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Privacy of the e-book?
This year will probably be remembered (among other things!) as the year of the e-book-reader device hype. We've seen new Kindles, the B&N Nook, the FBReader, applications for book reading on iPhones and other handheld devices, and more. And, of course, there is the elephant-in-the-room of the Google book scanning project. (I find it so odd that so much of the popular press refers to the Google "Library" when it is clearly a Google book store.) It will be a while before we know if the digital age will turn into the end of sharable books (see: Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books), but we certainly should be tracking the development of the advantages and disadvantages of e-books and e-book readers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is helping us track how these developments affect privacy:
- An E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy, Commentary by Ed Bayley.
EFF has created a first draft of our Buyer's Guide to E-Book Privacy. We've examined the privacy policies for the major e-readers on the market to determine what information they reserve the right to collect and share.Continue reading
“Foreign Relations of the U.S.” series falls further behind schedule
State Dept Series Falls Farther Behind Schedule, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (December 22nd, 2009).
The U.S. State Department’s official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series had another disappointing year in 2009 with only two softcopy volumes published to date, including one released last week on "Global Issues, 1973-1976." ...a third FRUS volume on "Foreign Economic Policy, 1973-1976" [should] appear before the end of the year, and at least one other in January 2010.... There are four Vietnam volumes alone that should be published in 2010.Continue reading
White House praises Princeton Federal Register application
White House boosts social media apps, by Doug Beizer, FCW.com (Dec 15, 2009).
An application produced at Princeton University that makes it easy to search the Federal Register is an example of the applications White House officials want to see created, McLaughlin [the deputy federal chief technology officer] said. The application, named FedThread, also lets users to sign up to receive alerts about items published in the Federal Register based on keywords. ..."We can make a lot of government data available, but it doesn't really do much good unless apps developers translate it into Web sites, mobile applications or platform apps that really are useful."Continue reading
WSJ Tracks the Nation’s Bank Failures
The Wall Street Journal has a very nice visualization tool Tracking the Nation's Bank Failures. I wish they cited their sources and said something about their methodology and made the data they used available. For some odd reason, that is just not part of what newspapers regularly do yet. Continue reading
FOIA
Gabriela Schneider, the Communications Director of the Sunlight Foundation, writes:
David Brisson marked the completion of his fall internship at Sunlight today by posting a recap of his independent research project. Since it digs into FOIA, I thought you all would appreciate it: http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2009/12/18/can-the-internet-save-foia/Continue reading
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