At issue is the scope of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s power to obtain information from “electronic communications service providers” using national security letters (NLS), which compel private companies to allow government access to communication records without a court order. The administration wants to add four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to Section 2709 of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which spells out the types of communications data that can be obtained with an NSL. Yet those four little words would make a huge difference, potentially allowing investigators to draw detailed road maps of the online activity of citizens not even suspected of any connection to terrorism.

This has serious implications for our privacy online, and represents a serious expansion of government into our personal lives – giving anyone concerned with government overreach yet another reason to have serious doubts about this administration’s commitment to civil liberties. Unfortunately, the vast majority of progressive activists don’t seem all that concerned with this or any other abuse of power the current administration has carried over from their predecessors or expanded upon.

Sanchez ends on a chilling note:

We increasingly live online. We flirt, shop, read, speak out, and organize in a virtual space where nearly every action leaves a digital trace — and where those breadcrumb bits often track us through the physical world as well. If the Obama administration gets its way, an agency that has already proved itself utterly unable to respect the limits of its authority will have discretion to map our digital lives in potentially astonishing detail, with no judge looking over their shoulders. That the administration and the FBI would seek such power under the guise of a “technical clarification” is proof enough that they cannot be trusted with it.

As I’m fond of saying, things will get worse before they get better.

The physical True/Slant space

True/Slant, an incredible news site with an amazing team, is closing up shop soon. I was privileged to be part of that team on the night the site launched last year and to be among the site’s talented cadre of writers, many of whom are saying “Goodbye” here.

I have been honored to write about privacy, law, & technology for the site. It allowed me to harass Mark Zuckerberg; find and share cool stuff with my readers; expose ridiculousness; use the word ’skank’ repeatedly; ponder the state of privacy in today’s world; and share lived experiences when privacy and digital living collide.

I have enjoyed getting to know my readers and fellow True/Slanters, and I know our digital bonds will live on. After all, the Web means never forgetting. And I think that’s a good thing.

Do not worry, faithful readers. The Not-So Private Parts will continue on. Details forthcoming. In the meantime, please keep in touch by friending me on Facebook or LinkedIn, or following me on Twitter. I would give you my cell phone number, but that’s gone poorly before.

A special thanks to Lewis, Coates, Michael, Andrea, Steve, and Roger for imagining and creating a tremendous space for writers and readers.

We got to work (collecting Steve and Michael on the way) and on April 8, 2009 we launched our alpha site.

Twelve hours later we were called boring by Business Insider’s Dan Frommer.

Former longtime AOL (TWX) news exec Lewis Dvorkin has been working on a secret new project for about a year. It launched today — True/Slant, yet another news aggregator/blog farm — and it looks like a flop.

via Ex-AOL News Exec Launches A Boring HuffPo

A year passed and then Forbes announced it would be acquiring True/Slant.

Twenty days after that announcement Paul Carr took to TechCrunch declaring “RIP Forbes.”

I like the odds.

I feel incredibly proud and grateful to have shared the past 761 days with all of you, our T/S contributors and my True/Slant comrades.   In his post today Michael used the word joy, and he’s right.  Thank you all for that.

There’s a quote we often used from Jock Whitney, publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, and another I recently stumbled upon from Malcolm Forbes.

“News is more than what happens.”

“Presence is more than just being there.”

What is news presence in a multidimensional digital age?  That’s one of the things I’m thinking about.

The True/Slant story isn’t one with a discrete ending.  It is a step, with many more on the way.

On to the next one – at Forbes.   Hoping to see you there, present and accounted for…

yrs -
andrea

Columbus, Ohio. Image by SWolfeNI8W via Flickr

Well, hello, Columbus. ( Click here if you’re not a Philip Roth fan.)

Some people were surprised when Columbus, Ohio, appeared on the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) list of the top twenty-two energy “Smarter Cities,” sharing the spotlight with towns better known for their deep green glow. Places like Portland, Seattle, Boston and San Francisco.

One person who was not surprised was Michael Coleman, mayor of the city that in the 1990s still had the reputation as being just another bleak hole in the Midwestern Rust Belt. Coleman has led efforts to make Columbus a model of energy efficiency, one of the main priorities under a program called “Get Green Columbus.”

The program was already well underway when it received a huge boost from $7.4 million in federal stimulus funds. More than a score of city fire stations and several other city buildings are getting energy efficiency make overs. Businesses and homes are given incentives to lower energy consumption.

Well before the infusion of cash from Washington, Columbus had already completed its first energy efficient affordable housing, called, fittingly, Greenview Estates. The city also developed a recycling program, an initiative clean up air pollution and an infrastructure overhaul to ensure that residents had clean, safe water.

Energy efficiency has been at the core of the Columbus revitalization, however, which is why the NRDC included it as one of the 22 “Smarter Cities” for 2010.

The other cities, grouped by size are -

Large:

Austin, TX

Boston, MA

Chicago, IL

Columbus, Ohio

Dallas, TX

El Paso, TX

Long Beach, CA

New York, NY

Oakland, CA

Portland, OR

San Francisco, CA

Seattle, WA

Medium:

Berkeley, CA

Fort Collins, CO

Huntington Beach, CA

Reno, CA

Springfield, IL

Santa Clarita, CA

Small:

Beaverton, OR

Denton, TX

Dubuque, IA

Santa Cruz, CA

To lean more about how the NRDC picked these cities from among 655 considered, visit the Smarter Cities site.

Image by greyloch via Flickr

As the T/S farewells pile up, and tears are shed and toasts are made (midnight July 31 is endgame; even Gawker gave kudos), I have realized one thing about all my outdoorsy bloggin’: I never once talked about duct tape.

