Wozniak: Cloud Computing Will Cause "Horrible Problems"

"Wozniak didn't offer much in the way of specifics . . . . [but said, 't]he more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it.'" Steve Wozniak was the inventor of the Apple I and Apple II computers.

More at Business Insider. You can find more re- the kinds of problems I worry about by clicking on the label, "Worldbeam," at the bottom of this post.

Dead Drops

"‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. USB flash drives are embedded into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop is installed empty except a readme.txt file explaining the project. ‘Dead Drops’ is open to participation. If you want to install a dead drop in your city/neighborhood follow the ‘how to’ instructions and submit the location and pictures."

By Aram Bartholl; see deaddrops.com for more, including how to install.

Ideas for Facebook Apps

(1) "Who Are My Sycophants?"; and

(2) "Of Whom Am I on the Brink of Becoming Categorized as a Sycophant?"

Telecomix and We Rebuild

Telecomix seems perhaps to be a subset of We Rebuild, or a term associated with certain news and other functions? Among other efforts, Telecomix worked to provide alternate communication channels during the Mubarek regime's shut-down of Egyptian internet access (see Egypt/Main Page).

We Rebuild describes itself:

We Rebuild is a decentralized cluster of net activists who have joined forces to collaborate on issues concerning access to a free Internet without intrusive surveillance. . . . There are no leaders, nor members. We Rebuild is simply an international chaotic event, and our actions can not be predicted in detail. We are a flow of passions, and we sometimes refer to our driving force as “data-love”.

. . . . The We Rebuild initiative promotes and participates in building the Internet to be accessible for everyone everywhere, enabling true freedom of speech. This is something which can not be guaranteed by states or corporations, but requires the polyvocal voice of the Internet. You will run in to us when you least expect it, especially if you are making decisions about the Internet. But since our strategies are based in the passionate sharing of ideas, you will most likely be happy to see us.

More at the WeRebuild wiki and the Telecomix News Agency; see also Datalove.

Why We Need Net Neutrality: ISP's Are Already Throttling the Internet

If you had any remaining doubt as to whether and how much this is happening, wonder no more. Two projects have shown that Comcast and Road Runner consistently engage in substantial, discriminatory slowing or throttling of internet traffic (euphemistically referred to as "shaping") both to and from users, and that "Comcast, Road Runner (from Time Warner Cable), and Cox all use downstream shaping." (More at Boing Boing)

They claim they only do it to help manage traffic volumes. But there are many examples of known, wrongful censorship of political or other content, within as well as outside the U.S.; see, e.g., here (Comcast and/or Symantec blocked all e-mails containing URL of site calling for investigation into whether Pres. Bush committed impeachable offenses in connection with the push to invade Iraq, successfully reducing the impact of activists' efforts), here (AT&T censored Pearljam concert by deleting lyrics criticizing Bush), or here (Mindspring and OneNet Communications, successively, blocked site hosting Nuremburg Files).

As Lawrence Lessig stated in a recent article, "The innovation commons of the Internet threatens important and powerful pre-Internet interests. During the past five years, those interests have mobilized to launch a counterrevolution that is now having a global impact."

Bad enough that, as "Napoleon said . . . it wasn't necessary to completely suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay the news until it no longer mattered." But worse, ISP's can suppress any info they choose in ways that make it unlikely that many users will ever become aware that anything's been filtered out.

And as stated at sp!ked-IT with reference to Wikileaks, among others, "when an ISP removes [or blocks] content, it invokes the cyber equivalent to the death sentence. When an ISP acts it can effectively destroy a business or censor a political campaign, by making access to that website impossible.

If you agree that protecting the internet as a source of uncensored political information is one of the most urgent issues of our time, please spread the word about it.

Recent Assange on Facebook et Al., the Media, War, Etc.

Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and their communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo – all these major US organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use.

Now, is it the case that Facebook is actually run by US intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure on them. And it’s costly for them to hand out records one by one, so they have automated the process. Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them.

* * * * *

Our No. 1 enemy is ignorance. And I believe that is the No. 1 enemy for everyone – it’s not understanding what actually is going on in the world. It's only when you start to understand that you can make effective decisions and effective plans. Now, the question is, who is promoting ignorance? Well, those organizations that try to keep things secret, and those organizations which distort true information to make it false or misrepresentative. In this latter category, it is bad media.

It really is my opinion that media in general are so bad that we have to question whether the world wouldn't be better off without them altogether. They are so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is . . . we see wars, and we see corrupt governments continue on.

