“…a political resistance strategy in which small, independent groups (covert cells) challenge an established adversary such as a government. Leaderless resistance can encompass anything from non-violent disruption and disobedience to bombings, assassinations and other violent agitation. Leaderless cells lack bidirectional, vertical command links operating without a hierarchical command.” (link)
It’s challenging to combat a leaderless resistance because one can’t use the usual methods to discover participants by exploiting the social networks of known members.
Today’s new communication infrastructures make it easier for such distributed resistance movements to take hold and grow. Information, instructions and loose coordination can be spread via Web pages, Blogs, text messages, IRCs, mailing lists, etc.
A colleague Chris Diehl at JHU APL suggested the Estonian cyberwar might be a good example to study how the Blogosphere was used for this by combining sentiment analysis, geotagging and temporal analysis. This cyber attack was a subject of a recent colloquium at APL. It’s a great idea, but one made more challenging by the fact that the attack is over and would involve dealing with content in Estonian, which, although not exactly a low-density language, is also not one that has been extensively studied by computational linguists.
But maybe there is another example of an Internet-driven leaderless resistance, going on right now, that would be good to study as it unfolds. A group that calls itself Anonymous has announced it intends to launch an online DDOS attack on Scientology as part of a campaign against the organization.
The message is spread in part by YouTube videos starting on 21 January. There is also the Wikipedia page on Project Chanology which was created on 24 January 2008, an Anonymous Scientology Widget that counts down to (I suppose) when participating members should take action, and lost of mentions on forums, blogs and other forms of social media.
Linuxhaxor has instructions for what to do, which are offered only for educational purposes.
“This guide is for information purpose only, I, the site owner, do not encourage people to go about and follow these steps or Chanology in anyway to carry this attack, or any attack to any organization or any person. If you agree to follow these steps and help them carry this attack you are fully responsible for any consequences whatsoever. This act is illegal in many states and countries. ”
Finally, you can track the online interest through this Blogpulse trend graph comparing Blogosphere mentions of (1) “Tom Cruise” (2) Scientology and (3) anonymous+scientology and also the Google Trends graph comparing Google searches for the same three terms. Click on the graphs to see the current results.
Tom Cruise is in there because he’s rumored to be the second most important person in the Church of Scientology and his recent Scientology indoctrination video that surfaced on YouTube may have been the tipping point for some.
I confess to being thoroughly confused. The revealed wisdom in US higher ed has been that we are simply not producing enough grads in the STEM area, and we need to do more to attract folks to sciences/engineering/IT etc. The National Academy of Sciences weighed in on this as well. We certainly keep hearing that here in our department, with exhortations to increase enrollment.
However, the Urban institute folks (Lowell and Salzman) claim that not only is the US not lagging behind other nations in the quality of STEM education at the school level, it in fact overproduced STEM grads (three times as many as the net growth in jobs) in the period from 1985 to 2000. So not enough or too many STEM grads — which is it ?
This of course further muddies the immigration/ H1B debates. The IT industry claims that there is a shortage of IT grads, and so they need to be able to hire more from overseas. The “Immigration Restrictionists” of various flavors, and the Programmers Guild like organizations, argue that this is just a part of plan by corporations to keep the wages in the IT sector depressed. Many of them have blogged about this new Urban Institute study, offering it as proof that the H1B type programs can be scrapped.
However, if the primary push behind lobbying for increased skilled immigration/H1 workers was depressing (or at least not increasing) the wages, then a factor of three overproduction within the US should take care of this, right ? In other words, all the folks in STEM fields who weren’t getting jobs in their area would sign up for short MSCE/CCNA type courses (or AAs in IT) and then get hired. I presume Bill Gates or others don’t particularly like foreigners enough to go through and pay for the H1B/Green card process when they would achieve the same wage depressing affects by hiring US citizens retrained in IT areas from the oversupply in the overall STEM areas? On the other hand, there is a recent statement by Fed chief Bernanke doing rounds of the blogosphere that a non increase in STEM wages would indicate that there wasn’t a shortage in the area.
Net result, I am not sure what to believe anymore. In admissions events, I dutifully present data from CRA (which in turn got it from BLS) that seems to indicate that within the wider STEM areas, IT (strictly, Mathematical and Computer Sciences) would be the subfield where the total production of degrees would fall short of the projected job openings, even factoring in all the outsourcing.
Today’s Washington Post has a story, About Facebook! Forward March!, on the many academic researchers who are studying blogs, social networking applications and all forms of social media.
“The race is on — to an extremely obscure wing of the ivory tower. Who will own the study of the social networking sites? Is it computer science or behavioral science? Is it neuropsychology or artificial intelligence? PhDs around the country are trying to figure out, in their esoteric and socially awkward way, how to get in while the getting’s good.”