The reason being is that duct tape is as regular as air and water to the outdoors person. You really don’t think about it. It’s just there.

Look, I don’t know if you can repair an SR-71 or a Formula-1 car with duct tape, but tonight I did indeed duct-tape shut the inseam of my bathing suit in preparation for a day of kayaking tomorrow. Is that a total bachelor move, or just pure River Rat? Yeah — both.

Check this out: The duct-tape wallet –

Like many of you, I’m guessing, I always have a roll of duct tape nearby. I carry a roll in my vehicle, training bag, and on the boat. I’ve used it to do everything from secure a pheasant wing on a bumper to patch a leaky wader during a duck hunt to cover a blister on my big toe in the backcountry. But while on vacation recently my older brother, Christian, showed me a new use for duct tape.

It wasn’t an emergency and it had nothing to do with dog training, but it was pretty damn creative. He made a wallet from a few strips of duct tape. Not a clunky, sticky bunch of tape but a genuine wallet. In fact, he’s been using his own duct tape wallet for two years.

To be honest, I’m not too sure of the benefits of a duct tape wallet, but I do know you can peel some tape off if you need it in a pinch. And if you get tossed in the pond after you win a field trial your wallet will be fine. Or if your dog takes a liking to chewing on it, the replacement cost isn’t very high.

Four feet of duct tape and a pair of scissors. That’s all you need

That’s from Dave DiBenedetto, who writes the “Man’s Best Friend” blog over at Fieldandstream.com, all about his training his Boykin spaniel, Pritchard (he also wrote a great striper-fishing chronicle, On the Run.) Dave’s your man when it comes to Boykins, fly fishing the flats, and, clearly, duct tape. Read on.

And with apologies to Caitlin Kelly and Laurie Essig, whose posts I’ve read daily since I joined T/S, the photo choices that the Wordpress service offered for “duct tape” were a plain-old roll of duct tape and a young woman who had made herself some duct-tape underwear.

I selected for creativity.

Oh, and here’s a Hello Kitty AR-15, in case you wanted one.

via What is the Ultimate Use for Duct Tape? | Field & Stream.

Image via Wikipedia

While the national media are focused on Arizona because of the state’s controversial immigration law, there was virtually no coverage of a momentous leap in an area President Obama himself has declared “sexy.”

I’m talking about Arizona’s adoption, Tuesday, of a toughest-in-the-nation rule on energy efficiency.

The new rules require state-regulated utilities to cut the amount of electricity they sell 22 percent by the year 2020, through a variety of measures that help customers increase energy efficiency. These include rebates for insulating homes, planting shade trees, and buying more efficient air conditioners.

“This is huge,” says Jeff Schlegel, of the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project. “It puts Arizona in a leadership position in energy efficiency across the country.”

The rules, which still need to be approved by the state attorney general’s office, will save Arizona residents $9 billion in reduced utility bills over ten years, according to a study commissioned by SWEEP.

The Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities, voted 5-0 in favor of the measure last night.

ACC chairwoman Republican Kris Mayes, who as been called “a rock star” of the solar power movement for her past work making Arizona a leader in renewable energy production, told a local reporter she considers the energy efficiency measure “the most important thing I will ever do in my life.”

Fellow commissioner Democrat Paul Newman, in an email this morning, also stressed the importance of the new rule.

“EE [energy efficiency] is absolutely the cheapest way to reduce power costs, and carbon and toxic emission,” he wrote. “It’s an ambitious goal to be sure, but one that’s achievable and will force Arizona to pull out all the stops to reduce power use.”

Those comments were echoed by what might seem to be an unlikely source: APS, Arizona’s largest utility.

“APS is supportive of the new Energy Efficiency Standard,” said Jim Wontor, manager of the utility’s energy efficiency programs, in an email. “It is aggressive and challenging, but achievable.”

In addition to saving money for costumers, the new rule ultimately benefits the utility, wrote Wontor, by “reducing the cost to APS of meeting the increasing demand for electricity in the future.”

Not all utilities agree. Tucson Electric Power, for example, has objected to the measure it called unreasonable and costly.

SWEEP’s Jeff Schlegel, dismisses those claims. He points, instead, to additional benefits of the new rules:

“This will create 12,000 jobs, mostly in construction. It benefits consumers with lower electric bills, and it’s good for the environment.”

If the program is successful, Schlegel think the Arizona standard will spread to other states, and beyond.

“We hope,” he said, “that Arizona’s lead will have an impact on federal policy.”

Photo from Gawker

Ryan Tate at Gawker decided to sic a paparazzi on the man who brought an end to online privacy, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, over a long weekend. You can check out the photo shoot here. The photos must be a bit old because he still has his iPhone in them, and I noted yesterday that he’s moved on to the Android.

You may find the photos a little disappointing. Like my experience lurking in the life of a fellow New Yorker, Gawker’s biggest discovery is that Zuckerberg is not actually very interesting. At the end of the day, most people are pretty boring… which may be the best privacy protection we have.

Image by Getty Images North America via @daylife

Mark Zuckerberg may be regretting his decision to keep his Facebook profile privacy settings so low.

Last month, Mark Zuckerberg announced in a status message that his new iPhone wasn’t rocking his world. He wrote on his Facebook wall, “This week I got an iPhone. This weekend I got four chargers so I can keep it charged everywhere I go and a land line so I can actually make phone calls.” He added in a comment that his old Blackberry hurt his thumbs, and that he would switch to iPhone 4 or to the Android.

