Tag: technology

Science Debate: It’s about time!

Science buzz!!!

w00t! There’s a group pushing for a presidential science debate focused on the many scientific issues that face us nationally and worldwide. Their call:

Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Health and Medicine, and Science and Technology Policy.

I’m all signed up, and definitely encourage others to visit ScienceDebate2008.com and do the same. I seriously doubt there is a single major issue these days that doesn’t have a significant technological or scientific component. Yet there’s precious little discussion of science in our political dialogue, and candidates regularly display an ignorance of science that is at best extremely worrying.

To be honest, I have doubts about this happening, at least right away, but we’ve got to start demanding this sort of accountability on science and technology. Every journey begins with a single step web site…

Oh, and they really need a badge that people like me can include in posts and sidebars and such. Anyone want to make one?

Tags: blogging, debates, Politics, Science, technology

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Facebook a creepy peeping tom neighbor?

An evening on the computer

Apparently Facebook is collecting even more information about us than we thought:

A Computer Associates security researcher is sounding the alarm that Facebook’s controversial Beacon online ad system goes much further than anyone has imagined in tracking people’s Web activities outside the popular social networking site.

Beacon will report back to Facebook on members’ activities on third-party sites that participate in Beacon even if the users are logged off from Facebook and have declined having their activities broadcast to their Facebook friends.

I can’t say I’m surprised – the entire design of Facebook has consistently been geared to extract as much information as possible from their users, and they haven’t exactly been sneaky or subtle about it. Still, a depressing wake up call for all those folks who are blithely spilling their lives all over social networking systems.

They don’t provide much in the way of technical details. However, as the wonderful Web 2.0 world moves us farther and farther away from the web as a collection of simple text pages with HTML tags thrown in for pretties, there are more and more ways that we can be tracked and subverted. We can certainly do more (I do love Flickr, and Google Calendar is a joy), but we expose ourselves to increasingly more risk as a consequence.

Caveat emptor.

(Apparently Facebook has turned off Beacon, although my suspicion is that Beacon is just the tip of Facebook’s data collection iceberg.)

Tags: privacy, risks, technology, Web 2.0, Web development

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