On that note, the Columbia Journalism Review has reported on a new map of political blogs that my company, Morningside Analytics recently produced for a study being conducted by Columbia’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Reporting and the Berkman Center at Harvard.

(Click the image to read our blog post about it.)

I find this map extremely compelling, and it speaks volumes about the respective approaches that will follow one of these two men to the White House tomorrow.

John Kelly, our chief scientist and founder, sums it up:

“There are some groups of pro-McCain and anti-Obama blogs that are well connected to each other but not densely linked with bloggers in the longstanding political blogosphere, even those on the conservative side [...]. If these were typical political bloggers, we would expect to see them better woven into the fabric of the network.”

Cogitate on that, sleep well, and vote proudly.

[Update: Okay, yes, it's a stupid minor thing, but I made this in response to the proliferation of instructions like this.]

Tags: bell pepper, knife skills, cutting, kitchen, pepper

This leaves Paramount as the only major studio still backing HD DVD [update: oops, Universal too.].

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=803

http://www.timewarner.com/corp/newsroom/pr/0,20812,1700383,00.html

Tags: blu-ray, hd dvd, hi-def, hd, warner bros., warner

Who else, of course, but James T. Kirk?”

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/33832

Although I don’t think it would work as a standalone movie, I’m still waiting for the followup series they hinted at the end of TNG – the continual use of warp drive is found to be definitively unraveling the fabric of space-time. How do you deal with that? What does that do to interplanetary politics? How do you develop alternate forms of travel that don’t use warp technology? How do you stop everyone from using warp drive, and how do you police that? How do you impose that restriction on hostile entities? Nothing like a good galactic environmental crisis to bring Star Trek back into relevance.

(Of course, in TNG, the answer obviously lies in Wesley Crusher’s newly acquired godlike Traveler capabilities, but I think there are a lot of people who would find that objectionable.)

Tags: star trek, jj abrams, romulans, time travel

http://astore.amazon.com/buyadam-20/detail/B0009VXAM0/105-0381338-1255632

The new model includes a software emulator, but a fairly large number of the older games have at least some problems.

I’ve really been pretty blown away by how much fun the PS3 is, both for the newer games (which are huge and gorgeous) and for how much better it makes the PS2 experience – all games that support it can play in widescreen, everything’s faster, using the hard drive instead of memory cards is both more convenient and MUCH faster, and the analog sticks are more precise. I think dropping the hardware emulator is an unfortunate cost-saving move that will probably diminish the experience, if you care about that.

Also interesting – I found this list of current and upcoming PS3 exclusives, including PSN (downloadable) games:

http://www.psu.com/PlayStation-3-Exclusives-List-Feature–a1079-p0.php

I think the PS3 has only shown a mere fraction of its power, and Sony didn’t do even a passable job of promoting it properly at launch, but the slate of games on the list for the next six months and beyond has me very excited.

Tags: ps3, ps2, sony, software emulation, exclusives, playstation

The thing is, I think they’re right. I mean, it’s stupid, but then so is the DMCA.

There are some other provisions (which seem to not apply), but the crux of it is:

“No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that–

`(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of
circumventing a technological measure that effectively
controls access to a work protected under this title;”

It explicitly does NOT say “copy the work”, it says “circumvent the technology”. “Circumvent” is not the word they were looking for.

In fact, now that I think about it, convincing someone that DRM is bad is also a violation, as that may be interpreted as offering a service that is primarily design for the purpose of circumventing technological protection. Crap.

http://www.forbes.com/business/feeds/afx/2007/05/10/afx3708595.html

(via boingboing.)

Tags: drm, dmca, violation

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14deal.html?ex=1334203200&en=d94eb7f788b32db5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

http://consumerist.com/consumer/cadbury/cadbury-our-eggs-arent-smaller-you-are-bigger-250559.php

Tags: creme egg, stupid, smaller, insulting, lying, cadbury

You paint with the brush for broad strokes to define your selection, then you have a dialog box to refine the edge with radius, contrast, smoothing, feathering, and contrast selectors, with 5 kinds of masked preview. (Also, it appears that the Refine Edges dialog is also available on all of the other selection tools.)

