My photo of a mosque in Esfahan made it into somebody’s blog post. Yay for Creative Commons.
Note, I don’t think Ahmadinejad is right about what the world needs.
UPDATE: I asked Ally how she found that web page and then I tried to find it myself. I did, along with this SFist page using one of my photos of Boogaloo’s. Fun!
I’ve been waiting for the Privacy Lusitania, an event when the infrastructure fails and public opinion galvanizes around solving it. I think it’s a pretty apt metaphor. In WWI people thought everything was OK in the US until the vaguely dangerous power hit the US infrastructure by sinking a commercial transport ship. (Of course that’s all arguable.) 9/11 fits the same logic, but is way more complex in the social psyche.
When I read about the MySpace private photos leak, I thought this could be the I Lusitania was waiting for. But the press has been pretty quiet, by what I’ve seen. Why aren’t people up in arms? Why aren’t they suing MySpace? Does MySpace have any liability at all?
These pictures are on hard drives around the world in a big BitTorrent cloud. They will never go away. Accessible face recognition is here. Riya has been doing it for years and startup Polar Rose is rolling out a web service next quarter. Someone with enough time to make a point could easily run all these photos through face recognition and start putting together some pieces. They could make a wiki or ESP Game app where volunteers name the people in the photos. In fact, since the photos are linked to MySpace account IDs, there’s a whole lot that can be found out with some simple data mining. Those users can delete their accounts, but those pictures will live on in the torrent, undeletable.
Boing Boing recently had a headline, “Database leaks are as immortal and toxic as nuclear spills — let’s start acting like it”. I think now that Chernobyl is a better, albeit slightly ragged, metaphor. When will the public confidence in our privacy infrastructure melt down? It looks like it may be happening in England with those DVDs of private records lost repeatedly in the post. (And the article quoted in BB was from The Guardian.)
The power of IT to destroy privacy been advancing rapidly. Yet over last 7 years while we should have been working to preserve it, we’ve been convinced not to, in order to be safe. Don’t believe it. Security is not at odds with privacy. Security requires privacy.
Wish I had thought of this. And I wish my phone camera recorded better videos.
To see behind the curtain, try passingby-looking-right.
Did Paul Otlet beat Vannevar Bush to HyperText by 50 years? Paul Otlet had both the vision and a rudimentary implementation.
The following is from the blog of the Long Now Foundation, a great organization of which I’m a proud charter member.
Long Views » Blog Archive » Paul Otlet
Long Now seminar speaker Alex Wright brought to all of our attention the truly visionary work of Belgian Paul Otlet and his Mundameum of 1910 (video from a documentary above, and Stewart Brand’s description from the talk below.)
The greatest unknown revolutionary was the Belgian Paul Otlet. In 1895 he set about freeing the information in books from their bindings. He built a universal decimal classification and then figured out how that organized data could be explored, via “links” and a “web.” In 1910 Otlet created a “radiated library” called the Mundameum in Brussels that managed search queries in a massive way until the Nazis destroyed the service. Alex Wright showed an astonishing video of how Otlet’s distributed telephone-plus-screen sysem worked . - Stewart Brand on Alex Wright
Slate writes about GrandCentral, a phone service that wants to simplify your life.
I played with it a couple months ago when the NY Times covered it. I mostly wanted it to get a 412 number so people here in Pittsburgh can call me without paying long distance to my 510 mobile number. fwiw, I can now be reached at (412) ACE-NOMAD.
After toying with it a bit, I abandoned it. I didn’t like it much, mostly for the reasons described in the article. I also was creeped out by the features like “post to blog” for a voicemail you’ve received. That says something scary about the designers.
For listening to voicemails on the computer, I like GotVoice.com. It’s free and doesn’t try to take over your phone patterns. You just set it up to call into your voicemail and it plays the tones to match the button presses you would make if you were calling in. Only it records the audio of the voicemails and makes it available to you over the web. And they recently added a mobile web interface too.
I just wish they had a version for home answering machines so my mom could backup the messages she loves to save from me and my sister. There’s no room for new ones.
City Pages - Savage Love
With nothing but time on my hands this week, I slipped out of the office and went to the movies. Have you seen 300 yet? It’s about a handful of lightly armed ancient Greeks—the Spartans—who take on the mighty and massive Persian army. Some feel the film is homophobic; some feel it’s a conservative, pro-war piece of agitprop.
Homophobic? It’s Ann Coulter on a meth binge.
The Persian army is an armed gay-pride parade, a threat to all things decent and, er, Greek. The king of the Spartans—among the most notorious boy-fuckers in all of ancient history—dismisses Athenian Greeks as weak-willed “philosophers and boy lovers.” The Persian emperor? An eight-foot-tall black drag queen—mascara, painted-on eyebrows, pink lip gloss. Emperor RuPaul is positively obsessed with men kneeling in front of him. Why gay up the Persians? So that straight boys in the theater can identify with the Spartan king and his 300 soldiers—all of whom appear to have been recruited from and outfitted by the International Male catalog.
What isn’t up for debate is the film’s politics. The only times the Persian army doesn’t look like a gay-pride parade in hell, it looks like a crowd of madly chanting Islamic militants. And if the Spartan king has to break the Spartan law to defend Spartan freedoms? Well, sometimes a king’s gotta do what a king’s gotta do. Because, as the queen of Sparta points out, freedom isn’t free. And, yes, she uses exactly those words. George Bush is going to blow a load in his pants when he sees this movie.
Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up,
at least a little bit.
-Edward R. Murrow, journalist (1908-1965)
Aziz Ansari is a Fucking Badass. Seriously, he is pretty funny.
