Talking of Drones, the old-school spy-stories are evolving around this topic, as well. Apparently, the plans for a French-British drone collaboration have been stolen at Gare du Nord station in Paris:

The unnamed man briefly left his case unattended after his female colleague was “hassled” by a stranger, said a Paris Judicial Police source. Documents in the case were marked “Defence – Confidential” and contained details of a “joint Franco-British drone”, a legal source close to the case told Le Parisien newspaper.

Foreign Policy magazine, in there recent “War” issue, have an amusing list of drone-related info fast food.

Could you guess, for instance, the name and scope of Iran’s main drone in development?

Iran has also touted its program, including the armed “Ambassador of Death” drone, which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled by declaring: “Its main message is peace and friendship.”

Another interesting fact is the sheer scope of human involvement that is necessary to operate those vehicles.

Some 168 people are required to keep a Predator drone aloft — and 180 for its larger cousin, the Reaper — compared with roughly 100 people for an F-16 fighter jet.

The Reddit community has posted a proposed piece of legislation they call The Free Internet Act on Google Docs.

Just last week I was wondering where Github for legislation was. This week, the Reddit community published a collaboratively drafted1 “Free Internet Act’.

I haven’t read the document in whole yet, so I don’t have a clear opinion on it yet. It’s a nice stunt, however, and might change the conversation we have about net regulation.

  1. and fittingly titled… 

Carlos Bueno wrote a children’s book about digital literacy. From the description it reads like the kids book version of Douglas Rushkoff’s “Program or be Programmed.”

What happens next is beyond mere irony — Amazon’s prizing bots take over:

The plot of my book is about how un­derstand­ing com­put­ers is the first step to tak­ing con­trol of your life in the 21st cen­tu­ry. Now I don’t know what to be­lieve.

It’s pos­sible that the opt­im­al price of Laur­en Ipsum is, in fact, ten dol­lars and seventy-six cents and I should just relax and trust the tat­tooed hipst­er who wrote Amazon’s pric­ing al­gorithm. After all, I have no choice.

A very amusing account of happenstance that sounds all but too much like straight out of a Kevin Slavin talk.

From the Wired Story on GitHub:

Ryan Blair, a technologist with the New York State Senate, thinks it could even give citizens a way to fork the law — proposing their own amendments to elected officials. A tool like GitHub could also make it easier for constituents to track and even voice their opinions on changes to complex legal code. “When you really think about it, a bill is a branch of the law,” he says. “I’m just in love with the idea of a constituent being able to send their state senator a pull request.”

I think this idea has tremendous value and would love to see it happen. Imagine you had a complete revision history that tracks changes as legislation moves through the legislative process. And imagine the relief people in administrations would feel if they not had to work with MS Office inline track changes anymore.

TheNextWeb writes about a mini-documentary by Ericsson:

Thinking Cities explores the challenges and opportunities of urbanization in the Networked Society. Some of the world’s leading city-thinkers are interviewed for the film, including Geoffrey West, physicist and professor at Santa Fe Institute; Mathieu Lefevre of New Cities Foundation and Carlo Ratti, Director of MIT Senseable City Lab.

“For the first time in history, 52% of the world’s population live in cities,” explains Lefevre. “There are 200,000 new urban dwellers every day. That trend is accelerating, particularly in Asia, Africa, Latin America. By 2050, six billion people will live in cities.”

Sounds like a pretty familiar pitch to me.

Anyway, make sure to watch the video below.

Indeed, by what right do Disney and the BBC get to adapt Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and Sherlock without paying the descendants of Lewis Carroll, the Brothers Grimm, and Arthur Conan Doyle?

Beautiful satire over at the Telegraph.

If you’ve ever wondered how much can be disclosed about individual circumstance1 by analyzing aggregate user data, then this seminal piece by Charles Duhigg for the New York Times is a must read.

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

The gist: Target can offer baby related products to customers, sometimes even before the immediate family knows of the pregnancy.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

We should keep in mind that, with all the discussions about Do-Not-Track and Address Books, data gathering and analysis is wide-spread, is being used and is not happening strictly online. Further, with more and more signals being picked up and available for analysis, the potential for finding valuable patterns increases tremendously.

But it is really the part about pattern formation that’s the most interesting. Nobody says, it should only be companies that collect this information about us. Analysing that data for our own benefit2 should enable us to develop habits that we find beneficial.

  1. Hopefully that won’t be too many of you. 

  2. That is the essential promise of the Quantified Self movement. 

Dustin Curtis is weighing in on the Address Book issue which hit Path yesterday:

[…] fledgling app developers do everything they can to increase their chances. Because Apple provides extremely easy access to address book data, the pro — that is, using the data to improve user experience, increase virality and growth, etc. — outweighs the con. To stay on equal footing, larger apps, like Yelp, Facebook, and Foursquare, have to follow along.

I fully believe this issue is a failure of Apple and a breach of trust by Apple, not by app developers. The expectation of Address Book privacy is obvious[.]

Are you kidding me?

Just because Apple doesn’t expressly forbid, by technical means or App Store policy, that this data should not be used, it’s a free-for-all? I don’t buy this “If everybody else is doing it, we should as well do it also.” That’s exactly the lameness that is the “It’s current industry standard”–defense. That doesn’t count.

Yes, Apple should have restricted access to this data. They did not, and that’s bad. This does not, however, absolve any app developer that uses this.

I did a quick survey of 15 developers of popular iOS apps, and 13 of them told me they have a contacts database with millons of records. One company’s database has Mark Zuckerberg’s cell phone number, Larry Ellison’s home phone number and Bill Gates’ cell phone number.

Shouldn’t that be worrying?

Meanwhile, Path announced they deleted all harvested contact information.

Arun Thampi with an interesting observation:

I started to observe the various API calls made to Path’s servers from the iPhone app. It all seemed harmless enough until I observed a POST request to https://api.path.com/3/contacts/add.

Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path.

Dave Morin is reacting in the comments:

We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.

We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.

While I welcome the addition of Opt-Out functionality, not being notified, never mind asked about this kind of data disclosure leaves a bitter taste. Address books are very intimate and confidential data sets.

Arguing that:

This is currently the industry best practice.

only goes on to show how corrupting facebooks practices have been to the industry as a whole.