This alone is worth the price of the upgrade.

Documentation is non-existent in the beta, but I found this tutorial:

http://www.photoshopcafe.com/cs3/qs.htm

Tags: adobe, photoshop, cs3, quick selection tool

This completely destroys the rationale behind having any DRM at all. It can’t be because they’re afraid of the higher quality recordings getting out, because those are the ones they’re releasing without DRM. All that remains is shafting the customer, which is of course all that DRM is actually good for.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/04/02/itunes_store_will_se.html

Tags: itunes, drm, emi

I’ve talked about the dangers of breaking anonymization with leaking keys before:

• http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/30/flickr-pictures-web-beacons-and-a-modest-proposal/
• http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/29/whats-the-big-fuss-about-ip-addresses/

Short answer: It is not enough to say that a piece of data is not “personally identifiable” if it is unique and exists with a piece of personally identifiable data somewhere else. More importantly, it doesn’t even have to be unique or completely personally identifiable – whether or not you can guess who a person is from a piece of data is not a black and white distinction, and simply being able to guess who a person might be can leak some information that might confirm their identity when combined with something else.

This is also completely setting aside the fact that you have very little direct control over much of your clickstream, since there are all sorts of ways for a site you visit to get your browser to load things – popups, javascript includes, and images being the most prevalent.

Preserving anonymity is hard. This is an egregious breach of privacy. Expect lawsuits if this is true.

http://internet.seekingalpha.com/article/29449

Tags: isps, clickstreams, privacy violation, seekingalpha

http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html

The Penny Gap says that if your service is actually free, it will have a much greater uptake than one that is merely very very cheap. Rather than being a smooth curve up the value chain, there’s a quantum shift between “free” and “costs anything”. I think this is largely due to the implicit value factoring of the “cost” (in effort) of the transaction. If you could just wave your hand and pay a penny for something without getting out your credit card number or typing in your password, it seems like this gap would largely disappear.

There’s a similar effect at play when dealing with “unlimited” services. If you have to pay for usage, it takes a lot of mental effort to add up everything you’re paying and make sure you’re not over a certain amount. If you don’t, and have an unlimited plan, that mental effort goes away. Even if the unlimited service is more expensive than you’d pay with metered service, there’s less hesitation to use it because you never have to worry about keeping track of it. I feel like this effect is less prominent on services that give you constant feedback about how much you’ve used. Presumably the extra security of insurance of not ever going above a certain limit has some value to it as well.

Free and unlimited are obviously closely related, mentally and emotionally. I’ll have to think about this some more.

Tags: free, unlimited, unlimited chasm, penny gap

SCANNER COMPATIBILITY PROBLEMS?!? What year is it?!?

What a total embarassment.

Tags: windows, vista, goodfuckingluck

It comes in three sizes:

http://www.gorillapod.com/

I got the DSLR-Zoom for my big camera (which holds up to 6 lbs.) and the regular size for my little pocket cam (which is more portable). I’m a big fan of Canon’s wireless flash system, so this also seems like a great way to mount a remote flash in an inconspicious location.

Regular (digicams and flashes):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000EVSLRO/002-0315298-6861671?ie=UTF8&tag=buyadam-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B000EVSLRO

DSLR (no zoom):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000HAVVFG/002-0315298-6861671?ie=UTF8&tag=buyadam-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B000HAVVFG

DSLR-Zoom:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000KFRSG4/002-0315298-6861671?ie=UTF8&tag=buyadam-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B000KFRSG4

Tags: tripod, gorillapod, camera, photo

http://robertantonwilson.blogspot.com/2007/01/raw-essence.html

I can’t say enough about the importance of his writing to our national culture of weirdness. He will be missed.

