I’m glad to hear from Rachel (nearing the half-way point in her two year Peace Corps service in Madagascar) that USAID and the Peace Corps still teach the ABC approach to HIV prevention and planned pregnancy, despite political pressures at the highest levels to de-emphasize the “C” (condom use). Of course ABC alone won’t stop AIDS, but every little bit helps, and not playing idiotic far-right US politics with developing countries wracked by the AIDS epidemic is always a good step in the right…err…correct direction.

I am currently reading a short story collection titled _Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t As Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn’t Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out_. So far, so good.

David Pogue reviews the new TiVo Series 3, which can record in HD but costs a hefty $800. Many have scoffed at the high price compared to the DVR they can rent from their cable companies. I made the choice to go with Comcast’s DVR because I wanted HD more than I wanted to use my old TiVo, and I’ve just been amazed at the utter suckitude of it. To think, I had a TiVo *six years ago* that was better than this piece of crap that Comcast gives me. It is hard to explain what makes it so bad, I guess its sort of like how Mac users feel about Windows PCs — things are overly complicated, error messages are indecipherable, the interface is overly complex and unintuitive, the functionality is limited and the reliability spotty. If I hadn’t just bought a condo, I would find it a lot easier to plunk down the ton of money necessary to lower my blood pressure and make TV watching enjoyable again, but in my precarious financial state there is no way to justify it. I’m sure with time the Series 3 will come down in price, meanwhile I have to suffer with an absolutely horrid box courtesy of the idiots who think commercials exclaiming how “Comcastic” they are is a good substitute for actually caring.

Briefly, it bugs me that:

# After Veronica just “learned her lesson” about assuming bad things about people with the whole Parker situation, and feels really awful about it, she goes on and makes the same sorts of assumptions about the sorority and, when she gets the damning evidence, goes right to the paper rather that contacting the sorority leadership for comment. Yeah, I know its a big scoop, and a student journalist at, say, Brandeis, might be too excited by their story to risk “ruining” it by actually talking to people, but this is Veronica Mars — she’s discovered far more damning things before.
# Veronica lets the paper run the story with *her* byline even after she withdraws it, and the story contains details that she obviously could not have submitted in her original draft.
# Growing medicinal marijuana is *not illegal* in California — if the sorority’s story is true, and it certainly seems to be, what was going on is *not a crime*. While it may break Hearst College rules, the shocking revelation is far less shocking when you realize that, properly carried out, it was perfectly legal. And Veronica, smart girl that she is, surely knows this.

So those things bug me. Otherwise, a pretty good episode, even if the prisoner experiment was a bit obvious.

When I drove to work I could sing along to the music.

When I rode the bus, I could read a book.

When I walk, I ponder.

Whenever I was doing one, I missed the other two. Right now, with the walking, I miss the uselessness of riding a bus and the feeling that I can read because there is nothing else more important that I should be doing.

The CW seems to have been aggressively marketing _Veronica Mars_ as a girls show, positioning it to catch the lead-in audience from _Gilmore Girls_ and doing strange commercial tie-ins that are probably a turn off to most male (and probably many female) viewers. I hope this works for them, but I sorta wonder. You’re taking a show that’s trying to be “edgy” and “noir” and “dark” and positioning it for that elusive female bopper tween audience (or whatever). Not the choice I would have made, but for the sake of the show I hope it works and their numbers go up. Guess we’ll see when the fast national ratings come out later today. Much like _Buffy_ before it, _Veronica Mars_ has tons of critical praise and a rabid cult following, but so far has not been able to find major ratings success. That was sorta okay when they were on UPN, but now that they are on the combined CW network that is aiming to take on the majors, it won’t be enough to sustain the show.

*Update:* The fast nationals are out, and are about in line with last year’s ratings for the premiere. I could say a lot at this point about flaws in the ratings system, like how they undercount college students, but it doesn’t matter. This is not good at all for the future of one of the best shows on television.

