- By Susanne Posel – February 16, 2015
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corporations, cybersecurity, propaganda, technocrats
Susanne Posel ,Chief Editor Occupy Corporatism | The US IndependentFebruary 16, 2015
The latest warning of a digital dumbing-down has come from baby boomer Vint Cerf, vice president of Google, who told the press at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that he is concerned about “all the documents we have been saving on computers” being lost as “hardware and software become obsolete.”
The tech revolution could cause “future generations [to] have little or no record of the 21 century” because of the “digital Dark Age” we are entering.
Referring to the cloud services being pushed of late, Cerf warns “our life, our memories, our most cherished family photographs increasingly exist as bits of information” and they are at a potential risk of being “lost in the wake of an accelerating digital revolution.”
Cerf is worried “great deal about … old formats of documents that we’ve created or presentations may not be readable by the latest version of the software because backwards compatibility is not always guaranteed. And so what can happen over time is that even if we accumulate vast archives of digital content, we may not actually know what it is.”
However, Cerf’s solution is to use the cloud to preserve “the memories we hold so dear” for future generations in a digital museum.
Cerf said: “The solution is to take an X-ray snapshot of the content and the application and the operating system together, with a description of the machine that it runs on, and preserve that for long periods of time. And that digital snapshot will recreate the past in the future.
Interestingly, this scenario Cerf poses assumes that Google is still “around in the next millennium”.
Cerf replied: “I think it is amusing to imagine that it is the year 3000 and you’ve done a Google search. The X-ray snapshot we are trying to capture should be transportable from one place to another. So, I should be able to move it from the Google cloud to some other cloud, or move it into a machine I have. The key here is when you move those bits from one place to another, that you still know how to unpack them to correctly interpret the different parts. That is all achievable if we standardize the descriptions. And that’s the key issue here – how do I ensure in the distant future that the standards are still known, and I can still interpret this carefully constructed X-ray snapshot?”
Cloud services are becoming a quick and inexpensive way to store data online and the potential catalyst into digital ignorance warned against by Cerf.
Last year, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) handed Amazon Web Service (AWS) a $600 million defense contract to assist the agency in converting to cloud services.
AWS is tasked with warehousing data concerning government surveillance and information on spooks.
In the future, the cloud will be expected to deploy user decisions and make up the marketplace to keep cloud providers closest to the loop between government digital surveillance and maintaining customer data privacy.
Cloud computing is the future, according to groups like Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) who represent corporations such as:
• Disney Technology Solutions
• Deutsche Telekom
• SAP
• Infosys
• AT&T
• Microsoft
• JP Morgan Chase
• Dell Hewlett Packard
• Pfizer
• Purdue University
• Shell Global Solutions
• Sprint
Data security on the cloud is a concern of 80% of ODCA members; however 56% of those members complain that regulation will “limit” the adoption of cloud computing.
The California Department of Technology (CDT) is teaming up with IBM to create CalCloud , a new technological model for other states in the US to bring state governments into the cloud computing of the future.
IBM asserts that CalCloud is the platform that will allow municipalities, local and state governments to subscribe to cloud services, access to IT products “while minimizing upfront capital investment and controlling financial risk.”
CalCloud is meant to entice governments across the nation to “hare a common pool of computing resources and operate more efficiently. Immediate access to modern back-end services frees up state departments to focus on projects with direct impact on the public.”
IBM explained: “More than 20 state departments have already requested IT services through CalCloud.”
In 2014, IBM and AT&T announced combining forces to bring a connected network to cities in order to integrate the Internet of Things within municipalities.
This alliance has initiated with the task of with integrating digital solutions for infrastructure of cities to “improve urban planning” and reduce costs to residents.
The AT&T facility at the M2M Foundry in Texas and IBM Global Solution Centers (GSC) around the world will join forces to showcase new inventive smart technologies to enhance customer experience, improve safety measures and enhance protocol in currently used facilities.
Retail corporations see this venture as way to implement “intelligent retail cabinets, enable targeted digital advertising and reduce energy cost and consumption.”
The plan involves technology being shared across the two corporations in order to assist cities and utilities corporations in processing large amounts of data siphoned from databases and sensors that control the inner workings of our national infrastructure.
Key directives of this alliance include:
- Better allocate and distribute resources based on information reported from incidents and service disruptions.
- Analyze the movement of people to improve traffic management, parking capacity, location and number of first unit responders.
- City officials can better prepare and react to potential bottlenecks and other issues in case of an emergency.
- Identify inefficient traffic patterns so that traffic can be re-routed; better allocate public safety resources in places where majority of people congregate.
- Monitor social media updates from citizens reporting bad weather or major traffic so the city can take best course of action.
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