may maym

This post was originally published on my other blog, a much more Not Safe For Work site, at maybemaimed.com. However, it turns out that blog is censored in various countries, such as Dubai. Gotta love Internet censorship. Sigh. Anyways, since I think the material there is interesting and technology-relevant, and in order to help people avoid Internet censorship, I’m cross-posting the contents here. Enjoy.

Social media. Internet publishing. Privacy. Three phrases that have seemed to be at tenacious odds with each other in a multitude of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For people like me, who have progressive views about sexuality, these three things are constantly on our minds. How do we participate in the online revolution without being forced to “come out” about every sex act we enjoy, some of which are still illegal thanks to draconian restrictions on sexual freedom, even (and especially?) in America.

This month, a new social network called Blackbox Republic (BBR) is attempting to tackle this head-on and aims to create a place for, as Marshall Kirkpatrick put it, this particular large and unserved group of people. Although BBR is clearly a business, it’s a business whose creators have laudable intentions for positive social and cultural change. In that respect, and in many others, Blackbox Republic is worth a close look.

I was informed about the venture via Clarisse Thorn many months ago. I got in touch with BBR and signed up for a limited-offer “founder” account—basically a private beta. The founder account gave me free access to the features of the BlackboxRepublic.com website for what would normally be a $25 monthly subscription fee.

So, without further ado, here are my impressions about Blackbox Republic, and how its launch may be just what the Internet needs to get us moving in the right direction with regards to personal privacy, and mainstream awareness of the different needs of different people on the Internet.

Mainstream sex-positivity or a VIP room in cyberspace? Or both?

Over the past few months, Blackbox Republic has been building a marketing arsenal of anticipation and intrigue. Its creators are successful in non-sexuality-focused spheres of influence: Sam Lawrence is the respected former Chief Marketing Officer of Jive Software, Inc., and April Donato, has experience in community management. They also both jive (pun!) well with the sex-positive movement, discussing it at length in the early stages of their marketing efforts after de-cloaking the new company.

In an interview for Social Networking Watch, Sam Lawrence said,

[Sam Lawrence:] The co-founder [April Donato] and myself are part of [the sex-positive] community. Sex positive means that your sexuality is not an issue. You don’t have an issue with other people’s sexuality. You’re open to what other people are interested in and what their boundaries are, and you’re open with your own.

[…]

[Interviewer:] To what extent do you practice a sex-positive lifestyle?

[Sam Lawrence:] From the perspective of sex not being an issue, I think that love is generated by people being open enough about who they are as people to put all of themselves out on the table. As far as putting all of myself on the table, it’s something that I do every single day.

I have an enormous amount of respect for anyone able to so capably present themselves as authentically as Sam does. On the eve of KinkForAll New York City 2, I met Sam and April at one of their “founder meetups” and had the chance to talk to them face-to-face. Our conversation revolved around the importance of steadfastly holding true to one’s own desires and having appropriate places to express those things with appropriate communication tools. I really liked their emphasis on self-identification over labeling throughout our discussion.

I also really appreciated the way that Sam and April spoke about their target audience. Blackbox Republic will welcome everyone, but it’s not designed for everyone, and I think that’s a good thing. David Evans writing at Online Dating Post says,

BBR has room for everyone, but is not for everyone. Definitely catering to non-mainstream folks, it will soon feature a constellation of micro-communities, or groups, called Camps. BBR doesn’t tell people how to organize their camps; we’ll do it ourselves, thankyouverymuch.

So is Blackbox Republic a dating site, or a social network? Well, both, kind of. Part of BBR’s slogan includes, “Dates will happen. Sex will happen. It matters how you get there.” The implication, of course, being that the current suite of tools for finding love or play online—sites like Alt.com, OkCupid, and countless personals boards—focus too strongly on the end result, turning matchmaking into a meat market instead of the natural process of getting to know one another. The focus BBR is placing on each person’s “journey” is an extremely welcome paradigm shift in the online dating world.

Along with the welcome and (IMHO, painfully obviously better) new approach to online dating, however, Blackbox Republic faces some real challenges. For new users, the service costs a minimum of $5 a month to use (and $9 per month for new sign-ups starting in 2010), which gives access to basic features like a personal profile. For $25 a month, members get added features like the ability to list real-world meet-ups, send private messages, and partake in a virtual “gifting” economy (think LiveJournal’s “virtual gifts“).

