cyberbarf10.11

cyberculture, commentary, cartoons, essays

EXAMINE THE NET WAY OF LIFE

JUNE, 2011

 

IN THIS ISSUE:

FREE ON BOARD

NEW cyberbarf KOMIX

PERSONAL CLOUD LIBRARIES

PODCAST: JAPAN STATUS

HACK, HACK, HACK!

iTOONS

WHETHER REPORT

cyberbarf

FREE ON BOARD ARTICLE

Why anyone would give away their services for free to a for-profit enterprise based on the net has always been a strained proposition. Out of work journalists gravitated to the new medium that was allegedly destroying their own brick and mortar print shops as a way to continue writing. And the internet vultures were present to feed on their career insecurity as a means to take free labor for the illusionary promise of global work exposure.

It is the worst caste system in modern times. The web publishers suddenly have their own Internet stock bubble as their sites are suddenly worth millions of dollars on the back of unpaid contributors. And when these web publishers sell out to larger media enterprises, the money only flows into their bank accounts, and nothing trickles down to the unpaid serfs who put the value content on the site. It is a reversion to the nobles living large in their new media castles lording over their serfs toiling bytes of the infinite information fields.

The nobles appear to set themselves above the law. They stress that the writers volunteered their services. Free work was always a part of the program. Their sites would drive traffic to their stories. The allure of fame drove the writers to work for free. But when the Huffington Post cashed out to AOL, those writers were angry. They did not receive the fame or fortune for years of service. Reality hit home: bloggers can't make a living. But publishers who use bloggers can make a killing.

Lost in the moral discussion of the free blogger-writer Internet publishing model is the legal aspects of worker rights. Are these bloggers employees or independent contractors? Are they unpaid interns receiving the benefits of some specialized training? In most situations, the bloggers should be classified as site employees.

The Internal Revenue Service has promulgated a twenty factor test to determine whether a person is an employee or an independent contractor. This designation is important to the IRS as it determines which party is responsible for payroll and employment taxes. The factors boil down to three areas: control, organization and economic reality.

In the unpaid web content provider, control is defined as whether the web site owner or the blogger has control over the work being performed for the site pages. If the blogger is required to comply with instructions, guidelines, and how he or she is supposed to work, the blogger would be considered an employee.

If the blogger's services are integrated into the web site owners operations, this tends to support an employer-employee relationship, especially if the business's success or continuation depends to a large extent on the performance of the blogger's services.

If the blogger's services are subject to supervision, editing or assignments from the web page owner or his employees, the blogger is an employee because of the control asserted by the web site operator over the means and methods of the services being provided the site.

There is a presumption that if one is working substantially full time for a person, so he or she is not able to work for another company, then an employee relationship is assumed.

If these aggregation blog sites that rely upon unpaid content providers for their business model, then those contributors could be classified as employees under federal law. If that were to happen, the employer would be subject to all employment laws: wages, overtime, benefits and civil fines and penalties for failure to pay employment taxes.

The U.S. Department of Labor has been cracking down on the use by business of unpaid interns. The criteria for an unpaid internship are strict:

1. The internship, even though it includes actual operation of the employer's facilities, must be similar to training which would be given in an educational environment;

2. The internship experience is to the benefit of the intern;

3. The intern does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff;

4. The employer that provides training derives no immediate advantage or benefit from the activities of the intern;

5. The intern is not entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship; and

6. The employer and intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for time spent on the internship.

It is interesting to note that educational credit is not a factor in the Department of Labor test. Many professions have used interns as unpaid clerical staff, displacing the need for paid secretaries, clerks, gophers, runners or technical staff.