Tags: robertantonwilson, raw, illuminatus

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2007/corp_011007.html

Tags: apple, iphone, cisco, lawsuit, trademark infringement

Add this to AdSense, the Google Web Accelerator, Google Web Analytics, and Google Maps, and that’s a lot of data being collected about browsing habits, and the number of sites you can browse without sending some data to Google has just dropped significantly.

Previously:

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/02/03/detailed-survey-of-verbatim-answers-from-aol-ms-yahoo-and-google-about-what-details-they-store/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/30/flickr-pictures-web-beacons-and-a-modest-proposal/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/29/whats-the-big-fuss-about-ip-addresses/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/27/google-does-keep-cookie-and-ip-correlated-logs/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/26/does-google-keep-logs-of-personal-data/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2005/11/21/google-really-wants-your-logs/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2005/05/05/google-wants-your-logs/

http://www.aquick.org/blog/index.php?s=google&submit=Search

Tags: google, tracking, logs, surveillance

As predicted, with a decent RAW converter, the evident noise is strongly diminished, and the noise that remains is very very fine and can be easily removed with Noise Ninja.

Here’s a shot I took at ISO 800 with no flash:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fields/262621826/

Get the update here:

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/cameraraw.html

Tags: canon, raw, adobe, acr, beta, 400d, rebel xti

Some comments from Thomas Knoll (the man):

http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.3bb6a869.3bc1b01e/0

Tags: adobe, camera raw, acd, lightroom, canon, 400d, rebel xti, xti

For a $20 subscription, you get a year’s subscription (six issues), and 100% of your subscription fee goes to your choice of 12 partner organizations.

http://www.goodmagazine.com/subscribe/why/

Tags: good, magazine, subscribe

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/15/amazon_unbox_to_cust.html

Amazon Unbox has the worst terms of service I’ve seen in a long time. Like Cory, I’m a longtime Amazon supporter, and I think their customer service is outstanding, and this is a travesty. Way to fuck over the people who won’t actually read the terms because they just want to download a movie.

I only really have one thing to add with respect to the “if it has value then we have a right to charge money for it” proposition. Does the MPAA reserve the right to charge more retroactively if you enjoy a movie more than you expected to? That’s hidden value, right? This madness has to stop.

Mr. Bezos, you should be ashamed of yourself, and also whoever you put in charge of this.

Tags: amazon, unbox, drm, travesty, unfair terms of service

http://salon.com/tech/feature/2006/09/14/basic/index.html

It used to be BASIC – textbooks of other subjects had BASIC programs in them to try out, and it was installed everywhere. Even my Intellivision, one of the early game consoles, had a BASIC module.

Sure, it’s not good for teaching you about any modern programming concepts, but that’s less important in the beginning than understanding how computers fundamentally work.

There’s been a lot of ranting recently about how kids these days can’t program because all they learn is Java and they never get near the guts of the computer itself (because why should they learn something they’re never going to use?), but I think I agree with Brin’s point – it’s deeper than that. The prevailing opinion is that languages that force you to understand what they’re doing are not only useless but obsolete. The analogy to eating your seed corn is apt – we’re cutting off an entire generation from the hacker tools they need in order to learn how to do interesting stuff with technology instead of just put other people’s pieces together (and people who have never learned the basics are far more likely to be stumped when something doesn’t behave as they expect).

I’m not sure what the answer to this is, really, but it’s definitely worth discussing.

Tags: programming, basic, david brin, salon, educational, instructional

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/what_the_terror.html

Tags: terrorism, play into their hands, auto-immune disease, schneier, security

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/009461.php

There’s an important lesson in here. When you hang principles on a single race, and then lose, the principle goes with the race and suffers a horrible blow. This >WAS< the Dean mistake – it represented the internet way, and everybody fled when he lost, and how long has it taken that approach to recover its reputation?

