blog.mignault.net

More on the Kindle and privacy

Snoop-friendly Kindle e-reader highlights privacy issues raised by feds’ attempts to get list of p-book buyers | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home:

Just when the Kindle is appearing with its own Trust Us approach—Amazon stores everything for itself and maybe unwittingly for Washington—D.C. comes along to remind us of the risk of Big Bro even without the Kindle. Via an AP story, we learn that federal prosecutors sought “the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc.”

No word on how far they got in the used books. But some other highlights from the post:

Meanwhile Jeff Bezos and friend will be playing do-it-yourself snoops through a TOS specifically authorizing them to poke around your machine to see if you’ve been a good boy or girl. Naughty, naughty, naughty you’ll be if Jeff somehow finds you’ve been bypassing the DRM, and I doubt the punishment will be just a lump of coal. Away could go your Kindle service and book access—just read Amazon’s Terms of Use: “In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.”

And since that Kindle’s got no other use but reading e-books that you get from Amazon, you then have a brick. An ugly, beige, $400 brick. But wait, there’s more:

Meanwhile here’s another gem from Jeff’s snoop-friendly terms of service: “The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device). Annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings you make in your Device are backed up through the Service. Information we receive is subject to the Amazon.com Privacy Notice.”

Which privacy policy is then quoted, vague enough that you could easily get sold out to the feds. One thing you can say for the paper book, Amazon can’t turn it off. As much as we might want to get over the pesky inconvenience that privacy poses to the growth of social marketing by denying it exists, there are real and serious consequences to doing so. Relabeling it “identity management” in order to productize it and reduce it to a purely technological problem won’t help either. Just because you might not care who knows what you read doesn’t mean they should find out.

Technorati Tags: amazon, books, ebooks, kindle, libraries, privacy, politics, rss

Simulacra of engagement

dot unplanned » The Things Make Us Stupid:

I used to make a distinction between warm and cool voices … engaged vs. detached, involved vs. analytical. But both those entries struck me as entrants in a third category … warm, cool, and now “warmed over.” Compelled to appear engaged, but not. Interested to the extent a quota demands significations of interest at the rate of n per day, but not deeply involved or engaged, except perhaps on the level of knowing someting about a thing that others might not: That thing is popular, that thing is not popular, that thing is selling well, that thing is not selling well. Consumers like it. Observers do not like it.

Go read this right now. Mike’s “significations of interest” directly nails a bunch of what’s wrong with online right now, up to and including how words like “love” and “friend” have been co-opted by online business. When all you have a hammer, everything may seem like a nail; but it turns out to be much more efficient to call screws nails. Fuzzy thinking on my part, but go read the post.

Technorati Tags: blogging, folksonomies

ALA: what the hell is it?

I had originally written this as a comment on kgs’ ALA: what is to be done? post, but since it kept getting longer, I thought I’d post it here instead.

First, some background: I graduated lib school in 93, worked in software/web development till 2005. Started in a systems librarian job in April of last year.

That said, ALA makes me nuts. A few random things come to mind:

1. I joined ALA at a student rate when I was taking classes towards possibly getting school media specialist certification. (Dodged that bullet.) Despite contacting them to tell them I was no longer a student and even though I now pay non-student (read: full) membership fees, every single piece of mail they send me (at MPOW, no less) is addressed to “John Mignault, student.” This irritates me anew every time I see it.

2. The organization is enormous. I find it byzantine and incomprehensible, and I’ve programmed in PowerBuilder. There are too many fee-requiring sub-associations, divisions, councils, round tables, kaffeeklatsches, cells, and jamborees. There is too much crap to wade through, and most people don’t have the contacts that would make navigating the oranization easier.

