⟿ the daily after

“I wasn’t actually sleeping. I’m a beta tester for Google Eyelids.”
Morgan Freeman.

Nine years ago, Graham woke up and discovered he was dead. He was in the grip of Cotard’s syndrome. People with this rare condition believe that they, or parts of their body, no longer exist. For Graham, it was his brain that was dead, and he believed that he had killed it. Suffering from severe depression, he had tried to commit suicide by taking an electrical appliance with him into the bath.

Eight months later, he told his doctor his brain had died or was, at best, missing. “It’s really hard to explain,” he says. “I just felt like my brain didn’t exist anymore. I kept on telling the doctors that the tablets weren’t going to do me any good because I didn’t have a brain. I’d fried it in the bath.”

Doctors found trying to rationalise with Graham was impossible. Even as he sat there talking, breathing – living – he could not accept that his brain was alive. “I just got annoyed. I didn’t know how I could speak or do anything with no brain, but as far as I was concerned I hadn’t got one.” (1) (2)

the governments’ reliance on social networks for intelligence purposes means that they can’t intervene to help their populations get better at trading their privacy for services. […] If online oversharing is a public health problem, then the state’s decision to harness it for its own purposes means that huge, powerful forces within government will come to depend on oversharing. It will be vital to their jobs – their pay-packets will literally depend on your inability to gauge the appropriateness of your online disclosure.

The Guardian, Privacy, public health and the moral hazard of surveillance

also: The booming market for hacking tools known as zero-day exploits has officials at the highest levels in Washington very worried, reports Joe Menn at Reuters, “even as U.S. agencies and defense contractors have become the biggest buyers of such products.” White House cybersecurity policy coordinator Michael Daniel says the trend is “very worrisome to us.” But as Menn writes in a second piece in this Reuters special report, even as the U.S. government “confronts rival powers over widespread Internet espionage, it has become the biggest buyer in a burgeoning gray market where hackers and security firms sell tools for breaking into computers.” (+)

In the longer term, the Internet of Things means ubiquitous surveillance. If an object “knows” you have purchased it, and communicates via either Wi-Fi or the mobile network, then whoever or whatever it is communicating with will know where you are. Your car will know who is in it, who is driving, and what traffic laws that driver is following or ignoring. No need to show ID; your identity will already be known. Store clerks could know your name, address, and income level as soon as you walk through the door. Billboards will tailor ads to you, and record how you respond to them. Fast food restaurants will know what you usually order, and exactly how to entice you to order more. Lots of companies will know whom you spend your days —and night — with. Facebook will know about any new relationship status before you bother to change it on your profile. And all of this information will all be saved, correlated, and studied. Even now, it feels a lot like science fiction.

Will you know any of this? Will your friends? It depends. Lots of these devices have, and will have, privacy settings. But these settings are remarkable not in how much privacy they afford, but in how much they deny. Access will likely be similar to your browsing habits, your files stored on Dropbox, your searches on Google, and your text messages from your phone. All of your data is saved by those companies — and many others — correlated, and then bought and sold without your knowledge or consent. You’d think that your privacy settings would keep random strangers from learning everything about you, but it only keeps random strangers who don’t pay for the privilege — or don’t work for the government and have the ability to demand the data. Power is what matters here: you’ll be able to keep the powerless from invading your privacy, but you’ll have no ability to prevent the powerful from doing it again and again. (+)

Сеймур Темплар (Seymour Templar) Сайт

Фотографирует на улице людей из разного общества. Уличная фотография является одной из наиболее интересных жанров фотографии, поскольку оно позволяет захватывать в подробностях мельчайшие детали окружающие всех нас. В материале 50 лучших уличных фотографов, мы постараемся рассказать вам о самых лучших фотографов работающих в жанре «Уличной фотографии». (+)

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