When Lieberman wins, the ENTIRE “unseat the incumbents” approach dies a horrible death, in one single event.

How to dissociate the principles from the individual race?

Tags: lieberman, lamont, senate, races, keyraces, politics

http://www.megnut.com/2006/06/the-expense-of-eating-local

I have some responses to this.

1) The Union Square greenmarket is, in my experience, significantly more expensive than the other satellite markets throughout the city. There are a few possible reasons for this – it might draw the more expensive farms which sell different but slightly more expensive varietals of the same produce, the thriving restaurant business in the area could be a factor, or it could just be fame. What I do know is that everyone I know who shops at the USGM says “hey, this stuff is really expensive” far more than the people who don’t. I’d suggest doing some comparison shopping at other markets.

2) There are regional variations in the growing season and only the most prime produce will be at better prices. The berry season has barely started here in NY, so they’re more expensive. But lettuce, greens, beans, and cucumbers are all MUCH cheaper at my green market than the supermarket, and much higher quality. You’ve got to pick your battles. One exception I’ve found to this has been tomatoes. Local tomatoes are outrageously expensive compared to shipped tomatoes. But on the other hand, they’re incomparable, because tomatoes were not meant to be shipped. They are completely different beasts. $3/lb for local tomatoes is an indulgence I’ll gladly pay to consume what I consider to be among the most pleasurable culinary experiences we have available to us. The depth of flavor and delicate texture in a local tomato is simply something you can’t get for any price nonlocally, because what it must go through to survive shipping destroys its unique characteristics. I feel the same way about Ronnybrook Farms milk. It’s pretty expensive compared to other milks, but that’s only if you assume that because they have the same name that they’re somehow the same product. They’re not.

3) There’s a lot to be said about the freshness and fridge life of fruits and vegetables purchased locally. If you’re actually going to eat it in a day or two, the quality will likely be unmatched by anything you can find even at Whole Foods. On top of that, a head of lettuce purchased at Whole Foods will last maybe 3-5 days in the fridge before it starts to wilt, but I’ve eaten lettuce purchased two weeks prior from the farmer’s market, and it’s always still crisp and green.

Tags: megnut, shopping, local, food, expensive, prices, union square, greenmarket

This is really cool!

If you’re sorted by date, the mailbox displays as groups characteristic of the message date – Today, Yesterday, Last Week, Two Weeks Ago, Old Mail.

If you’re sorted by sender, you get a group for each sender.

Now, we only need the ability to sort the groups separately…

Tags: thunderbird, sort, grouping

It’s extremely easy to use.

You tell it a song or artist you like, and it builds you a customized “station” based on songs that are like that. At each song, you tell it whether you like it or not, and it learns. Alternately, you can branch off a new station based on any song playing.

I have not yet signed up or reviewed the privacy policy, but this seems intensely cool.

http://www.pandora.com

Also, it’s integrated with the Squeezebox, which I’ve recently obtained, and about which I’ll be writing a full review.

Tags: music, recommendation, pandora, squeezebox

http://www.opera.com

Also, the development team is blogging. They’ve been releasing weekly snapshots, most of which have been great, leading up to this release. They’ll continue doing so going forward.

Congratulations, guys!

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/

Tags: opera, browser, release, opera 9

Remember when you first realized that everything you saw in a photo could be faked and you couldn’t tell the difference? It’s here for video too.

http://raincloud.warnerbros.com/wbmovies/supermanreturns/jor_el/jor_el_large.mov

Tags: superman, superman returns, jor-el, marlon brando, brando, video, editing, sfx, special effects

As many have predicted, this is also likely to expose some interesting accidentally unprotected things at some point in the future.

http://www.google.com/ig/usgov

Tags: search, privacy, google, us government

I strongly support the concept in principle – you buy a “share” of a small local sustainable farm, and in return you get a portion of the harvest every week (or two weeks, depending), for the duration of the growing season, which is usually June through October for NYC. For the one near us, this seems to be an assortment of about 7-10 vegetables plus 2-3 fruits (which are two separate shares). You have to go to the drop location to pick up.

