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Showing posts tagged protest
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Wall Street Protests: Will the Revolution Be Tweeted?
If we’re going to point to any technology as being a real catalytic force in the Arab Spring, it has to be the cellphone. It’s not as exciting to talk about, I know, but they are amazing and politically historic things. Cellphones become more ubiquitous in areas where landlines, and often infrastructure in general, is underfunded and unreliable. Driven by competition to cater to consumers in wealthy nations looking for luxury features, cellphones have become ever smaller, and still and video camera capabilities have become cheap, near-standard features. As a result, a great many in less wealthy nations with less well-supported infrastructure have gained common access to small, powerful devices to transmit text messages, photos, audio, and video. The vast networks of communication, including websites like Facebook and Twitter, would have been useless without the ubiquitous mobile digital devices used to connect to those networks.
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“Over the last two months, the intense popular effort to stop SOPA and PIPA has defeated an effort that once looked unstoppable but lacked a fundamental understanding of how Internet technologies work,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), who has introduced narrower legislation favored by the Internet industry. (via SOPA sent back to the drawing board in wake of Internet protests - latimes.com)
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Google Privacy Inquiries Get Little Cooperation - NYTimes.com
After months of negotiation, Johannes Caspar, a German data protection official, forced Google to show him exactly what its Street View cars had been collecting from potentially millions of his fellow citizens. Snippets of e-mails, photographs, passwords, chat messages, postings on Web sites and social networks — all sorts of private Internet communications — were casually scooped up as the specially equipped cars photographed the world’s streets.
“It was one of the biggest violations of data protection laws that we had ever seen,” Mr. Caspar recently recalled about that long-sought viewing in late 2010. “We were very angry.”
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The high-stakes antitrust assault, which will play out this summer behind closed doors in Brussels, might be the beginning of a tough time for Google. A similar United States case in the 1990s heralded the comeuppance of Microsoft, the most fearsome tech company of its day.
But never count Google out. It is superb at getting out of trouble.
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The tale of how Google escaped a full accounting for Street View illustrates not only how technology companies have outstripped the regulators, but also their complicated relationship with their adoring customers.
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I’m having a very difficult time finishing anything lately. Post-college blues? I literally forced...
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Minimalist DC Superhero Mugshot Poster by Michael Myers
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“When The Chips Are Down”
Emmanuel O’Brien
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The Fifth Element by Paul Andrew/December Studio
