Circuit Writer Version 8.2

By Jim Scheef

This is a very special month: if I finish writing this promptly and newsletter production goes as planned, you will receive this issue the day before Election Day. Therefore we need to talk about voting.

An Important Election – Trite but True

Lately, every election seems to be the most important ever and while that may sound trite, it is true this time again. From the news and all the advertising on television, you would think this election is about taxes and big government. Well, you would be wrong. This election is about the Supreme Court. Back in January, the Justices nominated by Bush 43, who pledged they would abide by settled law and would not be “activists on the bench”, overturned nearly a century of precedent and ruled that corporations have the same rights to political speech as an individual. (Funny how I didn’t hear a single Republican complain about judicial activism during the confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan.) They made this ruling even though a corporation cannot vote or run for office and the individuals that made up the corporation already have full access to political speech.

You are now seeing the results of this ruling on your television screens – political ads (ones that tell you specifically for whom you should vote or vote against rather than “issue” ads) running one after another. At the end of the ad there is fine print and a soft voice saying the name of the organization that paid for the advertisement you just saw. If the ad was paid for by an organization other than a candidate or a political party, odds are it was funded by money from anonymous donors. It is this anonymity behind which corporations can hide as they push candidates friendly to their agenda. There has been much talk about how this is an avenue for money from foreign corporations or even foreign governments. Is Exxon a U.S. corporation? Most of its facilities are overseas. BP has more facilities in the U.S. than does Exxon, yet they are a foreign corporation. CITGO is a U.S. company owned by the government of Venezuela thru a chain of corporations. The biggest problem with political campaign finance law right now is that so much money is funneled thru anonymous channels that we just don’t know who are funding this advertising. Big Oil is just the tip of the iceberg. How much do you want to bet that the healthcare and banking industries are spending millions on campaigns right here in the Fifth District of Connecticut?

I hope you donated to the candidates of your choice. For more election cycles than I care to admit, I let “the other guy” fund political campaigns. This meant I had no one to blame but myself if my candidate was the loser come election night. Unfortunately, money is speech so now I put my money where my mouth is and donate what I can to the candidates I support. Volunteering your time is another way to take action. Candidates always need people to canvas either by phone or door to door. Because DACS is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit, federal regulations prohibit me from making specific endorsements here in the pages of DACS.doc – something the Supreme Court has yet to overturn.

When you distill all this down the choice really is quite clear: do you want to return to the policies that got us in this mess or hang in there for the change we really need.

Facebook Apps Selling Your Personal Information

Do you use any Facebook apps? Do your kids (or your grandchildren)? This is widely reported breaking news and especially timely given the discussion about Facebook during AskDACS at the general meeting this month. According to the reports, all the ten most popular Facebook applications gather your name and user id along with the names and user ids of your Facebook friends and then sell that information to third parties. The fact that Facebook is not doing this directly is only semantic as application developers pay for access to Facebook. The initial report appears to have been in the Wall Street Journal but since most people don’t have access to the WSJ website, here are links to a blog on Ars Technica, “Popular Facebook apps found to be collecting, selling user info” by Jacqui Cheng (tinyurl.com/28dkhgd); the New York Times, “Facebook Acknowledges Privacy Issue With Applications” by Miguel Helft (tinyurl.com/328jd84) and on the WSJ, “Facebook in Privacy Breach: Top-Ranked Applications Transmit Personal IDs, a Journal Investigation Finds” by Emily Steel and Geoffrey A. Fowler (tinyurl.com/27fnslp). The WSJ article includes a video. Among the “bad” apps is the popular and seemingly innocuous Farmville, so you can’t judge an app by the animals it keeps.

News on Xmarks Breaks Fast

Many times the questions and discussion during AskDACS has centered on how to synchronize Internet Favorites (in Windows-speak) or Bookmarks (everywhere else). Many times members mentioned a service called Xmarks (xmarks.com) that was not only cross browsers, but also works between Windows and the Macintosh. So my surprise was probably no greater than that of the thousands of Xmarks users when I received a notice that Xmarks would shut down operations on January 10, 2011, apparently due to a lack of funding. Gosh, imagine that a free service on the Internet could suffer from a lack of funding! To test support, they asked users to register their willingness to pay $10 per year to save the service. Since I had just set up two machines to test this out, I removed the browser extensions and deleted my account. That was last week. Read “No more Xmarks!? No!!” by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols on ZDNet (tinyurl.com/2vjp2hy) for a typical reaction. Now this week we learn that Xmarks has been rescued in “Xmarks Lives!” (tinyurl.com/36q2ojy) from the same blogger. My cynical bet is that this ploy revived the developers’ original business plan was which was never to build an actual viable business but to sell the application to someone else. The resurrection announcement does not specify the buyer.

Comments on my commentary

Recently I ran into someone who said he really enjoyed reading my column but had recently allowed his DACS membership to lapse. While I like hearing that readers enjoy what I write (even if you don’t always agree), I’m troubled when those readers drop their membership. Over the years, we have resisted the temptation to limit the newsletter to members only. So as we continue to make the newsletter available on the website for the world to enjoy, please keep in mind that someone must produce this newsletter each month. The team of people who publish this newsletter – twelve issues each year – are all dedicated DACS members. We watch the membership slowly shrink each month and wonder how much longer the club can remain a viable organization. When you drop your membership, you are voting and your vote tells us that our efforts are no longer worth the effort. If the club is not worthy of your support, for whom are we writing, editing, formatting, printing and mailing this newsletter?

This election cycle I have tried to avoid overtly political columns. Generally I tie things to a theme of computing technology, your rights to use the digital music and movies you buy, and your on-line civil liberties. As politics has become increasingly polarized, these issues have sunk out of sight behind the discourse over issues that no one can define, like “big government.” I believe the blind anger expressed by some people is fueled by the talking heads on television and radio that compete with each other to make increasingly extreme statements to drive their ratings so they can make more money. If someone paid them more to be liberals, they’d switch sides in a heartbeat. There was an article in the Styles section of the New York Times (tinyurl.com/3xo6349) about how Ann Coulter, the devil in a black cocktail dress, is remaking her image because she has been out flanked on the right! I’d be rich if I could make this stuff up, but unfortunately I can’t.