Year: 2014
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On the contrary — A review of Zero to One
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters This book is incomplete and thus unsatisfying. It is a condensed version of Peter Thiel’s Stanford class. It takes less than 4 hours to read, compared to 19 meetings in the classroom. Without context, footnotes, and evidence,…
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Bell Mobility’s ad targeting table
My previous post showed an individual’s (ie. mine) parameters for ad targetting by Bell. @BenKlass posted that he dredged up from this CRTC report. I thought it would be interesting to include it here with my story for context.
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Bell’s 56 categories for ad targeting
BACKGROUND: On May 5th I sent Shaw Communications and Bell Mobility each a request for the personal information they have on me as per the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). I used Citizen Lab research Chris Parson’s form letter which made it easy. You can read about the weird results from…
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Orwellian?
The US PCAST report puts forward the following scenario to illustrate how privacy mores change over time, and what the future could be like if digital natives fully trust in the cloud. They admit that “Taylor’s world seems creepy to us”, but they want to demonstrate that “In such a world, major improvements in the…
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Quarterly review: FY14Q2
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and too off-the-cuff to be included with the more indepth reviews I do on this site. Below are the highlights of the quarter. Books Although I am still a few…
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Shaw follow up
Upon receiving some strange results when I asked Shaw Communications about what information they had on me, I followed up with their investigations unit to see if they were aware that they had released information about other people in my privacy request for information. Here are the relevant bits of the email: Upon investigation we…
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Hack startups — The state of ink-stained disruption
Two of the scariest areas in startupland are healthcare and education. These are monolithic, highly regulated sectors with long sales cycles — not particularly prone to “disruption.” In this year’s Kleiner Perkins annual internet trends report, Mary Meeker argues that these two sectors might be at an inflection point. I remain sceptical. Another sector with…
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Reset the Net
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/qKk8MHFLNNE?rel=0 I added SSL to this site earlier this year. I have committed to adding HSTS and PFS. This stuff should all be default and would be great if hosting providers like Namecheap (my provider)offered this as a package out of the box. We shouldn’t have to pay to protect ourselves online, especially for such…
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What your telecom provider knows about you
Last April The Star reported that in 2011 alone, the Canadian government asked telecoms and social media companies to turn over user data on Canadians 1.2 million times. An interesting sidenote: the telecoms are charging the government for the privilege. Jesse Brown covered this in a number of Canadaland podcasts including an excellent one with…
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Quarterly review: FY14Q1
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and too off-the-cuff to be included with the more indepth reviews I do on this site. Below are the highlights of the quarter. Books As for books, so far I…