Notes ..

The Virtual Revolution ..

Explores role of Internet in contemporary politics.

• 1/4 of our world is now connected to the world.
• The web has allowed everything to be more open and everything less closed up.
• The web is shifting power in times we would never have imagined - Its reinventing warfare and is creating cultural cults. 

Twitter was developed in San Francisco 2006, apart with facebook its all called Social Networking, for new ways to stay in touch with people.

Iran riots (June 2009) occurred, riot police banned the media from broadcasting what had happened, turning people to Twitter to vent their anger, after 18 days there was over 2 million tweets were sent of out Iran from over a million people. 200 000 tweets were posted every hour.
Once the government found out they blocked websites such as Twitter.

The webs shaking up the worlds politics because it can capture information from a crown of eye witnesses and then it can transmit it globally in real time. 

      - Its unmediated    

      - It's interactive 

      - It's mobile 

• The web is like a tool box for protests unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
• The people who made Twitter aren't surprised by its transformation from celebrity news to weapon of revolution. 
• The webs linked information is piped through an older physical system, the internet that operates beyond the jurisdiction of any one country and works against central control.
• The internet was originally designed to protect the most powerful nation of modern time. 

Vint Cerf - Co-inventor of the Internet.

Underlining Cerf's work was a technology called packet switching, it lies in the heart of the virtual revolution.

Part of his intentions when making the internet was to build a system that did not have any central control.

Packet Switching 

• Takes a piece of information and breaks it up into small pieces. These are then sent over a network (not in the right order, or the same line). At the receivers end the packets are re-combined in the right order and the data is made whole again. 
• The perfect tool for computers to talk to each other because it allows for a huge amount of data to be transmitted fast through multi roots all at once.
• Unstoppable flow of data.

The internet is probably the most democratic opportunity for people to express themselves and to get information. 

In the 21st Century, if you had something to say in public, you couldn't. If you was a citizen but not a media profession you could not broadcast a message not matter how hard you tried.

WikiLeaks 

• Allows people to anonymously blow the whistle on governments and corporations, the people who run it have made some serious enemies therefore keeping a low profile.
• Has a database of over 1.2 million documents.
• Maintains it's own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military grade inscriptions to protect sources and other confidential information.       
• February 2008 came a court injunction by a Swiss bank, after it published allegations about tax invasions. 
• WikiLeaks website was taken down by court, however it made half the world more interested in the banks documents. 
• The New York Times published their IP address, CBS News said freedom of speech has a number and also published their IP adress. 

Austin Heap (25 year old San Franciscan) used his programming skills to develop haystack, a programme that hides in everyday websites, it allowed people to use the Twitter and other social networking sites in countries it was ban in (Iran). 

The web seems to be taking us back to a world before politics, a world of direct action, people can express their views simply by login in.

The web is this fantastic resource for transmitting information and gathering people together around an issue even in a particular place.

China has more people online than any other nation in the world - 253 million, so the webs effect on politics is a huge threat to the state and yet the technology has improved Chinas growth.  

The efforts China puts into censoping the web - 30 000 Chinese secretly police the web full-time.

The government in China started recuiting Internet commentaters, citizens who would write articles and Post comments all over the web in support of the official party line.

Censorship is two things, one which is blocking and the other which is guiding.

Petter Thiel - Founder of Paypal, a revolutionary international money transfer system, a new global currency. Petter Thiel believed Paypal was going to be the new currency and how it would change how the world used and saw money.

He was also a key early investor of Facebook.

Facebook now has 350 million users world wide, if it was a county it would be the third biggest population in the world. 

Paypal:

• Money can be moved across national borders through abstract cyber space.
• 2008 it was handling 60 billion dollars in transaction every year.  
• Origins of Paypal lie in Stanford University. 

The web has led to all kinds of new social groups.

Before the web, extremist were scattered around the world, the web then linked them all, gave them new tools allowing them to seize the initiative. 

The web acts like a virtual portable homeland.

The concept of a portable homeland refers to how different groups operating in different countries in the world who have similar aims can use the internet as a space that links all of them. So the internet replaces the borders in some of these countires for each of the groups which allows them to link as if they all live in one place.

The most common form of cyber attract is called a denial of services, one computer sends instructions to a network of computer known as a "botnet", these are just ordinary domestic computers that have been hacked and are now under the control of cyper warriors. This network bombards the chosen site with millions of requests, the site goes into meltdown and cannot respond which means no one can access the website, hence denial of service.  

"All you have to do is pick up a newspaper and see if there's any conflict which will tell you if there's any conflict in the cyber world."

At the moment, 1/4 of the planet is connected, what will happen when the remaining 75% comes online? Will the web help us to achieve greater global understanding? Or will we face new dangers that we never even imagined? 

The web confronts the world with both an incredible opportunity and incredible responsibility.  

The question for the future is, how will we use it?