In the weeks before Manning was arrested, Julian Assange was on the road promoting Wikileaks. ibid.
The release exposed candid, often embarrassing assessments. ibid.
For thousands of years mankind has dreamt of a giant library that contained every book in the world. Every human being would be able to visit this library. In the twenty-first century technology could make that dream a reality. Storyville: Google and the World Brain, BBC 2013
Man’s attempt to build a library that contained all knowledge began in the third century B.C. in Ancient Egypt. ibid.
In the late nineties, pioneers began to combine the scanner, the book and the Internet to create giant digital libraries. ibid.
Google scanned around 10 million books. 6 million of these were books in copyright – scanned without asking the authors’ permission. ibid.
Alongside Google and the Internet Archive, several large internet corporations have been implementing their own book scanning projects. Among them: Amazon, Microsoft and in China, Baidu. ibid.
Authors’ Guild files lawsuit against Google, alleging copyright infringement. ibid.
Google faces lawsuit from American publishers. ibid.
Google have agreed to pay $125 million in a settlement. ibid.
The Settlement gave Google an exclusive right to sell scans of all out-of-print but in-copyright works. These books are sometimes known as Orphans. ibid.
In September 2009 the US Congress held a hearing into competition and monopoly in the digital books market. ibid.
In August 2009 an American court began Fairness Hearings to consider whether it should approve the Google Book Settlement. No cameras were present. ibid.
Judge Chin rejected the Google Books Settlement. The Authors Guild and Google remain in dispute. ibid.
The Authors Guild is suing Google for up to $2 billion in damages for scanning books in copyright. ibid.
Google continues to scan out-of-copyright books in agreement with major libraries. They are also showing snippets of copyrighted books in agreement with many publishers. ibid.
Now government and libraries in Europe and America are working together to build their own public and free digital libraries. ibid.
Daxing Bootcamp for Internet Addicts, suburb of Beijing. China is the first country to declare internet addiction as a clinical disorder. Claiming it is the number one public health threat to its teenage population. Storyville: Web Junkies – China’s Addicted Teens, caption, BBC 2014
The Chinese government has built more than 400 rehabilitation camps for treating internet addiction disorder. The treatment usually lasts three months and claims a 70% success rate. ibid.
‘We call it electronic heroin.’ ibid. professor
‘They weren’t natural at all. They were things that could be changed. And they were things that, more importantly, were wrong and should change.’ Storyville: The Internet’s Own Boy, Aaron Swartz, Channel 4 2015
Bothered by wealth disparity, Swartz moves beyond technology and into a broader range of political causes. ibid.
The arrest took its toll on Swartz. ibid.
Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto: Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage published over centuries in books and journals is increasingly being digitised and locked up by a handful of private corporations. ibid.
‘You are powerful ... You are making a difference.’ ibid. Swartz
Years before Edward Snowden would expose widespread internet surveillance, Swartz was already concerned. ibid.
‘He told me immediately that it was from a website called Silk Road.’ Storyville: Silk Road: Drugs, Death and the Dark Web, rozzer, BBC 2017
Silk Road was the world’s first multi-million dollar dark web market for illegal drugs. ibid. caption
‘The Silk Road was a new kind of black market that the internet had never seen before.’ ibid. rozzer
‘The alleged mastermind goes by the nickname of Dread Pirate Roberts.’ ibid.
By 2013 Silk Road claimed to be making sales of up to $1.3 million every week. The US government had been trying to shut it down for over two years. ibid. caption
‘The FBI is usually there when they make that mistake.’ ibid. rozzer
Ulbricht was tried as ‘the kingpin’ of a criminal enterprise, for money laundering, computer hacking and conspiracy to traffic narcotics. The jury took just three and a half hours to reach their verdict. ibid. caption
Without us the internet would be a mess. We delete images, videos and texts which violate the rules of the social media. Most of the material that we check here comes from Europe and the US. Storyville: The Internet’s Dirtiest Secrets: The Cleaners, email extract, BBC 2019
There are smaller units in other countries but Philippines is the biggest one. There are thousands of workers here. ibid.
Our task is to monitor and moderate the user-based content. I help people. I stop the spreading of child exploitation. I have to identify terrorism. Have to step the cyber bullying. Algorithms can’t do what we do. ibid.
‘We have about 10,000 people who are working on safety and security generally and we’re committed to investing more – doubling that number by the end of 2018.’ ibid. Colin Stretch, Facebook
There’s a list of 37 terrorist organizations we have to ban. That list comes from Homeland Security in the US. ibid. email extract
Today, two of Iran’s top nuclear scientists were targeted by hit-squads in the capital Tehran. Storyville: Zero Days: Nuclear Cyber Sabotage, Alex Gibney, news, BBC 2021
Iran’s infrastructure is being targeted by a new and dangerously powerful cyber-worm. The so-caled Stuxnet worm is specifically designed it seems to infiltrate and sabotage real-world power plants and factories. ibid.
We absolutely knew that the facility that was being targeted had to be in Iran. ibid. programmer/investigator
The formula for a secret cyber weapon designed by the US and Israel fell into the hands of Russia and the very country it was meant to attack. ibid.
I really didn’t foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course – the computer industry didn’t even foresee that the century was going to end. Douglas Adams
Don’t believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose. Douglas Adams
Just move to the Internet. It’s great here. We get to live inside where the weather is always awesome. John Green
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts ... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding ... William Gibson, Neuromancer
Can we go back to using Facebook for what it was originally for – looking up exes to see how fat they got? Bill Maher
Everyone knows that the Internet is changing our lives, mostly because someone in the media has uttered that exact phrase every single day since 1993. However, it certainly appears that the main thing the Internet has accomplished is the normalization of amateur pornography. There is no justification for the amount of naked people on the World Wide Web, many of whom are clearly (clearly!) doing so for non-monetary reasons. Where were these people fifteen years ago? Were there really millions of women in 1986 turning to their husbands and saying, ‘You know, I would love to have total strangers masturbate to images of me deep-throating a titanium dildo, but there’s simply no medium for that kind of entertainment. I guess we'll just have to sit here and watch Falcon Crest again.’ Chuck Klosterman, ‘Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto’
The Internet is for lonely people. People should live. Charlton Heston
And people turn to the internet with the hope that in this virtual world, where real identity need not be disclosed, they will find someone before whom they could be their true self, without any pretensions and get an opportunity to release the pent-up emotions and feel light. Chitralekha Paul, Delayed Monsoon