Privacy

All too often adverts you see online are your past come back to haunt you. Advertisers use tracking cookies to capture the web history of users and monitor usage of a particular site. That information is used to serve up adverts most likely to influence you.But I discovered earlier this week that some advertising companies let you opt out of that tracking. Read on to find out how to free yourself from tracking.First, though, consider why you may want to. There are two ways of looking at this. Either you believe the advertisers who say well-targetted ads are actually helpful to users, or you think it best that your personal information stay that way.After all, the information ad firms gather can be enough to identify individuals.

This website attempts to guess the gender of its visitors, and provides an enlightening lesson about online security.Web browsers are happy to share your browsing history with all and sundry. The page uses data about the sex ratio of visitors to popular websites from this source to make a guess. My results are below:Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 0%Likelihood of you being MALE is 100%Pretty clear-cut. I think it's the dominance of tech- and science-centric sites that tend to have male-dominated audiences.This script exploits the way that links you have already clicked on appear in a different colour to unclicked links.

The Helga de Alvear gallery in Madrid is currently running a (very timely) exhibition on the controversial topic of Extraordinary Rendition. The expression was coined by the Bush administration to define new legal measures designed to sidestep the existing Human Rights system and deprive some individuals from its protection in the name of the fight against terrorism.

Detainees at Camp X-Ray, at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

It's not everyday that Dick Cheney gives its title to an art exhibition.

In the weeks following September 11, the U.S. Vice President justified a steep increase of surveillance measures by explaining that "Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in American life. They represent an understanding of the world as it is, and dangers we must guard against perhaps for decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy." Almost 7 years later, the collection and sharing of personal data by governments, luggage searches, Internet monitoring, and wiretaps have indeed become part of a "new normal" in American life.

View of the exhibition space

Back in November i was at Medialab Prado in Madrid to visit the Visualizar workshop and i had the pleasure to hear the talk that Juan Freire gave there. I was really looking forward to know better about the thoughts of someone whose keen observation on open knowledge, digital culture and everyware'd city i was following with interest for some time. Juan Freire is one of the very very few people who keep track of what is written in the field of ubiquitous computing, free software and technology but who would also hang around with media art curators and mingle with the hackers and the urbanists. And his everyday job doesn't have much to do with all of the above. He has a PhD in Biology, he is Associate Professor and Coordinator research group at University of Corunna.

The big-money investments in social networking sites like Facebook are based on the notion that it will be possible to spin users' networks of friends into gold. But as a Google co-founder admitted today, no one has yet perfected it.One open question has been the strength of the connection between our online relationships and our online interests and buying behaviour.

Is your internet service provider (ISP) spying on you?

An Atlas of Radical Cartography, edited by artists Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat (Amazon USA and UK)

Back from the 10th edition of ZEMOS98, a festival of audiovisual culture titled this year Regreso al futuro, Back to the Future. I wish all the events i attend were as intelligently curated, carefully organized and stimulating as this one. The audience was great too. And extremely polite: they sat all the way through the talk i gave there in a spanish bastardized with franco-italian words and grammar.

Image from the workshop Control Sonoro

REally interesting - don't know how this would go down in the UK

Judge: Man can't be forced to divulge encryption passphrase

A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that prosecutors can't force a criminal defendant accused of having illegal images on his hard drive to divulge his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) passphrase.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase to prosecutors. The Fifth Amendment protects the right to avoid self-incrimination.

Full article here

http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9834495-38.html?tag=cd.blog