WEEK 12 ESSAY

Discuss the impact of TWO of the following figures on the development of digital technologies and digital culture: Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, William Gibson, Kevin Mitnick, Alan Turing, Ray Kurzweil, J.C.R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart.

Throughout history few people have had the honour of being at the forefront of a new age in technological advancement. But the two pioneering figures that will be discussed in this essay have had that very honour. These two technological figure heads are Charles Babbage and Alan Turing. In this essay we will be discussing the inventions that put, Babbage and Turing at the forefront of the technologies and digital culture age. These two inventions being the ‘Colossus (code breaking computer) for Alan Turing and the Difference Engine by Charles Babbage.

ALAN TURING

The story of Colossus has its beginnings not in America or even Britain, but Poland. In 1932 the Polish Cipher Bureau broke Enigma. This was the coding machine used by the German navy in 1926, followed by the army in 1928 and the air force in 1935. But in 1939 the Germans increased the use of a plug board which greatly increased the complexity of the enigma machine. In July of the same year the Polish government invited members of the British and French Intelligence services to Warsaw and for several months Poland and Britain collaborated on everything Poland knew about the German Enigma codes. One of the members on the team that travelled to Poland was a mathematician named Alan Turing. Turing made many fundamental contributions to the work of breaking the German codes. For instance Turing suggested modifications to the bomb electromechanical relay machines used by Poland to help break the enigma and other codes. These new machines came to be known as Turing’s ‘bombe’ (called bombs because of the ticking noise they made), or decoding machine. In its finished format the bombe contained thirty-six replica Enigma machines, with ten miles or wire and a million soldered connections. This new prototype named ‘Victory’ was installed at the headquarters for code breaking in Britain, Bletchley Park. 1942 Bletchley Park was decoding 39 000 Enigma messages each month and 84 000 a month by the autumn of 1943.

During 1942 Turing started work on a new problem, which was a new machine named ‘Tunny’ which the German army used to encrypt teleprinter messages. The Tunny machines were used for high level signals such as messages from Hitler and the German High Command. These machines were using the Lorenz cipher system, which used a binary additive method for enciphering teleprinter signals. The cryptographic structure of the Lorenz machine or Tunny as it was known at Bletchley Park was given away by a mistake made by a German operator on the 30th of August 1941. Bletchley Park or as it was known by some, the Allies code breaking establishment, set up a special department to attack the Lorenz cipher, which they very uniquely codenamed “Fish”. Staff within this secretive department at Bletchley Park had come up with a series of arduous hand methods, to show it was possible to decipher these messages. But even with the pioneering genius of their work, there was still a delay of four to six weeks between deciphering each message.

Professor Max Newman another mathematician who has been credited with the conceptual design of the resulting machines, that helped the code breakers analyse the cryptic messages. Realised that this drawn out process of a four to six week wait between each message being deciphered, needed to be dramatically overhauled to speed up the process. In March 1943 he approached Dr Tommy Flowers to design a machine to break the Lorenz cipher more quickly. This special event proved to not only be a turning point in the war, but a hugely significant and historic milestone in the history of not only electronics but also computers and even code breaking. For this very machine became known as Colossus, the world’s first electronic computer. It took Flowers and his team at the Post Office Research Station ten months to complete Colossus. According to reports they worked day and night, pushing themselves until as Flowers (1976, p.42) said their “eyes dropped out.”

Yet with all its advantages that it produced, Colossus was not the same as a modern day computer we would see today. For instance to reset Colossus for a new job it was necessary for the wiring to be changed by means of switches and plugs. The idea behind how the Colossus computer would store memory, such as program instructions which is common place today came from Alan Turing. Once Turing saw that his ideas were feasible, he started drawing up plans in 1945 for an electronic stored program computer, to be called Automatic Computing Engine’.

