New Laptops on a Sinking Ship – by “Charles A”

December 1, 2010 ~ bradevanrosen ~ Leave a comment

How would you feel if you were on a sinking ship and someone handed you a new laptop? Somehow I don’t think you would be too pleased. Yet somehow Nicholas Negroponte doesn’t see any problem waltzing into impoverished countries with failing education systems and handing out laptops directly into the hands of children. What good does this really do anyone? With no infrastructure to provide technical support or adequate training to help teachers integrate the technology into their lesson plans, how much good is One Laptop per Child really doing? The problem with education in many of these developing countries goes far deeper than a few laptops can fix. The XO netbook isn’t going to be a revolution for more reasons than one.

How many of you own an iPhone? How many of you have bothered to jailbreak them? Very few I’m guessing. By most accounts fewer than 10% of iPhone users have tried to jailbreak their devices. The truth of the matter is that most consumers simply can’t be bothered to go the extra step to get that extra utility from their phones. Yet Zittrain somehow expects that the kids receiving these XO netbooks will be driven enough to learn the programming skills necessary to make the device suit their needs. This seems highly unlikely.

Instead I propose a different idea. Whatever happens to all the computers on campus when Yale decides to replace aging units? An initiative to donate used computers to these developing countries would be far more sustainable than convincing a government that probably has many other issues on its plate to spend 200 dollars on a laptop that will then be handed over directly into the hands of children. More importantly educators need to be trained to use these devices to take advantage of the wealth of free digital educational resources available out there. Even if every child won’t be able to attend Khan University on their own personal laptops, teachers will at least be able to access free online classroom aides or learn new teaching methods from Khan’s short but sweet style.

There is definitely a huge gap between the wonderful educational resources available online and the people who need them the most. But putting a laptop into children’s hands simply doesn’t get the job done if the correct infrastructure isn’t there to support both the child and the device. Education is certainly the key to closing the gaps between the developed and developing worlds. But throwing cute little laptops at kids is a far too narrow solution to have any real effect.

The Book’s New Cover: A Computer Monitor? – by “Cordera W”

December 1, 2010 ~ bradevanrosen ~ Leave a comment

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is a good one, but it definitely raises some red flags for me. Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but the idea of a child’s primary education coming from a computer bugs me. But, it’s not even as if these computer skills gained will be transferrable to other Windows, Mac, etc. computers. The XO’s linux based operating system is one that only trains one how to use an XO. On top of that, the XO is tethered in a way that would allow for the complete shutdown of the laptop from a remote location. The criminally deterrent ramifications of this are an obvious plus, however, that comes with a downside as well. Any information, books or otherwise, that a student may have saved on that device could be easily destroyed. I don’t know about you, but the idea of my favorite, thoroughly highlighted and annotated book potentially bursting into flames one day is unsettling. The situation with stored data on the XO is much the same.

The main problem with this idea is that it presents a “cyberized” education as a child’s first education. I make this distinction, because I think the utilization of technology in learning is a very good idea. A shining example of this is Sal Kahn’s online academy. He posts video mini-lectures on many educational disciplines and posts them online for all to see. His idea overcomes barriers of distance and communication that would otherwise be insurmountable without technology. However, the key thing that makes his method ok is the fact that the people utilizing it already have at least some form of education. Their entire conception of learning isn’t going to be shaped and centered around his online videos. The XO, however, gives first time learners a basis for understanding material that will be all but useless when applied to most real-world environment. The benefits of using an XO immediately disappear when you try the laptop’s methods with a book or even another laptop with a more mainstream OS.

Overall, I applaud the effort, but the OLPC idea is simply too much too soon. If the method is tried once the children have an educational foundation rooted in something useful outside the XO community, then I will support it. Until then, I say that we stick to the good old bound paperback.

Online news makes our bad habits so easy – by “Thomas B”

December 1, 2010 ~ bradevanrosen ~ Leave a comment

Computers did us a great service in bringing together up-to-the-minute information in a (somewhat) easy to view format on the web. These articles tend to be lower quality, which is understandable because they need to be written more quickly and their readers have shorter attention spans. The problem is, now that low-quality information is widely available, many people just settle at that. With the rise of sites like CNN.com, print news subscriptions have decreased dramatically (with a few exceptions that prove the rule). More and more people, especially in my generation, get news exclusively from the web.

