The Lori Drew trial is set to begin this week, and it is a travesty that this trial is even taking place. The basic facts of this case are that Drew was the mother of a teenage daughter and she created a fake MySpace profile for a fictional teen boy to befriend a classmate of […]
The Washington Post has an interesting article about the FBI’s surveillance of author Norman Mailer:
ABC News reports about a new scandal arising out of the NSA Surveillance Program: Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at […]
Academic presses are facing a difficult future. Book publishing in general is an industry that is struggling, and academic presses have it especially hard since many titles they publish will not have mass popular appeal. Unfortunately, many academic presses are no longer subsidized by their universities, including very wealthy schools like Harvard and Yale, which […]
Last year, I noted that employers and others were increasingly looking at applicants’ social network website profile pages in their hiring decisions. Apparently, now college admissions officers are also using social network sites like Facebook and MySpace to make decisions on applicants. According to the Wall St. Journal:
Much has been made of the fact that large parts of Sarah Palin’s speech were already pre-written before she was even chosen as the VP candidate. According to the Washington Post:
Recently, I was interviewed for an article in the Globe and Mail about the young teenage father-to-be involved in the media circus surrounding vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s pregnant teenage daughter. I believe that the media should restrain itself from prying further into Palin’s daughter’s private life, as well as that of the father-to-be. He […]
Professor Lior Strahilevitz (U. Chicago Law School) has an interesting post about Franz Kafka’s papers. The famous story about Kafka’s papers is that Kafka asked his friend, Max Brod, to burn them after his death. Although Kafka had published a few works during his lifetime, a great many stories, parables, letters, and diary entries were […]
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz has an op-ed arguing that we’ve gotten over privacy: We seem to be following the advice of Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun Microsystems, who in 1999 said, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” And the observation by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: “The privacy you’re concerned about […]
I’ve written an article for the September issue of Scientific American magazine called The End of Privacy? The article is available online here, with a slightly different title: Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?.