My pal Erik Cecil, one of the smartest and most energetic attorneys I’ve ever known (as well as a deeply insightful dude), is now at home on the blogging range as well as the foothills of the Front Range, where he and his large family (including large dogs) live. Welcome him abroad.
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Lots of folks in China get around the Great Chinese Firewall by using circumvention tools. But at what risk? That’s one of the biggest questions raised by Hal Roberts in this post here.
Seems the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, or GIFC, which offers this laudable PR…
- GIF Offers China-Based Reporters Software to Break Through Internet Blockade(2008-08-02)
- Testimony of GIFC in the US Senate Hearing on Global Internet Freedom (2008-05-20)
- GIF Defeats Another Wave of Internet Censorship (2007-11-11)
- Burmese Found Virtual Underground Railroad to Escape Internet (2007-10-09)
… is also selling users up who-knows-what rivers. At least that’s what Hal finds when he checks the FAQ at the Edoors Ranking Service, which lets you browse the “top anti-censorship sites”. The FAQ begins,
Q: Who is the owner of this service?
A: This service was developed by World’s Gate, Inc. with help from other Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC) partners.Q: Where did you get the raw data for the analysis?
A: The raw data came from the server log of GIFC member companies. Right now, data from three of the five tools of GIFC (DynaWeb, GPass, and FirePhoenix) are included for analysis.
Which sounds okay, so long as the data used is of the aggregate sort. In other words, as long as it’s not personal.
Alas, there is this smoking gun, pointed right at the heads of DynaWeb, GPass and FirePhoenix users:
Q: I am interested in more detailed and in-depth visit data. Are they available?
A: Yes, we can generate custom reports that cover different levels of details for your purposes, based on a fee. But data that can be used to identify a specific user are considered confidential and not shared with third parties unless you pass our strict screening test. Please contact us if you have such a need.
That means they track browsing data of individual users, and sell it. Hal adds,
…the data about circumventing users is much more sensitive than the data about most ISP users. These are the histories of users browsing sites that are not only blocked (and therefore mostly sensitive in one way or another) but blocked by an authoritarian country with an active policy and practice of persecuting dissidents. The mere act of anyone, let alone projects proclaiming themselves for internet freedom, storing this data is very bad practice. Any data that is stored can be potentially be shared or stolen. The best way to make sure that dangerous data like this does not get into the wrong hands is not to store it in the first place.
But these projects are not only storing the data. They are actively offering to sell it. None of the projects has anything like a privacy policy that I can find, and none of them provides any notice anywhere on the site or during the installation process that the project will be tracking and selling user browsing activity.* But all of the sites have deceptive language…
I’m sure what these companies are after is advertising money from companies wanting to “target” individuals personally. That’s what it smells like to me.
We live in a time when personalized advertising is legitimized on the supply side. (It has no demand side, other than the media who get paid to place it.) Worse, there’s a kind of gold rush going on. Even in a crapped economy, a torrent of money is flowing into online advertising of all kinds, including the “personalized” sort. No surprise that companies in the business of fighting great evils rationalize the committing of lesser ones. I’m sure they do it it the usual way: It’s just advertsing! And it’s personalized, so it’s good for you!
Ah, but what happens if one of those advertisers is a front for the Chinese governent, looking for dissidents to jail — or worse? If you’re one of those (or anybody) would you trust the “strict screening test” at Edoors Ranking Service?’
Me either.
