Global Media News

From Unheard Garage Bands to Superstars...

In a brief article by Glenn Peoples, founder and editor of music industry blog Coolfer.com, titled, “MySpace: A Music Industry Perspective (Or If Video Killed The Radio Star Then Social Networks…),” Peoples describes the importance of a newly rising social network, MySpace, from a different point of view.

Yes, the MySpace we all know, used to love and may have deleted once Facebook became the new trending site. The article was written in 2006, and highlights the great benefits to the music industry.

According to Peoples, starting a band page is the easiest thing to do, and in 2010, it still is. An account with MySpace is free. Free are always a plus, and anyone can make one.

Artists/Groups are given the opportunity to post new music, photos, new tour dates and blog posts about anything. New fans are made, previous fans are regulars to their pages and the Artists/Groups normally message back to their fans comments and questions.

Another benefit that there is no need for a webmaster or fancy layouts. As MySpace has progressed over the years, those two options have changed.

The best benefits to band pages are unity. According to Peoples, “It allows everybody an equal chance to be heard. From superstars to unheard garage bands, everybody can have a page and anybody can become a friend of those artists, thereby becoming part of their online network. And MySpace offers the same tools to everybody, big or small or in the middle.”

Like my friend Gary and his band, Paint the Target.

Gary is the guy to go to if you want any information on the band progression to the top. He plays the bass, updates the bands MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts and promotes their music, merchandise and tour dates there as well. I guess you can call him the manager, but his story is like so many other small acts that become big. 

One of my favorite parts of this piece is, “Ten years ago I would often go to a concert without ever hearing the music of the opening band.Five years ago I would check to see if the opening band had a website, and if so hope that the band posted some audio. Now I know the band will have a MySpace page. Everybody does.One click and I can hear the band's music and find out some basic information. I never again have to go to a concert not knowing if I'll like the opening band. And if I do like the opening band, keeping track of them will be made easy.”

It is so true! Before most social networks existed, I would run out and buy the CD of an unknown Artist/Group and if I didn’t like it, I told all my friends who were thinking to checking out the same Artist/Group. If I enjoyed the Artist/Group, then my friends and I swapped CDs.

 Today, Artists/Groups normally have a MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and

Twitter accounts, whether they are famous or not. Justin Bieber didn’t become famous overnight. He had a whole YouTube fan base before his first album.

The beauty of this form of niche marketing is that someone is going to like you, even if it not the majority.

Countries Call Meeting To Reduce Cyberwarfare Threat

 Last July a few nations such as United States, Russia and China have met to talk about “reducing the threat of attacks on each other’s computers networks” according to the site The Washington Post.The nations had reached an agreement at the United Nation.  The group of nations asked that the U.N. set rules for behavior in the cyber world/ cyberspace. The U.N stated that they will crank up the cybersecurity. They have made some less fortunate countries computer protection systems stronger.

"It is a step forward," and"There's been an increased understanding of the international need to address the risk." are qoutes an Obama administration official  stated. I guess in they felt that they did a good thing by reaching an argement. Because of the fact that there has been issues in the past with crimes online in the cyberspace. Also U.S. had tried before to work with other nations to form global partnerships. “The Russians proposed a treaty in 1998 that would have banned the use of cyberspace for military purposes. But the United States has not been willing to agree to that proposal, given that the difficulty in attributing attacks makes it hard to monitor compliance.”

heres a video posted in late Jan, 2009 by David Sanger talking about the future of cyber warfare

 

 

We Are Not Safe... And It's Our Own Fault

I chose to post about our safety because we aren't safe on our computers, and it is mostly our own fault. When we browse the internet, every key stroke we enter is logged in a database somewhere. This is done we are told to protect us from various things such as terrorism because we all know that what you are e-mailing your grandmother is obviously a matter of national security. Regardless, one of the big key issues to our privacy however is who we are allowing into our computers.

The government is always going to be able to spy on us, it goes back to the whole big brother is watching and I'm cool with that. It's one of those things if you have nothing to hide whats the big deal, but, when hackers and people along those lines get into my computer it gets me mad, but its probably my own fault. All the time we go to websites that we know we shouldn't be at or we download programs or music illegally and inevitably we do different things. We may download a virus onto our computer which just deletes everything we own, or we can allow spy-ware to enter our computer and then your life can change after that.

