"Trust No One"

<p>[l:http://www.nten.org/2005-sf-eff|Kevin Bankston] from [lk:eff.org|EFF] gave the keynote presentation at the [lk:nten.org|NTEN Regional in SF on Friday]. His presenation could have been called "Trust No One". It was a wakeup call for anyone who was listening who didn't already think about security. The talk ranged from a background of how we have gotten to where we are with privacy on the internet (content vs non content data), email snooping, logs of browsing, traffic analysis etc…</p> <p>I can't find the powerpoint online yet, but here is the short of it:<br /> ISPs and Websites are collecting all too much data and keeping it for too long. The government and civil litigants (think file sharing, the RIAA and MPAA) can get access to it, sometimes very easily and without your knowledge.<br /> We all should not be storing out email online (privacy after 180 days is questionable) and we should be using encryption whenever practical. We should also be using different logins and passwords on different sites and not be using any web based services for searching our desktops.</p> <p>check out <a href="http://tor.eff.org"...

Go Flock Yourself

<p>Chris Messina (formerly of [lk:civicspacelabs.org|CivicSpaceLabs] presented on a panel at the [lk:nten.org|NTEN Regional San Francisco] conference called "The Next Generation of Open Source Tools". He was there to talk about [l:http://www.flock.com|Flock], a "social web browser" that he is working on. Flock seems to combine the best of del.icio.us, Outfoxed and blog editing aps like Eckto.</p> <p>Flock works with Firefox and you should read more about it at <a href="http://www.flock.com"...

Hell is someone blaming it on technology

<p>In "In an age of atomization and social fragmentation it reinforces solipsism and places the individual and that dreaded value 'choice' at the heard of the experience…it encourages people to 'tune-out' while they're occupying social space with others, as if [they] were mere irritations; and it reduces the experience of music, which in my view is an inherently social and collaborative art and medium to a preselected relationship with the self"<br /> Ok, so it reinforces what is already there. Since the post war 50's Americans have had unprecedented choice in almost every realm of life. Dozens of brands of cereal, styles of shoes, models of cars, soap, detergent, toothpaste. Many would argue that the ability to choose and always find something a little better that what one has now has led to the degradation of the institution of marriage. That because i can always find some detergent better than the one i have, i am never quite content with the one i am with.</p> <p>Before the iPod people “tuned outâ€? as someone who has been riding the subway and bus for a decade in NYC i cannot remember a conversation with a fellow traveler who was unknown to me when i got on the train. Whether listening to a walkman, or reading a book or the newspaper, or the adverts in the subway, I have never entertained conversations with strangers on the train. This is not to say I have not through about breaking the awkward silence, but what is to be gained in trivial conversation about the smell, the heat, or the slowness of the train? Perhaps...

Data privacy here and abroad

<p>The NYT Week in review ran an interesting article about data privacy today. I have been having ongoing conversatoins with colleagues about this kind of stuff, and was excited to see it so prominently featured in the Times.</p> <p>A few months ago at a conference=, Dan Robinson and I were talking and he asked "Imagine if you could see the file that choicepoint and experian have on you? Imagine if american;s could see the information that the private companies keep." There would be a revolution.</p> <p>Well, perhaps that revolution is coming. AS the times reports, over 50 million americans have had personal data compromised this year through criminal actions and incompetance. </p> <p>The Times article tries to explain why this is a pretty uniquely American issue:</p> <p><cite>[l:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/weekinreview/07dash.html|More fundamentally, these two systems for dealing with data arise from a cultural divide over privacy itself. In broad terms, the United States looks at privacy largely as a consumer and an economic issue; in the rest of the developed world, it is regarded as a fundamental right.]</cite></p> <p>American's need to tell the government that we want our lives back, we want to controll out data and our digital identities.</p> <p>One of my colleagues, [l:http://fen.net/|Fen Lebalme], is a leading thinker in this field, what is becoming known as "persistent identity on the web", his work with [l:http://identitycommons.net/|IdentityCommons] offers a promising glimpse at the way things could be if we took some drastic steps away from the current system whgere private companies own our data and profit off of it, and to a system where we once again own our data and control how...

When Pigs Wi-Fi – New York Times

<p>[via <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/opinion/07kristof.html?">When Pigs Wi-Fi – New York Times</a>]:</p> <p><cite>This kind of network is the wave of the future, and eastern Oregon shows that it's technically and financially feasible. New York and other leading cities should be embarrassed that Morrow and Umatilla Counties in eastern Oregon are far ahead of them in providing high-speed Internet coverage to residents, schools and law enforcement officers – even though all of Morrow County doesn't even have a single traffic light.</cite></p> <p><cite>The big cities should take note, said Kim Puzey, the general manager of the Port of Umatilla on the Columbia River here. "We'd like people to say, 'If they can do it out in the boondocks with a small population, that model can be applied to highly complex areas,' " he said.</cite> </p><p>This is the second aricle this week (op-ed actually) to cover the issue of muni wifi. The first was a [l:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/opinion/03friedman.html?ex=1123732800&en=c7a5ef6c43908f9c&ei=5070&emc=eta1|"glowing" op-ed by THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN] about Andrew Rasiej's bid for public advocate in NYC that is based largely on a plan to deploy muni-wifi.</p> <p>I would concur with both Friedman and Kristof that the government (city state and national) need to look at the information infrastructure the same way original telephone and electricity infrastructures were seen. AS our nation moves further in the direction of an information economy, citizensd must have access to the internet the way businesses once needed to be near sources of power and transportation routes.</p> <p>In many cities, open wifi is becoming ubiquitous. By this i do not mean public or municipal hotspots, but thanks to the default settings on most wi-fi routers in conjunction...