We picked up our first drop tonight. It was a bit sparse, but it’s still very early in the season and I expect that the volume will pick up over the summer.

What we got this week:

5 garlic scapes
a small bunch of red radishes
about a gallon ziploc bag of mesclun greens
about a gallon ziploc bag of escarole
about a gallon ziploc bag of spinach
1 pint of sugar snap peas
5 rhubarb stalks
2 pints of strawberries

We also got the fresh flower share, which was just a bunch of assorted flowers. For $6 a week, this is definitely cheaper than any florist around here.

We ate the radishes and some strawberries tonight. The radishes were intensely peppery raw, but cooked up nicely braised with butter, balsamic vinegar and chicken stock. The strawberries are among the best I’ve ever had. Not yet prime of the season, and small, but again, very intensely flavored.

Depending on whether the portion sizes increase, I suspect that the prices are going to be about equal to going to the farmer’s market, but I like the idea of supporting a farm directly. This is somewhat of an experiment; we’ll see how it goes.

If you’re interested in this, it may not be too late to sign up, but do it ASAP. This is the NYC one; if you’re not in NYC, you might be able to find a local program by searching for CSA.

http://www.justfood.org/csa/locations/

Tags: csa, farm, local, organic, produce, sustainable

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70933-0.html

This is very very cool.

The software’s open source, and the hardware is cheap:

http://www.ettus.com/

Tags: software radio, gnu, wired, ettus

‘He sneered again. “Do you think for a minute that Bush would let legal issues stop him from doing surveillance? He’s got to prevent a terrorist attack that everyone knows is coming. He’ll do absolutely anything he thinks is going to work. And so would you. So why are you bothering these guys?”‘

It’s an interesting read, but I fundamentally disagree with the above statement, and this is the problem.

It’s not the surveillance that bothers me, it’s the resistance to oversight, even after the fact.

If there was any confidence that what they were doing was a reasonable tradeoff, they wouldn’t have to a) lie or b) break the law to do it. Yet they’ve done both of these things.

If the law enforcement community said “well shit, we’re out of ideas about how to stop these people, and so we really need to have our computers read everyone’s email and tap everyone’s phones and we guarantee that this information won’t be used for anything else, and anyone we find doing something nefarious will be dealt with according to due process”, then we could, you know, engage in a meaningful discussion about this. And then we could move on to the fact that “terrorist” is not a useful designation for a criminal, and then maybe we could fire the people who thought up this brilliant idea and find someone who would practice actual security because wholesale surveillance and profiling have been widely debunked as largely useless for anything besides persecution, political attacks, and invasions of privacy.

But we won’t, because that’s not what this is about.

This opinion of a member of the Dutch National Police is particularly telling:

‘He said that in the Netherlands, communications intercept capabilities are advanced and well established, and yet, in practice, less problematic than in many other countries. “Our legal system is more transparent,” he said, “so we can do what we need to do without controversy. Transparency makes law enforcement easier, not more difficult.”

The technology exists, it’s not going away, and it’s really not the problem. The secrecy is the problem.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,71022-1.html

Tags: surveillance, wiretapping, wired, secrecy

Two of them are kind of standard (open in a new window, and view the cluster for the search result), but the other one is so mindbogglingly obvious that I’m ashamed that they don’t all do this.

It’s preview. Click it and the link opens up in a small frame underneath the result without leaving the page. Even PDFs.

Duh.

http://www.clusty.com

Tags: search, ui, interface, clusty, yahoo, google, better, duh

http://www.thesheepmarket.com/

This is indicative of something, but I’m not sure what.

Tags: sheep, art, something, amazon mechanical turk

These links are helpful for migrating an existing system to using a RAID1 boot/root disk setup.

