Ashwin’s musings on technology, music and just about anything else…
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About time - a US Supreme Court ruling makes "obvious" patents harder to defend. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of the end for all those idiotic "my business process is more original than yours" patents from the last few years.
More later. Can’t talk now. Must code. Must. Drag. Scorpio. Out. The. Door.
Looks like there are folks getting things done in the privacy space, especially with regards to standardizing privacy policies, something that I think would be a great enabler for business on the Net. My 2c: better, and more easily, informed consumers are happier consumers.
So I fired up my feed reader and started poring over posts from days gone by that I’d missed, and what do I find? Via Tim Bray, IBM suing Amazon over patent infringement. And what might the infringed patents be?
WTF???
If this isn’t an argument for patent reform, I don’t know what is.
If you ever wondered about the value of the Creative Commons, go read Ethan Zuckerman’s reporting of the amazing impact Andrew Heaven’s commonized work is having.Participating in the commons is most definitely a political act, as Andrew’s experiences show only too clearly. Whether you’re contributing pictures of your neighbour’s cat’s kittens, blogging a ColdFusion coding tip (yes, yes, I know I’ve been lax; more of those coming soon!), or, as Andrew has done, sharing portions of your knowledge or commercial work that will otherwise not see the light of day, you’re helping maintain a vibrant commons that our not-so-nascent online communities can build upon.
Do I sound like a zealot? Perhaps I am…
Around the time I put up my first post on privacy, I started noticing conversation on the topic in the blogosphere. Oddly enough, I had started writing that post before I noticed the attention that was being paid to the issue.
After I read Jon Udell writing on the politics of data control, I was absolutely certain something was in the air; how could I possibly anticipate information flows on the Net? Of course, there had to be an explanation, so I settled for the most obvious one - we are approaching the boundaries of the Singularity, that remarkable union of the collective human consciousness and the mass of information and processing power that is the Internet.
Then again, there is all that beer to be considered… and Technorati stats. Did you know that they provide a very cool embeddable trends graph?
With that, we return to our regular scheduled programming. Have a great weekend, folks!
Via James Governor, Kevin Murphy says that privacy policies should have RSS feeds.
Haig reminds us on James’ blog of the P3P (Personal Privacy Preferences) standard, though James seems to think that there’s no way we’ll ever be able to agree to standards for machine-readable privacy policies.
I don’t know about that - surely something akin to the Creative Commons licenses could be created for privacy policies? A common set of policies could be created in plain text, legalese and P3P, so that all consituencies, human, lawyer and machine, could be served equally. Assuming that these policies were capable of covering the privacy policies for most websites, they might find their way into general use, just as the Creative Commons licenses have.
So eBay’s partnered with Google to provide Google adwords results for the non-US market; eBay has exactly the same deal with Yahoo for the domestic US market. Odd moves indeed, but definitely safe ones for eBay.
The business behind the partnership is obviously sound; as the Search Engine Journal notes, Google has a greater search engine market share outside the US, which eBay is moving to capitalize on.
However, what worries me (a vague, insubstantial ghost of a worry for the moment), is what happens to our user data. Does eBay really share just search keywords with Yahoo/Google? Or does more user data get moved around? eBay’s privacy policy indicates that personal information may be shared with “members of our corporate family to help detect and prevent potentially illegal acts and provide joint services; (Our corporate affiliates will market only to users who request these services.)”. What exactly that means with regards to the partnerships with Yahoogle (pardon my French) remains unclear - does redirection of user-provided search keywords qualify as a “joint service”? Will users get to opt in to this service (we don’t seem to right now)?
Welcome to India, the land of the free, where the government blocks access to bits of the Internet whenever it gets in that techno-bashing mood. What, you haven’t heard? If you’re in India and you get your news from Typepad or Blogspot, of course you haven’t! Heaping stupidity upon lunacy, only Typepad and Blogspot have been blocked - LiveJournal and WordPress are still available.
We are told that terrorists use blogs to communicate; that this is merely a security measure. Well, terrorists use telephones, email, plain old vocal chords and sign language too… So let’s see now - I’m a blogger, I have a telephone, I have email, the ol’ vox box seems to be in working order and all ten fingers wiggling happily. Ergo, I’m a terrorist?
For info on circumventing the block, see this. Interestingly enough, one of the sites helping bypass the block, pkblogs.com, was originally setup to allow Pakistani bloggers freedom of expression when they had access to blogs blocked.
This police action is particularly worrisome in the light of the media and communications bill currently wending its way through the Lok Sabha. I haven’t had the time to read the full text of the bill yet, but I understand that it would, amongst other things, allow the government full control of media outlets when they see fit. Newspaper exposes nasty corruption scandal? No worries, shut ‘em down! Not a happy state of affairs at all.
On the subject of government and media control elsewhere in the world, the Stevens Bill is another monster to look out for. Check out the DPS Project for proposals to preserve net neutrality. Think this doesn’t affect you? Verizon’s new routers already have the capability for preferential routing built in. Big Brother is not only watching, he’s deciding where you should go, what you should do, and he ain’t letting on that you’re suddenly cruising his private payola version of the Internet.