For that reason, BBR has been called a “members-only club.” There are some legitimate differences of opinion as to whether this is a positive or a negative thing. In a press release over the summer, Blackbox Republic is reported as stating:

Blackbox Republic will be a members-only experience that will unite the sex-positive community and give them a personal, private and secure way to connect online and in person.

Writing for ZDNet, Oliver Marks likens Blackbox Republic’s approach to online dating to the fashionability of owning an Apple computer:

Think of Blackbox Republic as a fashionable online ‘members-only’ club where you might expect to meet people with similar interests to your own, and ideally the person of your dreams. […] Blackbox Republic is arguably an Apple product to Facebook’s Windows look & feel: a much more intimately crafted, fuller featured personal user interface which should appeal to Apple generation sensibilities.

Many pages on Blackbox Republic's website showcase fashionably dressed women.

Indeed, almost everything about Blackbox Republic’s marketing and design seems to me as though it’s positioning itself as the equivalent of the hip, new, and exclusive nightclub down the street. There are images of super-chic women in short skirts and tight pants all over the Blackbox Republic promotional pages—way more than there are pictures of men. I was (yet again) put-off by this over-prevalence of women in all advertising material.

This isn’t really a criticism of the site, but rather a statement of disappointment that the marketing gurus behind the effort seemed to me to have succumbed to overwhelming cultural pressure to sell their site with old-school sex appeal: women’s sex appeal, of course. How…traditional.

Not only is the Blackbox Republic intro video markedly gender-skewed, but somewhere along the line Sam and April decided to drop the “sex-positive” phraseology from their marketing:

[L]ike most startups, Blackbox decided it needed to change up. Observers were confused by the sex-positive label.

Oh well. I think this just goes to further showcase how much more social change we really need in our culture.

However, while the clubby, cliquey feel is totally my own subjective perception, there are other issues at play here, too. Most notably, as Clarisse Thorn and many others rightfully remind us very often, the sex-positive movement is overwhelmingly white, middle- to upper-class, college-educated, and privileged in a huge number of ways that many people often take for granted. Even without a for-pay social network, not everyone who wants to can participate in the great-sex-for-everyone party atmosphere of many sex-positive niches.

Will creating a “members-only club” of sex-positivity on the Internet really be a positive thing for “the movement”? Well, maybe. Although it has the potential to exclude lower-income people from the experience, who are sadly also often the people with the most pressing need for the kinds of privacy-related tools BBR offers (school teachers spring to mind!), one upside is that Blacbox Republic promises to pledge a portion of membership dues to a charity of the user’s choice.

It’s $25 a month and $5 of those community dues go to charity. One way to think about it is if you’re sex-positive, you can either spend money on expensive coffee every month or upgrade your social life and meet other sex-positive people like you.

Inescapably, the major selling point of any social network is, of course, the network! If your friends aren’t on Twitter, then you’re probably not going to find it useful. The same truth holds for Blackbox Republic: if the users you want to interact with aren’t there, I doubt you’re going to find the experience fruitful. Due to the membership fees and the socioeconomic realities of the sex-positive community, I’m concerned that BBR’s current business model is too exclusive, and as a result it will have a lot of trouble attracting the kind of diverse community its creators seem to be hoping for.

Yet, some others think differently (pun!). For instance, Dennis Howlett welcomes the for-pay model for a social network:

anyone can join provided they’re willing to pay the $25 a month (I like that he has a pay model from the get go. That sorts out the weirdos and hangers on from day one)

I wonder if adopting a free-mium approach might work better. Still, there are real-world limits to business. Everyone needs to make money, and I don’t think Blackbox Republic’s business model is inherently more exclusive than, say, purchasing access to porn. If anything, BBR’s got some real promise to inject much-needed financial awareness to the sexually insensitive corporate infrastructure of our society. Nevertheless, convincing people to join “the Republic” is going to be a hard sell.

Show me the features!

Let’s say you do decide to join. What do you get? Other than the sex-positive mindset, what’s the benefit?

Well, the bulk of the experience is what you’d expect. Profiles (called “personas”), messaging, user search capabilities (called “explore”), and so forth. A Twitter-like “activity stream” dominates the main page where you can post text, picture, or video status updates. Event listings fill the sidebar. (I’m not going to provide internal screenshots in deference to BBR’s strict confidentiality rules.)

While that’s fun, it’s nothing special. What makes Blackbox Republic different is flexibility, and privacy.

Goodbye drop-downs, hello sliders!

An innovative new interface acknowledges (most of) the diversity in human sexual experience and desire.

