Chris Espinosa reflects on what the technology behind Amazon's new web browser means on his blog cdespinosa's posterous

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

Facebook and surveillance

Why Facebook's new Open Graph makes us all part of the web underclass | Technology | guardian.co.uk

At least Facebook is upfront about Social Graph. Facebook's abuse of its Like button to invade people's privacy is much less publicised. We all think we know how it works. We're on a website reading an interesting page and we click the Like button. A link to the page gets posted to our wall for our friends to see and Facebook keeps this data and data about who clicks on it to help it to sell advertising. So far, so predictable.

What most people don't know is that the Like button tracks your browsing history. Every time you visit a web page that displays the Like button, Facebook logs that data in your account. It doesn't put anything on your wall, but it knows where you've been. This happens even if you log out of Facebook. Like buttons are pretty much ubiquitous on mainstream websites, so every time you visit one you're doing some frictionless sharing. Did you opt in to this? Only by registering your Facebook account in the first place. Can you turn it off? Only by deleting your account. (And you know how easy that is.)

I log into Facebook rarely, and never check the box that says "Keep me logged in." Please don't tell me I am still being tracked.

The threat of hactivism

They’re watching. And they can bring you down - FT.com

The state of technology security overall is so weak that intelligence officials see hacking as one of the largest threats to western powers. While their top concern is nation-backed attacks, the lines between protesters, criminals and spies can be hard to discern. Gonlag is one of thousands who have joined an unprecedented wave of what has been dubbed “hacktivism”, referring to the combination of computer hacking with political activism. The largest and best known of these groups is Anonymous, a virtual mob that makes it easy for people with little technological aptitude to participate in protests, many of them illegal.

Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants

Lawful access / internet surveillance

Michael Geist - Can We Please Focus on the Real Lawful Access?

Lawful access, the government's planned legislation on Internet surveillance, has generated considerable attention over the past few days as the government decided against including it in its first omnibus crime bill. That decision generated media coverage, claims that the government backed down in the face of a 70,000 signature online petition, and a debate in the House of Commons in which Public Safety Minister Vic Toews stated that warrantless online wiretapping is not planned. While I recognize these developments feel like a cause for celebration, I fear there is a major problem developing as too much of this discussion doesn't actually involve the real lawful access.

In a piece in the Toronto Star, Geist goes into some details of what this will mean

The new system would require the disclosure of customer name, address, phone number, email address, Internet protocol address, and a series of device identification numbers.

While some of that information may seem relatively harmless, the ability to link it with other data will often open the door to a detailed profile about an identifiable person. Given its potential sensitivity, the decision to require disclosure without any oversight should raise concerns within the Canadian privacy community.

CRTC on Vertical Integration in canadian information environment

Michael Geist - The CRTC's Vertical Integration Decision: A Step in the Right Direction

The Commission considers that the record of this proceeding demonstrates that VI [vertically integrated] entities have both the opportunity and incentive to give undue preference by providing themselves with exclusive access, on various distribution platforms, to content that they control. As a result, a consumer would have to subscribe to the distribution platform owned by the VI entity to have access to the exclusive content. The potential increase in the market share of the distribution services that form part of the VI entity would provide an incentive for a VI entity to deny competing distribution systems access to popular programming.

The suburbs and lack of empathy

AlterNet: What Awful Reality TV and Suburban Living Have to Do With the Tea Party's Lack of Empathy

To help explain this phenomena, we might remember another signifying characteristic of the Tea Party: despite the enthusiasm for country music, Tea Partiers proliferate in suburban and exurban districts.

Interesting in light of our discussion today about networked individualism. These people feel an attachment to a group, but one that emphases their individualism--their lack of connection to those physically the closest to them. The idea of the function of reality tv is also interesting.

reality TV signals understanding that it’s filling the gossip void in the lives of lonely suburbanites, by filling the set design with familiar aspects of suburban lives, but then populating it with the real people experiencing dramas that are shut off from suburban dwellers who don’t have enough interconnections to gossip about their own neighbors.

You can’t be anonymous

Rare Charge in Protest - WSJ.com

New York City police monitoring a social media-fueled protest in Manhattan's Financial District have charged demonstrators with violating an obscure, 150-year-old state statute that bans masked gatherings.

