ReadWriteWeb profiles a great little Facebook application:
Looking to visualize your Facebook friend graph? You can with a Facebook app called Nexus. This app is a friend grapher that displays a visual analysis of your Facebook connections. But it's not just a pretty picture: in addition to viewing how your friends are connected, you can use Nexus to discover what interests your friends share and which of your friends are the most similar to you.
Read more here.
Tech Law Prof highlights an interesting lawsuit:
A Dean of Students of a Roman Catholic school in Indianapolis is suing Facebook over a prank page depicting which depicts that individual as acting inappropriately for a person in that position. The issue for Tim Puntarelli is not to punish Facebook but to get them to cough up the details of who posted the fake page in his name. The judge in the case issued an order requiring Facebook to turn over information on the poster and to preserve the now deleted profile. Facebook requires a court order before they would give any details to anyone. The story in the Indianapolis Star did not indicate if Facebook put up any type of defense as to why they should not give up the information.
The story also quotes a staff attorney from the ACLU suggesting that the content of the fake page could be protected speech as a form of parody. That question, however, is reserved for a different legal action, should it be brought against the perpetrators by Puntarelli and the Roman Catholic Diocese.
One would think that the most interesting question to come out of this case is what level of detail Facebook has on the original poster, and how fast they give it out. The news story speculates that all Facebook could have is the IP address where the logins originated. With the aggressive marketing information Facebook is trying to collect with its Beacon program, there may be more information lurking than a simple IP address. We may learn more about the data collection process than strictly what information gets collected when setting up a profile, fake or real.
Read it here.
TechCrunch has a fascinating guest post from Brian Solis, Principal of FutureWorks, a PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley and also blogs at PR 2.0, on the evolution of the press release. Read it here.
Webomatica makes a good point:
Twitter is now known for going down without warning, leaving Twitter-addicts moaning that they feel disconnected and the world is coming to an end.
But the complaining brings up an issue that bugs me - it’s modus operandi for new web services to be free, initially. Free drives early user adoption, which is great.
I just wonder if this wealth of free stuff is creating digital cheapskates. Many users now expect things to be free and as soon as they have to pay for stuff, they jump to another free competitor. As a result, creating a sticky service that gets critical mass is very difficult with all the free options out there, and designing something that’s so sticky people will pay for it is another matter altogether.
One answer is the “freemium” model. You suck users in with the free stuff, but then slap on a paid option for more features. Flickr does it.
So here’s a friendly suggestion: if Twitter is so necessary to your communications and state of mind that you would break out in a cold sweat if it went down, volunteer your wallet for a monthly fee. Let Twitter to go “freemium.”
Twitter would then have a revenue stream and enough cash to hire some talented developers and invest in scaling and reliability. Or, at the very least, they would have much more incentive to keep the service running after everyone handed them their personal cash.
Otherwise, if you’re not wiling to pay for Twitter, I’m less sympathetic to expectations of 24/7 service. You get what you pay for, and I don’t think Twitter is a charity. There are any number of services that we pay for on a monthly basis (electricity, water, cell phone, cable, Internet), and nobody expects them to be free. And they still go down from time to time.
Read it here.
This video shows some of the many cool ways you can use a Mac set to the song of "Again & Again" by the Bird & the Bee:
is this offensive? I found it very funny (and I'm a Hillary supporter), but techPresident isn't sure:
OMG! WARNING: Over the top, offensive humor!
There seems to be no limit to the power of the people to use the internet to express themselves politically, artistically, ... you name it. Continuing in my emerging pattern of video show-n-tell, check out Hillary's Downfall. You can watch the video and vote on whether you find it offensive on this Democratic Underground post. I thought it was offensive, but I was laughing too hard to cast my vote.
Really, it is not for children or the feint of heart.
And here is the offending video:
From Boing Boing:
Brett from Open Source Cinema sez, "We're asking people to take photos of themselves with a mug shot plate indicating their copyright criminality. Then we're going to animate the photos and have them appear in our movie, Basement Tapes, an open source documentary." Link (Thanks, Brett)
Read it here.
Daniel Solove asks why is there no stare decisis for methods of interpretation?:
The judiciary adheres to stare decisis for many principles of law, but it seems to allow a free-for-all when it comes to interpretative method. Interpretative method (for both the Constitution as well as statutes) is left to the discretion of each individual judge or justice. So one judge might be an originalist, another might be a textualist, and yet another might adhere to the "living constitution." On the Supreme Court, for example, its institutional opinions -- those of the majority -- seem to shift from one interpretative method to another depending upon which justice authors that opinion. Why isn't the method of constitutional or statutory interpretation governed by stare decisis?
Stare decisis is justified based on the need for stability and consistency in the law. We frequently hear lofty pronouncements by courts about the great value of precedent. But these same values that underpin and justify stare decisis seemingly also apply to interpretative method. Wouldn't constitutional law be more stable and consistent if all the justices were to adhere to stare decisis about what method (originalism, textualism, etc.) should be used to interpret the Constitution? Why not bind justices in this way?
Of course, if methods of interpretation don't matter in the end, if cases are just decided on ideology and interpretative methods and theories are just elaborate window-dressing, then my question doesn't matter all that much. But if these methods do carry some influence or weight, if they do matter at all, then why do they remain so unsettled? Why not bind them with stare decisis? Perhaps justices might feel too constrained. If Justice Thomas couldn't be an originalist because of stare decisis, would this impinge upon his own individual prerogative, his unique judicial style? But stare decisis is about constraining justices based on what past justices have decided. So why not bind justices in this manner?
