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The internet is a giant playground full of potholes you can fall in without realizing it. Lifehacker has advice that you’ve probably heard, but can never be reinforced enough. Read these tips on protecting your privacy, your money, your data, your reputation, and your blood pressure. My favorite: Do not feed the trolls.
First, it’s important to remember that trolls are not attacking you—they’re attacking boredom. They have nothing better to do than say something mean so that’s how they’ve unfortunately chosen to spend their time. If what they’re saying isn’t going to have much of an impact on anyone, just remember that they’re bored, loathsome people and let it go. On the other hand, if they’re promoting hate speech and potentially causing harm to others, it’s best to avoid engaging them and instead report them to the site’s administrator. Many sites offer a means of flagging harmful posts, and commenting systems offer ways for an administrator to ban problematic users. A simple email is often sufficient to take care of a bad person. Engaging with a troll-ish thread is just going to make you angry and potentially get you in trouble, too. If you do fall into the trap of feeding a troll, however, using the principles of cognitive therapy can be a worthy solution. This means responding positively and calmly, while accepting their different opinion. The trolls will likely find it frustrating and even condescending, but it’s hard to argue with someone who is accepting your point of view (or even agreeing with you).
Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
A guy, called Raul for the purpose of the story, used sperm donation to pay his way through college at a time when it seemed like just a way to make some extra cash. Years later, he learned the power of the internet.
Raul made about $10,000 total by donating a couple of times a week for a year and a half, at $70 a sample. He didn’t dwell on the outcome—the possible children, the various mothers. He went on with his plans for a legal career, his artistic pursuits, and his own family life. Last year, he mentioned to colleagues that he’d been a sperm donor during his time off. “Have you ever Googled your donor number?” one of the other lawyers asked.
Raul had not. But that morning at work he typed his donor number into the search engine. The first hit was a blog called Django Djournal, a mother’s chronicle of the baby, Django, she had conceived with Raul’s sperm. At the top of the page was a photo of a chubby 2-year-old in striped shorts, smiling halfheartedly—Raul himself as a toddler. “It was out of context,” he explained. “So it took me a minute to realize why it was familiar.” During the period he was donating, he’d sold the photograph to the bank for an extra $200, to give a sense of what a baby of his might look like.
The next photo on the page was of 6-month-old Django, and the resemblance was indeed striking—the dark hair and eyes, the open face. Raul and his wife had two children of their own by this time, and Django resembled them, too. What made the blog entry even more transfixing, though, were the photographs of two other babies also conceived with Raul’s sperm. Their mothers had tracked down the blog, and the result was an impromptu online community of mothers who’d used Raul’s sperm.
Should there be a limit to how many times one man fathers a child by donation? Depending on the clinic, maybe twenty to over a hundred children could be produced by one man. An article in The Atlantic raises the question of whether sperm, particularly sperm like Raul’s that is in demand by multiple families, should be considered a product for sale or something more. In the internet age, there are also issues of privacy, obligations, and genetics. But there are no easy answers -especially for children who were conceived in the age of secrecy and grew up to confront the openness of the internet -and all their parents. Link
We’ve all — and by ‘we’ I mean my more inebriated co-bloggers at last year’s Christmas party — would like to avoid being photographed while relaxing in public. So this beer holder developed by the Argentine ad agency Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi could come in handy. When a sensor built into this beer chiller detects a flash, it emits its own flash in order to overexpose any photograph:
The agency says the device, which has so far only been planted in regional bars, is a real product that has been field tested and actually works. “We placed several beer coolers in different bars in the North of Argentina,” says Maxi Itzkoff, executive creative director at Del Campo. “People took lots of photos that ended up being blurry beyond recognition and then uploaded them to social media anyway.”
Link -via Glenn Reynolds
Do you use Gmail or other email cloud service? Then you’d be surprised to learn that according to the law, the government can get your email without a warrant if it’s older than 180 days. David Kravets of Wired’s Threat Level explains:
As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986. At that time, e-mail left on a third-party server for six months was considered to be abandoned, and thus enjoyed less privacy protection. However, the law demands warrants for the authorities to seize e-mail from a person’s hard drive.
