Slow afternoon thoughts: 3 links

[da]

I seem to have a pile of things bouncing around in my head, mostly in the not-useful state. But this bit has shaken out, and I want to record it for my own sake, if not for anybody else's.

Remember that "Pi" song and video? The band has an entire album, and a few more fun videos on their site. (Warning: these links are currently worksafe, but much of their site isn't. Just sayin'.) The music is mostly cynical bluegrass, which sounds to me like an untapped market. The song about patriotic dinosaurs is great, and so is the "matrix" video set to melodica.

The second musician link: Jonathan Coulton is a guy with a guitar. Kind of a musical xkcd, if you will; a lot of his themes are wistful and pretty geeky. He seems to have a following, and it seems to be mutual: one guy turned his podcast series into a book and a colouring book. Another made a card-game based on his song "Code Monkeys." Anyway, I like his science stuff. And "Re: your brains" is fun; it's about zombies at the office.

Both these bands release music through cdbaby, which has a scary, scary huge assortment of artists I've never heard of, most with samples of their music. CDs mostly in the $10-15 range. They have neat categories for finding music. ("If you're depressed and want to stay depressed", etc.) Where to find the time to browse it all, though?

Finally: the google-borg continues taking over my internet experience. I've been using google's web history for the last month and it's just great. It's an opt-in to let google record the URLs of where you've browsed.

But google also already has the page contents, for things they index; so in effect you can do a google search that only matches pages you've already visited, which turns out to be something I want to do every few days or so. Of course it also includes prior google searches and search output pages. Quite useful.

It requires the Google Toolbar, which has a "no visible toolbar" option so Firefox looks the same, except for the search box, which is slighly google-ified. And with an unexpected feature that the search box "suggested searches" are also useful (eg., catch misspellings before I hit "return").

Since it works on mac/linux/windows, my work and home browsers are recorded somewhere I can get to from anywhere with the net.

Oh right; it also has a "suspend recording" option and you can delete records from the history. And it seems to not record pages that aren't already in the google index; so password-protected stuff is safe. This privacy/usefulness tradeoff is acceptable to me.

Comments

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

they refused on the grounds that it would be too hard to extract one person's records from their logs.

I'm not sure what I think about that on a individual person basis. I'm convinced that subpoenaing for 1m users at once is illegal.

I was just googling around (of course) to get more info on this sort of thing. I googled "google refused subpoena", and only came up with the big Jan '06 case:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/01/21/google_subpoena_roils_the_web?mode=PF

...which seems to suggest that google's objections include the argument that complying /without/ releasing individually identifying information would be too difficult. And that fishing expeditions were illegal violations of privacy..


Google is vowing to resist efforts by the US Justice Department to obtain information about the searches run by millions of its users, even though investigators are seeking aggregate data about Internet use, not individual users' records. The Justice Department wants the information as part of its effort to defend the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 federal law that seeks to ban Internet sites from displaying content that the government deems ''harmful to minors." The Supreme Court has ruled that the law can't be enforced unless the government shows less intrusive measures such as Internet filtering are inadequate. The government hopes to use search results from Google and other companies to show that Internet pornography is so pervasive that only a federal law can protect children from it.

Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN search service, and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL service have all agreed to provide the information, according to a Justice Department spokesman. But Google has refused, saying that releasing the data would compromise its users' privacy and the company's trade secrets. ''Google is not a party to this lawsuit and their demand for information overreaches," said Nicole Wong, Google's associate general counsel. ''We intend to resist their motion vigorously."
[...]
In papers filed yesterday at a federal court in San Jose, Calif., government attorneys said that they are not seeking information about individuals. They want the search companies to provide a sample of a million websites from the billions they currently index, as well as all the search terms typed into the services during a one-week period. All information that could identify individuals is to be removed before the data is given to the government. The government could use the data to estimate how pervasive pornography is on the Internet and how often pornographic sites come up in random Internet searches.


The interesting development there for me was that google was still fighting that subpoena, a month later, when the ACLU was saying they'd have to subpoena google for the same info if google caved, as they had AOL and MS, which fed into Google's arguments against submitting to the huge subpoena.

http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6041223.html

Interesting stuff. ...I wish aclu's website wasn't down right now, I'd try and track this to the end.

I'd like to think more about subpoenas and individual search histories... but I think I've settled that as less worrying to me than mass subpoenas. Which isn't what you were talking about, I realize. :)