngsters coming into cyber maurading proliferate, in particular in nations outside the major powers who are learning the limits of power in cyberworld they have created and promoted.
This means that any platform which offers disclosure services, aka leaksites, will lag the prowess and multitude of attackers and should warn submitters that the first and most important defense must start on the submitters' end.
And that the greater the risk a submission poses to the submitter the greater the need for for submitter's own defenses and never rely upon the platform's promises of protection. This was put in a nutshell by a National Security Agency paper in 2000 addressing the futility of computer security, "The Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed Assumption of Security in Modern Computing Environments."
http://www.nsa.gov/research/_files/publications/inevitability.pdf
Beyond unavoidable insecurity in computers an networks, submissions may be intercepted in transit, misplaced at the platform end, misunderstood and/or misjudged by the platform staff, or improperly explained and published. Disclosure platforms do
not have sufficient stable, well-trained staff to compensate for the turnover in volunteers with their limited skills ineptly directly by site operators.
You will recall that these are all applicable to WikiLeaks and most of its emulators as well as governments, commerce and the wealthy. OpenLeaks has attempted to address them but it is quite difficult not only for a low-resourced initiative but also
for the well-endowed.
At the moment the well-endowed and those less so are obscuring the lack of online and other forms of digital security, instead engage in what the wizards call "security by obscurity," hoping attackers will not find and exploit weaknesses.
As we see near daily, admission of security breaches are escalating not because the providers want to tell but because insecurity is being exposed by those who wish to no longer hide the truth known to insiders and a growing crowd of outsiders. To wit, DDB and others in the security and hacker world. They are calumnized by insiders who hope to maintain obscurity a while longer.
This means your most distinguished institutional readers in finance, law, government, intelligence and the rest who vaunt their prowess for credibility, authenticity and security, face increasing disclosure of faults in their protection pretenses -- which includes global Cyber Command initiatives.
The petit furor with Wikileaks, OpenLeaks, Anonymous
and newsy ilk portends a grand furor building toward disclosing something wonderful, I hope, about the cost of excessive secrecy and security obscurity,
no matter who lurks beneath the cloak. Wikileaks and emulators are the least problematic compared to the Titanic-grade protectors of the commonweal who are being outmatched by icebergs much more threatening than security-truth-disclosure sites.
Via
A Dutch official said today that online security of government websites cannot be assured, that ordinary paper and mail are much superior. That has been Cryptome's advice for several years -- that online security is very poor and security peddlers and product distributors are concealing this deficiency to capitalize on the popularity of the Internet -- among them disclosure sites.
New cyber defenses become outdated instantly due to a continuous onslaught, some by amateurs having fun, some by competitors, most by criminals who sell their produce to a bevy of purchasers, governmental, commercial, individual.
Attacks are increasing geometrically as youngsters coming into cyber maurading proliferate, in particular in nations outside the major powers who are learning the limits of power in cyberworld they have created and promoted.
This means that any platform which offers disclosure services, aka leaksites, will lag the prowess and multitude of attackers and should warn submitters that the first and most important defense must start on the submitters' end.
And that the greater the risk a submission poses to the submitter the greater the need for for submitter's own defenses and never rely upon the platform's promises of protection. This was put in a nutshell by a National Security Agency paper in 2000 addressing the futility of computer security, "The Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed Assumption of Security in Modern Computing Environments."
http://www.nsa.gov/research/_files/publications/inevitability.pdf
Beyond unavoidable insecurity in computers an networks, submissions may be intercepted in transit, misplaced at the platform end, misunderstood and/or misjudged by the platform staff, or improperly explained and published. Disclosure platforms do
not have sufficient stable, well-trained staff to compensate for the turnover in volunteers with their limited skills ineptly directly by site operators.
You will recall that these are all applicable to WikiLeaks and most of its emulators as well as governments, commerce and the wealthy. OpenLeaks has attempted to address them but it is quite difficult not only for a low-resourced initiative but also
for the well-endowed.
At the moment the well-endowed and those less so are obscuring the lack of online and other forms of digital security, instead engage in what the wizards call "security by obscurity," hoping attackers will not find and exploit weaknesses.
As we see near daily, admission of security breaches are escalating not because the providers want to tell but because insecurity is being exposed by those who wish to no longer hide the truth known to insiders and a growing crowd of outsiders. To wit, DDB and others in the security and hacker world. They are calumnized by insiders who hope to maintain obscurity a while longer.
This means your most distinguished institutional readers in finance, law, government, intelligence and the rest who vaunt their prowess for credibility, authenticity and security, face increasing disclosure of faults in their protection pretenses -- which includes global Cyber Command initiatives.
The petit furor with Wikileaks, OpenLeaks, Anonymous
and newsy ilk portends a grand furor building toward disclosing something wonderful, I hope, about the cost of excessive secrecy and security obscurity,
no matter who lurks beneath the cloak. Wikileaks and emulators are the least problematic compared to the Titanic-grade protectors of the commonweal who are being outmatched by icebergs much more threatening than security-truth-disclosure sites.
Via
Queen - Live At Wembley Stadium 1986
1. One Vision
2. Tie Your Mother Down
3. In the Lap of the Gods
4. Seven Seas of Rhye
5. A Kind of Magic
6. Another One Bites the Dust
7. Who Wants To Live Forever
8. I Want to Break Free
9. Impromptu
10. Brighton Rock
11. Now I'm Here
12. Love of My Life
13. Is This the World We Created
14. Bohemian Rhapsody
15. Hammer To Fall
16. Crazy Little Thing Called Love
17. Radio Ga Ga
18. We Will Rock You
19. Friends Will Be Friends
20. We Are the Champions
21. God Save the Queen
Uploaded by http://www.freddieforaday.com/ to celebrate Freddie Mercury's 65th birthday
Footprints On The Moon
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has captured the sharpest images ever taken from space of the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 sites, revealing the twists and turns of the paths made when the astronauts explored these areas.
Via
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