One of the hopeful things that I’ve discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could've stopped it if they had searched deep enough; if they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could've stopped it. But what does that mean? Well, that means that basically populations don't like wars, and populations have to be fooled into wars. Populations don't willingly, with open eyes, go into a war. So if we have a good media environment, then we also have a peaceful environment.

(Emphasis supplied.) More at RT.

A Summary of the Case for Wikileaks; Plus, Who Let the Logs Out?! and Wikileaks UPDATES (2010-12-11)

[Scroll down to THOUGHTS for the case for Wiklieaks.]

Fwiw, in general, my fave institutional sources at present are Greg Mitchell's blog at The Nation, The UK Guardian, and Foreign Policy's Wikileaked blog. Below are some highlights (for highlights from previous days, click here).



NEWS:

At right, demonstrators in Brisbane, Australia. Protests are ongoing worldwide and more are planned (see the Guardian). Here's a FB page that may have some info re- planned protests.

The BBC has a good written summary about Anonymous here (but re- the video, I'm not sure all Anons would agree with all the one speaking says).

While Anons' DDoS attacks continue, they've decided to shift their efforts to publicizing content from the leaks themselves, since that's what the powers that be fear most; see, e.g., Operation Leakspin.

Question: What exactly are the Anons' demands? TorrentFreak refers to an Operation Payback page stating them, but apparently that site's been taken down.

A recent Anon tweet: "Join us. First for the good news! You get 72 virgins! Now for the bad news . . . ain't no girls here."

One small business reports that Paypal has locked its account because it donated to Wikileaks. Moneybookers is not an alternative because, even though it's based in Europe, it too has cut off payments to Wikileaks and has been taken down by Anon's DDoS attacks.

Not exactly new, but urgent in the light of current developments, is this story (as reported by the BBC) about the President's "killswitch" power – the power to kill the internet in the event of a national "emergency." UPDATE: "The Senate Committee on Homeland Security . . . has approved a cybersecurity bill . . . that would give the president far-reaching authority over the Internet in the case of emergency."

THOUGHTS: The Case for Wikileaks

We are living in times of extraordinary incursions against the rightful liberties and powers of ordinary citizens. The U.S. Congress has acquiesced in, among other things:

Routine secret service and police violations of First Amendment rights, including preemptive round-ups and detentions of protesters in connection with political conventions and other events (see various posts here and sources cited therein, esp. here and here);

Wholesale NSA/AT&T violations of Fourth Amendment and privacy rights, including warrantless wire-tapping and mining of e-mails of U.S. citizens (see various posts here and sources cited therein);

Gross TSA and other governmental or quasi-governmental violations of Fourth Amendment and privacy rights, including unreasonable and invasive searches without the least pretext of probable cause (see posts here {may include some repeats from previous link} and sources cited therein);

The institution of policies of kidnapping, torture, and assassination of U.S. citizens and others without trial (see, e.g., here, here, and here);

The invasion of Iraq based on lies; etc.

These violations are are massive, and they're becoming the new norm. And apart from a few bit-part scapegoats, no one has been held to account for them; indeed, for the most part, they have not even been investigated. Talk about the terrorists winning. 

And similar violations are taking place in other so-called democracies.

There have been periods in the past when the traditional media did a better job of fulfilling their proper function as the "watchdog of democracy." But it's been some time since they fulfilled that role (see, e.g., "leaked reports back up what Iraq vets have been telling journalists for years, only to be ignored").

I do not fault individual journalists, most of whom are over-extended and underpaid. But, leaving the internet aside for the moment, the vast majority of traditional media worldwide are directly or indirectly controlled by a handful of large corporations (see Wikipedia and the sources cited there). Resources for real reporting have been hollowed out, and most "liberal" journalists were driven out years ago. As a result, wittingly or not, much if not most of the traditional media functions mainly to "catapult the propaganda," controlling the national agenda by echoing talking points originated by conservatively-funded think tanks and disseminated by Faux News et al.

As for the internet, big business is already well on their way to controlling most of that, too; among other things, witness the latest pending FCC regulations and this article about proposed legislation to give the U.S. President the legal power to "kill" the Internet; see also Lawrence Lessig re- the "iPatriot Act."

With respect to the U.S. Embassy cables, Wikileaks is working with the major newspapers of the world to carefully vet and redact everything it publishes, and it has published nothing that has not been published by one or more of those newspapers.

