Date archives "January 2012"

Discussing OWS (1): How the #OccupyWallStreet Movement is Evolving from Networked Individualism to Empowered Communities

Excerpted from Michael Gurstein: “Certainly politics in the Information Society seems to have taken the shape prescribed for it by the marketplace—fragmented, concerned with short-term individualized interest maximization, personality-obsessed media saturation and so on. These changes in turn have been propelled by the forces of technology and the breakdown of established employment structures, education patterns,… Continue reading

BitTorrent’s New P2P Protocol Could Fix the Internet’s Shoddy Streaming Video Quality

Streaming video over the Internet is one of the most important telecommunication developments in the last decade. Problem is, doing so needs a massive system architecture to support it and the feed is often riddled with lag. A new protocol from BitTorret’s founder is aiming to change all that. Conventional video streaming—through, say, YouTube or… Continue reading

BlablaCar puts $10M in its tank for P2P ride-share site

Source: Krystal Peak – VatorNews With the economy pushing people to get creative and efficient with their resources, some are seeing extra seats in their car as opportunities to make a few extra dollars. A European carpooling forum called BlablaCar announced Tuesday that it scooped up $10 million from Accel Partners and existing investors to… Continue reading

The world economy is on the verge of a new recession, according to a report by the UN

Source: The Delta World The world economy is on the verge of a new recession, and what the report status and prospects of the world economy, prepared by the United Nations Conference on trade and development (UNCTAD) and presented on Tuesday, he warns that “a new global recession is a significant possibility”. Something that probably… Continue reading

SOPA: Lawmakers backing away from online-piracy bills

Source: Brad Plumer – The Washington Post It looks like the uproar over Congress’s online-piracy bills is having a real impact. This weekend, the White House strongly hinted that it would oppose the current legislation. And key sponsors are edging away from the bills’ most controversial features. (Lucy Nicholson – Reuters) Late on Friday night,… Continue reading

P2P Book of the Day: Betterness: Economics for Humans

Book: Betterness: Economics for Humans. by Umair Haque. Harvard Business Press Books, 2011 From the publisher: “Betterness: Economics for Humans” is a powerful call to arms for a post-capitalist economy. Umair Haque argues that just as positive psychology revolutionized our understanding of mental health by recasting the field as more than just treating mental illness,… Continue reading

P2P Essay of the Day: On the Failure to Measure the Contributions of the Internet Economy

Excerpted from Michael Gurstein: “I came to realize … that the implications of the limitations in the Internet accounting went beyond a simple technical glitch and had potentially quite profound implications from a national policy and particularly a CS and community based development perspective. The possible distortions in economic measurement arising from the absence of… Continue reading

Vinay Gupta: The Authoritarian Cause Will Be Defeated by Its Own Cognitive Dissonance

I (@KevinCarson1) just had an amazing Twitter exchange with Vinay Gupta (@leashless).  I’ve collated it below, with the Twitter shorthand filled in and separate tweets combined into paragraphs where it seemed natural. GUPTA:  1> No national government is capable of planning clearly for the horror of resource wars between China, America and Europe/Russia. 2> Therefore,… Continue reading