The Internet, as photographed by ​Peter Garritano

Quietly tucked away in a few unassuming buildings in lower Manhattan, massive flows of data pulse through some of the world’s largest and most heavily guarded hubs of global internet infrastructure.

​Peter Garritano is a photographer based in New York City.

See also

• The seven keys to the internet — “It sounds like the stuff of science fiction: seven keys, held by individuals from all over the world, that together control security at the core of the web. James Ball joins a private ceremony, and finds the reality is rather closer to The Office than The Matrix.”
• Ye olde submarine cable map — TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map has been updated for 2015. The latest edition depicts 299 cable systems that are currently active, under construction, or expected to be fully-funded by the end of 2015.
• The 10 Immutable Laws of Computer Security, by Scott Culp c.2000

Black MIDI

Black MIDI songs will kill your brain and your computer

This Exists: Have you ever been listening to a normal song and thought, “I really wish this normal song had 280 million notes and took up 1.1 terabytes of data and was literally unplayable on any computer?” Of course, you’re only human. Black MIDI is the hypnotic madness you’ve been craving.

Black MIDI is a sequenced MIDI file so dense with notes, it literally just appears to be jet black.

[Black MIDI] Nyan Trololol

See also

• This Exists — Digging up the pop culture peculiarities and nonsense that exists in the darkness on the edge of town.
• Rhizome: The Impossible Music of Black MIDI

• YouTube Poop — …does YTP ⋮ qualify as a “statement” of sorts? Is it a way to reclaim these pop culture symbols and create something that is truly our own? Or are they just the annoying byproduct of having video editing software and too much time on your hands?
• Mechanical techno demonstration — Made at Lime Wharf Machines Room as part of Rhythm & Drone Research & Development residency, September 2015
• The “millennial whoop” is taking over pop music — The same exact whooping, melodic sequence has been showing up in a surprisingly high number of recent pop songs

Daily papers: an artist’s crafty emojis

The Guardian: Kashia Kennedy uses a scalpel, tweezers and double-sided tape to create these tiny works, which easily fit in the palm of a hand for her #emojieveryday on Instagram.

“For some reason in 80-plus days I haven’t been able to bear the thought of skipping a day. I’d be so annoyed with myself.”

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The inventor of emoji on his famous creations

The Guardian: MoMA in New York has just added the first emoji to their collection – Shigetaka Kurita explains how he designed them.

“I was part of a team that spent about two years designing the first emoji for the launch of i-mode [NTT DoCoMo’s mobile internet system] in 1999. It limited users to up to 250 characters in an email, so we thought emoji would be a quick and easy way for them to communicate. Plus using only words in such a short message could lead to misunderstandings … It’s difficult to express yourself properly in so few characters.”

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[Updated: Making this a Guardian / emoji trifecta post.]

The Emojibator: how a euphemistic fruit became an actual sex toy

The idea of turning an eggplant (emoji-speak for penis) into a vibrator started out as a late-night joke. Now founder Jaime Jandler can’t make enough.

“Our mission is to destigmatize masturbation and promote healthy sexuality” – one emoji-themed sex toy at a time. “We don’t think sex needs to be taken seriously all the time,” he added. “So we’ll make more unique products that are both intimate and silly.”

See also

• That emoji does not mean what you think it means — Since emoji are designed differently across platforms, sometimes your text messages might get lost in translation.
• 100 new emoji, by Avery Monsen — featuring: ‘A Box Which Must Never Be Opened’, ‘Three Worms Pretending To Be One Long Worm’ and ‘A Spectre Rises From A Seven Layer Fiesta Dip’.

How does YouTube actually work?

Nat and Lo: After making (and uploading) videos to YouTube for about a year, we finally decided to go behind the scenes of YouTube and ask the YouTube engineers how YouTube actually works.

What does YouTube do to your video after you upload it?

What actually happens when you watch a YouTube video?