Wikileaks was founded in 2006; since then, not a single person is known to have been physically harmed as a result of any Wikileaks disclosure, ever (I'm pretty sure if the U.S. government could name one, it would have been leaked by now.) {UPDATE: Per Assange in an interview with Frost Over the World, the Pentagon has confirmed that it knows of no one that has been physically harmed because of any Wikileaks publication}).

In contrast, as of this writing, the number of Coalition soldiers who have died because of the lies used to justify invading Iraq, conservatively counted, are nearing 5,000, Iraqi deaths are nearing 1.5 million, and the U.S. has spent over $1 trillion {see info in the left sidebar of this blog}.

Some have argued that Wikileaks' publication of State secrets is as bad as our governments' and big businesses' invasions of the privacy of U.S. citizens; but this is a false equivalency. I don't have the power to act on behalf of or make decisions affecting the welfare of millions of other people; and if I did, again, I should not also have the power to unilaterally decide what they get to know about it.

Some argue that Wikileaks' work is not REAL journalism and so should not be afforded the same First Amendment protection as other news media.

Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the traditional media in the U.S. utterly FAILED to report the fact that the aluminum tubes claimed by the Bush admin to have been purchased for use in a nuclear weapons program were in fact ill-adapted for such use and were more likely purchased for other reasons (I heard that fact mentioned only late at night, on the BBC). Indeed, rather than verifying the Bush admin's claim, The NYT chose to publish Judith Miller's completely uncritical – if not complicit – story, "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts" – a story substantially based on the deliberate leaking of classified information by Scooter Libby, chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney. If what Wikileaks' work isn't journalism, I wish The NYT and other corporate media did more "non-journalism."

The corporate media are also the "journalists" who failed to analyze Bush admin. claims far enough to realize that a half-dozen specious reasons to invade Iraq did not add up to one good one – something obvious to the millions who demonstrated against the invasion in "the biggest global peace protests before a war actually started."

There simply is no principled basis for distinguishing Wikileaks' publications from those of The NYT and other newspapers.

Some argue the information published by Wikileaks isn't important enough to justify the breach of secrecy. So, who gets to decide what's important, and on what basis? The U.S. agents who warned of the possibility of 9/11 but were ignored have speculated that that tragedy might have been prevented if someone had leaked to Wikileaks.

How about the needless gunning down by U.S. military forces of a Reuters cameraman and Iraqi innocents shown here? Or, from the U.S. Embassy cables, what about the revelations that the British government secretly promised to protect U.S. interests during the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, or that, in response to U.S. pressure, the German government assured the U.S. that it would not follow through on its investigation of the CIA's abduction of a German citizen mistakenly identified as a terrorist, or that the U.S. dismissed British objections about secret U.S. spy flights taking place from the UK, amid British officials' concerns that the UK would be deemed an accomplice to rendition and torture, or that the U.S. sought assurances from the Ugandan government that it would consult the U.S. before using American intelligence to commit war crimes, or that as of 2009, Shell Oil had infiltrated all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, or that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer paid investigators to unearth corruption links to Nigeria's attorney general in an attempt to stop his legal action against a controversial drug trial involving children, or that Saudi Arabia is the world's largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups, or that the Obama administration and Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, are determined to reject talks with the Taliban, or that government corruption in Afghanistan is rampant (viz. an incident last year when then vice-president Ahmad Zia Massoud was stopped in Dubai while carrying $52m in cash), or that the U.S. seeks to manipulate nations opposed to its approach to global warming, or that the U.S. and China worked together to prevent European nations from reaching an agreement at last year's climate summit, etc.? And I look forward eagerly to the expected publications re- the Guantanamo detainees and a major US bank.

The U.S. and other governments have struggled for months to find some legal violation to charge Wikileaks with, without success. To date, the only U.S. law seriously proposed as a possible basis for charges is the Espionage Act, which was used to try to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers – and in that case, the charges were dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In Wikileaks' case, the argument for a violation of the Espionage Act is even weaker, since (1) Wikileaks has neither stolen nor leaked any information but merely published information others leaked to it, and (2) Wikileaks is not a U.S. citizen or resident.