Is there a good argument for why stare decisis should not apply to interpretative method?
Read more here.
The Washington Post charts the evolution of gossip to Juicy Campus and wonders what the law can do:
"I am suggesting that language evolved to allow us to gossip . . . to facilitate the bonding of social groups . . . it mainly achieves this aim by permitting the exchange of socially relevant information."
-- Robin Dunbar, "Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language" (1996)
"RE: Sluts Sluts Sluts
"I think that loud mouth girl from Starbucks is ALSO qualified to be in the listing above . . . No question that girl is nuts! I think my friend said her name was Cinthya."
-- post on JuicyCampus.com (2008)
When gossip clown Perez Hilton gossips on his blog about the stars of "Gossip Girl," we wonder how far we've come in spite of technology. The absurd self-reflexivity, the gazing at one another's navels, the swirling infinity of gossiping about a show about gossip -- it's like that snake that eats itself. And what are we left with? A reptile gagging on its own business.
Celebrity gossip, which clogs checkout aisles and runs wild in cyberspace, overshadows a more integral (and fascinating) form of gossip: the person-to-person kind, the overheard whispers, the pedestrian skinny. Gossip has been around forever, and, for almost as long, it has been labeled a vice. Moses descended Mount Sinai with a sub-commandment forbidding the bearing of tales. German philosopher Martin Heidegger dismissed gossip as a waste of energy. Only in very recent history have researchers and journalists started writing pieces with heretofore provocative titles.
"Gossip May Be Virtuous."
"Why Gossip Is Good for You."
"In Praise of Gossip: Indiscretion as a Saintly Virtue."
These conclusions are akin to the Food and Drug Administration reporting that fried dough is, in fact, nutritious, and the more you eat, the longer you'll live. But what does it all mean when it mutates on the Internet, spreading swiftly and sensationally?
For much of this year, college newspapers and m edia commentators have hemmed and hawed over JuicyCampus.com, a Web forum that provides a blank slate on which students can write anything they want about anyone. While the site attracts a large share of lurid, hateful and nonsensical ramblings (the stuff you'd find anywhere on the Internet), there is also gossip that includes full names and sordid details. Since its birth in August, JuicyCampus has courted the outrage of students who claim defamation and of state attorneys general who claim consumer fraud.
The site's 24-year-old founder, Duke University alumnus Matt Ivester, thinks it's all very natural. Social networking has moved online. Shouldn't gossip be a part of that?
"People talk about us being the opposite of Facebook and MySpace," notes Ivester, who says the site gets tens of thousands of hits a day. "We're completely anonymous. There are no profiles. We're filling that void. . . . People love celebrity gossip, and in many ways what we're doing is changing from Hollywood celebrities to campus celebrities."
This may be a vainglorious claim on Ivester's part, but Internet gossip might be a tempting venture for someone searching for "some kind of false and illusory prima donna status," as college senior Gregory N. Wolfe, 21, worded it in a column about JuicyCampus this year for the Cornell Daily Sun. Wolfe thinks JuicyCampus, apart from its innocuous ramblings, is damaging to communities because charges are unanswerable and viewed by thousands of people who have no reference point.
"At least in the typical telephone gossip you have source attribution, you know who's trustworthy," he says in a phone interview. "But you don't get this here, and you can't answer to it."
Instead of making the rounds in one social circle, Internet gossip jumps among them, and the information loses essential background information and credibility. "Traditional gossip occurs in a context, among people who know the person being gossiped about," writes George Washington University law professor Daniel Solove in his book "The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet." "But the Internet strips away that context, and this can make gossip even more pernicious."
Which is exactly what JuicyCampus does. Solove considers the site to be a paradigm of problems created when gossip and the Internet intersect: The site is not liable for anything users post, and the users are generally protected because they are anonymous. The rights of privacy and free speech engage in a confounding tango, and Solove thinks privacy is being compromised a little too much.
"I've thought long and hard to come up with an elegant solution . . . but there really isn't anything," he says. "There isn't a law that will make everyone play nice. At best the [existing] law can push norms in one direction or help raise awareness of a problem."
Read more here.
Boing Boing offers another good reason to own a Mac I suppose:
Glenn Fleishman says,
Two alleged thieves were found with stolen computer and A/V gear taken from three roommates in White Plains, N.Y., because one of the victims is a Mac expert. She used the notoriously hard-to-get-working Back to My Mac feature in Leopard which allows single sign-in to .Mac for remote, secure access to all computers on which you've signed in. (It uses UPnP/NAT-PMP, wide-area Bonjour, dynamic DNS, and IPsec's IKE coupled with IPv6 tunneling. Any surprise it's wonky? It's cool when it works, though.)
The unnamed victim in question was able to use remote screen sharing to capture a picture of one alleged burglar via the machine's built-in iSight camera, and copied photos on the computer that apparently were of the other alleged thief.
One of the other roommates recognized the two alleged perps from a party at their apartment (they were friends of a friend), told the police, who tracked them down, and made the arrests, finding all the stolen gear in the process.
While I've heard of plenty of Webcams-lead-to-capture stories, this is the first story that ties in IPv6 and recovered gear that I know of.
Link.
The views I express here are my own.
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