Tags: censorship, edoors, Hal Roberts
Stephen Lewis was wise to turn down the opportunity to participate in a Ponzi scheme in a time and place where the downside of failure was absolute. The lesson:
| Fast-forward a decade to 2005, Bulgaria is about to enter the European Union and bank and insurance moguls whose memories are the only remaining links to the identities of initial depositors and investors are being shot wholesale in gangland-style slayings. On a wintry Sunday, I join a friend for an early morning hike part-way around the base of Vitosha mountain, just outside of Sofia. At the town of Bistritsa we leave the hiking path in search of a restaurant serving tripe soup and grappa (shkembe chorba and rakiya to afficionados). As we enter Bistritsa we pass a neighborhood of immense homes worthy of present day Las Vegas or 1970s American television soap operas about the scandalous lives of California rich. On the gated entrance way of every third or fourth such mansion are posted Necrologs — paper fliers announcing or commemorating the deaths — of the home’s owner. Most of the deceased seem relatively young and few likely to have died from natural causes. My hiking companion, a retired journalist explains … some of the deceased are businessmen, some are gangland heavies and “narco-millionaires,” and others are “credit-millionaires” i.e people who had borrowed large sums of money from banks on behalf of others and made fortunes on commissions for doing so. |
This is one in a series of thoughtful posts that combine Steve’s wide travels and deep cultural understands with his photography. While some are timely, all are timeless. Samples here, here, here and here.
Since I’m an aviation freak, I’m also a weather freak. I remember committing to getting my first color TV, back in the mid-70s, because I wanted to see color radar, which at that time was carried by only one TV station we could get from Chapel Hill: WFMY/Channel 2 in Greensboro. These days TV stations get their radar from elsewhere, and have mothballed their old radar facilities. (Here’s one mothballed TV radar tower, at the WLNE/Channel 6 transmitter, which is istself doomed to get mothballed after the nationwide February 17 switchover to digital TV — marking the end of TV’s Mainframe Era.)
Online I’ve been a devoted watcher of both Weather.com and Weather Underground. Both those last two links go to local (Cambridge, MA) maps. They’re good, but they don’t quite match Intellicast, source of the map above. Play around witht the pan & zoom, the animation and the rest of it. It’s a nice distraction from weather as ugly as we’re getting right now here: sleet and then rain atop enough snow to cancel school today,.
Tags: intellicast, weather, weather underground, weather.com, wfmy, wlvi, wunderground
Fears over earthquake ‘swarm’ at Yellowstone National Park says TimesOnline. (That’s the London one.) In a report on the same development, David Isenberg begins,
| The local (Cody WY) newspaper says that there’s “no indication the park’s famous caldera is likely to erupt.” But in Honolulu, where the reporters know something about volcanos, the paper tells a different story under the headline, Quake swarm at Yellowstone may signal blast. |
This wouldn’t be a Mount St. Helens. This could be much bigger. More at Yellowstone Caldera, the B Bar Blog, and Time.
The more I fly, the more useful, or at least interesting, the NOAA‘s AviationWeather.gov service becomes. At any given moment it has dozens of different reports on weather at altitude, across North America. The one above is among the many that show potential or reported turbulence.
I also just discovered TurbulenceForecast.com, with the TurbulenceForecast Blog. There’s a lot of overlap with AviationWeather.gov, since it uses a lot of maps and data from there.
Here’s the FAA’s page on flight delays. Plus FlightAware, the best of a bad bunch — too much flash and other stuff that doesn’t work on too many browsers, especially ones in handhelds. Speaking of which, I’ve lately been appreciating FlightTrack. The list could go on, but I need to move on. See ya in Boston. (At IAD now. The last two paragraphs were written at SFO, where connectivity was minimal.)
Oh, click on the map above and check out the current maximum turbulence potential between here (Washington) and Boston. So far there’s just one pilot report, of moderate turbulence, over Connecticut.
Tags: aviation, aviationweather.gov, bos, Boston, faa, flighttrack, flying, iad, noaa, severe turbulence, sfo, turbulence, turbulenceforecast, washington
We were supposed to fly out of Santa Barbara on Thursday. New Years Day. That flight was cancelled. We rebooked for Friday. That flight was delayed for so long that we would have missed connections. We rebooked for Saturday: today. That flight was delayed beyond our connection as well. Now we’re sitting at the airport, waiting for a flight to San Francisco in time to catch a red-eye to Dulles in Washington. After that, a flight to Boston. If we arrive on time, it will be four days after we were to depart from Santa Barbara.