A coalition of internet service providers and other groups, known as Digital Due Process, has lobbied for an update to the law to treat both cloud- and home-stored e-mail the same, and thus require a probable-cause warrant for access. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on that topic Tuesday.
The companies — including Google, AOL and AT&T — maintain that the law should be changed to reflect that consumers increasingly access their e-mail on servers, instead of downloading it to their hard drives, as a matter of course.
But the Obama administration testified that imposing constitutional safeguards on e-mail stored in the cloud would be an unnecessary burden on the government. Probable-cause warrants would only get in the government’s way.
Did you forget where you parked your car? Well, a new camera-based surveillance system in parking lots can help:
Santa Monica Place recently unveiled the nation’s first camera-based "Find Your Car" system. Shoppers who have lost track of their vehicle amid a maze of concrete ramps and angled stripes can simply punch their license plate number into a kiosk touch screen, which then displays a photo of the car and its location.
But what’s the price of that convenience? Can this system be used by Big Brother to snoop on where you are and what you’re doing?
But what if that magic involved an array of 24/7 surveillance cameras and was also available to police and auto repossessers? What if it could be tapped by jilted lovers, or that angry guy you accidentally cut off in traffic? Would the convenience be worth the loss of privacy?
Those are some of the questions civil libertarians and others are asking as technology capable of spying on motorists and pedestrians is converted to widespread commercial use.
Martha Groves of The Los Angeles Times has the story: Link (Photo: Mariah Tauger/LA Times)
QuitFacebookDay is a pledge organized by two Facebook users with a simple goal: get as many people as possible to delete their Facebook accounts on Memorial Day as a reaction to the countless privacy concerns in the news recently. With new Facebook alternatives gaining steam and press, such as the upcoming Diaspora project, a lot have speculated that Facebook is beginning a slow descent. Over 12 thousand members have already pledged to quit Facebook, and the numbers are growing rapidly.
For us it comes down to two things: fair choices and best intentions. In our view, Facebook doesn’t do a good job in either department. Facebook gives you choices about how to manage your data, but they aren’t fair choices, and while the onus is on the individual to manage these choices, Facebook makes it damn difficult for the average user to understand or manage this. We also don’t think Facebook has much respect for you or your data, especially in the context of the future.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by nmiller.
Writer Evan Ratliff pondered the same question while writing an article for Wired magazine about people who for various reasons had tried to start over with completely new lives . A few months later he found himself a willing volunteer to find out firsthand what the experience entailed. With a 24 hour head start, $2000 cash stuffed in his belt and a fake office to set up in Las Vegas he drove his Honda Civic across the Bay bridge, then out of California in a bid to disappear entirely. Leaving behind family, a girlfriend, and any semblance of a normal life for a month while assuming an entirely new identity.
The magazine periodically published clues and made accessible to their online community all the information a private investigator might be privy to, as well as placing a $5000 bounty on Evan’s head. His travels took him across the country a few times, his disguises changed almost daily and online groups spontaneously emerged to track and document his every move. Amateurs and professionals from coast to coast took to the chase disseminating all the details they could uncover, staking out airports and bars, even trying to glean details from acquaintances as varied as his cat sitter.
In the end it wasn’t nearly what Evan had expected when he began.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by renderanything.
Advertising has always been an enterprise fraught with uncertainty. How can you know if all that money you’re paying is actually making you a return? Who’s actually even giving your advertisements a look? And are those people really paying attention? With some forms of media (e.g. on the internet), these questions are relatively easy to answer, but with other forms, like billboards, it’s still a significant gamble.
Enter billboard cameras, the type that can monitor not only how many people see a billboard, but what type of people they are too:
They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database. Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon. The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.
Nothing could go wrong with this plan, right? Hit the Link and decide for yourself.
(image by flickr user simon scott)
