zidouta.com

PopSci, The Anonymity Experiment:

“(…) Pay for everything in cash. Don’t use my regular cellphone, landline or e-mail account. Use an anonymizing service to mask my Web surfing. Stay away from government buildings and airports (too many surveillance cameras), and wear a hat and sunglasses to foil cameras I can’t avoid. Don’t use automatic toll lanes. Get a confetti-cut paper shredder for sensitive documents and junk mail. Sign up for the national do-not-call registry (ignoring, if you can, the irony of revealing your phone number and e-mail address to prevent people from contacting you), and opt out of prescreened credit offers. Don’t buy a plane ticket, rent a car, get married, have a baby, purchase land, start a business, go to a casino, use a supermarket loyalty card, or buy nasal decongestant.”

Niall Kennedy, Sniff browser history for improved user experience:

“I have been the browser history of my website visitors for the past few months to gracefully enhance adding my Atom feed to their favorite feed reader. Easily recognized branding such as “Add to My Yahoo” has yielded much higher conversion rates than a simple Atom link with a minimal effect on page load performance. Dynamically checking for active usage of 50 or so aggregators allows me to extend my total test list and promote an obscure tool that might never make the cut for permanent on-screen real estate.”

Adobe: How to manage and disable Local Shared Objects. Directe link: Website Storage Settings panel. (N.a.v. Marketingfacts’ Onderzoek Cookie Deletion Marketingfacts.)

“In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: I’ve got nothing to hide. According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.”

Daniel Solove: Privacy and the “Nothing to Hide” Argument. (via)

“Op vrijdag 21 september 2007 reikt Bits of Freedom voor de vijfde keer de Big Brother Awards uit. Met de Awards worden de persoon, het bedrijf of de overheidsinstelling te kijk gezet die zich het afgelopen jaar te buiten zijn gegaan aan het controleren van burgers en afbreken van hun privacy. Vanaf vandaag kan iedereen nominaties indienen.”

Big Brother Awards 2007 – Nominaties gezocht!

Zie ook XS4ALL’s Opinie: Big Brother Awards.

Salon: “The U.S. government now outsources a vast portion of its spying operations to private firms — with zero public accountability.”

PCworld: “A majority of Google shareholders today voted against an anti-censorship proposal that took aim at the way the search giant conducts its business in China and other countries that engage in active censorship.”

Het voorstel luidde:

1. Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet-restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.
2. The company will not engage in pro-active censorship.
3. The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.
4. Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access.
5. Users should be informed about the company’s data retention practices, and the ways in which their data is shared with third parties.
6. The company will document all cases where legally binding censorship requests have been complied with, and that information will be publicly available.

The Funds’ Stockholder Proposal, Internet Censorship

Anil Dash: “(…) But with the release of Web History, especially in the context of its recent acquisitions and announcements, Google may have crossed the line where regular users start to react with skepticism and caution instead of unabashed enthusiasm.”

Google Web History

TMN: “For celebrities like Mel Gibson and Hugh Grant, it can be hard to tell the difference between their on-screen and off-screen lives. In his show, “The Real Tinsel,” Dwayne Moser has created backdrops of infamous scenes involving celebrities. Built by backdrop artists from photos Moser takes of the sites, these paintings ask whether public figures have private lives anymore, or are even their most personal moments up for grabs?”

XS4ALL: “2 februari maakte XS4ALL een nieuwe klachtenprocedure bekend voor klachten over onrechtmatige content. De procedure voorziet in de mogelijkheid dat de provider NAW-gegevens (Naam-Adres-Woonplaats) van klanten bekendmaakt aan derden. Waarom bedenkt XS4ALL zo’n procedure?”

• Bank data mined by U.S. to halt terrorists – Americas – International Herald Tribune
  “While tight controls are in place, the official added, “the potential for abuse is enormous.”"
  (tags: datamining privacy us europe)

