Rabbits, Blinkity

This dog's been reading too much about online privacy. CC-BY-SA by Orin Zebest, modified.

Every few months, there's an article in a major publication decrying the lack of privacy online. And insisting that somebody Do Something About It™. For this month's edition, it's "Google knows too much about you" courtesy of CNN's Frida Ghitis. Did you know that Google changed their privacy policy? Turns out it's evil as ever.

The obvious, ethical, default setting should affirm that our private information belongs to us and nobody else -- not to Google, not to Facebook. We should call for laws that require them to change their terms of service so users have the option of giving or denying permission to them on holding personal data in storage.

Then again… Google and Facebook aren't public institutions. You don't actually have to use them; there are alternatives. Visiting somebody's website is sort of like visiting their house or place of business—yes, you have certain rights, but those rights simply don't extend to preventing others from putting up a security camera on their own property!

But there's a larger issue here. The Internet, as it turns out, is not a private place in the slightest. It should not be treated as such.
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So, this is a cool thing to write about: Things are easy/hard to learn. (Found via Clarissa's Blog which is awesome.)

The gist of the meme is to list three things in the course of your lifelong learning that came as natural as falling off a log, especially if they strike you as possessing elegance, expository power, arousal of curiosity, or best of all, a lot of formerly disparate concepts somehow “fall into place.” The other list is three things that are utterly opaque to your mind, that you have made repeated attempts to learn, but for some reason or other, you just don’t seem to be meant to learn these things.

Easy things

1. Understanding cultures and subcultures. Partly as a result of being raised in a mostly religious-right-conservative community, and now having shifted most of the way to the other extreme, I find it easy to get inside the heads of all different sorts of people.
2. Reading and writing. I don't remember learning to read, not even a little bit. I don't really remember even reading at a 'beginner' level, as it were. I just sort of... read. It's a part of me. I don't really understand, except in a superficial way, what it would be like to read with difficulty, word by word, or have trouble understanding complex grammar. I blame my parents for this.
3. Not being bored. I don't think I'm ever bored, actually. Even if I don't have anything specific to do, I'm perfectly happy daydreaming and…

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On the 1 in 1,000,000 change that someone reads this and hasn't managed to hear about SOPA, or isn't sure about it, or something, let me just urge you to look it up and consider it carefully. This is pretty bad stuff, even by post-9/11 standards. The really amazing thing, is how little our congresspeople seem to know about how the internet even works. Will this stop piracy? No. It won't even bother it a little bit. Will it seriously annoy legitimate content producers? You bet.

Could it potentially be used to censor anti-government, anti-corporate, or other forms of free speech? Absolutely. Will it? Probably not immediately to a great extent, and hopefully it would be stopped in court if it became too extreme, but in the future, well, who knows.

It's clearly wrong, clearly pointless, and possibly dangerous, which is why it needs to be stopped. Contact your congresscritters and senatecritters now.

Look, I'm used to trolls, okay? I've been using the Internet since Yahoo was a only a web index and not a search engine. I've even read Encyclopedia Dramatica on occasion. But I still don't understand this:

they call these s.lut.s professionals
-- boredwithnba

welcome to the PMS league..the WNBA is CRAP PY
-- saylaka2000

Now, I do understand, say, stupid tasteless comments on youtube - there are 'related video' links and 'featured videos' there to tempt you. Plus, it's an obvious enough target that you might just search for things just to be an asshole. But to make rude comments on an espn.com box score, you have to:

• A: Know that the game is going on.
• B: Be interested enough to check for box scores.

And you very likely care enough to actually watch the game. Which, in fact, the various "slut" commentators did, because many of them mentioned specific events from the game.
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