What this means is that Google and Earthlink plan to use online files (known as cookies) and other data-collection techniques to profile users and deliver precise, personalized advertising as they surf the Internet. (Earthlink is working with the interactive ad company DoubleClick, which collects and analyzes enormous amounts of information online to engage in individual interactive ad targeting.)
Not everyone is enthused by the Google/Earthlink model. San Francisco was advised by a trio of privacy advocates to develop policies that would respect personal privacy. In letters to the city, the ACLU of Northern California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) urged the adoption of a “gold standard” for data privacy (pasted in below from http://epic.org/privacy/internet/sfws22106.html), insuring that its Wi-Fi system would “accommodate the individual’s right to communicate anonymously and pseudonymously.” The groups also suggested that the city require any Wi-Fi company to allow users to “opt in” to any data-collection scheme. [Full disclosure: I rent office space in Washington, DC, from EPIC].
10 States Hardest Hit by the AMT
has released Who Pays The Individual AMT: State-by-State Estimates for 2006. Wisconsin ranks #6 – ouch!
The Real US Broadband Problem
Maynard Handley writes:
The issue of importance is not the cost of broadband; that is higher than it should be in the US, but it will fall.
Neither is the issue of importance the speed. Higher speed is nice, but what’s available in the US is adequate for now.What is important is the extent to which home users on the internet are empowered:
Do their terms of service allow them to run their own web pages off their home machines? Can they run personal blogs and wikis for their friends to visit? Can they log into their home machines from somewhere else? And so on.The common place TOS in the US prevent such activities; the powers that be in the US are interested in making the US an alternative form of television, and very much a one-way medium. Not only is this profoundly immoral, it is profoundly undemocratic, and profoundly stupid (since it is yet one more attempt to freeze an existing business model rather than looking at the big picture of how to take advantage of new, as yet undreamed of possibilities); but of course, this sort of trifecta is about what one expects from US business these days.
The point of my writing is to express my disappointment that these issues were not raised; either in the context of the US or in the context of France. I would like to hope that French companies are being better citizens about this than their US counterparts, but I have no reason to believe so. I would, however, hope that a newspaper article would include at least some nod to issues more important than saving a few bucks on one’s cable bill.
Yours sincerely,
Maynard Handley
Handley is correct. www.schoolinfosystem.org is a very small attempt to address some of these issues.
Yahoo’s China Problem
Companies can and do make choices. You can engage in China and choose not to do certain kinds of business. Yahoo! has placed user e-mail data within legal jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China. Google and Microsoft have both chosen not to do so. Why did Yahoo! chose to do this?
Google’s $2Billion Stock Sale
It must want to buy something. No other conceivable explanation jumps to mind for why a cash-gushing monster with an $8 billion war chest would toss away another 5 million shares in tonight’s shelf filing.
Scheduled 2006 big ticket items are $1 billion to AOL for the search deal, $1 billion (rumored) to Dell for the Google Pack deal, and $1-$2 billion for capex, all offset by an estimated $2-$3 billion of positive cash flow. Add that together and you get a net 2006 cash outflow of maybe $1 billion, leaving $7 billion on the balance sheet–more than enough to compete with anyone except…
Neko Case Interview
Music journalist Ashley Kahn profiles singer-songwriter Neko Case. She has a unique approach to lyrics and uses vivid musical imagery. Case’s new album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, has just been released.
Our Tax System: Higher Audit Rates for Lower Income Taxpayers
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of Syracuse University reports today that only 30 of the nation’s 180,000 plus millionaires were subject to face-to-face audits in FY 2005. When only traditional face-to-face audits are considered, those reporting less than $25,000 in total positive income were six times more likely to be audited than all those reporting $200,000 or more in income. IRS continues to withhold from TRAC statistical data it has made public in the past that might explain the aberration.
Surfing Faster
For years, France’s telecommunications industry was a state-owned monopoly with one of the world’s most backward broadband markets. But thanks to deregulation six years ago, French consumers have access to high-speed Internet service that is much faster and cheaper than in the U.S.
One telecom company in particular has exploited the changes and created competition in France — a start-up called Iliad. Over 1.1 million French subscribers pay as low as €29.99 ($36) monthly for a “triple play” package called Free that includes 81 TV channels, unlimited phone calls within France and to 14 countries, and high-speed Internet. The least expensive comparable package from most cable and phone operators in the U.S. is more than $90, although more TV channels are generally included.
Making a Market in Talent
Lowell L. Bryan, Claudia I. Joyce, and Leigh M. Weiss:
Savvy companies understand the competitive value of talented people and spend considerable time identifying and recruiting high-caliber individuals wherever they can be found. The trouble is that too many companies pay too little attention to allocating their internal talent resources effectively. Few companies use talented people in a competitively advantageous way—by maximizing their visibility and mobility and creating work experiences that help them feed and develop their expertise. Many a frustrated manager has searched in vain for the right person for a particular job, knowing that he or she works somewhere in the company. And many talented people have had the experience of getting stuck in a dead-end corner of a company, never finding the right experiences and challenges to grow, and, finally, bailing out
Evacuating a 900+ Seat Airplane in 90 Seconds
It’s Sunday morning and as usual I’m wearing a numbered bib and doing agility tests in an aircraft hangar with 1,000 Germans I’ve never met before!
As you’ll have guessed, the one thing we had in common is that we all thought it sounded interesting to be a volunteer in the first – and probably only – evacuation trial of the A380.
So here we are on a miserable, wet airfield in one of the biggest hangars in Europe at Airbus’ Finkenwerder production facility next to the River Elbe.
I’m number 873, proud of it, and with a white bib numbered in black to prove it. We hand in everything in our possession which, though I don’t realise it then, is going to make the next five hours pass very slowly indeed.