Sunday, August 25, 2002

Rick Prelinger, lord of ephemeral film. Great interview with Rick Prelinger, a film archivist whose world-beating collection of "ephemeral films" are being integrated into the Creative Commons project. If we want to have a sense of what it was like to be a member of a family, a nuclear family in the American 50's or 60's, you really can't get that authentically from a TV sit com, or from a Hollywood movie, or from a news reel. But when you see these films, they are filled with footage of idealized families in action. We get a sense of how the family actually looked and behaved, what was the body language, what were the gender roles, how kids were supposed to behave differently than adults, and you also get a sense of that sort of all-encompassing ideology. So you could argue that all of these films, in a way, are sort of an ethnographic vision of a lost America. Link Discuss (Thanks, Lisa!) [Boing Boing Blog] 10:38:10 PM    comment [] PCWorld.com - Privacy Watch: How to Surf Without Leaving a Trace. Worried that someone may be looking over your shoulder--in the virtual sense--as you browse the Web? If so, you don't have to be an online agoraphobe any longer: New tools from old hands in Web privacy will let you surf with complete anonymity. [ ... ] New browser plug-ins block far more than just your IP address. Both Anonymizer.com's Private Surfing ($30 per year, limited-feature free version) and Zero-Knowledge's Freedom WebSecure ($50 per year) promise to make you invisible to everyone on the Internet. Each product will encrypt transmissions between your computer and Web sites, scramble URLs so that they can't be seen by administrators, disable the tracking function of cookies (while still letting them save preferences or perform automatic log-in at Web sites that use cookies for those purposes), and block some--though not all--advertising banners and graphics. The plug-ins work only with Internet Explorer versions 5 and higher. Anonymizer's plug-in is compatible with versions of Windows from 98 through XP; a Zero-Knowledge spokesperson tells me that its tool can't run on some installations of Windows 98 and Me, but that it works well with Windows 2000 or XP. [Privacy Digest] 10:37:14 PM    comment []

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