Monthly Archives: February 2012

Clickwrap privacy isn’t the answer

posted on 27 February, 2012 with tags , , , ,

Two sets of mobile app privacy stories have broken into the mainstream press this month. The first half of the month was dominated by “addressbook-gate”, where Path (and then, it turns out, many other iOS applications) were found to be uploading and storing users’ phone contact lists to their servers. In the firestorm that followed, [...]

The Sutro Baths and Little Brother

posted on 19 February, 2012 with tags , , , ,

I’m a sucker for stories that are tied to places I know. When I first read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, I was only glancingly familiar with most of the Bay Area settings for the different scenes. Now I spend time every day in the Mission, where most of the action takes place, and have a [...]

What’s the right ratio of creative success?

posted on 12 February, 2012 with tags ,

It’s hard to ignore successes in middleman elimination like Radiohead’s In Rainbows, NiN’s Ghosts I-IV, Louis C.K.’s Shameless and the Double Fine Adventure. But they’re not immune to criticism either. Sure, it works for them — the argument goes — but they’re already famous. And the legacy players have always served (at least) two roles; [...]

Irrelevance is a far greater threat to gatekeepers than piracy — and they know it

posted on 11 February, 2012 with tags , , ,

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Paul Carr’s accusation of hypocrisy within the tech community for opposing bad copyright legislation and then also speaking out against plagiarism. His take was wrong, but it wasn’t unusual; it’s all too common for supporters of wrongheaded copyright legislation (like SOPA, PIPA and two decades of more successful [...]