Privacy vs. Surveillance
- On the privacy side: Surf safely with Web Pal. From Emmett Global and Customer Commons.
- Surveillance and Internet Identity. Francisco Correla in Pomcor.
- How to erase yourself from the Internet. By Andrew Tarantola in Gizmodo.
- Naked Capitalism: NSA Whistleblower: Government Failed to Stop Boston Bombing Because It Was Overwhelmed with Data from Mass Surveillance On Americans. Cross-Posted from Washington’s Blog. (Can’t find a byline.)
- Orwellian Societies, Mass-Surveillance and “The Edge Net” in MorningTao.
- Report: NSA can access most smartphone data (bigstory.ap.org)
- NSA officials told to evoke 9/11 sympathies when justifying mass surveillance (itproportal.com)
- Feinstein’s New NSA Bill Will Codify and Extend Mass Surveillance of Americans (activistpost.com)
- GCHQ looking after mass surveillance in Europe (voiceofrussia.com)
- Germany, Brazil submit UN draft resolution to end mass surveillance – RT News (pressall.wordpress.com)
- The Evercookie: “a javascript API available that produces extremely persistent cookies in a browser. Its goal is to identify a client even after they’ve removed standard cookies, Flash cookies (Local Shared Objects or LSOs), and others. evercookie accomplishes this by storing the cookie data in several types of storage mechanisms that are available on the local browser. Additionally, if evercookie has found the user has removed any of the types of cookies in question, it recreates them using each mechanism available.” More. Ars. Bruce Schneier. Read the comments to both.
- Why The Attack on Buffer Was A Serious Wake-Up Call For The Web. By David Berlind in ProgrammableWeb.
Media
- The rise of the reader: journalism in the age of the open web. About & by @KatherineViner. Subhead: Katharine Viner, deputy editor of the Guardian and editor-in-chief of Guardian Australia, gave the AN Smith lecture in Melbourne on Wednesday night. Here’s her speech…
- Kurt Vonnegut’s Rules for Reading Fiction. It begins, Suzanne McConnell, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s students in his “Form of Fiction” course at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, saved this assignment, explaining that Vonnegut “wrote his course assignments in the form of letters, as a way of speaking personally to each member of the class.” The result is part assignment, part letter, part guide to writing and life. This assignment is reprinted from Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield, out now from Delacorte Press.
- FCC’s proposals for saving AM radio. (Me: it’s too late.)
- The graying of traditional photography and why everything is getting re-invented in a form we don’t understand. By Kirk Tuck in Visual Science Lab.
Infrastructure & Culture
- Surfaces At The Urban Edge: “Let Them Walk On Concrete”. By Stephen Lewis in Bubkes.
- Here’s The Chart Of The US Infrastructure Spending Collapse That Everyone Is Talking About. By Joe Weisenthal in Business Insider.
- The Art of Asking. A TED talk by Amanda Palmer. Pull-quote: Alt-rock icon Amanda Fucking Palmer believes we shouldn’t fight the fact that digital content is freely shareable — and suggests that artists can and should be directly supported by fans.
- Smartphones are killing us — and destroying public life Subhead: Hey, you — look up! Our iPhone addictions are wrecking public spaces and fraying the urban social fabric. By Henry Grabar in Salon.
Etc.