Ten rules to survive the internet

1 - Thou shalt never give your credit card number or any bank informations, except on paypal platforms.
2 - Thou shalt never purchase anything on an unsecured website.
3 - Thou should think twice before posting funny pictures of yourself on Facebook that may be embarassing in the future.
4 - When looking for informations, thou shalt always check up the level of fiability of the sources.
5 - Thou shalt learn how to use new applications so thou do not get made fun of by the other internet users.
6 - NEVER add up your boss as a friend on facebook ! Thou never know what your friends might write about you thinking that no one else is reading it.
7 - Thou shalt never add strangers as your friends on the internet.
8 - Thou shalt set up a "safe search" application if children also use your computer.
9 - Thou shalt not spend too much time on the internet, there is an actual world out there that you have to discover !
10 - LEARN THOSE NINE PREVIOUS RULES BY HEART !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iROYzrm5SBM

e-book ? no way !

As you probably already noticed, even though I like new technologies, I don't enjoy every single new gadget the internet offers. For instance, I'm not crazy about the e-book. The book is probably one of the only object that has been around for centuries. It survived the radio, it survived the TV, and it will most certainly survive the internet.

Some things in this world have to stay physical, everyting cannot be entirely virtual. That's why the e-book, which by the way seems like a pretty interesting invention, won't replace actual books. E-books will maybe be useful to read all-time classics, but I really don't think they will ever replace new books that people can carry everywhere without worrying about the batteries...

For all this, I really don't think that I'll be buying an e-book anytime soon. But if I had to, I would probably buy an iPhone with an e-book application instead of buying an actual e-book, because today is all about cross-media !

My video resume

e-learning

I'll be less idiot tomorrow

Today's topic will be my own ignorance of the internet's endless possibilities. As I'm not what one would call a geek, there are plenty of things I just can't imagine myself able to do online.

First of all, I have never been able to download music from the internet myself. Sure I did get some music illegally when it wasn't very common and nobody really cared about it as much as we do today. But I have to admit that I was in no way involved in the whole technical process that lead to downloading since I never really took interest in technology and I'm not what people would call an early-adopter. The truth is that I simply called one of my friend, who is a computer expert, and asked him to install the downloading software on my computer.

But today, especially for you readers, I will try to tell you a little more about the technical aspects of illegal downloading. The first thing you have to do is to download a specific software such as emule. Then you have to connect it to a peer-to-peer network, this is a tricky part because the network you choose can have an important impact on your downloading speed. The more people share files on a network, the faster you will be able to download on your own computer.

Of course, I must warn you that downloading this way is illegal, even though sometimes it's the only way to get files you can't find on legal platforms.

Another thing I'm incapable of doing is creating a whole new website (except from this blog, of course). To tell you how to do it, click here.

Ok, that will be all for today folks ! I hope you'll wake up smarter tomorrow.

Hacktivism

As you can see in this video, "hacktivism" is supposed to be a useful act of civil desobidience. But a lot of people - mostly the ones who were hacked I'm guessing - think that the original goals of these "cyber crimes" were not to promote a good cause. They actually say that those so-called "hacktivists"are in fact bored young computer geniuses who claim they are trying to help companies by showing them the weaknesses of their online security system.

One of the most recent example of hacktivism in France took place during the debate about the "Hadopi" law project, which created a strict sanction system against illegal downloaders. Probably for the first time, a law was about to threaten the "geek" community. In other words, the government wanted to fight with a technology it barely understands. And on the other side of the battlefield, an army of hackers was prepared to do everything they could (which is a lot !) to keep the internet the way it was, with a total freedom to download. The hackers disturbed as much as they could the online debate around this law and their activism paid off, since the first version of the law was rejected by the Parliament.

I think in any future "online battle", some people will say that the hackers are just stupid "web rioters" and others will say that they are the new age activists who deserve to be heard and that they are right to use their most efficient weapon.

Combo

Impermanence + Precious opportunities

Sorry about the time it took me to post this new post. I decided to treat as a whole the two different subjects of impermence and precious opportunities because, to me, they are linked.

