Columbia University’s NYC24 | Tiny Trackers

NYC24 Covers RFID & Zapped

With 8 million people crammed into 321 square miles, privacy in New York City has always been a rare – and much valued - commodity. Now this basic right is being constricted by the onslaught of 21st Century technology. Faster, lighter, smaller and cheaper equipment have made it simple for even the most average Joe to access private information….

Add comment Datestamp: March 27th, 2006

Guide to Building Low Cost Telecommunication Infrastructure

Wireless Networking in the Developing World

The massive popularity of wireless networking has caused equipment costs to continually plummet, while equipment capabilities continue to increase. By applying this technology in areas that are badly in need of critical communications infrastructure, more people can be brought online than ever before, in less time, for very little cost. We hope to not only convince you that this is possible, but also show how we have made such networks work, and to give you the information and tools you need to start a network project in your local community.

Add comment Datestamp: March 26th, 2006

Exchange Loyalty Cards Online

This is a site where you can exchange a chain store “loyalty” card. For a number of reasons, many people don’t like supermarket loyalty cards. Supermarkets are willing to give you all kinds deals if you’re willing to sell them your privacy in the form of use of a loyalty card. The vast amount of often sensitive personal data collected by people who use loyalty cards can, has been, and will be continue to be abused.

The absolutely best way to resist loyalty cards is not use them and not shop at stores that use them. But many people who are concerned with loyalty cards are not able or willing to cut themselve off entirely.

In acts of civil disobedience aimed to weaken supermarkets’ data-mining operations, both in terms of personal cards and in terms of the larger system, many people have started swapping loyalty cards in both organized and ad-hoc meetings.

cardexchange.org is not a new idea. It’s simply an digital version of one of these card swap-meets.

Add comment Datestamp: March 21st, 2006

A Taxonomy of Privacy

By DANIEL J. SOLOVE, The George Washington University Law School

Abstract:
Privacy is a concept in disarray. Nobody can articulate what it means. As one commentator has observed, privacy suffers from an embarrassment of meanings. Privacy is far too vague a concept to guide adjudication and lawmaking, as abstract incantations of the importance of privacy do not fare well when pitted against more concretely-stated countervailing interests.

In 1960, the famous torts scholar William Prosser attempted to make sense of the landscape of privacy law by identifying four different interests. But Prosser focused only on tort law, and the law of information privacy is significantly more vast and complex, extending to Fourth Amendment law, the constitutional right to information privacy, evidentiary privileges, dozens of federal privacy statutes, and hundreds of state statutes. Moreover, Prosser wrote over 40 years ago, and new technologies have given rise to a panoply of new privacy harms.

A new taxonomy to understand privacy violations is thus sorely needed. This article develops a taxonomy to identify privacy problems in a comprehensive and concrete manner. It endeavors to guide the law toward a more coherent understanding of privacy and to serve as a framework for the future development of the field of privacy law.

Add comment Datestamp: March 21st, 2006

World Information Access 2006 Report

The briefing booklet is now available. The World Information Access 2006 Report presents important trends in the distribution of information and communication technologies around the world. We sometimes work with data that has been collected by international agencies, but more often our tables and graphics are based on original data collection efforts.

Add comment Datestamp: March 20th, 2006

Whitney Biennial 2006

Check it Out!
Whitney Biennial 2006 : Day For Night spacer on view March 2 - May 28, 2006. Together We Can Defeat Captialism’s clone of a portion of whitney.org website with added political commentary.

Add comment Datestamp: March 20th, 2006

What Lies Beneath?

Underground in NYC
Steve Duncan, a 27-year-old self-proclaimed “guerilla historian in Gotham,” has long been fascinated by what lies under New York. But unlike more casual history buffs, Duncan isn’t content merely reading about the abandoned Amtrak tunnels that once housed underground communities of homeless people or the steam tunnels under Columbia University through which materials for the Manhattan project were ferried. Instead, he prefers to put on his rubber boots and goggles and visit these places himself, sometimes again and again.

Add comment Datestamp: March 20th, 2006

Breaking the Game

From March 15-26 2006 Workspace Unlimited presents Breaking the Game Symposium, a first-iteration online event that brings together competing theorists and practitioners to debate and reflect on virtual worlds, computer gaming, immersive technologies, and new possibilities for artistic practice and experience. The symposium will open up the art of game modification to the contingencies of everyday life, where interactive technologies increasingly mediate physical spaces and human movements in very complex and dynamic ways. The symposium themes are: Hybridity, Overclocking the City and The Virtual as Interface to Self and Society.

Participants will consider gaming and other virtual technologies in relationship to building and designing cities, navigating and experiencing urban life, constructing identities, and creating and maintaining social interaction. The symposium encourages debate and discussion through multiple formats including text, video interviews, phone blogging, images, animation, and virtual walkthroughs.

We want the symposium to function as a workspace for testing out ideas, developing new tools, sharing creative processes and works in progress. Breaking the Game is a prototype for how we’d like to initiate and develop real projects around a specific focus, connect our own working process to the ideas and practice of others, and create networks that facilitate and feed into further collaborative opportunities.

Add comment Datestamp: March 20th, 2006

Viruses leap to smart radio tags

RFID is Buggy Too

Computer viruses could be about to take a giant leap and start spreading via smart barcodes, warn experts.

Security researchers have infected a Radio Frequency ID tag with a computer virus to show how the technology is vulnerable to malicious hackers.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at anti-virus firm F-Secure, said: “RFIDs with embedded computers are suspectible to basically all the same threats any other computers are. Unfortunately.”

Add comment Datestamp: March 17th, 2006

Google Zeitgeist

Most popular preoccupations…
Google just launched “Zeitgeist” which is a tally of most searched for items by week, month and country.

Add comment Datestamp: March 11th, 2006