A cheapest asacol doctor will also be able to help a person learn discount gentamicin eye drops if their memory issues are related to ADHD rather than lipitor sale another condition or cause. Additionally, because medical alert systems allow buy retin-a side effects work people to call for help in an emergency, they can ventolin no prescription benefit anyone wanting to "age in place." Exercise improves blood get compazine circulation, allowing immune cells to move more effectively throughout the clozapine body. Anyone experiencing new or worsening adrenal symptoms should speak buy generic diclofenac with a healthcare professional as soon as possible. However, it buy cheap clozapine without prescription is important to note that more research is necessary to buy cheap diovan find the best dose for anxiety and to investigate any get cheap viagra online effects long-term side effects. It is not possible to prevent Parkinson's cheap lumigan disease, but some lifestyle changes and precautions may help reduce advair online sales the risk. Doctors most often prescribe combination pills that contain both.

Khalil Gibran’s wonderful poem begins, “Your children are not your children.” They are of your lineage, that is, but you can’t control them like possessions.

I thought of this reading the woes iPhone buyers. From the beginning, Apple intended the iPhone to be usable only with AT&T cellular service. Steve Jobs was not amused when people figured out how to hack the phone so it could be used with other cellular service providers. So when he released the new iPhone, he made it harder to change the device’s intended functioning. You have to activate it while he (or his appointed representative at your friendly Apple store) is watching. Turns out the activation software was problematic and it’s been a very frustrating experience for many buyers, such as this one. Long lines in the store, people sent home and told to try from there, and discovering that they still can’t get the thing working. (There are many similar stories.)

Much can be said about Apple having — temporarily, no doubt — turned an engineering marvel into a public relations disaster. But if you look beyond the surface, there is an important philosophical point here. iPhone buyers thought they were buying a phone, and most people think that when you buy something, you should be able to do what you want with it. What Apple actually wants is to tether the phone to the company, making sure it gets used only in the ways Apple wants. You aren’t really buying a phone at the Apple store, because when you walk out of the store you are dragging the tether behind you, and Apple can jerk the tether any time it wants.

As long as things work perfectly and as the customer expects, tethering may be a sound business strategy. But in this fiasco Apple has bluntly reminded iPhone buyers that the thing they think they have bought isn’t really theirs. This larger point may ultimately cost Apple.

Here’s¬†a good AP column about the way the major players limit what can be said in order to satisfy what they consider appropriate standards of taste. There is a wonderful example of a Dutch photographer whose documentary photo of a street scene in Romania was taken down from Flickr — twice. The problem? It showed a young adolescent boy smoking, as happens a lot on the streets of Romania. Flickr didn’t want to encourage youth smoking, or perhaps didn’t want to be accused of encouraging youth smoking, or perhaps received actual complaints about the photo and found it easier to censor than to argue.

This is a tough problem, as private enterprises should generally be left to do whatever they feel is best for business, and it’s hard to see this kind of censorship as harmful. But as sites like Flickr become the technological equivalent of the public square, attracting huge numbers of participants because a huge number of participants are already there, it’s equally hard not to think that the personal judgments of random employees should not be decisive in what can be shown and what can’t be. And government regulations immediately raise the problem that web sites are multinational and governments aren’t.¬†

Politico reports today on Congressional efforts at data security. The story is prompted by claims from Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) and Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) that computers used by their staffers had been “hacked” by the Chinese government because the good congressmen supported the speech rights of Chinese citizens.

Unfortunately, as far as I could tell, the congressmen did not provide any forensic evidence about what the “hack” was or where it came from. These are not trivial matters; even if an attack looks like it is coming from China, that could be a spoof — the actual attacker might be half a world away.

More importantly, I suspect this incident reveals more about the sloppiness of congressional offices than about the sophistication of Chinese hackers. I don’t doubt that the Chinese are sophisticated, but even sophisticated criminals prefer soft targets to hard ones. Was it necessary for multiple staffers to have sensitive data, unencrypted, on their computers? Had any of the staffers opened any questionable attachments or gone to any virus-infected sites lately? Note that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s recent identity theft happened because a staffer at an investment firm used the same computer for client records and music file sharing. Share one file, share ’em all.

