Preserving the Ads?

Quinn Norton writes in The Hypocrisy of the Internet Journalist:

It’s been hard to make a living as a journalist in the 21st century, but it’s gotten easier over the last few years, as we’ve settled on the world’s newest and most lucrative business model: invasive surveillance. News site webpages track you on behalf of dozens of companies: ad firms, social media services, data resellers, analytics firms — we use, and are used by, them all.
...
I did not do this. Instead, over the years, I only enabled others to do it, as some small salve to my conscience. In fact, I made a career out of explaining surveillance and security, what the net was doing and how, but on platforms that were violating my readers as far as technically possible.
...
We can become wizards in our own right, a world of wizards, not subject to the old powers that control us now. But it’s going to take a lot of work. We’re all going to have to learn a lot — the journalists, the readers, the next generation. Then we’re going to have to push back on the people who watch us and try to control who we are.

Georgis Kontaxis and Monica Chew won "Best Paper" at the recent Web 2.0 Security and Privacy workshop for Tracking Protection in Firefox for Privacy and Performance (PDF). They demonstrated that Tracking Protection provided:

a 67.5% reduction in the number of HTTP cookies set during a crawl of the Alexa top 200 news sites. [and] a 44% median reduction in page load time and 39% reduction in data usage in the Alexa top 200 news site.

Below the fold, some details and implications for preservation:

Brief talk at Columbia

I gave a brief talk during the meeting at Columbia on Web Archiving Collaboration: New Tools and Models to introduce the session on Tools/APIS: integration into systems and standardization. The title was "Web Archiving APIS: Why and Which?" An edited text is below the fold

Archiving games

This is just a quick note to flag two good recent posts on important but extremely difficult problem of archiving computer games.  Gita Jackson at Boing-Boing in The vast, unplayable history of video games describes the importance to scholars of archiving games. Kyle Orland at Ars Technica in The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost forever covers the technical reasons why it is so difficult in considerable detail, including quotes from many of the key players in the space.

My colleagues at the Stanford Libraries are actively working to archive games. Back in 2013, on the Library of Congress' The Signal digital preservation blog Trevor Owens interviewed Stanford's Henry Lowood, who curates our games collection.

Brittle systems

In my recent rant on the Internet of Things, I linked to Mike O'Dell's excellent post to Dave Farber's IP list, Internet of Obnoxious Things, and suggested you read it. I'm repeating that advice as, below the fold, I start from a different part of Mike's post.

The Panopticon Is Good For You

As Stanford staff I get a feel-good email every morning full of stuff about the wonderful things Stanford is doing. Last Thursday's linked to this article from the medical school about Stanford's annual Big Data in Biomedicine conference. It is full of gee-whiz speculation about how the human condition can be improved if massive amounts of data is collected about every human on the planet and shared freely among medical researchers. Below the fold, I give a taste of the speculation and, in my usual way, ask what could possibly go wrong?

Time for another IoT rant

I haven't posted on the looming disaster that is the Internet of Things You Don't Own since last October, although I have been keeping track of developments in brief comments to that post. The great Charlie Stross just weighed in with a brilliant, must-read examination of the potential the IoT brings for innovations in rent-seeking, which convinced me that it was time for an update. Below the fold, I discuss the Stross business model and other developments in the last 8 months.

Bad incentives in peer-reviewed science

The inability of the peer-review process to detect fraud and error in scientific publications is getting some mainstream attention. Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, the founders of Retraction Watch, had an op-ed in the New York Times entitled What's Behind Big Science Frauds?, in which they neatly summed up the situation:

Economists like to say there are no bad people, just bad incentives. The incentives to publish today are corrupting the scientific literature and the media that covers it. Until those incentives change, we’ll all get fooled again.

Earlier this year I saw Tom Stoppard's play The Hard Problem at the Royal National Theatre, which deals with the same issue. The tragedy is driven by the characters being entranced by the prospect of publishing an attention-grabbing result. Below the fold, more on the problem of bad incentives in science.