Connexion by Boeing, the future of internet possibilities

Connexion by Boeing is the latest in inflight entertainment and communications and takes in-flight media and data transmitting to a whole new level. The site for this new technology is http://www.connexionbyboeing.com/ and offers a corporate style overview of this new and exciting business opportunity for airlines.
Connexion is a high-speed broadband internet service offered by Boeing to its airline customers. Several major airlines now have the technology installed on their Boeing fleets. Airline passengers previously were able to access the net but it was not personalized to their specific requirements in that you couldn't use your own laptop on a private basis. Now with Connexion, passengers are able to plug in their laptop computers and have a secure personalized connection whilst in-flight. Connexion also allows passengers to use their laptop wirelessly or through a standard connection port on-board.
Connexion uses transponders located on satellites to connect passengers into the web and e-mail. In addition to this, Connexion is also able to provide efficient crew communication through panels in the aircraft galley which provide specific information about each seat and its passenger. Some say that this is an infringement on the privacy of the individual passenger. This would allow flight attendants to monitor passengers individually and potentially an anti-terror tool. Connexion is different from conventional IFE (Inflight Entertainment Systems) by being secure, private and live and up-to-date. It also uses a space-based network rather than a ground-based one which actually helps trim costs down. In addition to this airlines can also offer passengers access to company intranets and internal servers. Connexion keeps each passenger's laptop private and therefore through a VPN (Virtual Private Network) travelers can access bank accounts and other private information.
The technology to use live internet with personalized 'e-space' whilst flying can mean that as human beings dealing and living in the realms of ‘hyper-space’, we are now never away from the ever-increasing grasp of the internet which we can now reach (or which can now reach us) miles above the Earth. Perhaps this may pave the way for the internet to be used as a space communication tool. Connexion by Boeing is somewhat ironic. The internet was originally thought of as a device for communicating privately by the military and now it seems security and privacy issues are once again stirring a need for this on-line demand from an aeroplane by civilian users.

GreaseMonkey: Set to Sabotage the Internet?

Here's my first contribution to the technoculture blog, to start off I thought I'd introduce everyone to a new emerging addition (or even modification) to internet browsing called GreaseMonkey.

Technically speaking GreaseMonkey allows a user to install javascript userscripts into their browser to dynamically rewrite webpages on the fly. In terms that you and I might understand better, it gives you the ability to change the the content of webpages as you load them, replacing context sensitive text and links with your own. Eg. you can visit a page like TradeMe, and have links to eBay search results appear right along side the TradeMe results. Alternatively you could have Telecoms YellowPages website give you links to the exact street address on Wises' mapping website.

An example of modified Amazon page with links and prices to stock of Amazon competitors.

Greasemonkey is like being able to rearrange the aisles at foodtown to set the beer and cornchips at entrance and play your own death-metal over the intercom.

Although the idea has been around for a while and Google has even caught on to it, by using the Google Toolbar a surfer can turn all ISBN numbers on a page into links to Amazon's listing for the book. As one developer points out in this screencast, he took this idea a step further, making the amazon webpage display links to his local libraries holding on the book (this even supports Voyager!).
Some bloggers are predicting that GreaseMonkey will absolutely destroy existing business models, set to destroy internet advertising and marketing (again, since popup blocking already did that). Already there are scripts available to link from Amazon to a BitTorrent of the searched movie title.
The question I'd like to put to the rest of you guys, what do you believe the rules and ethics with this technology should be?