The lack of any basis for legal action against Wikileaks has not stopped governments and big businesses from using all their might to try to crush it. They've tried to strangle Wikileaks' presence on the internet through their own DDoS attacks (yes, someone did it to Wikileaks before “Anonymous” did it to any of them) and by pressuring Wikileaks' website hosts and domain name registrars to drop Wikileaks; they're trying to strangle the organization financially (MC, Visa, Bank of America and other banks have stopped processing donations to Wikileaks, although you can still donate to the KKK); and much of the traditional media, particularly in the U.S., are working to bury revelations that Wikileaks has published or to make it and/or Assange look bad enough to make you forget about the governmental and corporate crimes that Wikileaks' publications are revealing. This could happen to you, even if you'd broken no laws, just like it happened to Wikileaks, if the powers that be didn't like what you were saying.

Some conservative leaders in the U.S. have even called for the assassination of Wikileaks' staff. One has to wonder what might have happened to Assange by now if he hadn't had his insurance file.

What governments and big businesses fear most is not terrorism, but us – and what we might do if we learn the truth.

Knowledge is power, and a balance of power requires a balance of knowledge. The way things are now, corporations and governments know everything about us and we know almost nothing important about them.

I believe that too much information is better than too little. I have more faith in our ability as a species to collectively sort through the info and interpret it helpfully, than I have in the likelihood that any smaller group of individuals entrusted with the power to pick and choose what we should know, without meaningful oversight, will refrain from abusing that power.

In truth, we must ALL be journalists, which means we must ALL have access to the facts.

If Wikileaks can be crushed by the powers that be, we can ALL be crushed. There's only one thing that can stop them: us.

If just ten percent of the people travelling by air over Thanksgiving had refused to submit to the unreasonable searches by TSA, it would have been the end of those searches. If enough of us stand up for Wikileaks, it will be the end – at least for a time – of our governments' and big businesses' efforts to crush those who insist on the right to know what the powerful are doing to us or in our name.

This blog supports Wikileaks. If you agree that free speech is essential to democracy, I hope that you too will stand up against those who seek to stifle it.

You can sign a petition to stop the crackdown on Wikileaks here.

At right, a bit of off-the-cuff Anon art.

Wikileaks UPDATES (2010-12-10): A Call to Arms, er, Computers; and We Must ALL Be "Journalists"

First, let me refer you to Greg Mitchell's blog at The Nation, the excellent UK Guardian, and Foreign Policy's Wikileaked blog. Here are a few highlights (based as always on my own idiosyncratic interests).



Funny/Scary:

"Wikileaks" Google searches exceed those for Justin Bieber.

HUGE volume of "Wikileaks" searches originating from U.S. intelligence agencies.

At least I'm not alone.

NEWS:

The images at right show the bunker in which the servers now hosting Wikileaks are located (thanks, Julie!), operated by the Swedish company, Bahnhof. Seriously.

You can sign a petition calling for an end to the crackdown on Wikileaks here.

TechCrunch reports DDoS attacks have hobbled Facebook, and as of 1:45pm CST, it does seem slow. Mastercard's site was down again this a.m.; "The attack was due to begin at 2pm and within five minutes MasterCard's site was down." "Most of those participating in the attacks are using the LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) DDoS tool . . . . The open-source tool . . . is being downloaded at the rate of about 1,000 copies per hour, said Tal Be'ery, the Web research team lead at Imperva's Application Defense Center." As of this a.m., I believe I read there'd been over 44,000 copies downloaded. UPDATE: Twitter is closing Anon accounts as fast as it can find them – which isn't fast enough. "#anonymous does not care why twitter is suspending accounts. we simply respawn. back to business."

Interesting article at Financial Times: "This year has seen military and security experts often warn about the prospects of 'cyberwarfare.' Few expected the most prominent assaults against large companies to come from a scattered group of anarchists and idealists with no identifiable leader, membership or nationality. . . . [One Anon said,] 'If [authorities] are willing to gun down WikiLeaks in broad daylight, they will come down on you as well.'" That reminds me, time to download a copy of this blog . . . .

A DNS provider that suffered backlash last week after it was wrongly identified as supplying and then dropping service to WikiLeaks has decided to support the secret-spilling site, offering DNS service to two domains distributing WikiLeaks content; more here.

Greg Mitchell has a great idea: "WikiLeaks should send its 249,000 unpublished cables to Bernie Sanders for him to read during his epic filibuster [of Obama's tax cut deal]; he could vet them as he goes along. Bernie now trending #1 and #2 at Twitter." He also says "[f]amed French newspaper Libération [is] now hosting a Wikileaks mirror site" (vive la France!)

Wikileaks now has a competitor: OpenLeaks.

Search the entirety of the cables for particular words or phrases here.