It’s like high school—when kids realize there are Spark Notes for a book in English class, it means a lot fewer kids read the book. When people don’t have to read the paper to get the news, they can settle for these watered down news sites. But unlike high school, where kids know they’re reading the Spark Notes, more often we’re just lowering the bar for “being informed.” These websites don’t portray themselves as “supplements” or “previews” for the news. They sell themselves as the whole deal, and they come with labels like The New York Times that many people trust.

Another option-related problem is that many people only read articles that confirm their existing political views. Although this was possible before the web, for instance if one exclusively watched NBC news, the degree of choice has been dramatically increased. A newspaper would usually provide several sides of an issue, but online it’s easy to see only conservatively-spun articles or liberal ones. Of the growing number of people who get all of their info from the web, a large portion are just reading watered down Fox News.

It’s not that people today are lazier than their parents a few decades ago (although that may be the case). And it’s not that computers are the source of the problem. It just turns out that people are willing to settle for less when “less” is an option that’s available. Whereas previous media helped saved us from ourselves, the web is an enabler for our bad habits.

Browser Privacy: ForgetMySecret.com – by “Andrew W”

November 30, 2010 ~ bradevanrosen ~ Leave a comment

Most Internet users believe that their actions online are anonymous unless they have recently explicitly identified themselves. This is far from the truth. Two common techniques greatly reduce your anonymity online: computer recognition techniques and cross site trackers. With our website (forgetmysecret.com), Thaddeus Diamond and I created a simple game which illustrates how powerful these tracking techniques are. I recommend you visit the website to better understand privacy on the Internet.

A website can remember your computer using many techniques. The three most common techniques are cookies, flash cookies, and browser fingerprints. Cookies are very simple to erase. Most browsers include a “forget history” option as well as a privacy web-surfing mode. Both of these will defeat the tracking ability of cookies. Flash cookies, however, are much more difficult to erase. Flash cookies are stored deep in the computer’s file system, are shared between browsers, are not eliminated when a browser’s history is cleared, and are not effected by using a privacy mode. To clear this tracking information you must determine where these are stored on your particular operating system and manually remove them. Some browsers have third party plugins available which remove these cookies. Browser fingerprinting does not even rely on storing information. Instead, it captures lots of information regarding your computer system (such as font lists, plugin lists and software versions) to establish a highly unique “fingerprint” of your system. This fingerprint can then be used to identify you even if you clear all of the cookies stored on your computer.

Computer Recognition alone does not pose a large threat to privacy. However, when computer recognition information is shared between websites through “trackers” online anonymity is greatly reduced. Tackers allow for users to be followed between different websites. For example, your activity on website A can be shared and grouped with your activity on website B. This is primarily used to display personalized advertisements to users. You may have experienced this before when it appears that a certain targeted ad “follows” you around the Internet and appears at different websites. However, this technology can also be used to identify an otherwise anonymous user. If you identify yourself by logging in to website A, and then post an “anonymous” comment on website B (or visit a website you believe you are surfing privately), your identity can potentially be determined by website B through the use of such cross site trackers. Installing the Ghostery plugin from ghostery.com can show you how you are tracked at various websites.

It is crucial that web users become informed about privacy online. Misinformed surfers can accidentally expose their real identities while believed to by anonymous. Furthermore, a web user’s activity can potentially be aggregated into a single data source and sold for data mining. This greatly compromises our belief and desire of privacy for our online activities. I believe in the future it will be crucial for web browser developers to include many more tools to protect the privacy of their clients. By educating users and redesigning our browsers we will be able to recapture the true sense of freedom once enjoyed on the world wide web.

Why Isn’t Universal Education a Right? – by “Jonathan E”

November 30, 2010 ~ bradevanrosen ~ Leave a comment

In this post, I explore various philosophical justifications for why education—specifically universal (worldwide) education—is not a right. Then I argue for a reevaluation of our notion of rights that allows us to conceive of universal education as a right.

The Natural Rights position

“Education is not a natural right,” claim adherents of this position. (This isn’t to say that everyone who believes in natural rights thinks education isn’t one—just that some of them do.) These natural rights advocates believe that our rights (such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) derive from God or from Nature. And, they say, education is not one of those God-given or Nature-conferred rights.

