Before the end of this year my hometown of Highland, Illinois will begin activating service for its new municipal fiber to the home project. I’ve followed the project passively over the last two years as it evolved from idea to certainty, and it is one that I have favored since the idea was early in its conception. Spending this summer in Highland I have had the pleasure of seeing wire being strung around town for the first phase of the project and the sprouting of small utility cabinets unobtrusively tucked away.
Author Archives: Aaron
Standards of Privacy and the Communities Setting Them
April 30, 2010 – 5:44 am
Considering the continuing debate over evolving privacy standards that has come to prominence with the move of social networking websites towards the mainstream, and in particular Facebook’s receding standard of privacy documented by the Electronic Frontier foundation in a handy timeline. Going back to 2005 and seeing
No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.
seems like an anachronism given Facebook’s current business model that encourages sharing with Third-Party applications and sites. While Facebook’s future redefinitions of privacy may only be speculated by those outside of the company, the framework for the site’s ongoing reconstructions of privacy’s meaning comes through in the 2006 privacy policy.
Facebook’s Expanding Chokehold Online
April 21, 2010 – 10:53 pm
Today at Facebook’s f8 (pronounced “fate” developer conference the social networking Goliath unveiled an new system for following their users outside of the Facebook site, and it could end up making the internet a very ugly place. In the wake of their privacy overhaul last December Facebook announced an expansion of the class of information to be considered public by default including a user’s hometown and current city. They also lifted the 24 hour restriction on how long application developers could hold on to user information allowing them to store user information they collect indefinitely. Expanding what they consider public information and allowing partners to hold on to users personal information longer is just the tip of the iceberg.
Connections
In a change announced earlier this week on the Facebook blog activities and interests listed on a user’s profile information will be linked to “community pages” centered around those interests. The EFF covers implications of this new connections system very well on their Deeplinks blog.
Model Educator Passes
March 31, 2010 – 10:27 pm
Jaime Escalante, the mathematics educator who was the inspiration for the film Stand and Deliver as well as the book Escalante: The Best Teacher in America passed recently. Reason Magazine has an insightful article on the work he did improving the educational opportunities offered to students who would have otherwise been neglected by an often uncaring and inefficient system as well as the way that his revolutionary programs were rolled back and dismantled by administrative indifference and institutional inertia during his life time to a shadow of were during their peak when Escalante worked with a dedicated principle who allowed his programs to blossom. The LA Times obituary outlines the story of his life well, but given the tough problems facing schools in these difficult times its worth looking at the insightful commentary Reason Magazine offers on his life and work.