There was a time (likely just before my college years) when I distinctly remember thinking “you know, the music I’m into now, I could just listen to nothing but this for the rest of my life, I mean, it’s that good.” (it was high school) No doubt I wasn’t the first to pledge such lifelong musical satisfaction. And not unlike myself, the musically-satisfied lives of my predecessors probably lasted like… what? A couple months?
Or maybe not. Maybe everyone is still listening to the same crap (excuse me, I mean music) they listened to in high school or college or whatever (I’m sure it’s still very good and not dated at all). And maybe I was the very first to anull my I-never-need-to-listen-to-new-music-again vows, because, like, the next day the Internet started getting really good at dumping piles of the stuff on my head. And then computers started getting really good at helping people make even more music and, hell, now there’s an awful lot of it.
And I’m back; blog vacation is over. Lots to catch up on. Let’s start with…
It’s been a few weeks since Usain Bolt’s celebratory 9.69 second jog, the Olympics are well and done, but I still find myself fascinated by the he’s-either-on-steroids-or-everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-sprinting-is-wrong 100m world record. I catch myself watching the final once or twice a day (I have the video on my phone); it probably won’t cease to amaze me until he finds a tenth of a second in his busy schedule to surpass it.
I, like the large majority of Americans, did not get to watch Bolt’s run live that Saturday morning as exclusive television rights kept major competitions off the air until NBC’s nightly primetime broadcast. That’s not to say I waited until 9pm; I waited about 15 minutes. continue reading »
This image of a so-called “Wii Spray” device, thesis project of a one Martin Lihs, has been making appearances on design and tech blogs lately. Discussion of the prototype has so far focused on heightened realism the controller would bring to a street-art videogame. Personally, I’m partial to the rainbow cable – but that might just be me. Aesthetics of cordage aside, what I find most intriguing about the device isn’t it’s application as a gaming interface but the potential to repurpose it as a recording device. TiVo for graffiti, as it were. So lets put our Johnny Chung Lee hats on for a moment and think this through… continue reading »
That’s how the 7th season of American Idol ended for a handful of viewers who watched the finale recorded on their DVRs. The live broadcast, which extended a couple minutes beyond the scheduled end time, was cut off right as host Ryan Seacrest went to announce which David (Cook or Archuleta) had won this year’s competition. Brilliant.
When limited by a scarcity of storage resources, what parameters dictate what will and won’t be recorded? An assumption as to the temporal certainty of an event’s occurrence lead those who hadn’t accounted for any margin of error to miss the mark. And seeing how it was the television network, the thing being recorded, that supplied the erroneous information, we’re reminded yet again that distributing misinformation is an extremely effective means of resisting surveillance.
Which begs a few questions: First, in a future of truly pervasive and distributed computing, is it useful to extend the notion sousveillance to include all surveillance facilitated by information supplied by the entity being observed? And more importantly, did Fox intentionally let the broadcast run long to teach time-shifting freeloaders a lesson?
Over the last month or so, Phorm has faced quite a bit of scrutiny. The London-based company has partnered with a number of major British ISPs (British Telecom, Virgin Media and Talk Talk) to track the websites people visit in order to serve more precisely targeted ads. Of course, the digital privacy sirens were sounded full blast at first mention of this joint venture. Phorm argues their “technology doesn’t store any personally identifiable information or IP addresses”. Their site explains that a “random number” is assigned to each user and it’s impossible to connect that number back to a person’s identity. But we all know what happened to No. 4417749. If AOL’s fiasco taught us anything, it’s that the information being associated with these random numbers can frequently contain more information about an identity than the information being concealed by the random number in the first place.
Similar to the Phorm/BT partnership, Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable operator in the US, announced this week that they’ll be tracking every site their customers visit and selling that data to ad-placement company NebuAd. What I think people find so objectionable with Phorm and NebuAd is they don’t seem to be offering anything of much value back to the consumer. If they were somehow enabling free/cheaper internet access (a la NetZero of the late-90s) or offering any sort of service of value that’s not strictly ad related, it might be a completely different story. But all they seem to be doing is introducing a privacy risk for what will most likely amount to a negligible increase in advertising relevance.
Anyhow, more interestingly, it’s time for me to ask my favorite question: What changes once a handful of ISPs begin tracking everything people look at online, when everything is recorded? The first behavioral response to Phorm’s technology has appeared in the form of software called AntiPhormLite…continue reading »
RSS
0 comments »