March 2020
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Zoom’s new privacy policy
Yesterday (March 29), Zoom updated its privacy policy with a major rewrite. The new language is far more clear than what it replaced, and which had caused the concerns I detailed in my previous three posts: Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act, More on Zoom and privacy, and Helping Zoom Those concerns were shared Continue reading
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Helping Zoom
[This is the third of four posts. The last of those, Zoom’s new privacy policy, visits the company’s positive response to input such as mine here. So you might want to start with that post (because it’s the latest) and look at the other three, including this one, after that.] I really don’t want to Continue reading
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Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act
[21 April 2020—Hundreds of people are arriving here from this tweet, which calls me a “Harvard researcher” and suggests that this post and the three that follow are about “the full list of the issues, exploits, oversights, and dubious choices Zoom has made.” So, two things. First, while I run a project at Harvard’s Berkman Continue reading
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We haven’t seen this movie before
Three weekends ago, we drove from New York to Baltimore to visit with family. We had planned this for awhile, but there was added urgency: knowing the world was about to change in a big way. Or in many big ways. The hints were clear, from China and elsewhere: major steps would need to be taken—by Continue reading
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Remembering Freddy Herrick
The picture of Freddy Herrick I carry everywhere is in my wallet, on the back of my membership card for a retail store. It got there after I loaned my extra card to Freddy so he could use it every once in awhile. As Freddy explained it, one day, while checking out at the store, Continue reading
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Remembering Freeman Dyson
By his own description, Freeman was a frog: Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the Continue reading
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The universe is a start-up
“Pillars of Creation” is a live view of stars forming in a neighboring region of the Milky Way. (Inside the Eagle Nebula, 5,400 to 6,100 light years away.) The Solar System, formed 4.6 billion years ago. Earth became a planet .46 billion years later. That was 9.247 billion years after the Big Bang, which happened 13.787 billion years ago, meaning Continue reading