Ryan Tate at Gawker wrote a post about the update: Facebook CEO Disses iPhone (which got over 100K views). Tate is a close follower of Zuck’s page, having also picked up a video the CEO was tagged in, of him “icing” one of his employees.

Zuck has since made good on his promise and purchased an Android, if his Facebook wall is to be believed:

But he may not want that reported. The man who has allegedly said he doesn’t believe in privacy seems a bit irked about his loss of privacy…

Zuckerberg appeared to regret his oversharing, and later got rid of the iPhone-dissing post (by deleting it or making it private), as noted by Geek.com. It appears Zuckerberg didn’t want to knock a fellow tech giant quite so publicly.

A friend of Zuckerberg’s posted a Techcrunch article about the story, leading to an annoyed comment from Zuckerberg:

Regarding that last comment — happy to fulfill your prophecy.

The CEO may object to the close coverage of his tech toy reviews, but he doesn’t mind continuing to publicize his “Bros icing Bros” activities. He has not asked his friend to privatize/take down the icing video, starring him that garnered Gawker’s attention, and when he got iced by his UK Sales Team later that month, he was happy to tell the world about it.

Slamming Smirnoff Ices doesn’t necessitate privacy. Slamming the iPhone does.

Image by Takver via Flickr

Passing climate-change legislation should have been a no-brainer. If our broken political system blocked a carbon-tax (even something as sensible as a carbon tax made revenue-neutral by tax swapping with something like reduced payroll taxes) then a market-based cap-and-trade system should have been a near unanimous choice. The science and economics are that clear.

Imagine it: conservative and progressive standing together and cheering; Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid joining hands surrounded by all the Senate grandchildren saying thank you. What a photo-op that would have been! America at it’s best.

Instead, we learned last week there won’t be any climate-change legislation getting through the Senate. Instead, we are going to continue slow-cooking the planet while falling further behind other nations who are moving towards sustainable energy futures.

This is an American failure so astoundingly stupid that it rendered the usually loquacious and sustainably optimistic Thomas Friedman speechless; he interrupted his own column titled “We’re going to be sorry” that had been bemoaning our inaction to say “I don’t have anything else to say.”

With a collective national failure as large and consequential as this we need to ask what the hell happened.

True. Even forget the lunacy of climate-change deniers, perhaps the most pernicious example of greed and cowardice is the ridiculous conservative notion that global warming is good because it will lower GDP marginally less than will a conversion to a sustainable energy economy.

But in addition to such greed and cowardice, planetary post-moterms can also find blame in the way our increasingly networked world can makes us, well, stupid. Networks magnify regardless of truth. Republican nay-sayers and their supporters are not all greedy cowards, many are simply victims. The unfortunate fact is that both the wisdom and the stupidity of crowds gets support from the content-apathy of networks: crap flows as freely as gold.

Every technology has unintended, and negative, consequences. Name a technology—internal combustion engines? nuclear power? genetic engineering? pharmacology?—and there are realized and potential downsides commensurate with the power to do good. No technology serves a free lunch. And magnified stupidity is a downside of a networked world.

For example, social network researchers like Christakis and Fowler have shown that networks are as good transmitting obesity, depression, and divorce as they are at distributing generosity, achievement, and empathy. Or consider last week’s story about Shirley Sherrod and Fox “News” racism. Content—crap or gold—doesn’t matter that much.

There are two main ways climate-crap has been made to flow through our information systems—including our connected brains.

The first is to pump a ton of crap into the network, and the oil companies have been pumping lots of it into our information systems. They pump crap as well as the oil we so greedily drink.

…look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Who Cooked the Planet? – NYTimes.com.

Have you read about so-called “global cooling?” Or been made to question the scientific integrity of climate-change scientists but then not been given equal access to the eventual reports clearing them of any substantive wrong doing other than bad email manners? If yes, then you too are a victim of big energy companies spamming our networks.

The second way climate-crap efficiently enters our information systems is by exploiting so-called “super-connected” network nodes. A feature of a robust network is having some nodes with vastly more connections than average. These “super-connectors” are able to distribute information quickly and widely. Can you say Ashton Kushner? Regardless of quality, if you get yourself connected to a super-connector then regardless of what you have to say your voice will be heard. For good or bad.

WikiLeaks wisely dropped their cache of battle reports in the lap of the super-connected NY Times. But remember, a network doesn’t care if the information is crap or gold, even at the Times.  Consider the way conservative idealogues are able to exploit super-connected NY Times columnist Ross Douthat, someone already exposed as shamelessly trafficking in pseudo-science when it supports his conservative agenda. He again cherry-picks questionable data to conclude that the best course of action when it comes to global warming is to “wait, get richer, and then try to muddle through.”

The fact he’s spouting ideological nonsense will not diminish his super-connected influence. And nonsense is what he’s spouting. The idea that doing what we’ve always been doing is the same as wisely doing nothing is just stupid. Similarly, the Amercian conservative solution he trumpets is basically a decision to enslave millions of third-world workers living in climates that no longer support life as we know it so we can continue to live in excessively air-conditioned desert homes next to lavishly irrigated golf courses. Way to go American conservatives, you’ve helped kill the planet that nurtured civilization.

Maybe it’s time for an Iced Tea Party, or a Green Tea Party? We could have a very simple platform: no support for any candidate who doesn’t enthusiastically support simple, unadorned climate-change legislation. It’s past time we took back not just our country but our planet and our future.

Image via CrunchBase

When I originally heard about Andrew Wylie’s announcement last week that he was partnering with Amazon to create “Odyssey Editions” — 20 special e-book versions of modern classics by writers whom he represents that will only be available for Kindle and devices that support Kindle software such as the iPad, I thought:

This is bad news.