Since Saturday, five people connected with the protest to "occupy" Wall Street have been issued a violation for running afoul of the antimask law, according to police.

technology and education

Views: The Challenge of Technology - Inside Higher Ed

Yet, the impact has been undeniable: e-mail, text messaging, Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, wireless, iPhones, iPads, Android, Skype, BlackBerry, Blackboard, mobile apps, the Cloud, and on and on. Today, you can use an app to find out what's for lunch at our campus, and one of our professors, Eric Chown, is even teaching a course on building these apps.

I own an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple computer, and an iPod. My son George calls me "Apple Redundant." I think it's fair to say that we actually find ourselves on the brink of that revolution or evolution envisioned in the late '90s, but it happened organically and through innovation, surrounded by less hype and without the market exuberance. At least until recently.

How software eats everything

Marc Andreessen on Why Software Is Eating the World - WSJ.com

Today, the world's largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company—its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software.

Today's largest video service by number of subscribers is a software company: Netflix. How Netflix eviscerated Blockbuster is an old story, but now other traditional entertainment providers are facing the same threat. Comcast, Time Warner and others are responding by transforming themselves into software companies with efforts such as TV Everywhere, which liberates content from the physical cable and connects it to smartphones and tablets.

Today's dominant music companies are software companies, too: Apple's iTunes, Spotify and Pandora. Traditional record labels increasingly exist only to provide those software companies with content. Industry revenue from digital channels totaled $4.6 billion in 2010, growing to 29% of total revenue from 2% in 2004.

Tracking Users / selling to users

Less Web Tracking Means Less Effective Ads, Researcher Says - NYTimes.com

 

Research by Catherine Tucker, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, has found that European Union regulations that limit the tracking of Internet users were associated with a 65 percent drop in the effectiveness of online marketing. In other words, if Internet companies cannot track what you do online, they find it harder to pitch you stuff that you may be persuaded to buy.

This is relevant now because lawmakers in the United States are weighing legislation to regulate consumer privacy on the Internet, to the dismay of Internet giants that rely on advertising revenue. Ms. Tucker is scheduled to testify before a Congressional subcommittee on Thursday.

 

Vancouver Riots - running the footage

Vancouver Police Thought It Would Take 2 Years to Analyze Riot Footage - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

Chu says that the DMEPL will be able to process the 1,600 hours of footage in three weeks rather years. So what is this magical lab? It's actually just 20 workstations running a system called dTective from Ocean Systems, which works in combination with Avid Technology Media Composer to aid forensic analysis. Avid Lanshare connects the stations together to guide the workflow.

The real Julian Assange (?)

The treachery of Julian Assange | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer

You did not have to listen for too long to Julian Assange's half-educated condemnations of the American "military-industrial complex" to know that he was aching to betray better and braver people than he could ever be.

As soon as WikiLeaks received the State Department cables, Assange announced that the opponents of dictatorial regimes and movements were fair game. That the targets of the Taliban, for instance, were fighting a clerical-fascist force, which threatened every good liberal value, did not concern him. They had spoken to US diplomats. They had collaborated with the great Satan. Their safety was not his concern.

people staring at computers -- is it art of invasion of privacy

[PHOTOS] 'People Staring at Computers' Art

People Staring at Computers

A New York City "artist," who installed spyware onto public computers to snap photos of customers in Apple stores was visited by US Secret Service on week.

privacy

Man Posts Pictures Of The Creep Who Allegedly Stole His MacBook On Tumblr | Cult of Mac

oshua Kaufman claims that he recently had his MacBook stolen, and so he did what anyone who was smart enough to follow our guide to recovering your pilfered Mac would do: he logged into his Mac via Hidden and has been secretly snapping photos, taking screenshots and snapping the alleged perp ever since.

That’s him up there, and I got to say: that’s some pretty amazing furniture for an alleged MacBook thief. Unfortunately, Kaufman is having a hard time getting Oakland police to help him recover his Mac, but we’ve seen this happen before, and if history is anything to go by, crowd sourcing your Mac’s recovery tend to work pretty well.

Climate change lawsuit

Toronto News: Media lawyers not warm on climate scientist’s lawsuit - thestar.com

Media law experts say a libel lawsuit filed by a leading Canadian climate scientist could have enormous implications for newspapers and other online publishers, forcing them to police the Internet for stories picked up by everyone from bloggers to Twitterers.