Under the guidelines, a person writing content for a web site for publication is taking the place of a paid staff member. The web site owner is receiving an immediate benefit from the postings as fresh content drives traffic to the advertising on the pages. In most instances, the intern is not training for anything; they are already professional (though displaced) writers, photographers, artists or journalists who already know their craft. It would be difficult for a web site publisher to classify their unpaid writers and bloggers as legal unpaid interns.

cyberbarf

PERSONAL CLOUD LIBRARIES ARTICLE

Sir Paul McCartney is at it again. After the Beatles collection has gone digital, he has decided to put his personal collection in cyberspace. HP announced that it has uploaded McCartney's non-Beatle music, video, photographs, artwork and personal items into their cloud servers. The reason was simple: Sir Paul wanted to access his stuff “ from anywhere.”

It is an interesting concept that a multimillionaire would want to have access to his intellectual property on a real time basis in digital form. This is a private library collection that the owner would have access 24/7. The original items would remain stored in physical warehouses. It is hard to tell whether this is brilliance, ego or both.

The cloud service providers are trying to convince people to port their lives onto their servers. It is the future, they say. A future fraught with dangers. The cloud service providers have not fully addressed the pitfalls that technical and legal experts have thrown at them:

Legal ownership of the data on the cloud servers.

Security of the data on the cloud servers.

The privacy of the data on the cloud servers.

Ability of the cloud host to deliver and maintain access and storage requirements.

The liability for down time/inaccessibility.

It may be one thing for a famous artist to digitize his works into a private cloud library with limited daily access to his files. But it is another thing for a large global bank transacting tens of thousands of customer transactions on a daily basis to not know whether the cloud is secure, private, guarded and won't crash every fifteen minutes.

There was a study that of all the iTunes downloads, 81 percent of that music is never listened to by the music collector. The conclusion that we only listen to approximately 19 percent of our music collection is a stunning cultural find. People tend to hoard content but rarely use it. The hoarding of content means taking up space, whether it be real (storage units) or virtual (cloud servers). If a sudden and expensive expansion of the new cloud network hardware centers is really only going to archive 80 percent of the data, then the economies of scale and the need to provide the service seem unrealistic to the average person.

While typing this, I pulled from the desk drawer “Let It Be” CD. It has not been played for years, but I knew I had it. You put in the re-mastered disc into the CD player and the music experience is immediate. With the advancements in flash memory, iPods and Shuffles can contain thousands of songs - - - more than any one can listen to in one sitting. You don't need to have a computer, hardline or wireless access to a cloud host, and a route to the cloud servers, just to play the same song that is on a CD or iPod. Maybe there are times where you just have to let it be.

cyberbarf

JAPAN STATUS PODCAST

cyberbarf

HACK, HACK, HACK COMMENTARY

Sony's PSN must now stand for Pirate Sentry Nation. The Playstation Network has been hacked several times, sending global gamers into a funk.

Sony was the electronics leader in the 1990s. It has been a slow descent since several notable fumbles like the betamax and the Walkman (when the world was going to digital music players). It held hope on its gaming hardware platforms, which turned into respectable machines. The multiplayer on-line universe was large enough for Sony to create its own.

But success put unwanted attention on Sony's game network. Attention from malicious hackers who have taken down the system three times. The first major hit was the identity theft of users personal data information, and possibly credit card information. This attack led to the complete shut down of the network. Several days later, Sony tried to get PSN back live, but there were still major security holes that were quickly exploited. The third attempt to re-start the system, by sending new passwords to old users, had its own critical logic flaw: the hackers had the email information and pass codes.

Sony's management blamed a hacker collective for its problems, which that community denied. Some believe that the malicious attacks on Sony's infrastructure is a form of consumer revenge for game hardware manufacturers going after people who mod their consoles to play unauthorized games. The disruptive attacks have been compared to the property damage protests of PETA or Greenpeace.

However, the theft of personal credit information goes beyond the bounds of civil liberty protests. Identity theft is the fastest growing white collar criminal crime. It is the equivalent of robbing a bank without the hassle of donning a sky mask, buying a gun and rushing in and out of a secured financial institution. Even if the thieves do not use the credit card information, they turn around to sell it to secondary criminals who use or manipulate the data bases for money laundering, property theft, spam lists or data mining.

