The plot for 'The Digital Apocalypse' was conceived after reading 'Heaven and Earth' written by Ian Plimer. Winston Frobisher, a social historian, experiences triumphs and tragedies as he navigates through an increasingly digital world of unprecedented social and technological change that challenges his basic principles of love and life. Adam Lampton, influenced by his experiences with aid workers in Africa, commits to a course of direct action to slow the advance of famine, pollution and habitat destruction that threatens the future of a voracious, rapidly growing human population. Individually, their lives are thrown upside down by the unpredictable conjunction of man-induced and natural phenomena that threatens the planet. Will one or both emerge to influence the future?
Why 1 = presence and 0 = absence and the digital world formula is x = xn: an exploration of meaning in a universe of infinite replication. In the beginning was the Zero, and the Zero was with God, and God was the One. —All and Nothing In 1854, the British mathematician George Boole presented the idea of a universe the elements of which could be understood in terms of the logic of absence and presence: 0 and 1, all and nothing—the foundation of binary code. The Boolean digits 0 and 1 do not designate a quantity. In the Boolean world, x times x always equals x; all and nothing meet in the formula x = xn. As everything becomes digitized, God the clockmaker is replaced by God the programmer. This book–described by its authors as “a theology for the digital world”—explores meaning in a digital age of infinite replication, in a world that has dissolved into information and achieved immortality by turning into a pure sign. All and Nothing compares information that spreads without restraint to a hydra—the mythological monster that grew two heads for every one that was cut off. Information is thousand-headed and thousand-eyed because Hydra's tracks cannot be deleted. It shows that when we sit in front of a screen, we are actually on the other side, looking at the world as an uncanny reminder of the nondigitized. It compares our personal data to our shadows and our souls, envisioning the subconscious laid out on a digital bier like a corpse. The digital world, the authors explain, summons forth fantasies of a chiliastic or apocalyptic nature. The goal of removing the representative from mathematics has now been achieved on a greater scale than Boole could have imagined.
THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Sparkling with mystery, humor and the uncanny, this is a fun read. But beneath its effervescent tone, more complex themes are at play.” —San Francisco Chronicle In his wildly entertaining debut novel, Hank Green—cocreator of Crash Course, Vlogbrothers, and SciShow—spins a sweeping, cinematic tale about a young woman who becomes an overnight celebrity before realizing she's part of something bigger, and stranger, than anyone could have possibly imagined. The Carls just appeared. Roaming through New York City at three a.m., twenty-three-year-old April May stumbles across a giant sculpture. Delighted by its appearance and craftsmanship—like a ten-foot-tall Transformer wearing a suit of samurai armor—April and her best friend, Andy, make a video with it, which Andy uploads to YouTube. The next day, April wakes up to a viral video and a new life. News quickly spreads that there are Carls in dozens of cities around the world—from Beijing to Buenos Aires—and April, as their first documentarian, finds herself at the center of an intense international media spotlight. Seizing the opportunity to make her mark on the world, April now has to deal with the consequences her new particular brand of fame has on her relationships, her safety, and her own identity. And all eyes are on April to figure out not just what the Carls are, but what they want from us. Compulsively entertaining and powerfully relevant, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing grapples with big themes, including how the social internet is changing fame, rhetoric, and radicalization; how our culture deals with fear and uncertainty; and how vilification and adoration spring for the same dehumanization that follows a life in the public eye. The beginning of an exciting fiction career, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is a bold and insightful novel of now.
"The Cyber Attack Survival Manual is the rare security awareness book that is both highly informative and interesting. And this is one of the finest security awareness books of the last few years." – Ben Rothke, Tapad Engineering Let two accomplished cyber security experts, Nick Selby and Heather Vescent, guide you through the dangers, traps and pitfalls of online life. Learn how cyber criminals operate and how you can defend yourself and your family from online security threats. From Facebook, to Twitter, to online banking we are all increasingly exposed online with thousands of criminals ready to bounce on the slightest weakness. This indispensable guide will teach you how to protect your identity and your most private financial and personal information.
