4/09/2016

Headline April 09, 2016/ ''' WHAT? SIR ! : *SHUTTER DOWN THE WEB?* '''


''' WHAT? SIR ! : 

*SHUTTER DOWN THE WEB?* '''




OF COURSE. of course, there's also a way in which social networks seem to be feeding a cycle of action and reaction.

In just about every news event, the Internet's reaction to situation becomes a follow on part of the story, so that much of the media establishment becomes trapped in an escalating, infinite loops of 140-character, knee-jerk insta-reaction.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR  Whitney Phillips   - *of literary studies and writing*   at Mercer  University-

Who is the author of :
''This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things,''  a study of online  ''trolling''.

When humans, leaders, or  the world does something that we all consider insane, it's not just that it gets reported on by one or two or three outlets, but it becomes this wave of iterative content on top of content in your feed, taking over everything you see.''

The spiraling feedback loop is exhausting and rarely illuminating, states the author. The news brims with instantly produced  ''hot cakes''  and a raft of fact free assertions.

By and large everyone,  is always on guard for the next opportunity to meme-ify  outrage: What crazy thing did the leader/world/New York Times/The New York Post etc say............

And what clever quip can you fit into a  tweet  to quickly begin collecting ''Likes''.

There is little room for indulging nuance, complexity, or flirting with the middle ground. In every issue, you are either with one aggrieved group or the other, and the more stridently you can express your disdain  -short of hurling profanities at the leaders on TV, which will earn you a brief suspension,   -the better reaction you'll get. 

DESPITE EVERY EFFORT,  -it is just not clear to me what Donald J Trump actually meant, one beautiful Monday, some months ago-, states the author.

When he conjured up the idea of getting Bill Gates to help  ''close up''  the Internet.

All in all  Why Trump's suggestion to pull Internet's plug to fight terror is, to put it very simply, Impossible.

Mr Trump hasn't elaborated much after that, and Mr. Gates, who stepped down as Microsoft's chairman just close to a year ago, is spending much of his days at the   Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

However, since he remains a technological adviser to the company's current chief executive, Satya Nadella, you could imagine Mr. Gates returning to Redmond, Wash., where Microsoft is based, and the two of them going down into the basement at Microsoft HQ and pulling the plug.

The problem is that the Internet's backbone doesn't run through Redmond, it never did.

There was a time, of course, in the 1990s when it seemed as as if Microsoft ran the Internet, when the company got into antitrust trouble with the United States Justice Department.

But that was business control  -to an extent. It was never technical control.

in 1993, John Gilmore, a  freedom-of-speech activist and one of the founders of the  Electronic Frontier Foundation, was quoted as saying, ''The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.''

He was referring to the basic design of a computer network that was intended to have no central control and no single point of failure. There is no one plug or server to block.

That centralized structure has created headaches for anyone trying to control electronic communications.

Of course, Mr. Trump was probably not asking Mr. Gates to shut down the Internet, but looking for some way to deny it to the Islamic State and its allies as a propaganda and communications tool.

Mr. Trump's suggestion touches upon a long-running debate regarding the Internet and censorship. Instead of Bill Gates, he might receive a better advice from Li Keqiang, the prime minister of China, which has put a great deal of energy into  ''closing up''  the Internet, including barring the electronic distribution of  The New York Times

Perhaps an anti-Islamic, State wall   -a bit like China's  ''Great Firewall'' that controls Internet Traffic in and out of the country   -would be the prefect companion to Mr. Trump's proposal for a physical wall along the united States southern border.

Mr. Trump could benefit from reading  ''Shockwave Rider,'' a  1975 science fiction novel written by John Brunner.

Mr. Brinner's novel is best known for coining the term  ''worm''  for a malicious computer program that could move  under its own power from computer to computer via network.     

Computer worms became widely known in the real world in 1988 when a *young computer science graduate student*:
Robert Tappan Morris, let one loose and -

Because of a programming error,  briefly created a monumental traffic jam that brought the Internet. then brand new, briefly to its knees.

Mr/ Brunner's novel imagines a  totalitarian government that exercises its power through computer network that gives it control over the population.

In the novel, the protagonist, who is a member of the rebel group, lets the worm loose in the network, putting the government in a real bind. The only way it can destroy the worm is to bring down the network and in the process undermine its power.

If that were done to the real Internet, bringing down the network might displease Mr. Trump, who had the last count over 5.15 million followers on Twitter.   .

With respectful to the Leaders of the Free World. See You all, Your Excellencies, on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and the Ecosystem 2011:


'''Outrages All'''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

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