Sky’s Blog

Cory Doctorow posted a BoingBoing article about a recent National Security Letter requiring the Internet Archive to reveal user information to the FBI. In case you’re not familiar with this process, certain government agencies can issue these letters under the PATRIOT act, which require you to disclose information about your online users, and you can be required not to disclose even the existence of the NSL to anyone else – not your board of directors, not your employees, not even your dog. You can tell your attorney, otherwise this would violate due process of law because you would be denied legal representation. EFF stepped into this^[1] as legal adviser to the Internet Archive and Brewster Kahle. The legal grounds on which they contested this was that the Internet Archive is a library (recognized by the State of California) which is exempt from these requirements under US law. The provisions apply to providers of Internet communication services (such as ISPs, duh, by definition).

Regardless of how you feel about government agencies having unchecked access to this kind of information — If you ran an online service that promised “we never share your information with anyone else” – what would your reaction be to an NSL requiring that you give up something like IP addresses, or physical address, or other information about a user of your service, without informing anyone? Would you be happy telling your users that you never share their information?

(continue reading…)

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Neat idea – go to ReclaimPrivacy.org and get a “bookmark” that contains code that you can use to scan your Facebook privacy settings to see exactly how private you might not be!

I thought I had most everything set pretty well, but I was a bit surprised at my results. What’s more, this piece of code can fix the settings for you – simple as clicking a button. (continue reading…)

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I just realized (smack me in the face, huh!) that MyBlogLog.com, which I signed up for some months ago, is actually something I don’t want any part of! Duh.

It’s a “service” that shows my little face photo on sites that subscribe to their service, saying “Sky has been reading this page.” Given what Facebook did to me in December, revealing who all of my friends are^[1][2], I’ve become somewhat protective of where I go and what I read. (continue reading…)

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At LeWeb in Paris (December 2009) Chris Pirillo articulated some underlying principles for creating true (virtual) community. Matt Buckland^[1] recorded Chris’ points in text form. I’m going to make some comments on them now.

Chris started by saying “I don’t have an agenda; I don’t have an announcement…” referring, of course, to the number of companies that had been making announcements on the stage. Probably not unusual, since you want to make product announcements where they will be heard, but it was certainly being noticed this time around.

The full video of Chris’ talk appears at the bottom of this article. I’m going to pick and choose from the points that Matt jotted down.

So, what is the essence of community? Community… (continue reading…)

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