The story focuses on Dana Boyd as an example of a young researcher who has achieved recognition that is quite remarkable for someone still in graduate school, largely because she was among the first to do good work on a hot new area.
While the article is interesting, it uses the academic politics frame, as in the famous “Academic politics is so bitter because the stakes are so low” bon mot.
“The culture of academia is like a land rush: professors poised around the edges of each new intellectual territory, waving flags emblazoned with theoretical frameworks, making frenzied dashes to stake claim on new topics, ready to shoot trespassers.”
The result, I think, will leave most readers with the impression that studying social media is faddish, self indulgent and without practical application.
The Washington Post has an article, Kremlin Seeks To Extend Its Reach in Cyberspace , on how the Russian government is increasingly using the Web to influence and control public information and opinion.
“After ignoring the Internet for years to focus on controlling traditional media such as television and newspapers, the Kremlin and its allies are turning their attention to cyberspace, which remains a haven for critical reporting and vibrant discussion in Russia’s dwindling public sphere.”
With more than one-third of new Web content now coming from users of social media sites, this effort is focused on blogs, which have been a problem for in the past.
“Some Russian Internet experts say a turning point came in 2004, when blogs and uncensored online publications helped drive a popular uprising in Ukraine after a pro-Moscow candidate was declared the winner of a presidential election.”
But, as we all know, it’s possible for a knowledgeable and active group to have an undue influence in social media systems. An example from the Wapo story is telling.
“On April 14, an opposition movement held a march in central Moscow that drew hundreds of people; police detained at least 170, including the leader of the march, chess star Garry Kasparov. Pavel Danilin, a 30-year-old Putin supporter and blogger whose online icon is the fearsome robot of the “Terminator” movie, works for a political consulting company loyal to the Kremlin. He said he and his team, which included people from a youth movement called the Young Guard, quickly started blogging that day about a smaller, pro-Kremlin march held at the same time. They linked to one another repeatedly and soon, Danilin said, posts about the pro-Kremlin march had crowded out all the items about the opposition march on the Yandex Web portal’s coveted ranking of the top five Russian blog posts. “We played it beautifully,” Danilin said.”
In addition to governments implicit or explicit self-promotion through pushing their message, they can also crack down on voices they do not like.
“Prosecutors have begun to target postings on blogs or Internet chat sites, charging users with slander or extremism after they criticize Putin or other officials. Most such incidents have occurred outside Moscow, and federal officials deny that they signal any broader campaign to control the Internet.”
I am afraid that we will see much more of this from all kinds of governments and also from large and powerful businesses.
LinkedIn is an online network of more than 4.2 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 130 industries.
When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you.
We’ve been conducting a pilot study at http://fieldmarking.reger.com/ towards creating a Global Human Sensor Net: people all over the world collaboratively reporting, tagging, and thus exchanging information about their observations of the natural world. Such information is already piling up in casual text in blogs and discussion forums, but it is not very accessible to scientists there.
The FieldMarking concept is to let people freely report what they see in unstructured text, but to provide them with appropriate data fields to structure or annotate their own — or somebody else’s — observations. To use text scrapers and existing ontologies to provide suggestions for appropriate markup. To publish the structured data in RDF so it can be intelligently retrieved and aggregated so that scientists can be alerted, for example, to invasive species or emerging diseases. Interactive graphing tools would allow both citizens and scientists to visually mine the data.
FieldMarking combines observation in the “field” with the idea of filling out data “fields” or creating semantic “markup.”
The current prototype, FieldMarking, uses the datablogging technology at Reger.com. Thus we can take advantage of RSS syndication, mobile posting, and graphable data fields from shared templates. Datablogging also does not require any special plug-ins to be installed by users. Our testing suggests that, in addition to some bugginess in the Reger.com software, this approach has some limitations. We need to be able to apply multiple data records to a text entry, because it often makes sense to report many observations or many kinds of observations in one paragraph. Also, we need to allow data records from other users who may dispute the original markup. Customized log types can be shared with other users of reger.com, but we’ll want to more broadly distribute across multiple platforms.
All the same, the potential is enormous and we will continue to gather pilot data on the kinds of biological information available in these unstructured data sources, the willingness of people to structure it, and the technologies that will make it possible.
To add some justification to my previous post, here’s a good summary of IBM’s adoption of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web — from the “The Future of Social Networks” event at IBM, Cambridge. Summary of the panel talk and discussion on IBM’s adoption of emerging technologies for the intranet make a useful read.
The prospect of every licensed vehicle being required to have an active RFID tag raises lots of privacy issues, although in many ways ways we have them already with visual tags and modern image processing. It also opens the door to many new opportunities.
The British government is preparing to test new high-tech license plates containing microchips capable of transmitting unique vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers more than 300 feet away.
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Proponents argue that making such RFID tags mandatory and ubiquitous is a logical move to counter the threat of terrorists using the roadways, and that it will scoop up insurance and registration scofflaws in the process.
