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I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and the conclusion I eventually came to really startled me.
TLDR: The more communications data is recorded, the less scrutiny any of it gets.
Disclaimer: I have a longstanding amateur interest in cryptography and cryptanalysis; I’ve read a few books. I’ve never held a security clearance nor worked in intelligence. […]

First there was Flickr. I liked Flickr a lot; it was a very convenient way to share photos with my friends and family. I didn’t know anybody on the Flickr team personally or anything, but it was clearly a small, bright outfit. The vibe of the site made me feel comfortable letting them keep track […]

For my taste, this does not compensate for

the leading edge of intrusive/obnoxious web ad delivery/click tracking tech
(sometimes including spyware)
the general level of inanity
the most obnoxious music player since the glory days of shockwave
funnelling more dollars into Murdoch’s multi-media empire

But Billy Bragg’s efforts to alter MySpace’s TOS (warning: tracking cookies and other nasties) is […]

Hey, yeah, so, Granite Shadow.
Arkin sounds comparatively rational (in his inaugural entry, he says his “basic philosophy is that government is more incompetent than diabolical”), but many of the comments on Arkin’s post bear the hallmarks of paranoid schizophrenic delusions.
The bane of conspiracies is that people just aren’t very good at keeping secrets. (This is […]

I never made it through a whole Clancy novel, but I think I grasp the basic formula anyway: a bunch of factual background + some more-or-less plausible speculation + a chain of innocent-seeming coincidences = a thriller. Clancy, obviously, is hawkish, implicitly conservative, explicitly technophilic.
This is an idea for a techno/political thriller rooted in somewhat […]

Huzzah to Boston Globe for daring to print author Ross Gelbspan’s op-ed piece, the first (to the best of my knowledge) in a major mainstream US media outlet to connect the dots. The severity of the damage done by Katrina is related to the storm’s total energy, which is related to the temperature of […]

don’t worry, i’m not gonna make a habit of rehashing posts from slashdot. but this interested me because while it’s not unusual to hear gadflies like me shrilling about how the damage MS’s hegemony wreaks; it’s more noteworthy to hear the same sentiment coming from comparatively sober industry publication (not a clean link; ‘ware tracking […]

cleaning up the ‘net?