BWAB: Do “They” Have The Right To Know?

Let me preface this with saying that I gave up any debate on this issue, long ago. This blog is an archeological relic and I barely ever shlock stuff over here unless it's just irresistibly retarded like this one.

“Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.”

Please list all aliases or “handles” you have used to communicate on the Internet.

Bozeman isn't simply interested in finding out where to look for potentially embarrassing personal details; the city wants full disclosure, since the form demands username and password information for each. City employees will apparently be able to dig through any information applicants have put online, regardless of whether it's accessible to the public.

It's probably safer to ascribe this sort of behavior to cluelessness rather than malice. (Or maybe not). But the cluelessness is apparently a two-way street, as Sullivan indicated that nobody has objected to the city's request for login credentials.

Yeah, right, whatever ... if you're only discovering this question NOW, you basically lost your right to ask it nearly 10 years ago.

And as an extension of that utter cluelessness, "people like them" continue to wonder why "people like us" simply do not fit into this society. Sorry, but we just can't teach rocks to read, regardless of the persistence of our own earnest optimism, patience, and fortitude.

Sometimes, ipso facto, this is the kind of stuff that makes me suspect that "we" -- some theoretical and as yet ill-defined nebulous sub-group of the human race -- are already an entirely distinct evolutionary branch of the species from "them" -- occupants of the middle of the bell curve of human cognition.

If none of this makes sense to you, dear reader, don't worry, here's a special translation just for you: "OMG! Look at all the Ponies and Rainbows! OMG! LOL!"

Profiles as Mitigation Measure

Randomly checking my profile site today, I discovered that now, for a limited time, you can order your own mini set of 25 Google Profile biz cards.

Perhaps this is part mitigation measure (of dubious effectiveness, I suspect) for the previous post’s observations?

If it’s not that, it is certainly more fulfillment what we began talking about here in the first place and drives another welcomed nail into this blog’s coffin.

Ideas aren’t *supposed* to be hip and novel forever, they are supposed to come to fruition; and with luck, incrementally improve the world for humans in some modest way as they metamorphose from larvae to butterfly, fluttering off into the ever fleeting future.

EPIC FAIL! What Google says can make or break your career

“Any information that raises a red (or yellow, or even faded green) flag can quickly take candidates out of consideration for a job,” he said.

Apparently HR hasn't receive the memo yet: It's way too late to go back to your make believe saccharin corporate world.

Promoting an increasingly artificial boundary between Humanity and Work serves no good or productive cause. It's far too late to put the genie back in the bottle. That might be what the Corporate Control Freaks want, but We the People outnumber them, massively.

Corporations are all "made" men and women and WE "make" them. So BE YOURSELF, 100% of the time. It's their culture that must change to accommodate us, because without us, companies are nothing.

You're no longer in the position to dictate the terms of our existence Computer World Canada, Robert Half, IBM, or whatever. We are the talent that you need and we're no longer leaving our humanity at the door.

We tried it your almighty know-it-all market way and you failed, repeatedly and completely; now, the tables have turned.

Welcome to the Identity Web, the Human Internet, where People Are First and Corporations Shall Now Serve Our Requirements.

See you at Happy Hour!

Isn't it Time You Owned Your Identity?

Rolling on the floor laughing my ass off. When I made the first post to this blog (and wrote the first essay much earlier) people looked at me like, "WTF are you talking about, man?" You'd think eventually one would get used to that, huh?

Now, even a Chi.mp gets it, the importance of a "Centralized You" on the web. Awesome.

Oh, and of course PeopleBrowsr takes it completely to the n'th degree.

Newsvine: Whose Vine Is It, Anyway?

Note: My crusading days are well past me now, so this is mostly for my own entertainment, though there is an infinitesimal embedded hope that someone, somewhere in this sprawling User Generated Content circus, will eventually pause to think some of these things through and improve the current, mostly cobbled-together early model for aggregating, exchanging, and circulating information value. Cheers!

On Aug 15, 2008, at 2:00 PM, Newsvine Help wrote:

Hello,

Please note that Newsvine is a platform designed to enable collaborative discovery and discussion of the news -- it is not a vehicle for self-promotion. As such, it is the community's policy to prohibit the seeding of links to your own web site, and/or the posting of material deemed to be advertising or of a promotional nature. You are welcome to list a web address under the 'personal home page' field on your account settings page. A link to your home page will then be available to other users on all of your articles and seeded links.

This policy -- and all other guidelines from the Newsvine Code of Honor and User Agreement -- is designed to help keep Newsvine an honorable place. We fully understand if this particular guideline wasn't immediately clear.

Best regards,

- Newsvine Team
Additional information can be found here:
http://www.newsvine.com/_cms/info/codeofhonor
http://www.newsvine.com/_cms/info/useragreement

My Response

Oh, the policy is quite clear, I just believe that it is wrong for a number of reasons.

Foremost, *I* am your CONTENT and I own ME and all that *I* produce. My work is a gift from me to you if I choose to use your pretty templates to do what I already do in a hundred other places.

If anyone is curious to know why the policy is wrong, one could start by watching this http://blip.tv/play/Ab69Ra47 and reading this.

If none are so curious, that's okay too, we'll just use some other service for publication of our particular newsvines. There is absolutely nothing special that forces me or anyone else to use this particular "vine."

Not attempting to be unproductively combative ... just passin' on another view of truthiness for those who care to consider it.

What many social media sites are not quite realizing is that they are equally fortunate to have all of us as we are to have the pretty templates that sites like Newsvine provide. That is pretty much the only thing of value NV provides: a pretty template with predictable subject hierarchy, and a statistically unknown (though possibly some day significant) global brand. Even then, the brand is only as valuable as US, THE PEOPLE, unless you want to just be a Green Themed version of Google News.

I appreciate that it burned a ton of VC cash to get to where you are, but we the people don't really care about those debts and we are of equal and even greater value than pretty templates and fledgling brands. So feel free to banish my account if you like, it is no skin off my nose in the least. It is, however, ONE LESS CONTENT PROVIDER and one less ad viewer and distributor for Newsvine, right?

Again, please pardon the abruptness, but it is to establish a point that seems to not be getting through to people who really do need to find ways to adapt the model, or ships will indeed sink. Desperate times call for desperate measures, right?

I am more than happy to intelligently discuss all of this with anyone who cares to help prevent Newsvine's otherwise inevitable bankruptcy; but if there are no such people at NV, I only wish you ...

All the best,

m.s.

Current state of eWork

oDesk and Elance are cited as examples. Either way, u r pwnd. What business is it of the client's if you outsource a product or service they hired you to deliver? If the deliverable meets and exceeds all mutually agreed upon quality standards and is delivered within time and budget, you have fulfilled your every obligation.

eWork norms are in the process of being established. YOU have a choice as to how you participate and what you help to become normalized, so think of the kind of workplace you are creating for your children. You are not a powerless inconsequential cog, you are a VOTE, and votes ultimately decide all collective outcomes; at least in any environment even remotely resembling a democratic atmosphere.

You WILL Provide A Mug Shot

Like it or not. On Slate.com:

Lately, the Internet has been trying—politely—to find out what I look like. Gmail suggested that I upload a photo "that everyone will see when you email them." My new Apple computer asked whether it could take a webcam shot for iChat. And Facebook was so annoyed with my question mark icon (where a photo would normally be) that it found a photo of me that someone else had tagged, surrounded my head with a red square, and asked whether it might make a good profile picture. The text-y era of the nobody-knows-you're-a-dog Internet is ending. You either have a head shot or you're invisible.

The more you think about Web head shots, the more loaded a social artifact they become. Scholars have begun to examine "impression management" online.

No kidding? You mean, Online Identity Management became a science after all. Gee, never saw that one coming, did we? Slate goes on to summarize:

So it seems that you, Internet person, are left with two options: Just pick a photo and go for it, or go the arty/ironic route. It's not as if you can stay hidden forever. Eventually someone will upload you to Flickr or tag you in a wedding pic wearing an unflattering, unchosen color.

And where exactly do they derive the right to TAG YOU? It doesn't matter, does it? It's way beyond that.

Welcome to the Transparent Society. Game over. Blog obviated. Another Quixotic battle reaches its inevitable outcome. Don't worry, it's now the age of Wind Energy, so plenty of new windmills to tilt upon!

Onward.

