onfocus

This is a lot easier than whatever I've been doing.

"Differences between Republican and Democrats exist...but those differences are often dwarfed by the differences between those entrenched in and dependent upon the Washington Establishment and...American citizens -- who are not." [via rc3]

"The U.S. Senate this afternoon passed the FISA Amendments Act...granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the president's illegal domestic wiretapping program." Discouraging.

This is going to change my life.

"I do wonder, however, whether my son will someday feel that his privacy is being violated, or more likely, be embarrassed about the site." I struggle with this issue too and it's why I don't post very much in public about my son. [via Daddy Types]

"Google is to be forced to release the records of every video watched on YouTube, including user names and web addresses, to entertainment company Viacom after a US federal court ruling." Copyright trumps privacy. [via MeFi]

"Perhaps the right answer is to excise the links from the old posts and to add a note explaining why the links were removed." Rafe brings up a good reason why you might need to alter archives and how you might handle it in a way that doesn't break links.

[via magnetbox]

Lots of trails around Corvallis I didn't know about. I have my work cut out for me this summer.

"In this paper, EFF offers some suggestions, both legal and technical, for best practices that balance the needs of OSPs and their users' privacy and civil liberties."

Some clever CSS/JavaScript hacking that determines which sites on a list someone has visited. Used for questionable good here, but could be a privacy nightmare. [via hackszine]

"...good practices of pagination design as well as some examples of when and how the pagination is usually implemented." [via swissmiss]

Matt and Jessamyn discuss the week in Metaflter that was. They have a nice rapport, and I think it'll be a great way to find gems across MeFi that I might have missed. (It's like a living, breathing sidebar!)

Cringely speculates that the *real* purpose of the AppleTV is building a massive P2P network for iTunes video distribution. Clever!

Someday everything will be tagged whether we know it or not. I, for one, welcome our new powdery RFID overlords.

danah starts a discussion about virtual walled gardens, gated communities, whatever you want to call them. Be sure to check out the comments. The central question to me is: "who owns the walls?"

Google is considering adding data portability--the ability to easily move your information out of Google to competing services. [via Slashdot]

rafe comments on his recent experience with a PDF book.

great story about a Neuroscientist using ideas from his field to help win a gameshow. [via Mind Hacks]

a quick, straightforward explanation of data portability and why companies like Google should support it. [via battelle]

Flickr applies for a patent on "interestingness" as a way of determining which media objects are getting the most attention from users. [via kottke]

John Battelle has a great idea about storing data in info-privacy friendly countries. But I'd go a step further and say that big data stores should also store data in an encrypted format, so only someone with a key can make the data useful.

put in some text, and see if this script can guess the author's gender based on word usage. (I was looking for a Perl module that does this, but no luck.)

Easy-to-install version of GPG for Mac folk.

I just tried Enigmail again after a couple years, and it actually works well. This plugin handles encrypting/decrypting email on the fly. (If you have GnuPG installed.)

"Marine scientists say archaeological remains discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old." [via sterling]

rael and michael's startup has a blog now.

Valid criticism of the official Google Blog's headlines, and good advice for any weblog author. Headlines are insanely important in the age of aggregation.

free VPN application [thanks, mathowie]

now you can talk like Mr. Burns! [via kottke]

Sounds like you can add some Google Homepage modules to any web page now

This talk at Google by Dan Frankowski shows you can identify people based on anonymous movie ratings if you have another non-anonymous set of related data. [via O'Reilly Radar]

"A 2005 report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project called 'Teens and Technology' found that teenagers preferred new technology, like instant messaging or text messaging, for talking to friends and use e-mail to communicate with 'old people.'" [via cameron]