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The U.K. Department for Transport gave the official go-ahead for the microchipped number plates (as they are called in the United Kingdom) last week, and the trial is expected to begin later this year. The government has been tight-lipped about the details. One of the vendors bidding to participate in the trial said it would start with smartplates added to some police cars.
The point of the test is to see whether microchips will make number plates harder to tamper with and clone, said U.K. Department for Transport spokesman Ian Weller-Skitt. Many commuters use counterfeit plates to avoid the London congestion charge, a fee imposed on passenger vehicles entering central London during busy hours.
The Washington Post has an article on a popular new web diversion — AIMFight — that lets you compare the popularity of two AIM screenames. It feeds off a combination of the importance of social networking and our urge to compete by framing the issue as a one-to-one comparison between the social networks of two individuals. Your AIMFight score is just the “sum of the current number of people online who have you listed as a buddy, out to three degrees”. The metric is simpler than that used by PageRank in that it doesn’t divide a buddy’s contribution to your rank by the by number of other buddies he has. The idea is clever, though, and admits lots of possibilities to explore better algorithms for ranking individuals in social networks. For example, a natural extention would be to integrate information from many social networking systems — AIM, MSN, FOAF, linkedIn, etc. FOAF could be the glue to help do this.
Technorati API allows 500 queries per day. We picked query words randomly from an english dictionary. We then collected the top 100 results (most live blogs) between 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM EST over a period of the last 18 days. We eliminated duplicate blog home pages to create a list of 173192 unique blogs.
Note: Technorati ranks results by freshness — our statistics are hence for the “Live Blogosphere”.
We do not claim our statistics to be representative. These are the biases –
Technorati index.
US Blogs, given our query time-frame.
Blogger — spam blogs are very live.
Self hosted blogs. Our numbers only use URLs to classify blogs. For instance, a blogger weblog hosted at a personal website is not classified with blogger. Blogger blog’s are identified by “blogspot.com” being part of the URL.
Even with these biases, our numbers should give a good estimate of blogging host popularity.
Based on our collection here’s how blog hosts compare.
Technorati API also provides inlink information of blogs. We normalized inlink for these blog hosts to find the the number of inlinks/blog for each of these hosts. Total inbound links in our collection is 1.8 Million. The mean inlink/blog is 10.64
The impact rating - inlinks/blog
The Rest .. includes many blogs which are self-hosted. Self-hosted blogs, as is evident are the most popular.
Thanks to Jim Mayfield for suggesting the use of technorati.
Trading virtual objects may sound zany, but it seems people can get motivated enough to kill for them, like this tragic incident.
Who owns virtual resources? Can there be rights over objects/artifacts in virtual gaming worlds and for that matter the Internet? Do we own email messages sent or received on Hotmail or Gmail? Is this really different from privacy? Is this DRM?
$9m trade revenues on eBay for such artifacts, gives an idea of the scope of the problem.
Lots of interesting posts on folksonomies in the many2many group blog.
Clay Shirky offers an interesting metaphor for how new ideas and technologies, folksonomies in this case, evolve and are adapted.
To put this metaphorically, we are not driving a car, with gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of choice as to route. We are steering a kayak, pushed rapidly and monotonically down a route determined by the environment. We have a (very small) degree of control over our course in this particular stretch of river, and that control does not extend to being able to reverse, stop, or even significantly alter the direction we’re moving in.
One of the things that I’ve tried to emphasize every time I’ve talked to people involved with search engines is the growing uselessness of ranking algorithms that take the search and linking habits of the whole world into account. I don’t want to know what the average eight-year-old calls an image. I want to know what my friends and colleagues call an image. Or a link. Or a photo.
Flickr and del.icio.us work so well for me not because they aggregate the world’s tags, but because they allow me to aggregate my social network’s tags, links, and photos. I don’t want to see everybody’s links on productivity, but I do want to see Merlin Mann’s. I don’t want to see everybody’s links on blogging, but I do want to see danah’s. I don’t want to see “research” resources from a molecular biologist, but I do want to see them from a sociologist studying online social networks.
How does each of us personalize the ranking algorithms used by information retrieval systems? We can tell Flickr who’s in the group of people whose opinions we value. But do we have to do the same for del.icio.us and technorati and the 87 other sites we visit? An obvious idea is to integrate a trust based approach with a system to aggregate and integrate RDF information on our social network (FOAF) and the objects being searched over. One problem is that the straightforward way to define a ranking algorithm is non-incremental and expensive. Even incremental approximations will be expensive for large collections of things to be ranked. Google can afford to do it for the average web user, but not for each of us. Personalized and topic-based ranking offers many challenges (see An Analytical Comparison of Approaches to Personalizing PageRank for some discussion).
RDF + trust might form the foundation for a good motor for our kayak. We’ll have to see if it’s too big.
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