Those who believe in God will treat their religions beliefs as nonnegotiable, and from such beliefs they can justify virtually any position (look to slavery advocates who used the Bible as evidence, for example). Because religious belief too easily precludes rational discourse, I will not try too hard to convince the theist. For those who believe that Nature confers negative rights, or that rights inhere naturally in humans, I say that such a position is extremely problematic for three reasons. First there is an epistemological issue: Hume’s “is-ought” problem says that we cannot derive normative claims from empirical claims; since empirical claims about the world are all that we can reliably know, we can’t determine the validity of normative claims (which includes rights claims). Second there is an ontological problem: What do natural rights look like? What are they made of? How can nature dictate laws about how we should behave? And are those laws really laws if they’re not enforced by nature? Third there is good evidence for thinking that our ideas about morality and rights result from cultural norms and evolved psychological adaptations (cooperating in repeated iterations of prisoner’s dilemmas, i.e. acting altruistically when it’s not immediately advantageous, is an evolutionarily stable strategy). There: three good reasons to reject the idea of natural rights.

The “Education is a negative right” position

“I think everyone has a right to education; I just don’t think our government is obligated to pay for it.” This attitude reflects the belief that education is a negative right—one that cannot be trampled on, but also one that no party has a duty to provide. For example, the right to free speech is often conceived of as a negative right: no one is allowed to take away your free speech, but no one is compelled to give you printing materials or a megaphone either. Taking education as a negative right, then, frees one from admitting that one’s government is obligated to ensure noncitizens’ education.

One problem with this position is that it’s unclear where the dividing line between negative rights and positive rights lies. In many cases, the government must treat a supposedly negative right as a positive one. For example, my right to be free from violence seems to be a negative right, but for that right to mean anything in practice, the government must provide a police force and a military. Another example is due process: we tend to think that the government is obligated to provide an attorney for indigent defendants, because doing so is the only way to ensure that defendants actually receive due process. Applying this to education, it seems meaningless to say that education is a right if there’s no practical way for a person to exercise that right, other than the government providing it or ensuring it some other way.

Another problem is that it’s little arbitrary to call education a negative right. What is the principle that explains which rights are negative and which are positive? I don’t think there can be any such principle. Please comment if you want to propose one!

The Social Contract position

Many Americans would say education is a right, one so important that our government is obligated to provide even to those who cannot afford it. But they hesitate to extend that right to those living outside our borders.

This attitude can be justified by appealing to social contract theory, according to which the rights of citizens and the obligations of their government are established through a social contract. The reason Americans have a right to education while noncitizens do not is that Americans consent to being ruled by their government in exchange for their government fulfilling certain duties—one of which is providing some degree of education to citizens.

I won’t argue that this social contract position is wrong (even though I think it’s fraught with problems), because I think the social contractarian is correct in believing essentially that rights are what we say they are. As a result, social contract theory allows us to extend rights to noncitizens if we so choose. For example, it’s okay for a social contractarian to demand that his government intervene in order to stop genocide in a foreign country—as long as the majority (or some supermajority) of citizens agree that such intervention is permitted by their social contract. Since social contract theory allows us to confer rights on foreigners, all that’s left to do is convince the social contractarian that he should want to confer the right to education to noncitizens. I save this for later.

The “Rights don’t exist” position

Those who agree with my response to the natural rights position might be inclined to conclude that rights don’t exist. But all that my arguments demonstrate is that our old conception of rights (as being derived from nature) is problematic. We can reconceptualize rights to be how we want people to be treated. What’s appealing about this approach is that it allows us to say that people do have a right to life and liberty. It allows us to criticize people who act in ways we find repulsive. And it restores structure to how people interact, giving us the means to craft a society we find tolerable.

Why education should be a right

Rights are what we want them to be. This is where we seem to be left after rejecting the traditional notions of rights, and where we ended in “The Social Contract position.” So I guess now it’s my job to convince you that you should want education to be a right for everyone, because that’s all it should take for you to then believe universal education is a right.

Luckily, I don’t think there’s much work to do. If you believe in liberty, then you should believe in the importance of removing barriers to liberty. (And you probably know that education is one of the best ways to do this.) If you believe in reducing suffering—and you recognize that educating a populace is the best way to eliminate cruel and outdated practices, to reduce the spread of disease, to ensure proper nutrition, and to raise the standard of living—then you should believe in the importance of education. If you believe in equal treatment of individuals, regardless of race, ethnicity, or religion, then you should believe that the rights Americans have should extend to non-citizens.

Don’t let dumb philosophical positions dictate your stance on how people should be treated. Just be consistent and fair. Taking this more simplistic and humble attitude will mean better outcomes for everyone.

