Clobbering tourism, sports, higher ed, and all tech conferences
Privacy International says “The U.S. Government intends to force visitors to submit their digital history and DNA as the price of entry.” The proposed changes are here. Particulars from the piece:
The changes include:
- All visitors must submit ‘their social media from the last 5 years’
- ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) applications will include ‘high value data fields’, ‘when feasible’
- ‘telephone numbers used in the last five years’
- ‘email addresses used in the last ten years’
- ‘family number telephone numbers (sic) used in the last five years’
- biometrics – face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris
- business telephone numbers used in the last five years
- business email addresses used in the last ten years.
- All these travellers will now have to use an app provided by CBP (‘CBP Home’) and an app for their ESTA application (‘ESTA Mobile App’). The ESTA website is being decommissioned.
- The ‘CBP Home’ mobile app will be used by people to provide biometric proof of their departure, to ‘close the information gap’. The app will disclose the user’s location once they have left the U.S. and run a liveness detection on the selfie photo.
If approved, this policy would apply to all visitors who currently travel without a visa. For the estimated 14 million annual ESTA travellers, CBP thinks that this will take the average visitor 22 minutes to submit themselves and their family members.
That is smart
Why Intelligence Is a Terrible Proxy for Wisdom, by Joan Westerberg, says “Wisdom is knowing what you don’t know.”
Because we need to save the Web from AI overviews
I’ve read The Domain Name’s New Role in the AI Web, by Simone Catania, several times, and know there’s even more for me to get out of it.
So call it a https://www.privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/5713/trump-administration-wants-your-dna-and-social-media
Netflix is pitching their new talk videos as “podcasts.” They are not. If you want to know what a podcast really is, go to the blogfather: Dave Winer. Says Dave, “A podcast is a series of digital media files made available over the open web through an RSS feed with enclosures.”
We need a word for what Netflix is pitching. When I posted Podcasts, Wallcasts, and Paycasts back in October ’24, audio that was also video wasn’t common. Now it is. We have almost reached the point where a podcast isn’t a podcast unless it’s also in video.
On that post, I said, “For subscription-only ‘casts, such as some on SiriusXM*, I suggest paycasts.” And, “Bottom line: It can’t be a podcast if you have to pay for any of it, including archives.” Netflix isn’t free. And it’s not on the open Web. I also don’t know if it uses RSS. But it still fails to fit the definition of a podcast.
Preach!
Because you haven’t yet heard everything about Fernando Mendoza and the Indiana Hoosiers, I give you Mason Whitlock’s take.
Snow ‘nuf
My watch told me it was minus-1° when I woke up this morning, just like it was a year ago today. There’s 14.5″ of snow on the ground, and I need to go shovel a sidewalk that’s 200 feet from here. For footwear, all I have are a pair of old hiking boots, which only go up to the ankle. I unloaded my nice calf-high Columbia snow boots last Summer when I left New York, because I had to purge 95% of my accumulated possessions there, and just take what fit in my small VW wagon.
So, between the last paragraph and this, I waited until it was a balmy 9° and trudged up there. One of our kind neighbors had already cleared paths on the sidewalk and to the front porch. I widened the sidewalk, then tried to expose as much of the concrete surface as I could. Stopped when I couldn’t feel my fingers (the gloves aren’t great), and left satisfied. At 78, I’ve still got (some of) it.
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