New search engine Cuil has an interesting privacy policy (those links might not work right now due to the load). They’re apparently not going to track individual users’ searches at all, which, in comparison to Google’s behaviour, is quite a difference. As TechCrunch puts it: […]
All posts filed under “Privacy”
Smile, you’re on Countermanded Camera
Image from Miquel Mora’s website We’ve looked before at a number of technologies and products aimed at ‘preventing’ photography and image recording in some way, from censoring photographs of ‘copyrighted content’ and banknotes, to Georgia Tech’s CCD-flooding system. Usually these systems are about locking out […]
Review: Architecture as Crime Control by Neal Katyal
Review: Katyal, N. K. “Architecture as Crime Control”, Yale Law Journal, March 2002, Vol 111, Issue 5. Professor Neal Kumar Katyal of Georgetown University Law School, best-known for being (successful) lead counsel in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case dealing with Guantanamo Bay detainees, has also […]
The Convention on Modern Liberty
Britain’s supposedly on the verge of a summer of rage, and while like Mary Riddell I am of course reminded of Ballard, it’s not quite the same. I don’t think this represents the ‘middle class’ ennui of Chelsea Marina. Instead I think we may have […]
On ‘Design and Behaviour’ this week: Do you own your stuff? And a strange council-run ‘Virtual World for young people’
GPS-aided repo and product-service systems Ryan Calo of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society brought up the new phenomenon of GPS-aided car repossession and the implications for the concepts of property and privacy: A group of car dealers in Oregon apparently attached GPS devices to […]
‘Value of your home to be determined by the “freedom” your gadgets exhibit’
In a piece examining GPL v.3 and Linus Torvalds’ recent comments (‘If Linus snubs new GPL, is that it for ‘open source’?’), Andrew Orlowski discusses an idea put to him by a “GPL 3.0 advocate”:
Richard Stallman’s ‘Right To Read’ dystopia growing closer every day
We seem to be accelerating towards the nightmare vision presented by Richard Stallman in his 1997 article, ‘The Right to Read’, ninety years too early, and investigated so thoroughly by Cambridge’s Ross Anderson. (See also here for more discussion of DRM and ‘trusted’ computing).
Another dystopian vision
I should have posted this very impressive piece last month, but forgot, so here it is: ‘Burnoff: Part 1 – The Bad Guys Win’ by Tarmle.
Motor insurance ‘black boxes’
Last month, Norwich Union (one of the UK’s largest insurers) opened up its ‘black box’-based car insurance policy (see here) to a wider range of drivers, with a lot of publicity.
‘Techno world has MPs beat’ – Guardian
Particularly in reference to the ID card issue, but relevant also to the creeping pervasion of deleterious architectures of control and their sanction by governments, a nice quote from a Guardian article:
New Scientist : Crowds silenced by delayed echoes
Via Boing Boing – ‘Hooligan chants silenced by delayed echoes’, a New Scientist story looking at the work of Dutch researchers who are using out-of-sync replayed sound to disrupt synchronised chanting at football matches. “Soccer hooligans could be silenced by a new sound system that […]