CHARLES BABBAGE

But with all the success of Alan Turing and his fellow code breakers at Bletchley Park, none of their achievements would have been possible without the pioneering work of Charles Babbage. Babbage who was an inventor and mathematician was continually frustrated at the amount of errors being found in sets of mathematical tables he was reading, proclaimed, ‘I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam’ (Charles Babbage). Babbage’s frustrations not only were with the monotonous style of checking tables but also with their unreliabilty. Many trades of the day relied heavily on the accuracy of mathematical tables such as science, engineering, construction, banking and insurance. As well as ships navigating by the stars also relied on them t ofind their positions at sea. Babbage then set himself the task of designing and creating a calculating machine that would eliminate such errors. The ironic thing about Charles Babbage is that he is credited as inventing computers but he actually failed to completely build them.

Charles Babbage designed two different engines one being the Difference engine and the other being the Analytical engine. Difference engines are called difference engines because of the mathematical principle on which they are based, namely the method of finite differences. The difference engine machine uses only addition and removes the need for multiplication and division which are more difficult to implement mechanically. Difference engines are strictly calculators. They crunch numbers the only way they know how - by repeated addition according to the method of finite differences. They cannot be used for general arithmetical calculation. The Analytical Engine is much more than a calculator and marks the progression from the mechanised arithmetic of calculation to fully-fledged general-purpose computation. There were at least three designs at different stages of the evolution of his ideas. So it is strictly correct to refer to the Analytical Engines in the plural.

Difference Engine No. 1

Babbage began in 1821 with Difference Engine No. 1, designed to calculate and tabulate polynomial functions. The design describes a machine to calculate a series of values and print results automatically in a table. Integral to the concept of the design is a printing apparatus mechanically coupled to the calculating section and integral to it. Difference Engine No. 1 is the first complete design for an automatic calculating engine.

From time to time Babbage changed the capacity of the Engine. The 1830 design shows a machine calculating with sixteen digits and six orders of difference. The Engine called for some 25,000 parts shared equally between the calculating section and the printer. Had it been built it would have weighed an estimated fifteen tons and stood about eight feet high. Work was halted on the construction of the Engine in 1832 following a dispute with the engineer, Joseph Clement. Government funding was finally axed in 1842.

A New Difference Engine

With the groundbreaking work on the Analytical Engine largely complete by 1840, Babbage began to consider a new difference engine. Between 1847 and 1849 he completed the design of Difference Engine No. 2, an improved version of the original. This Engine calculates with numbers thirty-one digits long and can tabulate any polynomial up to the seventh order. The design was elegantly simple and required three times fewer parts than No. 1 for similar computing power.

Difference Engine No. 2 and the Analytical Engine share the same design for the printer - an output device with remarkable features. It not only produces hardcopy inked printout on paper as a checking copy, but also automatically stereotypes results, that is, impresses the results on soft material, Plaster of Paris for example, which could be used as a mold from which a printing plate could be made. The apparatus typesets results automatically and allows programmable formatting i.e. allows the operator to preset the layout of results on the page. User-alterable features include variable line height, variable numbers of columns, variable column margins, automatic line wrapping or column wrapping, and leaving blank lines every several lines for ease of reading.

The success of these men in their endeavours can not only be measured in terms of scientific or even historical value. But also in the number of lives these ground breaking devices saved from near certain death on the battle fields of Europe and the world and also the lives of sea-faring navigators. For “The successes of the World War Two Allied code breakers, some claim, shortened the war by up to two years.” (Plimmer, 1998, p37a) These men can also hold their heads high with those select few who have had the brilliance and tenacity to invent a machine that laid the historical and scientific ground work, for future generations to come. So whether you’re a computer literate person or not Charles Babbage and the men and women who worked endless hours to construct Colossus and other innovative machines during World War Two have to be considered as some of the founding forefathers of the early computer age.

