Here are a bunch of pages that are worth your while today.
Google is evil. Comrade Misfit points out how to keep them from collecting (and selling, or giving to the police and/or the TV News) your location data.
Tacitus has been blogging for 8 years, and muses on how the blogosphere has changed over that time. Not sure how I found his blog, but I've been linking to him for most of that time. ER doctor, Battlebot coach, and amateur archaeologist who sometimes goes spelunking in old beer caves, there's always something interesting over there.
This is the smartest analysis of the Julian Assange case that I've seen.
I don't follow basket ball very much, but Old NFO has something that shows that greatness of the soul is sometimes best measured off the court, by the number of lives you touch. Highly, highly recommended.
The problem about most advice about how to deal with Google (and Facebook) is that it focuses on individual action. Turn stuff off, use DDG, sell stock etc. The fact is that the tech oligarchs are too rich, too powerful and too pervasive for this to be anything but our version of virtue signalling. To have any kind of real impact, it is regrettably going to take governmental action. I don't think regulation will work because of the well known phenomena of regulatory capture so I favor laws that will destroy their business model by moving ownership of data to the person it pertains to, as suggested by Berners-Lee. Some additional action will be necessary to require transfer of ownership of data to be on a bit by bit basis rather than blanket via abusive TOS. The oligarchs are a new threat which is an order of magnitude worse than Standard Oil in the old days. They are out to destroy the republic and any vestige of personal privacy. Therefore new and more extreme measures are necessary to fight it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the kind words!
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