Paul's Web Space 2.1

Blog Action Day Post - Kick the Bottled Water Habit

Hey everyone - it's Blog Action Day! Here's my environmental post for the day.

Simply click on the picture to the left and pledge to break the bottled water habit. It's easy and fun, and when you realize how much needless waste you're saving, you'll wonder why you didn't do it already. A lot of the time, you're simply buying filtered tap water. The amount of energy and other resources required to create and fill those little plastic bottles, and then truck all that water around, is truly staggering . Finally, all that extra plastic is going to be around a lot longer than you are.

So kick the habit...and blog for the environment today!    Link: http://blogactionday.org/

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Eventful October - Part 1

Last week I did a lot of things that reminded me of my days on the board of directors of CPSR — some really cool events that had my head spinning with information and motivation.

First, on Tuesday, I attended "ITIF Forum: There is a Free Lunch – How Opening Up Unused ‘White Spaces’ on the Airwaves Will Drive Broadband Innovation" which was co-sponsored by ITIF and the New America Foundation. The speakers outlined a very compelling case for opening up for unlicensed applications (like WiFi) some of the bandwidth being freed up by the transition to digital television. This would provide a more flexible array of unlicensed bands to make wireless networks more flexible and powerful.



Then on Wednesday evening, I attended a fascinating talk by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn at the National Archives entitled "Internet Governance - Does anyone run the Internet?" They addressed that question, but also reminisced on the history of Internet development and speculated some on the future, and received some very incisive questions.

Finally on Friday I saw a truly scary panel discussion sponsored by EPIC, called "The President, Privacy, and Domestic Surveillance." The event, at Busboys and Poets, featured Charlie Savage, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting for the Boston Globe, and author of a new book, "Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy." Also speaking were Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems Distinguished Scientist and author of "Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption," and Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of EPIC. They discussed how the the Bush Administration's goal of reasserting and vastly enhancing the power of the presidency, through signing statements and other means, has been both unpublicized and very effective, enabling this White House to elevate the power of the executive branch to frightening levels, potentially threatening our very political system.

This week is less event-full but only by a little. Tuesday night, I went on a river wine-and-dine cruise courtesy of Visual Sciences, the vendor of HBX Analytics, as part of their VisCon Fall 2007 user conference. Tonight is my only policy-related event this week — I'm attending Public Knowledge's 6th Anniversary Celebration and 4th Annual IP3 Awards, honoring Jamie Love, Tim Wu, Bob Young, and the band OK-Go. When I was in graduate school in the early 1990s I worked for Jamie Love at the Taxpayer Assets Project; his current organization, Knowledge Ecology International, is a logical extension of the work we were engaged in back then. ¶ 1:46 PM | Permalink | | | Links to this post
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Blog Action Day Quiz

Labels: activism, blogging, environment

   Link: http://quiz.blogactionday.org

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Free Burma!

While we're at it, help put an end to genocide everywhere (including Burma, and especially Darfur), stop arming the combatants waging civil wars that currently rage on at least three continents, or perhaps something we in the US can affect, stop stupid wars that states wage against each other.

But above all, today, Free Burma!

Labels: Free Burma

   Link: http://www.free-burma.org

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Google: Search and Data Seizure

In his most recent Nation article - "Google: Search and Data Seizure" - Jeff Chester makes an interesting case that Google is amassing an alarming amount of power, based upon the information that it has about the users of its applications, along with the tools that it is developing to profile and market to those end users.

Google certainly seems to be everywhere these days. And it's easy to accept that they will use their powers for good. One poster points out that this technology makes it more likely that the pitches we see will be relevant to our needs; but in a larger sense who knows what we need. Perhaps we really need to save money, which is made more difficult by a constant onslaught of ever-more-tempting pitches.

In the area of privacy, they might not always have the choice to first do no evil - the government could compel them to turn over information that they would prefer to keep confidential. According to TechCrunch, it appears that "Google [is planning] To “Out Open” Facebook On November 5" by opening up their platform - and data - to outside developers.

"Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time."

The details are sketchy, but unless they offer end-users the ability to maintain strict and fine-grained control over what is done with their personal data, this capability could certainly be exploited for unseemly ends - Facebook has had problems with people marketing their applications overly aggressively, and I think they could make more improvements on this score. On the other hand, by opening up this information, Google might be making this market even more open to competition.

One final bit of positive news out of Google is the new YouTube Nonprofit Program, whereby they will provide branding support and publicity for nonprofit videos free-of-charge, in what looks like a cool bit of generosity.

One thing's for sure, Google is both hard to figure out and becoming all-powerful at the same time.    Link: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071015/chester

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NOSO - the Anti-Social Network

NOSO is a really funny site/service that offers its members the opportunity to unplug from the network completely for a period of time - a collective antisocial experience. It seems like a way to shut off from your social network(s) for a time, to take a break. It seems like a joke, but then again it resonates with a lot of people.

From the web site:

NOSO is a real-world platform for temporary disengagement from social networking environments. The NOSO experience offers a unique opportunity to create NO Connections by scheduling NO Events with other NO Friends.

   Link: http://nosoproject.com/

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