From the bestselling author of The Dark Net comes a book that explains all the dangers of the digital revolution and offers concrete solutions on how we can protect our personal privacy, and democracy itself. The internet was meant to set us free. But have we unwittingly handed too much away to shadowy powers behind a wall of code, all manipulated by a handful of Silicon Valley utopians, ad men, and venture capitalists? And, in light of recent data breach scandals around companies like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, what does that mean for democracy, our delicately balanced system of government that was created long before big data, total information, and artificial intelligence? In this urgent polemic, Jamie Bartlett argues that through our unquestioning embrace of big tech, the building blocks of democracy are slowly being removed. The middle class is being eroded, sovereign authority and civil society is weakened, and we citizens are losing our critical faculties, maybe even our free will. The People Vs Tech is an enthralling account of how our fragile political system is being threatened by the digital revolution. Bartlett explains that by upholding six key pillars of democracy, we can save it before it is too late. We need to become active citizens, uphold a shared democratic culture, protect free elections, promote equality, safeguard competitive and civic freedoms, and trust in a sovereign authority. This essential book shows that the stakes couldn't be higher and that, unless we radically alter our course, democracy will join feudalism, supreme monarchies and communism as just another political experiment that quietly disappeared.
Responding to a plethora of media representing end times, this anthology of essays examines pop culture's fascination with end of the world or apocalyptic narratives. Essays discuss films and made-for-television movies - including Deep Impact, The Core, and The Day After Tomorrow - that feature primarily [hu]man-made catastrophes or natural catastrophes. These representations complement the large amount of mediated literature and films on religious perspectives of the apocalypse, the Left Behind series, and other films/books that deal with prophecy from the Book of Revelation in the Bible. This book will be useful in upper-level undergraduate/graduate courses addressing mass media, film and television studies, popular culture, rhetorical criticism, and special/advanced topics. In addition, the book will be of interest to scholars and students in disciplines including anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, and religious studies.
Will your organization be protected the day a quantum computer breaks encryption on the internet? Computer encryption is vital for protecting users, data, and infrastructure in the digital age. Using traditional computing, even common desktop encryption could take decades for specialized ‘crackers’ to break and government and infrastructure-grade encryption would take billions of times longer. In light of these facts, it may seem that today’s computer cryptography is a rock-solid way to safeguard everything from online passwords to the backbone of the entire internet. Unfortunately, many current cryptographic methods will soon be obsolete. In 2016, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) predicted that quantum computers will soon be able to break the most popular forms of public key cryptography. The encryption technologies we rely on every day—HTTPS, TLS, WiFi protection, VPNs, cryptocurrencies, PKI, digital certificates, smartcards, and most two-factor authentication—will be virtually useless. . . unless you prepare. Cryptography Apocalypse is a crucial resource for every IT and InfoSec professional for preparing for the coming quantum-computing revolution. Post-quantum crypto algorithms are already a reality, but implementation will take significant time and computing power. This practical guide helps IT leaders and implementers make the appropriate decisions today to meet the challenges of tomorrow. This important book: Gives a simple quantum mechanics primer Explains how quantum computing will break current cryptography Offers practical advice for preparing for a post-quantum world Presents the latest information on new cryptographic methods Describes the appropriate steps leaders must take to implement existing solutions to guard against quantum-computer security threats Cryptography Apocalypse: Preparing for the Day When Quantum Computing Breaks Today's Crypto is a must-have guide for anyone in the InfoSec world who needs to know if their security is ready for the day crypto break and how to fix it.
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with the future, by the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine. “Deeply funny and life-affirming, with a warm, generous outlook even on the most challenging of subjects.” —Esquire We’re alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. A pandemic draws our global community to a halt. Everywhere you look there’s an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on earth is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell is consumed by these questions—and, as the father of two young children, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization’s collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited—real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. What emerges is an absorbing, funny, and deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with what’s ahead.
In this post-apocalyptic rollercoaster ride, philosopher Srećko Horvat invites us to explore the Apocalypse in terms of ‘revelation’ (rather than as the ‘end’ itself). He argues that the only way to prevent the end – i.e., extinction – is to engage in a close reading of various interconnected threats, such as climate crisis, the nuclear age and the ongoing pandemic. Drawing on the work of neglected philosopher Günther Anders, this book outlines a philosophical approach to deal with what Horvat, borrowing a term from climate science and giving it a theological twist, calls ‘eschatological tipping points’. These are no longer just the nuclear age or climate crisis, but their collision, conjoined with various other major threats – not only pandemics, but also the viruses of capitalism and fascism. In his investigation of the future of places such as Chernobyl, the Mediterranean and the Marshall Islands, as well as many others affected by COVID-19, Horvat contends that the ‘revelation’ appears simple and unprecedented: the alternatives are no longer socialism or barbarism – our only alternatives today are a radical reinvention of the world, or mass extinction. After the Apocalypse is an urgent call not only to mourn tomorrow’s dead today but to struggle for our future while we can.