That first is particularly good, as it details how to set up the array with a failed member initially so you can get it set up, copy your data to it on the new drive, then add your existing drive to it, without overwriting your existing contents. I haven’t tried it yet, but the instructions look right. The others are about using grub with RAID1 drives.

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/238
http://www.doorbot.com/guides/linux/x86/grubraid/
http://www.linuxsa.org.au/mailing-list/2003-07/1270.html

Tags: linux, boot, raid1, raid5, redundancy

‘We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.’

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/1,70886-0.html

Privacy is freedom. It is freedom from judgement, the freedom to stew in our own individual cognitive juices, the freedom to express and learn and argue.

Tags: security, privacy, schneier

The intention economy hasn’t really arrived. As a customer (no longer “consumer”), when you’ve decided what you’re going to buy, you still have to go find someplace to buy it. In the intention economy, you should be able to announce your intention to buy, and companies who are selling will come looking for you. We’re getting closer to that – shopping comparison sites help, but they’re still static snapshots. What’s needed is a dynamic marketplace around these ideas. Incidentally, that’s why I don’t necessarily think that blog search is a marker of the Live Web – RSS feeds aren’t interactive. They’re push, to be sure, so you get more updated static information, but like the shopping comparison sites, they’re still just static snapshots. On the other hand, getting people used to having some automated process working in the background is a step in the right direction.

The existence of branding is tied very closely into this. In a certain sense, a brand exists primarily to help make products seem better than they are, by associating them with other things that are known to be good. If you already know what you want to buy, maybe you’re past this point, and it’s more honest to do without. As a counter example, consider these two products, which are made by the same company and basically identical. One’s a piece of foam sex furniture for adults, and one’s a piece of foam gaming furniture for kids. Esse vs. Zerk. Same product, two very different uses. Brands serve to make the distinction. Does the fact that the same product has two different names for two different audiences make a difference? I’ll have to think about that one some more. Incidentally, if you switch the marketing copy on those two pages, it’s really funny.

(Who wants to help me come up with a brand for my spool-fed bacon-wrapped CPU cooling scheme? You have to refresh the bacon every once in a while, but on the plus side, it’s tasty.)

Tags: doc searls, branding, live web, syndicate, feeds, control, intention economy, liberator, esse, zerk, bacon

The hole is considered more worrisome than most security problems discovered on modern voting machines, such as weak encryption, easily pickable locks and use of the same, weak password nationwide.”

Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that the Diebold systems themselves ARE the security glitch.

http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_3805089

Tags: diebold, electronic voting, security

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/1,70832-0.html

I disagree. I often find the boss battles to be the most tedious parts of the game. Instead of another interesting level, you’re treated to a 10-30 minute repetetive motion fest until you can find the one pattern that works against the increasingly overpowered enemy.

Sometimes, this is well done, but often not. I’d feel better about them if the boss battles required a little strategy or intelligence beyond “Find the four switches/weak spots/colors, hit them in order, then the boss will reveal the little extra boss inside the other boss and you can kill that too. And once you figure out the trick, the next three are all exactly the same as the first one, and between doing these tasks, you have to run in circles to avoid the predictable fireballs/rocks/energy blasts.”

The Vizier in Prince of Persia 3? Nope, I don’t think so. That battle almost killed me with its tedium alone. I could almost hear Hank Azaria’s character narrating along between hits … “dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge!” And to add insult to injury, after a fantastic game about sand powers and time travel, you get to use almost none of those interesting powers, because there’s no refill sand during the battle. Bleh.

God of War was refreshing in this instance, by accident. They had to leave some of the bosses out due to time pressure, and I’ve never been so relieved as I was when progressing from one really interesting level to another really interesting level without another button masher in the middle.

The boss battles should be woven into the pace of the game, not grind it to a halt. Integrate the boss battles into everything else. Have other stuff going on at the same time. Punctuate it. Don’t make me start all over unless I do every single keypress right. If the way to kill the boss is to find the pattern and do something specific more than once, you’ve done something wrong. When done well, boss battles can be interesting. But they rarely are anything more than a placeholder for a lack of gameplay imagination.

