Adam Clark Estes

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“Hackers On The Moon?”

February 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Whitey has already been on the moon, and now hackers want in. A note from Adam Clark Estes on Atlantic Wire about the increasingly outré plans of attention-seeking hackers, who are Anonymous but don’t wish to be anonymous:

“‘At the Chaos Communication Camp 2011 Jens Ohlig, Lars Weiler, and Nick Farr proposed a daunting task: to land a hacker on the Moon by 2034,’ Tom Hardy writes on The Powerbase. ‘The plan calls for three separate phases: 1. Establishing an open, free, and globally accessible satellite communication network, 2. Put a human into orbit, 3. Land on the Moon.’ 

Hackers on the moon? Promoting these crazy-sounding plans may be a way for older school hackers to steal back the spotlight from LulzSec and its sometimes meaningless website takedowns in 2011. Even their fellow hackers made fun of the group at the time of the assaults. ‘They were rampaging, and clearly not willing to stop,’ one hacker who calls himself Asherah told The New York Times last summer. ‘Despite the rumors, they’re not very accomplished hackers. They’re attention-drunk.'”

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The World’s Cheapest Tablet Computer

October 5, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Going a step or two further than Amazon with its Kindle Fire, the Indian government is hoping to bridge the digital gap between haves and have-nots with the Aakash, which is the lowest priced tablet in the world. Having access to seemingly infinite information hasn’t necessarily enriched Amercians  or made us significantly smarter–not yet anyhow–but those long denied the basics tend to use tools more aggressively than those of us in more comfortable situations. From Adam Clark Estes’ Atlantic Wire post:

“On Wednesday, Indian officials proudly touted the launch of the Aakash, a government-backed tablet that costs only $35 for students and $50 for everyone else. The WiFi-enable touchscreen device is the size of a paperback book, can handle video conferencing and comes with 4GB of storage. Some testers complained that it’s a little slow, but did you see the price? The government is giving away the first 100,000 to students for free. ‘This is not just for us. This is for all of you who are disempowered,’ Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said. ‘This is for all those who live on the fringes of society.’

The idealistic rhetoric behind the launch of what’s being billed as world’s cheapest tablet is not restricted to the Indian government. It seems like everyone has high hopes for the potential of ultra-cheap technology like the Aakash, which means ‘sky’ in Hindi. The Washington Post calls it the ‘tablet computer to lift villagers out of poverty,’ Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of DataWind who’s manufacturing the tablets, boasted to the BBC, ‘We’ve created a product that will finally bring affordable computing and internet access to the masses.’ The inverse relationship between internet access and poverty is not a new idea. Sha Zukang, the United Nation’s Under Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs told the crowd at last year’s Internet Governance Forum, ‘Through both simple and sophisticated techniques, the internet can help eradicate poverty, educate people, sustain the environment and create healthier populations.'”

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