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS:

Re- the Second Amendment . . . this whole affair shows that computers are the "arms" of our time, and the hazards of surrending them in favor of Cloud-based facilities owned or controlled by others. Maybe the Second Amendment should be expanded to include computers.

(New train of thought:) We're seeing the beginning of a push to sell the claim that Wikileaks' actions are not protected by the First Amendment because what it does is not "real" journalism. I'm pretty sure this is B.S. and hope to hear more from the EFF and ACLU on this point.

And I'm not really so interested in the U.S. media's opinion as to why Wikileaks' work is not "journalism."

These are the media who utterly FAILED to report the fact that the aluminum tubes claimed by the Bush admin to have been purchased for use in a nuclear weapons program were in fact ill-adapted for such use and were more likely purchased for other reasons (a report I heard only on the BBC). On the contrary, instead of verifying the Bush admin's claim, The NYT chose to publish Judith Miller's completely uncritical – if not complicit – story, "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts" – a story substantially based on the deliberate leaking of classified information by Scooter Libby, the chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney.

So, it's journalism to publish without question leaked material produced by persons known to have spoken in furtherance of their own political agenda, but it's not journalism to publish leaked material produced by persons who to all appearances had no agenda other than to tell the truth?

The corporate media are also the same "journalists" who failed to analyze Bush admin claims far enough to realize that a half-dozen specious reasons to invade Iraq did not add up to one good one – something obvious to the millions who demonstrated against the invasion in "the biggest global peace protests before a war actually started." (See also, e.g., Phil Donohue pushed off the air for opposing Iraq invasion.)

Publishing facts is at least as important as the corporate media's much-vaunted "analysis."

In truth, we must ALL be journalists, which means we must ALL have access to the facts.

I'm also hearing the argument that the Wikileaks' disclosures don't deserve protection because the lies they reveal aren't as big as those revealed by the Pentagon Papers. To this I say, (1) who gets to decide? and (2) only a tiny fraction of the material held by Wikileaks has yet been published.

Terrific new essay by Naomi Wolf at HuffPo: "Espionage Act: How the Government Can Engage in Serious Aggression Against the People of the United States" – i.e., the law was created as a way to do that; and as a result, e.g., "poet E.E. Cummings spent three and a half months in a military detention camp . . . for the 'crime' of saying that he did not hate Germans."

Good essay by Ian Welsh here: "The odd thing about Wikileaks is that their success has been assured, not by what they leaked, though there is some important information there, but by their enemies. The massive and indiscriminant overreaction by both government and powerful corporate actors has ensured this, and includes but is not nearly limited to . . . ."

The latest from Anonymous:



They say access to the internet is a fundamental human right. I'm inclined to agree.

TSA to Block Sites that Contain "Controversial Opinion"

. . . per CBS News.

Google

is f---ing with my blogger interface. They eliminated a lot of buttons and replaced part of the interface, and the new part no longer connects to the other parts I use most; plus there are other new glitches and limitations on what I can do. Extremely annoying, having put so much into this thing, only to have it degraded by a forced "upgrade" that doesn't work (welcome to the Cloud).

I'd been thinking about migrating to WordPress . . . I'll let you know.

Clusty - Yippy - WTF

For some years, I've used Clusty as my primary search engine, because supposedly they don't track your keystrokes, etc.; i.e., maybe, unlike Google and virtually every other search engine I'm aware of (and I'm no expert, but), they actually were not evil.

Today, the Clusty home page changed to Yippy, and says, "Welcome to the Cloud!" That was not reassuring. As I wrote in 2007:

As my three readers know, I'm very concerned that, at least partly through the instigation of right-wing authoritarians but also partly through the more or less semi-witless facilitation by the rest of us, the internet is rapidly being transformed into a potential top-down surveillance and mind-control system easily manipulated by gummints and corps (for more details, see my previous posts on the subject, most recently here).

I never thought I'd see Microsoft as on my side, but in its current battles with Google, that's how it's shaping up. Google is actively promoting its "cloud" model of the internet, in which not only software but most of your data live on the 'net -- i.e., in hardware owned and controlled by others -- while Microsoft continues to favor a distributed model in which most of your software and data live in your PC.

See also another, earlier, 2007 post in which I wrote,

Free speech in general and the internet in particular seem to worry control freaks.

As of 2000, just five megacorporations – Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) – controlled over 90% of the media industry in the U.S., with General Electric's NBC a close sixth (see here, here, here, and here).