See also

• YouTube compression — Brandon from RocketJump shares the settings he uses to get the best quality and the smallest file-size video possible before uploading to YouTube.
• YouTube: The Medium Is The Message — The largest ingredient of online video is the awareness that every consumer is a possible creator.
• YouTube Poop — The so-called ‘subversive remix’ is not a new phenomenon.

US government framework for handling cyberattacks

The Verge: The White House now has a color-coded scale for cybersecurity threats

The Presidential Policy Directive on United States Cyber Incident Coordination builds on the action plan that Obama laid out earlier this year, and it’s intended to create a clear standard of when and how government agencies will handle incidents. It also comes with a new threat level scale, assigning specific colors and response levels to the danger of a hack.

The cyberattack severity scale is somewhat vague, but it’s supposed to make sure that the agencies involved in cybersecurity — the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence — respond to threats with the same level of urgency and investment.

See also

• The 10 Immutable Laws of Computer Security
• The seven keys to the internet

The business of GIFs: Then and now

Vox: The GIF was invented in 1989. And since its beginning, the GIF has been used to make money. At first, GIFs were sold as placeholders for the web of the ’90s and early 2000s. But after web design became informed by professional standards, gifs lost their role as placeholders. Eventually they became tools of expression, turning snippets of video from popular culture into bite size communication devices. Today, a few big tech companies are trying to capitalize on this new use of GIFs, partnering with brands who want their content to be used as communication.

See also

• Reply All episode #61 Baby King — This week, Alex stumbles upon the weirdest gifs ever made, and goes hunting for their creators.
• That emoji does not mean what you think it means
• How to speak on the Internet

How to speak on the Internet

How To Speak On The Internet (MMM™)

Satchell Drakes: After spending quite a few years on Twitter, I’ve had my fair share of getting pulled into toxic moments. I’ve also made some of my closest friends on there. I wanted to put together a resource that might help people share their worldview in a manner that is effective and conscious of their context. Mike McHargue of The Liturgists Podcast essentially did all of the work and tackled this issue the best with a matrix of four questions to help with just that. Here’s essentially an overdramatic Retweet of that matrix.

See also

• That emoji does not mean what you think it means — Since emoji are designed differently across platforms, sometimes your text messages might get lost in translation.
• Why Are You So Angry? — A six-part series on the male gamer’s relationship to feminism.
• This Video Will Make You Angry — How ideas spread as ‘thought germs’ over the internet.

See also

Mapping the Online World — an atlas redrawn according to the number of registrations within each country’s internet domain* — whether .uk for the UK, .de for Germany, .cn for China, and so on.

On a map of the world scaled to the most popular top-level domains, the Pacific island of Tokelau reigns supreme.

Wired: With more than 31 million .tk websites, the tiny New Zealand territory has more domain registrations than any other nation or territory in the world. It might measure just four square miles and have little over 1,400 residents, but Tokelau’s .tk dwarfs the rest of the world.

Domain map of the world

‘Online Europe’ is so much larger than geographic Europe because of the high rates of internet adoption by countries in this region. The UK, for example, is only the 21st largest country in the world by population, and the 78th by area. But in terms of internet use, it’s right at the top of the table.

Domain map of Europe

The USA, on the other hand, is an anomaly. Despite having high levels of internet use, e-commerce and online innovation, there are comparatively few registrations under .us, its official country-code domain. Americans and American businesses tend to prefer .com, which at around 123 million registrations is the world’s most common domain.

• Ye olde submarine cable map — TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map; the physical internet.
• Tor Flow: Mapping the Tor network — a visualization of the vast amounts of traffic streaming between its many nodes, delineating a map of the internet as it can’t otherwise be seen.

See also

Max Braun: My Bathroom Mirror Is Smarter Than Yours

Welcome to my bathroom. Please excuse the carefully arranged mess around the medicine cabinet and its pristine mirror surface.

To the right of where my face would be we have the time and date. To the left is the current weather and a 24-hour forecast. Below are some recent news headlines.