REFERENCE LIST

• Burgos, N. (2009). Metal Miner: Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage and The Difference Engine that Made a Big Difference. Retrieved 19 October 2010, from
  http://agmetalminer.com/2009/12/18/ada-lovelace-charles-babbage-and-the-difference-engine-that-made-a-big-difference/
• Charles Babbage (n.d). Retrieved 20 October 2010, from http://www.thocp.net/biographies/babbage_charles.html
• Charle Babbage's First Difference Engine (n.d). Retrieved 20 October 2010, from http://sites.google.com/site/babbagedifferenceengine/
• Copeland, B.J. (2004). Colossus: Its Origins and Originators. Annals of the History of
  Computing, IEEE. 26 (4), 38 – 45.
• Copeland, B.J. (2006). Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Code Breaking
  Computers. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
• Copeland, B. J. & Proudfoot, D. (2004). Alan Turing: Code Breaker and Computer
  Pioneer. History Today. 54 (7), 7 – 7.
• Plimmer, B. (1998). Machines Invented for WWII Code Breaking. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin.
  30 (4), 37 – 40.
• Randell, B. (1976). The Colossus. Retrieved March 25, 2008, from
  http://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/file_store/trs/90.pdf.
• Reed, D. (2004). A Balanced Introduction to Computer Science. Retrieved March 27,
  2008, from http://www.dave-reed.com/csc107.F03/Chapters/Ch6.pdf.
• Thornton, J. (2007). The Foundations of Computing and the Information Technology
  Age: A Historical, Sociological and Philosophical Enquiry. Frenchs Forrest,
  NSW: Pearson Education Australia.
• Williams, M. R. (1997). A History of Computing Technology (2nd ed). Los Alamitos,
  California: IEEE Computer Society Press.

WEEK 10

OVERALL COURSE EVALUATION

I must admit I didn't really know what to expect when I enrolled in this course, as I took it as an elective from my regular course in the bachelor of IT degree. With this being the case I found the summary of the course content interesting and relevant to my degree as an IT professional needs to keep up to date with all new communication technologies, so therefore I enrolled. During the semester of turning up to lectures and tutorials, I found this course to be taught professionally and in a refreshingly light hearted manner. The syllabus and assessable content, I thought was well thought out (eg. getting everybody to provide course feedback under the guise of a web blog assessment) and was well reflected in the real world of communication technologies. The tutors provided friendly and entertaining environments to learn in every wednesday morning that I had to attend tutorials.

Overall I guess I would rate my experience in 1501HUM New Communication Technologies as a very enjoyable one. Many thanks to the entire teaching and behind the scene's staff for giving me a happy and knowledgable memory in my progression through the at times frustrating thing we call a degree. The only real downside is the annoying half hour drive down the motorway to the Gold Coast every monday and wednesday for class from Logan. But that's my problem, not yours, so once again many thanks for making this semester an enjoyable one.

WEEK 10 LECTURE

CENSORSHIP / PRIVACY IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Today's lecture focused on the issues involved in the censorship and privacy of social media such as Facebook. Since the dawn of time there have been debates about censorship and privacy, but in the time of online predators, cyber bullying and identity theft do we have to more aggressive in the way we protect ourselves online. When people hear the word censorship they automatically think of restrictions, anti - freedom of speech and anti-freedom of expression. But how does the terms of censorship and privacy fit in with the ideologies of the internet and social media, for the whole point of the internet is to give the everyday person freedom in the way they access and share content and information.

If we take a look at Facebook, one of the giants in the social media world we can see a never-ending tug of war between the freedom of expression through discussing your life with your virtual community of online friends and the desire to protect all content posted within the site. But once something is posted or uploaded to net of Facebook isn't it then public property and is free to be used however some random user wants. To answer this question we can look back to the topic discussed in week's seven lecture which discussed the role of creative commons licences. Which basically is an add-on or an extension of the liberties of the copyright law, which states that copyright law applies to online content as well. So there is a fine line Facebook and it's contemporaries must try to walk, where they offer their users certain freedoms while protecting how their content and information get used and accessed. According to the website 50 interesting Facebook Facts is that a recent survey of 500 top colleges found that 10% of admissions officers acknowledged looking at social networking sites such as Facebook to evaluate applicants. Thirty-eight percent of admissions officers said that what they saw negatively affected the applicant. Whether this use of social media is ethical or not remains to be seen but more to the point is the reality of how easy it is to access information from social media.

