Wednesday, December 11, 2002

Good enough for me, BBEdit rules anyway! Bare Bones Software Supports the Electronic Frontier Foundation.. Bare Bones Software Supports the Electronic Frontier Foundation. [Hack the Planet] 10:57:03 PM    Comment [] God I love kuro5hin! How To Post Absolutely Anonymously? How To Post Absolutely Anonymously?. The year is 2007. The "war on terrorism" has gone on for years and there is no end in sight. FBI investigations of "suspicious persons" at American companies and the media frenzy about Middle Eastern terrorists has gotten to the point that many Muslim Americans have lost their jobs because they are considered "security liabilities." Word leaks out that the all-seeing eye of the Information Awareness Office, headed by Bush's crony John Poindexter (the Reaganite of Iran-Contra fame), is using its powers to spy on "leftist radicals," which in actuality is just about anyone criticizing Bush, Israel, American foreign policy in the Middle East, reading Chomsky, or sympathizing with the plight of Muslims. It is the new McCarthyism, and you do not want to be its next victim. What do you do? [kuro5hin.org] 10:09:28 PM    Comment [] What is bloggers' endless fascination with Google? I don't know the answer. In academia, social sciences, pre-web, we were warned against "data mining." It was described as BAD SCIENCE, to take a given data set and probe around for things that had little to do with your original research question. A conumdrum for that graduate research methods course that is already giving you fits trying to program SPSS on a command line interface, you know? Madness. And at the time it made no sense to me. The web was just starting then, and mining data, well hell, it seemed like a rich endeavor, like journalists would do in investigative peeks into huge databases that back then were not readily available to just anyone. And if you were to take Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and consider what it does to social research--the act of looking at something changes it--observer effects, data contaminated by the original research question bias (unconscious, of course!), well then, it seems to me that mining around in a given data set generated from other research, provided the data was responsibly and ethically gathered, would bring the new questions to the data without any new "observer effect" influencing it. And if you were lucky, it would be outside of the original questioners bias. You'd just have to deal with your own subconscious bias. Now a beast like Google has these goo-goo-googly eyes on everything. Perhaps Google is the embodiment of our Stay-Puf Marshmallow Man, the instrument of our own destruction, the PANOPTICON. But data, loads of it! And bloggers, generating stuff with their APIs and endless reports on referers (is an obsession with this stuff mere vanity, or cliquish-ness, or is it something darker?) On one hand, it may usher in a new generation of self-organizing sites and links (and I gotta figure out how wiki fits in here, but I can't help it, why are wiki sites so BUTT-Ugly from a design standpoint?). On the other, the constant links of link references and popularity contests seem like some variation of a handwashing obsession. Egad! Anyway, because of interesting stuff like below, I am keeping my mind open. Miasma <---to let the bad smell come through New Google Fun. New Google Labs! "Google Labs has two new projects: Google Viewer lets you view the web pages of your search results, in a slideshow fashion. Google Webquotes annotates results with quotes from other sites." [Google Weblog] Both of these are pretty fun (I especially like the slideshow), as well as innovative. Imagine a slideshow as a way to browse through titles in a library catalog. Not searching, mind you, but browsing (bestseller lists, new mysteries about chefs, etc.). Oh, and the 2002 Year-End Google Zeitgeist is out! [The Shifted Librarian] 1:51:22 AM    Comment [] Guns vs Books. Which are more dangerous? Correlate this story to the stuff the Shifted Librarian and others have put me on to (but otherwise I've heard little about) about all books in the very near future being chipped with wireless transmitters for tracking and location. A librarian's dream, right? Every book. Someone will be able to track every book you have. Books will be more exhaustively tracked than guns. Think about it. Do we need the equivalent of the second amendment for books? Does everyone have the right to keep and bear books? NRA would be happy to tell you the next step after registration is confiscation. Since books will come to you essentially pre-registered, ready to help catalog the thoughts in your head, we can CLEARLY see what the Powers That Be in the world think is more dangerous. Miasma Convicted? Need a Gun? No Problem. Thousands of individuals who aren't legally permitted to buy firearms are purchasing them with little effort, despite a system of background checks that's supposed to stop them. By Lia Steakley. [Wired News] 1:01:23 AM    Comment [] A Terrorist Attack of Our Own Making New York Times - free registration required New Tools for Domestic Spying, and Qualms. From New York City to Seattle, police officials are looking to do away with rules that block them from spying on people and groups without evidence that a crime has been committed. [ ... ] But just as the effort was wrapping up in July, the F.B.I. ran into a two-man revolt. The owners of the Reef Seekers Dive Company in Beverly Hills, Calif., balked at turning over the records of their clients, who include Tom Cruise and Tommy Lee Jones -- even when officials came back with a subpoena asking for "any and all documents and other records relating to all noncertified divers and referrals from July 1, 1999, through July 16, 2002." Faced with defending the request before a judge, the prosecutor handling the matter notified Reef Seekers' lawyer that he was withdrawing the subpoena. The company's records stayed put. "We're just a small business trying to make a living, and I do not relish the idea of standing up against the F.B.I.," said Ken Kurtis, one of the owners of Reef Seekers. "But I think somebody's got to do it." In this case, the government took a tiny step back. But across the country, sometimes to the dismay of civil libertarians, law enforcement officials are maneuvering to seize the information-gathering weapons they say they desperately need to thwart terrorist attacks. [ ... ] Still, civil libertarians increasingly worry about how law enforcement might wield its new powers. They say the nation is putting at risk the very thing it is fighting for: the personal freedoms and rights embodied in the Constitution. Moreover, they say, authorities with powerful technology will inevitably blunder, as became evident in October when an audit revealed that the Navy had lost nearly two dozen computers authorized to process classified information. What perhaps angers the privacy advocates most is that so much of this revolution in police work is taking place in secret, said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented Reef Seekers. "If we are going to decide as a country that because of our worry about terrorism that we are willing to give up our basic privacy, we need an open and full debate on whether we want to make such a fundamental change," Ms. Cohn said. [Privacy Digest] 12:54:46 AM    Comment []

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