User:Notes and annotations

From XPUB & Lens-Based wiki
Revision as of 14:14, 10 March 2014 by Michaela (talk | contribs)

This directory is for notes and annotations on themes, current readings and projects, related to my graduation thesis.

Vanish project research and software created bundle by Roxana Geambasu, Amit Levy, Yoshi Kohno, Hank Levy and Arvind Krishnamurthy

Researchers at the university of Washington developed technology called Vanish that makes electronic data “self destructive” after a specific period of time. Instead of relaying on Google, Facebook or Hotmail to delete the data that is stored “in the cloud “- in other words, on their distributed servers – Vanish encrypts the data and then “shatters “ the encryption key. To read the data your computer has to put the pieces of the key back together, but they "erode" or “rust” as time passes, and after a certain point the document can not longer be read. Vanish does not provide with an ultimate solution how to take control over your personal data ( emails, text, photos or anything posted on the cloud ) but instead suggest the possibility to have certain control / date expiration over the content. The project departures and was developed in partnership with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a system created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991, the aim of which is to provide a public and private keys to encrypt and decrypt texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partitions and to increase the security of e-mail communications.


Annotation on Delete:The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

In a recent book, “Delete:The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age“ the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites Stacy Snyders case as a reminder of the importance of “societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from the past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people's sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever remember / tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concluded that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult task.”