A Scenario where the Cloud is not an Option, Private Communication beyond Control of Those who Want to Spy on You

One of the parts of using those free cloud apps is those who run the service can spy on you and even cut you off.  This has occurred with the Hong Kong protesters and their choice of using Firechat which allows communication to others without internet access.

Hong Kong protestors use FireChat to text without cell service 

 

Hong Kong protestors are using FireChar, a mobile messaging app, to communicate without using cellular or Internet service. Pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong downloaded the app 100,000 times in just one day.

By Bryan Cronan, Staff Writer OCTOBER 1, 2014

What do the protests in Hong Kong and the festival Burning Man have in common? FireChat.

Protestors in Hong Kong are using the messaging app FireChat to communicate without using cellular or Internet service. 

Venturebeat has a guest post suggesting there will be more services that skip the cloud to support those who want to be private.

In 2015, popular online social networks will be reduced to serving for social branding, and a next generation of apps using peer-to-peer networking instead of cloud computing will be used for texting and image and video sharing.

The exodus from popular social networks will be accelerated by increasing revelations of both the storing and monitoring of personal communications by the government, and experimentation on users of social networks for the financial benefit of third parties. The exodus, like most all technological trends, will be led by the young and the tech-savvy, and the rest of the worlds’ users will slowly follow as technology inevitably spreads.

• 
  Vincent Yu/AP

  View Caption

What do the protests in Hong Kong and the festival Burning Man have in common? FireChat.

Protestors in Hong Kong are using the messaging app FireChat to communicate without using cellular or Internet service. 

Hiding Your Moves on the Internet by acting like a Criminal is not Effective

The Guardian has a post on Janet Vertisi’s efforts to hide her pregnancy on the internet. 

Attempts to stay anonymous on the web will only put the NSA on your trail

The sobering story of Janet Vertesi's attempts to conceal her pregnancy from the forces of online marketers shows just how Kafkaesque the internet has become

The bit of irony is The Guardian hid the origin of the presentation Janet made which is here on Mashable.

How One Woman Hid Her Pregnancy From Big Data

For the past nine months, Janet Vertesi, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, tried to hide from the Internet the fact that she's pregnant — and it wasn't easy.

Pregnant women are incredibly valuable to marketers. For example, if a woman decides between Huggies and Pampers diapers, that's a valuable, long-term decision that establishes a consumption pattern. According to Vertesi, the average person's marketing data is worth 10 cents; a pregnant woman's data skyrockets to $1.50. And once targeted advertising finds a pregnant woman, it won't let up.

The part that had me laughing is when she figured out her process of being invisible made her more visible as a potential criminal.

Genius, right? But not exactly foolproof. Vertesi said that by dodging advertising and traditional forms of consumerism, her activity raised a lot of red flags. When her husband tried to buy $500 worth of Amazon gift cards with cash in order to get a stroller, a notice at the Rite Aid counter said the company had a legal obligation to report excessive transactions to the authorities.

"Those kinds of activities, when you take them in the aggregate ... are exactly the kinds of things that tag you as likely engaging in criminal activity, as opposed to just having a baby," she said.

What Janet was doing in her efforts to hide her pregnancy and her purchasing behavior, is she was doing the same things a criminal does to hide their activity.  If you want to hide, then blend into a crowd like camouflage.

Background matching is perhaps the most common camouflage tactic. In background matching, a speciesconceals itself by resembling its surroundings in coloration, form, or movement. In its simplest form, animals such as deer and squirrels resemble the “earth tones” of their surroundings. Fish such as flounder almost exactly match their speckled seafloor habitats.

Don't Think Social Issues are Important in the work place? Social Threats are close to Physical Threats

The latest book I am reading is Social by Matthew B. Lieberman

Two points made that can open your mind up.

Our brains evolved to experience threats to our social connections in much the same way they experience physical pain .

We intuitively believe social and physical pain are radically different kinds of experiences, yet the way our brains treat them suggests that they are more similar than we imagine.

Lieberman, Matthew D. (2013-10-08). Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (p. 5). Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

So much of work and school thinks being social is bad and a distraction, but you cannot turn off being social.

Based on the latest cutting edge research, the findings in Social have important real-world implications.  Our schools and businesses, for example, attempt to minimalize social distractions.  But this is exactly the wrong thing to do to encourage engagement and learning, and literally shuts down the social brain, leaving powerful neuro-cognitive resources untapped. 

Are you ready for the re invention of Media? Bezos, Omidyar, Jobs

NYTimes has a post about the reinvention of News Media.

What will get your attention in Paypal founder Omidyar is joining Bezos efforts in media.

Pierre M. Omidyar, the founder of eBay, revealed last week that he would back the journalist Glenn Greenwald and his colleagues in a newly conceived news site to the tune of $250 million. Just over two months ago, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, spent the same amount to personally buy The Washington Post. That’s half a billion dollars dropped into serious news production, a sector that investors in distressed assets have been fleeing.

And Steve Jobs wife is investing as well.

It doesn’t stop there. In July, Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs, invested in Ozy Media, a news start-up, joining a group that includes the angel investor Ron Conway; Larry Sonsini, a lawyer from an eminent Silicon Valley law firm; Dan Rosensweig of Chegg.com; and David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer.

What are some of things these  people are thinking?

“I think that technology could help find a way to actually do important journalism for our democracy that can impact many more people and help serve it to a general-interest audience in a way that can be commercially sustainable,” Mr. Omidyar said. (A separate article has more excerpts from the interview with Mr. Omidyar.)

Or some may just be dreaming.

This unfolding partnership will be fun to behold. For all their differences, the news and technology businesses share a kind of utopianism, an idealistic belief that the work of human hands can make life better for other humans.

40 Days of Dating goes Viral, Could 40 Weeks of a Data Center work too?

I was reading Om Malik's post on 40 days of dating.

40daysofdating: An awesome new kind of long-form story telling

by Om Malik

AUG. 4, 2013 - 12:16 PM PDT

3 Comments

• A
• A

SUMMARY:

40daysofdating is a website that combines text, photos and video to tell the story of two friends Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman who after failing at finding love, are dating each other and sharing the experience. It is like reality television, except for the web.

I've been waiting for when someone would have an interesting web site that tells a story.

Needless to say, we have barely scratched the surface. At some level, 40daysofdating is like reality television — reality web if you will — and a good signpost for what could be a more episodic approach to content and story telling. In the past, it was comic books and stories in noir magazines that kept you hooked. So why not web-based episodic story telling?

In the data center world, there could be 40 weeks of a data center.  But, it could be 40 years before the data center world would adopt story telling as a way to share its ideas. :-)