Implication of the Red Sox winning

I have now seen the Sox win the World Series twice. (I also saw Bill Buckner do his thing as well. Yin and yang.) Can I still claim to be a “long suffering” Red Sox fan? Now that we’ve won twice in four years, what does this mean for the Sox Nation? If we cannot define ourselves using our suffering, our endless series of broken hearts, how can we define ourselves?

Was Verizon trying to incinerate my town?

I don’t know about you, but drilling into the electrical main supplying juice to a house does not sound like a good time. This whole affair is strange enough, but the fact that it occured in my hometown is even stranger. BTW, my parents got FIOS from Verizon. After a few months of wrangling they finally got it installed properly. Pretty damn fast, but a pretty big pain in the butt.

What could possibly go wrong?

Indonesia to try and plug mud volcano with concrete balls.

First, that headline is in dire need of a comma or two. I didn’t know that volcanoes can spew different things. Mud volcano. Lava volcano. Refurbished iMac volcano. It is truly amazing what nature can produce. Also, I didn’t realize that volcanoes could have balls, let alone concrete ones.

I’ll give Indonesia an A for creativity and effort. I just wonder what happens when the volcano is full of concrete balls. In the future will we read a headline that says: Indonesia pummeled by concrete balls launched from constipated mud volcano. Tune in and see.

Why I don’t travel for major holidays or How the FBI stole Christmas (and our privacy)

Bruce Schneier posted an essay he wrote on Surveillance and Oversight over on his blog.  He compares the FBI’s actions over a potential terrorist threat during Christmas 2003 to the response to a potential riot by the Rotterdam police force.  He illustrates how the FBI’s lack of judicial oversight coupled with FISA warrants and national security letters leads to its ability to consume massive amounts of data about people without their consent and knowledge.

I used to say, it didn’t really matter what the government collected about me as I wasn’t that interesting.  But at some point, something just snapped inside, and I have become fiercely protective of my data and distrustful of the government’s ability to do the right thing with that data.  I am still not that interesting, but that doesn’t mean I want the FBI hoovering up bits of me from hotels, credit card companies, airlines, and libraries.

Okay so we don’t have an explicit Constitutional right to privacy.  The Supreme Court’s ruling have help establish privacy as a basic human right.  We certainly don’t have an explicit Constitutional right to anonymity.  Yes, there are cases around various aspects of anonymity, but nothing overly definitive and nothing explicit.  It would be interesting for someone to write a history of anonymity.  I’d love to see a time-line of when we lost our ability to be anonymous citizens, tourists, and customers.

As Turkey Day approaches, let us be thankful for for what privacy we have, that there are people still interested in our digital and personal freedoms, and that you paid cash for that turkey.

Ian Glazer
=ian.glazer

Technorati Tags:   ,