Valuable Links
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/intermediation.html
http://dunck.us/collab/GreaseMonkeyUserScripts
http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/
http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2005/04/11/etiquette

Hi, listen, this is my post to try and gain responses to help me put together what the fundamental issue is, that we are looking at. I guess that I have a lot of questions when it comes to techno cultre and new media, and this is not helped by the fact that I dont know a lot about the refined technological aspects of the medium. But, for me, what seems to be a major issue is distance versus human contact, organic form versus a less real form of creation and meaning. I know that someone could argue that any creation is an organic creation, and that this includes the way that technology has come from the base origins of technology and human creation and moved ever foward in evolution becoming what it is today - but I just seem to sense that there is a growing distance in the way that people communicate and create through the new mediums available. I guess that this course has moved sevral (if not a few hundred) steps ahead of me in terms of content and the kinds of issues that are being dealt with, as it seems indicated by the blogging, that it is all about the way that we can access new media and how it works and what it does and what kind of advantages it has etc etc. But for me the question still remains of what it actually means in terms of the way that is is effecting the way we communicate and do many many other things - but I have to go and so will someone offer some comment? Feel free to be brutal. che

The beauty of simplicity…

So, while exploring through various websites provided in lecture and tutorial, I saw a healthy amount of real creative sites. Sites that were filled with sound and video effects, witty transitions, mouse-over applications, etc. But then when my friend casually told me to throw some pictures up on webshots.com so he could see them a second, the site’s simplicity overruled many of the recent loaded sites I’d been to. In just a couple minutes, my friend here, and family and friends back in the States as well, were quickly in awe of my adventures in New Zealand! No flashy attraction or intensely clever site technology; one can make it as attractive as he desires with the creativity and originality of his own pictures. Content over presentation with this idea. For the fact that the presentation takes care of itself with your own original display of personal photos. May be old hat to some, but just a reiteration of the underlining benefits of the simple ideas that are often overshadowed by the ever-growing creative work that so many continue to generate on the web. The precious simplicity that allowed my family in Michigan and myself here to see the birth of a friend’s baby in South Africa, literally hours after her delivery. All without the wait for a flash application to download.

-Claire

Epic 2014

Hi guys,

I think this link provides a great insight into what the future could look like with the continued rise of Amazon.com, Google and the like. Its an 8 minute clip but well worth watching.

In the year 2014 the New York Times as gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunate have waned. What happend to the news? And what is Epic?

Find out here!

Keep it foolish!
Christian

Maddox on Blogs.

Many of you might already be familiar with maddox, here is a link to one of his patented rants, this one relates to blogs. Maddox on Blogs.

Star Wars Revelations fan film

I've put the Star Wars Revelations fan flick in the '203 Resources' folder in the computer lab, so you don't have to download or stream from the web to watch it. If you don't know how to connect to the 203 resources folder, please ask myself or Kevin. There's a stack of royalty-free imagery in there too, for you to use and abuse at will. If anyone would like to share any digital resources with the rest of the class (images, graphics, video, sounds etc.) - without infringing copyright, of course - let me know.

Class Rep

Hi,

I've volunteered as the class rep. If you have any problems with the course at all gimme an email at dsad005 @ ec.auckland.nz and I'll bring em up in the meetings, you can be 'brutally frank' if you like.

Daniel.

What the different between a blog and a Messageboard ?

My personal opinion is that blog is an Episodic personal daily entry , unformatted and unpolished where others make comments on every entry by the author. this format mainly show the personal views and insight of the author and other's comment on it !

Where Messageboard is where someone poses a question or a statement and other people saying yea or nae, and gave their comments and opinion on the issue. this I believe being more a discussion group. compare to the blog format ?

What do others think ?

Mana-E

Class rep

I'm still looking for a volunteer to serve as class rep in time for the first meeting (next Weds, 10am in Room 524). Please email me if you're interested (l dot goode at auckland dot ac dot nz).