Why Lance Cottrell defends Anonymity

The battle over the role of anonymity continues to rage. Mostly, it is those who are frustrated that they are unable to attack YOU instead of your IDEAS with which they might disagree with evangelical fervor. A primary function of anonymity is to protect humans from unjust retaliation for holding unconventional or even threatening ideas that might prove to influence society away from it's current configuration. Tyrants have always resorted to name-calling, marginalizing, and defending their status quo by threat of violence because there is nothing more dangerous to a tyrant than an idea who's time has come; whether that be democracy, or the technoprogressive advancement and enhancement of persons exercising their supposedly inalienable right to LIBERTY from social and character assassinations by those defenders of the Static Norm who seek to keep the world under their collective analogical thumbs.

If not for voices of reason such as Lance Cottrell, your right to Grow, Adapt, and Evolve over time could become permanently revoked by those who seek to strap you down permanently to the current version of you and your developing opinions, your evolving online and offline identity.

In "A question of identity," Lance does an excellent job of describing the practical foundations for many of the values promoted and defended in this blog. It's worth the click.

Digital Homocide: It Can Happen To You

From the "We Told You So About A Million Times" files: A Google Living Nightmare.

Greenspun: No Google Hits, No Job.

A couple weeks back, Phil posted this anecdote:

One of the hackers/company owners at the conference I attended in California said something that interested me: “When I get a resume, the first thing I do is type the person’s name into Google. If nothing comes up, I trash the resume without reading it.”

This employer assumes that any competent programmer has left some trace of him or herself in version control trees of open-source software, question and answer forums, and other repositories accessible to Web search crawlers.

This is yet another bit of compelling anecdotal evidence that Google has -- in tandem with achieving it's de-facto monopoly in search -- indeed incurred the responsibility to provide tools to individuals to permit them configure and update their own Online Identity Management.

I'll do my best to come back and link to some specific articles from the blog, later; but it shouldn't take more than a few minutes of browsing below to see what I've been trying to get across about this topic for almost seven years, now.

gWifey: The New Google Wife Finder

I wonder where does this fit in the Open Source Physical Security matrix?

Here's Google latest plan to take over the galaxy with the power of their fully armed and operational server fleet: let you tag everything you want, from your dog to a book to your cellphone to your car keys, and have it controlled at all times using RFID. According to a report on the Daily Mail.

Of course, you have to consider the source, here. The Daily Mail is actually so irrationally paranoid as to use such captions as, "Facing the future: Will too much power be concentrated in Google's hands?"

Obviously, The Daily Mail is completely out of touch with reality as Google's SEC filings clearly promise that they can't ever be evil. Besides, first you'd have to define what is "evil," then you'd have to overcome the Empirical Fact that the first 50% of Google's name is a 75% instantiation of the word "Good." In Sergey we Trust.

Oh wait, there's my good friend's RFID moving right over ... toward ... uhhh ... my wife's RFID ... what? She just said she was working late again ... let's zoom in here a sec ... what? Motel 6? Dammit! Not just one, but TWO cheapskates! Oh well, thankfully Google has thought of EVERYTHING with this handy, context-aware "click to divorce" AJAX widget!

Phew! That was close, I was almost inconvenienced there, for a moment. Gee, thanks Google!

Do NOT E-mail Us our Passwords

If I had a nano-cent for every time I've unleashed this rant to a bank, online broker, or web site, I'd be richer than Sergey by now.

Please, listen to Brad and DO NOT EMAIL US OUR PASSWORDS!

Memo: Bush Regime to Silence Dogood -- STFU!

Slashdot reporting:

"Protecting anonymity isn't a fight that can be won. Anyone that's typed in their name on Google understands that," said Kerr. Kurt Opsahl of the EFF said Kerr ignores the distinction between sacrificing protection from an intrusive government and voluntarily disclosing information in exchange for a service. "There is something fundamentally different from the government having information about you than private parties. We shouldn't have to give people the choice between taking advantage of modern communication tools and sacrificing their privacy."

Great. Just great. Brilliant. Yeah, THIS will really show those terrorists that they can't ruin our Legacy of Liberty. What's next? Look for the Bush Nazis to pull a Musharraf in the name of Foreign Surveillance Intelligence? Think it could never happen in America? That's what many day-to-day Germans thought, too. Besides, what can a nation of 300 lb. consumer cattle do about it? Answer: Absolutely nothing.

At least, that's what the machievellian pinheads would LIKE you to believe; but the truth about how much we should trust our government versus our own individual ability to act is a bit more complicated than that. Now more than ever is the time to advocate, educate, and actively support the Electronic Frontier Foundation and development of frameworks such as Open Source Physical Security (which, to the best of my understanding does NOT mean merely using something like LAMP with bolt-on iris readers -- although that could be one tiny part of the framework).

In contrast, OSPS means Open Source-style Security for the Whole Physical World and "preparing for bizarreness" as defined by the Girly Geeks over at She's Geeky and an important key Working Topic for Penguicon 6.0, April 18-20, 2008 in Troy, MI.

IIW2007: The Internet Identity Workshop

Coming soon to the Computer History Museum, December 3-5. Now is the time to register. Unfortunately, I was previously booked for this important weekend, but that doesn't mean you should miss it -- especially at the screaming deal bargain Student Rate. This is a key issue for defining Web 3.0 for which we desperately need New Thinking and Fresh Eyes on the subject.

Off Topic: Why Everyday Encryption will NEVER happen

Not strictly OIM related, but couldn't resist commenting. Sorry.

It's so sad. The folks at Kryptiva have done an absolutely stellar job, but the target audience is simply far to impatient and attention defecated (corporate version of ADD) to ever change behavior to this extent. Yes, Kryptiva has made the process as simple as possible, but no simpler; but it's not a technology problem. It's a human problem and humans will always be the problem.

Kryptiva - Democratizing Email Encryption - User Experience Demo

Sorry to say, but the closest you'll ever get to such laudable goals is to transparently secure the links between clients and switches, switches and servers, servers and routers, routers and clouds. At least by securing all the pipes -- a feat that leaves end users completely out of the loop -- administrators can ensure traffic integrity every but at the endpoints.

At some point, users do have to take on accountability for their own behavior, and for better or worse, as of Q4 2007, that point is still at the Windows login screen. <sigh>.

Who is this person?

Still think OIM doesn't matter? With Who Is This Person? :: Firefox Add-on Highlight any name on a web page and see matching information from LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Google News, Technorati, Yahoo Person Search, TailRank, ZoomInfo, IMDB, MySpace and more.

Chill. I'm not saying this is a bad thing ... I've just been saying since at least 2001 that this is an increasingly RELEVANT thing.

Suit against blogger a legal test in Paris, Texas

As reported by Chron.com - Houston Chronicle, clearly the concept of Innocent Until Proven Guilty is increasingly endangered as a species. What's the connection? Simple. There is ZERO need to violate an *alleged* offender's privacy. If guilt can be PROVEN, then and only then can a violation of privacy be entertained. Far too often, an allegation is equivalent to GUILT in the public perception courtroom.

Rather than ISP's handing over "questionable" bloggers, the correct direction for America should be to protect ALL *accused* and *indicted* individuals. Consider the case of the Duke college lacrosse team kids WRONGLY accused of rape for so long. We certainly need to protect *alleged* victims, but increasingly, a Wrongly Accused individual is at very high risk to themselves be a victim of public infamy; whether justified or empirically disproven. The explicit connection to OIM? If you happen to find yourself in any kind of controversy like this, the online world immortalizes such allegation like never before; constituting an unjust and defamatory blot on YOUR online identity. Why should I care if I have nothing to worry about myself? I must care PRECISELY because I have nothing to worry about, myself. It is the everyday do-gooder like you and me who are the most likely to wind up in such an unsavory situation. Just go ahead and cross the wrong politico or wrong former employer or wrong journalist ... and you'll be shocked at how quickly some version of this risk could quickly apply to you.

[T]he question is not whether a plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit should be able to get the name of an anonymous blogger, but "what hoops they have to jump through" before violating the blogger's free speech rights.

The number of corporate and political lawsuits around the country against "John Doe" bloggers has been growing dramatically since 2000, said University of Florida law professor Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky, an expert on these types of lawsuits.

Lidsky, a Texas native and graduate of the University of Texas law school, said most Internet libel lawsuits are brought to "chill the speech of bloggers," though some involve genuine defamation.

"It is evolving. You're seeing courts struggling to accommodate different interests," Lidsky said. "On the one hand, you do have a right to speak anonymously. On the other hand, you do not have the right to defame people."

