Long time no see

About a year ago, a few factors caused me to stop posting on this blog. I got a new full-time job that kept me quite busy (that's the main reason), the 2006 airshow season started (which meant I spent 1 out of 3 weekends at airshows, and the other two weekends editing the photos and making the webpages for those airshows), and I moved away from Silicon Valley (I pretty much stopped reading SlashDot, although I do visit Reddit and BattelleMedia every now and then, Digg regularly, and BoingBoing every day). I have also become more interested in issues of intellectual property, copyright, DRM, the DMCA, etc, so that has pretty much replaced my interest on privacy, as far as keeping track on how new technologies make people have to reconsider old ways of doing things, old expectations, etc.

There have been some news regarding online privacy over this past year, but nothing major. There was Google's announcement about anonymizing their logs after however many months. And that one thing about how someone logged into their Google account on another person's computer, and the other person did not log out so all their searches were visible by that someone, which for some reason some people found outrageous. And the whole thing about Yahoo and the guy in China who went to jail. And soldiers in Iraq not being allowed to blog quite freely. And how US intelligence agencies pretty much spy on everyone. Maybe I'll comment about these topics, while I'm resurrecting this blog.

But the real reason I just brought this blog back to life was to give my reaction to the whole Google Maps Street View thing, another tool that manipulates public information in a way that many idiots have found to be scary, due primarily to their misconceptions about whether what you do in public is private (they seem to think it is). So my next post will be about that. I'll be done with it soon. Stay tuned.