Newgrounds.com - Flash Portal

I'm sure plenty of people have visited Newgrounds at some point, especially fans of flash animation, games and movies. Even if you've never visited the site you are likely to have seen some of the content before. Newgrounds is a site that hosts games and movies, anyone can create an account and upload their own creations. However the site does have content control, users are encouraged to rate submissions and any new submissions which receive a 'blam' or low rating are removed from the site.
Many web phenomena have sprung out of newgrounds, the numa numa dance for example can be found on the site, in its original and many parodies.
The site does contain a fair amount of advertising, predominantly adult material because newgrounds allows adult rated content which other advertisers don't seem to like. Despite this advertising the site is still very user friendly, easy to navigate.
Content is sorted into many subgenres in games and movies. There are collections such as 'assasssin' games where you can hurt your most loathed celebrities, and collections of parodies on popular culture such as Pokemon, Harry Potter and Dragon Ball Z. There are also many series, some simple and humorous, others long, well designed and intelligent. Even the series Broken Saints, mentioned by Kevin, can be found on the site.
I'd highly recommend having a look around the site, and for those who are easily offended pay close attention to the ratings each submission has.
Newgrounds.com

Game : Crimson Room

Hi~
Maybe some people already know what this is~
For those that don't know~

Crimson Room is a game that test your problem solving abilities~
The aim of this game is to escape this room by using the items that is hidden somewhere around the room. This may seem easy but infact it's pretty hard, have a go at it.
I already finished this game, if you need any hints, just leave a message.

enjoy~

Crimson Room

BitTorrent

Hi all,
Has anyone heard of BitTorrent (BT) before? I reckon most western people are not familiar with this new technology because the name is rare on all English Internet. However, BT is very popular in China. It, simply saying, is a kind of download software. Each complete original source, say a movie, is regarded as a seed. When you want to download the movie, they must make sure those who hold the seed are on line, so that you are connected. More people on line means you get more seeds, getting download process faster. Meanwhile, you, become a new seed and take the responsibility to spread source to other down loaders automatically. Couple of months before, I used BT for downloading movies. However, recently, I find it not a good tool to use, and I don't recommend people to use it. The reason is that BT badly hurts hard disk on our PC. Ordinary downloading software put all downloaded details together and records them onto hard disk once, which means they could only hurt our PC once. However, BT record information individually as it finishes each element. So, our computer will get damaged. Another big concern is that because BT requires an open and sharing internet environment, piracy would become common, and personal copyright could be violated.
Melissa（mfu005）

Cool short flicks.

Hey all,

Most of you are probably already aware of the BMW series of 8 short films (seeing as they are about 3 years old), but if you aren't they are well worth a watch. BMW FILMS - THE HIRE

BMW commissioned 8 of the worlds finest directors to helm each of them. Sure, they're just a bunch of extended commericals, but still pretty interesting to watch. My favourites - Joe Carnahan's "Ticker", Wong Kar Wai's "Follow", John Woo's "Hostage", and Innaritu's "Powderkeg".

It's also interesting to note that Audi have used a similar campaign. I haven't seen any of these shorts, though. A3 FILMS

The wonderful global community!

Hi

I'm one of the unfortunate mugs who cannot make it to any tutorials, so I'm making up for my physical absence with a (hopefully) meaningful online presence. At this stage I'm feeling like Doogie Howser (anyone remembers this TV show?) writing his diary on his PC.

Anyway, I had a conversation with Kevin during class break today about online communities and so I would like to share my experiences with online forums.

I play a fantasy Football Manager game online (www.fm-o.com but its in german!) and have an online presence through their forum, on which I have been fore more than 3 years. Despite hardly knowing any of them personally I have had visitor from Austria and Germany only based on their behaviour on this particular forum. For what I know they could be serial killers on the run but I have trusted that their online presence is similar to their "real" presence. I have not been disappointed as they all were pleasent and we continue to be friends in real life.

Which brings me to the minor debate of moderated vs unmoderated forums. I present for your consideration

(a) the Trade Me messageboards
(b) Crown Princess Marie Chantal of Greece

The Trade Me messageboards, despite having sub topics, are cluttered and particular subjects are hard to follow. During 2 months of spending time on this messageboard I am put off by discussions ranging from particular women's problems to cheating husbands, misbehaving kids, political rants very much in the style of blogs within a messageboard which makes it nearly impossible to keep track of any discussions. Also spelling and grammar on this board is abhorrent and the issues discussed are probably a generalisation of "Mainstream NZ'ers" Don Brash is trying to reach. Absolutely not my crowd.