*Update 2:* The final nationals show that retention in the target demos was fairly high and — get this — _Veronica Mars_ male 18-34 viewership numbers were up 23% over the lead-in show, _Gilmore Girls_ — despite being up against baseball! The numbers among adults 35-49 were also up a bit. Which shows that despite the CW’s targeting at the female youngsters, men and middle-agers tuned in. Yay for that! And with that crash course in Neilson ratings over, back to our regularly scheduled blog programming, whatever that is, and let us never speak of these things again. Right. 😉

Just finished watching _Veronica Mars_ episode 2×17, “Plan B.” Amazing episode. The choice of the song “Sway” by The Perishers to play behind the Veronica/Logan dancing scene was inspired. Don’t believe me? Read the lyrics. The emotional tension of that scene and is easy to miss among all of the other emotionally tense scenes in this episode. Still pondering all the things that happened, still wondering how they possibly fit so much plot and character development into one 44 minute span, still trying to put together all of the new clues and figure out what the heck is really going on. Five episodes left to watch on DVD, three days before the season three premiere. Things were a bit off earlier in the season, but its getting really damn good. Yikes.

David Plotz wrote an article (PDF) for _GQ_ back in 2001 about the loss of privacy and why it is a good thing. In it he revealed his social security number, banking data, the license plate of his car, and the like. I think its a pretty good article, and while I disagree with some of it I also agree with some of it. His most salient point is the idea that while tons of people are collecting information about us, they don’t actually care about that information in any human way. They just sift it with computers to find the things they need, not to “spy” on people. Of course this is part of what worries me, because if data has no “value” why take steps to protect it against people to whom it may have nefarious value?

Another idea I both agree with and take issue with is Plotz’s assertion that the most valuable privacy is that that gives us the freedom to open up and share our feelings with others. To the extent that Google is reading your email and AOL is recording your searches and someone is archiving your chats, I believe this creates chilling effects on that sort of “privacy.” How can you have enough trust to open up to people online, as we are increasingly doing, when the intermediary is very likely spying on you and sifting through what you say in ways that you don’t understand that may lead to consequences you didn’t anticipate?

Article reprinted below (and cleaned up a bit) if you don’t want to read the PDF.

Continue reading “They’re watching your every move. Big deal.”

If you’ve been keeping track, I’ve had quite a saga of computer purchases, sales, repairs, and replacements over the past six months or so. In the process I managed to use up all of my five allocated computer activations for iTunes, meaning that with my most recent machine I was no longer able to play any purchased iTunes content. I got pretty angry about this, decided DRM is evil all over again, and started re-buying the songs I had from allofmp3.com in a non-DRM format and replacing the ones I had bought from Apple.

Then it occured to me to email iTunes customer support. I laid out my problem in three sentences, and within a day or two my account had been reset and I could once again authorized five computers. How awesome is that?

I’m still replacing iTunes music with allofmp3.com music anyway, as I find it and remember to do so. Its just more convenient to not have to worry about silly DRM restrictions and to be able to occasionally send a song to a friend or whatever. But I’m no longer pissed at Apple. I know their DRM is insidious, because it gets consumers to accept DRM. On the other hand, the reason its so effective is because its such a good compromise, compared to everything else out there, and the way they make it easy to use and generally keep it out of your way does deserve to be commended, even if I still can’t agree with it in principle and try to limit my purchases on iTunes to avoid the lock-in that DRM imposes.

Bill McGeveran discusses the availability of congressional staffer’s salary information on the web and suggests that in cases like these the goal of governmental openness are minimal while the privacy implications for those whose information is revealed are not, and thus on balance the public is not well served by having the information out there. I agree with him that openness is laudable but that disclosures should always be balanced with the right to privacy. For example, anyone can go down to the Middlesex County clerk’s office and find out how much I paid for my condo, but very few people actually will because the “speedbump” of having to make the trip and pay the fee is enough to discourage casual snooping. Often openness is good, sometimes it is bad, and sometimes limited openness is the best approach. Putting the salaries of young congressional aides online doesn’t seem to have much public interest benefit, but then again maybe we just haven’t figured out what that benefit is yet.

Danah Boyd has posted an essay called Facebook’s “Privacy Trainwreck”: Exposure, Invasion, and Drama that is an incredible analysis of a very interesting situation. From her blog post about the essay:

The key points that i make in this essay are:
* Privacy is an experience that people have, not a state of data.
* The ickyness that people feel when they panic about privacy comes from the experience of exposure or invasion.
* We’ve experienced the exposure hiccup before with Cobot. When are we going to learn?
* Invasion changes social reality and there is a cognitive cap to being able to handle it.
* Does invasion potentially result in a weakening of meaningful social ties?
* Facebook lost its innocence this week.

