Doc Searls Weblog

Surveillance

• Have we passed peak surveillance? By Brad Feld. Pivots off my Thoughts on Privacy.
• The Only Way to Restore Trust in the NSA. By Bruce Schneier in The Atlantic. “The public has no faith left in the intelligence community or what the president says about it. A strong, independent special prosecutor needs to clean up the mess.”
• US should re-evaluate surveillance laws, ex-NSA chief acknowledges. By Spencer Ackerman in The Guardian. “Bobby Ray Inman defends the NSA’s bulk surveillance but says the nature of communications has changed – and that the US must revisit laws in the private sector as well.”
• What Did Edward Snowden Get Wrong? Everything. By Andrew Liepman in the LA Times.

Media

• Elizabeth Wurtzel: My Tea Party Mom Loves Al Jazeera America. By Elizabeth Wurtzel in The Daily Beast. “Sick of hardballing, roundtabling, and punditry in general, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Tea Partier mom has turned to the new Al Jazeera America—and is loving it. Welcome back, real cable news.”
• The Internet’s Next Victim: Advertising. By Andrew Leonard in Salon. “What the story of AdBlock Plus tells us: The online economy is broken, and won’t be easy to fix.” BTW, a chapter in The Intention Economy is titled “The Advertising Bubble.” It starts with this argument: “Advertising is a form of one-way signaling defined from the start as guesswork. As more ways are found for customers and vendors to signal their intentions directly to each other, advertising as we know it will shrink to what only one-way guesswork can do.”
• Larry Lessig Threatened With Copyright Infringement Over Clear Fair Use; Decides To Fight Back. By Mike Masnick in TechDirt. “from the bad-ideas:-threatening-larry-lessig-with-a-copyright-infringement-lawsuit dept.”

Science

• Carbon dating shows ancient Egypt’s rapid expansion. By Jo Marchant in New Scientist.
• Asteroid crash in Quebec may have caused prehistoric climate change. By Jacob Kastrenakes in The Verge.

Liberation

• The Indie Box Project.

Biz.

• Ronald Coase, the ‘father’ of the spectrum auction, dies at 102. By Dieter Bohn in The Verge. Shit, he was the father of a lot more than that.
• The Microsoft-Nokia Deal: Risks and Messiness. By David Pogue in The New York Times. “It will get very, very messy, and the whole thing is probably doomed.”
• What exactly did Microsoft just buy from Nokia? A visual guide. By Nilay Patel in The Verge. “Pulling apart the numbers of a major transformation.”
• Aldi confirms up to 100% horsemeat in beef products. In The Guardian. “Supermarket says it is angry with supplier Comigel after tests reveal 30% and 100% horsemeat in withdrawn ready meals.”