On the other side Crown Princess Marie Chantal of Greece has been set up after the Fametracker forums have been discontinued. This forum is moderated by someone who spent a lot of time on this forum and couldn't handle the fact that her favourite Celebrity, Film, TV, Books, etc discussion board was gone. So she used free software to host her own message board which is closely guarded and moderated. Topics which are slightly similar are immediately deleted and a high standard of spelling and grammar are expected, otherwise your account will be deleted. Certainly a crowd I would like to be part of.

OK, anyone of this class wants to share their experiences with online forums?

On a humurous note, I finally got my hands on the new Chris Morris comedy "Nathan Barley" a self professed 'media facilitating node' who runs the fictional website www.trashbat.co.ck. Its a great satire on the mediascape in London, where magazines are kept alive by advertising rather than the subscriber's money or hard-hitting journalism. But like most good comedy it will take years before it comes to New Zealand television.

Take care,
Christian

Gröûp X: Arabian Rap Sensations

http://www.groupxarab.com/

Group X are an extremely controversial (and funny!!) hip-hop group who masquerade as 'Arabian Rap Sensations' and cannot seem to speell very ghood. In actual fact the members are from Georgia, USA. They have two independantly released records and an upcoming live DVD.

Chances are, you will not hear Group X on many radio stations around the world. Most of the lyrics are... err... a little course.. And the latest album is called 'Stepping on the Crowtche owf Your American President'. But the internet community has given Group X a cult following.

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/groupx/

Various Flash animators have visualised Group X's songs. The tradition being, the characters in the videos are all stickmen. I think this goes back to what Luke said in the lecture about the decentralised/unstable models of digitisation. And also the sense of the internet as a culture or a community. The internet has done for this group what no record label could ever do.

Check out the videos, they are very funny....

Musical Mashups

A year back or so I just heard about a musical mash up between Jay Z's Black Album and the Beatles White Album where Dj Dangermouse used the songs from the Beatles and put Jay Z's vocals from his acappella version and called it(funnily enough) the Grey Album. I thought it had a couple of gems in it, and was quite brilliant. You can't purchase it legally anymore because Jay Z's record label (EMI I think?) pulled it because they thought more people were buying this mash up rather than the original Black Album (which is ironic because Jay Z sold the Black Album in acappella just so people could mix it with what they want).

Fast forward one year and I've recently just acquired a new mash up which is getting alot of play time where Notorious B.I.G's lyrics are put over Frank Sinatra's instrumentals, the albums called 'Blue Eyes meets Bed Stuy' (Franks nickname and the Biggies hometown). Examples of the songs were lyrics of Juicy mashed with the orchestral sounds of New York, New York, Nasty Boy is mixed with For Every Man theres a Woman and 10 Crack Commandments was rapped over Fools Rush In. Genius.

I'm wondering is this the way forward for musical sampling? Songs most recently seem to be sampled from a song put out a few years back, that was sampled from a song in the eighties, that was covered from a song in the fifties, that was based on a song in the fourties. Now we're seeing entire albums sampled and mixed up from different musical era's and bands and somehow, it's working. These works of art aren't coming from just the professionals, but from everyday consumers who work on them at home, put them online and spread the word. (I think you call it Prosumers, but that's probably not what they want to be called)

There are plenty of other mash ups around, Snoop Dogg over Led Zeppelin (one song called Drop it Like It's A Whole Lotta Love - link goes to .mp3 file)etc, and one mashup has already invaded the charts (recently Jay Z And Linken Park released a mash up to moderate commercial succss). Is this the future of sampling where it's not just a hot riff sampled off a random song, but entire song's (and in some cases, albums) cut and mixed up?

