Hi, my name is Max Darham. I am at present the Hearing Voices intern. I am 18 years old and from Bozeman, Montana. I am a freshman at Bennington College and currently participating in the college’s annual Field Work Term. The point is to intregrate your academic learning with real life work experience. In my case it’s working for Barrett and Hearing Voices. I grew up in Bozeman MT skiing, hiking and having fun. I will be producing an audio-slideshow movie, designing photo-journalism web-pages, archiving HV’s online audio collection, and writing several blog-posts over the next few weeks.

Frazer Lake, Summer 2007

Akamai has a Real-time Web Monitor tracking “global Internet conditions around the clock.” Areas w/ highest traffic are brightest. You can also color the map by areas with the slowest connections (latency) or the most recent “network attacks.”

From September’s Wired: Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe.

A fairly chilling account of internet vulnerability that reads more like one of William Gibson’s or Bruce Sterling’s fictions.

The ramifications of an attack such as this are reasonably severe — and yet this is the first I’d seen or read any news on the subject, even considering the number of tech.-related publications I regularly peruse.

An Ars Technica article compiles the latest illegal music download research in “A $13 billion fantasy: latest music piracy study overstates effect of P2P.” These studies conclusively show P2P sharing nets cost the industry somewhere between $0 and $13B ($US) yearly. Doncha just love research?

Inside the newly released iTunes 7.3 is an online University. iTunes U, sez Apple, is “giving higher education institutions an ingenious way to get audio and video content out to their students.” Already a dozen colleges offer course materials and podcasts via this new feature inside iTunes Store (link launches iTunes). Find out about “The Future of the Internet” (iTunes) from Stanford University, view the virgin “Mary in Folk Art and Belief” (iTunes) at Otis College of Art and Design, or figure out “Physics for Future Presidents” from UC Berkeley

From USA Today “U.S. Net access not all that speedy:”

Median US broadband: 1.97 MB/s (Montana: 1.312)
Japan: 61 MB/s
France: 17 MB/s
Canada: 7 MB/s

Hey — at least we’re not in SoDak (0.825)!