Two recently released reports (one from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the other from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario) offer thorough, carefully considered looks at security and privacy in a world that relies increasingly on mobile and Wi-Fi internet.

The Canadian Privacy Commissioner issued her annual report to Parliament on the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). What follows is a snippet from the introduction to her report.

"Personal information has become a valuable commodity. Companies make money from the use of personal information – it’s no wonder that some would like us to believe that privacy doesn’t matter. [...] The pressure on privacy is not just the result of new social standards or new and captivating technologies. In the commercial sphere where PIPEDA applies, it chiefly comes from the fact that there is big money to be made in pushing the privacy boundaries."

The Ontario-specific Commissioner's Office released a more focussed report, examining the implications of security flaws in the information architecture of Wi-Fi Positioning systems. They come out strongly advocating a Privacy by Design model, as opposed to Open by Default, since we all know "the default rules".

"Privacy is predicated on providing users with personal control along with openness and transparency associated with one’s practices, which demonstrates respect for the user, and builds greater trust."

They give strong examples to indicate why there's a need for policy:

Facebook came up in conversation over dinner with a group of friends from university. We all attended McGill between 2004 and 2008, and we entered university at exactly the same time that Facebook began to be available outside of those first Ivy League schools, the first Canadian school they expanded to being McGill.

In a sense, we're Facebook veterans. We remember before liking, before fan pages, before grown-ups or high school kids could have profiles. We remember when the Wall was anonymous, when you logged in at http://www.thefacebook.com and all the many upsets of Facebook design changes.

And so it's now that I am beginning to worry, now when the flames of fury that we felt about every minute change have finally died down. Resignedly, we discussed the new features of the site ("why can't they stay the same? it worked fine!"), and trotted out the same tired "I'm seriously thinking of committing Facebook suicide." lines. But whereas we once complained about the privacy policy and the Beacon advertising system, we now bemoan the sorting of the News Feed or the 'comment by hitting enter' aspect.

Similarly, this Techcrunch article outlines a handful of concerns Orli Yakuel has with Facebook redesigns, but, as with my friends, the concerns are with cosmetic changes, not the privacy issues or data-mining tactics Facebook is angling to implement. There's a reason for this:

I spent some time in New York in early December and I was really pleased to devote a few hours to the New Museum, where there were two ongoing exhibits that touched on subjects close to my heart: "The Last Newspaper", and "Free".

I was most curious about the free exhibit, because we're still seeing new directions for how the internet disrupts both meanings of the word free - how we think about liberty (personal and societal), and how we assign value to things. Seth Price's essay "Dispersion" is both an inspiration for the exhibit and a part of the exhibit, where it is the eponymous essay in Essay with Knots. From a New Museum article about his work: "Price discusses attempts by conceptual artists to circumvent the structures of the art world and the art market by co-opting the distribution-oriented, communicative media associated with popular culture."

In "Dispersion", Price's primary focus is on how the way we foster collective experience has shifted:

A quick note inspired by today's Metaviews Teleseminar on the Internet as Application. There was a brief discussion about the relative stickiness of Facebook in spite of its failure to consistently offer trustworthy custodianship: why people leave, why they come back, why they stay, and, above all, how for some people it represents a really special different way of interacting with others. On social networking sites people can find voices more powerful than they might have offline.

When I think about the idea of being famous to your friends or of having a 'successful' Facebook identity, I think about Sheila Heti, whose book, How Should a Person Be?, is (amongst other things) an exploration of how we conceive of our own identities.

From the excerpt on her site:

"I can tell that a lot of young people today are interested in being famous. I’ve often heard that while young people used to want to be doctors and ballerinas and firemen, now they want to win a singing competition. I do too.

"How should a person be? I sometimes wonder about it, and I can’t help answering like this: a celebrity. But for all that I love celebrities, I would never move somewhere that celebrities actually exist. My hope is to live a simple life, in a simple place, where there’s only one example of everything.

