This is Professor Lessig’s new push. I thought his presentation was well worth the hour. Originally from Lessig Blog
As promised, here’s the first lecture on corruption. It is an alpha version. I’m eager for comments and feedback. My first written feedback came from Aaron Swartz, with whom I had conspired last winter about making this move. I have reprinted his comments in the extended entry, with some replies.
I’ve also set up a page on the wiki where I will collect significant versions of the argument. Summary and criticism there would be helpful.
I thought I’d pass this along to my friends and family that use Verizon. They are going to sell all of your call records unless you ask them not to. Please call and ask them not to. I hope you get angry and dump them all together. More and more I wonder if there are any good mobile phone companies out there. Besides this absurd breach of your privacy, Versizon has recently attacked Vonage with frivolous patent claims. A good company like Vonage is getting squeezed out of a competitive market by Verizon. How does this type of capitalism benefit the consumer? The same way selling all of your call data does. Negatively!
Check out this post on Slashdot and get your personal data out before it gets sold!
An anonymous reader writes to let us know that Verizon Wireless is planning to share its customers’ calling records (called CPNI) with “our affiliates, agents and parent companies (including Vodafone) and their subsidiaries.” The article explains that CPNI “includes the numbers of incoming and outgoing calls and time spent on each call, among other data.” Some subscribers, it’s not known if it’s all of them, received a letter in the mail giving them 30 days to opt out of this sharing by calling 1-800-333-9956. Skydeck, a mobile and wireless services company, seems to have been the first to call attention to the Verizon initiative on their blog; they also posted a scan of the letter (sideways PDF) from Verizon.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Since the upgrade to WordPress 2.3 I’ve been cleaning house and rearranged some things. Making a wild assumption that there may be someone else out there that reads this, please be patient as usual with my changes and the new stuff. I’m still working though a few issues.
Here are a few of the improvements:
Still need to be worked out: