So what happens when someone dies suddenly and all the family digital photos, financial records, and address books are password-protected? And what about MySpace, Live Journal and iTunes?
The situation poses a dilemma for e-mail providers that are pilloried by privacy rights advocates at the mere suggestion of sensitive data being exposed, at the same time they are expected to hand over the digital keys to family members when a customer dies.Last year, Yahoo was forced to provide access to the e-mail of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq to his father, who got a court order in the matter.
"The commitment we've made to every person who signs up for a Yahoo Mail account is to treat their e-mail as a private communication and to treat the content of their messages as confidential," said Yahoo spokeswoman Karen Mahon.
Beyond acknowledging that Yahoo complies with court orders, Mahon declined to discuss Yahoo's requirements for providing family members access to the e-mail accounts of their deceased loved ones.
Google will provide access to a deceased Gmail user's account if the person seeking it provides a copy of the death certificate and a copy of a document giving the person power of attorney over the e-mail account, said a Google spokeswoman.
Is iTunes a monopoly or a failure? Maybe neither.
It's not a monopoly, says Daniel Eran because similar products are on the shelves right now:
Likewise, there is no scarcity of WMA content that is holding back WMA players. Rather, they are simply not selling because they are poorly built, and poorly marketed, and have a feature mix that gets all the details wrong. They fail to provide what consumers demand or anticipate features they will find useful.
And it's not a failure either:
Somewhat ironically, the same bloggers who like to worry about an iTunes monopoly were quick to jump on a report by Jupiter Research with data that found the average iPod user in Europe had only bought 20 tracks from iTunes. Does that mean the iTunes Store is a failure headed nowhere? ...Mulligan [of Jupiter Research] found that while few music player owners were regularly buying music online, iPod users are more likely to buy legal music downloads than users of competing products, particularly the WMA platform. In other words, the emerging market for digital downloads is brand new, and Apple's clearly leading it.
What are some of the reasons iTunes has been successful then? Eran lists the following as possibilities:
The Pew Internet and American Life Project asked over 700 technology experts to look at trends for the year 2020:
The highly speculative scenarios presented to respondents are all vaguely reminiscent of various themes commonly found in contemporary science fiction. From artificial intelligences dominating humanity to disgruntled Luddites engaging in violence, the poll looks more like an abandoned script by Michael Piller than a serious exploration of the future. Let's examine some of the more colorful quandaries, and see how many of the concepts have been prominently featured in Star Trek:Attack of the Amish
Expressing belief that some who reject technology will perpetrate terrorist attacks against technological infrastructure, almost 60 percent of respondents agreed with the following scenario:"By 2020, the people left behind (many by their own choice) by accelerating information and communications technologies will form a new cultural group of technology refuseniks who self-segregate from "modern" society. Some will live mostly "off the grid" simply to seek peace and a cure for information overload while others will commit acts of terror or violence in protest against technology."Will disenfranchised LoTeks wreak havoc on society? Comparing future anti-technology vigilantes to modern day "eco-terrorists," Internet education expert and poll respondent Ed Lyell pointed out that "Every age has a small percentage that cling to an overrated past of low-technology, low-energy, lifestyle." Respondent Thomas Narten, a member of IBM's Internet Engineering Task Force, believes that "by becoming valuable infrastructure, the Internet itself will become a target," and FirstGov developer Martin Kwapinski feels that "random acts of senseless violence and destruction will continue and expand due to a feeling of 21st century anomie, and an increasing sense of of lack of individual control."
I'm not entirely sure how 'prominently featured in Star Trek' constitutes an argument for or against 'might actually happen,' but it's an interesting article, nonetheless.
When Viacom offered $750 million for Facebook in January, he asked for $2 billion and was rebuffed, according to a person involved in the negotiations. Now, he remains undecided about the latest offer, made in the last few weeks by Yahoo. That offer, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was confirmed Thursday by two industry executives, one briefed on the deal by Facebook and the other by Yahoo. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are continuing.
To woo Zuckerberg, Yahoo has offered about $900 million for Facebook and says it will keep the company somewhat independent, with Zuckerberg in charge. This has been its model with other acquisitions like Flickr, a photo-sharing site, and Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service that lets members share lists of their favorite Web sites.