It’s not about the idea! It’s all about the people – by “Sebastian P”

November 29, 2010 ~ bradevanrosen ~ Leave a comment

You hear it all the time:

“We have this cool new idea that will revolutionize everything!”

“We’ll be the next Facebook!”

“We’re innovating on a social media platform that will not only revolutionize everything you do, but will make us all rich. This is your last chance to jump on!”

As an aspiring entrepreneur (and for anyone who is even remotely interested in the field of entrepreneurship in the digital age), these are just some of the phrases that one hears uttered incessantly in the field. On any given day at Yale, all one has to do is walk through the Bass Library Cafe to overhear a handful of strikingly similar startup pitches to potential members (usually the engineers whom they will need to convince to do most of the work). They ask for NDAs, talk about immediately changing the world, and believe it is only a matter of time before their idea makes it big. Yet, according to a VC firm into which the University invests heavily, Yale produces record lows in terms of entrepreneurs, when compared to MIT, Stanford, and even Harvard.

Why is this? I contend that it’s because of the obsession that we, Yalies and technocrats of the digital age, have with ideas. And while ideas drive our world, ideas are not currency of entrepreneurship.

First, I don’t want to confuse anyone. Idea formation plays a key role in the success of every startup. Ideas are what created Facebook (“let’s connect friends”) and Google (“let’s make search suck less”). A good (borderline great) idea is what will inevitably anchor a company to success.

However, as the parenthetical statements reveal, these ideas are not revolutionary or that hard to think of. The latest tech obsession Instagr.am, is a take on social media and location-based technology in relation to our cell-phone cameras. It’s rumored to have reached a million users and received a $20-million evaluation within 19 days. It’s today’s “next big thing.” Despite this, the technology behind it isn’t that complex, nor are its ideas something so revolutionary that no one else could have possibly thought of it; in fact, we know for a fact that picplz is another startup with the exact same idea around the same time, if not earlier. We all get caught up in how awesome the instagram idea is and lament that we didn’t come up with it first — or we want some credit for having come up with the idea.

XKCD: Business Ideas — Because everyone believes they thought of it first and should get paid...

The true entrepreneurial story behind Instagram is that, according to TechCrunch, the program was built in just eight weeks. Many would consider this to be the value of the idea. But on the contrary, the secret behind this speedy development and release is that the team behind Instagram had worked together on another project, Burbn, for over a year!

Meebo.com, a company founded on AJAX (not the cleaner, but the Asynchronous Javascript and XML) implementation within the browser that allows for Instant Messaging chat, tells a similar story. It was pivot (definition: an entrepreneurial phrase that describes how a company originally set out to do one thing, but does something else) that came from a need that people had (a need to get on an IM client through a Web browser) and the entire thing was built extremely quickly. The team that built it, however, had worked together for much longer than its product’s existence.

Additionally, ideas can be “discovered” independently by many different people around the same time (see earlier reference to picplz vs. instagram). Google and Facebook weren’t the first companies that were founded on the idea (anyone remember Friendster, Myspace, AskJeeves, or even Yahoo?), they just did it better than everyone before them.

What can we draw from these successful companies? How did they do engage in these god-speed pivots? They’re all able to do this because they had the talent pool of founders and developers which allowed them to transition and make their startup goals come true.

Ideas may bring teams together, but the team is what drive a startup. We, as entrepreneurs, should seek to develop relations with engineers, business people, and friends to discover the correct group of people in which to stake our futures.

When all is said and done, if we as entrepreneurs focus too much on how “brilliant” an idea is, we’ll probably end up like the lady in this video.

So do you want to be an entrepreneur? Do you want to be a founder? Skip the social media pitches, the NDAs, the “stealth mode that’ll change everything!”, and instead find talented, intelligent people who you would want to spend sleepless hungry nights working with. Or don’t. More of them for me.

-Sebastian

Elon Musk: From Web Servers to Rocket Ships – by “Andrew W”

November 29, 2010 ~ bradevanrosen ~ Leave a comment

The digital age has undoubtedly brought significant changes to the entrepreneurial community. Both fixed and marginal costs are now lower than ever resulting in fewer barriers to entry for aspiring entrepreneurs. As more and more young students have capitalized on this opportunity society has become fascinated by the college-student-turn-billionaire concept enabled by these trends. The Internet economy is not without its drawbacks. Businesses must now find new and unique competitive advantages as the marginal costs of Internet services approach zero. Also, certain existing industries have been greatly challenged by the disruptive nature of this new economy. However, I believe the greatest impact of the digital economy will be its ability to act as a gateway for aspiring entrepreneurs.

