Last night I had a horrifying dream that a group of well-intentioned middle-aged people who could not distinguish between a domain name and an IP address were trying to regulate the Internet. Then I woke up and the Judiciary Committee’s SOPA hearings were on.
It’s exactly as we feared. For every person who appears to have some grip on the issue, there were three or four yelling at him.
“I’m not a nerd,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D- Calif.). “I aspire to be a nerd.”
“I’m a nerd,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).
If I had a dime for every time someone in the hearing used the phrase “I’m not a nerd” or “I’m no tech expert, but they tell me . . .,” I’d have a large number of dimes and still feel intensely worried about the future of the uncensored Internet. If this were surgery, the patient would have run out screaming a long time ago. But this is like a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together to perform heart surgery on a patient incapable of moving. “We hear from the motion picture industry that heart surgery is what’s required,” they say cheerily. “We’re not going to cut the good valves, just the bad — neurons, or whatever you call those durn thingies.”
This is terrifying to watch. It would be amusing — there’s nothing like people who did not grow up with the Internet attempting to ask questions about technology very slowly and stumbling over words like “server” and “service” when you want an easy laugh. Except that this time, the joke’s on us.
#3 in time spent online!! I love you guys. :D
First off - I hear that. An unhealthy amount of my time gets sucked into that vortex.
However, I take issue with the fact they’re calling Tumblr a social network. I wouldn’t call Tumblr a social network any more than I’d call Twitter one. They are both communication platforms (one a bit more expressive than the other - I’ll let you figure that out.) but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re “social networks”, the way Linkedin and Facebook are, or MySpace and Friendster used to be. None of those platforms allow asynchronous information flow (fancy way of saying one-way communication), which is the ‘key’ difference in defining an online social network.
Which is also, precisely where the appeal and the power lies for both Twitter and Tumblr.
For many of us they are two of the most well designed, well thought-out, highly effective tools for personal expression and content consumption without the fuss and the clutter - or “Friends” as they’re often referred to on those other platforms.
The title of this WIRED article may seem a bit sensational but unfortunately it’s quite accurate. As it turns out, KISSmetrics - the tracking service in question - sets a unique ID for each visitors, and tracks them across the web. You can’t shake it off, even if you clear your cache or the browser is set to private/incognito mode. What’s more fascinating is just how they’re doing it:
One of the techniques used involves using something called ETags in the browser cache, a once-theoretical technique that’s never before been seen in the wild on a major site, according to the researchers.
“…these services are using practically every known method to circumvent user attempts to protect their privacy (Cookies, Flash Cookies, HTML5, CSS, Cache Cookies/Etags…) creating a perpetual game of privacy ‘whack-a-mole’.”
Fun stuff! (Amusingly enough they found function names like “cram cookie” in the code. Talk about naming your functions appropriately.)
Google “helvetica” before the day is over.
If I can sit through the first 14 mins of Up by myself in a dark theater without crying and only (?) a lump in my throat - I can sit through this little ad from Google - however poignant and sigh-inducing.