Blackbox Republic’s most visible feature is the way its interface allows you to flexibly self-identify various facets of yourself. Rather than give you static drop-down menus or radio buttons for things like your sexual orientation and relationship status, you’re presented with sliders you can change at will. Perhaps you’re feeling particularly same-sex attracted one day. Just move the “Orientation” slider towards the “Gay” end and away from the “Hetero” end. If that changes tomorrow, just move the slider back. Sho-weet!

BBR offers you 5 different sliders for your profile. In addition to the one for sexual orientation, you also get one for relationship “status” (ranging from attached to unattached, with Facebook’s famous “it’s complicated” neatly in the middle), whether you’re available for more partners or not, how comfortable you are with casual sexual activity, and how eagerly you’re looking to par-tay. I’m instantly reminded of FetLife’s innovative, if dull-looking, mechanism for specifying multiple relationships. Blackbox Republic gives you similar flexibility as FetLife does but presented in a superb and far more intuitive interface.

All that said, one slider is conspicuously missing: the one for gender. The sliders are a very interesting idea and might just be the most innovative feature of the entire site. It speaks volumes about the sensitive and thoughtful mindset of the developers, and that’s why I’m so disappointed that the interface for self-identifying gender is relegated to the Sex 1.0 days of a single, binary option of “male” or “female.”

What gives? Are polyamorous people more welcome here than those who don’t fit the gender binary? I hope this is simply an omission that will be fixed as the service matures, since I couldn’t find any other reason why gender was absent from the sliders. For extra credit, I hope to see different profile options for “Sex” and “Gender,” two distinct concepts that frequently and incorrectly get used interchangeably. This would make it possible to represent complex gender presentations like additive gender on a social networking interface for the first time ever, and that’d totally be something to write home about!

Privacy and security

The other major selling point of Blackbox Republic is its careful attention to privacy. The entire offering, including its name, is predicated on letting users very carefully segment their information based on their privacy boundaries. I love some of the things BBR has done to enable this, and I can only imagine it’s going to get better from here.

Blackbox Republic’s Web of Trust

There are three levels of privacy, which (as far as I can figure out) map directly to the level of trust other members have gained within the Republic’s community. It works like a web of trust. New users are “un-vouched.” As they begin to interact with others on the site and, hopefully, make some friends, they should receive “vouches”—or votes of trust—from previously-vouched members. As a member, you get to control whether something you do, such as posting a status update, gets sent to the “public,” (i.e., the entire public-facing Internet), to all Blackbox Republic members (i.e, to both vouched and un-vouched members) or only to vouched members.

Additionally, privacy settings allow you to specify whether you want to allow un-vouched members to send you private messages, to follow your updates, to comment on your posts, or to see you in search results.

Unlike Facebook, which has very good privacy controls that almost nobody on Earth is aware of (thus negating the control’s usefulness), Blackbox Republic makes it a point to highlight their privacy controls at just about every sensical turn. Each of the settings I found defaults to the most private setting, not the most public, which is exactly the right move. I gotta say, I found turning off privacy settings instead of having to turn (or leave) them on to be a really empowering feeling.

You’re not a “friend,” you’re an acquaintance!

Moreover, the Blackbox Republic platform makes a native distinction between “friends” (again, like Facebook, or FetLife) and “followers” (like Twitter). When I friend someone, I’m connected to them in a way that I’m not if I just follow someone. I’m not yet certain what the practical distinction between “friending” and “following” are, other than the fact that your view of the people you’re connected with is segmented based on which button you clicked, but I think the distinction is a very appropriate and natural one to embed in the software.

This separation is probably the single most important innovation in the space of social networks as a medium of communication and collaboration that I can point at. I love that I can indicate without ambiguity which people I want to remain in constant communication with and which I simply want to watch from a distance. After all, aren’t at least some of your “friends” on Facebook really just “acquaintances” in reality? I think that for the first time ever in a social network, Blackbox Republic gets this feature right. Now, if only I could figure out what it actually does. :)

What? No on-the-wire encryption?!

With all that being said, there’s still at least one really frightening problem with Blacbox Republic’s careful attention to privacy: as far as I could tell, no part of my session is SSL/TLS encrypted!

Stunningly, for a site that sells privacy, not even Blackbox Republic's login form is on a secure page.

The entire BlackboxRepublic.com website is served over HTTP, including the login form and—again, as far as I could tell—every page on the inside of the site. This means that it’s trivial for malicious people who don’t even have a Blackbox Republic subscription to intercept, eavesdrop, and modify my interaction with the site. They could watch—and save—private messages between me and one of my friends (or lovers!), for instance.