After all, at its face it seems to be exclusive deal with one retail outlet.

Here’s the thing, though.

As I like to point out, Kindle’s not just a device, it’s software that works on many devices.

What Wylie has done is take 20 great books that have not been available electronically and made them available to a pretty large audience.

Sure there are some people who are upset.

For instance, I suspect Wylie won’t be getting any holiday cards from Random House this year. And there’s a book store in Mississippi that’s making a big deal of this.

The only ones who seem to be taking a balanced, sensical approach to the whole kerfuffle is The Author’s Guild.

Is there any real difference between what Wylie has done and say, special editions for The Franklin Library or the Library of America?

Well, yes.

Wylie has created a series of affordable editions for a very wide audience.

Good for him.

Related articles by Zemanta

• EvilWylie vs. GoodRandomHouse: The Publishing World’s Twitter Battle Of The Century (huffingtonpost.com)
• US authors blame publishers for Wylie Amazon ebook deal (guardian.co.uk)
• Andrew Wylie, Literary Agent, Plans E-Books (nytimes.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday, several of the privacy thinkers that I follow on Twitter tweeted a piece on Slashdot about a big change at Facebook:

Facebook have quietly added the ability to delete you account. ‘Deactivate Account’, under Account Setting, has become ‘Deactivate or Delete Account’, and when checked it purports to permanently delete your account and all information you have shared. Facebook is actually willing to erase your data permanently? They must be counting on very few people doing so.

People seemed quite excited about this. As Nick O’Neill put it on AllFacebook, the “Web [went] crazy.”

Apparently, they overreacted…

I checked my “Deactivate Account” page and it was the same as always, with little photos of my friends telling me they would miss me. I checked in with a spokesperson, who told me:

We’re constantly testing new ideas, including placement of various features. One of these recent tests included variations of the delete account option for a small percentage of people. It’s very likely you aren’t part of the test.

Why anyone would delete their Facebook account is beyond me. It’s part of the new world people; embrace it. Well, unless you’re dating multiple people and don’t want them to know about each other — a novel reason for not having a Facebook account that was shared with me recently.

If you are currently spending your nights with a bevy of attractive people, here’s the lowdown on deleting your account — a topic that came up in an interesting talk about online privacy on the New York Times Bits blog. When you delete your account, you have two weeks to change your mind (just in case one of those flings develops into a monogamous relationship). And in fact, you’ve always had the option to “permanently delete” all your data.

A Facebook spokesperson told me a couple months ago with regards to the long-standing “Deactivate Account” option:

We wait 14 days between receiving the request from the user and deleting the account. Since deletion is irreversible, this allows people who mistakenly submitted a request to let us know before their information is deleted. It also give us time to send an email notification to the account owner in the event that the request was made maliciously by someone who has access to the person’s login credentials. After the 14 days are up, the account is deleted. Personally identifying information is purged, and the account can’t be reactivated or restored.

I then asked whether the information completely disappears or whether it stays on Facebook’s servers somewhere, like a ghost that’s not publicly accessible:

When a photo or video is deleted, or when a person deletes his or her account, we delete all of the metadata for the content as well as any and all tagging and linking information. For all practical purposes, the photo or video no longer exists, and we wouldn’t be able find it if we were asked or even compelled to do so. This is similar to what happens when you delete information from the hard drive of your computer. Technically, the bits that make up the photo persist somewhere, but, again, the photo is impossible to find.

If you do want to commit Facebook suicide, you can do that here. Though if you keep reading the NSPP, I will keep trying to talk you off that digital ledge.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The Holy Grail of the solar industry — reaching grid parity — may no longer be a distant dream. Solar power may have already reached that point, at least when compared to nuclear power, according to a new study by two researchers at Duke University.

It’s no secret that the cost of producing photovoltaic cells (PV) has been dropping for years. A PV system today costs just 50 percent of what it did in 1998.

Breakthroughs in technology and manufacturing combined with an increase in demand and production have caused the price of solar power to decline steadily. At the same time, estimated costs for building new nuclear power plants have ballooned.

The result of these trends: “In the past year, the lines have crossed in North Carolina,” say study authors John Blackburn and Sam Cunningham. “Electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants.”

If the data analysis is correct, the pricing would represent the “Historic Crossover” claimed in the study’s title (pdf).

Two factors not stressed in the study further bolster the case for solar.

1) North Carolina is not a “sun-rich” state (pdf). The savings found in North Carolina are likely to be even greater for states with more sunshine –Arizona, southern California, Colorado, New Mexico, west Texas, Nevada and Utah.

2) The data include only PV-generated electricity, without factoring in what is likely the most encouraging development in solar technology: concentrating solar power (CSP). CSP promises utility scale production and solar thermal storage, making electrical generation practical for at least six hours after sunset.

Power costs are generally measured in cents per kilowatt hour – the cost of the electricity needed to illuminate a 1,000 watt light bulb (for example) for one hour. When the cost of a kilowatt hour (kWh) of solar power fell to 16 cents earlier this year, it “crossed over” the trend-line associated with nuclear power. (see chart below)

Chart by Blackburn and Cunningham, 2010

The authors point out that some commercial scale solar developers are now offering electricity at 14 cents a kWh in North Carolina, a price which is expected to continue to drop.

While the study includes subsidies for both solar and nuclear power, it estimates that if subsidies were removed from solar power, the crossover point would be delayed by a maximum of nine years.

The report is significant not only because it shows solar to be a cheaper source of energy than nuclear. The results are also important because, despite the Senate’s failure to pass a climate and energy bill this year, taxpayers now bear the burden of putting carbon into the atmosphere through a variety of hidden charges – or externalities, as economists call them. Fossil fuels currently account for 70 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. annually. (Nuclear generates 20 percent.)

