IBM Scientists Rely on the Principle of Uncertainty To Develop Web-Privacy: Letting Web Users Fib Scientifically Is Key … hmmm… this bothers me.

In less than a week, a collaborative piece that i have been working on will be going up at the Artists Space in NYC (feel free to join me at the opening May 30 6-8PM). I’m quite psyched, actually – it’s going to be absolutely gorgeous… I don’t have actual screenshots from my work quite yet, but as i was websearching, i found the most intriguing image that shows the kind of thing that we’re showing: clusters of people, partially colorcoded, interacting with other people:

(only ours is all text representations of people instead of actual people.. although it would be absolutely fun to have real people)

For four years, i dated a boy named Jon and my name has no ‘h’ on it. Yet, when Jon’s roommate received a piece of spam this morning, it took him a bit to realize that it was exactly that, not a real piece of mail. Why? Because the message was from “Dana” about her evil ex “John.” The mail was an advert for a porn site, and a bloody hysterical one at that, particularly considering that it was most likely randomly chosen names. (see email inside)

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I’m sitting at work, coding away, when my partner-in-crime notices that subscriptions to his daily readings are going through the roof (gotta love scripts that mail you things, push media style). So, this means a plod through log files. Sure enough, CNN is doing a story on Star Wars websites and his Find Your Star Wars Twin survey is linked directly from there (mmm… personality tests).

Ooooh.. Raffi just posted a bitty note on using the packets that go across the ‘net to do interesting visualization/audiozation, creating the awareness for the general population. It reminds me of the silly things that i want to do… Take Social Network Fragments and start mapping out the entire population’s social network (since email headers are read by gov’t) and make people aware of what they know… I love the idea of packet-sniffing to create awareness/empowerment.

I just went to a fun talk by Bob Sabiston (Media Lab alum who is a software designer for A Waking Life) – what great fun to see how the movie was made, to see the ease in which the animators can create that look & feel. I have to admit i’m such a sucker for seeing how animation techniques work; oh, how i crave to go to SIGGRAPH this year…

In my mail this morning, i also got a fun rendering from Karrie, using a basic edge detection technique. I think that i look better sketchy:

wouldn’t it be fun to turn in my thesis as a series of cartoon plates? yes, i’m having a bit of difficulty in the writing stage. but anyhow, i couldn’t help but appreciate the fact that User Friendly is choosing to use the @ symbol to represent an individual’s digital avatar in Nethack.

so, i’ve spent the last 1.5 weeks slaving away at building a working demo of SecureId. it feels like i’m back at Brown – 6000 lines of code in under two weeks. damn. poorly commented, utterly hacked and in need of a desperate cleanup, but it’s the best i could do with such little time.
but i have to admit that i’m kinda proud of myself… who would’ve thought that i could put all of that together so darn fast? wow.
unfortunately, i also have to move on to a million different things asap. eek. so much to do, so little time. i’m so angry with myself for letting everything slip. ::sigh::

Nelson was right-on with his thoughts of using images as passwords – it seems as though Microsoft thoughts of that. People have much better visual memories that verbal ones…

It scares me to realize the approach that our government is going in copyright protection. I think that we’ve lost a sense of the purpose of copyright. The idea is to get more information to the common good in a way that protects the creators of the ideas. Alas, we are now seeing bills like the SSSCA/CBDTA. Of course the tech-industry is up in arms – this is against everything that we stand for, and it’s just not reasonable for the common technologies.. talk about a way to make all but the monopolies have no chance…

And remember all of my worries about consumer agents being automated, meaning that you could prioritize your customers in scary ways. It seems as though more and more companies are using bots to replace customer service folks. And i thought Sprint’s Claire was annoying… Shit… How can you make a bot realize that what you need is important or doesn’t fit into the previous protocol? How will i be treated as a young person without enough credit?

And isn’t it funny that the government can order websites to delete data, but consumers and general people can’t? I really hope that archive.org works here…

Oh.. and it’s really funny to think about artificial societies– how do you grow them and what can they tell us about the future? I think that my problem is that i want to have my own society, my own rules, my own system.. i keep thinking that i should start my own country.. i wonder if i would be a bad dictator…. i still believe that the best countries are run by benevolent dictators..

They just announced that CNN Student News will remain commercial free – thank goodness!! To me, this situation is a *big* sign that capitalism has reached a point of being absolutely ridiculous. I mean, isn’t it a bad sign that everyone needs corporate sponsorship in order to be functional in this society? Corporate sponsorship means corporate control which means limited control. If a site is supposed to be educational, supposed to teach students (which means is supposed to give multiple perspectives, not just the ones desired by that corporation), isn’t it dangerous to imagine corporate sponsorship? It reminds me of the battles that Ms. went through when they were battling whether or not to have advertisements. They couldn’t get food-related ads because they wouldn’t put recipes in their magazine; they were denied makeup-related ads because some of the images on their cover had women without makeup on!! If educational material was all corporate-sponsorship, would students not be able to hear conflicting perspectives? Would they not hear about oil spills because Exxon was a sponsor? Eek!