Finn Brunton's Books

Communication

By: Paula Bialski,Finn Brunton,Mercedes Bunz

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Communication

By: Paula Bialski,Finn Brunton,Mercedes Bunz

On contemporary communication in its various human and nonhuman forms Contemporary communication puts us not only in conversation with one another but also with our machinery. Machine communication—to communicate not just via but also with machines—is therefore the focus of this volume. Diving into digital communications history, Finn Brunton brings to the fore the alienness of computational communication by looking at network timekeeping, automated trolling, and early attempts at communication with extraterrestrial life. Picking up this fascination with inhuman communication, Mercedes Bunz then performs a close reading of interaction design and interfaces to show how technology addresses humans (as very young children). Finally, Paula Bialski shares her findings from a field study of software development, analyzing the communicative forms that occur when code is written by separate people. Today, communication unfolds merely between two or more conscious entities but often includes an invisible third party. Inspired by this drastic shift, this volume uncovers new meanings of what it means “to communicate.”

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Page Count

138

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1452959293

ISBN 13

9781452959290

Digital Cash

The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency

By: Finn Brunton

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Digital Cash

The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency

By: Finn Brunton

The fascinating untold story of digital cash and its creators—from experiments in the 1970s to the mania over Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies Bitcoin may appear to be a revolutionary form of digital cash without precedent or prehistory. In fact, it is only the best-known recent experiment in a long line of similar efforts going back to the 1970s. But the story behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and its blockchain technology has largely been untold—until now. In Digital Cash, Finn Brunton reveals how technological utopians and political radicals created experimental money to bring about their visions of the future: to protect privacy, bring down governments, prepare for apocalypse, or launch a civilization of innovation and abundance that would make its creators immortal. Filled with marvelous characters, stories, and ideas, Digital Cash is an engaging and accessible account of the strange origins and remarkable technologies behind today's cryptocurrency explosion.

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Page Count

272

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691209162

ISBN 13

9780691209166

Obfuscation

A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest

By: Finn Brunton,Helen Nissenbaum

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Obfuscation

A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest

By: Finn Brunton,Helen Nissenbaum

How we can evade, protest, and sabotage today's pervasive digital surveillance by deploying more data, not less—and why we should. With Obfuscation, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum mean to start a revolution. They are calling us not to the barricades but to our computers, offering us ways to fight today's pervasive digital surveillance—the collection of our data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers. To the toolkit of privacy protecting techniques and projects, they propose adding obfuscation: the deliberate use of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection projects. Brunton and Nissenbaum provide tools and a rationale for evasion, noncompliance, refusal, even sabotage—especially for average users, those of us not in a position to opt out or exert control over data about ourselves. Obfuscation will teach users to push back, software developers to keep their user data safe, and policy makers to gather data without misusing it. Brunton and Nissenbaum present a guide to the forms and formats that obfuscation has taken and explain how to craft its implementation to suit the goal and the adversary. They describe a series of historical and contemporary examples, including radar chaff deployed by World War II pilots, Twitter bots that hobbled the social media strategy of popular protest movements, and software that can camouflage users' search queries and stymie online advertising. They go on to consider obfuscation in more general terms, discussing why obfuscation is necessary, whether it is justified, how it works, and how it can be integrated with other privacy practices and technologies.

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Page Count

137

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262529866

ISBN 13

9780262529860

Spam

A Shadow History of the Internet

By: Finn Brunton

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Spam

A Shadow History of the Internet

By: Finn Brunton

What spam is, how it works, and how it has shaped online communities and the Internet itself. The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come from? As Finn Brunton explains in Spam, it is produced and shaped by many different populations around the world: programmers, con artists, bots and their botmasters, pharmaceutical merchants, marketers, identity thieves, crooked bankers and their victims, cops, lawyers, network security professionals, vigilantes, and hackers. Every time we go online, we participate in the system of spam, with choices, refusals, and purchases the consequences of which we may not understand. This is a book about what spam is, how it works, and what it means. Brunton provides a cultural history that stretches from pranks on early computer networks to the construction of a global criminal infrastructure. The history of spam, Brunton shows us, is a shadow history of the Internet itself, with spam emerging as the mirror image of the online communities it targets. Brunton traces spam through three epochs: the 1970s to 1995, and the early, noncommercial computer networks that became the Internet; 1995 to 2003, with the dot-com boom, the rise of spam's entrepreneurs, and the first efforts at regulating spam; and 2003 to the present, with the war of algorithms—spam versus anti-spam. Spam shows us how technologies, from email to search engines, are transformed by unintended consequences and adaptations, and how online communities develop and invent governance for themselves.

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Page Count

295

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

026252757X

ISBN 13

9780262527576

Obfuscation

A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest

By: Finn Brunton,Helen Nissenbaum

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Obfuscation

A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest

By: Finn Brunton,Helen Nissenbaum

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

137

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262529866

ISBN 13

9780262529860

Digital Cash

The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency

By: Finn Brunton

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Digital Cash

The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency

By: Finn Brunton

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Page Count

272

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691209162

ISBN 13

9780691209166

Communication

By: Paula Bialski,Finn Brunton,Mercedes Bunz

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Communication

By: Paula Bialski,Finn Brunton,Mercedes Bunz

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Page Count

138

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1452959293

ISBN 13

9781452959290

Documenting Aftermath

Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters

By: Megan Finn

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Documenting Aftermath

Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters

By: Megan Finn

An examination of how changing public information infrastructures shaped people's experience of earthquakes in Northern California in 1868, 1906, and 1989. When an earthquake happens in California today, residents may look to the United States Geological Survey for online maps that show the quake's epicenter, turn to Twitter for government bulletins and the latest news, check Facebook for updates from friends and family, and count on help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). One hundred and fifty years ago, however, FEMA and other government agencies did not exist, and information came by telegraph and newspaper. In Documenting Aftermath, Megan Finn explores changing public information infrastructures and how they shaped people's experience of disaster, examining postearthquake information and communication practices in three Northern California earthquakes: the 1868 Hayward Fault earthquake, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. She then analyzes the institutions, policies, and technologies that shape today's postdisaster information landscape. Finn argues that information orders—complex constellations of institutions, technologies, and practices—influence how we act in, experience, and document events. What Finn terms event epistemologies, constituted both by historical documents and by researchers who study them, explain how information orders facilitate particular possibilities for knowledge. After the 1868 earthquake, the Chamber of Commerce telegraphed reassurances to out-of-state investors while local newspapers ran sensational earthquake narratives; in 1906, families and institutions used innovative techniques for locating people; and in 1989, government institutions and the media developed a symbiotic relationship in information dissemination. Today, government disaster response plans and new media platforms imagine different sources of informational authority yet work together shaping disaster narratives.

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Page Count

281

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262552752

ISBN 13

9780262552752

Spam

A Shadow History of the Internet

By: Finn Brunton

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Spam

A Shadow History of the Internet

By: Finn Brunton

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Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

295

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

026252757X

ISBN 13

9780262527576

Book's by Finn Brunton

Communication

Communication

Digital Cash

Digital Cash

Obfuscation

Obfuscation

Spam

Spam

Obfuscation

Obfuscation

Digital Cash

Digital Cash

Communication

Communication

Documenting Aftermath

Documenting Aftermath

Spam

Spam

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