Facebook has tried to appease users and regulators worried about this fact by moving closer to a Bill of Privacy Rights. On the Electronic Frontier Foundation website there is an article that states a number of different recommendations that Facebook should implement. Recommendation one being users being allowed the option of receiving a notice in their newsfeeds whenever a selected application requests data, rather than just allowing them to see only the last data request. While perhaps few users would adopt this option, those that did could evaluate and rate those apps and tell the world about any unusual behavior. Recommendation two was the option to show a more complete history of an app's behavior, beyond just the last information that was pulled, would allow users to see the frequency and patterns in application information requests and would help them make better choices about which apps they want to continue using. It remains to be seen if there can be a successful symbiotic relationship between freedom and censorship/privacy on Facebook.

But Facebook isn't the only source of censorship/privacy issues there is also issues surround some content controll software labeled an internet filter. So what essentially is an internet filter, according to web defintions, the internet filter is a content-control software, also known as censorware or web filtering software, and is a term for software designed and optimized for controlling what content is permitted to a reader, especially when it is used to restrict material delivered over the Web. As stated earlier the whole purpose of the internet is to give the everyday person freedom in the way they access and share content and information, so isn't this software going against the very nature of the internet? According to Microsoft the internet filter is there to protect parents, guardians, or school administrators and to protect kids from viewing inappropriate material as well as identify which Web sites kids can visit. Well isn't this software a good thing for isn't it just a net nanny on steroids, or are we being sold something that's dressed up as something else.

The website No Clean Feed - Stop Cencorship in Australia paints a rather different more sinister picture. They claim that much more than just innappropraite material but rather movies, websites and video games designed for user's sixteen an up. Despite this software being according this website universally condemned by the public, ISP's and state governments it seems Australia is determined to force this filter onto every Australian web user. If we as responsible internet user's really wanted to protect ourselves, our children, work colleagues and everybody else from innappropriate material, we don't need this invasive software. For we already have numerous software options already in widespread public use that does what the authorities claim the internet filter does, without the blatant censorship being grievously forced upon the rest of the consenting public.

REFERENCE LIST

• Biggs, T. (2010). Filter on Hold until 2011, Post Election. Retrieved October 2, 2010 from
  http://www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com/


• Electronic Frontiers Australia. (n.d.). No Clean Feed - Stop Internet Censorship in Australia. Retrieved October 4, 2010 from http://nocleanfeed.com/


• Microsoft Security. (2010). What is an Internet Filter? Retrieved October 3, 2010 from http://www.microsoft.com/protect/terms/internetfilters.aspx
  


• Opsahl, K. (2010). Facebook Moves Closer to EFF Bill of Privacy Rights. Retrieved October 2, 2010 from
  http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/10/facebook-moves-closer-eff-bill-privacy-rights


• Random Facts. (n.d.). 50 Interesting Facebook Facts. Retrieved October 3, 2010 from
  http://facts.randomhistory.com/interesting-facebook-facts.html


• Wayne, T. (2010). Government Finds Uses for Social Networking Sites Beyond Investigations. Retrieved October 1, 2010 from http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/08/government-finds-uses-social-networking-sites

WEEK 9

TUTORIAL TASK & TUTESPARK

- PLANNING THE ESSAY -

In a couple of weeks I will be posting my essay for 1501HUM New Communication Technologies. The essay will be my last official blog post for the second semester of university, which makes one wonder, where has all the time gone.

The topic of my much anticipated essay (not) will be focusing on the first essay question listed on tutespark. Which was to discuss the impact of two prominent figures in the development of digital technologies and digital culture. We were given a list of names to choose two from that included many great technological pioneers, but the two I have chosen to focus on are, Charles Babbage and Alan Turing. This will take me from Babbages 19th century Difference Engine all the way to Turing and the computers developed at Bletchley Park to crack the German 'enigma' codes during World War Two.

There are many places I could start planning and researching this assignment as I have plenty of resources to draw information from. As I am doing a bachelor of IT degree and have already written a couple of assignments about Charles Babbage and Alan Turing and their places in the early history of computing. Another positive factor is the fact that I did a first year IT subject a couple of years ago called Foundations of Computing and Communication that discussed these topics in their syllabus. So I guess finding relevant information for this particular essay will not be a problem. But the thing I find most facinating about these two men is the fact that they were able to see and implement an idea in times when these ideas were considered foolish or improbable, yet they had the guts to not say, this can't be done but rather how can it be done.