Other concepts I’m playing with are traffic, reminders, and essentially anything that has a Google Now card. The idea is that you don’t need to interact with this UI. Instead, it updates automatically and there’s an open-ended voice search interface for anything else.

Medium: My Bathroom Mirror Is Smarter Than Yours

• Phones for the people — What changes when you stop designing phones for companies and start designing them for people?
• PirateBox: Your own Internet in a box — a DIY anonymous offline file-sharing and communications system built with free software and inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware.
• Grovemade make gorgeous handcrafted tech accessories — Based in Portland, Oregon (where else?) Grovemade produce gorgeous tech accessories that I really, really want.

YouTube Poop

YouTube Poops… is there more than meets the eye?

PBS Idea Channel: The so-called ‘subversive remix’ is not a new phenomenon. Artists from all mediums have been destroying established cultural symbols for the sake of making a statement for decades. So does YTP also qualify as a “statement” of sorts? Is it a way to reclaim these pop culture symbols and create something that is truly our own? Or are they just the annoying byproduct of having video editing software and too much time on your hands?

See also

• Wikipedia: YouTube Poop (often called YTP for short) is a type of absurdist video mashup, created by editing pre-existing media sources for the purposes of humor, entertainment, shock, and/or confusion.
• YouTube: The Medium Is The Message — The largest ingredient of online video is the awareness that every consumer is a possible creator.
• How to make a supercut — Co.Create interviews Nick Douglas about his supercuts videos.

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This ‘Tor Flow’ visualization shows information flow between relay servers of the Tor network for a selected day.

The Tor network is a group of volunteer-operated servers (relays) that allows people to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Tor’s users employ this network by connecting through a series of virtual tunnels rather than making a direct connection, thus allowing both organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.

(via Boing Boing)

See also: Drone strikes: an infographic; Edward Snowden on freedom; ‘1984’ stealth fashion for the under-surveillance society; Paranoid Android: Silent Circle’s Blackphone 2.

Why Are You So Angry?

Ian Danskin (aka Innuendo Studios) has just posted the final part in his six-part series on the male gamer’s relationship to feminism.

Part 1: A Short History of Anita Sarkeesian

The internet is full of Angry Jacks, and Jack is not exclusively, but is typically, male. He’s also commonly white, and/or straight, and/or cis, and/or raised middle class. Which is to say, he usually looks like me.

To people who look like me, Jack is often a nuisance. To people who don’t look like me, Jack is frequently dangerous.

Part 2: Angry Jack

[…] And you’re thinking, or maybe even starting to say, “I shouldn’t have to have this debate right now. I just wanted to go to a fucking party. I’m normal! This is a normal thing to do!” And all she said was “no thanks, I don’t drink,” but that doesn’t matter, what you heard was “you’re a bad person.”

Russia’s “Internet Research Agency” troll farm

The New York Times looks into ‘The Agency’, a pro-Kremlin propaganda operation that has “industrialized the art of trolling”.

The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.

Ludmila Savchuk worked at the agency for two months.

The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted. Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day.

Savchuk told me she shared an office with about a half-dozen teammates. It was smaller than most, because she worked in the elite Special Projects department. While other workers churned out blandly pro-Kremlin comments, her department created appealing online characters who were supposed to stand out from the horde. Savchuk posed as three of these creations, running a blog for each one on LiveJournal. One alter ego was a fortuneteller named Cantadora. The spirit world offered Cantadora insight into relationships, weight loss, feng shui — and, occasionally, geopolitics. Energies she discerned in the universe invariably showed that its arc bent toward Russia. She foretold glory for Vladimir Putin, defeat for Barack Obama and Petro Poroshenko. The point was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person.

Savchuk’s revelations about the agency have fascinated Russia not because they are shocking but because they confirm what everyone has long suspected: The Russian Internet is awash in trolls.

