industryterm:computer network

#RIP Robert Taylor, founder of the idea of the internet

▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/technology/robert-taylor-innovator-who-shaped-modern-computing-dies-at-85.html

His seminal moment came in 1966. He had just taken a new position at the Pentagon — director of the Information Processing Techniques Office, part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA — and on his first day on the job it became immediately obvious to him what the office lacked and what it needed.

At the time, ARPA was funding three separate computer research projects and using three separate computer terminals to communicate with them. Mr. Taylor decided that the department needed a single computer network to connect each project with the others.

His idea led to the Arpanet, the forerunner of the internet.

Très intéressant extrait du livre « How Not to Network a Nation : The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet », racontant les malheurs de Viktor Glushkov en essayant de convaincre le Politburo de faire de l’URSS une nation connectée.

▻https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-invented-the-internet-and-why-it-didn-t-work

#Internet #СССР

“But the very first connection of a Soviet citizen to a worldwide computer network occurred much earlier, in 1982. Understandably, this came as a surprise to the network’s users, as most of them at that point were American or European.” Le titre de l’article est ridicule (cela n’a rien à voir avec l’Internet) mais c’est une jolie histoire

▻https://globalvoices.org/2015/12/29/how-the-soviet-union-sent-its-first-man-to-the-internet-in-1982

#réseaux_informatiques #modem #BBS #histoire #Union_Soviétique

Adam Curtis - NOW THEN (BBC blogs)
▻http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/NO-FUTURE

http://static.bbc.co.uk/programmeimages/512xn/images/p023l4mv.jpg

ALADDIN is the name of an incredibly powerful computer network that is based in a tiny town called East Wenatchee - it’s in the middle of nowhere in Washington State in North America.

Aladdin guides the investment of over $11 trillion of assets around the world.

This makes it incredibly powerful. Aladdin is owned by a company called Blackrock that is the biggest investor in the world. It manages as much money as all the hedge-funds and the private equity firms in the world put together. And its computer watches over 7% of all the investments in the world.

(...) its aim is to not change the world - but to keep it stable. Preventing any development thats too risky. And when you are moving $11 trillion around to do that -it is a really important new force.

But it’s boring. And there is no story. Just patterns.

(...) It is the modern world of power - and it’s incredibly boring. Nothing to film, run by a cautious man who is in no way a wolf of Wall Street. It’s how power works today. It hides in plain sight - through sheer boringness and dullness.

No wonder we find it difficult to tell stories about it.

Une promenade dans le monde du #secret, de la #surveillance, de l’analyse booléenne, d’#ELIZA, du #big_data et de la #prédiction, où l’on voit un vieux sujet de Duncan Campbell (le futur découvreur d’Echelon), l’histoire d’Ethel Voynich (fille de George Boole), et bien d’autres merveilles des archives de la BBC.

http://static.bbc.co.uk/programmeimages/448xn/images/p023kv8l.jpg

et au final ce montage d’Adam Curtis
▻http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p023kq11

Report: Web monitoring devices made by U.S. firm #Blue_Coat detected in #Iran, #Sudan - The Washington Post
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/report-web-monitoring-devices-made-by-us-firm-blue-coat-detected-in-iran-sudan/2013/07/08/09877ad6-e7cf-11e2-a301-ea5a8116d211_story.html

American-made devices used for Internet monitoring have been detected on government and commercial computer networks in Iran and Sudan, in apparent violation of U.S. sanctions that ban the sale of goods, services or technology to the autocratic states, according to new research.

#surveillance

Facebook’s ’3.74 degrees of separation’ is a world away from being significant | Matt Parker | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/23/facebook-degrees-of-separation?fb=optOut

The area of mathematics known as “graph theory” looks at complicated networks and tries to understand their fundamental characteristics. While this is vital work when it comes to building robust computer networks, it does not tell us anything of great note about social degrees of separation. It’s not socially meaningful that a friend of your friends is buddies with an acquaintance of someone else’s pal. It’s just an innate feature of large, tangled networks.

So as much as I hate to maths on a parade, that isn’t actually very amazing. If everyone only had the median 100 friends this report found, that means you already have 10,000 friends of friends. If you include their 100 friends each, you’re at 1 million people within three degrees of separation. At five degrees of separation you have 10 billion people linked to you, which is greater than the Earth’s population.