Category: internet

To measure the policy positions of every single person






The rule of “suspicion algorithms”






How Apple keeps track of the programs you install on your Mac

It probably doesn’t come as news but I just got curious why this little program called gkoverride wants to call someone through my firewall when I try to install a patch for SPSS and I found a pretty good explanation on Zdziarski’s Blog of Things saying that Apple basically checks new program installations for security purposes. However, without asking they also keep track of the programs users install — in the name of security. Most users probably care more about security than about privacy but I think it should be made more clear and transparent and it would be important to also provide alternative security mechanisms — as suggested by Zdziarski.

A browser extension that exposes the role money plays in the US Congress

What moneyed interests support a politician? It would clearly enhance the politics section of any newspaper if that type of contextual information could be presented as an accompaniment to news articles that feature the words and voting behaviour of elected representatives. That’s probably exactly what a teenager in the USA was thinking when he developed a browser plug-in that “when you mouse-over the name of a US lawmaker, will serve up a list of which parties have donated to their campaign funds, and the quantities”.



One could think of many interesting extensions or alternative applications: For example, one could adapt it to other polities by drawing on datasets from other countries or it would be possible to switch the perspective from lawmakers to firms and represent information on firms’ lobbying history via mouse-overs.

In their book “Full Disclosure. The Perils and Promise of Transparency”, Fung, Graham and Weil (2007) call this type of emergent transparency “collaborative transparency”. In the age of big data, ubiquitous information technology and smart kids, this is going to stay exciting for a long time to come.

Enlightened public policy for the internet age

If you wanted to have journalism for the whole population, for the entire citizenry, it would require massive postal subsidies, to make it possible for the abolitionist press, for example, to come into existence, or the suffragist press. All that took enlightened public policy making, and we need another strong dose of that today.
Interview with Professor Robert McChesney