Previously: A professional Russian propaganda troll tells all

A professional Russian propaganda troll tells all

Dmitry Volchek and Daisy Sindelar talk to former professional Russian troll Marat Burkhard about his well paid work perpetuating a pro-Kremlin dialogue online:

There are thousands of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and vKontakte, all increasingly focused on the war in Ukraine. Many emanate from Russia’s most famous “troll factory,” the Internet Research center, an unassuming building on St. Petersburg’s Savushkina Street, which runs on a 24-hour cycle. In recent weeks, former employees have come forward to talk to RFE/RL about life inside the factory, where hundreds of people work grinding, 12-hour shifts in exchange for 40,000 rubles ($700) a month or more.

St. Petersburg blogger Marat Burkhard spent two months working at Internet Research in the department tasked with clogging the forums on Russia’s municipal websites with pro-Kremlin comments.

RFE/RL: How many departments are there at Internet Research?

Burkhard: It’s a modern building, four floors. There’s a LiveJournal department, a news department, a department where they create all sorts of images and demotivators (Editor’s Note: Demotivators are satirical graphics that tend to undermine their subject matter), a department where they make videos. But I was never in those departments. Each of them has its own office, tables, and computers, and no one prowls around from place to place. Everyone stays in their spot.

The entire article is fascinating and includes multiple example case studies. These trolls work in teams of three — a troika with a well defined process: Villain Troll > Link Troll > Picture Troll.

Burkhard: Our department commented on posts. Every city and village in Russia has its own municipal website with its own comments forum. People would write something on the forum — some kind of news — and our task was to comment on it. We did it by dividing into teams of three. One of us would be the “villain,” the person who disagrees with the forum and criticizes the authorities, in order to bring a feeling of authenticity to what we’re doing. The other two enter into a debate with him — “No, you’re not right; everything here is totally correct.” One of them should provide some kind of graphic or image that fits in the context, and the other has to post a link to some content that supports his argument. You see? Villain, picture, link.

Translation: Ukraine, rise up! Southeast, sit down, don’t make a fuss, and put up with it.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: One Professional Russian Troll Tells All (via)

See also

• Teens, social media and privacy
• The adventures of Russian Man
• This video will make you angry

See also

TeleGeography’s 2015 submarine cable map

TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map has been updated for 2015. The latest edition depicts 299 cable systems that are currently active, under construction, or expected to be fully-funded by the end of 2015.

The map provides latency from the United States, United Kingdom, and Hong Kong to several other countries, presented in milliseconds of round trip delay.

The map is adorned with images of common causes of cable faults, including fishing vessels, anchors, and trenches on the ocean floor, as well as cable maintenance vessels responsible for repairs. In homage to vintage maps, it also includes ornate illustrations of mythical sea monsters.

Inset illustrations depict steps in the cable laying process, including the receiving of a submarine cable on shore and the coiling of cable within a ship’s tank.

Inset infographics provide lit capacity data from 2002-2013 for the trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific, US-Latin America, and Europe-Asia via Egypt routes.

The map depicts routes of 278 in-service and 21 planned undersea cables. Capital cities for each country are also provided.

(via Vox)

• Climate change map of the world
• Richard Edes Harrison: Mapping the world at war
• Canyonlands National Park texture and shaded relief map

This Video Will Make You Angry

CGP Grey on how ideas spread as ‘thought germs’ (memes in the traditional sense) over the internet, how these ideas use our emotions to survive longer and how ‘opposing thought germs’ (divisive ideas) can survive indefinitely.

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In a similar vein, here is a near-future startup promo video by Tom Scott:
The Bubble: imagine the web without trolls, or shocks, or spam

What if you could have a perfect filter for the web? Anything you’d regret seeing or reading: it’s gone before you even see it. Welcome to the Bubble.

The 4 types of audio that people share online

Public radio produces a lot of audio — but it doesn’t always get the attention on sharing platforms that it might deserve. Our friends at NPR Digital Services want to fix that, which has led to a series of experiments. Here, NPR’s Eric Athas shares some of what they’ve found.