As mentioned above, a FALSE ACCUSATION in itself is clearly a powerful form of defamation and one that LASTS FOREVER as part of the defamed victim's Online Identity Management so we must be very, very careful about the direction these cases lean when setting early precedents.

Mashable's DIY OIM Kit

It's very encouraging to see Mashable shine some much needed light on OIM with 25+ Ways to Manage Your Online Identity, along with Sean P. Aune's pragmatic observation that, "yes, there’s some irony that there are so many sites to manage your identity: hopefully all these will adopt a set of standards to make life easier for us all." As readers well know, I couldn't agree more. Of course, ultimately, it will be users who define which solutions become the Trillian or Meebo of OIM; but the first step is to inform people about both the issues and the solutions so that each can make the best informed vote possible. By definition, Online Identity Management is EVERYONE'S ISSUE. So go check out Mashable and become an informed OIM voter.

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Online Identity, Offline Responsibilty

Did you enjoy such Safe and Normal films as The Rose (Bette Midler) or Trading Places (Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd)? What if such a regular Safe and Normal producer of such Safe and Normal films, in the final work of his all-too-short life, subsequently told you about this? Sure, it's easy to dismiss crackpots, paranoid televangelists, and the tinfoil hat brigade, but what happens when Safe and Normal people, in growing numbers, begin coming to the same Dangerous and potentially Revolutionary conclusions? Then what?

Forget for a moment the relatively benign question of Who Owns you Online, and just consider who or what pw3nZ you, period. Are you fully and authentically enjoying the reasonably unfettered Liberty granted by your Constitution? Really? Do you even know, in the most simple terms, what that word means? If you do, and if you are experiencing something akin to that kind of Liberty, you may well be among an increasingly small number who can honestly answer yes to such questions. If that's the case, do you owe any marginal obligation to your fellow citizens, whatsoever? Or if you're good to go, is that good enough, and F the rest?

All I'm suggesting is to stay informed and to think responsibly about the potential for unintended consequences, online and offline, that's all.

Moving forward, there may be equally compelling arguments for both achieving global political unity and preserving global political diversity; all I am suggesting here is that it is our obligation ... YOURS and MINE ... to think, to deliberate, to debate, and participate in ways that will hopefully result in the best outcomes for the greatest number of individuals. There are significant risks and unprecedented opportunities ahead for Americans and for Humanity, in the coming century. While it's crucial to man the lifeboats, it's clearly best for the ship and its passengers if we never need use them.

Happy Labor Day, and may each of our labors be both richly rewarding and commensurately rewarded.

LifeLock or LifeCrock?

Would be interesting to hear from people whether or not this service has been of any use to everyday people. Running advertisements on CNBC would certainly seem to lend the venture credibility, yet Mashable levels some extremly hefty indictments against the service. From the site:

LifeLock Identity Theft Prevention & Identity Theft Protection Agency is the leading industry leader in the rapidly growing field of Identity Theft Protection. We are based in Tempe, Arizona. Our company is led by experienced and successful entrepreneurs and industry experts. We are backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the leading venture capital firms in the world. We serve tens of thousands of consumers in every state of the union, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Take a moment to browse and learn about the team that will work for you.

And the Hamsters shall in-Ferret the Earth

Who 0wn3d'z U Online, today? Just your friendly neighborhood SideJacker; who, once she's followed your cookie crumb trail to your almighty hidden secret Yahoo and Gmail accounts, is free to be your constant shadow companion; to send things AS YOU; to scan all of your archived items for any manner of ID-absconding information from banking information to those lying cheating emails with your fellow online philanderers and former back stabbers that you promised never to deal with again. Then you wonder why you're racked with paralyzing and debilitating guilt all your life. The hidden things shall all be made plain, my friend; and as always, what you do when you think nobody is watching defines your real character. From that, even the one and only truly individual and originally novel online IdentityMan can not save you.

The Boring Side of The Identity Web

It has been said that variety is the spice of life, but monotony finances it.

In partnership with Zoho Office, E-Signatures, Digital Signatures, Contract Management, NDA, and Document Management from EchoSign, helps to prove that you are who you say you are and mean what you say you mean. Welcome again to Web 3.0: it's Web 2.0 plus Identity Aggregation, Authentication, and Non-Repudiation.

SPOCK pwnZ U online ...

More momentum in Identity Aggregation this morning on mashable:Spock Officially Launches People Search Engine

Spock is a search engine that collects data about you from across the web, aggregating it all to offer a complete (or as close to complete as Spock can get) picture of your web presence. Pulling data from social networks like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, among other places in the web, Spock looks to offer users the important information about you as a person–your occupation, age, and even a bit of history thrown in there to add background information.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who remains skeptical, Mr. Spock:

For many people, the MySpace or Facebook profile is their most prized online possession. How many of them will want to give full control of that possession to a company they never heard of, and what value do they get from it? And for people like me, who already appear at the top of the Google search listings, what incentive is there to enter all of my information into a walled garden like Spock? Anything that I want people to find about me in a search engine, they can already find. And the features they offer are all available on other social networks. I am skeptical about an attempt to birck over a user experience that aggregates across other social networks. Spock doesn't solve any problems that I have.

I think that entity search is a great idea, and the big search engines will add features related to people search. But I don't think they'll do it this way. Who knows, maybe the "ask people for all their passwords" and "brick over LinkedIn/Facebook" approach will work out. But not for me, not for now.

Facebook is my [OIM] boytoy and LinkedIn is my [OIM] fiance

That's Susan Mernit's [OIM-ized] blog entry and it's right on the mark.

Complete Privacy Options from Ask.com

Well done! Congratulations! After calling for tools like this for years, ASK.COM has finally become the first to meet this undeniable requirement for Web 3.0, protecting your Individual Privacy as you Search. Ask.com to be the First Major Search Engine to Offer Complete Privacy Options.

We'll see if several logical next steps follow, and when they do, today could well be the day that we can look back to say Web 3.0 - The Identity Web was born.

Too Late for GOONgle to be first, but now they better get crackin' and become second. In all fairness to the goongies, it looks like their avarice and greed could actually create some powerfully positive side effects for Ethernet Everywhere.

7th Grade Playground Popularity Contest as Web 3.0 Biz Model?

On the lighter side of OIM, Mashable Reports:

Gleamd to Launch “Digg for People”: The idea of Gleamd is to spotlight interesting people who are doing interesting things on the Internet, they say: how useful that proves is debatable. You could also potentially use it to see if a group of strangers find you interesting.

This is interesting because the flip side of the coin to managing your online identity is that once OIM is defined and controlled by YOU, then the community gets to decide what that MEANS the "them." (Insert spooky, conspiracy-theory-provoking .mp3 file and a covert flash of the Neuralizer via tiny inverse-something-or-other pulse wave to the MacBook iCam).

Our social identities are all co-created by a ridiculously scatterbrained analogical committee; perhaps that's why we're all so messed up -- whether we recognize it or not. There is no single entity in our current human context who can claim the title of prototype "normal" ... no, not one. Roughly speaking, the analogical committee for Total Identity Definition and Integration (TIDI {tie-dye, of course}) is comprised of, at the very least: our individual genetic predisposition (nature), our formative upbringing (nurture), our immediate surroundings (environment), our ever-evolving -- hopefully -- developmental self-awareness (consciousness), the perceptions and opinions -- accurate or not -- about us as held by others (community), and the popular culture, conventions, and norms -- positive or otherwise -- of our regional demographic group (society). All of the best and worst cliche's linking committees to product design outcomes clearly apply. In the end, we're all PRODUCTS of that unweildy mishmash of contributing and influencing factors. Welcome my son (and daughter) .... to The Machine.

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GoDaddy is the latest to Attack Anonymizer

In our last chapter, boys and girls, we gave a glimpse into why your privacy is toast and Anonymizer is Doomed. So GoDaddy is evidently the latest to join the Empire's Fleet to crush your puny rebel privacy and co-opt your online identity. When sending a very important business email today via GD's Web-Based Email 4.10, here's what happened multiple times until it finally dawned on my that they'd joined the Empire. Not sure precisely how long this has been going on, as I just now had to resort to the web-based mail as a backup measure with a particular customer.

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at
gem-wbe26.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following
addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<vip1@companycorp.com>:
208.109.NNN.NNN failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 554 The message was rejected because it contains
prohibited virus or spam content

<vip2@companycorp.com>:
208.109.NNN.NNN failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 554 The message was rejected because it contains
prohibited virus or spam content

--- Below this line is a copy of the message.

