Rational Rants
Mitch Ratcliffe blogs about the constantly changing boundary between media and life, the businesses that live on that border, and the meaning of all this change to society and the economy.
Latest Posts
Government data-mining: No boundaries?
ADVISE, a recently revealed U.S. government data-mining operation, raises questions about privacy and the meaning of public actions.
Hacktivism: Users in charge
Small projects will punch huge holes in the Great Firewall of China and the Fatwa Barriers of the Middle East.
Chipped like a dog
In the first example of a company embedding RFID chips in employess, we see the boundary between work and life erased.
EFF: Google over-steps on Privacy
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is warning people not to use Google Desktop, because it opens a huge hole in personal privacy.
Conflicts and passions
The controversy surrounding bloggers with business connections is important to understand.
Justice knew Bush wiretapping illegal
The Washington Post reports that U.S. District Court judges have been warned by Justice Department lawyers that warrant-less wiretaps had been used to obtain illegal warrants in federal courts.
What Fred said
Network neutrality, the idea that carriers should be providing IP connections and staying out of the way of traffic on their networks, is critical to both the Net's growth and the carriers' success.
Zillow: Welcome to Whoville, where everyone knows your property value
Zillow, a new real-estate search service, offers astonishingly deep insight into local markets and individual lives. This is a good thing with all sorts of potential negative costs that will have some folks howling.
There's no such thing as good S.H.I.T.
C.R.A.P. is one way to describe DRM, but there's no such thing as simple hacks of intellectual transactions (S.H.I.T), because we're distrustful little monkeys.