Author Archives: Jeff Porten

  • Janice Ryan:
    Me trying to take it easy: 4500 steps and 8 flights of stairs on the Fitbit so far today.

Reading your tweet burned 15 sympathy calories.

  • Jesse Spector:
    Time to head back to NYC. It’s DC for me tomorrow. Massachusetts, I’ll see you again real soon.

in DC tomorrow. Buzz me if you’re free

  • Jesse Spector:
    It’ll just be train down, work, train home.

well, buzz me when Amtrak inevitably delays you for 3 hours. :-P

  • Peter Cohen:
    I need a good kugel recipe. Anyone got one they want to share?
  • Peter Cohen:
    Doing kegels while making kugel. It could be a new exercise trend.

be very careful re noodle kegels.

“How long did you bake your kugel?” “It wasn’t *baked*, exactly….”

Just remembered that tomorrow is the birthday of a girl I met once in Barcelona in 1985. #HowMyBrainWorks #NotUsefulAtAll

Need a haircut. My shadow looks like an exploding dandelion.

  • Janice Ryan:
    if exploding dandelions wore hats, right?

currently bare headed, have to go shopping. Well, bareheaded like a dandelion, that is.

  • Peter Cohen:
    I have never uploaded a picture to Instagram but I have close to 400 followers. Why?
  • Andrew Laurence:
    perhaps your reputation for hermaphrodite midget porn? Oh wait, that’s . Never mind.
  • Peter Cohen:
    That’s right. For me, it’s bestial crossdressing scheisse porn.

OmniFocus note: block ‘s tweets before coffee. (OmniFocus: you’ve made that note 8 times.)

  • Melody Kramer:
    I’m sitting in a room that has 40 or so black latex gloves hanging from the ceiling.

that is surprisingly creepy.

  • Serenity Caldwell:
    (I got bangs for the first time ever. It is SUPER WEIRD. But kind of fun. We’ll see if my hair cooperates after today.)
  • Kirk McElhearn:
    And I’ve learned that over here they call that a “fringe.” (Here is the UK now.)

those Brits have a different word for every type of bang.

  • Kirk McElhearn:
    Yep, even the shaggy kind. It’s an interesting experience in this alternate language universe.

The Internet is a surveillance state

Posted on

Bruce Schneier declares that the privacy war is over, and the panopticon won.

Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about us. Unmasking Broadwell’s identity involved correlating her Internet activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product.

This isn’t something the free market can fix. We consumers have no choice in the matter. All the major companies that provide us with Internet services are interested in tracking us.

Personally, I think that there are two ways we need to address this. The first is to understand the massive distinctions between the panopticons created by government, for-profit businesses, and individuals. These have different effects and different benefits, but we tend to sweep them all under the same rug.

Second, it seems utterly bizarre to me that I own the copyright of this post for 70 years after my death (although that’s completely unenforceable, as I’m not a millionaire), but I have no ownership over data about me. We need to formalize the unspoken right to data that is implicit in signing a TOS with Google and Facebook, because so many entities simply take this information and provide nothing in return.

  • Wil Wheaton:
    Waiting for a sandwich at the deli. The oldies radio station is playing Prince. The. Oldies. Station. Is. Playing. Prince.

“: The oldies radio station is playing Prince. The. Oldies. Station. Is. Playing. Prince.” // Worse still, now he’s the Regent.

  • Glenn Fleishman:
    “EVGENY MOROZOV explains…” didn’t get any further.

I like some of his analysis. What turned you off?

  • Glenn Fleishman:
    He’s an epic troll with a few good points who engages in endless ad hominem attacks.

Ah. Noted. Somehow I’ve missed most of that.

  • Glenn Fleishman:
    Fascinating. He has a few top-line ideas, but every tweet, blog post, and most of his books are intellectually flawed and vile.

That explains it. I’ve only ever seen brief interviews and pull-quotes. Don’t think I’ve ever read long-form by him.

  • Glenn Fleishman:
    He tried to smear Clay Shirky as an agent of Libya due to one brief meeting in NY with a cultural party.
  • Glenn Fleishman:
    Ah, yeah, like D___ W_____ he has some great ideas but you have to wade through oceans of merde

Oh. Well, *that* sounds perfectly reasonable. </sarcasm>

You’ve been spending too much time at Economist happy hours. Not sure who you mean.

  • Glenn Fleishman:
    The name that must not be spoken lest he appear.
  • Josh Centers:
    Listen to Glenn. His is the name that must not be named.

I’ve only had 60 oz of coffee and 3 shots of espresso today, so clearly the brain is not yet at maximum RPM.

Wonderful. My first at-tweet from Jane McGonigal, and it’s encrypted in .

Finally figured out DW after allowing my mind to wander the frontier for a while.

  • Melody Kramer:
    Some days, the alumni mailing list Oxymoron is the best thing ever. It’s like a personalized Reddit, only better. <3 <3 <3

I keep procrastinating on signing up for fear I will enjoy it too much. How much traffic does it get?

Thermo Scientific Particulate Monitor.

I plugged the serial number on the box into Google, that’s what came up. Could be subterfuge.