Odyssey Online

…this from the Boston Phoenix around Christmas, a convincing and frightening piece about how federal, state, and local governments are “drowning in data.” From the article, “Even with millions being spent on storage solutions, public workers warn that at the bottleneck of information flow sits a good old-fashioned shortage of manpower.”

…a couple of follow-up’s for a Friday on the travails of the Internet.  In Slate Larry Downs wrote a piece arguing that if the history of the Internet tells us anything about assuring Net Neutrality, it’s to do nothing.  It’s an interesting contemplation on the “the Net” has always taken care of it’s own business.

…and I found this interesting, it’s an explanation of how the Egyptian Government could turn off the Internet as part of its attempt to quell the recent street protests…

Happy new year and welcome back to Odyssey Online and blogging in 2011.  An update on a topic vital to the future of the Internet…back on December 22nd the FCC created a new set of regulations to “…prohibit broadband providers from interfering with Web traffic and discourage them from giving some Web destinations preferential treatment…” effectively a version of Net Neutrality.  The ruling was widely decried by people on both ends of the political spectrum. Verizon has now challenged the ruling in court, and this piece by Brad Reed in Computerworld is a good summary of the lawsuit, and what the FCC rulings really is and does.    Chloe Albanesius has a useful article in PC Magazine about what is likely to happen in the near future (taking Verizon’s lawsuit into account), and Ars Technica has an interesting piece on the support for network neutrality from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the National Council of Churches…

From Atlanticwire, a sampling of reactions to a Federal Trade Commission proposal that companies be regulated  in their ability to track one’s treks across the Internet.  For truly thoughtful commentary on what happens and should happen to the information one leaves in one’s tracks across cyberspace, see Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s book Delete: Virtual Forgetting in the Digital Age…

Firesheep is a Firefox add-on.  Now, Firefox add-ons are generally good, utilitarian, useful things…this add on however allows anyone to hack someone else’s Facebook account and pretty much do whatever they want with it.  A man named Eric Butler created it saying he did so to illustrate the security vulnerabilities of social networking applications.  It strikes me that there is a “take pride in your work” issue when it comes to software that will do your hacking automatically for you, but leaving that for the moment here is other commentary on Firesheep’s implications:

• Whose Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?
• Firesheep Users May Be Breaking the Law
• Firesheep’s Real Lesson: Take Wifi Security Seriously
• Concerned About Firesheep? Here Are Some Wifi Alternatives

Fear the sheep…

…an interesting piece in the Huffington Post by Peter O’Dowd on ways companies and candidates bury themselves in Google. That is, folks such as eMarketer who will help you not only maximizes your Google presence (there are dozens of books on this kind of Google hack) but minimize at least part of your Google presence so unflattering accounts of your company or candidacy will be well down a Google results lists.  On a certain level this kind of manipulation really is just a day at the office, but it makes the days of information wants to be free seem far away…

…Atlantic Magazine recently pointed to a number of articles in which top executives at Google (such as CEO Eric Schmidt) have made statements that suggest they see Google applications so thoroughly embedded in people’s lives that any real sense of privacy, if privacy is defined as the ability to control information about oneself, disappears.  These articles are:

• We Know What You’re Thinking by Andrew Orlowski
• The Schmidt Problem by Nick Saint
• A Creepy Future by Ian Paul
• Eric Schmidt: Google Tries to Get Right Up to the Creepy Line by Matthew Zuras

Now Google isn’t the only online company in the world with privacy issues (think Facebook), but vision of human computer interaction here is one that makes one pause over what Google could possibly mean by “evil” in their famous slogan…

…an interesting little note on Term Paper Mills. With the advent of the Internet a fear arose that Term Paper Mills, those folks who, for a fee, will write you a paper, had been given the perfect delivery mechanism.  A few years ago this fear on campus was palpable, and there was even services one could avail oneself to to create libraries of student work on foil these online paper mills at their own digital game.  Dan Ariely, a professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University, did an experiment this fall to text the quality of the product produced, which he concluded is “best described as gibberish.” His argument is that the papers are so bad intellectually and technically that an student submitting one would rue the day…one less worry?

…okay, I promise, last one, but it appears that Israeli Security Forces are confiscating iPads. It has something to do with Wi-Fi issues, and is likely to end at the end of May, but for now taking a iPad into Israel is kissing it goodbye.  Coverage on this from the Tech-Herald,  Computerworld, and PC Magazine…

…Google Buzz is certainly proving to be an interesting bee. It is Google’s social networking software that is built right into G-mail. This merging has been called Simple Genius and a Facebook killer (more on the killer stuff here).  However, no sooner did buzz leave the hive that it was discovered to have serious privacy problems, serious vulnerability to hackers…these issues chronicled here, here, and here.  My advice? Leave Google buzz until spring and read instead:

• Spring Without Bees: How Colony Collapse Disorder Has Endangered Our Food Supply by Bill McKibbon
• Buzz About Bees: Biology of a Superorganism by Jurgen Tautz
• A Keeper of Bees: Notes on Hive and Home by Allison Wallace
• Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey, The Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the World by Holley Bishop