Salon.com > Denise Caruso

Ciao for now

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:52:00 +0000

I'm at the end of my stint as Machinist's guest writer, and I wanted to say "ciao" and "grazie infinite," as they say in my country.

I haven't dipped back into the tech world since I started Hybrid Vigor in 2000, and before that it had been years since I'd written for a publication where I could really write in my own voice. So this week was tremendously rewarding, if only from that perspective.

But wait, there's more!

What I found even more pleasing than romancing my muse was the quality of the commentary here. A minimum of snark, a maximum of actual thoughtful perspective about the topic at hand -- how very rare. And what a great experience for a writer. Every day, I looked forward to what you had to say.

Until next time, then ... thanks again.

Artist at work

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:30:00 +0000

Sometime on Thursday night, the creative dynamo known as Allee Willis launched the next phase of her own personal 15-year-plus "power to the people" interactive media revolution, with a new song, video and window into the creative process called "Editing Is Cool" by Bubbles & Cheesecake, aka Willis (Bubbles) and the terrific torch-soul singer and songwriter Holly Palmer.

"The video is honestly the best thing I've ever done," said Willis. "The whole thing is eight parts, so you can see every single stage of the song and video coming together, along with work logs and lyrics and lots more. It's the first time I got to go this deep into everything I stand for."

Why is Facebook so addictive?

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:15:00 +0000

Snapz Pro X screenshot

According to Facebook, today is B.J. Fogg's birthday. I know that because he, like millions of other people -- many of whom, like me, are online privacy freaks -- blithely entered this and many other highly personal details about his life when we joined the service.

Unlike most of us, though, it's his job to figure out how they got us to do it.

Fogg is director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, an independent research center that explores a discipline he invented, called "captology." Captology stands for Computers As Persuasive Technology, and it looks at how certain technologies intentionally persuade us to do their bidding.

Fogg's research examines how product designers can methodically use persuasive techniques in everything from ATMs to shareware.

Will advertisers kill the market for online tv?

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:34:00 +0000

Ellen Page as Lilith Sandstrom in ReGenesis

Yesterday I saw that Hulu announced an upgrade and program additions to its HD Gallery, including a high-def version of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

In her blurb on the news, CNet's Caroline McCarthy notes that "the No. 1 thing worth watching on Hulu is the stellar Season 2 premiere of AMC's Mad Men," but I disagree. I'm going with the first season of ReGenesis, the Canadian Broadcasting Co.'s award-winning biotech thriller that Hulu recently scored. It's so good I've already plowed through the whole thing, and I've been badgering the Movie Network, Hulu, Shaftesbury Films and anyone else with a logo on this show to get us the rest of the seasons, and pronto.

Catching Comcast

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:15:00 +0000

On Monday, Comcast was ordered by the Federal Communications Commission to stop secretly using "discriminatory" techniques to interfere with file-sharing applications like BitTorrent. The decision was a surprisingly swift and sensible response (for the FCC, anyhow) to the news that broke in October 2007, when first the Associated Press and then the Electronic Frontier Foundation caught the company spoofing and jamming Internet traffic.

By harmonic convergence, also on Monday, EFF released an open-source, "test your ISP" software tool that will let you check your own Net connection for ongoing Comcastian interference.

Called Switzerland, EFF says it's:

designed to detect the modification or injection of packets of data traveling over IP networks, including those introduced by anti-P2P tools from Sandvine (widely believed to be used by Comcast to interfere with BitTorrent uploads) and AudibleMagic, advertising injection systems like FairEagle, censorship systems like the Great Firewall of China, and other systems that we don't know about yet.
Continue Reading...

Can avatars stop identity theft?

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:11:00 +0000

Screenshot from Entropia Universe

The laptop data security issue I wrote about yesterday caused several lines of thought to dovetail for me about the less obvious, more everyday trust issues that we find ourselves dealing with online, and what technologies can be rallied to solve the problem.

First, I'm sure many of you know these stats, but they are so bad and have such dreadful ramifications for a healthy Internet that they bear repeating. A 2008 survey of 18- to 55-year-old U.S. consumers, published by Gemalto, a digital security company, showed that 74 percent are afraid of identity theft as a result of online transactions. Fear of getting their online bank account hijacked was next, at 44 percent -- understandably so, since nearly half of them had already fended off such a theft.

Don’t want your laptop strip-searched?

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:00:00 +0000

Late last month, I opened an e-mail from my friend in Paris, and the first thing I saw was

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----Hash: SHA1

PGP is encryption software that's been around since 1991. When I asked him why he was using it, he told me his company had been talking to the CIA for a while about its technology and he'd just gotten used to encrypting all his e-mail.

I started writing about all things encryption before 1991, when the development of PGP first made public the conflict between my right to privacy and government's right to intercept criminal communication. It's been hammer and tongs between the encryption/privacy community and the government ever since.

Still, I can count on zero hands the times I've actually encrypted an e-mail or a file. I don't know exactly why. It seems like it's never been easy enough to do to make it practical. Plus it's not as if I'm carrying around state secrets on my MacBook.