Nieman lab: From explainers to sounds that make you go “Whoa!”: The 4 types of audio that people share

See also: What can make audio go viral? NPR experiments with building earworms for social media

Making podcasts: Great advice from the professionals

Various professional podcasters talk about how they make great podcasts…

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Jason Snell is a tech writer who hosts several podcasts while guesting on many more. He has written several excellent blog posts about podcasting, starting with some general advice: Don’t be intimidated.

“The great thing about podcasting is that anyone can do it. You don’t need to have access to a broadcasting company’s radio transmitter and studios packed with equipment. You can reach people with your voice right now.”

QuickTime Player is a great podcast recording tool, and it’s on every Mac.

Jason then followed up with How I podcast: Recording and Editing, two posts full of practical advice.

“Not to get all philosophical on you, but editing audio is a lot of work, and depending on what kind of a podcast you’re producing, most of it is probably not necessary. Just because you can edit a podcast within an inch of its life—clearing out pauses, removing every um and uh and awkward pause and spoken digression—doesn’t mean you must.”

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Marco Arment has some strong opinions on the importance of improving the technical quality of your podcast:

“Making your podcast easy to listen to is worth some effort.”

“Just as blogs need sensible fonts, colors, layouts, and spacing to be comfortably readable, podcasts need to be listenable. And you can’t make easily listenable podcasts without at least basic equipment and production.”

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Dan Benjamin is founder of the 5by5 podcast network and has shared a great deal of information at podcastmethod.co. There’s a comprehensive equipment guide, a series of podcasts (of course) and this video on proper microphone technique…

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Alex Blumberg is a public radio producer known for his work with This American Life and Planet Money. He recently co-founded Gimlet Media, a podcast network. Alex documented the early days of his new company in the network’s first podcast, StartUp).

Tim Ferriss interviewed Blumberg for his own podcast: How to Create a Blockbuster Podcast. It’s a special two-part episode, and the second part is a 40 minute excerpt from a masterclass Alex taught on creativeLIVE, on the art of the interview, what to ask, the power of the right question, and more.

Amongst other things Blumberg advises that you don’t ask yes or no questions, instead ask “tell me about the time when…” or “tell me the story of…” questions.

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Those links again:

• Jason Snell: Want to do a podcast? Don’t be intimidated
• Jason Snell: How I podcast: Recording
• Jason Snell: How I podcast: Editing
• Marco Arment: Easy Listening
• Dan Benjamin: The Podcast Method
• Alex Blumberg: How to Create a Blockbuster Podcast
• Alex Blumberg: StartUp

See also: How to script and record narration for video.

You are not a “content creator”

Jonathan Mann on the objectionable term ‘content creator’.

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“I am confident that enchanted objects will change how we live. They will change health. They will change transportation. They will change housing. They will change how we understand our own habits around energy and resource conservation, and they will even help us with creativity and expression. I’m confident there’s a promising future in terms of this new way of interacting and positioning ourselves relative to technology. I think one of the biggest challenges is to not think about this as computing. I don’t think there is a ‘future of computing’.”
David Rose on the IoT’s impact on our relationship with technology.

Amazon: Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things by David Rose.

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Emoji masks

Why privacy matters

Glenn Greenwald: Why privacy matters

Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters to see — and write about — the Edward Snowden files, with their revelations about the United States’ extensive surveillance of private citizens. In this searing talk, Greenwald makes the case for why you need to care about privacy, even if you’re “not doing anything you need to hide.”

(via Boing Boing)

This is Phil Fish

This is Phil Fish, a case study in internet celebrity by Innuendo Studios:

I’m not entirely sure what to expect from having this online. I suspect it’s either going to be really contentious, or go largely unnoticed. Unnoticed, because, hey, it’s YouTube. Contentious because I don’t come down on the side of “Phil is an asshole,” largely because whether or not Phil is an asshole is irrelevant to the point I’m making (and similarly irrelevant to my life), but talking about Phil and saying anything other than “Phil is an asshole” tends to make you a lot of enemies. Sorta like how not blowing smoke up the PS4’s ass proves that you’re a Microsoft stooge.

Whatever. Enjoy!