Return-Path: <me.myself@companycorp.com>
Received: (qmail 29414 invoked by uid 99); 9 Jul 2007 18:15:42 -0000
Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2007 11:15:42 -0700
From: Me Myself <me.myself@companycorp.com>
Subject: Important Item
To:vip1@companycorp.com
cc:vip2@companycorp.com
Message-ID: <20070709111xxx...@email.secureserver.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/html; CHARSET=US-ASCII
User-Agent: Web-Based Email 4.10.1
X-Originating-IP: 209.59.32.201

Just in case you hadn't notice, it's that last line that is the give away. When using Anonymizer, GoDaddy is flat out lying with the message, "contains prohibited virus or spam content." That's completely false for at least two reasons:

1. It was a plain text email with zero attachments, not even sig blocks.
2. Turning off Anonymizer and getting a new X-Originating-IP allows the mail to go through without a hitch.

So GoDaddy has committed at least two bald-faced, bald-headed, and not-very-cute even in cutoff tank tops offenses:

1. They've blocked or black-listed usage of Anonymizer.
2. They lie about the reason for failure to transport your mail.

Oddly enough, one can login to the Web-Based Mail, one just can't send mail. Or maybe it's not so odd. By bouncing back the LYING error message, perhaps many people wouldn't ever realize that it had to do with their protecting their privacy and online identity with an anonymizing proxy.

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Time for Summer Vacation

Maybe permanently.

"While membership in groups will always matter, the authenticity of the individual will finally reassert itself as the atomic unit from which any credible and useful social network emerges." - The One True Authentic and Only Indisputably Original and Unequivocally Exclusive and Pansophically Tautological IdentityMan (tm){sm}(R)[pat. pending]

While I'm still skeptical of corporate motives, it could very well be that Web 3.0 will become known -- at least in part -- as The Identity Web. Stage one: Widespread denial (2001-2005). Stage two: Social Networking (2005-2007); Stage three: Stand alone Identity Aggregation sites (2007-2008). Stage four: Concede that we were right all along (2008-2009). At the final stage, all the big search engines will be forced by both popular appeal and the marketplace to allow you to finally control your own identity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the numbers are *very* rough generalizations. No social or technology trends develop in such discrete units of time and I'm only referring to the current dispensation.

Surely, if you think you're an "online community and identity" veteran, you'd need to have some IDEA of how long StumbleUpon has been around. These luminaries pretty much INVENTED "The Social Web" that we know today, as early as 2001. Yeah, that's how long some Very Smart People have been paying attention to this social networking stuff; despite a few rowdy newcomers who seem to think that they somehow invented community and identity over the last 2 or 3 years. Word: you didn't invent jack and you don't own jack.

In fact, Usenet was actually one of the earliest global "Social Networks." Even prior to that, some fairly smart people participated (and helped build) Fidonet and various BBS Communities that were absolutely the genetic origins of today's Social Networking. Sorry, but your "new and hip causes" are just not all that new, nor all that hip. Berkeley 1972? Now, that was hip AND new.

Which leads to the reason that this post may be one of the last for this ole blog. I began voicing this particular issue in 2001 and picked up tracking various OIM related items here in early 2006, partly as a way to just play around with an evolving Blogger platform (no, the original paid blogger founders never did pay up on the "free pyras" promised to me as a paying customer, but that's another story).

At this point, my original insights about OIM have all be thoroughly validated and the marketplace is responding; however haltingly. If these efforts continue (as I expect they will) I can now see a fairly clear path to resolution. A sufficient number of Smart People have finally either Paid Attention or reached a similar conclusion about the urgency and primacy of OIM, based on the data; and entrepreneurial solutions are beginning to proliferate in sufficient numbers to be solidly self-sustaining.

The current trend of Aggregation of "social networking" sites will continue to form a solid foundation for individuals to get a handle on what I've referred to as OIM. Bright young people are already realizing, by way of the practical, hands-on exercise of aggregating their "friends" information from various sites and services, that they are consolidating and polishing a lasting Online Identity for THEMSELVES.

Finally, people are already realizing, "Oh! This was as much about ME as all my friends!" Granted, for some, it was about THEM, all along; but for many, the social networking craze was about The Group more than the individual. This focus will likely change dramatically over the next 18 months or so, even if the change is not widely heralded as newsworthy in empire ink. While membership in groups will always matter, the authenticity of the individual will finally re-assert itself as the atomic unit upon which any credible and useful social network is built.

Which means that anonymity's days may be numbered in this current frenzy to proclaim ME, ME, ME, I OWN, I OWN, I OWN; and with the exodus of anonymity, a loss of loyal cognitive dissonance and freedom of expression at the fringes could give rise to the golem that bites back.

This too is the same as it ever was. The more significant the social trend or policy, the more significant the potential for unanticipated blow back. So, while OIM has been of concern to me for the past 6 or 7 years, there are vastly bigger issues facing all of us, just beyond the horizon, and I must begin turning my attention in new directions.

Presently, I feel that I have given sufficient energy to the case for OIM and leave it to others to hold onto The Cause as it declines into increasing obviousness. If OIM is essentially incorporated into all the major search engines (either by internal development, acquisition, or market-mandated indexing preferences) by 2008 or 2010, I will consider my energies invested from 2001 to date, well spent.

Ziki Launches Newest Version of Digital Life Aggregator

Benefits allegedly include you’ll get a bit higher on search engine results, such as Google. We'll see.

Is It OK that Google Owns Us?

Short answer: No. It's not. Period. Especially when so clearly premeditated.

Although today, as Mr. Self-Appointed Identity Man (yep, every bit as self-appointed as the fairer gendered legacy version) has been saying for YEARS, eWeek now suggests, "The fury boils down to one question: whether or not it's OK for Google to own us."

eWeek goes on to add, "Make no mistake, Google owns you."

But it's such a cute word ... it's so ... gooogly and everything. Surely that can't be harmful.

But look at all the Good we do with our Evil Centralized Control of All the World's Indexed Information

Google Announces RechargeIT to Reduce Greenhouse Emissions. So clearly, Evil can be use for Good purposes; launching us into that eternal philosophical refrain, does the end justify the means?

Are Google's moves creeping you out? | CNET News.com

If not, you either haven't been reading this site, not paying attention in general, or not participating in society sufficiently to really give a damn. Of course, the less stake an individual feels she has in a given enterprise -- including society as a whole -- the less she tends to care. So if you don't really plan on contributing much, you may not care too much about the topic of this site. Personally, I've been creeped out by Google for years ... for reasons archived here and many other places; but maybe now that others like CNET News are asking the question, perhaps the general public will begin to take notice.

Protect your Identity with SpamBox.US

Spambox.US: just use it.

Apologies to IDW

Based upon a couple of comments received, it appears that I may have inadvertently upset Identity Woman. I hope that she will accept this sincere public acknowledgment of her concerns, her preeminence, and her leading identity as the first, the one, and only IDW! However, I do pose some of the same questions she addressed to me, in return, only for the purpose of opening what I hope could be a productive dialog.

For instance, why not open up the ID[W|M] franchise to the public? Why not encourage people to claim themselves as an IDENTITY WOMAN or an IDENTITY MAN? To my mind, this could be a great way to expand buy-in and participation. Personally, that's one of my actual motivations here ... to expand awareness and ACTION by everyday folks for whom OIM is a very real issue; but who may not yet be fully aware of the implications.

On the other hand, I suppose that in the wholly unexpected case that IDW is not on the side of expanding awareness of OIM issues and increasing participation in OIM causes, then I may have misunderstood her crusade and must sadly position myself in opposition to her otherwise noble cause!

To my mind, asking the public the questions: Are YOU an Identity Woman? Are YOU an Identity Man? ... could be great banners for RAISING AWARENESS. The answers of, "Yes, *I* am IDW ... IDM!" could thereby become monikers of EXPANDED UNDERSTANDING.

A person self-identifying as an IDW or IDM says, in effect, "Yes, I've read up on this stuff to some extent ... I've become somewhat aware ... I think I basically understand what all the "identity rants" are all about and I too ... Mrs. Jane Average ID and Mr. Joe Average ID ... believe in the importance of The Cause and support the efforts of those doing this important work.

Certainly, I gain nothing and contribute nothing in offending; so I hope that the authenticity of my motivations will become clear as others explore these possibly quirky contributions to OIM. After all, this is not my profession by any means; the thoughts captured herein merely represent one current socio-technological issue category among many categories that I view as important to our near and long-term personal and collective liberties.

