Transparency

Jaron Lanier has wondered whether we should take stock of our current notions of privacy in favor of a more stable society:

"I can see a few rays of hope that dimly illuminate how a society might be pleasant and still protect itself from violent/suicidal cults. Instead of surveillance, a high degree of transparency might protect us from evil. An American supreme court justice famously proclaimed that 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant.' While this trope originally concerned censorship, it could just as easily be applied to the balance between privacy and security. The Dutch came upon a version of this. Theirs is a dense society of intense interdependence, and in it one does not close one's curtains. Perhaps we should make all our emails and phone calls freely available to anyone who is interested. Almost no one will be. Once revealed, our fascination with the private lives of other people will be so minimal that our boredom could form the basis of a stable social order."

It strikes me that the proliferation of weblogs fits into this picture somewhere as well. While I cling just as fiercely to my right to keep certain information within the confines of my household as the next red-blooded, that's-what-we-started-this-country-for independent citizen, I can see where Lanier has a point and a vision - one that might go beyond social stability to the developing (and highly centralizing) arenas of knowledge management and wireless communications. As Scott McNealy famously observed, the "jini" may already be so far out of the bottle that we might as well learn to stop worrying and love the Bomb. ("You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.") If you get Tech TV, keep an eye out for Lanier's interview on Big Thinkers - living on in reruns, and worth a look.

RealNames, Real Gone

Excellent weblog journalism going on courtesy of Dave Winer over here. As Dave points out, "Look what happened to RealNames when their only partnership was with Microsoft. Caveat developer." Interesting that Keith Teare writes one of the reasons Microsoft gave for not renewing its contract with RealNames was, "We do not believe in 'Naming,' we believe in search," and, "Some of us believe search results are a better experience than navigation through naming." Quite apart from the question of Microsoft's motives, in my view the naming versus search approach does have some real problems if you're going to let registrants tie up generic identifiers like "web expert."

-Later, more re RealNames:

The Washington Post
Slashdot and Newsbytes [via Bret Fausett]
ICANNWatch

Tidbits

Type any* characters - except pro and pro2 - before ".blogger.com" and you get Blogger's homepage. Is this, like, a completely normal thing? It's leading to some interesting entries in the referral log...

Shelley is a goddess. My pesky permalinks are finally fix-ed. It's so gratifying to see those suckers work after all this time. I feel like I should cook her dinner.

*"any" is unconfirmed, but it seems to work.

$.10 A Lap Dance; The Spring Collections; Pathetic Plea

Chuck Hartley's "Live Live Nude Nude" Casual Friday edition deserves your attention, and I love his blog's new look. Jeneane's is also sporting a spiffy new wardrobe, but she, like me, is having trouble with blogspot permalinks. Please help if you know why even when the "/?/" fix is applied, these pesky things still insist on pointing to a week's worth of posts.

Viral and Wiral

I've gotten two of these emails in the last 24 hours:

A Nice Game
This is a nice game.
This is my first work.
Your're the first player.
I hope you enjoy it.

Think it's Klez or something. Interesting bit of social engineering.

I'm in Chapter 11 of Jaclyn Easton's Going Wireless, which I told Ernie is like a bridge between today and a William Gibson-esque world where commerce and communication is made technologically instant and effortless (and yes, the W.G. reference is intended to invoke the darker side). The audio book is entertaining, as it's read by the author and her passion comes through. Right now, she's talking about Wireless and a Higher Power:

"You are about to meet a nun whose convent is probably more technologically advanced than your company. What she understood - years before wireless was widely implemented - was the importance of connecting an enterprise, whether it's a multi-national conglomerate, a neighborhood business, or, in this case, a convent. Empowerment, and the inevitable success that follows, flows from workers saturated with information to them, any time they want it, anywhere they need it. While the promise of wireless in the corporation centers on cost-savings and productivity, the real value is in connecting people. We all know that when people are connected, they truly become a team, and as a team, they can dream bigger and execute more meaningfully than any individual . . . 'This is definitely cutting edge technology, and we've had it for two years. Others are just beginning to use it,' notes Sister Deborah Marie Bucher [phonetic], Dominican Sisters of Mission San Jose. The technology she is referring to is a wireless local area network, the installation of which she supervised at her convent in Fremont, CA in 1999 - years ahead of the curve. Today, you'll find the nuns there roaming the convent campus with laptops in tow, checking their email via internet connectivity from their wireless hub installed in the church's belltower."

I'm with Jaclyn, and cannot wait until we can effortlessly all pull just the information we need, when we need it, from thin air. As she points out elsewhere though, we need to be paying close attention to security, privacy and individual rights considerations as all this unfolds - or the game we'll be playing may not be so nice.