The concerns arise out of a statement of claim filed by Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria professor and Canada Research Chair in climate modelling, over a series of articles published in the National Post between Dec. 9, 2009, and Feb. 2 of this year.

Weaver alleges the pieces, including a column which accused him of joining the “left coast Suzuki-PR-industrial complex” on global warming, were designed to destroy his reputation internationally.

Postmodernism and the Internet

Postmodernism: from the cutting edge to the museum | Art and design | The Guardian

Use Google's ngram viewer to look at the incidence of the word "postmodernism" in books since 1975 and you find a sharp rise, peaking in around 1997, then an equally sharp decline. Plot this against the use of the word "internet" and the comparison is startling. Almost unused before the mid-80s, "internet" overtakes "postmodernism" in 2000, and carries on rising. All avant-gardes are in the business of futurism. They make an attempt to inhabit the space they predict, and in so doing, they bring it into being. Postmodernism was, crucially, a pre-digital phenomenon. In retrospect, all the things that seemed so exciting to its adherents – the giddy excess of information, the flattening of old hierarchies, the blending of signs with the body – have been made real by the internet. It's as if the culture was dreaming of the net, and when it arrived, we no longer had any need for those dreams, or rather, they became mundane, part of our everyday life. We have lived through the end of postmodernism and the dawning of postmodernity.

The revision of Canada's Copyright Law

Geist: Canada pressed on copyright law, cables show

The government introduced revisions to Canada's copyright law before the election. As Michael Geist writes

That bill garnered some praise for striking a balance on difficult issues such as fair dealing, damages, and the liability of Internet providers. However, its approach to digital locks — which are used to control access to DVDs, CDs, and electronic books — was roundly criticized by consumer, education, and technology groups since it effectively ensured that inclusion of a digital lock trumps consumer and fair dealing rights. The bill’s digital lock rules largely mirrored those found in the United States.

However, Wikileaks released diplomatic cables reveal some interesting facts about the proposed revisions

newly released cables reveal that former industry minister Maxime Bernier raised the possibility of leaking the copyright bill to U.S. officials before tabling it in the House of Commons and a former policy official with industry ministers Jim Prentice and Tony Clement encouraged the U.S. to pressure Canada by elevating it on a piracy watch list.

 

Thoughts on your university education

Schumpeter: Angst for the educated | The Economist

Several economists, including Paul Krugman, have begun to argue that post-industrial societies will be characterised not by a relentless rise in demand for the educated but by a great “hollowing out”, as mid-level jobs are destroyed by smart machines and high-level job growth slows. David Autor, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), points out that the main effect of automation in the computer era is not that it destroys blue-collar jobs but that it destroys any job that can be reduced to a routine. Alan Blinder, of Princeton University, argues that the jobs graduates have traditionally performed are if anything more “offshorable” than low-wage ones. A plumber or lorry-driver’s job cannot be outsourced to India. A computer programmer’s can.

The future of Television -- Google's perspective

Eric Schmidt's MacTaggart lecture - full text | Media | guardian.co.uk

Eric Schmidt's MacTaggart lecture - full text

Read the full text of the Google chief executive's keynote speech from the 2011 Edinburgh TV festival

Gives a point of view--Google's--on the future of television, but also provides a good sketch of the media landscape in 2011.
Also gives Schmidt's list of things to pay attention to: "mobile, local and social" (p. 5).

Impact of Social Media on Social Movements

Beyond Streetbook - Technology Review

The subject continues to be debated, largely across a false dichotomy of Gladwell ("the revolution will not be tweeted") versus cyberutopianism ("it's a Facebook revolution!"). Amongst close followers, including many revolutionaries themselves, however, the reality is more subtle: The revolution will be tweeted, and Facebooked, but it will also be fought, sometimes bloodily, on the streets.

In "Streetbook," John Pollock deftly illustrates the impact of social media tools in Tunisia and Egypt, the two countries in which, thus far, we have seen the true Arab Spring. Pollock's conclusion—that digital tools contribute greatly to the offline organizing necessary to topple a regime—fits the narrative put forth by the various activists he interviews (as well as the many I've seen speak at various fora this year), while his narrative offers an insider's view into just how those tools have been used.