New Transparency Project gets $2.5 million

[via Privacy Commissioner of Canada] (emphasis added)

“The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting” received $2.5 million from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. [...]

The New Transparency has proposed a series of lofty goals – to make “visible the identities of individuals, workings of institutions and flows of information never before seen” – using surveillance as the key to gather this data. The project intends to focus on “three vitally important questions”:

1) What factors contribute to the general expansion of surveillance as a technology of governance in late modern societies?
2) What are the underlying principles, technological infrastructures and institutional frameworks that support surveillance practice?
3) What are the social consequences of such surveillance both for institutions and for ordinary people?

BBC SuperPokes Facebook Privacy Risks

From Privacy Commisioner of Canada’s blog (emphasis added),

And while Facebook says it advises its users to “employ…precautions” when downloading applications, any Facebook user will tell you that most applications simply won’t work if you don’t agree to give the developer access to your information.

BBC’s technology program Click decided to test out this security flaw (with news video) by creating its own Facebook application meant solely to “steal the personal details of you and all your Facebook friends without you knowing”.

Sniffing for the right privacy balance

Interesting article by Ian Kerr,

Last Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada released two important privacy-related decisions, both addressing an increasing trend in which Canadian law enforcement agencies use police dogs to conduct random searches of public spaces.

[via Michael Gesit]

Links: 2008-04-21

1. Tension Over Sports Blogging - NYT - a note on bloggers from credentialed news organizations
2. What Warren thinks... - Fortune interview
3. Edward Lorenz, father of Chaos Theory, dies
4. Brokeback Mountain director warns Bill C-10 means censorship
5. Filmmaker Ang Lee has no love for 'Canadian values' bill, but plenty for Vancouver
6. New Wii Games Find a Big (but Stingy) Audience - an insightful look at the Wii gaming business
7. Our Top Ten list of Privacy Act fixes - by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner

Links: 2008-03-26

1. Jim Cramer is still putting random words in random order
2. Companies that use Gmail abroad break the law because PATRIOT makes it possible for US spooks to spy on Google
3. Photos from rotting Chinese theme-park in Orlando - a series of 200+ rather sad pictures
4. Wing On, Hong Kong’s Great Department Store
5. India's Tata Motor to Buy British automakers Jaguar and Land Rover for $2.3 Billion
6. Ta, Ta, Jaguar
   

Links: 2008-03-11

1. Japan IDs All Its Citizens - It depends on how much risks are needed to be considered as "substantial" ? - "There are no substantial risks of information leakages or their misuse for purposes other than originally intended"
2. Facebook CEO Admits Missteps
3. The GigaOM Interview: Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO Facebook
   
4. Brantano Shoe City Ad
5. NYT Obit of Gary Gygax, co-creator of the game Dungeons & Dragons
6. How Google keeps your information secure - from Google

Is this frog a prince?

Hmmmm, I am slow but late is better than never I guess. Is this frog a prince? Bought to you by the good people at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (emphasis added),

Last year, IT security firm Sophos ran an experiment on Facebook to demonstrate just how willing people were to hand over their information to potential ID thieves. They created a fake profile page on Facebook for a small green plastic frog and sent out 200 friend requests to other Facebook users. Eighty-two of those people responded, and in doing so, divulged personal information like their email address, birthdate, workplace or school location, and phone number - all useful details for the aspiring identity thief.

I guess even a frog can teach us something. (smile) Including PLASTIC frog! (big smile)

Links: 2008-02-21 Free Speech, US Mail Surveillance, Privacy, Games for Windows?, Google Video Ads, Emerging Tech 2008

1. In Free Speech Flap, Calif. Judge Orders Web Site to Shutter
2. U.S. Post Office to Enable Wholesale Surveillance of Mail - Hmm, not good
3. Canadian Privacy Commissioner's Power and Privilege
   
4. "Games for Windows?"
5. AdSense for video now in beta - Interesting Google Video Advertising Solutions
6. MIT Technology Review Emerging Technologies 2008

Links: 2008-02-14 - HP Spying, $3m party, Google forms, RCMP secret files, Office Romances

1. Hewlett-Packard Settles Spying Case
2. Blackstone $3m vs. low key birthday party
3. Rethinking the Spreadsheet: Google Forms and Live Data
4. RCMP slammed for storing secret files on Canadians - Commissioner report in PDF
5. Office Romances & The Law: a Q&A With Ashley Brightwell - WSJ Law Blog
   

Security Links: 2008-02-07

1. Cloned Trucks - Criminals are using cloned FedEx, Wal-Mart, etc trucks to bypass security.
2. VoIP Threats - Threats in using Voice over IP
3. NSA Monitoring U.S. Government Internet Traffic