Testitis

As James rightly pointed out in class today, we need to clear out the test posts soon to make the blog more readable. I mentioned in class that blogging is rather like vomiting so I guess all the test posts are a bit like the coughing noises that come before a good chunder. By all means make a test post so you know you won't get caught short once inspiration does strike you. But please don't be offended if your beautiful rendition of the word "testing" is cleared away sometime afterwards. (A leading new media commentator, Arthur Kroker, would condemn my actions as "digital hygiene". But when I'm asking people to stop coughing politely behind their handkerchiefs and let rip with the rainbow yawns, that criticism won't really fly.)

By the way, in case 'testitis' is a real, known disease, I apologise unreservedly to all sufferers for my insensitivity.

Next week's readings

Next week Nabeel Zuberi will be lecturing on popular music and digital networks. As background reading, he would like you to look at this and, if you have a thirst for more, this too. Choose the articles that interest you most - you're not expected to have read each one! Remember that readings provide ripe material for analytical blog posts.

something that I remembered hearing from the news

Hi

I remember hearing from the news that the photo album is the main thing that most families grab in the case of a fire and because a number of us now are taking digital photos and having them saved on computers, one expert from a photo company (can't remember the name) mentioned that for those who do take large proportions of photos digitally and is saved on thier computers, it is best to have two to three other backup devices, such as save them in two C-D roms or floppy disks incase of a house fire otherwise you will lose all your photos as a computer would be hard to take incase of event of a fire. I thought i'd share that with those who use digital cameras.

sharing some of my good news

Hi All,

I admit I have never used blog before, this is my first time. I know a friend of mine loves using blog. A good friend of mine has come back from China and brought back alot of gifts for me. It has brighten up my day. One present includes an electronic dictionary because he thought it would be a very useful tool to assist me in my stage three Chinese course. However the language is in Chinese which I am finding it hard to go about using it. He showed me his cool Nokia cell phone (the one one a camera in it.) I feel that taking digital photos from the cell phone is a great tchnology tool, but I would still prefer to take photos that can be kept in photo albums rather than computer of cell phones. Is it just me or does everyone else prefer photos in this way?

Flickr for photo hosting

I don't know if many of you have already heard about this but I thought I'd post it because I think it's the "bee's knees". Flickr which is a tool for posting photos online and sharing them. The nice thing about flickr, besides that it's handy for posting photos that you want to link to or display on websites, is that it also allows you to tag photos with keywords that describe them. This makes it easy to search for a theme and get a collection of photos that relate.

Additionally Flickr has groups, where people that take pictures of different things or in different styles come together to share their photos and discuss. Two of my favorite groups are the one that focuses on using low depth of field and the Auckland Graffiti group.

I've got my photos posted on Flickr posted over here including a bunch of photos I took during my year in Japan.

You can join up for free, I believe, and you get a monthly megabye limit that you can upload until or you can spend a little and get a gigabyte monthly limit.

The nice thing about Flickr is that it creates communities with a purpose. I've had friends who've used Friendster or other things like that and I've never seen the purpose. "Tagging" in conjunction with Flickr's use of the Creative Commons could also be a resource for artists who are into remixing other people's art.

-Michael

Lady Six from the Shapeshifter show. Test of the Cell image send. Just emailed this image and put it up.

uploading photos from bluetooth mobiles

Check out Jules's recipe for uploading photos from mobiles in the comments attached to her fireworks picture (or visit the permalink here). Looks very simple (if you have a nice bluetooth phone, which I don't) and doesn't involve Blogger's moblog service referred to a couple of posts ago. As I understand it, that's only available in the US at the moment (and costs and arm and a leg in network charges). Have a look at this story about moblogging.

Photo help

Hey,
To those who have managed to upload photos from their mobiles, did you do this with the mobile blogger process? If so, how long did it take for you to get your claim token??
I know they give step by step instructions and include a jingle and all, but I really am dazed and confused by the whole process.
Thanks.
p.S testing

Testing with images

Trying to see if i can use the Bluetooth device on my Phone and up load an image on here.......
Think ive figured this out!

Fire works at the Viaduct over the wend :)

exploring the infinite abyss of blogs....