Identity Man on IdentityMan.Info

For the past several years, Identity Woman has been Saving the World with User-centric Identity. For those who don't know her, Kaliya is a freelance evangelist for open standards in user-centric digital identity, whom I had the privilege of meeting briefly last year a community building event at Stanford.

// Update 06.04.2007 - though intended light heartedly, an unappreciated associating statement has been deleted from this entry out of respect for the wider OIM community. I hope this will show my goodwill in contributing in some small way to increasing awareness of OIM issues. //

Welcome another portal focused upon the issue of OIM: IdentityMan.Info. It may take a couple of days for DNS to propagate, but after that, the URL should be live.

I believe this reflective symbolic pseudonym makes sense because the Tools approach of IDW and the Corporate Accountability and Expansion of Identity approaches of IDM seemingly provide useful complementary perspectives for exploring the omni-dimensional implications of the Identity Big Bang, presently underway.

I do hope that IDW will consider this as the friendly gesture of partnership intended; as a natural expression of an enthusiastic shared interest in elevating the discussion and awareness of OIM issues, in general.

More IMPOSSIBLE Google OIM Infractions

More absolute direct lies, bugs, problems, discontinuities ... pick your excuse, but these are more almighty Google Results that are EMPIRICALLY FLAT WRONG. Whether intentional or due to ineptitude, both are PURE EVIL and the Google Golem is growing every day.

Google's virtual omnipresence renders pretty much all other efforts moot by comparison. Hence, my relative obsession with "picking on" poor little Google to the exclusion of others. With great power comes great responsibility, verdad?

1. Your search - link:michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us - did not match any documents.
Suggestions:

• Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
• Try different keywords.
• Try more general keywords.
• Try Yahoo or another search engine that accurately reports reality, such as Ask.com.

2. Your search - related:michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us - did not match any documents.

Right, NOT A SINGLE PAGE ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET even remotely related to me as a human being. Okay, right. Whatever.

Once again, 3vi1 iz az 3vi1 diZ, my friends.

Or, as Mashable put it:

It’s simple: a perfectly good thing can become bad when there’s too much of it. Google (actually, Immersive media, their partner for the Street View project) is not taking a picture: they’re taking all of them.

So once again, it looks like my little ole' lone voice from 2001 is not so lonely anymore. And whether you agree with my line of inquiry or not, it's still more imperative than ever that we never stop questioning.

.

Google Photos Stir a Debate Over Privacy - New York Times

No, really ... you think? This is sooo shocking and "newsworthy." Thank goodness the NYT is keeping us abreast such surprising and utterly unanticipated phenomena as this and this!

Why Anonymizer is Doomed

With all the rate shaping and packet pilfering at the ISPs, the Price of Privacy is just way too high. No conspiracy needed with typical results such as these, right? I must admit, I'm a bit confused by the upstream stats, although BBR did report "ISP upload compression" as possibly destroying the integrity of the upload test. Utterly shocking, right? Or not.

Without $99/yr. paid anonymizer Privacy:


With $99/yr. paid anonymizer Privacy:

Google Sabotaging Individual Online Identity Management Again?

As a follow up to the post covering this WSJ article, I submit the following experiment. Try a name-specific search:

• with Yahoo
• with Google

You see that? The URL that contains MY EXACT NAME ... http://Michael.Silverton.Palo-Alto.CA.us/ is somehow virtually eliminated from Google's results. Meanwhile, Yahoo correctly lists it as #1. I patiently await the feeble explanations for Google burying my self-selected individual online identity site -- even with quotations! If not for the blogware hack, Google would have succeeded in intentionally making it impossible for me to differentiate myself, to manage my own identity online. Given this post, I suspect they'll bury the blogware hack, next. Check back in six months to find out for yourself. Google has long since jumped the shark, boys and girls. When will we learn?

SearchMash: Google's Next-Gen Search Playground

Question: How can it possibly be that the site with URL included in the name http://Michael.Silverton.Palo-Alto.CA.us/ does not come up on the entire first page of results for the this specific Oh-So-Advanced Search on SearchMash, goog's next-gen search playground; much less, This One!? How can that even be possible without direct intervention to demote a particular site that is the Best URL Match and Best Authenticated Identity Match for a given search term?

The only reason you DO find this URL is because of a hack implemented a year or so ago, to further illustrate the emerging prevalence of OIM. Had I not implement the hack back then, you would not have found that URL as a text reference among these specific results, now. Will goog begin administering penalties for anticipating changes to their algorithms? Of course not! That would be evil!

The Attention Economy

Because what we pay attention to eventually shapes who we become -- our identity -- the Attention Economy has always been very closely related to the OIM economy. This interdependence is migrating to web 2.0++ just like everything else. From AttentionTrust:

"Our Attention data has real value and needs to be protected."

So you better hurry and Swarm over to the AttentionBank where you can:

"Reclaim the power of your data."

Somehow, meethinks, there is much more to come in this "track yourself so we don't have to" panoptic web. So which way are you paying attention? Getting paid for your attention? Or paying for someone else to control your attention? I know, it's all so arcane and confusing. Never mind, just don't think about it and it will all go away.

Monday is Wiretap the Internet Day

Slashdot Reports:

"Alien54 wrote with a link to a Wired blog entry noting that May 14th is the official deadline for internet service providers to modify their networks, and meet the FBI and FCC's new regulations. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires that everyone from cable services to Universities give them access, within certain parameters, to the usage habits of customers."

You're a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well

No. Ya' Think? Gee, I never would have imagined that you'd be considered a Nobody Unless Your Name Googles Well. The WSJ is such a trend-setter, don't you agree?

Woman denied degree over MySpace photo

Wow. This is udder BFS. Yes, "udder" is a play on words, retards; and BFS is Bull Effin Shite. Woman denied degree over photo. The most under-appreciate, underpaid, CRUCIAL role in society, and these morons want to body slam someone for daring to have fun ON THEIR OWN FREE TIME after enduring all the stress of gaining the "privilege" of dealing with the next generation of neglected brats? Puh-lease. This goes WAAAAY too far.

Online, The Cost of Convenience is Usually Privacy

As Digg users have noticed, in order to get its data, the add-on is sending the URL of every page you visit to Digg. I'll say that again: If you use this add-on, Digg is collecting your browsing history from this step forward. Whether or Digg actually saves the data or analyzes it is unknown, but this tool--which Digg didn't even build itself--does give the company a scary capacity to collect deep information about its users. It reminds us, of course, of Google, and the recently-released Web History feature that reveals to you what Google already knows: Every page you've visited after you installed the Google toolbar. In other words, the Smart Digg Button tool badly needs an "off" button.

OpenYou: The Limits of Privacy on the Social Web

ReadWriteWeb:

The inevitable reality is that we get more and more open each day. The limit? Perhaps the black inner circle, perhaps nothing ... Perhaps we will completely give up our privacy - and for example we can get all the information about someone online before meeting them in person. We may have 'Human search engines', which make everyone easily trackable.

Cryptome to be Terminated by Verio/NTT

Slashdot says: "Cryptome, a website concerned with encryption, privacy, and government secrecy, has received two weeks' notice from Verio that its service will be terminated for unspecified "violation of [its] Acceptable Use Policy." Cryptome has a history of making publicly available documents and information that governments would rather keep secret. For the notice, and a public response by Cryptome webmaster John Young, see Cryptome Shutdown by Verio/NTT."

by Marcion (876801):

So the British "intelligence" services, the same ones that said Saddam Hussein had huge stockpiles of WMD that could strike the UK in 45 minutes, can get a website turned off it America? The ISP just weasely pulls the plug without negotiation just because some guy with a British accent rings up?

Come on America, we all used to look up to you as the beacon of freedom, but now your country is being turned into a Tudor monarchy, within a few years there will be no freedom left, will the last one out please turn off the lights when you leave.

by NormalVisual (565491):

I suspect what happened was that someone in the US government saw something they didn't like, and sent a National Security Letter or other such silliness to Verio. Verio of course can't legally disclose that, but given that Verio had been always been very forthright with John Young in the past but is being tight-lipped about the situation now, I think it's quite possible that something like this is behind Verio's actions. Gotta love living in a nation where the government makes you do their own damn police work against someone else against your will, and then threatens you with jail if you say anything about it.

Gmail Keeps Guzzling Your Info Even After you Turn off the Data Flow at the Tap

You can disable importing at any time from the Accounts tab of your Settings page. Just click delete next to the appropriate email account. -- Gmail's new POP import page.

OR NOT.