Having dropped below the cost of nuclear power, solar energy may now be one of the least expensive energy sources in America.

In the halcyon days of advertising, digital billboards would have been viewed as grotesque and intrusive, an affront to the delicate sensibilities of American consumers — an audience that once held great sway in the minds of corporate leadership. Madison Avenue’s elite creative minds were, for a fleeting moment, above such shenanigans. Today, however, eyeballs — and more so attention spans — are at a greater premium than ever before. And like the claustrophobic city scenes from Neo Tokyo or the dystopian Los Angeles portrayed in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, attracting the eyes of a targeted demographic now requires the ability to powerfully disrupt the public space.

One example of such wholesale public disruption can be seen in Times Square, where youth clothing brand Forever 21 (which now inhabits the old Virgin Megastore) has transformed its billboard into a crowdsourced sideshow. With technical/creative direction from Space 150, the billboard employs the use of high-tech surveillance cameras, computer vision technology, and a playful female model that interacts with the massive crowds, essentially creating a steroid-infused social media platform in the tourist core of Manhattan:

the new digital billboard features virtual models interacting with the crowd in a number of ways: a polaroid is taken of the street and instantly shown by the model to the crowd, an individual is picked up and turned into a frog by a kiss, while some are snuck under a hat or dropped into a shopping bag to get toted off the screen. for this to work, space150 required the use of high-tech surveillance equipment and computer vision technology. the software identifies and maps the people below which allows the computer to build a composite image of them in near real-time. this data is then used for the simulation with the virtual model as shown on the 61-foot screen. the computer also has the ability to pick out the yellow forever 21 shopping bags in a crowd. those who are standing below with the shopping bag are more likely to get picked up by the model. other features of the project include ‘love tweets’, a live on-screen feed of twitter messages from fans that include the words ‘forever 21′ and ‘love’. below the billboard, the entrance of the store uses thermal imaging cameras to trigger paparazzi-like flashes when a customer walks through the door. (via Designboom)

This concept feeds into our collective desire to be loved, the idea that we each deserve to be the main character in our own reality show — or worse yet, that our life is in fact a reality show. When Andy Warhol declared in 1968 that — “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” — even he couldn’t have known how prophetic the statement would become — and that it would apply in so many ways. By now Warhol’s words have become contrite, the phrase most often invoked to explain international obsession with reality television and the ever-present cult of celebrity. But it seems Warhol’s Nostradamus-like prediction is most often evidenced in the nebulous realm of advertising — an industry hell bent on, quite literally, augmenting the very reality of our everyday lives.

In his assessment of the billboard, Dangerous Minds’ Marc Campbell references a fitting quote from Marshall McLuhan: “Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.” If McLuhan were still around to witness how invasive the reach of advertising has become, I wonder if he might say we are beyond salvation.

After having watched the trailer above, I don’t know why Nintendo is wasting its time with crappy games like “Enjoy Your Massage!”. The music sounds like I am riding in an  elevator to hell, the point of view never zooms out so I can see the female giving the massages (just my hands), and the actual massage motion looks like I am scrubbing or cleaning something, not massaging. I hope young boys who buy this game don’t think this is what massages are like.

As for actual game-play, it’s just a memory game so that might be fun for someone? I call this game adolescent soft-core porn because of the rewarding pictures you get to see of your clientèle once you’ve successfully completed a massage (there is even a zoom feature, presumably to get a close-up shot of panties or cleavage)- and there is no other reason to have those reward photos except to stimulate arousal.

If I was an adolescent boy, I’d rather play any of the Dating Sim games at Newgrounds.com being as they are free… and sometimes show nudity.

In fact, it felt like he ripped quite a few pages from Solove’s 2007 book, “The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet.” Rosen’s message was a condensed version of that book — essentially, that it’s scary that it can be so difficult to control the information disseminated about ourselves online, and that we as a society need to come up with ways to protect people. That would be protection from the reputation ruining that comes from someone tagging you in a nasty blog post and having it turn up as the first result in a Google search of your name, but also protecting people from themselves in this age of indiscreet Facebooking and Tweetaholicism.

The piece went online early last week, and many people sent it my way. When I opened it and it started with the “drunken pirate” anecdote, I closed my browser and decided to wait until the magazine came to my house on Saturday. I decided that if the article was using an anecdote from four years ago as its hook, it could wait a few days to be read.

I enjoyed the piece, but in many ways, it felt as dated as that lead.

Most people know the story of Stacy Snyder, a Pennsylvania woman who was kicked out of teaching training due to a drunken photo on Facebook in which she was dressed as pirate. The world of digital living is changing rapidly, and that particular story feels old to me. One big change since the mid-aughts is that being seen in drunken photos is becoming more acceptable. Rosen mentions this briefly at the end of his piece through an interview with a psychology professor at the University of Texas:

[Samuel] Gosling is optimistic about the implications of his study for the possibility of digital forgiveness. He acknowledged that social technologies are forcing us to merge identities that used to be separate — we can no longer have segmented selves like “a home or family self, a friend self, a leisure self, a work self.” But although he told Facebook, “I have to find a way to reconcile my professor self with my having-a-few-drinks self,” he also suggested that as all of us have to merge our public and private identities, photos showing us having a few drinks on Facebook will no longer seem so scandalous. “You see your accountant going out on weekends and attending clown conventions, that no longer makes you think that he’s not a good accountant. We’re coming to terms and reconciling with that merging of identities.”

