Root kit -- Buffer overflow: the space and time of cyberwar -- Injection attack: writing and the information catastrophe -- Distributed denial of service: cybernetic sovereignty -- Spear phishing: nodal subjects -- Firmware vulnerabilities.

Programming languages have developed significantly over the past century to provide complex models to think about and describe the world and processes of computation. Out of Alan Kay’s Smalltalk and a number of earlier languages, object-oriented programming has emerged as a preeminent mode of writing and organizing programs. Tracing the history of object-oriented programming from its origins in Simula and Sketchpad through Smalltalk, particularly its philosophical and technical developments, offers unique insights into philosophical questions about objects, language, and our digital (...) technologies. These early attempts to understand objects as basic elements of computation demonstrate the ways in which language, while firmly planted in the material reality of computation, must delimit objects from each other. This essay critically explores this history and explicates a theory of objects suggested by the development of object-oriented programming languages, which insists on the importance of language for representing and delimiting objects. It argues that the philosophies behind object-oriented programming are ultimately opposed to the claims of object-oriented ontology and find themselves more closely allied with philosophies that insist on the mediation of what exists through language. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 239. In 1998 the Securities and Exchange Commission authorized electronic exchanges. Not only did this give day traders access to buy and sell securities from their desktops, it also made it possible for high powered Wall Street traders to program algorithms to make trades at speeds on the order of milliseconds.(1) The advent of automatic algorithmic trading, now known as high-frequency trading, has vastly accelerated the already increasing speed and volume of trading. This project was an attempt (...) to capture in an ephemeral and environmental way the dizzying acceleration of networked markets. The change in the daily closing value of the Dow and daily trading volume were each set to control a sine wave oscillator between 20 and 800hz. The oscillators were combined to ‘sonify’ the data, creating a changing noise reflecting the daily change and trading volume of the market. The resulting sound is somewhat tedious until the trading volume begins increasing in the 60s and then becomes increasingly complex as high-frequency trading and market volatility set in during the 1990s and 2000s. NOTES 1. Charles Duhigg. “Stock Traders Find Speed Pays, in Milliseconds.” New York Times . July 23, 2009. (shrink)