Although, in point of fact, Zuckerberg hasn't said he's going to sell yet.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has refused to censor Wikipedia for China
Wales said censorship was ' antithetical to the philosophy of Wikipedia. We occupy a position in the culture that I wish Google would take up, which is that we stand for the freedom for information, and for us to compromise I think would send very much the wrong signal: that there's no one left on the planet who's willing to say "You know what? We're not going to give up."'
According to the BBC, 80% of young people (in England, presumably) have mobile phones:
...78% of 11 to 17-year-olds believe having a mobile has given them a better social life as it meant it was easier to keep in touch with their friends.
By contrast, many young people - especially teenage girls - admit they would feel unwanted if the day passed without their mobile ringing.
Among those quizzed 26% said they would feel left out, compared with just 11% of parents.
Three-quarters of youngsters have had their phone bought for them by their parents, while half have their calls paid for by their parents.
The survey found that most parents (71%) believed mobiles were a useful way to keep track of their offspring.
However, only a third of 13 to 16-year-olds thought it was reasonable for parents to use mobiles for this reason.
One in three youngsters added that they use phones to keep in touch with people their parents did not want them to contact.
...via Smart Mobs
Here's an interesting article on research into mobile phones and business opportunities. Much of this research, it appears is taking place in Africa because the mobile phone use there is so pervasive ("Over the past five years the continent's mobile phone use has increased at an annual rate of 65 percent - twice the global average. In June of 1999, Kenya had 15,000 mobile phone subscribers. By the end of 2004 the country had 3.4 million subscribers, and in the last 18 months this number has grown to over 5.6 million, despite the fact that only 200,000 Kenyan households have electricity") and the mobile phone is <i>the</i> tool for all kinds of communication:
A large part of this boost comes from the innovative use of mobile phone technology by local entrepreneurs. In contrast to their use in the developed world, mobile phones in Africa are used for a wide variety of tasks, from sending money to family members to buying a fish from the market. Kenyan business men, farmers, and laborers are finding new uses for a tool thought of as simply a voice communication device in the West, and are coming up with original methods for solving their own problems. For example, contract laborers can now provide their phone numbers to potential employers and move on, instead of having to wait for hours at a workplace in case a job arises. Access to market information through mobile phones also provides rural communities with invaluable information about centers of business; many African fishermen check the local fish market prices on their phones to determine where to bring the day’s catch. The Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange (Kace), now provides crop growers with up-to-date commodity information via text message (sms). This allows farmers to access daily fruit and vegetable prices from a dozen markets, and many have quadrupled their earnings because they have access to information about potential buyers and prices before making the often arduous journey into urban centers to sell their produce. The community payphone, another innovation unique to the developing world, has helped bring mobile phone usage to the poorest areas of Africa.
In case you were interested:
In 1888, Thomas W. Holley, a 24-year-old paper mill worker in Holyoke, had an idea for how to use the paper scraps, known as sortings, discarded by the mill. Sortings were anything trimmed away as scrap or considered of lesser quality than the writing paper eventually packaged and sold. Holley's notion was to bind the scraps into pads that could be sold at a cut rate. Convinced he had a winning idea, he founded his own company to collect the sortings from local mills (Holyoke was then the papermaking capital of the world) and began churning out bargain-price pads.The legal pad's margins, also called down lines, are drawn 1.25 inches from the left edge of the page. (This is the only requirement for a pad to qualify as a legal pad, though the iconic version has yellow paper, blue lines, and a red gummed top.) Holley added the ruling that defined the legal pad in the early 1900s at the request of a local judge who was looking for space to comment on his own notes.
That, at least, is the story AMPAD tells. Holley never filed a patent for his invention; no other company in the legal pad market has ever come forward with a competing claim. Like many origin myths, AMPAD's answers some essential questions but leaves others unresolved. It doesn't, for instance, explain the emergence of yellow as the standard legal pad color. Holley is thought to have created white pads, not yellow ones. Yellow paper is about 10 to 20 percent more expensive than white paper, due to the cost of dye and the additional cleanup the dyeing process necessitates, an extravagance the thrifty Holley would likely have dismissed.
...via BoingBoing
The hacking of the Social Democrats internal network in Sweden is being linked to lousy passwords (as in passwords anyone and their five-year-old could guess).
According to this Slashdot report, (the original article is in Swedish) the hacked account was 'sigge' with a password of (oh, just guess) 'sigge.'
So, strong passwords (passphrases are better) use upper case, lower case, numbers and symbols. Make sure you can remember it and avoid writing it down.