In today’s world, teachers do have a few drinking photos on their Facebook page, and they probably won’t get fired over them. That initial backlash against seeing people’s non-professional sides is fading.

Rosen reaffirmed something else for me in his piece — the beauty of having access to all of this information about people as a way of effectively judging them. Rather than having to work with and get to know people over time, we really can just look at their Facebook profile for a rather accurate measure of how we present ourselves offline.

In other words, you are who you are online:

Samuel Gosling, the University of Texas, Austin, psychology professor who conducted the study, told the Facebook blog, “We found that judgments of people based on nothing but their Facebook profiles correlate pretty strongly with our measure of what that person is really like, and that measure consists of both how the profile owner sees him or herself and how that profile owner’s friends see the profile owner.”

By comparing the online profiles of college-aged people in the United States and Germany with their actual personalities and their idealized personalities, or how they wanted to see themselves, Gosling found that the online profiles conveyed “rather accurate images of the profile owners, either because people aren’t trying to look good or because they are trying and failing to pull it off.” (Personality impressions based on the online profiles were most accurate for extroverted people and least accurate for neurotic people, who cling tenaciously to an idealized self-image.)

Rosen laments the accumulation of information about us online and our inability to escape it. Reading that makes me think of what it must have been like when cars became ubiquitous and lovers of horse-drawn carriages lamented this new mechanization of traveling. We live in a faster world with greater access to information, and greater means to control it in some ways.

The publishing platform of the Web is open to us all. Before, if you were written about in a news article (*Ahem*), that piece determined your reputation and how you were perceived and you really had no means to weigh in on it yourself. Now, you can respond to that which is inaccurate in cyberspace. In fact, there are professional services devoted to controlling your Google search results — Rosen namechecks ReputationDefender, one of the most successful of these.

I realize I have a unique perspective on this, being a professional online writer. I’m constantly spinning my name out into the Web and have a very public presence because of the nature of my job. But society is moving in a direction where we will all have online presences of some sort. And studies show that young people are getting good at managing that presence. See Pew’s recent study on this:

More than half (57%) of adult internet users say they have used a search engine to look up their name and see what information was available about them online, up from 47% who did so in 2006. Young adults, far from being indifferent about their digital footprints, are the most active online reputation managers in several dimensions. For example, more than two-thirds (71%) of social networking users ages 18-29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online.

Reputation management has now become a defining feature of online life for many internet users, especially the young. While some internet users are careful to project themselves online in a way that suits specific audiences, other internet users embrace an open approach to sharing information about themselves and do not take steps to restrict what they share.

Rosen notes that we don’t have perfect control over how we’re viewed. But I would say that in fact, we never have had that complete control. And I see great value in our ability to gather more information about one another, and to share more information about ourselves. I’m not alone:

“Search engines and social media sites now play a central role in building one’s identity online,” said Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist and lead author of the report, “Many users are learning and refining their approach as they go–changing privacy settings on profiles, customizing who can see certain updates and deleting unwanted information about them that appears online.”

When compared with older users, young adults are more likely to restrict what they share and whom they share it with. “Contrary to the popular perception that younger users embrace a laissez-faire attitude about their online reputations, young adults are often more vigilant than older adults when it comes to managing their online identities,” said Madden.

via Reputation Management and Social Media | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

One solution that Rosen presents is destroying data: setting expiration dates on pieces of information so that it disappears. I may be an online radical, but that sounded to me like a digital equivalent of Fahrenheit 451 — “let’s set things afire to maintain control.”

My reaction to the piece echoed that of my friend and colleague, David Lat, with whom I often meld minds. He wrote (on both Facebook and Twitter, of course), “David Lat doesn’t HATE privacy, but he does think (1) it’s overrated and (2) all the hand-wringing over the erosion of privacy is simply ANNOYING (just shut up and deal already).”

His advice (and mine): “(1) Live your life as publicly as possible, and (2) teach yourself to care less about your reputation.”

In that, there is another nugget: care less about the reputations of others as presented online. If you see a drunken photo of someone, you don’t have to fire them over it.

Image via Wikipedia

Rounding a bend in the road around a local airport the other day, I glanced to the left and saw a cop sitting in the grass off the pavement. The white SUV was easy to see. The guy wasn’t trying to hide, but he didn’t need to because people love to come whipping around this particular stretch of road — it lends itself to speeding — and probably a few of them can’t slow down soon enough and shoot past the cop’s position.

As I passed him, however, I was struck by a very depressing thought: The day is coming when your car — your very own, much loved member-of-your-family automobile —  is going to fink on you, rat you out, and otherwise get you in trouble.

Oh, yeah. Because eventually cars will have a communication system that by law will have to be able to communicate with the police. This will be factory-installed in the name of safety. It will amount to this: You’ll pass by a cop’s location, and your car will tell the laptop in his car how fast you’re going.

Don’t think so? Live long enough, you’ll get to enjoy this and much more. Rental car companies are already letting subcontractors spy on you and fine you. Retailers are tagging their crappy clothes so that they can track your movements and spending habits. A respected American aircraft manufacturer, maker of one of the aeronautic icons of WWII, is proud to offer a high-altitude, long-flying spy drone that will undoubtedly spy on Americans. I’ve already written a post about the day when the Earthly landscape itself spies on you using “smart dust.”

I hate all this because I’m getting intensely beleaguered of being observed, tracked, and otherwise spied upon in “the Land of the Free.” I must point out, however, that at times I submit voluntarily to observation either because I simply can’t get around it, or a desired activity results in observation.

This blog and also my Facebook profile are examples of that voluntary action. Search engines survey the words I use in blog posts, and advertising related to the concepts of those words pops up on Beaufinn now and then. Some months ago when I wrote about wild boars in Germany, an ad for boar hunting in America appeared on my site.