I set up a test acct to try grabbing external POP mail and now Gmail is STILL pulling in my external mail even after deleting the acct from Gmail!

Better yet, I've gone and changed my password over at the other acct and yet Gmail is STILL sucking in my 3rd Party mail. WTF? How is that even possible? Did Google "pre-fetch" everything before I could change my password?

Is this Google's not-so-subtle way of attempting to co-opt more and more of your personally identifiable information? What ever happened to "don't be evil"?

Here is Google support's response to the very same words posted above:

The Google Team to me
10:23 pm (24 minutes ago)
Hello,

Thanks for taking the time to send us your report.

We haven't been able to test POP access with your mail client yet, but we're working to make our service compatible with as many mail clients as possible. We look forward to announcing additional compatibilities in the future. You can tell us what POP clients you'd us to support in the future at https://services.google.com/inquiry/gmail_suggest/.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

I'm a simple guy, I'd settle for Gmail Support just supporting Gmail. How about that? Never mind that this issue has absolutely nothing to do with mail clients. Now that canned non-responses like this have become the norm, Google has officially jumped the shark.

Lunch Talk on Monday, March 5: Chris Kelly of Facebook

From the "Trust Us, *they're* all evil but We're Good" Department:

The Center for Internet and Society and
The Stanford Law and Technology Association

present

Privacy and Public Policy Challenges of Social Technology

with
Chris Kelly
Chief Privacy Officer
Facebook

Monday, March 5, 2007
12:30-1:30
Room 280A
Free and Open to the public (no rsvp required)
Lunch will be served

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/5173

The rise of social technology through sites like Facebook empowers users to model their connections with other people in the real world and allows them to share information more effectively and efficiently with their friends. Most of this sharing is unquestionably socially beneficial. But fears that some of the sharing can be harmful lead to regulatory and other efforts focusing on privacy, safety, and asserted illegal use of material protected by copyright and other intellectual property regimes.

Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook, will discuss the current state of the regulatory and public policy landscape in the US and abroad, what the near future might look like, and the technologies and social architectures Facebook deploys to minimize potential misuse of the site.

Help "Them" Watch You

Now "they" don't have to watch you anymore, because you can keep "them" informed of your every breath, with Nearbie.

Nearbie: Help us, to track YOU.

Note to trolls: Relax, if you can't read the tongue in cheek into this post, go read something more appropriate to your mentality.

Google's Bogus Remove URL Program

I'm pressed for time, so will have to update this later. The short story is this:

I've tried numerous times, at different times of day an night, over a period of 60 days, to remove GOOGLE CRUFT that garbles up my online identity. Allegedly, once registered, you are able to remove g-CRUFT using this URL:

Remove URL

This Google service says:

Remove an outdated link.

Enter the URL of your page. We will accept your request only if the page no longer exists on the web.

Note: this takes 3-5 business days to process.
URL to remove:
e.g. http://www.google.com/page.html

Remove:
* anything associated with this URL
* snippet portion of result (includes cached version)
* cached version only
----------------------

I find it more than interesting that virtually everything with the Google name on it works perfectly the first time, every time, but when it comes to cleaning up CRUFT, it's broken every time, at any time.

More later.

Linked In clues in to OIM

Surprise, surprise, people may actually CARE about their online identities.



This is definitely another big step in the right direction; however, why do users have to expose the full monty in order to get indexed? Also, the search engines seem to be credibility leeching off of the social networking sites. The search engines still owe human individuals a way to directly manage their own identities within their spidery indexes. I continue to assert that Yahoo could get back in the game in a big way if it focused on OIM and positioned itself as The Identity Defender, empowering the individual with tools to dress him or herself up on the web however they see fit and to change presentation and dress-up styles over time, just like people do in the real world.

I know, I know, it's a radical departure to consider Mystical Ethereal Cyberspace as part and parcel of the Real World; but R & D is just my thing.

New rules compel firms to track e-mail

This is a departure from the core theme, but a relevant reminder that your employer owns you, at work. So be good -- after all they are signing your paycheck. "U.S. companies will need to keep track of all the e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated by their employees thanks to new federal rules that go into effect Friday, legal experts say."

claimID.com - Manage your online identity

Now that's what I'm talkin' about! Well Done!

claimID.com - Manage your online identity

Sure, there will be refinements and improvements over time, but this is an absolutely essential first step!

Jane Pauley Sues New York Times

Wall Street Journal reports that TV's Pauley Sues New York Times, ostensibly, for abuse of her digital identity in the form or pictures taken under quite different pretenses -- an apparently increasing practice. This article also does a good job of parenthetically reinforcing destructive 1950's style stereotypes of bipolar disorder; casting ever-so-subtle doubt upon the veracity of Pauley's claims, due to the fact that she came out of the closet in 2004. The odds are very high that the most charismatic, focused, productive, and articulate few people you yourself know exist within the bipolar spectrum. Far from a liability, mild to moderate bipolar conditions are extraordinarily well suited to insanely long work hours and extraordinarily high productivity. That's one big reason for all the "hush-hush" about it.

It would not surprise me in the least to discover that there are more bipolar investment bankers than in almost any other trade. So, when you think bipolar, don't think "mentally ill" first; think "kicks my ass on the tennis court every week" and "kicks my ass in sales numbers every month."

That's what makes you, the underachiever, the "healthy" one and them the "sick" one, so there's nothing to fear from those deranged manic depressives. Besides, it's pretty convenient to have a condition that effectively reveals your own incompetence categorized as a mental illness, isn't it?

In case you don't recall, in 1950 gay people were officially "mentally ill" too. History clearly suggests that the idea of mental illness itself is a bipolar social construct, vacillating between 70% social construct and 30% biochemistry or 30% social construct and 70% biochemistry. Better visibility into brain chemistry and operations are helping to correct that, but just ask any Irish American, African American, Japanese American, or heaven forbid, Persian American -- old (and not so old) prejudices die hard.

Conform or Be Cast Out

If you haven't caught this summer's Aleksey Vayner lynching, there's an interesting counterintuitive take at Conform or Be Cast Out.

For the purposes of OIM, how would YOU feel if your more refined and not-so-maligned submission for a specific job were broadcast to the web? Now THINK about this for a minute before just snapping off some smart-alek, self-righteous answer.

Nearly every resume coach on the planet recommends you create MULTIPLE VERSIONS of your resume to target specific situations an opportunities. However, if an employer who did not hire you and had no intention of hiring you, publicized your resume in a way that some other prospective employer might get the impression that "that isn't what THIS VERSION of the resume said," and subsequently attacked you for being duplicitous or even dishonest, how would you feel about that?

In review:

• Step One, you are advised by the university's career counselor to tailor opportunity-specific resumes and cover letters.
• Step Two, an employer accuses you of LYING because the resume he or she received differs from another version he or she found on the internet.

Think this doesn't matter to you? Just wait until your next job search. Personally, I'm tempted to begin showing up to interviews with my own NDA which prospective employers must sign before I will even talk to them.

Content As Democracy

Alexa pissed off many people several years ago as one of the original spyware kings; but you can't argue with their interest and passion for understanding web-user behavior. As mentioned before, the YouTube and StupidVideos phenomenon absolutely ends any remaining debate over where the ultimate source of value resides in an open, distributed network -- it's At The Edges.

In the old Ma-Bell, Cable Co. world, all the valuable content and services were hoarded in the core of the network and meted out via teired monthly rationing regimes. To put it in formal academic terms, that ain't gonna' cut it no more with "the rise of user-submitted, user-rated media, represented by a new breed of sites like youtube and metacafe that completely bypass the cloistered editorial process in favor of open consumer-based systems," as the Alexa Web Discovery Machine blog succinctly puts it.

Now, in such a system, YOU, the CREATOR OF THE VALUABLE CONTENT are more than entitled to a cut of the revenues generated from that content. Very soon, it's my assertion that we will see the emergence of services and platforms that understand the BASIC ECONOMICS of this situation. Today, the CONTENT CREATORS are not being compensated for their work. As you begin to compensate them, they will suddenly begin to understand the value of OTHER PEOPLE'S digital content, and guess what will happen to piracy in such an environment?

You will be able to toss out tons of cheap carrots and put away the heavy-handed and extremely costly stick of digital content enforcement. Please don't insult my intelligence or readers intelligence with comments that this is not a silver bullet; no duh, nothing is. However, there are new business models just waiting to be fleshed out; models that will begin to both spread the wealth and reward the enablers of that distribution -- all in strict keeping with free market economics and enlightened self interest.

