Doc Searls Weblog

Wars and Rumors of Wars

• The First Global Civil War – Lionel Dricot. By Jaap van Till n The Connectivist.
• Syrian NYT Hack Shows New Asymmetries of Modern War: While U.S. troops readied for a possible military assault Tuesday, pro-Syrian hackers brought down the NYT and crippled Twitter. By Tom Simonite in MIT Technology Review.
• Obama is talking America into war. By George F. Will in The Washington Post.

Customer evangelism

• M2M for People. By Phil Windley.
• Has the Intention Economy Finally Arrived? By Alan Gleeson in Entrepreneur Country. (.pdf) A marketing angle on The Intention Economy.
• Enabling the Health Care Locavore. By Adrian Gropper in The Health Care Blog.
• Doc Searls Video Q&A: How The Internet of Things Will Revolutionize Customer Service. By Ashley Verrill in Software Advice.
• A Better Marketplace. By Katherine Warman Kern in Comradity. Expands on Don Marti’s piece below.

Surveillance vs. Privacy

• A Nation of Sullen Paranoids. By Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. She says that’s what we are becoming in a climate of surveillance fear.
• Opinion: NSA’s surveillance programs are the “most serious attacks on free speech we’ve ever seen. By Josh Levy in BoingBoing.
• The Real, Terrifying Reason Why British Authorities Detained David Miranda: The scariest explanation of all? That the NSA and GCHQ are just showing they don’t want to be messed with. By Bruce Schneier in The Atlantic. Also by Bruce: NSA intimidation expanding surveillance state: Column in USA Today.
• Winners and losers in a world without cookies. By Kyle Spencer in Seeking Alpha.
• Google and the NSA: Who’s holding the ‘shit-bag’ now? By Julian Assange in The Stringer.
• The Maginot Line. By Devin Coldewey in TechCrunch. Pull-quote: “…we may also have to face the idea that the savior Perfect Security may never appear to rapture us into a world of true anonymity, fountains of bitcoins, and desiccated surveillance apparati, lovingly tended by weeping spooks.”
• How Surveillance Changes Behavior: A Restaurant Workers Case Study. By Steve Lohr in The New York Times.
• Hijacking the Internet, by Don Marti.
• In ACLU lawsuit, scientist demolishes NSA’s “It’s just metadata” excuse — The power of metadata: Addiction, sex, and accusations can all be discovered. By Joe Mullin in Ars Technica.
• Gambling with a Space Fence: An analysis of the decision to shut down the Air Force Space Surveillance Fence. By Brian Weeden in The Space Review.

Media

• PressThink is ten years old. To celebrate I’m asking its readers to de-lurk. Want to play? By Jay Rosen in Pressthink. It begins, “Your turn: so who are you and what do you do and what interests you enough to show up here occasionally and read these posts? Tell us.”
• Kevin Spacey’s MacTaggart lecture prompts defence of traditional TV: Hollywood star’s view that TV executives must embrace online met with call for hybrid viewing model and focus on content. By John Plunkett and Mark Sweney in The Guardian.
• The shock of inclusion: Why the NSA story has turned journalist against journalist. By Mathew Ingram in Gigaom. Summary: “The response from some of the mainstream media world to interlopers like Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald and WikiLeaks is an immune-system response from a traditional industry that sees itself as being under attack.”
• The Butler — Feh. By Dave Winer in Scripting News. “But it was awful. A stitched-together set of scenes. None of the characters got us to care.” Bonus Link: The Onion’s Lee Daniels reviews ‘The Butler’.

Tech

• The nan who ‘got it’ too much. By Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry in The Kernel. The man is Steve Ballmer.
• The Vision For $3.4 Billion Uber Is Much More Than Just A Car Service, And It Could Vastly Improve Our Lives by Allison Shontell in Business Insider.
• Camilstore. A “storage system for life.”
• Big Data investments by Industry (Gartner). In The River.
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. By Patrick in Kalzumeus.
• Why Google is the Next Microsoft. By The Venture Company.
• The Decline of E-Empires. By Paul Krugman in The New York Times. Pull-quote: “Creative destruction means that monopolies aren’t forever, but it doesn’t mean that they’re harmless while they last.”