In 2003, despite the largest public outcry in FCC history, the FCC adopted rules loosening restrictions on media ownership (stories here, here, and here). Although courts ultimately threw out the rules, the FCC is now trying again (stories here and here).

Certain people have spent a lot of money to gain all that control, and notwithstanding claims of hard times in the media biz, the investment has proved profitable; but one of the main benefits that might have been hoped for – control over the agenda and messages reaching audiences of any significant size – is threatened by the 'net.

Internet freedom, neutrality, etc. have accordingly been attacked on a variety of fronts.

In an earlier post, I discussed conservatives' plans to replace the internet as we know it with something called the "Worldbeam" (a.k.a. the "Cloud"), a system in which, instead of storing all your personal docs, files, and software on your own computer at home, everything would be stored on larger computers elsewhere, and you would just have a box that would be little more than a gateway to the Beam.

Instead of buying your own copies of applications, the most basic might (or might not) be provided on the Beam for free, and you'd pay license fees for anything fancy, so vendors could force you to upgrade whenever they liked. Although access to your own data would theoretically be protected by a password or other security, the gummint or others who controlled the Beam could access, modify, or simply delete any or all of your or others' data much more easily than now. [ . . . ]

I was worried, but thought it would be some years before the "Beam" replaced the 'net as we know it.

Duh. It's finally dawned on me, there's no need for those desiring Beam-like control to engineer any single, vast switch-over to a new system. They're simply colonizing the 'net little by little – and many of us are unwittingly helping them.

Think MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, MeetUp, LinkedIn, del.icio.us, Ancestry.com, and yes, Blogspot – you upload or create tons of data about yourself and your activities, opinions, social and other relationships, and personal preferences into online facilities that are maintained and controlled by other people. You may or may not even keep copies on your own computer of everything you put on the 'net. Think online banking and investment, every airplane ticket you've ever bought and hotel you've booked, every comment you've ever posted, and every purchase you've ever made esp. from vendors like amazon that keep track so as to make recommendations. Think on-line spam filter services (I realize AT&T is probably already giving the gummint copies of every e-mail that passes through AT&T's "pipes," in direct violation of our constitutional rights -- see here -- but hey, we managed to shut that down, didn't we? Oops, guess not.) [ . . . ]

The fact is, many of us have for some time been eagerly shifting vast portions of our lives into Beam-like facilities that are based somewhere out there and are only nominally under our own control. . . .

So I clicked on "about" Yippy to find out if this was just a name change, or Clusty had been acquired by evildoers, or what; and what I got was not reassuring:

About Yippy

MISSION STATEMENT:

We are the creators of all that is good and helpful. Our mission is for the good in everything. Our products and services are for those who desire a protected place in which to conduct computing and online activities through the .yippy VPN grid. Yippy is simply hardware mated to dynamic software sets through a worldwide LAN using a virtual ubiquitously connected web-based operating system. . . . Yippy will promote the positive and shun the negative of the digital world.

What we do is just good!

YIPPY is foremost the world's first fully-functioning virtual computer. A cloud-based worldwide LAN, YIPPY has turned every computer into a terminal for itself [i.e., for YIPPY – that's the point of cloud computing]. On the surface, YIPPY is one-stop shopping for the web surfing needs of the average consumer. YIPPY is an all-inclusive media giant; incorporating television, gaming, news, movies, social networking, streaming radio, office applications, shopping, and much more . . . .

The custom YIPPY OS is fully-operational and currently installed and running on existing hardware devices. . . . Computing must be made more personal to the end user and contain programs relevant to their personal lifestyle. This is accomplished through a VPN network grid with the ability through DB to cookie cut software packages together quickly and efficiently for consumers or businesses.

Below the surface:

YIPPY is an advertising vehicle. Recurring revenue is generated by unobtrusive ad programs that are strategically placed in the OS driven locally on the device. These advertising impressions would be demographically and geographically quantified by the user’s registration and extremely valuable to the bottom-line. The consumer is exposed to not only ad banners in an array of IAB standard sizes, but rich media advertising, video advertising, CPC, CPA and in-player banner advertising delivered directly into the entertainment stream. All advertising is database-driven and fully customizable according to the needs of the marketer. Advertising can be delivered via geolocation or targeted to particular demographics according to the section of the site visited. Do you want to advertise only to visitors who use TWITTER? How about only to users who are interested in football? YIPPY can deliver that. Time-on-site statistics are also significantly higher on the YIPPY platform due to the inherent enticement provided by the web-based OS.

