trollzor’s blog

Grafedia looks like a cool service. It’s not unlike tinyurl but for embedding “links” into graffiti so you can access associated content on the net. An interesting note is that many of the classic shock sites are detected by some of the url shortening/re-directing services. So were someone to link to something disturbing (such as the Goatse picture, to which I will not link) tinyurl will warn the user before it takes them there. It’s been a classic technique of trolls on slashdot (where the domain of a link is printed after it revealing where it’s going more obviously) to get people to click on tinyurls but now this avenue is somewhat closed. I somehow doubt they will stopped so easily.

I am not a big fan of psephology-like “what if”s, I had only written this a while ago to vent frustration, but this weeks reading for one of my subjects touched on some of the issues of democratic implementation and I got all fired up again.

The results of the Australian 2004 federal election are well known, but the most outrageous result is number of seats the nationals have compared to the greens in this regionally defined electoral system. These figures show that with 5.9% of the national vote the national party get 12 seats but the greens, with 7.2%, get no seats. While I will be the first to admit that the regional electorate system allows for voters to be able to hold their representatives accountable directly, the inequity in a 7% share party having no seats in a 150 seat parliament is far more of a problem for a system that claims to be democratically representative. And I can hear people mentioning the senate already, but the senate is not a good enough solution to these problems either, as it is not fully proportional because doing it state-by-state still lets the two party system dominate.

A good example of this senate problem is the Victorian reforms of the legislative council which break the stranglehold of the conservatives and make the system “fairer”. But it divides into “regions” which each have five members, and it while it might make in “fairer” for the two parties it looks not unlike tullymandering to me. In this day of telecommunications and the car and train is a regionally divided electoral system the fairest democratic implementation? And surely if we are to have two houses rather than a unicameral parliament we should have at least one of them as a fully proportional house rather than these half-measures.

A hypothetical unicameral federal parliament of 300 seats might have something like (this is rough working from the results) 3 One Nation members, 3 Democrats and 20 or so Greens. When the Liberals like Eric Abetz taunt Bob Brown for not being able to be in two places at once you have to wonder what they would say if there were twenty greens members able to campaign etc. And the most interesting thing from such a hypothetical parliament is that the current government would still hold power, so it’s not a radical change designed to favour one party. It’s a systemic change which attacks the duopoly of the major parties, and restores voice to the disenfranchised.

RMIT firewall update: ITS sent back a reply basically saying “Get your lecturer to tell us what you need/why you need it” so it looks like it will be some bother trying to get real net access. Which is a shame because…

Blogsome: I don’t think I want to stay with blogsome, they are slow and keep having outages. So I was thinking I’d host something on my own machine. In addition to ssh and VNC there is a new remote screen access technology called NoMachine which is awesomely fast. I have set it up on my LAN at home and used a test account on a machine in Italy. Here is a picture of my desktop with a small window logged into the Italian test machine. It doesn’t lag too much going to europe fullscreen, and it can handle video over LAN (although there is no sound transport layer). It would be very nice to be able to access my home machine like that.

This is all quite asides from the fact that there is a truly free (no advertising) wordpress hosting being offered by RMIT which Warren and Peter are on.

Felt ill after riding in for class yesterday, I think it might have been the peak-hour car fumes. The first reading, from Mitchell, would have been good to discuss in class too. I have been trying to get a better grasp of the network theory stuff for a while now and that gave me a better view. I am still not utterly convinced as to the utility of network theory over and above using tools like Foucault’s governmentality. As I see it, many of the network theorists have come to the point where they deny the “natural” power of “organic” networks as some did in the beginning and have come to call them a new form of practice and focus on what constitutes the “nodes” and the “routing logic” of the networks if you will. But I see this as already having been done by some of the work surrounding governmentality, the network is the discursive environment in which we make decisions and the locus of decision is what we can call the “actor” (which is perhaps more flexible than the node/individual in some ways). I suppose it’s good to have a different angle on things.

Well I only got a note back from RMIT ITS stating that they had assigned my question to a particular person, so I don’t know if I will get a reply from them or not. So I am working on getting around it. It seems that there is software which can tunnel through a http-only firewall and let me get to my computer at home. I have found two pieces of software called corkscrew and http-tunnel but I am not sure how they will go. If it requires a client on the RMIT side it’s unlikely to work, but if I can find one that loads a java app from my server it might work. I was looking around elsewhere and it seems like Adrian has also discovered the wonders of a restrictive IT policy. Perhaps with staff a formal petition could be made to get access for the computers in our lab. We can’t do studies of media and communications if we can’t do what the average net user can. This is not too dissimilar to the NAT modem-router problem that many broadband users have, but at least in that situation outgoing traffic is allowed and traffic returning in response is allowed.

Richard M. Stallman works at MIT and was one of the first people to see the potential for computer software to be control what it’s users can do in a bad way. He started the GNU (GNU Not Unix) project in 1985 to create a free software operating system (free not only in price, but as in freedom) which would not limit a computer users freedom. That dream, to a better part, has been realised through the GNU/Linux operating system which exists under the GPL licence and which I use at home on my PC. A blog of his activities promoting GNU is here.

My thesis is studying the actions of trolls and what they reveal about structures of discursive power on the Internet. One example of trolls is the cheating myg0t gaming clan, who disrupt other players of games on the Internet. For example myg0t players disrupted a game of Everquest and wrote it up as a story. But it’s not just raging in game worlds, but also other exercises of power on the Internet in all sorts of communities. For example community CMSs and blogs have particular structures of power which are the focus of the thesis.

If you have Java on your system, you can plug websites into Touchgraph and then see a graphical representation of who they link to and who links to them (made from google data). I added in some blog index sites and when you are using it you can see how while they don’t link directly to each other, they often link to the same sites. To get a closer look, click on the image above or just go to Touchgraph and have a look around.

I added a picture to my blog that I use as my IM avatar, then I remembered the copyright warning and looked up a few things. The picture is probably familiar to you as it’s one of the better known pictures from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol. And while you might find the text of the book in Project Gutenberg the copyright count for the pictures starts at the illustrators death. Lucky for me it seems John Tenniel died long enough ago for our “50 years” rule, and even if the free trade deal with the US causes retrospective legislation I’m still outside the 70. I think they are worrying less about Carroll and more about a mouse. I also found this after I had done all the searching, which explains it all better than I can. I also found this which appears to be Carroll’s original drawings.