“Pigeon: Impossible.” 🙂 How companies learn your secrets. The bit about the pregnant women (pages 6 & 7) is the creepiest. Hint: aside from not giving ’em any personal data (e.g. pay cash, never participate in a survey, etc.), don’t be a creature of habit. Oh, those tidy Swiss. Now they’re set to clean up outer space. How the brain responds to disaster. This specifically pertains to earthquakes, but I know from experience that it applies more broadly. (Tip o’ hat to PT.) Long feared, now here: microchips you swallow with your meds to report your body’s doings. This is…
Category: Privacy and self ownership
Owning our own information and telling Big Brother to get lost
Now the gummint wants to predict the future. Given their fear of us, I suspect surveillance of us will play a large part. And their “predictions” will be just as wrong as their pernicious assumptions. Yep, I’d say that collection agency got just a tad bit out of hand. Hope that old lady beats the &^%$# out of ’em. “Spirit of a Racer in a Dog’s Blood” Oh, so this is where all those Downfall videos come from! Cubicleism: a new school of art. 🙂 (Actually, this guy does all these copies of classics on a white board. With dry-erase…
Recreational cannabis soon to see widespread legalization? Let’s hope Time magazine isn’t as wrong on this as it often is on so many other things. “We the People” is rapidly losing its appeal around the world. No surprise. (Tip o’ hat to MtK.) Can’t you just picture Obama in a Joe Arpaio jail? Chortle. (And thanks, JS.) Poetic justice. Obama vs the Catholic church. And vice versa. If you had any doubt that copyright overreach had sunk to absurd lows, you can become a true believer now. Another state legislature takes on the NDAA. (How much would you like to…
If you’re going to the big game today I’m sure this’ll make you feel wonderful, no matter who wins or loses: hot dog vendors with the skills and proclivities of the TSA. Of course, if you turn out to be one of the “suspicious” attendees, you won’t feel good at all if they use one of these on you. (And here’s a video.) But it could be worse, you know. All of which got me to wondering how the fedgov would handle somebody like Lawnchair Larry today. Or for that matter, any of us. So if you’re going to do…
Good for people who’ve suffered brain injuries that affect speech. Bad in the long run for privacy. National Geographic is usually pretty good. But it appears their new series, which starts next week, sets out only to portray us all as loons. So much for progress. (Tip o’ hat to H.) Here’s a perfect example of the long arm of the U.S. government. Might not agree with this guy 100%. But bless his noble heart. (Nice backgrounder on him, too.) I’ll soon be reading his book. And here’s another doctor with courage — though it may be too little, too…
The strange birth of New York’s gun laws. Oooh, now this is cynical. And fraught with … well, just fraught. (Tip o’ hat to JB.) Darn. They’re ruining it for me! (Tip o’ hat to MJR.) At least Twitter is is trying to mitigate its consent to censorship. “Why Conservatives Should Be Libertarians.” The Barefoot Bandit will probably serve just under five years. Federal and state sentences to be concurrent. Seems a reasonable mercy — and with luck a chance for that bright but screwed-up boy to get his head together. (HT to PT.) A troop of gorillas visits a…
Drones over NYC. If you thought SOPA was bad … Rutherford institute tells the Census Bureau to back the heck off. Ominous? Interesting? Ominously interesting. Ditto this: Punching holes in firewalls. How long would it take to break your password? You remember the good old random name generator, don’t you? This may be the best test I’ve seen of Internet invisibility. When I visited with JavaScript turned off (standard practice with unknown sites), it told me I was “very visible” in these days when most sites require JavaScript. But it didn’t tell me anything else. When I temporarily enabled JavaScript,…
… not to destroy the One Ring, but to join up with Sauron. How exactly does this qualify as “non-evil”? On the contrary, outside of government, this is about as evil as it gets on the Internet. Universal tracking across all Google sites and products with no opt-out? D., who sent the link, added that he googled “f**k you Google” and got 41 million hits. 🙂 For safe, private searching, StartingPage.com and DuckDuckGo.com are your friends. If you must use Google for anything (I still find Google’s YouTube and image searches very useful), go to your browser’s cookie management window…
The newspaper that said, “Up yours” to the Internet. A bit of good news from the Supremes — though (typically) it may not mean much in practice. This Saturday is Data Privacy Day. Though since it was declared such by Congress, it may not mean much in practice, either. Good one, MamaLiberty. Did those guys in the SUV really have curly earpieces, too? LOL. Two lessons from the Megaupload seizure. Big lessons. May God (if any) keep and preserve Glenn Greenwald. Simon Black echoes the sentiments. “Another reason to homeschool,” sez D, who sent this link. What kind of screwed-up…
Cowboys, superheroes, and freedom. Intelligent dogs party down. Are the NDAA and the upcoming Enemy Expatriation Act two pieces of the same puzzle? Writers: You may want to may want to avoid self-publishing via Apple iBooks Author. The evolution of the U.S. dollar. (Tip o’ hat to D.) Yet another reason to be glad you don’t live in New York. You’ve heard about the long arm of the Feds reaching to New Zealand to shut down one of the biggest sites on the Web without due process — showing that the MPAA, the RIAA, and the fedgov hardly need SOPA.…