The bad guys are out there, for sure, but when a Congressmen starts creating an international incident out of something that happened two years ago and won’t disclose the details, remember Pogo’s profundity, which I quote in the Politico article: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

A bill is before the Massachusetts legislature that would require web sites to give users the option of not having the records of their visits retained to be used to aid in targeted advertising. I am quoted briefly in the Patriot Ledger story on the bill, which seems unlikely to pass because, well, it’s July and the legislature wants to go on vacation. (See also this State House News Service story.)

I can’t speak to the details of the bill, in which many devils generally lie. It’s hard to argue against requiring an opt-out provision, which is likely not too hard to implement and won’t affect the advertising business model very much since few people ever change the default options on anything. (If you have the option of registering as an organ donor when you renew your drivers license, for example, participation rates vary hugely depending on whether the default is to be a donor or not to be a donor.)

Nonetheless, some of the sweeping statements about this issue are debatable. “It’s really your business what you visit on the internet,” said Rep. Daniel Bosley, speaking in support of the bill. Well, sort of; it’s also the web site’s business decision whether to send you a page when you ask for one. Google is not a public utility, even though it doesn’t require you to register in advance. Disclosure and transparency are good principles, but so are the laws of economics.

Randy Skoglund of the Americans for Technology Leadership, also supporting the bill, says “Most consumers aren’t aware how much info on them there is and how it’s being used. Consumers need to feel safe and protected online.” The first statement is absolutely true; people need to be more aware, and our book and the various disclosure mandates are steps toward educating the public. I am not so sure about the second. Is is the job of the government to make the public feel safe and protected online?

One of the fondest hopes for the Internet is that it will re-energize the democratic spirit, by making it easier for citizens to participate in the democratic process. Senator Obama is thought to have profited in particular from the mass participation of Internet users.

An Obama supporter ¬†has used the Obama Facebook group to organize opposition to the senator’s position on FISA (previously discussed on this blog). It’s a lovely example of the double-edged sword. Conventional wisdom requires that modern campaigns be well controlled. (Good grief, the Dems are so focused on image control that they are dictating the colors of the food on the plates at their convention, and the percentage of fruits and vegetables – do they really want us to think that is the way they will run the country?). The control instinct runs counter to the spirit of participatory chaos that the open Internet also supports. I’ll bet that in four years this conflict will have been sorted out a bit better in the political campaigns, at a cost to that spirit of individual entrepreneurial power that is so invigorating right now.

There is a good short article on the NYT Business page today about the ways in which Microsoft and Google have made network effects work to their advantage. A network effect is simply a situation in which having more people use your product makes it more valuable for other people to use it too, causing its popularity to snowball. Bill Gates is credited as the master of network effects, having built the Microsoft empire on the foundation of Microsoft’s operating system. Google has no such single control point, goes the argument, because of the Internet’s open standards, but has nonetheless been quite successful at exploiting “softer” network effects.

As I was cleaning up some old files I ran across a compelling example of the way network effects have changed the personal computer industry. In early 1984, as personal computers were becoming common at Harvard, I did a campuswide survey to find out what machines students had. 54 students said they owned personal computers and 32 of those said they had them at Harvard. These numbers are surely underestimates; the survey was unscientific and there was no reward for participating. But the distribution is fascinating:

8 Apple; 10 IBM; 4 Tandy; 4 Commodore; 5 Atari; 1 Zenith; 4 TI; 3 DEC; 2 Osborne; 4 Kaypro; one each HP, Sinclair, Brothers, Actrix, Corona, Ohio Scientific, Sol20, Timex, and NEC. I remember preparing the report itself on a Heathkit Z80 machine I built at home.