StumbleUpon -- The Secret Google PageRank Maker?

Sure, I should probably keep this to myself, if it's true; but WTF, I'm spewing everything else out here, so might as well just keep letting 'er rip.

Here's the observation:

Day One: Site I want to be #1 when Googling my name shows up on page 2 or 3, depending on quotes, lack of quotes, etc.

Day Two: Go a stumbling on StumbleUpon and give my page one single Thumbs Up vote.

Day Five: (Yeah, three days intervening). Page I wanted to be #1 is indeed #1.

Could be a complete coincidence, but I encourage you to play around with the idea just to see what happens. Can you stumble pages up the Google PageRanks? Bookmark this post and c'mon back to let us know in the comments. That way, Google can adjust its algorithms to once again screw up your own individual influence over your own individual information again.

Because, after all, you should wear the clothes that everyone else says you should wear; you should live in the house that everyone else says you should live; you should drive the car that everyone else says you should drive; and you should have no control over which content ABOUT YOU is atop the search results on the web. To give you that control, according to The Googlebot, would "unfairly weight" that information. On the web, you should be who Googlebot says your are, not who you say you want to be.

Do you own your webmail or does your webmail own you?

Are you sure?

Obviously, I am far from alone in terms of increasing sensitivity to these issues of Online Identity and Content Management.

A careful and clueful Cairo blogger at "i am arto" offers this take on the Free Email Combo Dance: And Without Selling Your Freedom.

Some of Arto's justifiably hyperbolic (IMHO) criteria include:

1. Ratio between Overall Features Offered versus Imposed Benefit Gained by the email service provider.

2. Level of Freedom & Flexibility Offered versus Imposed Prisoning Restrictions by the email service provider.

3. Level of Lack of user Awareness acknowledged by the email service provider versus their False Apparent Pretense.

Arto sums up his recommendations as Gmail + Hushmail. Personally, I'd take that one step further and go with Inbox.com + Hushmail.

Fiorina on Web 2.0 (indirectly, anyway)

So, I just got back from listening to Carly Fiorina tell her side of the story while pitching her book, Tough Choices, over at Kepler's in Menlo Park. Behind this former Most Powerful Business Woman in the World stood her husband Frank, who found his own set of groupies, post-talk. But what does this have to do with Who Owns YOU? Well, regardless of what you think of Fiorina, the strategies that HER TEAM ENGINEERED are the very ones that have recently led to HP surpassing Dell in the PC world. So that means this is a clearly insightful and visionary woman to whom one should pay attention, if not consummate respect. Personally, I believe on the the jealous hesitate to give her all due props on both accounts. Paraphrased here is what Carly said is happening in technology, moving forward:

1. The dotcom boom was only the end of the beginning.
2. Now, the sustainable technology revolution is ready to commence.
3. That means, EVERYTHING that isn't already, will become increasingly:
* Digital
* Mobile
* Virtual
* Personal
4. Personal, in the sense that THE INDIVIDUAL IS IN CHARGE of the proliferation of information with which they interact.

From the tone of her description, I do not at all think it a stretch to extend and clarify that Fiorina's phrase, THE INDIVIDUAL IS IN CHARGE means essentially the same thing that I have been saying here, since 2001, at least. THE INDIVIDUAL has the RIGHT to be in charge of all the public digital content that they create or that pertains to them. THE INDIVIDUAL has the RIGHT to be the editor of all their online information; comments made directly about them in forums, allegations, reviews (both positive and otherwise), candid snapshots or thoughts captured online, academic papers, records, essays containing ideas that given ten additional years of maturity, may no long reflect their identities or philosophies in the least.

So, feel free to keep ignoring my take on the situation, but one who ignores Fiorina's essentially common assessment of the significance of Online Identity Management (OIM) does so at their own business risk. Individuals WILL CLAIM these rights, so you can either get ahead in offering them tools NOW, or play catchup and lament the shot at sector leadership, later.

Just for the Record

This past week, I interviewed for a position at a search company called Kosmix. When I presented these ideas it was a bit difficult to read the reaction, although it appeared that an obviously brilliant and rather sardonic product manager (it takes one to know one) was intrigued, but perhaps skeptical when I described that providing tools for humans might be a way to differentiate the product in a compelling way. I wasn't hired, which is fine; though just for the record, if you see Kosmix develop this approach, let the record reflect where they got the idea.

By default, I would not expect such a fine entrepreneurial group to engage in an unethical disregard for intellectual property or to shun even the most rudimentary academic integrity in source attribution. However, there would be no IP law if there were no need for it, even among extraordinarily educated monkeys like us.

Of course, in the event of such an unlikely hypothetical development, the company could change its mind and respect the license on these pages; after which, one would happily amend these statements. Better yet, perhaps someone further up the management chain, who can see the bigger picture, could do the right thing and hire me to lead an initiative to create the tools I've been describing over the past five years. That could be a mutually profitable scenario.

In any event, I wish them only success and encourage the purchase of licensing rights to use of any of the ideas protected within these pages, should they so choose to implement them for branded commercial use. Of course, my old compadre Larry might just as well enjoy the opportunity to further strengthen the Creative Commons license that he invented, if things were to unexpectedly not work out amicably.

It's all good, yo.

failure - Google Search

I'm as anti-Bush as anyone, however, consider the results of failure - Google Search. Just in case things change, here is a screen dump of the results on the date of this post.



Here's a link to the official excuse. This could be the most visible case of "It isn't was our fault, it's the robot's fault and we can't control it" to date.

Extrapolation scenario: so someone decides to pull a similar google-bombing "prank" on you. Yet unlike, say, inaccurate information on your credit record, there are no requirements for search provides to empower individuals with tools to protect their own identities or reputations. There are no tools for you to authenticate yourself and correct the "prank." Over the coming decades, keeping tabs on your web identity could become just as crucial as keeping tabs on your credit rating. Search providers can begin addressing this themselves, or you can bet that legislators will address it for them.

“Good name in man and woman is the immediate jewel of their souls.”
-- Shakespeare

Pew Internet: Future of the Internet

In the latest shocking empirical results, guess what emerged as the single most contentious issue, with opinions split nearly straight down the middle? Yep, while the semantics may differ, the sentiments are empirically and functionally equivalent. The issue is: WHO OWNS YOU ONLINE.

Curiously, the summary statement significantly downplays the SCIENTIFICALLY OBJECTIVE dramatic split between well established business and opinion leaders on this subject. At Pew Internet: Future of the Internet, the overview chooses to truncate the findings as:

"People will wittingly and unwittingly disclose more about themselves, gaining some benefits in the process even as they lose some privacy."

While the full PDF version of the study clearly goes on to state:

"Respondents split evenly on whether the world will be a better place in 2020 due to the greater transparency of people and institutions afforded by the internet: 46% agreed that the benefits of greater transparency of organizations and individuals would outweigh the privacy costs [while the dominant plurality of] 49% disagreed."

Why the wording is so obviously overweighted to emphasize the BENEFITS of said "transparency" when the DATA leans toward the opposite conclusion, is left to the reader's analysis. It seems even somewhat more curious, considering that the report is founded upon "a non-randomized sample [wherein] a margin of error cannot be computed" (page i, Summary of Findings). But let's drill down even a bit more. On page ii, the raw data -- non-random, such as it is -- is as follows. The proposition put to respondents:

Transparency builds a better world, even at the expense of privacy: As sensing, storage and communication technologies get cheaper and better, individuals' public and private lives will become increasingly “transparent” globally. Everything will be more visible to everyone, with good and bad results. Looking at the big picture - at all of the lives affected on the planet in every way possible - this will make the world a better place by the year 2020. The benefits will outweigh the costs.

49% said, NO, THE BENEFITS WILL NOT OUTWEIGH THE COSTS while 46% said they will. That split, and it's consequent significance for all of us, seems to be entirely absent from mainstream soundbites. If I'm wrong, I'd be thrilled to see some links in the comment section to any mainstream news sources who are covering this in any detail, as opposed to dismissing or glossing over a comparatively glaringly conflict among experts' collective expectations for the future of the internet.

Summary page v:

“Privacy is a thing of the past. Technologically it is obsolete. The future of privacy: However, there will be social norms and legal barriers that will dampen out the worst excesses.” – Hal Varian, University of California-Berkeley and Google.