No one exemplifies this concept better than Elon Musk. After graduating from college Musk formed two Internet based companies: Zip2 and later PayPal. Both ventures achieved great success and were started with little else than Musk’s own creativity. It is difficult to imagine an entrepreneur receiving such rapid achievement from little investment before the changes brought by the digital revolution. However, Musk did not stop after PayPal. Instead, he invested his profits into his own new venture, SpaceX. Unlike Zip2 and PayPal, SpaceX has little or nothing to do with the Internet. Rather, this company develops rockets and spacecraft which use reusable vehicles. SpaceX has already transformed space exploration from an exclusively government controlled operation to competition amongst private firms. Musk further went on to fund and lead the development of Tesla Motors, a company frequently credited with revolutionizing the automotive industry.

This example illustrates how the Internet has been able to act at as “gateway,” allowing creative individuals to become entrepreneurs. In the case of Musk, he was able to expand from digital markets with low costs to developing markets with astronomical costs. The Internet has changed our society in countless overt ways, however perhaps this is the greatest contribution the Internet will make, it can guide individuals into the world of business and innovation. As countless business leaders can now attest to, the Internet allows for entrepreneurship “with training wheels” due to unprecedentedly low barriers to entry. Hopefully the web will be the beginning of myriad serial entrepreneurs.

SpaceX Rocket

“Don’t make an App for that” – by “Nathan B”

November 17, 2010 ~ bradevanrosen ~ Leave a comment

If there’s one term it seems that tech writers can’t get enough of, it’s Web 2.0. It has spawned design conferences, a host of new applications, and even Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. The idea behind this buzzword is that while once the average user went online and found a plethora of content produced by others which they could access, this new incarnation of the internet would be democratized. Instead of its content being dictated by only a few individuals who knew how to code and could afford hosting, now any user who wanted to could produce websites, blogs and videos and share them with the world via the internet. This supposedly marked a great shift in how people communicated and would help realize the web’s true potential.

At the same time, there has been a significant change not only in the way that online content is produced, but how it is accessed. Where internet users were once chained to personal computers (which were themselves bound by the limitations of wired access and WiFi), they can now go online via mobile devices, whether they be through smartphones like the iPhone or the Droid, or tablets like the iPad (because, let’s be honest, no one is actually going to buy the Samsung Galaxy).

If all of this is true, then the question needs to be asked: why is Apple (one of the largest and most influential makers of mobile devices) standing in the way of electronic populism?

Apple has long been known for its draconian policies on any number of subjects, and they’ve made it abundantly clear that content on their mobile devices will be no exception. The App Store has produced nearly $200 million in profits for Apple (though it only accounts for about 1% of gross profits), but more importantly, the broad range of applications available through the App Store has fueled sales of the iPhone, driving up its market share.

This diversity of applications has emerged in spite of Apple’s promulgation that it will remove any Apps which, for example, have metadata that mentions the name of any other computer platform, misspells the name of any Apple product or even simply has icons which are too similar to those used by Apple (not to mention the fact that, lest this be easy for developers, having an interface which is too complicated is also grounds for removal). In short: if you want to put your application on the iPhone, you had better follow Apple’s rules, no matter how ridiculous (also, don’t think you can get away with talking about how absurd you think some of the regulations are, either).

So, what does all of this have to do with Web 2.0? Simply put, the fundamental idea behind Web 2.0 is that users get to dictate the content they find online with relatively little interference from the electronic “elite.” Apple’s actions, however, drive the newest online frontier in the opposite direction. Instead of creating an electronic forum where ideas and innovation flourish free from censorship, Steve Jobs would impose a world where the unwashed masses are kept away from “undesirable” content in the name of Apple “trying to do the right thing for its users,” instead of those users deciding what is right for themselves.

While more open platforms like Google’s Android have been gaining steam in recent years, users of iPhones and iPads are left with little recourse against the arbitrary governance of their closed platforms, except, perhaps, someone playing them a sad, sad song on the world’s tiniest open-source violin.

All-in-one or Nothing at All? – by “Ker M”

November 17, 2010 ~ bradevanrosen ~ Leave a comment

The desire for increased compatibility, portability, and adaptability in technology–particularly, internet technology–has been the driving force behind innovation in the past few decades. From the room-sized giant proto-computers of the 70’s to the netbooks and iPads of the new millennium, technology has become faster, smaller, and more capable. My Blackberry serves as my phone, calendar, instant messenger, and internet and e-mail client when I’m on-the-go; and it conveniently fits in my pocket.

