Another social network launches and another kerfluffle about gender and privacy is born. This time it’s Google+, it’s must-be-public* gender drop down, and the choice to identify as “Male,” “Female,” or “Other.” Randall Munroe sums it up nicely. For a discussion about why “Other” is problematic as a category, see Sarah Dopp’s piece from November, [...]
[22 Jul 2011]
One of the best outcomes from November’s Wave Protocol Summit was a proposal for Wave to enter the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator program. Apache has a fantastic reputation for fostering healthy open source communities that create great software. Last week, that proposal was accepted, and we’re spinning up the project infrastructure so that the community [...]
[7 Dec 2010]
Friendship is uniquely suited to fill this void because, unlike matrimony or parenthood, it’s available to everyone, offering concord and even intimacy without aspiring to be all-consuming. Friends do things for us that hardly anybody else can, yet ask nothing more than friendship in return (though this can be a steep price if we take [...]
[26 Aug 2010]
My husband, who used to be a pretty good early adopter of technology, said he wishes he could turn the internet off. It’s killed journalism, it’s killing pornography, it’s killing writing, it’s killing a lot of things because everybody, anybody can write a blog now and thinks their opinion is worth as much as facts [...]
[14 Jul 2010]
But the mobile Web means different things to different people. For more affluent populations, it generally means wireless access with a laptop computer. For poorer people it means a cellphone, which is not a perfect replacement for other forms of online access, said Mr. Smith and several others who study social issues related to technology. [...]
[8 Jul 2010]
The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is [...]
[14 May 2010]
Our player doesn’t just simply stream video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other things that aren’t necessarily [...]
[14 May 2010]
The complaint has over 150 numbered paragraphs, runs 38 pages, and includes a lot of legalese. But the basic claim is simple: Facebook pulled a “privacy bait and switch.” They told users to sign up and provide personal information under one set of privacy policies, and then they changed the policies. It’s like if someone [...]
[14 May 2010]
In today’s brave New World, the new economics of digital distribution mean that we no longer need to shape our copyright law in ways that disadvantage creators vis-é-vis distributors unless we want to, writes Litman. That’s Jessica Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan. She would like existing copyright law be simplified by [...]
[22 Mar 2010]
From Saudi women revel in online lives on GlobalPost: In a country where about one-third of the population regularly goes online, the internet gives women “a place to vent out our frustrations and our dreams,“ said Reem Asaad, 37, a professor of banking and finance in the Saudi port city of Jeddah who blogs at [...]
[4 Feb 2010]