Recent stuff

Interesting review on Google by Daniel Soar: "It knows"

And while we're on the subject of "it", a recent article about our official class snack,  It's It (or for Aaron, Pop-tarts)

And one on location and privacy from the New York Times,

And one that Anders sent on NSA spying
And one from Jenny on Digital textbooks
--t

Current items

Some items relating to our recent discussions:


On open social network information, The Social Graph is Neither , a blog post by Maciej Ceglowski.


We talked about planned obsolescence of things like toasters.  A great piece on the way all this works is Annie Leonard's Story of Stuff


I mentioned the article about direct brain connection in the Economist, called "Mind goggling" (not googling)


And a current New York Times article by Claire Miller on our friend Larry, 

Privacy in the mall

A new startup called Euclid Elements emerged from stealth mode today to debut its customer-tracking solution for brick-and-mortar merchants it’s calling “Google Analytics for the physical world.” The name is an apt description for the new solution, which employs sensors and wireless technology to track customer behavior...

So what does Euclid actually do? It uses preconfigured in-store sensors plugged directly into switch in the network closet to track the Wi-Fi signals on customers’ smartphones. In doing so, Euclid can map out and analyze customer shopping behavior, including things like foot patterns (the movement in and out and through the store), plus customer loyalty, retention rates, “dwell time,” and even things like “window conversion rates,” which can be thought of as the offline “click-though.” (A window conversion means a customer sees a window display and then decides to enter the store).

Privacy conference

You might be interested in what is getting covered at the Public Voice Conference on Privacy.

Even as privacy rights spread around the world the struggle to promote privacy continues to be challenging. Laws and regulations continue to face economic and technological challenges, effective protections continue to require constant campaigning, implementation of rights continue to be questioned on the grounds of culture and conflict of laws. This Public Voice meeting aims to address these challenges with an emphasis on developments in Latin America. Follow #TPV11for updates and information related to the meeting.

Liberation Technology Seminar this Thursday - How the Street, Institutions, and Mediascape Converge in Egypt

Layers of Networks: How the Street, Institutions, and Mediascape Converge in Egypt 
Liberation Technology Seminar Series

October 20, 2011
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

Wallenberg Theater
Wallenberg Hall
450 Serra Mall, Building 160

Speaker
Ramesh Srinivasan - UCLA

Abstract

Running across freeways with labor organizers, speaking with taxi drivers and laborers, and visiting rural areas of Egypt convinced me during my fieldwork that neither social media technologies nor the youth that use them caused or directly led a revolution where people from every walk of life took to the street. Indeed, only 15% of Egyptians and other Arab Spring countries have Internet access and a small percent of them are active on social media. These dynamics replay themselves in the many countries and cultures that I have worked within - from Kyrgyzstan, to Native America, to India. Indeed, while re-telling a story that places heroic youth and wonderfully liberating technologies at the center ignores the masses, dismissing social media’s dramatic impact on journalism and high-end organizing in turn is equally shortsighted. This talk will bring up different arguments (sometimes in conflict with one another) of how networks of the street and networks of the Internet work with one another, placing working classes and community organizers side-by-side with social media users.

Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote a front page article on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post, an Op/Ed in the Washington Post on Social Media and the London Riots, an upcoming piece in the Washington Post on Myths of Social Media, and was recently on NPR discussing his fieldwork in Egypt on networks, actors, and technologies in the political sphere. He was also recently in the New Yorker based on his response (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers who were involved in overthrowing the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/cv

Anonymity and rage

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/24/internet-anonymity-trolling-tim-adams

How the internet created an age of rage

The worldwide web has made critics of us all. But with commenters able to hide behind a cloak of anonymity, the blog and chatroom have become forums for hatred and bile

• •  reddit this
• Comments (185)

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• • Tim Adams
  • The Observer, Saturday 23 July 2011
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Interesting followon to today's discussion on Internet and ID

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/9b28f1ec-eaa9-11e0-aeca-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rss#axzz1abZ0ZBlO

Founding father wants secure ‘Internet 2’

By Joseph Menn in San Francisco

Vint Cerf, known as one of the fathers of the internet, acknowledges that he and co-founder Bob Kahn did not think enough about security when they built the framework for the web. He shares a view held by a growing number of experts that the best way to defend against cyberattacks might be to simply start again.

“I would have put a much stronger focus on authenticity or authentication – where did this email come from, what device I am talking to . . . those things are elements that would make a big difference,” Mr Cerf says.

More

ON THIS STORY

• Chinese army mobilises cybermilitias
• FT series Cyberwarfare - the new arms race
• Agreement on cybersecurity ‘badly needed’
• US starts to tackle hacking curse
• Interactive Cybersecurity deals

The fight to secure the current internet is unwinnable, says Ori Eisen, founder of a security company called 41st Parameter, which defends banks against online crime.

A faulty initial design – with net protocols that rely on trust and freely allow anonymity – has been compounded by the slow rollout of security gear, he says.

“I can do a very good job,” says Mr Eisen, whose company tries to keep pace with advancements in the cybercrime underworld. “But in the long run, it is essentially hopeless.”

So, what would a secure internet look like? Mr Eisen has set out plans for Internet 2 in a document called Project Phoenix. Included in his blueprint are biometric identification, encryption of all keystrokes and virtual machines created for every transaction.

His plan has drawn praise from the security industry, including Michael Barrett, PayPal’s head of security, who calls it a “very helpful scenario”.

“There are a number of people in the community who have been arguing for a while that we need to press the proverbial reset button and start again,” Mr Barrett said.

The US government has made some tentative steps in that direction. Military contractors funded by the Pentagon’s defence advanced research projects agency – which sponsored the first version of the internet – are also contemplating redesigns. But these efforts are aiming mainly at isolated government locations and not broad adoption in the civilian world.

A new internet, along the lines of Project Phoenix, seems destined to remain a plan on paper only – at least for now. A company based on Project Phoenix would be doomed without a government mandate or a consortium of banks or telecommunications companies stepping in, says Ted Schlein of Kleiner Perkins, 41st Parameter’s prominent venture capital investor.

“The concept of a more secure network that customers or vendors are willing to pay for is probably the only way to provide the security that people want to have,” Mr Schlein says.

Mr Cerf said the ubiquity of the present internet need not block the adoption of a new version.

“I’m actually quite interested in the clean-slate ideas,” Mr Cerf said. “People will say, ‘Oh you can never do that, it’s already too deeply embedded in everything else.’ But you could have said that of the telephone system in 1973, and the internet is replacing the telephone system.”

Additional reporting by Tim Bradshaw in London