Her essay has completely changed my mind on this issue. I think the reason I didn’t feel about the issue the way hundreds of thousands of others did is because I’m not an avid user of Facebook and don’t see a huge utility to it, and so because I wasn’t already using it on my terms my life wasn’t upset by those terms being changed abruptly, without warning, and without recourse.

Danah also makes good points about how the internet mediates gossip as just another form of information, but throws out of whack the whole notion of gossip as a way of communicating and forming relationships. She mentions feed readers (aggregators that let one read many blogs at once from a convenient interface) as an awful invention that ruins the paradigm, and I can’t disagree — my feed reader feels much more like an obligation than an enjoyable way to catch up on what people are doing. Furthermore, she hints at the information overload problem that comes with aggregating so much data in one place — I thought I liked Facebook better now, but today when I logged in I started to feel that same sense of dread as I realized how much of my “News Feed” I would have to read through to see what has changed since last I visited.

And one final point. When I logged into Facebook to check out the new News Feed, I noticed Luis was using the Facebook “Notes” feature to syndicate his blog posts. I liked the idea and followed suit, and now even that is starting to make me feel icky. Random blog posts in someone’s information stream with no context or background is a bit creepy. They can’t turn it off, so in some ways I (with Facebook’s help) am pushing my thoughts at them against their will, and I cannot control who starts seeing little snippets of my life with no background or context. Icky indeed.

Read the article, it’s worth it.

Secrets revealed! Story broken! Internet wins again! The people behind lonelygirl15 are a few amateur filmmakers, the “professional production values” consisted of a few lamps and a webcam — they just knew how to use them correctly. The actor who played Bree hasn’t been hiding anywhere — she’s been living openly in LA and, as you might expect from LA, no one has noticed her. As for the producers, they don’t have any major corporate or viral marketing plans (at least not yet), and hope the story can continue to take its course, even though it may play out differently now. After all, says the _NY Times_, “[p]art of the appeal of the series was that the serious-minded, literate Bree offered an unbeatable fantasy: a beautiful girl who techy guys had something in common with.”

Okay, fine, we now know who the actor is that plays lonelygirl15. Big whoop. To the people who feel “angry” and “betrayed” for taking it seriously and being duped, meh. I don’t feel your outrage. I don’t really care *who* she is, what I care about is the *what* and the *why* of the videos. Perhaps its because I and the people I know who are watching the videos didn’t go in from the start believing they were real. Perhaps its because I’m not caught up in the current YouTube hysteria of “citizen created” crap and the hundreds of thousands (?) of people who put up boring, low quality, badly-edited video blogs. Or perhaps its just because some of us have been around the internet block a few times and know now to take everything so gosh darn seriously.

The lonelygirl15 storytelling is not amazing (perhaps a limitation of the medium they are emulating), but I find it captivating enough to keep watching, and I will continue to even though it is now “confirmed” that the characters are figments of some writers imaginations. The bigger question, I think, is what the story is about, where it is leading, why is behind it, and what they are getting out of it. Will it turn out to be some big viral marketing campaign with more effort behind it than any we’ve yet seen? Some filmmaker’s pet project? A promo for a video game or movie? I guess we’re just going to have to wait a month or so and see where we end up. I certainly hope the backlash doesn’t cause this experiment, or whatever it is, to end early, before the interesting bits are revealed.

Have you ever written an entire post and then, I dunno, forgot to hit the “post” button or something? Because I wrote something last night that would put that last remaindered link about lonelygirl15 into context, but it seems to have been lost to the ether. Eh, I’ve only been doing this newfangled blogging thing for five years, give me a break.

Anywho, the post in question eventually pointed at this _LA Times_ article about the lonelygirl15 phenomonon that tells you everything you need to know about the whole interesting enigma of the very popular (and mysterious) video blog, who may be behind it, and why it is captivating large numbers of webernetizens.

