Author: Christopher Parsons
Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.
“When I apply a new CSS for the first time” by Martin Valasek
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2013.2.28
… test version of a data-mining tool in Delta’s offices, and he was surprised by the technology’s power to collect vast amounts of personal information using one start point. Jackson volunteered his Social Security number and watched the tool retrieve his address, the names of his neighbours, his wife’s name, and the date they were married, all from publicly available information. Some of the Delta employees had been test subjects already, and when his own personal information stated popping up for all to see, Jackson joked he’d seen enough. But the demo convinced him that the government had to have this capacity. Not because he wanted it. But because he was afraid he couldn’t do his job without it.
Shane Harris, The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State
Marriage versus Ph.D illustration
I’m pretty sure I’ll lack the remorse after finishing. It’s actually surprising nice to know that I’m done with academe in a 6 months or so!
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Do Not Covet Your Ideas
Frickin’ love this.
Reblog via &soweramble
This is also a pretty compelling argument for certain ideas in Open Culture.
Giving away and open-sourcing ideas has led to some of the greatest experiences of my life. It can be terrifying but it’s amazing to see what boomerangs back on you.
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Powerful men may actually be the worst?:
As a political reporter for GQ, I’ve been jokingly asked whether I ever posed for the magazine and loudly called a porn star by a senior think-tank fellow at his institute’s annual gala. In my prior job as a Hill reporter, one of my best source relationships with a member of Congress ended after I remarked that I looked like a witch who might hop on a broom in my new press-badge photo and he replied that I looked like I was “going to hop on something.” One journalist remembers a group of lobbyists insisting that she was not a full-time reporter at a major publication but a college coed. Another tried wearing scarves and turtlenecks to keep a married K Street type from staring at her chest for their entire meeting. The last time she saw him, his wedding ring was conspicuously absent; his eyes, however, were still fixed on the same spot. Almost everyone has received the late-night e-mail—“You’re incredible” or “Are you done with me yet?”—that she is not entirely sure how to handle. They’re what another lady political writer refers to as “drunk fumbles” or “the result of lonely and insecure people trying to make themselves feel loved and/or important.” … Sometimes they reach the level of stalking: One colleague had a high-profile member of Congress go out of his way to track down her cell-phone number, call and text repeatedly to tell her she was beautiful, offer to take her parents on a tour of the Capitol, and even invite her to go boating back home in his district.
This speaks depressing volumes about many individuals who are deeply invested in the political machinations of nation-states.
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TarenSK: Thank you
I’m being very careful not to generalize from this grieving experience. Someday other people close to me will die. It will not be like this. But this once, it can be and is like this, and I am grateful.
Along with all the multitudes of lessons to draw from Aaron’s life and death, I hope one can be an ongoing commitment to unconditional support for each other in times of great personal crisis.
The truth is, Aaron was very bad at asking for support. He didn’t want to be a burden on others. He believed he ought to be able to make it on his own. He demanded independence from those who loved him. He was eager to help anyone else, but to ask for help for himself was terrifying. That made his 2-year ordeal much harder in many ways.
I’ve learned what I believe are the right lessons from this, and I hope you all will as well. The world is often — though not always — naked and cold. Confronting it on our own is sometimes merely difficult, sometimes downright impossible. We have a responsibility to help each other through the hard times, and an equal responsibility to ask for help from each other.
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I still think [Apple] should go back to Dropbox with a blank check and just ask how many zeros they need to put at the end to make it happen.
My friend Dave Zaffrann, practicing the art of Having a Decent Idea while lamenting iCloud’s future (via chartier)
I think that this is on the mark, in the sense that iCloud is gross and Apple needs to do better. I also hope it never comes to be, given how much I use Dropbox on non-Apple devices and products.
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Why I’m quitting Facebook
I left Facebook a long time ago, before many of the current realities of that ecosystem. Rushkoff didn’t leave for the same reasons I did (which stemmed from philosophical conceptions of temporality, time, and privacy) but his reasons echo those I keep hearing from undergrads. It isn’t just that Facebook isn’t ‘cool’; they’re spending less time on the site because the company is increasingly seen as manipulative, secretive, and portrays users in ways antithetical to how the users perceive themselves.
What is perhaps most concerning is what will happen to all the data the company has amassed if/when it implodes like MySpace did. What if, in five or seven years, Facebook effectively closes shop: who will get the mass of data that the company has collected, and how will they subsequently disseminate or manipulate it? It’s this broader concern about long-term use of incredibly intimate data that leaves me most leery of corporate-hosted social media platforms, and it’s an issue that I really don’t think people appreciate. But, then, I guess not a lot of people really remember the dot com crash…
Even if Aaron’s intention was in fact to distribute the journal articles (to poor people! for zero profit!), that in no way condones his treatment.
But the terrifying fact I’m trying to highlight in this particular blog post is this: According to the DOJ’s testimony, if you express political views that the government doesn’t like, at any point in your life, that political speech act can and will be used to justify making “an example” out of you once the government thinks it can pin you with a crime.
Talk about a chilling effect on freedom of speech.
Chilling of speech is very, very real. And the things we’re learning in the aftermath of Aaron’s death only amplify concerns.
Excited Pixels 