Sociologists complain that if these tech savvy hackers would put their talents to productive uses, our society would have cured cancer or landed a man on Mars by now. That may be a candyland view of the global realities. The planet is under pressure from a highly educated, high unemployment global economic recession. Underemployed people throughout the world are angry at their governments, the authority figures, as stealth inflation is sending them into long term poverty. At a certain point, scam artists believe they have no choice but to bend the law or set aside their moral codes.

Observers believe that these problems will continue to grow in number and intensity. The Macintosh community has been the recent target of malware. A fake security pop up appears on Macs, claiming that it MacDefender anti-virus software that can be activated with a simple download. This is a false statement. The whole purpose is to confuse the naive user to download a trojan program. Now, Apple has downplayed the existence of virus and malware as part of its OS. Apple store employees are trained to deny the existence of Mac security issues. You have to press them to bring out a Norton Anti-Virus product from the store room since it is not displayed on the software shelves.

NO platform is immune from bad behavior. The use of card swipe theft devices is rising at retail stores. Illicit taps on ATM machines are a growing concern. The misappropriation of large corporate client payment information has been long considered an inside job by disgruntled IT workers. This risk increases with the more open and portable personal information is on smart phones and e-commerce payment processing systems.

cyberbarf

EXAMINE THE NET WAY OF LIFE

 

Nothing less than the truth would sell.

John Dean

cyberbarf

 

THE STEAM PUNK SPECIAL EDITION featured new Music from Chicago Ski & the (audio) Real News:

Steampunk

(mp3/4:14 length)

NOW ENTERING OUR

11TH YEAR

EXAMINING THE NET

WAY OF LIFE

cyberbarf™

distributed by pindermedia.com, inc.

CHECK OUT THE

NEW REAL NEWS KOMIX

REGAL SKY

A MODERN WOMAN'S

TAKE ON HER LIFE

@

SKIREALNEWS.COM

FEATURING:

THE REAL NEWS

IMPACT

EDITORIAL CARTOONS

WRIGLEYVILLE WAR

POLITICS

ENDORPHIN RUSH

THE DARK ABYSS

RANDOM ELECTRONS

SPECIALS

FEATURING:

THE REAL NEWS ARCHIVES

CARTOONS

MADAME'S TEA HOUSE

THE BAR

EXPLORE THE CITY SCAPE

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

SURPRISES

ESTORE

SPECIALS

 

iToons

 

 

 

THE PINDERMEDIA STORE IS FULL OF FUN TEE-SHIRTS AND SELECTIONS.

FUN . . . . VALUE . . .. FUN . . . . VALUE!

SUPPORT cyberbarf

VISIT THE CYBERBARF STORE!

cyberbarf

THE WHETHER REPORT

cyberbarf

STATUS

Question: Whether the law for patents for computer processes be reversed and revert to purely copyright principles?

* Educated Guess

* Possible

* Probable

* Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

* Doubtful

* Vapor Dream

Question: Whether more on-line gaming platforms will be hacked like the PSN?

* Educated Guess

* Possible

* Probable

* Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

* Doubtful

* Vapor Dream

Question: Whether LinkedIn's IPO will signal the start of a new rush of tech site stock offerings, leading to another stock bubble crash?

* Educated Guess

* Possible

* Probable

* Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

* Doubtful

* Vapor Dream

REWIND

LOST

AFTER

A

FULL YEAR

ON

LOSTHEORY

cyberbarf

Distribution ©2001-2011 pindermedia.com, inc.

All Ski graphics, designs, cartoons and images copyrighted.

All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

 

cyberbarf

EXAMINE THE NET WAY OF LIFE

cyberculture, commentary, cartoons, essays

ARCHIVES ADVERTISING iTOONS INDEX TERMS EMAIL eSTORE LINKS PODCASTS KOMIX