How come privacy seems to be a matter of concern only in Europe?
“European data privacy regulators have put renewed pressure on Google to alter its privacy policy. It follows changes to the policy two years ago which regulators felt breached European rules.”
via BBC News – Google urged to change privacy rules by data regulators.
I’m beginning to grow weary both of the commercial social networks and their alternatives. The web outside of them was always more expansive and interesting than that which is caught within them. Its content is more usefully captured directly than through artificial filters. I would be more interested to read what my friends publish unconstrained in the personal space of their own website or blog than within the artificial confines of a social media stream. On a personal site, I decide on what content to present and how to present it. It’s my own decision and I feel more free about it.
The problems with this approach are mainly –
a) more and more people are abandoning such personal spaces and consigning their content to social media streams.
b) it is difficult to effectively capture what’s interesting on the web without the recommendations and filters provided by streams.
To the latter my best response is still RSS news feeds. A federated version of something like the old Google Reader would be better. (Not something like Digg.)
To the former, the best response is to nurture one’s own blog or site as an example, and to share to it, rather than to the streams.
About how broken copyright laws offer little protection to individuals and small businesses
Bugging out: How rampant online piracy squashed one insect photographer | Ars Technica.
Apple and Google are making things difficult for law enforcement, but:
“The weak link in the law enforcement scenario for Google and Apple is cloud storage. Companies can and will turn cloud data over to the police, and Google has even done it proactively. Smartphones today have cloud backup systems for just about everything, so while this will probably protect you from individuals trying to snoop in on a stolen or resold phone, there’s nothing to stop the police from getting a warrant for data on your phone or for data stored in the cloud connected to your account.”
via Apple, Google default cell-phone encryption “concerns” FBI director | Ars Technica.
I think I misunderstood the quoted paragraph. Apple says that it’s not possible for them to surrender such data in IOS 8
The Guardian: “Ello is the ‘anti-facebook’, positioning itself as a network with a social conscience. It might not be the one to replace the social giant, but Facebook is getting old”
Ello or another competing service won’t be the answer. What Facebook and other social networks offer is “good enough” for what people currently want.
My prediction is that what will foil Facebook is some sort of change in the infrastructure of the internet. If someone can make the infrastructure more decentralized, so that we are less dependent upon information silos like Facebook, and yet find better ways of tying it together, that would do it.
Examples of early moves in this direction are GNU Social, OwnCloud, Friendica, Red Matrix, Pump.io and especially Twister. Twister makes it possible to use any computer as a decentralized network hub, without needing Apache or other web server software or tying an IP address to a name server. It uses BitCoin technology. But all these are baby steps. We need something new, that makes decentralization really easy and user friendly, but which somehow gives big companies the opportunity to make money. Without the money incentive, it probably won’t happen.
“In 2011, when Google+ just started, some high profile people said they were walking away from their own self-hosted domains and just redirecting to their Google+ profile, which was flying with comments and +1s. I warned against this move, saying “I Gave Away My Web Identity. All I Got Was a T-Shirt.” Even when the product you’re pointing to is high quality, it’s very unlikely a stream-oriented product can match the quality and depth of longer form content that belongs to you.”
louisgray.com: Blogs Still Trump Streams for Longform Content With a Long Shelf Life.
He quotes an article with a similar message, “Why Blogging Still Matters: Data, Distribution, and Ownership of Content” by Adam Singer
The Guardian’s view – and mine too – of a war that achieved nothing but bloodshed and destruction.
Postach.io takes the post you put in a notebook on Evernote and serves it in a blog hosted on Amazon Web Services. This technical stuff happens in the background so, from the user’s point of view, the result is a really simple way to blog, with the added security that every blog post is synchronized both on Evernote and on one’s home computer.
In addition, Evernote has just improved its security in order to allow third party authorization only for a single notebook, which means that using Postach.io with Evernote is also much more secure than in the past.
I used Postach.io for a short time, but stopped mainly due to Evernote’s poor integration with Linux. Unlike, say, Dropbox, the only way to use Evernote offline on a Linux desktop is to rely on third party solutions that are much poorer than the native Evernote desktop interface. So, in order to use Postach.io, it was necessary to write online – in which case I may as well use WordPress, or use one of these Evernote 3rd party options. In addition, post-Snowden, I started to think about privacy issues and stopped using Evernote for other kinds of notes. Nowadays I simply use Emacs Org Mode for my notes.
Postach.io has also introduced blogging via email – just as many blogging platforms including WordPress do – but that doesn’t work for me as I always need to edit and re-edit whatever I write.
For someone who is not a Linux user and loves Evernote, Postach.io is a clever solution.
It’s not easy finding new and interesting ways to illustrate the growth of income inequality over the past few decades. But here are a couple of related ones. The first is from “Survival of the Richest” in the current issue of Mother Jones, and it shows how much of our total national income growth gets hoovered up by the top 1 percent during economic recoveries. The super-rich got 45 percent of total income growth during the dotcom years; 65 percent during the housing bubble years; and a stunning 95 percent during the current recovery. It’s good to be rich.
via The Rich Are Getting Richer, Part the Millionth | Mother Jones.
The director of Liberty has written an important, sometimes startling book about the battle ahead. When it comes to human rights, common sense and decency is never enough
via On Liberty by Shami Chakrabarti – ‘I don’t trust the powerful’ | Books | The Guardian.