3. WRT #2, it’s insane that so many publications (I am looking at you, Library Technology Reports) are outrageously expensive, and not included in a LITA membership. 63 bucks for a single issue of a magazine? I work in a botanical library, fer Chrissakes. We’re strapped enough as it is – I can’t ask them to pay some outrageous sum of money for these publications, and I’m already into ALA for enough dough as it is. Why isn’t this stuff online? How can anyone take ALA seriously with regards to Open Access when they act like Elsevier?

4. When I saw the absolute fetish librarians have for listservs (three letters. R. S. S), I decided I better get my subscriptions out of my personal gmail account and into another for mailing lists only. I’ve been trying to unsubscribe from LITA-L for a couple weeks now, only to continually get errors from the lisetserv processor.

5. Elections. ALA bugs the crap out of me to vote in elections. They send me postcards. They send me e-mails. Great, now I can vote for a bunch of people who I’ve never heard of whose position papers require a much greater degree of knowledge about the organization than I have. I can go by the biblioboogersphere, but they say things like “Vote for J. Random Librarian, because he/she *gets it.*” Well, I’m glad someone does, but I need more, you know?

6. Just read this passage from kgs’ post:

Council elects an Executive Board, which theoretically runs ALA, but delegates to the Executive Director of ALA, currently Keith Fiels (a good guy, but he also isn’t going to steer ALA anywhere EB isn’t taking it — and that’s correct behavior). Council nominates and elects EB. With a majority on Council, you theoretically have control of ALA (since you can elect the EB). There are just under 200 Councilors, so elect a slate of 100 Councilors and you have a majority. Yet it’s not that simple, either, because as the ALA website notes, “Council, the governing body of ALA [is] comprised of 183 members: 100 elected at large; 53 by chapters; 11 by divisions; 7 by roundtables; and 12 members of the Executive Board.” It’s not impossible that a slate couldn’t include chapter, divisional, or roundtable candidates, but it would require more effort, and since not all Councilors are elected at the same time, you can’t just run 100 at-large candidates. More likely than electing Councilors from chapters and divisions is first, to build a reform Council over several years, and second, that a strong Council EB slate would pick up additional votes outside the original reform slate.

My head hurts.

Anyway, that’s a start.

Unboxed and unviewed

Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology: amazon unbox Goes Live

I’ll be interested in the first reviews of his (sic) product.

Ok, here’s a review:

First, and worst, doesn’t work with a Mac. Surprising for Amazon, and right there a deal-breaker. You can only watch on an XP PC. Can’t burn to DVD (except as a backup that won’t play in a DVD player, and librarians love DRM, right?) So I guess I’d say it sucks.
Technorati Tags: geek, amazon, library, stupid, mac

Pass the chemo

a flower called nowhere ++ go fly a kite with a hole in it ++:

Comparing the whole Bush/Rove/Rumsfeld/evangelical right-wing Christian/capitalist agenda to a cancer upon our country is insulting to cancer.

Technorati Tags: politics

Women in systems

Library Journal – The Gender Gap

We won’t be changing to help women. We will be doing it for our libraries, for our profession, and for ourselves. We need women in digital library positions. We need their unique perspective and their civilizing influence on the boys’ clubs that many library systems units, professional events, and online forums have become. But more than that, we simply need their talent.

Excellent article by Roy Tennant. Read the whole thing. I especially agree about the civilizing influence. It would go a long way towards eliminating the tedious culture of one-upmanship often endemic to technical communities. As long as we continue to have a geek culture mainly driven by the wants and desires of 20-something white males, we’re going to miss out on the true potential of Web 2.0 as an agent for far-reaching change. And in a profession like librarianship where women are by any measure the majority, the lack of women in systems librarianship just doesn’t make any sense at all.

Technorati Tags: library, library+2.0, systems+librarianship, feminism, geek, politics

They call it football.

USATODAY.com – A worthy goal for soccer:

Perhaps the rest of the world is happy with the game as it is and don’t care whether Americans fall in love with it or not. Despite the writer’s attempts to head off the “ugly American” label by twee jokes, he is the definition of the term.

Technorati Tags: soccer, stupid