Internet
Stewart Brand‘s maxim, “information wants to be free,” has to be the most widely quoted aphorism on the net. Unfortunately almost everyone forgets the second half. Brand’s complete statement at the 1984 Hackers Conference in San Rafael was, “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” Cory Doctorow writes in the Guardian that it’s time for the cliche to die because the entertainment cartel is using it as “the easiest, laziest straw man ... as a justification for the monotonic increase of surveillance, control, and censorship in our networks and tools.”
From out of nowhere, here comes Google with the Google Font API and the Google font directory. Fine, so let’s see some typefaces from some real type foundries. The first framework with a real type catalog will win this one.
Law
This week the US Supreme Court, in a 7-2 ruling, found that the US government has the absolute right to continue to detain convicted sex offenders in “civil commitment” after they have served their prison sentences. The supremes upheld Section 4248 of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 which states that a convicted sex offender who is determined to be “sexually dangerous” can be detained indefinitely by the government. Section 4248 does not require proof of “sexual dangerousness” beyond a reasonable doubt, only “clear and convincing evidence” need be provided. If the government can continue to detain sex offenders if they are deemed to remain dangerous, who is next? Terror suspects? Apparently even those with no criminal history of sexual offense are subject to Section 4248. In its amicus brief, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) argued that Section 4248 authorizes “certification and potential commitment of a significant number of persons with no criminal history of sexual misconduct.”
Privacy
Your web browser is giving away a lot of information of which you are probably not aware. The user-agent and HTTP accept header information is available to any website. If you have Javascript turned on (it’s becoming required for more and more websites) screen resolution, browser plugins, and even your geographic location are easily discoverable. Install Flash or Java and even more information—like a complete list of all your installed fonts—is available. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published its web browser fingerprinting study (.pdf; 420KB), reporting that 83.6 percent of the 470,161 web browsers participating in the EFF Panopticlick project had an “instantaneous unique fingerprint.” It gets worse if you have Java or Flash installed: 94.2 percent of web browsers were uniquely identified. Study author Peter Eckersley argues “policymakers should start treating fingerprintable records as potentially personally identifiable, and set limits on the durations for which they can be associated with identities and sensitive logs like clickstreams and search terms.”
Publishing
Yahoo! has purchased content farm Associated Content for US$90 million. Content farms like Associated Content produce generally low-quality content with very low overhead (read: They pay their writers next to nothing) in response to close to real-time search engine queries. Yahoo! has historically spent a lot of money in an effort to create high-quality content. Chalk this one up as a loss.
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