Georgian woman cuts off web access to whole of Armenia
No, this is not a late April Fool’s joke.
How, you ask, could I ever explain what the Internet is to a street urchin should I time travel back to 19th century London. With a flowchart, naturally. This is but one example included in Doogie Horner’s book “Everything Explained Through Flowcharts”.
Via Fast Company
Source: Fast Company
Delicious Dotcom Decadence
A Rake’s Progress III: ‘The Orgy’ by William Hogarth
Who says engineers are boring? When Henry Nicholas, founder of Broadcom, rode the dotcom wave all the way to the bank, he actually gave Hugh Hefner a run for his money.
An excerpt from the article in The Independent:
The 6ft 6ins engineer founded the company Broadcom in 1991, making
the innards of cable TV boxes at his Redondo Beach apartment. When it floated in the go-go years of the internet boom, his shares went up in value 40 times and he soon acquired the trappings of the super rich: private jets, a Lamborghini and a mansion in Laguna Hills with its own equestrian estate and, court documents claim, his personal brothel, hidden in an underground grotto.The grotto was reached by hidden doors with secret levers, leading
to tunnels and a 2,000sq-ft underground sports bar called “Nick’s
Café”. According to claims in court papers, this was a “secret and
convenient lair”, to cater for “Mr Nicholas’s manic obsession with
prostitutes” and his “addiction to cocaine and ecstasy”.He used his private jet to pick up prostitutes as far away as New
Orleans, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles “and bring them back to the Pond for his rock star friends”, according to documents filed with
Orange County Superior Court. “He provided his guests with
transportation and cocaine, ecstasy, methamphetamines, marijuana,
mushrooms, and nitrous oxide [laughing gas]”.
13 Year Old Conman Lives the High Life
From Mirror.co.uk:
A BOY of 13 swindled firms and punters out of £250,000 - after passing himself off as a high-flying tycoon.
The
lad, who set up online businesses that sold non-existent goods,
travelled in chauffeur-driven limos, wore designer suits and had cases
of champagne sent to his home. The smooth-talking teen’s scam lasted
three years.When victims confronted him he laughed and told them: “You can’t touch me - I’m a minor.”
Now 16, the boy faces jail after admitting fraud.
A gangly lad of 13 embarked on a £250,000 swindling spree after he was inspired by hit crime movie Catch Me If You Can.
The
boy was so enthralled by the film - in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a
teenage con artist who makes millions posing as an airline pilot,
doctor and lawyer - he decided to use it as a blueprint for his own
criminal adventure.
Link: Mirror.co.uk - News - Top Stories - £250,000 CONMAN AGED 13.
Generation Web: What Privacy?
Found this great article from New York magazine which covers the younger, Facebook mad, crowd and how they are widening the chasm with older generations that are not so willing to forego their own sense of privacy.
An excerpt:
It’s been a long time since there was a true generation gap, perhaps 50 years—you have to go back to the early years of rock and roll, when old people still talked about “jungle rhythms.” Everything associated with that music and its greasy, shaggy culture felt baffling and divisive, from the crude slang to the dirty thoughts it was rumored to trigger in little girls. That musical divide has all but disappeared. But in the past ten years, a new set of values has sneaked in to take its place, erecting another barrier between young and old. And as it did in the fifties, the older generation has responded with a disgusted, dismissive squawk. It goes something like this:
Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.
“When it is more important to be seen than to be talented, it is hardly surprising that the less gifted among us are willing to fart our way into the spotlight,” sneers Lakshmi Chaudhry in the current issue of The Nation. “Without any meaningful standard by which to measure our worth, we turn to the public eye for affirmation.”
Clay Shirky, a 42-year-old professor of new media at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, who has studied these phenomena since 1993, has a theory about that response. “Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in something old people are not allowed to, it makes us bitter. What did we have? The mall and the parking lot of the 7-Eleven? It sucked to grow up when we did! And we’re mad about it now.” People are always eager to believe that their behavior is a matter of morality, not chronology, Shirky argues. “You didn’t behave like that because nobody gave you the option.”