WEEK 9 LECTURE

CYBERPUNK & WILLIAM GIBSON

First of all before I start blogging about this weeks lecture, there is a confession I must make, I didn't actually go to this lecture. I tried but due to a crash on the freeway which I wasn't involved in (thankfully) I arrived just after this lecture finished. All this was just to give you (the marker) a heads up if you find this blog entry confusing. Because I'm trying to write it from the lecture notes provided and I'm finding them confusing so bare with me.

The lecture started off by outlining what Cyberpunk actuall is
Cyberpunk is typically distinguished from standard science fiction by the inclusion of several prominent tropes, including but not limited to:

The existence and proliferation of cybernetic enhancements or replacements – in other words, cyborgs
•the existence of synthetic or non-organic life forms, of various degrees of sentience (androids, replicants)
•a future society governed under a corporatist or oligarchic dictatorship
•prominent asiatic or oriental influences in subsequent cultural advertising and common language
•graphic violence, sexuality, drug use, and other anti-moralist narratives and archetypes (a natural consequence of the focus on hard-boiled noir characters)

Who wrote/writes cyberpunk?

- William Gibson
- Bruce Sterling
- Neal Stephenson
- John Shirley
- Lewis Shiner
- Rudy Rucker

Who is William Gibson?

http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/source/source.asp

- born: 17th of March, 1948, in Conway, South Carolina, USA
- grew up in Wytheville, Virginia
- Vietnam draft dodger; moved to Toronto, Canada
- Received a Bachelor of English from University of British Columbia in 1977
- Has written many things, including several ‘trilogies’

The Sprawl Trilogy:
Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)

The Bridge Trilogy:
Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999)

The Blue Ant Trilogy:
Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), Zero History (2010)

The street finds its own uses for things…

Neuromancer, 1984: “cyberspace”

Written entirely on a typewriter

Coloured geometrical representations of data

Shadows are security, rumours are almost true
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc26BVmpQsU


Burning Chrome

Aesthetics: gritty, tech heavy, seductive, claustrophobic

Genre: hybrid, draws from film noir and SF

Style: prose is written in fragments that skip around ‘narrative time’

Key Issues: theft, seduction, voodoo/luck, contingent alliances, addiction, fusion of human and machine, tragic desire, the eerie in the everyday


Cyberpunk as a lingua franca of digital culture

huge impact on imagining human-and-machine interconnections

ubiquitous access to information and its lack of security

largely pessimistic view of humans and machines (cunning opportunism) but not large apocalyptic scenarios of other SF

CP gave a language to the way the markets of capitalisms have material impacts on people’s lives and how people get hooked on technologies


Some Examples

http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biFMsh2g0OM
No Maps for these Territories (DVD, in library)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNs9iznzOj8&feature=related

The Future will be a Will Be A Privatized Corporate Dystopia

I agree with the second commentators view of the future, that we will be a privatised corporate dystopia, and his assessment of wall to wall advertising and images. But what I have to add is the fact that the head of this corporate dystopia will be the companies Facebook and YouTube. With the president of the world or Supreme Galatic Chancellor being Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

In the year 2020, the number of active Facebook user's has risen exponentially to make it that one in every three people on the planet use facebook. According to statistics if it were a country it would be the largest country on the planet. The only thing standing between Supreme Galatic Chancellor Zuckerberg (All Hail the Leader) is the worlds second largest corporate entity, YouTube. During the social media wars of 2015, Zuckerberg financed a takeover of YouTube at the Battle of MySpace. Zuckerberg our Supreme Galatic Chancellor promised to accept YouTube's friend request if YouTube would merge with Facebook and become one galatic self promoting entity the likes of the world has never seen. But after the deal had been signed, Zuckerberg changed his privacy settings and denied YouTubes friend request and blocked him from viewing his personal page.