Links: 2008-01-23

1. WordPress.comCreator Raises $29.5M
2. Privacy Commissioner of Canada sent letter expressing concerns regarding possible amendments to the Copyright Act
3. RConversation links for 2008-01-22 - good read about the problem with China
4. How To Bake a gorgeous vegan herb bread - beautiful
5. Apple cripples debugging tool to keep iTunes DRM safe - Very sad and misguided
6. US Supreme Court Dive back into Patent Waters
7. He’s Money - Royal Bank’s Gordon Nixon - Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year

Links: 2008-01-16

1. Designer presents his life as a corporate annual report
2. Copyright updates: “Campus Press Picks up Copyright Mantle” and “Vancouver Sun Warns Against Unfair Copyright“
3. Your information. Your choice. - After you hand over your info to companies like Facebook, etc, is it still ours? Can we change the info, take it back, and even move it somewhere else? A few informative links.
4. U.S. FBI is considering the development of an international database - The money quote from the Privacy Commissioner blog entry is this, “In terms of Canadian participation, our citizens rightfully expect that their personal information remains safeguarded and understandably, could be reluctant to see that information freely shared with two countries that were ranked near the bottom of Privacy International’s ratings of privacy protection around the world. “
5. Oprah TV, Paul TV, […] TV
6. Greenspan said to join Paulson & Company (a New York-based hedge fund) as adviser
7. Tons of Apple coverage at 2008 Macworld Expo - a most shocking news to me includes - MacBook Air doesn’t have a user-replaceable battery. Wow, give me a break Apple! Don’t like this. And install software remotely via wireless network. Hmmmm, I don’t think this is a good idea (to put it politely).
8. Christie introduces LX500 (a 5,000 ANSI lumens) professional projector

What have you changed your mind about? Why?

Thanks to Tim O’Reilly’s blog entry, I started looking at the long list of people and their answers to the 2008 questions from Edge,

“What have you changed your mind about? Why?“

Here are links to the top 27 of my ranked favourites (out of a list of 160+),

1. Alison Gopnik - Imagination is Real. (I find this piece unexpectedly insightful even it may seem a bit abstract. And Gopnik just bumped Dyson off the top of my list!)
2. Freeman Dyson - when he speaks, I listen and think. And here, Dyson tries to demolish the myth that “the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring World War Two to an end” in order to take the “useful first step toward ridding the world of nuclear weapons“. I will find some time to check out “The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima” from International Security.
3. Daniel Gilbert - “The willingness to change one’s mind is a sign of intelligence, but the freedom to do so comes at a cost.” (Check out his master class videos - session 1, s2, s3, s4, s5, s6)
4. Frank Wilczek - The science formerly known as religion
5. Howard Gardner - view about Jean Piaget. I love Piaget’s study of children (including his own).
   
6. Kevin Kelly - How Wikipedia changed his mind
7. Esther Dyson - “What have I changed my mind about? Online privacy.” Interesting discussion re: Facebook Beacon. I had similar thoughts. And yes, Esther is daughter of Freeman Dyson. I had the pleasure of meeting and listening to her once in Bruce Mau’s Massive Change conference. And I should also mention we have one of the best and smartest privacy commissioner (with a blog) in the world!
8. Terrence Sejnowski - “I have changed my mind about cortical neurons and now think that they are far more capable than we ever imagined.“
9. Nassim Taleb - The Irrelevance of “Probability” (author of The Black Swan)
10. Daniel Engber - It’s hard to perform ethical research on animals
11. Alan Kay - Vacuums Don’t Suck.
12. Leo Chalupa - Brain Plasticity and more
13. Marti Hearst - Natural Language processing
14. Helena Cronin - Why men are at the top - More dumbbells but more Nobels. A pretty good read.
15. James Geary - Neuroeconomics really explains human economic behavior
16. Bart Kosko - The Sample Mean vs. the Sample Median. (Quite statistical but very insightful.)
17. Karl Sabbagh - the views of the experts vs non-experts. quite a good read.
18. Irene Pepperberg - the fallacy of hypothesis testing. a bit technical but insightful
19. Tim O’Reilly - “social software”
20. David G. Myers - on psychological science
21. Robert Sapolsky - Adult brain making new neurons
22. John McCarthy - (AI pioneer, LISP inventor) Attitudes trump facts
23. Xeni Jardin - co-editor Boing Boing about online community
24. Linda Stone - on healthy breathing patterns
25. Daniel Kahneman - the sad tale of the aspiration treadmill
26. Danny Hillis - (He is just neat. not a great entry though.)
27. David Gelernter - (I just want to tag and remember David as people I think are smart (Bill Joy, Danny Hillis, Cliff Stoll) think David is smart.)