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Why Does Gravatar Want My Google Apps Contacts?

After a successful return to WordPress.com from WordPress Multisite, I began rooting around the Settings and Tools and Appearance areas for my WordPress.com account to discover any new joys that were added during my inattention.

I found I could now add my “Google Profile” as a “verified” external service via Gravatar.  I clicked to continue to complete the verification process for my “Public Profile.”

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Eben Moglen and his Facebook Death Wish

Our beloved and respected Eben Moglen is back in the news this week.  We met Eban a year ago during his FreedomBox days:

SuperGenius Eben Moglen wants free and unfettered access to the internet and he’s putting his money where his mind is by creating the “FreedomBox” — a device that plugs into the wall and gives you unfettered and unrestricted access to the internet — to help make certain that a government cannot disconnect its people from communicating with the rest of the world during a perceived crisis.


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Your Facebook is Leaking

Did you know your Facebook privacy has been leaking?  As that social network expands to flow like a never-ending molasses across the grimacing façade of the nameless masses — suffocating us in pokes and Mafia War requests — we need to pause a moment and step back to wonder just what’s happening to us beyond the velvet curtain.

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Did Tyler Clementi Leap to His Death, or Was He Pushed?

The recent, leaping, suicide death of 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi from the edge of the George Washington Bridge reads like “Lori Drew: Part II” in so many sad ways.  Two Rutgers students are charged with “invasion of privacy” because they secretly streamed live internet video of Tyler making out with a guy in his dorm room.

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When Celebrities Attack Photographers

I remember when I was a child reading how actor Sean Penn had attacked a photographer at his wedding. It was big news in the day and it was news that seemed to repeat itself every time a photographer got a little too close for Penn’s comfort. Just last October, he attacked a photographer and broke his camera.  Now there is a report that American Idol contestant Adam “Glambert” Lambert got enraged when a photographer was, so to speak, doing his job — and he attacked the photographer.

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3100 MTA Eyes and 2000 NYPD Requests to Watch

We know we are being watched.  We accept we are being recorded.  We’ve even learned to recognize the multiplicity of cameras that bludgeon our every move now and forevermore.  There are cameras in the lampposts.  There are recording devices in the coffee cups.  The eyes of a peacock’s tail — as it struts along fallow land in the wilds of the Bronx and the niches of Central Park — have become a thousand, Panopticonic, eyes perceiving our every move.

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The Uninvited Camera as Art

Last weekend, my mother held a reception in honor of my having gotten married. A little before the reception actually started, a good friend of my mother took what seemed like a thousand pictures of my wife and me with various other people who were there: My parents, my stepparents, my second cousin, and of course just the two of us — in countless configurations. Everything was posed as he told us where to stand and where to look and, in some cases, what to do with our arms. In contrast, the Tate Modern is now featuring an exhibit called Exposed, which is entirely filled with photographs that were taken without the subjects being aware of it at the time.

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