When you get infected on your computer its not as simple as deleting the virus and everything is all good. Without you even knowing it, your computer was manipulated to send information to someone and that information can range from something as simple as your password to your blogging account, but most of the time its a more serious thing like credit card account information, or even worse your Social Security Number. We all know the dangers of browsing at unfamiliar websites, but alas we do it anyways and there was a prime example of this just within the past few years.

A few years ago  we experienced a world wide phenomenon. It was something that took our nation by storm. You were most likely victimized by it, and I definitely was. You see, we would get home from school or work and go check our e-mail and there would be something from our good friend in our in-box and it would say something like "Dude, check out this video of us at the party last weekend." So inevitably, you would click it because you believe your best friend, right? Well long behold, you click the link to the website and it brings you to some third party website and then this happens.

You would laugh and call or text your friend cause he got you again, but little did you know that someone planted a cookie into your computer and they could now harvest information about you. It's the little things like this that kill us, and that is why we are not safe, and it is our own fault.

 

 

What Is Crowdsourcing?

    Companies try new ways to advertise and get people to buy their products every day. One of these new ways to advertise is called crowd sourcing. To fully understand how this type of advertisement work you must know what crowd sourcing is. According to the Article “What is crowd sourcing” by Phil Dobbie it states that crowd sourcing is taking a job and asking people outside the company to do it. For example if Doritos company ask people to make a commercial and the best one gets picked, they save time and money figuring out what type of commercial to make next because people would be sending in their videos and they would just have to look through the videos that were sent in and pick the one they want.

    EBay is among these companies that are trying new things. In the article “EBay to Use Crowd Sourcing to test new features, starting with streamlined search” by Devindra Hardawar it talks about how EBay is trying to create new features and test them by using crowd sourcing. EBay is saving money by not having to pay testers and programmers to find out what’s wrong with its new features and since it’s the consumer that’s testing it they save money and get really good feedback and advice on how to make it better.

 

There is no cyberwar

In an article written by Ryan Singel called White House Cyber Czar:"There is no Cyberwar" Howard Schmidt, the new cybersecurity czar for the obama administration says that"There is no cyberwar. He says that the government needs to focus its cybersecurity efforts to fight online crime and espionage. His first move in his new job was to publish a 12-point cybersecurity plan, known as the Comprehensive national cybersecurity initiative. The plan was formed under a veil of secrecy in January 2008. He convinced the president that a cyberattack could cause more economic damage to the u.s

Cyber War Resources & Links

Here are a few recent articles and resources on the topic of Cyber War.

The New York Times "Topic" pages that archive articles on cyber war:

• Times Topics: "Computer Security (Cybersecurity)"
• A series of NYT articles on Cyberwar (2009-2010).

A PBS documentary web site provides a good basic introduction to topic:

• Frontline: Cyber War! PBS Documentary Web Site (April 2003)

A debate about the reality of the threat of cyber war:

• Intelligence Squared U.S. (IQ2US), Debate: "The Cyber War Threat Has Been Greatly Exaggerated."  June 8, 2010.

Here is the best single page of links to recent articles about Cyber War:

• "Research in Depth" from Intelligence Squared U.S. (IQ2US).

Investigative Reporter Seymour Hersh's recent article on Cyber War:

• Seymour Hersh, "Online Threat," The New Yorker, November 1, 2010

Former NSA Director Mike McConnell on the Cyberwar Threat:

• "Mike McConnell on how to win the cyber-war we're losing" Washington Post, February 28, 2010

Wired's "Threat Level" and "Danger Room" blogs often have posts about Info War and the Cyber Warfare debate:

• Cyber Warfare : Threat Level : Wired.com (Wired's Threat Level Blog)
• Info War : Danger Room : Wired.com (Wired's Danger Room Blog)

The Citizen Lab (Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto) and The SecDev Group have created a useful website that follows this topic:

• Information Warfare Monitor

 You may wish to check out some of their reports on 'cyber espionage':

• Information Warfare Monitor & Shadowserver Foundation, "Shadows in the Cloud: Investigating Cyber Espionage 2.0," April 2010.

Cyber Warfare

Cyber warfare takes place on computers and the internet through electronics.  It is a method of attack on other nations through computers. People are able to get backdoor access to computer systems which hold top secret information. You are able to interrupt a nation’s electrical grid and even attack government computer systems. It involves illegal utilization methods on the internet such as corruption, hacking, and spying. It is a global security threat and a weapon of choice in prospect conflicts. There are thousands of attacks on federal and private computer systems in the United States. Many of them are from China and Russia. In 2009 President Obama announced a government strategy to cyber attacks. It was a way to balance the countries answer to a growing threat with concerns that the government would be regularly dipping into internet traffic that knows no national boundaries stated in a New York Times Article. Senior officials say that the Pentagon plans to generate a new cyber command to systematize and educate for digital war and supervise others both offensive and defensive operations.