In Blackbox’s defense, I don’t know of any social network that protects you from this. FetLife is another example of a website that should seriously consider HTTPS-only pages, but as of this writing hasn’t implemented it. Therein lies one of the most frightening oversights in the entire social networking space: regardless of so-called privacy settings, everything you do on the vast majority of social networks, blogs, and other sites on the Internet are the equivalent of passing notes between friends in a classroom. Better hope that big bully who likes to steal your lunch money doesn’t open the note and read it himself while he’s passing along your login details!

The thing is, few other social networking sites place so strong a spotlight on user privacy and security. Since Blackbox Republic seems to be nobly and rightfully holding itself up to a new standard of privacy, I feel justified in pointing out this glaring omission in their service offering. Given everything else they’ve done so well, and how well-aligned the majority of their technical implementation seems to be with their philosophy, this omission came as a big surprise to me.

Until Blackbox Republic only serves HTTPS traffic for all private areas of their site, I can’t make a recommendation in good conscious that it’s the place to be for privacy-conscious people. But again, despite public opinion to the contrary, I’ve never been able to make that claim for FetLife either.

Conclusion

Blackbox Republic is one of the most interesting websites on the Internet today. Its privacy-conscious and sexually open approach to social networking and online dating deserves huge praise. Its technical implementation—although plagued with some glaring oversights for now—is to be seriously respected.

From a social change perspective, I think the site is a mixed bag. Its exclusivity arguably makes the insularity of the sexuality communities an even bigger problem than it already is. On the other hand, the market-value of that very same exclusivity, if steered toward a benevolent purpose, can end up benefiting philanthropic, non-profit, and other sex-positive endeavors that often struggle to find necessary financial support.

Moreover, Blackbox Republic’s internal gifting economy does seem to encourage a sort of altruistic nature among members. How that may or may not translate into increased support for non-commercial activists has yet to be seen. Nay-sayers should remember that this kind of thing simply hasn’t been done before and the net effect could be quite positive.

Having just launched, however, I don’t think Blackbox Republic should be touted as the go-to site for sex-positive people quite yet. Like other social networks, it needs to grow to become truly useful, and its subscription fee business model poses a serious obstacle to many people. I was fortunate to get in with a free “founder” account, but I have mixed feelings about encouraging my friends to join me knowing they—or someone nice enough to “gift” a limited-time subscription to them—will have to pay for the service.

Additionally, its focus on being, well, a black box and its commitment to not allow Google or other search engines to index its internal content simply doesn’t resonate that strongly with me.

Lawrence emphasizes that what members say in Blackbox Republic will stay private. There’s no danger of what they post inside becoming part of their “Google resume,” as he puts it. He says he would resist efforts from search engines to index content the way Facebook and Twitter allow. “The value proposition is this is the first private, large social network out there,” Lawrence says.

Put simply, and noting that I’m probably not the majority case here, I rely on my “Google résumé,” to use Sam’s words, to live the life I want. My lukewarm reaction to this isn’t a criticism of the goal, simply an observation that it turns out I’m not in the ideal target market for Blackbox Republic’s value proposition.

In other words, I think I’m “too out” for this site to be immediately useful to me. The fact that FetLife is not readily available to the public Internet is the single biggest reason why I don’t sign on to that site very often, and so I have the same reason not to spend all that much time behind the curtains of Blackbox Republic.

Nevertheless, many other people do. If you’re among the cross-section of the populace who’d like a sociosexual experience online and would also like to effectively outsource your social reputation management, if you will, but you feel that sites like Facebook just aren’t cutting it, then Blackbox Republic is definitely worth checking out.

If you do check it out, or even if you don’t, I’d love to know what you think in the comments. And if you’re definitely sold, consider signing up via my partner link. Full disclosure: signing up that way earns me a small commission. If you’d rather sign up but not give me a commission for the referral, just register from the front page.

Last week, I was invited to make a guest appearance on a technology talk radio show called Technocolor, which airs on 90.3 FM locally in New York City. The radio station is WHCR. The invitation was rather unexpected but I had a great time and a fun conversation with the host, Lena Marvin. We had such a fun time, actually, that Lena invited me to make a second guest appearance this week and, unlike the first show, I managed to record the audio stream, so you can replay the taping of the show and download it.