As for Facebook, we all fell for it, really, including me. We unnecessarily gave away a ton of personal information, and that site is now obviously all about watching and monitoring people and their activity, and trying to sell stuff to them. I no longer post photos to my Facebook profile, and comment minimally on my own activities, because I find it akin to reporting on myself to both the world and also to a hidden authority about which I get to know nothing.

Privacy has become a commodity, and I’m starting to invest more and more, or at least try.

As for that idea about your car ratting you out to the cops, that’s not entirely about privacy, because if you’re just +2 mph over the limit, you’re doing that in public. What’s wrong with that is the passivity of it — that my machine, not I, files a report that I wouldn’t deign to file. The person is in charge of the machine, or should be. My car shouldn’t be making phone calls that I didn’t dial or wouldn’t dial.

Is it all about safety and peace of mind? Will we feel wonderfully secure in a world where our cars are talking to the other cars and regulating their speed together while we, in our GPS-tracked, holographic clothes, can spend the drive to work already doing work using our cranially implanted PDAs? While overhead, the drones know exactly who’s where, what they had for breakfast, how much they weigh, their blood sugar and heart-rate, and if they’re pregnant or not?

At lunch, you take a walk, and the genetically modified trees can detect the skin cells you shed. They record your presence in an embedded chip.

Oh, yes — trees will be computerized in the future.

I just wonder: How soon?

Image via Wikipedia

Every American airplane geek recognizes the term “Skunk Works,” and its logo, at left. It is the semi-comical name attached to the most cutting-edge engineering efforts by Lockheed Martin Corp. Years ago, the rudders of several SR-71’s flashed that cartoon skunk.

Now, a fly-rod maker has glommed onto the name, and named his business Skunkworks Fly Rods, and created his site as www.skunkworksflyrods.com.

Lockheed doesn’t like this, even if rod-maker Jerry Foster writes “Skunkworks” as one word, as BusinessWeek.com reports:

Lockheed Martin Corp., the world’s largest defense contractor, has told a maker of bamboo rods used for fly-fishing that his website infringes the company’s trademark.

Sections of a letter from counsel for Lockheed are posted on the Trout Underground blog site. In the letter, sent by Lynne Boisineau of Chicago’s McDermott Will & Emery, the fishing-rod maker was told his choice of skunkworksflyrods.com as a domain name “is in bad faith and is an attempt to profit off the goodwill of the Skunk Works trademark” and the misdirect the “unwitting public” away from the defense contractor’s official Skunk Works website.

The term had its origins in a “L’il Abner” comic strip by the late Al Capp, who used “skonk works” as a name for an illegal still in the swampy backwoods of Dogpatch, an imaginary town.

According to the database of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Lockheed first registered “skunk works” as a trademark in July 1981. The mark is registered for use with “engineering technical consulting, and advisory services with respect to designing, building, equipping, and testing commercial and military aircraft and related equipment.”

In November 2001 Lockheed added another registration for the mark, to be used with games, sporting articles and stuffed animals.

I’m not surprised by this. Everyone has to “protect the brand” these days, even if you’re the largest defense contractor in the world and you’re going to push around a very small-time fly-rod maker.

Maybe Mr. Foster is an airplane geek, too, and used the name as an homage to the fantastic Lockheed designs of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Or maybe Mr. Foster is a L’il Abner fan. If so, he might avoid a lot of hassle and legal fees by quickly changing the name of his business to “Skonk Works Fly Rods.”

However, has the expression “skunk works” or “skunkworks” moved into the American lexicon as a common term meaning a project with a “high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy“? Could this be the usage Mr. Foster intends, to indicate that his fly rods are not major-label items, but carefully crafted works of art from a small business that operates with minimal hassle and presents the same to its potential customers?

If so, perhaps Lockheed has no case? Their own linguistic invention has taken on a life of its own, and perhaps they can’t get it back.

This will be an interesting case on numerous levels: intellectual property, freedom of speech, and big-guy-versus-very-little-guy.

Keep an eye on it.

# # #

Thanks for a tip from MidCurrent.com.

via Gilead, Sperian, Skadden, Tata: Intellectual Property – BusinessWeek.

Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

If the announcement of a new government study doesn’t send your heart racing, Grist staff-writer Tom Philpott has an excellent overview of the ethanol energy analysis in today’s edition.

For my fellow ADHDers, here’s the take home message from a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study: Government funding of corn-based ethanol, bad.

Philpott translates the CBO’s data into simple English: “Subsidizing corn-based ethanol is a mind-numbingly expensive way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Another of Philpott’s bullet points: The modern agribusiness model for growing corn is so energy intensive that corn-based ethanol “is really just a clever way to convert natural gas and coal into car fuel.”

There’s another good reason for steering clear of ethanol, one not mentioned in the CBO study or in Philpott’s summary.

Ethanol kills.

In a 2009 study, Professor Mark Z. Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford University, ranked alternative fuel sources for powering cars, based on environmental effects. Ethanol ranked at the bottom of the list, in part because the tailpipe emissions from burning bio-fuel cause as many premature deaths as gasoline — somewhere around 10,000 each year.

So let’s see: Crazy-expensive, causes deaths from air pollution. But, heh, ethanol is “Alternative Energy.” So, it’s all good, right?  Sure, and because smokers sometimes switch to chewing tobacco as an alternative to cigarettes, a wad of Skoal could be considered  health-food.