 

In an article Cyber-warfare ‘is growing threat’ IISS (International Institute for Strategic Studies)  director-general John Chipman said: "Despite evidence of cyber attacks in recent political conflicts, there is little appreciation internationally of how to assess cyber-conflict. We are now, in relation to the problem of cyber-warfare, at the same stage of intellectual development as we were in the 1950s in relation to possible nuclear war." Hostile governments could hide behind rapidly advancing technology to launch attacks without being detected since there is no control over cyber weapons. In January 2010 Google launched an investigation into cyber attacks originating in China which targeted the email accounts of human rights activists. The Pentagon created US Cyber Command which was the opening a cyber-security operations centre attached to GCHQ at Cheltenham. William Lynn, US deputy defense secretary, described the cyber challenge as unprecedented. The most known cyber-warfare that took place was Estonia in 2007. The attack was from Russia. More than 1 million computers were used to jam websites from businesses, media, as well as the government.

Virtual worlds aid cyberpsychologists to learn more

One of the cyberpsychologists 'Dr. Suler' has been involved in virtual world research for more than a decade now. He has written books on it. He has been completely dedicated and imersed himself into the virtual world completely. Here is the image of Dr. Suler's avatar improving from the newbie in Second Life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before joining Second Life, he worked as an avatar of Palace. He has familiarized himself completely with the virtual worlds in these past years.

Since avatars in virtual worlds represent those traits of the people which they may hide in real life, or may at least want to have but don't, it is easier for the psychologists to identify their personality. According to Dr. Suler, you may not see the aspects of personality in real life interaction with that person, that you are easily able to identify in the virtual world, and that person may not even consciously aware of it.

Nowadays, that cyber world interaction is becoming more common and assimilated in the actual lives of the people, more and more psychologists are working on it. And it is a very interest aspect of psychology. Psychologists do need to come up with new techniques and psychological terms related to the cyberworld and virtual world now. The visual aspects of the 3D virtual worlds make it easier for people to execute their personality in the form of avatars and this makes it easier for the psychologists to point out various aspects of their personality, and hence although cyberpsychologists were already working with other forms of online interactions, the visual form of virtual worlds seem even more attractive to analyze. Dr. Suler is studying the psychology of avatars and Graphical media space and chat communities.

This is now a very common way of studying human psychology. A lot of activity online is being studied by many cyberpsychologist, and as human's life is becoming more and more affiliated to the online world, it is becoming more and more common.

With the help of American Nurses Foundation and Midwest Nursing Research Soceity, Melissa Pinto-Foltz, a post doctoral scholar, and an instructor at Case Western Reserve University is working with a group to develop an e-Smart-MH program for young adults with mental illnesses. These young adults that are already affiliated to technology and virtual worlds, are encourage to interact with the provider avatars and psychologists online, when they hit the rough spot, virtual coaches pop up to guide the patient.

Therefore, a lot of psychological work is now being done on the latest form of online interaction of users, that is the 3D visual virtual worlds.

Virtual Worlds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Will we be living in virtual worlds?

Click to Listen to our Webcast!

This Week on the Digital Revolution Webcast:

• Demographics: Who is playing these games?  And Why? 
• Sims: Building your own perfect civilization
• World of Warcraft: Playing world domination games from your livingroom 
• Play Station3 and XBox: From game consoles to virtual worlds
• Virtual economies: How the military and corporations use the virtual world to their advantage
• Cyber-psychology: Psychotherapy in virtual worlds
• Virtual Futures: What does the future hold for the virtual realms 

As you avid listeners will notice DJ Joey Guido will not be hosting today he has passed the mic over to Jose Miranda.  Thanks for checking out the show and I hope you find it both informative and interesting. Please feel free to leave comments concerning the show's topic coverage and delivery.

 

GOOGLE AND GOVERNMENT MONITORING

I found an article on google search via http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/opinion/02sun3.html. The article touches on how google plans to work with governments of several countries in providing the with vital information about it's users. This according to the article, was done by Google to help "promote a more informed discussion about government monitoring the internet". The tool helps get rid of information that goes agains governmental laws and will aide not only the government; but everybody "in seeing exactly where the problems lie"