Kids taunting classmates (with resulting emotional scars and even suicide); harassment, stalking, and death threats; and organized and race-, gender-, religion-based hate groups; prominent bloggers like Kathy Sierra and Blackamazon have take their blogs down after death threats or attacks … along with all its promise and power of cyberspace, the Internet also distributes words and images of hate that often lead to real-world violence.
We plan on examining several different types of social networks. Some of these networks are geared toward sending out 'news blasts' to your network of friends, while others support having a much deeper conversation about the topic at hand. Protest groups on Facebook can quickly grow to over a million people– and lead to millions demonstrating in the real world. New technology such as "causes," now available both on Facebook and MySpace, allows for fundraising and eases recruiting. Easy sharing can increase the viral spread of videos and web pages. Innovative mashups like those promoted by Netsquared with their Mashup Challenge make information and calls to action more easily available to more people. We'll survey the available functionality and describe how to use the different variants for education and activism activities, as well as giving tips on how to become part of the particlar social network community that the participant is interested in.
The program is here, but you only have a few more days to sign up so get on it!
The CFP2008 conference is coming up in late May. They're not taking registrations yet, but their information page is up at least. I wasn't able to attend last year, but the 2006 session was very cool.
The conference is the perfect place for paranoid anti-government/business privacy invasion types to congregate and complain as a group. Besides that, there are useful technical sessions about privacy technologies and such. I particularly liked the session hosted by Public Citizen where they described the ways they protect people against companies trying to stifle their free speech online. In cases where a blogger was issued take-down notices by big companies that didn't like what the blogger was saying, Public Citizen took their case for free and defended them. Very cool.
Also of note was the session about RFID where an industry crony "debated" the author of the book Spychips (though to call it a debate is laughable). When the crony was challenged about his company's use of privacy protections and he didn't have any good answers for the crowd, he bacame flustered and accused us of being "technophobes" (HA!). What an idiot. But it was very entertaining
Anyway, if you'd like to meet some of the people in all the various consumer groups who are protecting your rights every day, this is an awesome way to do it.
I've been holding back on covernig this because it's just so damned depressing. But the story is that Bush managed to shove a "FISA modernization" bill down congress's throats and the witless saps passed it. Understandibly, this has a lot of privacy and consumer advocates in a tizzy.
I've heard some people say that this could legalize the illegal spying program. My question is, how many times do people have to openly agree that the program is and has been illegal before someone puts Bush in jail for this? So it's (allegedly) legal now, but "Sure I was speeding, but I'm going the speed limit NOW officer" has never been a defense.
Why not just ask for an anonymous card? Exchanging means that you'll get a bunch of ads for stuff that has no relation to you. What if you exchange with a guy who buys ingredients for a bomb or a meth lab? that might come back on you.
Even if the store won't give you an anonymous card, just use fake data.
If you're curious why store value cards and such are a bad idea, see Nocards.org for details.
I feel pretty dumb for not noticing this new law, but now Maryland residents will get credit freeze protection! It doesn't go into effect until Jan 1st, 2008, but as soon as it does, people in Maryland will no longer have to worry about most ID theft or data breaches.
Privacy International has released a report of privacy scores for top Internet companies and Google was notably the only one to recieve the lowest ranking.
I like Google and use it constantly because of it's clean, simple interface and solid dependable results. However, when it comes to privacy, I don't think they're where they should be. They recently announced they'd annonymize all search records after 2 years, but that only announced to the world that they track searches to individual people and store that information for 2 years!
They say they need it for optimization, but I still haven't heard of anything they do that actually needs personally identifiable information to be optimized other than revenue streams from selling the data.
In a past life we were asked to prove that local gas stations were price gouging New York City residents. We knew this to be false, and found the proof we needed in a meticulously researched report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
And more importantly:
Despite popular misconceptions, price gouging almost never occurs as prices rise. Instead, price gouging occurs when dealers keep prices artificially high in order to gain a little extra profit or recoup costs, even though the DTW price has declined.
Which means that a fairly good sign that you're not being gouged is when the prices are going up.
Executive customer service is a firewall team that keeps your complaints from disturbing busy executives golf games. Very often, they do this by actually solving your problems, possessing superhuman powers to command all parts of the company to action, from billing to technical.
If the company you need isn't on the list, they have a method for finding the executive customer service contact information for just about anyone as well.
It's stuff like this that makes me a fan of the Consumerist. They have a certain amount of clout and companies take notice when they are blogged about negatively on their site. If you have a complaint of some kind, maybe you should try talking to the guys at the consumerist for help.
A lot of the newsletters I subscribe to and groups that I follow are making more noise about this. The main point, from Defective by Design's e-newsletter:
The Department of Justice has drafted this outrageous legislative proposal that threatens ordinary Americans with jail time and the sort of property forfeiture penalties applied in drug busts for P2P users, mixtape makers, and mash-up artists. The law would stiffen penalties for "attempted infringement", basically removing the requirement that the government or Big Media companies actually prove that infringement occurred. The IPPA would also authorize massive wiretapping to investigate copyright infringement by individuals. The government has plenty of tools to investigate and prosecute large scale criminal enterprises engaging in bootlegging, the IPPA will target every citizen.
The main point here is that it makes copy right infringement a criminal offense and that it only has to be attempted! Think of all the people who've already been served with lawsuits (many who were clearly innocent). Now imagine that they no longer have to prove infringement, only attempted infringement. This makes their case far easier to fight. But now it's a crime so the punishment would be stiffer as well.
I see a vast trail of destruction with the RIAA leading the march in the future if this passes.
Now it's up to 50 organizations. Since they've gone through the trouble to make a coilition website, I wonder if they'll tackle more issues together now.
Not surprisingly, once you're out of the top 5, the trust level is in the 60% range or lower. Considering that there are a lot more than 5 government agencies, it seems there's not a lot of trust in government. Anyway, the report is very short so give it a quick read.
Were you or someone you know unfairly caught in Viacom's dragnet? If your video was hit with a bogus takedown, contact information@eff.org — we may be able to help you directly or help find another lawyer who can. In this situation, as in so many others, EFF will work to make sure that copyright claims don't squelch free speech.
Public Citizen reports one of their recent victories against American Airlines on behalf of John Cerqueira, who was denied the right to ly after airline authorities thought he might be "Arab, Middle Eastern or South Asian descent".
$400,000 dollars is a small price to pay for taking away an American's freedoms. The airlines and the TSA better figure that out in a hurry.
After seven years of State of the Union addresses from the Bush administration, the American public has learned that President Bush’s policy recommendations are often based on misinformation. As such, Public Citizen has prepared the following guide to the 2007 speech so consumers can get complete and accurate information about the issues.
Under the new law, anyone attempting to "knowingly and intentionally" acquire the phone records of a third party by making false representations to a phone company or selling such illegally obtained records will face up to ten years in prison and fines.
Is it just me or does this seem really wrong? Why did we have to make a law about this? Wasn't it obviously a bad thing already?
