5 research outputs found
Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed
We’re used to talking about how tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon rule the internet, but what about daemons? Ubiquitous programs that have colonized the Net’s infrastructure—as well as the devices we use to access it—daemons are little known. Fenwick McKelvey weaves together history, theory, and policy to give a full account of where daemons come from and how they influence our lives—including their role in hot-button issues like network neutrality.
Going back to Victorian times and the popular thought experiment Maxwell’s Demon, McKelvey charts how daemons evolved from concept to reality, eventually blossoming into the pandaemonium of code-based creatures that today orchestrates our internet. Digging into real-life examples like sluggish connection speeds, Comcast’s efforts to control peer-to-peer networking, and Pirate Bay’s attempts to elude daemonic control (and skirt copyright), McKelvey shows how daemons have been central to the internet, greatly influencing everyday users.
Internet Daemons asks important questions about how much control is being handed over to these automated, autonomous programs, and the consequences for transparency and oversight.
Table of Contents
Abbreviations and Technical Terms
Introduction
1. The Devil We Know: Maxwell’s Demon, Cyborg Sciences, and Flow Control
2. Possessing Infrastructure: Nonsynchronous Communication, IMPs, and Optimization
3. IMPs, OLIVERs, and Gateways: Internetworking before the Internet
4. Pandaemonium: The Internet as Daemons
5. Suffering from Buffering? Affects of Flow Control
6. The Disoptimized: The Ambiguous Tactics of the Pirate Bay
7. A Crescendo of Online Interactive Debugging? Gamers, Publics and Daemons
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Internet Measurement and Mediators
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
Beneath social media, beneath search, Internet Daemons reveals another layer of algorithms: deeper, burrowed into information networks. Fenwick McKelvey is the best kind of intellectual spelunker, taking us deep into the infrastructure and shining his light on these obscure but vital mechanisms. What he has delivered is a precise and provocative rethinking of how to conceive of power in and among networks.
—Tarleton Gillespie, author of Custodians of the Internet
Internet Daemons is an original and important contribution to the field of digital media studies. Fenwick McKelvey extensively maps and analyzes how daemons influence data exchanges across Internet infrastructures. This study insightfully demonstrates how daemons are transformative entities that enable particular ways of transferring information and connecting up communication, with significant social and political consequences.
—Jennifer Gabrys, author of Program Eart
Biologically inspired methods for organizing distributed services on sensor networks
Tales HeimfarthPaderborn, Univ., Diss., 200
My Struggles with the Block Universe
This document is the second installment of three in the Cerro Grande Fire
Series. Like its predecessor arXiv:quant-ph/0105039, "Notes on a Paulian Idea,"
it is a collection of letters written to various friends and colleagues, most
of whom regularly circuit this archive. The unifying theme of all the letters
is that each has something to do with the quantum. Particularly, the collection
chronicles the emergence of Quantum Bayesianism as a robust view of quantum
theory, eventually evolving into the still-more-radical "QBism" (with the B
standing for no particular designation anymore), as it took its most
distinctive turn away from various Copenhagen Interpretations. Included are
many anecdotes from the history of quantum information theory: for instance,
the story of the origin of the terms "qubit" and "quantum information" from
their originator's own mouth, a copy of a rejection letter written by E. T.
Jaynes for one of Rolf Landauer's original erasure-cost principle papers, and
much more. Specialized indices are devoted to historical, technical, and
philosophical matters. More roundly, the document is an attempt to provide an
essential ingredient, unavailable anywhere else, for turning QBism into a live
option within the vast spectrum of quantum foundational thought.Comment: CAUTION, do not unthinkingly print from a printer: 2,349 pages, 4
indices, 6 figures, with extensive hyperlinking. Foreword by M. Schlosshauer,
edited by B. C. Stacey. v2: more footnotes, fewer typo
Social work with airports passengers
Social work at the airport is in to offer to passengers social services. The main
methodological position is that people are under stress, which characterized by a
particular set of characteristics in appearance and behavior. In such circumstances
passenger attracts in his actions some attention. Only person whom he trusts can help him
with the documents or psychologically