The YIPPY video player features an array of licensed television shows with unlimited capacity for expansion. . . . With YIPPY, you can tailor your ad dollars to your audience. . . . The YIPPY player also supports the capacity for shows to be controlled by trusted partners [emphasis supplied] through a web-based upload form. . . .

Oh, we should say that we are a very far-out group of people. Everyone is a certified genius here and we work together for our goals for the love of it all. Good vs. Don't be Evil ... We are too smart to sell out to Porn, Gambling and other things that infect our society for profit. Good always wins, and conservative values will bring us our victory in the market place.

Summing it up !!!

God controls all creative thought it's what you do with it that defines who you are.

"!!!" indeed! At first I thought this must be a hack or joke.

Per Wikipedia, On May 14 2010, Clusty was acquired by Yippy, Inc.; no other helpful info available as of this writing (at least not through my new, Yippy search engine).

So here's the problem. It doesn't matter how good or evil the company really is, BECAUSE if it's privately owned, once it's got a lot of users, somebody "evil" can come along and buy it or take over its Board of Directors (I put "evil" in quotes 'cuz I don't think I believe in good and evil, but use it as shorthand for something else that's a whole 'nother discussion).

That's why it's better if certain things are owned by the gummint – oh wait, that's privately owned now, too (literally as well as figuratively; e.g., AZ, CA et al. selling off public infrastructure and assets to private corps. at fire sale prices).

That's why I keep saying, there are certain chunks of internet and other facilities that need to be literally owned by the USERS.

Even that's not a sure fix; but we need to start slowing the "evil"-doers down enough so the rest of us have a better chance at catching up.

And can anyone recommend a new replacement for Clusty – quick?

Facebook's New Privacy Options

Electronic Frontier Foundation has a helpful article analyzing the changes, which FB is promoting as giving users more control over who has access to their data. While it's true that the new privacy settings interface is more convenient with respect to some kinds of information, FB is in fact eliminating many privacy options that used to be available. B.t.w., EFF recs that you NOT accept the privacy settings that FB recs.

More here.

(Pretty much all I post on FB is warnings about FB.)

UPDATE: Great NYT article here walks you through the settings to do what little you can to try to protect your privacy under the new FB regime.

Google Now Tracking Logged Out Users

I understand that, until recently, it's been at least theoretically possible to use Google yet prevent the company from tracking all your online activities by logging out of your Google account.

Not any more.

As of last Friday, even searchers who aren’t logged into Google in any way have their data tracked in the name of providing a ‘better service’.

* * * * *

The company explained: “What we’re doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customise search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.”

However, if you’ve previously been a fan of the log-out method to avoid being tracked, there’s still the option to disable the cookie by clicking a link at the top right of a search results page.

Don't forget to do that. Via Tech Radar (thanks, Ben!)

Amazon Patent$ Method to $ystematically Maim Text$

Per Slashdot, Amazon's method calls for "'programmatically substituting synonyms into . . . books, short stories, . . . reviews, news articles, editorial articles, technical papers, scholastic papers, and so on' in an effort to uniquely identify customers who redistribute material. In its description . . . Amazon also touts the use of 'alternative misspellings for selected words' as a way to provide 'evidence of copyright infringement in a legal action.'"

FBI Investigates Coder for Downloading Public Records

Per Wired, 22-year-old programmer Aaron Swartz has been investigated by the FBI because the Government Printing Office experimented with offering free access to its database of public court records, and Swartz made the mistake of accepting their offer.

Swartz downloaded 19,856,160 pages, uploaded them to amazon.com's EC2 "cloud" service, and donated them to public.resource.org, "an open government initiative spearheaded by Carl Malamud as part of a broader project to make public as many government databases as Malamud can find. It was Malamud who previously shamed the SEC into putting all its EDGAR filings online in the ’90s, and he used $600,000 in donations to buy 50 years of documents from the nation’s appeals court, which he promptly put on the internet for anyone to download in bulk."

Prior to the GPO's experimental offer, the records had been available only for a fee of 8¢ per page, or more if purchased through a privately-owned, commercial intermediary. When the gummint figured out what was happening, they abruptly terminated the experiment and notified the FBI that the database was "compromised."