(via @viticci)

PirateBox: Your own Internet in a box

PirateBox is a DIY anonymous offline file-sharing and communications system built with free software and inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware.

PirateBox creates offline wireless networks designed for anonymous file sharing, chatting, message boarding, and media streaming. You can think of it as your very own portable offline Internet in a box!

When users join the PirateBox wireless network and open a web browser, they are automatically redirected to the PirateBox welcome page. Users can anonymously chat, post images or comments on the bulletin board, watch or listen to streaming media, or upload and download files inside their web browser.

To get started you will need one wireless router, a USB flash drive, an Ethernet cable and a computer with ethernet port, with an optional 5V/USB Battery.

piratebox.cc

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OpPornPixie: Molly Crabapple’s self-portrait,
defaced with the hateful things people say about her on the Internet

Molly Crabapple is an American artist, known for her work for The New York Times, The Paris Review, CNN, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Der Spiegel, Marvel Comics, DC Comics, and as a regular columnist for Vice. (W)

The Kindle’s wink to Fiona

Robin Sloan:

If you own one of Amazon’s e-readers, there’s a good chance you’ve accessed the “Manage Your Kindle” page at some point.

Do you notice anything strange about that URL? What’s fiona? An acronym, perhaps. Functional… Internet-Oriented… Native… Application? File I/O Network Access?

No. It’s not a what but a who.

Fiona Hackworth is character in The Diamond Age, a science fiction novel written by Neal Stephenson, published in 1992 with a plot that hinges on the theft of a kind of super-book.

A super-book that is engrossing, interactive, networked; with pages that change before your eyes; that knows more or less everything.

A science-fictional object that served as the lodestone for Amazon’s efforts, in the early 2000s, to develop an e-reader.

On Amazon’s campus in Seattle, many buildings are named for company concepts and codename. Neal Stephenson visited one.

The light was perfect and I couldn't help myself pic.twitter.com/7eOcZxSLvt

— Neal Stephenson (@nealstephenson) July 19, 2013

The Kindle wink is a piece written by a collective publishing on Medium as The Message.

The seven keys to the internet

Meet the seven people who hold the keys to worldwide internet security

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction: seven keys, held by individuals from all over the world, that together control security at the core of the web. James Ball joins a private ceremony, and finds the reality is rather closer to The Office than The Matrix.
James Ball, The Guardian

The keyholders have been meeting four times a year, twice on the east coast of the US and twice here on the west, since 2010. All have long backgrounds in internet security and work for various international institutions. They were chosen for their geographical spread as well as their experience – no one country is allowed to have too many keyholders. They travel to the ceremony at their own, or their employer’s, expense.

What these men and women control is the system at the heart of the web: the domain name system, or DNS. This is the internet’s version of a telephone directory. Without these addresses, you would need to know a long sequence of numbers for every site you wanted to visit.

Small Empires: OkCupid

Small Empires: finding love with 1s, 0s, and OkCupid

This week, we check out OkCupid, the dating site with a propensity for data research. Alexis sits with Christian Rudder about how he and the SparkNotes founders went from study guides to an online dating network — and from there, how the startup functions after being purchased by Match.com owners IAC.

Maciej Cegłowski: Thoreau 2.0

This is probably Thoreau’s most famous quote: “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify.” I like to paraphrase it as: “Simplify”.

Maciej Cegłowski’s XOXO 2013 talk:

First, though, a word of warning. Thoreau is a wonderful writer and often extremely quotable. But when people are very quotable, it can make it harder to listen to what they actually have to say.

Walden is a layered work. You can’t just go in and strip-mine it for a bunch of Tim Ferriss-style life hacks, or inspirational quotes, without missing the entire point of the book.

Since we have limited time, though, I’ve gone and picked out some Tim Ferriss-style lifehacks and inspirational quotes, which I will present as a set of bullet points.
Thoreau 2.0

What is reddit?

What is reddit?

I’m going to show this to anyone I see moaning about how reddit is some worthless hive of scum and villainy.