Research
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Tweezeday
Not cheap, but appealing Is my future portable drive one or more 8 TB strips (such as one of these) that I carry with me and plug into one of these? I laid out the problem in more detail here. Nothing has changed yet. On the continuing death of TV (and everything else) as we… Continue reading
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Because Pricing is Getting Too Personal
Surveillance pricing already has its own page in Wikipedia. It also has its own authority: Abbey Stemler, Associate Professor of Business Law and Ethics and Weimer Faculty Fellow in Business Law & Ethics at Indiana University’s Kelly School of Business. And she’ll be speaking about her work a week from now: As you see, she’ll… Continue reading
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Funday
I shall not see my shadow It’s too cold to go out today, so far, here in The Bahamas. So I am staying bundled and warm, getting work done. This was not my vacation plan, but it’s cool. For maximum freakage and fascination Moltbook is it. Zvi Mowshowitz runs it down. “Best start believing in… Continue reading
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Warm Takes
We still await truly personal AI. Google just launched Personal Intelligence. “Get highly personal help with everything from vacation ideas to project plans, and more. Gemini connects the dots across your Google apps—like Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube—and your chat history preferences to provide suggestions tailored to your world.” That should be called personalized, because… Continue reading
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Friday Afternoon Lights
Let there be a FHS bulb Osram Sylvania MR13 300w 82v 3300k GX5.3 Bought a used Kodak 4200 Carousel projector for pocket change at a garage sale a few months back, so I could go through my large cache of slide photos shot between 1950 and 1972. Turns out the bulb was dead, so I bought a… Continue reading
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Dept. of Overstate
Pull almost-quote: Never mistake malice for stupidity Says here that 4% support for the U.S. taking over Greenland is in the lizardman range. When will he come to the US? Peter Bence is an amazing pianist. Made it a bit punchier I just gave The Only Way to Get Privacy Online a fresh edit, based on… Continue reading
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Fire and Rain
Twenty-fifth in the News Commons series Southern California has two seasons: Fire and Rain. Rain didn’t begin this year until a few days after Fire ended apocalyptically, incinerating much of Altadena and Pacific Palisades. Now Rain is here, with the occasional atmospheric river flowing across the faces of hills and mountains whose beards were just… Continue reading
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Microsoft Bing Chat 0, Perplexity.ai 1.
So I thought I’d give Bing a try at using ChatGPT to answer a question for which I knew the answer. The question was, “What group sings the theme song to the podcast ‘A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs’?” Bing search took me to a page of search results about the podcast itself,… Continue reading
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On using Wikipedia in schools
In Students are told not to use Wikipedia for research. But it’s a trustworthy source, Rachel Cunneen and Mathieu O’Niel nicely unpack their case for the headline. In a online polylogue in response to that piece, I wrote, “You always have a choice: to help or to hurt.” That’s what my mom told me, a zillion years… Continue reading
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Social shell games
If you listen to Episode 49: Parler, Ownership, and Open Source of the latest Reality 2.0 podcast, you’ll learn that I was blindsided at first by the topic of Parler, which has lately become a thing. But I caught up fast, even getting a Parler account not long after the show ended. Because I wanted to see what’s… Continue reading
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About face
We know more than we can tell. That one-liner from Michael Polanyi has been waiting half a century for a proper controversy, which it now has with facial recognition. Here’s how he explains it in The Tacit Dimension: This fact seems obvious enough; but it is not easy to say exactly what it means. Take an example. We know… Continue reading
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Dear @WashingtonPost
This is wrong: Because I’m not blocking ads. I’m blocking tracking. In fact I welcome ads—especially ones that sponsor The Washington Post and other fine publishers. I’ll also be glad to subscribe to the Post once it stops trying to track me off their site. Same goes for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal… Continue reading
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Is ad blocking past 2 billion worldwide?
The answer is, we don’t know. Also, we may never know, because— It’s too hard to measure (especially if you’re talking about the entire Net). Too so much of the usage is in mobile devices of too many different kinds. The browser makers are approaching ad blocking and tracking protection in different and new ways… Continue reading
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A helpful approach to personal data protection regulation
Enforcing Data Protection: A Model for Risk-Based Supervision Using Responsive Regulatory Tools, a post by Dvara Research, summarizes Effective Enforcement of a Data Protection Regime, a deeply thought and researched paper by Beni Chugh (@BeniChugh), Malavika Raghavan (@teninthemorning), Nishanth Kumar (@beamboybeamboy) and Sansiddha Pani (@julupani). While it addresses proximal concerns in India, it provides useful guidance for… Continue reading
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GDPR will pop the adtech bubble
In The Big Short, investor Michael Burry says “One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud.” Based on that assumption, Burry shorted the mania- and fraud-filled subprime mortgage market and made a mint in the process. One would be equally smart to bet against the mania for the… Continue reading
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Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing
Let’s start with Facebook’s Surveillance Machine, by Zeynep Tufekci in last Monday’s New York Times. Among other things (all correct), Zeynep explains that “Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.” Irony… Continue reading
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Geology questions for Montecito and Santa Barbara
This post continues the inquiry I started with Making sense of what happened to Montecito. That post got a record number of reads for this blog, and 57 comments as well. I expect to learn more at the community meeting this evening with UCSB geologist Ed Keller in the Faulkner Room in the main library… Continue reading
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On cryptocurrencies, blockchain and all that
Take a look at this chart: CryptoCurrency Market Capitalizations As Neo said, Whoa. To help me get my head fully around all that’s going on behind that surge, or mania, or whatever it is, I’ve composed a lexicon-in-process that I’m publishing here so I can find it again. Here goes::: Bitcoin. “A cryptocurrency and a… Continue reading
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Exploring the business behind digital media’s invisibility cloaks
Imagine you’re on a busy city street where everybody who disagrees with you disappears. We have that city now. It’s called media—especially the social kind. You can see how this works on Wall Street Journal‘s Blue Feed, Red Feed page. Here’s a screen shot of the feed for “Hillary Clinton” (one among eight polarized… Continue reading