A partially-redacted FBI report shows they ran Swartz through a full range of gummint databases, among other things checking his work history, his Facebook data [see, e.g., here and here], whether his cell number had ever come up in a federal wiretap or pen register, and checking him against a private data broker’s database; they also obtained his driver's license photo and considered a stake-out of his home (which they concluded would be too conspicuous, since few cars parked on Swartz's dead-end, suburban street).

"The feds evidently identified Swartz in the first place by approaching Amazon, which provided his name, phone number and address. . . . Amazon’s user agreement for its cloud computing solutions gives it the right to turn over customer information to the government on request."

More at Wired. (And for more on Amazon's role, see Amazon EC2 and Amazon VPC.)

(Thanks, Ben!)

Re- Facebook

Great article at ReadWriteWeb, "What Facebook Quizzes Know About You":

"[M]illions of Facebook users taking quizzes are revealing far more personal information to application developers than they are aware of. . . . whether or not your profile is set to 'private.' Even worse, the ACLU reports that even if you shun quizzes yourself, your profile info is revealed when one of your friends takes a quiz. Want to see how bad the problem is? Just take the ACLU's Facebook Quiz and prepare to be shocked."

(Emphasis supplied.) "Application developers" means, of course, anyone who develops quiz or other application for use on FB, including various Big Bros. and, potentially, crooks.

"[U]sers can limit how much information applications (including friends' applications) can see by tweaking their privacy settings. . . . To do this yourself, go to Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Applications [-> Settings]. From there, you can uncheck the boxes next to the items which you don't want apps to have access to."

Note: if you've ever taken any FB quizzes or used any other apps, you'll need first to go to the Applications page and uncheck all the applications with x's across from them (which are still authorized to share all your info).

"This [Data] Will Self-Destruct in Five Seconds."

"Vanish is a research [?] system designed to give users control over [their] . . . personal data stored on the web or in the cloud. Specifically, all copies of Vanish encrypted data — even archived or cached copies — will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service.

"For example, . . . a user can create an email, a Google Doc document, a Facebook message, or a blog comment — specifying that the document or message should "vanish" in 8 hours. . . . after that timer expires, nobody can read that web content — not the user, not Google, not Facebook, not a hacker who breaks into the cloud service, and not even someone who obtains a warrant for that data. That data — regardless of where stored or archived prior to the timeout — simply self-destructs and becomes permanently unreadable.

* * * * *
"An enormous amount of private data is now stored on the web or in the cloud, outside the end-user's control. . . . Web-based email systems may back up the message, potentially forever, even if you delete it. Similarly, when you send a message via Facebook or create a Google Doc, you have no idea where and for how long copies of your data will be stored.

" . . . . There are known examples of data remaining in the cloud long after users explicitly request that data's deletion. Private data could be exposed by accidental misconfigurations on a web service, be compromised by hackers, or be used in legal proceedings.'"

(Emphasis supplied; via boingboing, via Ben – thanks!) More at Vanish.

Of course, this means the gummint can "vanish" its own records, too – but lately there's been little to stop them from doing that the old-fashioned way.

Kate Miller-Heidke (V. Good)

Stick it out 'til at least 1:06 min.



(Thanks, Paula!)

City Requires Job Seekers' Facebook & Other Passwords

Just makin' sure you all saw this:

"Bozeman City, Montana now asks all applicants for jobs to 'Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.' . . . . There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords."

Via boingboing; more at Montana's News Station.

Police Tweets

here.

Name Unofficially Denton
Location Denton, TX
Web [Police Mugshots (working title)|Spring 2009]
Bio The unofficial Denton Mugshot twitter for Denton, Texas. Programmed by a UNT art photography student, drawing attention to how much public info we put online.

The artist explains further,

"When I stumbled upon the Denton Police Department City Jail Custody Report page, I was surprised to find that the name, age, charge(s), and mugshot of everyone currently in custody was available to the public. I got to thinking, what if someone I know gets arrested? I wonder if I could be notified of that somehow.

"At the same time, we had been learning about New Media in my photography classes. Projects like We Feel Fine and Listening Post especially caught my attention. The live nature of the work was especially interesting to me.

"So, when I found Twitter and TwitPic, I saw how they could be a good medium to connect to the Custody Report. Once operational, things started to change due to the increasing importance and power of social media (SM) platforms today, such as Twitter. Half a dozen friends following the twitter feed turned into nearly a thousand followers, and tens of thousands of page views.

"The project had changed from its original intentions to an illustration of the power and importance of SM today. It's clear viral marketing techniques and SM are giving the public an easy and powerful way of reading and creating news, in one centralized place for the first time."