• Record meteorite hit Norway – Aftenposten.no
  “As Wednesday morning dawned, northern Norway was hit with an impact comparable to the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima.” – Nooit meer slapen.
  (tags: norway space meteorite)
• Dreams and Nightmares of the African Astronauts
  “Italian artist Marco Boggio Sella travelled to Burkina Faso in search of people who had never heard about the moon landing. “
  (tags: art space culture burkinafaso)
• China leads world in rainmaking
  “The rainmaking army uses rockets, artillery and aircraft to sow chemicals and artificially induce rain in times of need, said an official with the bureau’s Department of Forecasting Services and Disaster Mitigation.”
  (tags: china rain weather)
• China says it made rain to wash off sand – Weather – MSNBC.com
  “Rockets launched with chemicals to trigger rain after huge storm”
  (tags: china cloudseeding weather)
• Schneier on Security: Privacy as Contextual Integrity
  “Contextual integrity ties adequate protection for privacy to norms of specific contexts, demanding that information gathering and dissemination be appropriate to that context and obey the governing norms of distribution within it.”
  (tags: privacy)
• New Scientist Technology – Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites
  “New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.”
  (tags: privacy datamining nsa socialnetworks semanticweb)

• Flash: 10 ways, “information”
  “outstanding recursive photo mosaic browser” – (Waxy)
  (tags: photography)
• 75-day Getting Real book stats update – Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
  “It’s been about 75 days since we released Getting Real, the book, in PDF format” “The revenue generated so far is a hair under $175,000.”
  (tags: publishing 37signals books)
• 80s videos
  “Los 80s: a gigantic list of 80s videos on YouTube.”
  (tags: music video youtube)
• The Longest Building I Have Ever Seen
  “It is totally windowless and stretches for at least a mile, although it seems to defy laws of space-time so it may be longer or shorter than that. “
  (tags: architecture)
• Guardian Unlimited Arts | Hockney painting likely to establish new record
  “Another art market world record is expected to be broken when one of David Hockney’s most significant works comes to auction.”
  (tags: art hockney)
• Wired News: The Eternal Value of Privacy
  “The most common retort against privacy advocates — by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures — is this line: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”"
  (tags: privacy security)
• if the earth were a sandwich
  “Never before have two pieces of bread been simultaneously placed on the ground directly opposite each other on the globe, thus making an EARTH SANDWICH. The fact that the earth has never been a sandwich is probably why things are so f*cked up”
  (tags: zefrank earthsandwich)

• ACLU – Pizza
  They know everything.
  (tags: privacy us)

• RTV Noord-Holland Laatste nieuws
  “Het Amsterdamse stadsdeel Oud-Zuid start binnenkort een proef met cameratoezicht op het Museumplein, in het Vondelpark en in de Diamantbuurt. “
  (tags: amsterdam privacy camera oud-zuid)
• YouTube – raverabbit – Dominik Eulberg
  “an animation showing a day with Dominik Eulberg and his animated fury friends…” Beeldkwaliteit is helaas slecht.
  (tags: video clip eulberg)
• Google Groups : 43 Folders
  “This is a very simple question I would like to extend to the group that has,
  what I expect to be, a very complex answer. What do you use the internet for? “
  (tags: internet 43folders)
• Current style in web design
  “This is where I try to sum up the current state-of-the-art in graphic design for web pages, and identify the distinctive features that make a web page look fresh, appealing and easy to use.”
  (tags: web design)

• [print version] FAQ: When Google is not your friend | CNET News.com
  “Google’s recent legal spat with the U.S. Department of Justice highlights not only what information search engines record about us but also the shortcomings in a federal law that’s supposed to protect online privacy.”
  (tags: google privacy)
• The End of the Internet?
  “The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everyth
  (tags: internet carriers us)
• Pimp My Safari
  Safari spul.
  (tags: safari osx plugins)
• Het Parool – Rondleiding door het Nieuwe Stedelijk Museum
  Virtueel model, in quicktime.
  (tags: stedelijk amsterdam museum)
• Tweakers.net – Nieuws [ Nederland vastgelegd op luchtfoto van 850GB ]
  “…detail tot ongeveer 40 centimer groot te onderscheiden…”
  (tags: nl luchtfoto mapping)
• What Are The Best BitTorrent Search Engine Sites of 2006?
  (tags: bittorrent)
• trendbeheer » Blog Archive » Erik van Lieshout @ TENT
  “Waanzinnig goed werk. Gaat dat zien! Nog tot 26 maart”
  (tags: art todo tent vanlieshout trendbeheer)

• Google’s Help Center Page About Censorship Back Online With New Text
  “It is Google’s policy not to censor search results. However, in response to local laws, regulations, or policies, we may do so. “
  (tags: google china censorship)
• Adam Fields (weblog) – » What’s the big fuss about IP addresses? – entertaining hundreds of millions of eyeball atoms every day
  “Given the recent fuss about the government asking for search terms and what qualifies as personally identifiable information, I want to explain why IP address logging is a big deal.”
  (tags: ip privacy datamining)