So now we have the new ruler of the world and his corporation Facebook and YouTube or as some people are calling it now, FaceTube. The future is now a bleak landscape of school children thinking nothing is fact unless they saw it as a post on Facebook. Or the extremely annoying new game show sweeping the air waves right now called, Everybody Poke a Stranger. Where contestants trawl through their list of so called friends and poke everyone, the winner is the one with the most pokes back, the loser gets a lobotomy. But Zuckerberg, sorry Supreme Galatic Chancellor being the nice guy he is, at least let's you take your piece of your frontal lobe home with you in a jar, so you can have something to stare blankley at for hours on end. The world is now full of friend requests and invitations to join online groups about wierd stuff nobody who had a life would ever join. But if heaven forbid you should not accept a friend request than you will immediately be hauled off by the secret Facebook police called the Facebook SS, to be reprogrammed by viewing hours and hours of YouTube videos laced with sublimal messages.

Homes of the future will be just box apartments one on top of the other, far as the eye can see. Where every each of the apartment walls will be covered in plasma tv's running YouTube video's 24/7, this is what keeps the population well behaved and obedient. You may think (please don't) that surely not everybody can be under the influence of Facebook, surely their must be a rebel alliance (finally got my Star Wars reference in) and you would be right. There is a small group of outsiders or rebels who live in the country areas, these people live wierd lives where they read these things called books and they actually talk to people face to face (what savages). But beware outsiders the few who sneak into the cities to syphon off electricity for their hybrid cars and what not, get caught and those who don't get sent for reprogramming through YouTube get sent to the Supreme Galatic Chancellor Zuckerberg's money mines. The money mines an evil place where men go and never come back, a place of horrible paper cuts and ink stained fingers. This is the place where Zuckerberg our most exalted leader keeps all his money, and get's it filtered back and forth between him and the mines.

But has anybody seen the Supreme Galatic Chancellor in person lately, well no. Nobody knows what has happened to him but ever since a fan sneezed on him that one time he left his computer for a Facebook Day Parade their have been rumours. Rumours that he keeps hmself locked away in a darkened room doing nothing but watching YouTube videos and sending random friend requests and pokes to random people. They also say he hasn't showered or shaved or clipped his nails in years and that he pee's in special bottles delivered to him daily through a cat flap in the door. He has fears of people using his hair or dna to clone him and to take over.

Oh, how I pity the future generations. On second thought I might go and post that same thing on Facebook.

WEEK 8
TUTESPARK & TUTORIAL TASK

I really liked looking into the Cyberpunk idea of corporate control over society. The tutespark website states this idea as a powerful controlling entity that directs society. Most often this is represented as a corporation. Some times its simply an ever present singular government. A common theme for corporate control involves a futuristic dystopia, where the last traces of high civilization exist only in an enclosed and protected city, where civil liberties are removed under the guise of protecting humanity.

This idea of an all controlling corporation that has taken over the role of conventional governments. Has been present in numerous movies from Children of Men, Equilibrium to V for Vendetta. All these movies and literature that promote this theme can all be traced back to the argument that was argued by Plato that we heard in this weeks lecture. That reality was expressed in hidden forms that could only be appreciated by an elite who thus had the duty to use the arbitrary powers of the police state to enforce a harshidealism. There are certain people who view our ongoing reliance on technolgy as new and improved ways to control us and make us behave a certain way. People who take this view see the rise in power of corporations and their impact on society as an acceptable form of uniform slavery.

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." (Thomas Jefferson)

Disclose.tv - V for Vendetta Speech Video

After much searching I found an interesting article located on, The Onion website that was actually two articles in one. The article titled, "The Future will be a Totalitarian Government Dystopia vs. The Future will be a Privatised Corporate Dystopia." , that outlined what two people thought the future was going to be like. One thought the future will be a totalitarian government dystopia, where our very existence would be nothing more than to serve the leader through any means necessary. While the other person predicted a future of a privatised corporate dystopia where all of our senses are bombarded at every opportunity with corporate logos and advertising. In the next post of my blog you will see my attempt at writing my own response to their predictions of the future.