Here are my late-night and very sleepy attempts at listing some of the stuff we talked about, with as many links for show notes as I can manage to find:

• April Fools’ Day jokes: GMail Autopilot automatically writes your emails for you, Identi.ca acquires Twitter, The Guardian will publish its archives by tweeting them.
• NetFlix will demolish traditional cable television.
• Drop.io can replace email attachments.
• Skype has an official iPhone client; AT&T is not happy.
• Stanford University to offer free iPhone development courses. Why go to college anymore? MIT already offers plenty of educational material from Open Courseware, iTunes University does something similar.
• iPod Shuffle randomly maximizes its volume when people exercise. Owch. DRM physically bad for your ears?
• New York Public Library offers free access to language learning courses from MangoLanguages.com, a $150 value.
• Internet not actually good for job hunts.
• Identi.ca hopes to add OpenID support (eventually). It’s a distributed “micro-blogging” platform. Fear vendor lock-in; Laconi.ca implements the open micro-blogging standard. Community organizations are especially vulnerable to vendor-lock in.
• Free as in beer is an open source cultural reference. But wait, there is actually a “free beer”.
• How to create your own secure, yet memorable, password algorithm: use the name of the site you’re on combined with a secret prefix to create unique passwords for each site.
• Financial software to help you do taxes: Mint.com versus Quicken or Microsoft Money. TaxSlayer.com helps you file taxes electronically, possibly for free! Also, online government tools exist at, for instance, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance.
• PDFs should be used better than they are; PDF creators can use PDFs as online, electronic forms. Lots to learn about Adobe’s products for free at CreativeSuitePodcast.com.
• Newer Microsoft Word document formats cause pain for the uninformed. Also, will newer versions of the PDF standard stay backwards compatible with older PDF files?

Listening to myself is a bit odd, and makes me realize just how quickly I speak. I need to learn to slow down a little. Nonetheless, I think I did okay, although I suppose I should have plugged my own web dev book a bit more. Meh, whatever. I was just there to have a good time, and I did exactly that—it’s incredible how quickly an hour goes by when you’re having fun!

Still, I’d love to hear feedback from listeners, as I very much welcome constructive criticism of what I could have done better and how. I’m also hopeful that I’ll get even more opportunities to chat with Lena, Javier, and the rest of the Technocolor crew semi-regularly from now on, since she mentioned something about being able to Skype me in even after I move to San Francisco.

In some communities, this is sort of old news, however I’ve recently become aware of an exciting and affordable security product called the YubiKey, manufactured by Yubico. The YubiKey is a $35 USD one-time password second-factor authentication token that uses 128-bit AES encryption to provide identity verification. That’s a mouthful, but what it really means is this: using a YubiKey to log in to stuff makes your logins about as secure as a military installation. Here’s how.

When you log in to just about any Web site or Internet-enabled service, say Basecamp for example, you traditionally simply type in a user name and matching password. This is known as one-factor authentication because all you need to do to log in successfully is use a matching pair of user names and their passwords. Since the user name is not hidden, the only piece of the puzzle that’s providing any security is your password.

Now, a password is something you have to remember, so this factor is called "something you know." Of course, if someone else also knows your password, this means that person can log in pretending to be you. Thus enters the need for a second factor for authentication.

The YubiKey is a physical USB fob device with a unique ID. That is, each YubiKey in the world has its own ID, meaning that no two are identical. This implies that if you have a YubiKey with you, no one else can have that same YubiKey anywhere else in the universe. Thus, this gives you a second factor with which to authenticate yourself, specifically it’s "something you have."

When you combine something you know (for instance, a password) with something you have (such as a YubiKey), you have two-factor authentication. Authenticating yourself with both of these factors is obviously more secure than relying solely on one factor because in order to compromise it an attacker needs to compromise both factors; the attacker would need to know what you know (figure out your password) and steal something you have (physically obtain your YubiKey).

If you’re familiar with one-time credit cards such as those that PayPal offers, you can think of the YubiKey like one of these cards, but instead of being used to make online purchases, it’s used for logging into stuff (and, of course, you don’t need more than one physical YubiKey). Of course, for authentication to work with the YubiKey the application or service you are logging into has to be able to understand that you’re using one of these authentication devices.

The good news here is that the entire process of using a YubiKey is a well-documented, open-source, and open-spec scheme so it’s easy for service providers to implement. And, because Yubico is also an OpenID identity provider, you can use your YubiKey to log into any site that supports the OpenID protocol right now, such as (you guessed it) Basecamp! There’s even a WordPress YubiKey plugin so you could theoretically use your YubiKey to secure your authentication to any of your WordPress blogs.