Tags: boss battles, wired, video games

1:

The original films’ video quality will not match up to that of the restored versions. “It is state of the art, as of 1993, and that’s not as good as state of the art 2006,” Ward said.

You have no idea why we like Star Wars, do you?

Wait… what was that? 1993?

2:
Two-disc special editions? Come ON. Everyone who’s going to buy this either already has the revised DVD edition, or doesn’t want it.

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?id=35855

Tags: star wars, dvd, original cut

It’s going to get worse before it gets better. No online service considers your IP address to be private information, and now they will be required to maintain logs mapping your IP address to real contact information, for a period of at least one year after your account is closed.

The only way to prevent this information from being misused is to not keep it, and now there won’t be any choice.

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200604/msg00176.html

I’ve discussed this before:

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/01/29/whats-the-big-fuss-about-ip-addresses/

Tags: surveillance, ip address, data retention

http://www.startribune.com/389/story/369290.html

MJD (hey, man – what happened to Advocacy?) rightly savages the list:

http://www.plover.com/blog/physics/questions.html

The analysis is mostly very strong. My only complaint is that he failed to note that evolution doesn’t actually “choose” anything, and saying that it does is just typical “owning the terminology” ID doublespeak.

And what is up with that last paragraph in the article about family life interfering with remembering things you learned in high school?

My choice for this question would probably have been “What is the scientific method?”.

Tags: science, high school, questions, star tribune, mjd, dominus, plover, kottke

http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,6771,27610,00.html

Tags: nokia, unmanufacturing, heat disassembly, recycling

Of course, this is nothing compared to the fact that the RIAA says you shouldn’t be allowed to break DRM even if it’s going to kill you if you don’t:

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=984

I’ve discussed this before:

http://www.aquick.org/blog/2005/08/01/why-i-oppose-drm/

Tags: drm, riaa, quit school, MIT, unreasonable

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1943847,00.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/activating_activex.asp

1) This does not affect pure DHTML/javascript, only DHTML/javascript that interacts with embedded applets.

2) As described in the MS article and some of the links below, it is possible to bypass the restriction by loading the objects from an external page, and this can be automated in some circumstances. Apparently, Adobe/Macromedia is also working on better fixes.

http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/activecontent/
http://www.devx.com/webdev/Article/18063
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+tweaks+browser+to+avoid+liability/2100-1012_3-5980658.html
http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_Offers_60Day_ActiveX_Reprieve/1143650536

Tags: microsoft, eolas, patent, activex, control, widget, interaction

Maybe that’s okay with you, but it really ought to be a personal decision and not something that’s foisted off on you. Here’s how to turn it off if not:

http://www.blizzard.com/support/wow/?id=aww01954p

Tags: world of warcraft, blizzard, bittorrent, downloading, bandwidth, defaults

Bruce Schenier has a blog entry about the Greek cell phone tapping scandal – about 100 cell phones of politicians and officials, including the American embassy, have been tapped by an unknown party since the 2004 Olympics.

Bruce points out that the “malicious code” used to enable this was actually designed into the system as an eavesdropping mechanism for the police.

“There is an important security lesson here. I have long argued that when you build surveillance mechanisms into communication systems, you invite the bad guys to use those mechanisms for their own purposes. That’s exactly what happened here.”

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/more_on_greek_w.html

Tags: surveillance, greek, wiretapping, security, privacy

I’ve noticed that answers.com and m-w.com are now both supporting putting a query in the url path:

http://www.answers.com/privacy
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/privacy

Also, there’s gada.be search, which lets you do things like:

http://privacy.gada.be

Any others?

Tags: mobile, url, reference, easier

http://www.phonescoop.com/news/item.php?n=1577

Tags: oil-based lenses, lenses, cameraphones, zoom lens