Blind City Planner

City of God and City of Man. this landscape suggests a few things the city planners don’t understand. Cities have a way of wrapping you in sinking you deeper and deeper each day as your roots are severed from flesh and blood and the rawness of rural life. We faint at the realities of life. […]

Snowden Updates

A Web Guerrilla Breaking News From the Jungle: Inside Glenn Greenwald’s Mountaintop Home Office by David Carr at the NYTimes “On approaching Glenn Greenwald’s home office high in the jungle-encrusted mountains above Rio de Janeiro, all is tranquil, bucolic even. A gurgling stream at the entrance frames the idyll. And then the dogs notice the incursion. […]

Surveiller

Busy signals signals flicker under oath you throw blanket over both the truth and lies that you’ve huddled together in a mess of wires emitting sparks which scatter that across the world.   (Photo credit: takomabibelot)

Popes, Pseudo-Events, Computer Marriage and the Simple Life

In this week’s reading list, we have quite a combination. A murder in Montgomery remains unsolved as the victim’s simple life leaves no social media, email or other electronic footprints for law enforcement to follow. A Florida man is demanding his right to wed his pornography-laden computer. We’ve also got a scholarly love letter to […]

The Queen’s Speech: The enemy is “abused technology”

USA Today says the Queen probably never saw the speech. But apparently the UK government had prepared a speech for the Queen to give in case of nuclear war in the 1980s, and it was just released to the public for the first time. A stand-out line from the speech: “The enemy is not the […]

Online Privacy: How Did We Get Here?

From the description: As technology has evolved over the past two centuries, so have our expectations about privacy. This new digital world allows us to connect with each other with increasing ease, but it has also left our personal information readily available, and our privacy vulnerable. Cultural norms have pushed us all online, seemingly at […]

NSA Spying: Just the Basics

Edward Snowden, a former worker for the CIA and NSA, has leaked top secret government documents that seem to show that the US government collects large swaths of electronic data of its citizens, including data about phone calls, emails, Internet usage, etc. He is now hiding in Hong Kong. Read the original exclusive from The […]

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