Posts Tagged Internet

Two of the first sci-fi fandoms I grew up with and embraced with fervor early in life were Star Trek and Dr. Who – primarily because they were the two that I had the easiest access to via network television.  Cable was unavailable in our rural area, and satellites were, at that time, prohibitively expensive.

As I grew up, I moved on to other fandoms and other shows – particularly the ones springing from the mind of Joss Whedon – and while I didn’t forget about those shows I’d grown up with, I wasn’t so excited about them anymore, beyond the usual haze of nostalgia.

The new Star Trek reboot brought the excitement back in a big way.  It was almost like returning to the embrace of an old friend.  Shortly after the movie, I discovered that the entire Star Trek Original Series was available streaming direct from the CBS website, and took the opportunity to watch it all over again – this time in order. I’d never seen it in order – the shows were reruns shown in syndication by the time I watched them as a child.

The magic of the internet has enabled me to reawaken my interest in Dr. Who as well – watching the new BBC production on  Netflix. It took me a bit longer to warm to the new Doctor than it took me to embrace the new Kirk and Spock, but after a few episodes I was firmly hooked.

I’ve rediscovered the fandoms of my childhood and found them new and fresh.  The reboots of each helped this, of course, but it occurred to me that it couldn’t have happened in such a way without the internet. The web gave me both the old and the new versions and ways to compare the two almost side by side through streaming media, websites and communities to renew my participation in, wikis to research, fanfiction to read and write, and of course, the inevitable visits to TV-Tropes.

You know, I kinda like living in the future.

But it left me wondering: Is there some fandom that you’ve had a reunion with thanks to the internet? Something that you’d almost forgotten existed and then suddenly became excited about again upon finding something in some hidden corner of the web?

I’ve had a number of people ask me about podcasts lately.  It’s an odd enough subject that I was a bit surprised to have several people ask me about them in fairly quick succession, so I thought I’d do a little list of my recommended podcasts.

If you don’t know what a podcast is, well, it’s like a radio show that you can play on an MP3 player (any MP3 player, it doesn’t have to be an ipod) or your computer.  I’m one of those odd people who concentrates better when I’m listening to something, so I listen to a lot of podcasts at work.  I’ve tried, discarded, and become a devoted listener to quite a few.  Naturally, thanks to my interests, they are all suitably geeky in nature.

For the Book / Writing / Grammar Geek:

• Grammar Girl: Quick and dirty tips for those persistent grammar-related questions, done with a sense of humor.
• The Writer’s Almanac: A short little daily show from public radio regarding what’s going on in writing on this day, what has occurred in writing history, and always ending with a selected poem.

For the History Geek:

• Hardcore History: This is my favorite of all of the podcasts, and seems to be one that even non-history geeks might enjoy just because of the way it’s presented.  Dan Carlin goes beyond the pages of the history book and guides you through imagining what things were actually like for the people who lived them.

For the Gamer Geek:

• Analog Hole Gaming: This podcast is definitely not for ginger ears, but it’s the best general-gaming podcast that I’ve come across that, more often than not, leaves me chuckling.
• Game-Specific Podcasts:
  • World of Warcast: This is possibly the oldest continuing WoW podcast, and is a lot of fun. The hosts, Starman and Renata, are both older gamers with Jobs, Families, and Mortgages, so it’s nice to get a more grown-up point of view on gaming.
  • The Instance: The instance is the most popular of the WoW podcasts, it tends to focus on news and strategy discussions with more of a raider point-of-view.

For the Whedonverse Geek:

• The Signal: You can’t stop the signal. This podcast definitely deserves the awards it’s won, and the hosts are well on their way to becoming “celebrity fans” in their own right. They have interviews with whedonverse stars, a radio melodrama based on the Serenity/Firefly universe, and good music.  What’s not to love?

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• Dan Carlin – Hardcore History “Addicted To Bondage” (craiggunderson.com)

When the usual sites I check every morning were down the first time I checked them Thursday morning, I shrugged, thinking that the storm the night before had somehow messed up the DSL connection at the office, as bad storms occasionally did.

Then I noticed that those same sites weren’t pulling up on my blackberry and that other sites were operating just fine, though, with a few exceptions, the sites affected seemed entirely unrelated.

Turns out there was a pretty wide-spread DDoS attack (that is, Denial-of-Service Attack) that seemed to be specifically targetting social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, and successfully took down Facebook for a short while during the morning and Twitter for most of the day. Unfortunately, the general overloading of networks was enough to cause difficulties on some completely unrelated sites.

That’s fine, I can do without Twitter for a day, and I don’t bother with Facebook, but it is worrying.  If an attack is able to do this to big-name but relatively unimportant sites like Facebook and Twitter, what’s to keep them from targeting financial websites and banking institutions? The network infrastructure of the US was, for the most part, built to withstand traffic that is less than a tenth of what it now is forced to support, and while banks and high security networks are built to withstand hacking attempts and attacks intended to steal information, most are not equipped to deal with the pure server overload that is the typical DDoS attack.

If someone can shut down Facebook and Twitter so successfully and for so long just by over-loading their servers with traffic, how long will it be before they can shut down something much more important?

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• Twitter hit by DDoS Attack
• Twitter Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) (mashable.com)
• Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal Down at the Same Time! (Update) (readwriteweb.com)

In the wake of Independence day, I’d like to encourage everyone to read John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.  It is easily one of the most eloquent and well-thought essays on the reasons why the internet and cyberspace needs to be a place of free and unfettered discourse, without censorship or interference of government agencies.

The internet is a place where everyone can express their opinion in relative anonymity, without fear of reprisal.

It is the true home of free speech, some of the most free speech in existence, even in countries where that right is protected and held sacred.

You may not, and probably will not, like everything you find on the internet.  Much of it is crass, ignorant, and occasionally very, very silly and stupid. It can also be the last and only refuge of people who are unable to fight oppression in any other way, the only place where they can, with any measure of safety, express dissenting opinions.

So go give it a quick read…I assure you that it’ll make you think.

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• Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran (theswarm.wordpress.com)
• China: 2009 Declaration of the Anonymous Netizens (advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org)