Brian Flemming posts a mashup of _The Passion of the Christ_ and the song “Sometimes When We Touch”. I had no desire to see _The Passion_ in theaters or otherwise, and if this two minute mashup is enough to make me feel sick, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to sit through two hours of it — and bring their children. And of course its another chance to reflect on the insanity of the MPAA’s ratings board that would give two hours filled with hideous graphic violence an acceptable rating because of its subject matter, but rate _Clerks_ NC-17.

A large proportion of users of the popular college/adult social networking site Facebook were surprised, shocked, and upset when Facebook launched a new feature that aggregates data about changes to user profiles into a “feed” page that shows, at a glance, what your friends are doing, new photos they’ve uploaded, changes in relationship status, added and removed group memberships, and publically posted messages on other users’ “walls”.

I don’t get it, not at all. I’ve never really understood or enjoyed using social networking sites, mostly because I find them fairly useless. When I logged into Facebook and saw all this interesting new information, I found myself coming back much more frequently than I ever had before. I don’t care to spend hours trolling through my friend’s profiles seeing what they’ve added and removed. Being presented with it on one page made Facebook actually useful, sorta like a blog, letting me keep track of what the people I knew were up to.

Wendy’s take on the outrage is a bit different:

When thinking about our information, we don’t just have two settings, “public” and “private.” Those who spill their lives into Facebook profiles still have expectations of privacy. We might be comfortable sharing information with some people, in some doses, expecting the typical human attention span to shield us from too much probing, but object when that same information is catalogued and read back. This is part of the horror of a wiretap or a secret police file, even if it discloses only innocent activities.

I guess she’s right, but I’m really confused about what users were using the site for and what they expected. Perhaps it is a bit surprising and upsetting to see how much information you have put into Facebook, but *you* were the one who put it there in the first place! Its like the kids who are shocked that potential employers check out their public profiles and see them admitting to engaging in illegal acts and then deny them jobs.

Facebook’s News Feed feature did not do anything that contradicted with the site’s already extensive set of privacy settings. Users had already chose to let their friends see things about them. Their friends are now able to see those things a bit more easily. It is a useful and innovative feature, and ironically, being able to see friends joining groups and posting messages made it far easier for masses of users to join in anti-News Feed protests utilizing Facebook itself. I doubt the people protesting understand the irony.

I can buy _The Jetsons_ season one on DVD for $25, complete with multiple languages, special features, and commentary tracks, and I can play it in any standard DVD player or use (admittedly illegal) tools to transfer it to my computer and/or iPod. Or I can buy _The Jetsons_ season one as DRM-encumbered Windows Media files for $38 with no commentary, no special features, and no ability to play it on a DVD player, much less an iPod (or even a Mac!).

Yeah, Amazon, I’m afraid your new video download service, so carefully negotiated to appease Hollywood and other rights holders, is not the least bit appealing to your actual customers, people like me. You need to do a lot better, and the only way you’re going to do that is by sticking up against the big rights holders and negotiating terms that favor the people whom you actually want to buy your videos.

In an episode of _Life on Mars_ I watched a few days ago, Sam Tyler arrested a suspect and began reciting the warning mandated by the UK’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, before correcting himself with the proper 1973 warning, which begins, “you have the right to remain silent.” Interested in what the new warning is, I looked it up on the ever-useful _Wikipedia_ and found a few interesting variations. I like the UK one’s phrasing best (even if it might serve to abolish the right to silence), what do you think?

United States:

bq. You have the right to remain silent. If you give up that right, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney and to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you at no cost. During any questioning, you may decide at any time to exercise these rights, not answer any questions, or make any statements. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak with me?

Australia:

bq. “You are not obliged to say or do anything unless you wish to do so, but whatever you say or do may be used in evidence. Do you understand?”

United Kingdom:

bq. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.

Many other countries have variations that include statements about the charges and maximum length of custody.

I need someone to live with me because my previously-agreed tenant bailed on me a couple days ago. The place is nice, the price is reasonable for the area, and the move-in date is flexible. I’m posting here rather than Craig’s List because I’d like to find someone I know, at least somewhat, who is clean, quiet, and low-maintenance. 2 bedroom, ~1000 sq ft, washer/dryer, 1.5 bath, by Porter Square. Email me for details: zeno at agblog — dot com!