“We are constructing architectures of surveillance over which we will lose control. It's time to think carefully about 'Frankenstein,' The Three Laws of Robotics, 'Animatrix' and 'Gattaca.'“ – Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“Before 2020, every newborn child in industrialized countries will be implanted with an RFID or similar chip. Ostensibly providing important personal and medical data, these may also be used for tracking and surveillance.” – Michael Dahan, a professor at Sapir Academic College in Israel.

Please, if these matters interest you, read this influential report for yourself. This is a compelling body of significant and uniquely insightful -- if anecdotal -- data of a quality that businesses, policy makers, and individual citizens need to incorporate into their wider forecasting models. There will be sufficient numbers of unintended consequences to overcome as a result of ongoing technological advances to unduly hamper ourselves with clearly anticipated maladaptive outcomes.

After all, we will create this future together -- wittingly or unwittingly -- so why not give the former every fair chance to sway the outcomes in a direction that will provide the most benefits while mitigating the deleterious effects of foreseeable harms?

California's SB 768 - Will The Governator Terminate Personal ID Privacy?

RFID is a really nifty supply chain technology. However, the potential for abuse in government issued, health insurer, or consumer "loyalty program" ID cards is obvious. As RFID is presently deployed, personal information or medical data can be read passively, remotely, and without the holder's knowledge or consent. It's staggering to imagine that there are thinking human being that might think this is okay.

Nevertheless, the RFID cat is out of the bag. The only recourse left to citizens and consumers is to insist upon as many safeguards as possible, when RFID is inevitably used as a form of ID.

The RFID Identity Information Protection Act of 2006 is sitting on the Governor's desk, awaiting his signature. Here's the text of the fax that I sent. Feel free to duplicate and spam the governor's office with support for this important bill.

Governor Schwarzeneggar:

Please sign SB 768.

SB 768, thoroughly scrutinized by both side of the aisle, passed with bi-partisan votes in both the Senate and Assembly.

SB 768 aligns you with the interests of tens of millions of your strongest base constituents while casting a reasoned, bi-partisan light upon your governance.

/s/

Read the full SB 768 Bill Text.

Users have rights and will behave as if they have rights

Is the Digg Community Its Own Worst Enemy? | Performancing.com: "The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you'll hear about it very quickly."

This pertains to the web itself, every bit as much as it pertains to software; particularly as the web becomes increasingly, a distributed software platform.

WE -- You and I -- are The Content

Slashdot reporting Social News Sites Pay Top Submitters

tags: who owns you online, social justice

You Are Who Google | Yahoo | MSN | MySpace Say you Are

Gee, what a shocking turn of events. Nobody would have ever guessed that this would be the case:

The Wall Street Journal -- Mr. Pratt Cleaned Up His Act To Impress an Employer; Killing a MySpace Profile -- But inventing a new self was much easier than killing the old one. He says he emailed MySpace, begging the site to take down his old page. Nothing happened. He sent at least eight more urgent messages to the site, including a note to MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson. Finally, he received a cryptic email telling him to write his user name -- "craigisanidiot" -- and password with a marker on a piece of paper, to take a photo of himself holding it up, and to email it to MySpace along with a note saying, "I wish to be removed from MySpace."

People who have spent years leaving behind traces of themselves all over the Web are finding it's hard to erase them.

Susan Amirian, a 54-year-old media professor in East Stroudsburg, Pa., has lost more than 100 pounds in two years and is trying to start dating online. Ms. Amirian, who was recently divorced, thinks that potential mates will find the old photos and avoid her. "They're going to Google me and come up with these monstrous pictures," she says (WSJ).

This is great. When the topic was political or religious ideas, nobody cared; but now that it might be FAT pictures or other F pictures, heaven forbid! LOL!

On the plus side, I'm no longer a voice in the wilderness; but then, anyone who knows me also knows that once an institution like the Wall Street Journal finally acknowledges my long-standing observations, my work is done and it's time to find a new emergent cause. Hmm, how about, "citing the original source for your story ideas, even when that source is just a little nobody that you met at a Stanford conference; or a relatively obscure blog or webpage in the sea of cyberspace."

Nah, nevermind. I mean, it's probably just a coincidence that I've been writing and ranting about this on and off since 2001, only to be met with blank stares; but then, only a month ago or so, I happened to share the growing effects of this idea with a table full of journalists from Slate, the WashingtongPost, etc., at a conference. Six weeks later, bam; it's in the news. I'm sure it's just coincidence.

Actually, I partly don't mind, so long as the issue is finally coming to the public's awareness. On the other hand, this isn't the first time I've seen something like this happen, so I'll have to start collecting better data on the phenomena. The follow on to Who Owns You may just be Who Gave You "Your" Ideas? People hear things all the time, publicly dismiss them if they seem marginal at the time or place, then go away and later think, "gee, what a novel idea I just had." I'm sure there's a whole body of psychology on similar human behaviors, now it's just time to go out and learn more about it, then come up with a way to observe and measure it in real life.

Why bother? Because in a world were ideas and insights are increasingly the stock in trade, it's high time that the originators be better compensated and recognized. What I am talking about now is intellectual property on a whole new level, one that would have been the domain of pure science fiction just a decade ago, but which may not only become feasible in the next couple of decades, but absolutely essential as society decides which minds to upload where, when, and in what order. Do you want the minds that reported the novel and the new, or the minds that repeatedly and consistently understood and anticipated what would not become obvious to others, for years to come. Of course, if you're presently a lead policy or decision maker, a lead patron or promoter, and you run across some nobody whom has consistently understood and anticipated events better than you, is that person suddenly a top candidate, or a threat to your precious "leadership" position? Will pre-post-humans help those who have helped them glimpse the road ahead, or will they marginalize and eliminate them?

Finally, of course, and as usual:

A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on Ms. Amirian's experience.

WSJ.com - Covering Your Tracks In an Online World Takes a Few Tricks

Food for Thought

How does Webwide Face Recognition factor in to your online identity management?

Who Owns YOU Online?

// Begin 06.03.2007 Update //
This video and audio were inserted on 6/3/2007 because they seem fitting in the context of this "mission-defining" post. Thank you to IDW for helping me to rightly represent. No ill will intended, but I do understand the initial observation. Thank you!

Identity Man: Charging to the Identity Big Bang

Identity Man, the Sibelius Music score by Philip Tsz Kin Yu (2005).
// End 6.3.2007 Update //

Opening a conversation, based upon the essay I wrote in 2001.

It's five years later, and search engines STILL spit out ineptly distorted, disinterested, and wholly undifferentiated displays of YOUR online identity. Perhaps an illustration will serve best to demonstrate.

At the very least, the following link is a more relevant way to Google Me, as are this google or that google and another google. Now compare those to a plain old stupid google which -- at the time of this posting -- even throws in random references to Canadian "Mike" Silverton. No offense, Mike, but I'm sure you don't like seeing all my Ethernet First Mile stuff potentially confused with you any more than I prefer your StereoTimes Reader Feedback, 1999 in my top ten hits.

I will refrain from writing more than a single paragraph reminding that the dot-US (.us) cc-TLD was suppose to be free to everyone and also help in this disambiguation, and as many understood it, pretty much intended to stay that way. Theoretically, the guidelines ensured a free and unique fully qualified domain name (FQDN) for virtually any city, school, library, local organization or individual who desired one. After all, the "cost" of a domain name is nothing more than a line of text in a zone file.

By way of further illustration, if a search for my name needs to be mistaken, this common top 20 result from the combination of Michael + Silverton belongs near the top of the stack. (Note: I have no relation to AnneMarie whatsoever, although she obviously does the surname brand proud!)

In contrast to other search engines, Ask.com almost gets it right (but for over-weighting Wikipedia and the erroneous www in the second listed URL). At least Wikipedia's approach disambiguates from other instances of a name and helps create a more credible portrayal of people; and all are open to public review, critique, and correction to keep things real.

The point in all this: if the site or sites that YOU LIST FIRST (after all, it is YOUR online identity) are at the top of the search engine results, we learn a lot more about you, more quickly. In my case, I can share that I enjoy and value the work of people from Lanier to Kurzweil, that I'm a General Aviation enthusiast and volunteer of various community and innovator-enabling organizations. This is a dramatic departure from a plain "google me" and find some random post about PCMCIA drivers for Linux laptops, a Usenet post circa 1995, or a Fidonet post, circa 1992.

Who owns YOU Online? No question about it, YOU DO ... and since more and more of your content -- the online YOU -- is creating the VALUE of their networks and services, the accidental designers of your inadvertent dossier owe you simple and secure tools for Online Identity Management (OIM).