A while back Mitchell Porter decided it was less important to blog about climate change because nanotechnology will kill us all. Now he’s blogging about n=4 super-Yang-Mills theory, whatever that is. Chris from Mixing Memory is alive and well according to an unnamed internet person. I think the last name I mentioned Mitchell I also brought up Vichy’s new blog, but now that’s the old one and the new one is here, although testing now it appears to be private. Youtube user page here.
October 2, 2011
October 3, 2011 at 2:32 am
Well, well, well…
Google officailly turned to the “dark side”, when trying to access the link above
http://thismachinekillscommunists.blogspot.com/
I had the surprise that to access a blogspot URL Google *requires* that you login to your own blogspot account (so, validating your identity).
It seems that it applies to *any* blogspot user/url, can anybody confirm this?
October 7, 2011 at 7:17 pm
Well, it made me log in, then told me “this blog i only open to invited users, which you ain’t. So go the fuck away.”
Is your blog invitation only?
October 8, 2011 at 1:50 am
I used to read vichy’s old blog. Vichy if you’re reading this please invite me.
October 8, 2011 at 5:18 am
There’s a goofy war on anonymity going on with these megacorp social network sites. For example, I can’t name myself “Hopefully Anonymous” in either facebook or blogspot registered ID’s. So I go as Hope FullyAnne Nonemus, or some such thing.
October 8, 2011 at 6:39 am
There seem to be a nasty trend looming about anonymity and privacy, David Brin’s Transparent Society has apparently been endorsed by the “big names” and the future may end up in a black-and-white dichotomy, either you are fully transparent and expose your arse inside out to the whole world or you are on the “dark side” of Anonymous and the Russian Business Network, very ominous…
October 8, 2011 at 9:40 am
I don’t think it’s a big deal because cranks and eccentrics don’t matter much. It’ll lead to a more boring and repressed reality for those with some niche aesthetics like most of us in TGGP’s comment section. I think it’s the wrong call but but I don’t see a course reversal by this stampede of tech elites.
October 11, 2011 at 10:27 am
Oh! Yeah?
Not a “big deal”?
Google Hands Wikileaks Volunteer’s Gmail Data to U.S. Government
(WITHOUT a warrant…)
October 11, 2011 at 2:18 pm
We (TGGP comments section) ain’t wikileaks.
October 11, 2011 at 9:35 pm
Allright, talk again 5 years from now, remember…
(that won’t be 1984, just really, really, deep shit annoyance)
October 13, 2011 at 12:39 am
So there are two different areas where we can talk about transparency. There are blog comment sections, where folks like Facebook are making it more difficult to be anonymous (strictly speaking, impossible, though pseudonyms are a decent substitute). Then there’s wikileaks, which is built on a model of having anonymous leaks and retaining no information that can be used by the feds to track down the source (Assange was even involved in rubberhose encryption). The latter is of course a bigger deal than my comment section, and Kevembuangga is arguing that similarly anti-privacy forces are affecting both.
Personally, I find the idea of the transparent society attractive (“knowledge is good”, as Faber college teaches), but that’s not quite what we’re looking at.
IA little while back I went to a meetup Radley Balko called and was surprised to find that nobody else I met was in software (I thought everyone one the internet was) and explained that I may be a small cog in the coming surveillance state and then cited the transparent society as possible hope that it won’t be so bad. I don’t know if the people I talked to were actually familiar with the reference though (I personally haven’t read any of Brin’s books and don’t intend to).
October 13, 2011 at 2:17 am
Of course technicalities differ but these are not that much “separate” realms, the core idea is the same: do you allow anonymity or not?
It’s already badly screwed, I recently setup a Gmail account to register(supposedly) anonymously to a private forum, yet Google insisted to identify me by calling me at home for an activation code.
Youtube refuse to let me login with an old pseudo I had and insist I login via some of my Gmail accounts or Facebook which it seems to have access to by some cookie mongering (or may be even IP number?).
All that crap is gonna get worse and worse.
October 13, 2011 at 6:29 am
Hopefully I am not a US citizen nor California resident:
Calif. Governor Veto Allows Warrantless Cellphone Searches, enjoy…
(not 1984 but…)
October 13, 2011 at 7:04 am
In in the probably rare space (I like to think of it as nuanced) where I think we need much fewer legal privacy protections against large organizations (govt. or corporate) for their own analytic use, but aesthetically I want much strong privacy protections from exposure to the larger public of our private activities (the harder case is to argue that my aesthetic preference is actually better for society, it’s an empirical question I don’t know the answer to).
October 13, 2011 at 7:47 am
LOL, it’s very kind to you to be willing to give up your privacy if your aesthetic preferences aren’t “better for society”.
Do you think the suckers on the “other side” have such qualms?
October 15, 2011 at 12:05 pm
With iOS 5 You’ll Be Stalked Like Never Before
More of the same, don’t worry it’s for your own good…
(not yet convinced HA that all this will suck big time?)
P.S. I am in Europe and I don’t even have a cell phone, so, not yet my problem but it’s only a reprieve.
October 15, 2011 at 6:28 pm
I don’t think H.A said he was “willing to give up” anything, just that it’s hard for him to make an argument to the contrary. So there might be something he individually benefits from, but if your utility function doesn’t depend on his benefit you won’t care.
October 9, 2011 at 12:00 pm
George, my blog is certainly not invitation only. Vichy isn’t a reader here, so your question will go unanswered.
Yglesias used to have Disqus, a much better commenting system. The new system takes Facebook as the default, though I usually try to use the Yahoo option. Pretty often it fails to post a comment and asks me to log in even after I did the Yahoo login. I really hate it.
H.A, why can’t you register as Hopefully Anonymous when using blogspot? You have a blogspot site by that name. Is the name already taken?
October 9, 2011 at 5:44 pm
I don’t know. I put in a limited effort when moved to, then use what workarounds I can.
October 9, 2011 at 5:48 pm
Oh, I misread you. Blogspot is apparently aping facebook, and when they ask you to register a firstname/lastname, they don’t accept my preference as Hopefully/Anonymous because their simple screening software detects them to be fake names. It’s just clunky anti-anonymity assholery, but they’ll probably only get better and more aggressive at it.
Since most people don’t much value anonymity on the internet, but a tech elite clique really values barriers to anonymity, I see the clique winning, and not much changing except me and my cohort will probably blog unconventional thoughts less and spend more time doing conventional things.