Now that was a Cambrian period in the evolution of the industry. This was 9 years after Microsoft had been founded, and there was still plenty of competition. But the incompatibilities made fertile ground for de facto standards to emerge, and Gates’ company tilled that earth with amazing skill.

The data about YouTube viewing that Google must turn over to Viacom, described in yesterday’s post, includes data from all over the world. So the viewing habits of individual Frenchmen and Italians will be there for the analyzing. A nice piece of reporting by Bloomberg’s Stephanie Bodoni points out an interesting side-effect of the judge’s order: it may breach some important and delicate international trade agreements.

As discussed in Chapter 2 of Blown to Bits, privacy standards in the EU are higher than privacy standards in the US, where free expression rights (happy Independence Day, everyone) tend to trump privacy rights. This creates a problem for the transfer of personal information out of the EU to the US. While the US government never signed on to EU privacy rules, a “safe harbor” was created for individual American businesses that could certify their compliance with European standards. US businesses with multinational operations have to demonstrate their compliance with seven principles for handling personal information, including security, access controls, and the like, in order to be able to import personal information about Europeans.

The judge’s order that Google must turn over that personal information to another US company, whatever deal Google may have struck with the EU, is a breach in these international privacy agreements. And the Europeans are gearing up to complain.

One has to wonder whether the judge was aware of the international dimensions of his order, or didn’t care about them.

The worlds of copyright and privacy collided on Tuesday to cause a massive, privacy-shattering digital explosion. A judge ordered Google, which owns YouTube, to turn over to Viacom all its records of who has watched what videos. What clip, under what name, and from what IP address. Viacom is suing Google for accommodating its copyrighted materials on YouTube, and the judge dismissed privacy arguments Google tried to mount as “speculative.” The story is here and the judge’s order is here. (Thanks to Wired’s blog for these.)

Readers of Blown to Bits will recall how easily “anonymized” search records were de-identified, so there is serious reason to doubt that the fact that YouTube users are free to choose non-identifying login names will really protect their privacy.

The logs themselves comprise twelve TERABYTEs of data. There are lots of things that can be done with that data and there are lots of ways it can go astray ….

The judge denied various other requests of the plaintiffs, including a request for the source code of the Google search engine itself, supposedly so the plaintiff could check if Google was doing something special to make infringing material more attractive.

But the judge did require Google to turn over every video it has ever taken down for any reason, so Viacom can sort through them and draw their own conclusions about why. So if you ever put up a video while you were drunk and then changed your mind in the cold light of day, it’s part of the evidence in this court case now.

So much for the illusion that watching YouTube is like watching TV. But I’m sure there’s no reason to be worried about all those activity logs. Surely everyone will understand that you were just horsing around when you were watching that stuff ‚Ķ or maybe you were conducting research, yes, that’s what you were doing ‚Ķ.

As the New York Times reported last week, Google now keeps track of what you’ve been searching for in order to show you more relevant advertising. So if you’ve been asking about various islands in the South Pacific and you search for “Java,” you’ll likely get advertisements for travel offers, not for guides to the programming language by the same name.

Google’s technology for achieving this effect involves leaving cookies on your computer. But the article notes that Google already had access to the previously visited site, even without leaving a cookie. That’s a standard part of the HTTP protocol for web browsers. Click on a link, and the browser dispatches to the web server not just the URL of the page it wants, but the URL of the page that contains the link on which you clicked.

That datum is called the “referer.” (Yes, the word is misspelled that way in the HTTP standard. Oh well.) This is what makes possible some interesting customizations of web pages. For example, if Joe’s Books has a site that links to Blown to Bits, we could greet people who visit our page from Joe’s with a distinctive message such as “Thanks for coming over from Joe’s Books!”

Now this is all wonderful and a little disquieting. Such tricks make the experience more personal, and perhaps more informed. But is that what we really want? Do we like knowing we are leaving tracks that others know about? And if not, would we rather have them know about the tracks but not tell us that?