Santa Monica resident Aurelie Foucaut traveled last month to Paris with her two kids. During a brief stopover in Montreal, she made six calls on her BlackBerry to friends and family members, each lasting less than three minutes.

Foucaut's wireless bill from T-Mobile arrived a few weeks ago. It included $59.77 in ordinary usage charges. It also included a $2,367.40 "data service roaming charge" for nearly 158 megabytes' worth of Internet access while in Montreal -- the equivalent of downloading about 80 novels.

The international roaming situation with cellular data is out of control.

A cellphone bill roams to the stratosphere - Los Angeles Times

The LPGA Tour for the last few years has wrestled with the dilemma of so many young South Korean women making a splash and the hint that it was bad for business. Tour officials know they could never put a limit on how many South Korean players can make the tour, so imposing an English proficiency provision is a veiled attempt to do so.

I love playing golf, its a great sport, but I don't like golf culture. There is something subtly unwelcoming about it. Every few years the thin layer of modernity gets scuffed off by some event and you see these people for who they really are. This move, ripped from the pages of 1920's "Jim Crow" laws in the South, is the latest evidence that the sport is run by a bunch of racist old fucks.

LPGA way out of bounds - The Boston Globe

A few people have recommended these to me and I had chance to catch some on a flight recently and they are quite good... I thought I'd pass the recommendation on.

Too often historical portraits glorify the extremism of the partisans whose goals were ultimately successful in a given conflict. Here a more complicated picture is painted ... the fact of conflict is mourned in victory and in defeat, as a tragedy and a failure, and a course of events which the individual characters don't have the power to turn, but only to manage through.

HBO Films: John Adams

Purewire has some startup money and is one of many examples that Atlanta’s Internet security industry is thriving despite a sour economy. New technologie s combined with a growing group of cyberthieves continue to create opportunities for new research and new companies.

“Atlanta is a good place to start a security company,” Judge said. It has enough companies and educational assets to attract talent, but not as many companies as in Silicon Valley, where job-hopping can be excessive. “There’s more loyalty, and you can focus on building a company.”

Atlanta is rising star in field of Internet security | ajc.com

In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

SSRN-'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy by Daniel Solove

There are certainly some thought provoking issues here. Do you have a right to prevent websites (particularly blogs, wikipedia, etc) from hosting embarrassing information about you? Slanderous accusations that are completely false? Video taken of you without your permission? True facts that you simply would prefer remained private? Can these things impact your ability to obtain a job (yes)? How would you balance rules about this against people's right to freedom of speech?

I think this is a very difficult matter that will take a long time to figure out.

Daniel Solove, in Scientific American:

Young people share the most intimate details of personal life on social-networking Web sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, portending a realignment of the public and the private

From the archive:

If you work in privacy or data protection either from a technology or policy perspective, you need to read this book and understand Solove's approach.

Praise for The Future of Reputation:

"No one has thought more about the effects of the information age on privacy than Daniel Solove."
—Bruce Schneier

More recently:

Noooooo problem ... don't worry about privacy ... privacy is dead ... there's no privacy ... just more databases ... that's what you want ... that's what you NEED ... Buy my shit! Buy it -- give me money! Don't worry about the consequences ... there's no consequences. If you give me money, everything's going to be cool, okay? It's gonna be cool. Give me money. No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?

janelane wrote:

The company's main product, Enzyte, which promises sexual enhancement, has ads featuring ''Smiling Bob,'' a happy man with an exaggerated smile.

Holy crap! I just saw this ad yesterday! Wait...you mean "natural male enhancement" is just a pseudonym for fraud? Inconceivable!

-janelane

Apparently "natural" means "herbal" which often means "snake oil," but then you gotta figure a placebo is probably all a lot of these guys need. :)

Regardless, this case has raised important Internet civil liberties issues as the government was reading this guy's email for years and was able to do so without a search warrant. I talked about this issue a bit in my 2006 Phreaknic talk on situations where the 4th amendment doesn't apply.

Thus, in the case of e-mail messages stored and sent in the cloud, the government doesn't need a warrant, doesn't need probable cause, and doesn't need to provide the "owner" of the communications with notice. At least, not right away. Indeed, the government can request that the ISP "preserve" future communications that haven't even been conceived of yet, so that the government may demand them if the situation warrants.

The EFF has obtained a ruling (in THIS case) that this practice is not constitutional but that ruling is controversial.

In some respects this is similar to the border search issue. In general, the police are used to the idea that they can search anything at the border. So people start bringing years worth of email correspondence with them across the border and the police think it makes sense for them to be able to search it. Same thing here. The police are used to being able to search any information you've provided to a third party without a warrant. So people start hosting their entire email archive at gmail and the police figure it makes sense for them to be able to search that without a warrant.

The problem is that we're rapidly approaching a place where the 4th amendment won't matter much as a practical concern because our technology has changed in a way that puts most of our personal information beyond its reach. It will be as good as if it didn't exist, and no one is really considering the impact that change is going to have on the nature of our culture. When America finally wakes up and realizes that the Constitution doesn't work the way they thought it did, I think there is going to be hell to pay for the politicians and lawyers who have blissfully allowed this slide down the slippery slope, but in the mean time there are a lot of people like Mr. Warshak who are going to be surprised to learn that everything they are doing has been watched for years without probable cause. Whether or not he deserved it, its still a scary thought.

RE: Ohio company owner gets 25 years in fraud case - NYTimes.com

you can read how Anton Kapela and Alex Pilosov conducted their interception of the DefCon network traffic in the slides from their talk (.ppt). Their DefCon presentation, by the way, was an unscheduled, last-minute talk that occurred at the end of the last day of the DefCon conference, so it hadn't appeared on the conference schedule.

Worth a look.

More on BGP Attacks -- Updated | Threat Level from Wired.com

Star Caller provides a fun and fresh way to promote an assortment of products ranging from entertainment to hard goods. Star Caller utilizes celebrity fan bases to promote our clients products. Our marketing is successful because it not only reaches the target demographic, it also provides leads for our clients that would normally be unattainable.

What is it? Fun, dynamic phone calls, in the voice of stars and customized to the individual characteristics of each fan. Our technology allows you to speak directly to your fans - and have your brand go viral so that fans market you to others.

I wish Jello good luck with his new startup!

Star Caller - Home Page

In this keynote talk at Personal Democracy Forum 2008, Pesce situates the current moment of transformation in the context of 60,000 years of human civilization; argues that our innate tendencies to connect with each other, copy behaviors and share ideas are now on hyperdrive; and projects a near-future where "hyperempowered" individuals and networks transform politics. As he concludes: "Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and ‘rebooting’ them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him."

The speaker created VRML. Memestreams readers will be familiar with the theme of liberal democracy and high technology being a product of the printing press, and the development of computer mediated communications being a similarly important development which will create similarly important changes.

Ultimately, a nice segway into Virgil's recent work on Wikipedia.

A more detailed discussion is here.

PdF2008 Talks: Mark Pesce on 'Hyperpolitics (American Style)'