More disturbing news about the erosion of privacy: Declan McCullagh at Cnet reports that the Feds want ISPs to keep track of the “origin and destination information” of all users and keep records for two years:
As far back as a 2006 speech, Mueller had called for data retention on the part of Internet providers, and emphasized the point two years later when explicitly asking Congress to enact a law making it mandatory. But it had not been clear before that the FBI was asking companies to begin to keep logs of what Web sites are visited, which few if any currently do.
Aside from the gross invasion of privacy involved in such widespread spying, the retention of these records themselves poses a separate and possibly worse violation of privacy. One errant click could be enshrined in a permanent record for years (setting aside the creepiness of having corporations create secret permanent records on users in the first place). Perhaps ingenious corporate types and law enforcement will work together to create efficient uses of this permanent data: we’ll be able to adjust credit scores, criminal records, and sex offender registries remotely. What possible harm could come from a cozy relationship between business and government centered on monitoring communication among citizens?
Note to self: buy more aluminum foil for millinery.
In a detailed and provocative article in The New Republic, Lawrence Lessig considers the impact of the drastically revised idea of copyright in the Age of Digital Reproduction:
What are the rules that will govern culture for the next hundred years? Are we building an ecology of access that demands a lawyer at every turn of the page? Or have we learned something from the mess of the documentary-film past, and will we create instead an ecology of access that assures copyright owners the incentive they need, while also guaranteeing culture a future?:
i saw the Shakespeare Quartos Archive looking over the shoulder of a woman in the computer lab. She was surreptitiously submitting transcriptions of hard to read fonts in one of the folios. Usually when I’m looking at something I’m not supposed to, it’s not as highbrow.
The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is a digital collection of pre-1642 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays. A cross-Atlantic collaboration has also produced an interactive interface for the detailed study of these geographically distant quartos, with full functionality for all thirty-two quarto copies of Hamlet held by participating institutions.
Genuine data solidarity or corporate hokum? Google’s Data Liberation Front is supposedly interested in your data’s autonomy.
The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to “liberate” their products.
One thing that seems to run against this idea is Google’s propensity to hold onto data generated by users (Gmail only added a delete button after users complained). Perhaps another way to liberate data (or users of Google’s services) would be to delete search logs in a shorter amnount of time, as the European Union has pressured it to do. Joe Fay at The Register describes this tension over Google’s policies:
Google has been under particular pressure in Europe to stick a time limit on how long it hangs onto information that can be used to identity searchers.
In 2008 it halved the time it hung onto such info to nine months, a cut that still did not find favour with Eurocrats. It continues to hold data beyond that date, but says it does not hold the full IP address of users, effectively anonymizing the data, but still making it useful to the world’s largest ad broker.
When will all this senseless bloodshed stop? After the destruction of the VHS/Beta Wars, the chaos of the HDDVD/BluRay spat, and the decades-long Plasma/LCD debacle, Laura Miller at Salon shows us another conflict rising up from the ashes of peace: The iPad vs. Kindle Wars
Ultimately, if the iPad takes off, the Kindle is in serious trouble. In order to maintain the complete, current selection of titles that is one of its device’s great features, Amazon has to be willing to come to terms with publishers. Publishers, eyeing the prospect of millions of new iPad owners — people who’d never have bought a Kindle, but are game to try out iBooks — now feel more free to threaten to restrict Amazon’s supply of e-books if their terms aren’t met. If the iPad offers all (or nearly all) of the convenience of the Kindle, plus color (imagine the graphic novels!) on top of the ability to watch videos, surf the Web and check e-mail, many potential Kindle buyers will be happy to fork over the extra cash for an iPad instead.
One interesting point the author makes is that most of the cost of a book is not in printing, but in royalties, promotion, design and other immaterial things, so by her reasoning an e-book is not that much cheaper to create than a printed book. I’m not sure if I’m buying that . A lot of the cost of a book is tied up in immaterial things certainly, but her calculations don’t include the cost of the publishing company itself (secretaries, CEOs, Manhattan office buildings, and so forth).
From now on, information overload will be known as filter failure. Death will be called life failure, and poverty will be called money failure.
His point about the persistence of information overload as a feature of life since the invention of the printing press is very astute. Information overload is a very broad, overused term that probably refers to many things.
Things get more interesting in the final chapter, where Menand explains how academe’s training and hiring system works and suggests, unconvincingly, that the preponderance of liberals in academe is partly a function of “increased time to degree.” It now takes a decade on average to get a Ph.D. in English, and surely that fact discourages risk-taking. But it does not explain, say, why Democrats outnumber Republicans 10 to 1 in departments of physics. Along the way, Menand notes that most graduate students don’t earn Ph.D.’s, and that most Ph.D.’s don’t get tenure-track jobs: “There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs” — graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations — who can teach introductory courses for a pittance.
South Africa’s leading Internet service provider is facing some unexpected competition. A financial services company, frustrated with super-slow Internet speed, decided to try a homing pigeon instead. It strapped a memory card to the leg of a bird. By the time it arrived at the data’s destination, 50 miles away, the Internet had managed to send only 4 percent of the information
Unhappy Hipsters: Finally, you can use sarcasm to stop feeling inferior about the status of your home’s decor and your obstinate refusal to stop eating food that came from someplace other than a charming little farmer’s market.
More disturbing news about the erosion of privacy: Declan McCullagh at Cnet reports that the Feds want ISPs to keep track of the “origin and destination information” of all users and keep records for two years:
