Blog Posts

what the...

WSJ on nuking privacy for profit

The Wall Street Journal took a look at the trackers (cookies, beacons, etc…) used by advertisers to track activity and connect various bits of data (what movies you like, what websites you go to, what music you buy, etc…)

They claim that the data they store is anonymous.

The information that companies gather is anonymous, in the sense that Internet users are identified by a number assigned to their computer, not by a specific person’s name. Lotame, for instance, says it doesn’t know the name of users such as Ms. Hayes-Beaty—only their behavior and attributes, identified by code number. People who don’t want to be tracked can remove themselves from Lotame’s system.

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Googlethink - displaced agency through the cloud

>Software programmers are taking the displacement of personal agency to a new level. Relentlessly focused on making their programs more “user friendly,” they’re scripting the intimate processes of intellectual inquiry and even social attachment. We follow their scripts when we click on one of Google’s keyword suggestions, and we follow them when we select from a list of categories to describe ourselves and our relationships on Facebook. These choices are convenient, but they’re not our own. They’re generalizations masquerading as personalizations.

networked

I ran EtherApe on my Ubuntu Server system for about 45 minutes this afternoon, sniffing network connections on the office LAN. Nothing snoopy/creepy, just network addresses and protocols. Man, there are a LOT of machines involved…

The node at around 10 o’clock is my desktop Mac.

irrational objection to the wild, wide open?

Stephen responds to my previous post on classblogs:

> My first reaction (as I’m sure it is for many) is that we shouldn’t compel them to do anything. But when you ask the question in the context of formal education, you begin to see how ridiculous it is. Is there anything in education that isn’t compelled? Participation is enforced to the age of 18, college and university courses typically have requirements for graduation. So why should public performance be any different? And - it isn’t! We require singers and actors to perform in public in order to graduate. Lawyers stand in moot court. Interns perform in actual hospitals, apprentices in real garages. Graduate students are frequently reminded that they should have some journal publications to their name. So why the objection to publishing on the web? It’s an irrational objection, when compared with the practices we see everywhere else in education.

why

good questions, indeed…

other search engines take a stab at the meaning of life:

Anthony Bourdain on the modern panopticon

In Medium Raw, Bourdain describes the thoughts he had, transitioning from a coke-head heroin addict to a doting father, and how the panopticon (he didn’t call it that, though) played a role in the process:

The iniquitousness of Twitter and food- and chef-related Web sites and blogs has totally changed the game for anyone with a television show - even me. You don’t have to be very famous at all these days to end up with a blurry photograph on DumbAssCelebrities.com. You don’t want your daughter’s little schoolmates reading about her daddy, stuttering drunk, two o’clock in the morning, at a chef-friendly bar, doing belly shots from a chunky and underdressed cocktail waitress – something that could well have happened a few years ago. In a day when a passing cell-phone user can easily get a surreptitious photo of you, slinking out of the porn shop with copies of Anal Rampage 2 and MILFBusters under your arm, and post it in real time, maybe that’s a particularly good time to trade in the leather jacket for some cotton Dockers.

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the death and dumbification of journalism is dangerous

With journalism being neutered in favour of fluff pieces like cat fashion and covering the latest reality tv shows, there is a real danger. If real professionals aren’t left in the newsrooms, who will be asking the tough questions?

From an interview with climate scientist Stephen Schneider:

> The reason that we do not ask focus groups of farmers and auto workers to determine how to license airplane pilots and doctors is they have no skill at that. And we do not ask people with PhDs who are not climatologists to tell us whether climate science is right or wrong, because they have no skill at that, particularly when they’re hired by the fossil-fuel industry because of their PhDs to cast doubt. So here is where balance is actually false reporting.
>
>What the media needs to do is not to ignore outliers—we should never ignore outliers—[but] to frame where they sit in the spectrum of knowledgeable opinion. The good reporters always did that. They said, ‘There are a small number of people, many of whom are funded by particular industries, who make the following point.’ That’s completely legit, because now the public knows where these guys sit.
>
>But now, given the new media business-driven model, where they fired most specialists and the only people left in the newsroom are general-assignment reporters who have to do a grown-up’s job, how are they going to be able to discern the north end of a southbound horse?

procrastination

I just found a (new?) project listed in our TLC timesheets system. I think I have a new favourite project…

on private "classblogs" vs. the wild, wide open

This post has been percolating for a while, but was finally pulled out by a post from Stephen Downes, linking to a post from Lisa Nielsen.

Most of the blogs set up on UCalgaryBlogs aren’t fully public - many allow anyone to see the content, but block search engines. But, many others are restricted to only allowing members of that site to access the content.

Initially, this bothered me. People weren’t seeing the Power of Being Open. I tried arguing the whole “information wants to be free” and “going public with network effects” etc… yaddayadda.

ubuntu!

I’ve been playing around in Ubuntu Server for the last couple of days, setting up a test sandbox of WordPress 3 to safely try upgrading UCalgaryBlogs. I’ve used Ubuntu before, but it’s really feeling like a solid system, and the LAMP stack is fast. I’m only running it in a VM under VirtualBox on my desktop, but if I had to deploy a fresh server, I’d definitely be picking Ubuntu to run it. As a virtualized sandbox, it’s a pretty great platform. And the ease of updating/configuring is pretty slick. Certainly more nimble than RHEL5…

fun with compiling PHP

I’m toying around with building a fresh copy of PHP so I can run a relatively recent version (5.3.2) vs. the antique version bundled with RHEL5 (5.1.6). Having lots of fun, so far…

Sometimes, it’s worth running your own server, so you can do things like update packages without having to resort to compiling from source…