I have driven across the country in less time.
Part of the problem is timing. It’s winter. There’s lots of weather, and lots of weather-caused delays and cancellations. And it’s the end of a holiday season, with lots of people travelling home from trips.
And part of the problem is traveling as a family. There are only three of us, but that’s enough to exclude us from many flights that a single passenger, especially one with a high frequent flyer status, could make.
So I’m not complaining. Aviation has made the miraculous mundane. But I do regret slowing down all the work I was going to get done over the weekend. That already replaced earlier plans to go skiing with The Kid after we got back.
C’est le vol.
I’ve been shooting stars and planets the last few nights (see here and here), as the Moon passes by Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. It’s the kind of thing obsessives do, when they combine devotions to astronomy and photography. Anyway, I thought it would be fun to identify a few of the stars in the neighborhood Venus was visiting, when I found a star where none should be.
Take a look at the two photos above. The original one on the right is here. On that one I note names and other data for all the main stars in the shot other than the bright blue one near the middle. It’s not on any start chart I’ve consulted. Sooo… what is it?
My fantasy was a nova of some kind. But I doubt that’s it. Judging from the color alone, I’d say it’s a lens flare. Meanwhile it was fun doing detective work with The Kid.
Tags: astronomy, kid, nashira, night, Photography, sky, star, venus
JD Lasica at Social Media has put up a list of front-line 2009 conferences.
For what it’s worth, I’ll be attending fewer of those kinds of conferences this next year, while I get more heads-down with VRM and Linux Journal work. The current calendar includes several VRM-related conferences (plus the usual IIWs), Public Media ’09, Supernova, LinuxWorld, OSCON, Reboot and Lift. When VRM takes off, it will become a topic of other conferences as well — and that alone should push me past another 100,000 miles on United next year.
That’s actually small potatoes compared to what many other business travelers compile, especially ones who travel frequently across oceans. I flew to Europe four times last year, from Boston to London, Paris and Amsterdam (hubbing through Frankfurt, Zürich, Warsaw, Chicago and Washington). That seems like a lot, and it is; but I’m guessing that two trips from anywhere in the U.S. to anywhere in Asia would yield the same sum of miles, or more.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to make travel better with VRM: by providing passengers with the tools required to improve airline service. I might have more to say about that in the next few days, or after we get back to Boston from our very pleasant family vacation in Santa Barbara. (Which is just a paradise right now.)
Bonus link to an old but still relevant Conor Cahill post, plus the comment I just appended to it (currently pending approval):
I realize this is an old thread, but it comes up at the top of a search for United Global Services, so it’s still current in that respect.
I’ve been 1K for three years running, and flew at least two full-fare business class flights overseas from the U.S. in 2008. I’m also rather publicly a United flier, with over a dozen thousand photos taken from the windows of United planes. (Plus thousands of photos tagged United, UAL and United Airlines.)
Before that I was a Premier or Executive Premier flier on United, going back to the early 90s.
But in the current economy no clients are funding business class flying for the near future, and my total miles with United are still a bit short of a million. So I figure if I reach GS, this will have to be the year for it. Otherwise, ain’t gonna happen.
By the way, my experience with United has included nothing bad in all the time I’ve been with them. My only persistent complaint is an odd one: I don’t want upgrades to business or first class if it’s not to a window seat. I’ve been offered several upgrades this past year to aisle seats and have turned them all down. (I accepted one that did go to a window seats.) One time this past year I was upgraded to an aisle seat and it annoyed me badly because the seat I gave up in economy had a windwow. Yet I still managed to shoot this set in a hurry while the woman with the window seat next to me was asleep.
Tags: "United Airlines", Amsterdam, frankfurt, Holland, Poland, Travel, ual, united, Zürich