Using the friendliest assumptions possible (note that some prominent researchers argue that ethanol actually generates more GHG emissions than gasoline), CBO reckons that by supporting ethanol through the tax break, taxpayers are shelling out about $750 for every metric ton (2,205 pounds) of carbon kept out of the atmosphere by ethanol. To put that number in perspective, note that the carbon-offset company Terrapass values 1,000 pounds of emissions reductions at $5.95. Converting that to metric tons, Terrapass charges about $13 to do what the ethanol industry is charging us $750 for.

If greenhouse gas reductions are the goal, merely handing $5.16 billion to Terrapass to buy offsets would be about 57 times more effective than subsidizing ethanol production.

Of course, from my perspective, a far more effective use of that money would be to invest in technologies and infrastructure that reduce energy consumption altogether, like mass transit. But using it to encourage people to convert corn into car fuel is surely madness.

via Ethanol gets skewered by recent CBO assessment | Grist.

The problem, of course, was capacity.

Now adding new users in waves. We’ll update you when we’re ready for the next wave, after we deploy new servers tonight

the developers told followers on Twitter late last night. By this morning the message was

Hey all – we’re working on the login problem on Flipboard by creating an invitation system, and letting people in more slowly.

All this raises a couple of questions. Having snuck early access to Scoble, All Things D’s Katie Boehret and a handful of other influential writers — Scoble was muttering about something new and “revolutionary” as early as last week — why didn’t the dev team anticipate a rush of early users once the embargo was lifted and scale up accordingly? Why didn’t they over-commit to server resources and scale back after launch if necessary? (Money wasn’t an issue: The app launched with $10.5 million in VC money behind it.) And what can they do now to alter the appearance of fecklessness, especially among those early-adopting types who can do so much to evangelize for a new product?

All this is Monday-morning quarterbacking, to be sure. And let me be clear: I can’t wait to try Flipboard. I wish its clever, ambitious dev team all the best. But you only get one chance to make a first impression, the cliché goes. Flipboard’s first impression has been of a potentially great racehorse who’s stumbled out of the gate.

UPDATE: Flipboard has, as promised, been adding capacity today, and I was able to hook my Facebook and Twitter accounts into the app a little while ago. It feels remarkably polished and well thought-out, with loads of smart interface touches. (My favorite: It pre-caches in the background the complete text of any article you’re sampling, so if you choose to pop out to the full Web version, it loads instantaneously.Very smart.) It turns out, though, that — for me — the ability to view one’s own feeds is its least useful feature. It’s true that Flipboard bundles and presents your social-media streams in a compelling alternate way, but it’s still just that — an alternate way. More useful, to my mind, are the pre-populated subject-centric feeds the service provides for you (on tech, design, food, music, and many other topics). They’re only Twitter lists, really, but if the service is truly aimed at facilitating access to new content shared on social-media sites, this is where it works best — not in its presentation of content which is already easily accessible in other ways. In any event, Flipboard looks like a solid app that’s working its way through a rocky start.

Britney Spears is the most popular person on Twitter

Last night at an East Village bar with two of my journo friends, we talked about our favorite celebrity tweeps. My favorite is Roger Ebert (@EbertChicago) — though some might argue that Ebert is a fellow journo, not a “celebrity.” He has excellent Twitter taste in both links and retweets, and is pithily wise. I’m also a fan of Conan O’Brien, who doesn’t tweet often but always tweets funny (@ConanOBrien).

One of my friends favors Mindy Kaling of The Office (@mindykaling). She’s humorous and a big basketball fan. The other friend drools over John Cusack’s dreamy tweets (who used to have the handle @shockozulu but has now converted to the more banal @johncusack).

None of these are the most popular celebrity tweeps. Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher, and Lady Gaga top that list. Sorry to break it to her fans, but reading her twitter feed, I think Spears may have hired a six-year-old to ghost-tweet for her.

This morning, I was thinking about what it is we derive from being able to follow and interact virtually with “famous people” we respect/admire/hate/love/obsess over.

Ta-Nehisi Coates touched on this yesterday in the Atlantic in a post on KingJames, though his focus was more on what the celebrities derive:

A measure of how different things are nowadays was James [LeBron's] decision, shortly before his Decision, to join Twitter. We have unparalleled access to movie stars, athletes, politicians, etc. They seem more approachable than in days bygone, even if we are merely one of thirty-thousand, following a brand. And so we have new ways of imagining ourselves within this constellation of stars. We can like each other; we can bask in some approximation of “friendship.” A politician comes across as just another guy, a rapper seems like someone with whom you could hang out. Perhaps, like Kanye West, who attended James’ Decision party, they’re just misunderstood and their blog-their ALL CAPS direct line to the people-lets them really be who they want to be. There is a value to being merely “likable” in this sense, to being “cool” enough to inspire a random person to click a link. A few thousand people liking something in unison, a band of followers skimming your 140-character missives: brands have been built upon less.

via Random Thoughts on LeBron and Social Networking – Culture – The Atlantic.

Twitter, Facebook, and blogs allow celebrities to make themselves more accessible and seem like “normal people,” and at the same time, allow normal people to make themselves more visible and “known” like celebrities. At what point do those two things converge and eliminate unique celebrities all together?

Some celebrities, like Ebert, became celebrities because they have very interesting things to say. Getting to be part of their daily conversation on Twitter is a bit of thrill. With other celebs, like Lady Gaga, I think the act of following is simply a declaration of “I like what you do.” Twitter is a nice free way of consuming the person and their output, what Coates calls their brand.

Of course, in the course of sharing, some celebs may hurt their brands by killing their mystique.

In the meanwhile, are there any celeb tweeps you recommend @kashhill follow for wisdom, laughs, or mystique-killing?