Sunday, July 20, 2003

Howard Rheingold on Smart Mobs on NPR's Weekend Edition (Real Audio). 8:41:37 PM    comment []

MAPS AND CHARTS OF OILFIELDS: CHENEY ENERGY TASK FORCE. Judicial Watch via Daypop Top 40. 8:32:20 PM    comment []

P2P Prohibition: Top 11 Signs your ISP has given you up to the RIAA at NetworkComputing, via JP and Xeni. 4:48:15 PM    comment []

Dave: [snippage] Locked trunks can be gotten out of. Houdini did it. Netscape led us out, in 1994, but didn't stick around to finish the job. Google had promise for a while, but the promise is fading. Microsoft-free Fridays were a response to Smart Tags, which will come back (probably in Longhorn) Allchin promises. Then people will be outraged, again, but will it matter? In the meantime every user who switches to a modern non-Microsoft browser is doing us all a favor and should have our thanks. And to be honest, the reason I'm rambling so long here is so I have enough space to include yet another cool Bryan Bell graphic on Scripting News today. Important point: adopting a technology has consequences for others on account of network effects and lock in. I talked about that in "Privacy, Technology, and Care" last year. 1:23:12 PM    comment []

Approx 21 years ago: Kathy to Hilary, July 22, 1972 cont., Tehran, Iran. Of course Bob S. has long hair and smokes dope! . . . . A week ago I was left alone in the house for three days as the rest of the family went to Tabriz and Lake Rezayieh. I had summer school exams. They actually t r u s t e d me. The general rule about no male visitors is to be expected and not very unreasonable. But what is reason in the face of higher things? And very sorrowfully I broke their trust. . . . . [Tehran <-> Washington, DC 1970-1973 teen girl blog] 10:28:57 AM    comment []

Robert's finished his poll of Salon bloggers on their preferences among U.S. Presidential candidates. 9:18:20 AM    comment []

More Doc, on digital identity: Towards a Popeye Dentity. Somewhere past few months somewhere, David Sifry, prophet (and probably also profit) of the Principle of Good Enough (POGE), suggested that the simplest and potentially most useful form of digital identity (DigID) is the email address. Nothing, he said (I know it's somewhere around the Web here), better fits, in a practicable way, the definition of a Tier 1 DigID — one that belongs to the individual, and around which individually-useful services can be built. As Tier 1 infrastructure gets built out — whether or not email addresses are involved — there are bound to be problem with identities that are granted by Tier 2 entities — those corporations and other organizations that confer identites upon us. You know what they are: your wallet is full of them. This came home to me this morning as I read Tom Matrulo's Bollocks to Shrimp: So I called Earthlink, and had a healthy dialogue with a good guy there named Lance. He explained that the only way for me to drop Sprint and keep my Earthlink email address is to (a) drop Sprint, (b) lose that address for up to a month until Sprint sends it, along with a bunch of other dropped accounts, to Earthlink in a batch, (c) sign up for Earthlink dial-up, and (d) add that email address after it's been cancelled by Sprint. The antediluvian wonders of batch processing could require that much time for this occur, Lance patiently explained. I somewhat less patiently explained to Lance that my Earthlink address, which I guard somewhat jealously, is now built into a web of relationships - not only with people, but with institutions - banks, credit card companies, mailing lists, billing notifications, etc. etc. It is my "digi ID" which I share as needed to maintain relationships online, and which I really don't have the luxury of turning off, even for a month. But this "digital identity," although it's the lynchpin of a web-based reailty, is not mine, because Earthlink has locked itself into an antique meatspace business model with Sprint, an industrial telco that sees my email address as its property, to do with as it sees fit. It will run a batch ( sans jouissance, bien sur ) and include me when it feels up to it. Does it not seem obvious that it should work the other way around? Our online ID is, or should be, a modular element of digital reality which belongs to us, and the ISP, the telco vendors, and the rest need to conform to the exigencies of working with it. How else will it be possible for anyone who is mobile, at least in any international sense, to have any continuity of ID without being subjected to usurious rates? How can we be expected to feel "liberated" by the wonders of, uh, cyberspace if it insists on emulating the dullest forms of meatspace? Unfortunately, Earthlink's relationship with Sprint isn't the reason Tom's Earthlink email address isn't his. In fact, it has nothing to do with relationships at all. It has to do with Earthlink's own identity as a conferrer of branded email addresses. @earthlink addresses belong to Earthlink. I see by whois that Tom appears to be the owner of matrullo.com, currently parked at Register.com. Owning one's surname is a smart move. (It doesn't help nonfamily members who share the surname, of course; but it's a useful form of grandfathering to own your own domain — or at least to rent it long-term from a registrar.) In the long run, I believe, we will all need to be masters of our own domains. Some will match up with surnames. Many more won't. What matters is mastery. And we're not going to get that from Tier 2 IDs. I've been thinking this year about digital identity, too. It's been ten years now since I first wrote about identity on the Net, then in the context of anonymizing remailers and what they Meant. I concluded this summer that I should revisit the topic, and I'll write something up when I get back next month from vacation, I think. Although this sort of example isn't one I had in mind, it fits neatly with the twisted irony that will be the central focus of the essay: that ten years ago it looked as though anarchic cypherpunks breaking with Net traditions could be poised to destroy identity on the Net, it turns out that control freak commercial interests are the real threats to identity today. A promissory note? 9:12:23 AM    comment []

Con Artists See Gold in Do-Not-Call Registry. DIARY Con Artists See Gold In Do-Not-Call Registry. By Compiled by Vivian Marino. [New York Times: Technology] 9:05:56 AM    comment []

Dan is trying the new AOL blogging tool: AOL Journals: Blogs Made Even Easier. Well, I've made my first posting on my new blog, Dan Gillmor's AOL Journal, a test of AOL's weblog application.... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 9:05:24 AM    comment []

Cash. Fame. Pressure. And Garlic.. "The Restaurant," NBC's new six-episode reality series, quite accurately assumes that the mechanics of running a kitchen have dramatic potential. By William Grimes. [New York Times: Business] 9:04:01 AM    comment []

Doc: In case you forget. Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular. The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Thanks to Kevin for the link. [The Doc Searls Weblog] 8:59:22 AM    comment []

Pancho Villa assasinated, this day, 1920. 2:20:33 AM    comment []