Internet is the media where impermanence is the most obvious. New programs, new websites and new innovations are created almost on a daily basis.

Blogs were considered a revolution a few years ago and are now on the verge of being "online dinosaurs." The same thing happened to the Myspace platform.

That's where the concept of precious opportunities is relevant. You have to cease an innovation from the very beginning of its creation. The first musicians who became famous thanks to Myspace, The Artic Monkeys for instance (see picture above), were the pioneers of this website, and their fame was probably due as much to their music as their ability to cease this new opportunity to broadcast their art. Their followers were not as succesful, although their music was probably just as good...

In conclusion, to find precious opportunities, the impermanence of the online world is a good way to start ! 

Stop doing that!

Is it a good habit to break up the habit?

As far as the internet is concerned, the answer seems to be "yes".
Every month - if not every week - new tools or new online applications emerge and constantly change the face of the online world and therefore our way to use it.


When I was about 12, I chatted for the first time on a common online platform. Only teenagers were "hanging out" - so to speak - on this website, and the vocabulary level was extremely limited... This platform was like a large common computer window, where people posted their reactions in a total anarchy.

But revolution was about to happen : MSN made an impressive breakout in our lives of early internet users. New habits were emerging. Young people started to say "lol" (laughing out loud) and "mdr" (mort de rire, in French). A whole new social etiquette was born, with its own codes and habits.

I'm only talking about the chatting applications of the web, but this pattern is almost the same in every aspect of the web. I don't think these habits are a good or a bad thing to break, I think the really important question is that we constantly need to adapt ourselves to the internet's evolutions, so that we can keep up with the rest of the world.

Your mother wasn't made of cellophane!

Transparency. Today's new religion.

Everybody knows the novel 1984, a story about a dictatorial world where everyone is constantly watched by the entity "Big brother". However, strangely enough, it seems that nobody realizes that today's world and the nightmare described by George Orwell a few decades ago, looks more and more alike!

Public cameras now seem to be everywhere. In the streets, in the subway, even in public restrooms! Anyone can learn about someone else's life with a few clicks on Google. And the scariest thing is that, at the moment, there is no valid law that prevents those kinds of privacy invasions.

If a majority of people still approve most of the measures that improve transparency in general, more and more citizens are concerned about their privacy.

In my opinion, transparency has many advantages but can lead to dangerous situations. Anyone can find a lot of informations about anyone and can use these informations against them. There is almost no way to take back the informations we did not want to spread online. Today, new companies are being created precisely to keep track of their client's reputation. They are called "reputation cleansers", their activity consists in erasing their clients' informations online.

I'm thinking these companies will make a lot of money in the next few years!

Musicians on the verge of a nervous breakdown

For most people, internet means "freedom" or "ability to speak with the people they care about anywhere in the world". But for the music industry, internet is rather a synonym of "economic downturn".

As a matter of fact, over the last ten years, musicians have witnessed a incredibly fast fall of their sales. And, as less and less albums were sold in the music stores, just as much music was - and still is - downloaded for free from the internet. If some governments are currently thinking about the different possible ways to prevent those illegal downloads, most people keep filling up their hard drive with albums of their favorite - and less favorite - bands.

If I'm saying "and less favorite", it's because these changes in the habits of those new "consumers" have also changed their listening habits. In fact, many illegal downloaders say that a lot of the music they download is so poor that they just wouldn't buy it if it were the only way they could listen to it. Some also say that when they really like an album, they still go to a store or on a legal online platform to buy it to support the artists that are actually worth it.

So who is to believe? Is the music industry right when it says that it is only the victim of a worlwide theft, or is today's music so bad that it explains alone the reason why people prefer getting most of it for free?

The artists themselves seem divided about this difficult issue. If the mainstream musicians are generally in favor of a strict legal ban of illegal downloading, some are more balanced in their analysis. For instance, some new artists became famous precisely thanks to the internet and the ability it gave them to broadcast their songs.The other main issue lies in the technical advance the hackers always have on the law.

And what about my opinion, do you ask? Well, I don't know, I'm just too into this new album I've just downloaded to answer right now...