Matei Candea (ed.): The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments (2009)

The social sciences and humanities are now being swept by a Tardean revival, a rediscovery and reappraisal of the work of this truly unique thinker, for whom ‘everything is a society and every science a sociology’. Tarde is being brought forward as the misrecognised forerunner of a post-Durkheimian era. Reclaimed from a century of near-oblivion, his sociology has been linked to Foucaultian microphysics of power, to Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, and most recently to the spectrum of approaches related to Actor Network Theory. In this connection, Bruno Latour hailed Tarde’s sociology as “an alternative beginning for an alternative social science”. This volume asks what such an alternative social science might look like.

Publisher Routledge, 2009
CRESC (Culture, Economy and the Social) series
ISBN 0415543398, 9780415543392
287 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)

IACAP: The Computational Turn: Past, Presents, Futures? conference proceedings (2011)

In the West, philosophical attention to computation and computational devices is at least as old as Leibniz. But since the early 1940s, electronic computers have evolved from a few machines filling several rooms to widely diffused – indeed, ubiquitous – devices, ranging from networked desktops, laptops, smartphones and “the internet of things.” Along the way, initial philosophical attention – in particular, to the ethical and social implications of these devices (so Norbert Wiener, 1950) – became sufficiently broad and influential as to justify the phrase “the computational turn” by the 1980s. In part, the computational turn referred to the multiple ways in which the increasing availability and usability of computers allowed philosophers to explore a range of traditional philosophical interests – e.g., in logic, artificial intelligence, philosophical mathematics, ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, ontology, to name a few – in new ways, often shedding significant new light on traditional issues and arguments. Simultaneously, computer scientists, mathematicians, and others whose work focused on computation and computational devices often found their work to evoke (if not force) reflection and debate precisely on the philosophical assumptions and potential implications of their research. These two large streams of development – especially as calling for necessary interdisciplinary dialogues that crossed what were otherwise often hard disciplinary boundaries – inspired what became the first of the Computing and Philosophy (CAP) conferences in 1986 (devoted to Computer-Assisted Instruction in philosophy).

Since 1986, CAP conferences have grown in scope and range, to include a bewildering array of intersections between computation and philosophy as explored across a global range of cultures and traditions. In keeping with what has now become a significant tradition, IACAP‟11 will accept presentations across this array and range. At the same time, in order to recognize and celebrate the 25th anniversary of the CAP conferences, we specifically encourage submissions that include attention to the past, present(s), and possible future(s) of their foci as expressions of this computational turn.

International Conference of Computing and Philosophy (IACAP)
Organizing Chair: Charles Ess
Program Chair: Ruth Hagengruber
Aarhus University, 4-6 July 2011
336 pages

conference

PDF

McAfee: Revealed: Operation Shady RAT (2011)

“What we have witnessed over the past five to six years has been nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth — closely guarded national secrets (including from classified government networks), source code, bug databases, email archives, negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions, document stores, legal contracts, SCADA configurations, design schematics and much more has “fallen off the truck” of numerous, mostly Western companies and disappeared in the ever-growing electronic archives of dogged adversaries.

What is happening to all this data — by now reaching petabytes as a whole — is still largely an open question. However, if even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the other team’s playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat not just to individual companies and industries but to entire countries that face the prospect of decreased economic growth in a suddenly more competitive landscape and the loss of jobs in industries that lose out to unscrupulous competitors in another part of the world, not to mention the national security impact of the loss of sensitive intelligence or defense information.

Yet, the public (and often the industry) understanding of this significant national security threat is largely minimal due to the very limited number of voluntary disclosures by victims of intrusion activity compared to the actual number of compromises that take place. With the goal of raising the level of public awareness today we are publishing the most comprehensive analysis ever revealed of victim profiles from a five year targeted operation by one specific actor — Operation Shady RAT, as I have named it at McAfee (RAT is a common acronym in the industry which stands for Remote Access Tool). ” (author)

Revealed: Operation Shady RAT: An investigation of targeted intrusions into 70+ global companies, governments and non-profit organizations during the last 5 years
White paper
by Dmitri Alperovitch, VP Threat Research, McAfee
Published 2 August 2011
14 pages

author’s blog entry
author’s tweet
further coverage (Vanity Fair)
further coverage (Security Week)
further coverage (Reuters)
further coverage (Guardian)

PDF (updated on 2017-11-24)