To pull from the Electronica duo, Daft Punk, the motivating factor behind this “harder, better, faster, stronger” mentality is the seemingly indisputable claim that all-in-one technology is ideal. But is this really true? Sure, the advent of these all-in-one technologies can make life a little easier in some senses, but how is it affecting true technological development?

All-in-one devices have fueled the fire behind technological appliancization. Companies that create these machines restrict how they can be used and what can be used on them for user safety and product stability. The idea is that restrictions on what one can and cannot do are necessary to prevent a user from putting a program on the device that will harm it. Since it is an all-in-one device, that would mean losing everything: phone contacts, important documents, etc. This appliancization, though increasing user safety, has seemed to make the technology stagnate in terms of development. Sure, the devices are a little faster and can hold a bit more memory than they could in the past, but true innovation has been stifled because of the big company roadblocks that prohibit developers from contributing to the technological wealth of knowledge.

Perhaps this can most easily be seen in the public rhetoric used to promote these devices. The discourse revolves around the same few features: internet speed, number of applications available, and screen resolution. None of these showcase the innovativeness of the design or functionality. Why? Because, in general, there isn’t any. Just look at these articles about the Playbook and the Tab. These articles discuss the new players in competition with Apple’s iPad, focusing on those aspects of the devices which are not actually different from those available on the Apple machine. It becomes more clear that the companies creating these all-in-one devices are not actually concerned with technological development (in the way early computer pioneers were), but rather with market competition. The strategy questions change from “how can we make our consumers lives better?” to “how can we narrowly outdo our competitors for a small bump in revenue this market period?”.

This type of technological development leaves everyone unsatisfied. The ability for devices to do more and more is great until something goes wrong. Restrictions on individual developers stifle creativity, while company goals shift from the user to the market. In the end, all-in-one appliances leave us with nothing at all.

Anonymity Online is Impossible – by “Logan M”

November 3, 2010 ~ bradevanrosen ~ Leave a comment

Thomas Pynchon has disappeared. He has not actually disappeared, of course, but very few photos of him have been taken in the past forty years and almost no-one, even his most devout fans, recognize him if and when they see him on the street. Pynchon has achieved an almost unfathomable level of anonymity – and we think he is insane for it.

Pynchon-simpsons — Thomas Pynchon on the Simpsons

All media require a yielding of some information in order to transmit their data. The spoken work means that the content of our message is no longer private to the individuals involved. We take precautions against eavesdropping if we have reason to do so, but these actions themselves show that we accept this loss of privacy in return for the convenience of the spoken word. Similarly, when we communicate using the medium of the mail (physical, not electronic), we give up the privacy of the recipient of the message. Return addresses are not mandatory, but I challenge anyone to send a letter with no delivery address listed. In sending a letter we reveal to those who handle the mail as well as anyone and everyone near the delivery address that our intended recipient is being contacted. We give up the privacy of who is being contacted in return for the convenience of the postal service.

The internet is simply another medium through which data is transmitted. However, because of how the system is designed, one must be connected to a central hub (an ISP) before one can transmit data. This connection, and the fact that the ISP routes all signals coming to and from it, means that the ISP knows everything that you do online (whether or not a specific individual at the provider does). This is the privacy that you give up when you sign onto the internet – you lose the ability to act anonymously.

There are of course programs and systems like TOR, which allow you to make anonymous your internet activities to an extent. However, this is simply another part of the ongoing arms race between ISPs and sites attempting to control information and people attempting to conceal it. When people figured out that whispering made conversations less able to be overheard, other people designed amplification devices. When people developed codes for their ideas, other people cracked those codes. TOR and other similar programs are important in that they further this progression of technology and work to set up a balance between groups of people. What they do not offer is perfection; anyone seeking perfection must avoid the system entirely.

My girlfriend does not have a Facebook account. She does not use LinkedIn, Blogger, or otherwise put her information online. This does impact her life negatively because she is unable to interact with her friends using this medium, but, for her, the desire to remain private is more important than these benefits. For now, this is an understandable view, and in fact the correct action for someone who wishes to remain anonymous and private. I wonder how long it will be, though, before society moves on to the point where a virtual recluse is viewed in the same light as Thomas Pynchon – someone to be mocked on TV and called out on blogs for being, as I said earlier, insane.