The YubiKey spec is, itself, completely independant of the OpenID spec and vice versa, which is what makes the combination so formidable. What’s so cool about this process is that the site you’re authenticating to, such as Basecamp or your WordPress blog, doesn’t have to know anything about how you’re authenticating because the OpenID provider (Yubico in this example) simply returns the answer—a perfect example of a well-constructed API at work. Either you have successfully authenticated to your OpenID provider or you haven’t, and the site can respond accordingly.

And if that’s not cool enough, want to know the coolest thing about the YubiKey? It’s environmentally friendly! The YubiKey web site states that the robust, ultra-thin and battery-free design increases lifetime and reduces environmental impact.

I’m more than seriously considering getting one of these myself, and even beyond that, getting one for all of my fellow site editors on some of the community web sites I help maintain. This is especially important for sites dealing in confidential or otherwise sensitive information, such as those which hold financial records or have other privacy concerns. Securing the authentication of privileged users such as the site administrators seems a natural step.

Even better yet, because the only cost to implementing this system is developer resources and the cost of the physical YubiKey device, I’m also seriously considering baking this right into any new sites I develop. At $35, a YubiKey is actually cheaper than an SSL certificate, and even though they don’t protect against all the same attack vectors, I think a device like the YubiKey is clearly a vastly superior solution in the majority of use cases.

I never really had a compelling reason to begin to propagate an OpenID identity before but now, at last, I do.

I think it’s important—for a lot of reasons—to let people do what they want rather than to try to force people to do what you think is right. Ning is a company that gets it:

In a nutshell, we aren’t pro-porn, but we are pro-freedom.

To prevent porn, you have to take an activist stand against freedom of expression — you have to get in there and judge content, judge people, judge intent, and take action based on your judgments. I would never criticize a company for doing so, but I don’t want to do that, and we as a company don’t want to do that.

We think a better approach is to let people fundamentally do what they want, as long as it isn’t illegal and doesn’t otherwise violate our terms of service.

A heartfelt applause to Marc and everyone at Ning for putting their user’s personal choices ahead of their own. It’s not only good social justice, it’s excellent business.

Marc even provides some history:

From the very beginning of the Internet as a mass medium, porn has been present, and all of the Internet companies that have come before us have had to figure out where they stand.

[…]

[D]uring my time at AOL, I was fascinated to see how AOL dealt with porn. AOL had to balance two facts. One, their entire marketing thrust to be a mass market service meant that they had to come across as — and be — highly family-friendly. And in fact, they did a lot of work with parental controls and other features to make sure that families would use AOL safely. But the other fact was that a huge part of AOL’s actual usage all through the 90’s was for adult content — chat rooms, bulletin boards, and all the rest.

In practice, I think they balanced those two facts quite well — AOL could be used as a family-friendly service or as an open environment for people to do whatever they want, and it worked quite well for everyone.

This is a model that Yahoo then followed, and Google more recently.

Yahoo has always had an enormous amount of adult activity and material — some estimates are that as much as half of Yahoo Groups’ activity is adult in nature, for example.

And Google of course famously crawls and serves up search results and images for all kinds of adult topics, among every other topic in the world.

In light of many high-profile anti-porn practices by social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and to a lesser degree, LiveJournal, it’s great to see that at least one company has put its own business ahead of other people’s politics. It’s precisely that sort of thing that’s made Marc an entrepreneurial blockbuster time and time again.

And frankly, I think the social agenda called freedom is just as important.

Via Susan Mernit

From the everything-you-say-can-and-will-be-used-against-you department:

• Computer scientists will almost always be able to de-anonymize “anonymous” data, in this case thanks to movie ratings,
• Google offers users another way to store personal data,
• and all of this is old news

I’ve been doing this for years, and my solution is pretty simple: no regrets.

As an aside, these days when you punch in “privacy concern” into Googlepedia, you get the Wikipedia entry for Facebook. I was kind of expecting the entry for “US Government,” but whatever.

Things that are absolutely nuts:

• Net Neutrality is finally a completely obvious good thing, as opposed to just the sort of obvious good thing it used to be. (Of course, that issue isn’t really about Net Neutrality, but it’s at least tangentially related, which makes this bullshit an order of magnitude less bullshitty than what usually happens.)
• Verizon’s greed knows “unlimited” bounds.
• If we can’t impeach Bush, we can sue him, right? Yeah, that’s how we solve things in States.

In completely unrelated news, maybe here’s why I’m such a pessimist.