choir.io explained (Alex Dong) — Sound is the perfect medium for wearable computers to talk back to us. Sound has a dozen of properties that we can tune to convey different level of emotions and intrusivenesses. Different sound packs would fit into various contexts.
Identity Single Point of Failure (Tim Bray) — continuing his excellent series on federated identity. There’s this guy here at Google, Eric Sachs, who’s been doing Identity stuff in the white-hot center of the Internet universe for a lot of years. One of his mantras is “If you’re typing a password into something, unless they have 100+ full-time engineers working on security and abuse and fraud, you should be nervous.” I think he’s right.
What Does It Really Matter If Companies Are Tracking Us Online? (The Atlantic) — Rather, the failures will come in the form of consumers being systematically charged more than they would have been had less information about that particular consumer. Sometimes, that will mean exploiting people who are not of a particular class, say upcharging men for flowers if a computer recognizes that that he’s looking for flowers the day after his anniversary. A summary of Ryan Calo’s paper. (via Slashdot)
Life Inside Brewster’s Magnificent Contraption (Jason Scott) — I’ve been really busy. Checking my upload statistics, here’s what I’ve added to the Internet Archive: Over 169,000 individual objects, totaling 245 terabytes. You should subscribe and keep them in business. I did.
