Apr 28 2011

Random Thoughts April 2011

Google Buzz is more Safe for Work (SFW) than Facebook in the sense that it looks like a a typical GMail account and the URL to access it also resemble GMail’s URL. Employers don’t typically block personal email access but do block networking sites. Its so easy to switch between Google Buzz and GMail.

Gutenberg died broke, his problem was that when he invented the printing press he printed the Bible. Ben Bernanke learned that lesson and instead of printing religious tomes he prints cold hard cash.

Between easy and hard, you’ll see a lot less competition if you go for what is difficult and you’ll see a lot more adoption if you make easy what was once hard.

First they seized crack warez sites and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a cracker. Then they came for the torret sites and I didn’t speak out because I don’t pirate content. Then they came for offshore online gambling sites and I didn’t speak out because I don’t play poker. The they came for my blog and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Reading about the recent Dropbox security issue and I realized that I have more valuable and personal information in the cloud than in my home. I have family pictures, calendar events for contacts, tax documents, inner most personal writings and journal entries, and much more on Google Docs, Dropbox, Yahoo Mail, and whatever other cloud service I use. Yet police agencies do not require a warrant to access that information but they do to come into my home and conduct a search. The search warrant is now obsolete. Google and other online services has made the search warrant obsolete.

It was recently reported that the US State Department is developing a mobile phone panic button, probably in the form of an app, for pro-democracy activists in foreign countries to erase a phone’s contents when they have are detained by the secret police. At the same time, the US Department of Justice and California’s Supreme Court have upheld the right of police to search the contents of a detained person without being arrested or having a warrant. Police are using digital equipment that can read all of the data in a phone in minutes at the point that police has stopped someone. Welcome to the future of pre-crime proactive policing.