Coming Through Loud and Clear?

if everything you hear is always recorded, if your phone can be active with no external indication, if your main lines of communication can be tapped or hacked, the potential for Big Brother abuse grows exponentially. privacy concerns loom, piracy is facilitated, and safety issues escalate (hopefully, by the time earpods replace cell phones, cars will be driving themselves!) new forms of public and private behaviour will develop; work and personal relationships will evolve based on previously nonexistent modes of communication; new digital divides (those that can iHear vs those that can't) will deepen.

Imagine if this stuff is only closed source: let's get some open source hackers working on it fast. (Via O'Reilly Radar.)

Unreal Reality Shows in the Virtual World

So-called "reality" shows like Big Brother are, of course, unreal by virtue of their artificial situations. So the news that Big Brother is coming to Second Life, that most realistic of non-naturalistic virtual worlds is, in a way, simply surreal.