Yes, episode 8 of Stilgherrian Live Alpha will be recorded tonight at 9.30pm Sydney time. See you then.
Crikey: Oh no, Google took a photo of my house!
[This article was first published in Crikey yesterday.]
This morning Australians woke to the news that Google’s Street View has taken photos of their street, their office, their school — their home! — and published them for all to see. Doubtless we’ll now see a flood of stories screeching “Invasion of privacy!” Hardly.
A picture taken on a public street isn’t “private”. A house is a visible, physical object that anyone can walk past and photograph. Its address is a known fact. Anyone can post pictures online with a description. Real estate agents do it all the time. All Google has done is photographed “everywhere” all at once, and given us the results.
Worried that knowledge of who lives in your house will become public? That data is already available — in the phone book, in most cases, or the electoral roll. If you’ve done any renovations recently, there’s probably even a floor plan of your house on your local council’s website.
Besides, when you use Street View, chances are the very first thing you’ll look up is your own home. Knowing this, Google can simply cross-match that with everything they already know about you: every Google search you’ve done, every link you’ve followed, every YouTube video you’ve watched — and, if a website uses the “free” Google Analytics or runs Google AdSense advertising, Google also knows about every such website you’ve ever visited. Congratulations, you just let them write your address across the top of their dossier!
And isn’t Google owned by the CIA anyway? Beware The Googling… ! [Insert maniacal laugh here.]
Continue reading “Crikey: Oh no, Google took a photo of my house!”
Links for 04 August 2008 through 05 August 2008
Here are the web links I’ve found for 04 August 2008 through 05 August 2008, posted automatically using a coat hanger, three melons and a small well-brushed poodle.
- Scoble, Brainstorm & Braided Journalism | Global Neighbourhoods: Shel Israel adds an extremely sensible contribution to the eternal journalists vs bloggers whingefest. If you know any journalists, tie them to a chair and force them to watch this twice before they’re allowed any more beer.
- Blade Runner sweded | YouTube: Forget the Director’s Cut, this 4-minute version of Blade Runner is superb. I love the release of the white dove.
- Sweded Films (and Movies): Films: An A-Z listing of Sweded films.
- Be Kind Rewind | Wikipedia: Just in case you don’t know what the term “Sweded” means, here’s the explanation from the Wikipedia entry for the movie Be Kind Rewind.
- Tron, a video from freres-hueon | Dailymotion: A Sweded version of the lightcycles scene from the movie TRON. Using live stop-frame animation to recreate a CGI movie? Priceless!
- Digital futures report: the internet in Australia | CCI: Findings from the first survey by the Australian component of the World Internet Project. This survey is a major piece of research undertaken by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Innovation at Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research.
- Large Hadron Collider nearly ready | The Big Picture: Beautiful photography of The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27km long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests.
- Atomic Weapons Tests: TRINITY through BUSTER-JANGLE | Internet Archive: A 1952 film providing an overview for security-cleared members of US Congress committees and military. Declassified 1997, but some technical details still redacted. 22 minutes.
- Kosovo Parody Song | YouTube: A Seattle radio DJ created a parody song to criticise US involvement in Kosovo. Norwegian peacekeepers then shot a video clip parodying the original. Fun.
- Tabloid remarks | 12seconds.tv: Sitting sideways in the video, I rant about the Daily Telegraph for 12 seconds.
- Foveaux: We haven’t tried this fine restaurant in Surry Hills, Sydney, but the cocktail bar downstairs is excellent. The website still shows the summer menu drinks list, fools.
Amnesty International in China
I’ve just recorded an interview with Amnesty International’s Sophie Peer about human rights in China, with an emphasis on Internet censorship. The video is online, though the vision is just me talking on the phone.
So, did we attract more porn searches?
Did publishing a list of porn site search terms change the pattern of traffic to this website? Not much.
The most common search terms apart from my own name are still “heath ledger jokes”, “steve irwin jokes”, “used knickers” and “corey delaney”. The only ones I could see “young pussy”, “asian pussy”, “strip pork gams porn”, “sex fuck cartoon milf jimmy neutron”, “latina asian hardcore free no charge gratis porn sex amateur” and, my favourite, “deep throat black hung transsexuals no membership free access”.
[Update: Actually, there is an increase in traffic. It’s not showing up in the search analysis, but that page of search terms is getting 200 visitors a day.]
The Great Firewall of China: how it works, how to bypass it
[This week journalists arriving in Beijing for the Olympic Games discovered that the IOC had cut a deal with the Chinese government so that their Internet connection was censored. Crikey commissioned this article, which was first published yesterday. I’ve added further linkage at the end.]
China’s “Great Firewall” (GFW), officially the Golden Shield Project (金盾工程) of the Ministry of Public Security, is both clever and stupid, subtle and blunt.
As with any Internet filtering system, there’s only two methods to block bad stuff: keep a list of “bad sites” and prevent access, or look at the content live and figure out whether it’s good or bad on the fly. GFW uses both.
Al Gore was mocked for calling the Internet the “Information Superhighway”, but the analogy works. Like the road network, a maze of suburban streets leads to relatively few freeways, all administered by a myriad of local authorities.
When your computer requests a website, imagine a truck driving out your front gate. The driver knows the site’s name but not how to get there. Normally, you’ll get directions.
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