"By a simple life, I mean a life of undying fame that I don’t have to participate in. I don’t want anything to change, except to be as famous as one can be, but without that changing anything. Everyone would know in their hearts that I am the most famous person alive — but not talk about it too much. ... It is the quality of fame one is after here, without any of its qualities."

I was interviewed by the Is Well Read blog. The concept behind Is Well Read is that every couple of weeks Jackie profiles different people talking about their reading habits, their obsessions, and their favourite books.

In my interview, we focus a fair bit on how working at the Librairie Drawn & Quarterly affects my reading and recommending books. I also admit that I only finish books I don't like if someone recommends them to me, and talk a little bit about how I go about recommending books to and for total strangers.

Here is the link:

http://iswellread.wordpress.com/2010/11/15/julia-is-well-read/

And here is a little snippet to get you interested:
"My relationship with books changes so much over even short periods of time that I am hesitant to re-read much, because I worry that when I go back, it won’t hold the same emotional power as the first time I read it."

Bonus: You get to admire my nerdy cool Halloween costume!

Recorded Future is a temporal analytics engine that attempts to predict the future by understanding the past and the present. It does this by analyzing archived data, partly to look for recurring patterns that lead to predictive outcomes, but also by focusing on language that points to time, possibly indicating intent. Weather forecasting is an obvious area in which this kind of calculation already takes place, with historical and real time data combined to predict short and long term weather patterns. The company behind Recorded Future is taking a similar approach, but seeks to apply it much more broadly.

The technology Recorded Future employs is reminiscent of a search engine with three fields: What, Who/Where, and When. When these are completed, the engine attempts to answer the query, displaying a visualization that shows historical data, current trends, and forecast events or patterns. It costs 150 USD per month to use the search engine and visualization tools, but "future alerts" are provided free. These alerts are basically "blind searches" as you're using the search engine, only getting the results emailed to you one at a time as they are predicted.

A revolution in 3D printing is upon us, and it has been driven by amateur robotics enthusiasts. The 3D printer is not a tool that is limited to making robots - 3D printers can be used for home fix-it jobs and a wide variety of other projects.

"A MakerBot is an affordable, open source 3D printer. It's a machine that can make things. It's your own little factory!"

The MakerBot costs about a thousand dollars, and it employs software that can create and break down a 3D modeled object. It then feeds that data to a 3D printer which is essentially a plastic modelling machine that melts and remolds plastic into any desired shape. The name MakerBot derives from the fact that it is a type of robot, and also from the fact that it is capable of making things, but also because the MakerBot was built by enthusiasts who themselves like making robots. There are several huge events every year called Maker Faires which are full of home-made robots, many of which have been created by this MakerBot. The enthusiasm of its users indicates that the MakerBots are catching on, albeit currently within a small early adapter group.

The beauty of the MakerBot is its broad applicability: it can be used to build anything out of plastic. The MakerBot can build other bots, but it can also build any object you can imagine: stuff for your home, garage, toys, models, you name it.

These 3D printers are really just consumer versions of fabrication technology that is used industrially in factories and shops all around the world, but cost anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000. What makes the MakerBot revolutionary is its relatively cheap cost and small size. As more people learn about them and understand their potential applications, a lot of small business will begin taking advantage of this, either to create unique branded products, or to fabricate new parts, or even to fix old ones.

At five years old, YouTube serves two billion videos daily and is a dominant player in the global media industry. Taking a step back, it's interesting to consider how YouTube got here and what the relationship between Google and YouTube has produced.

I know this may seem a little tardy, but I thought it would be nice to collect a few of the most interesting musings on Google, in case you have somehow missed the biggest non-Apple news of 2010. This has already been a big year for Google, between the announcement that it was leaving China, the launch of the Nexus One, Google Buzz, and their energy and broadband initiatives. Without further ado...

For about 10 days in February, I escaped the bitter northern cold of Montreal for warmer climes. One of the most interesting experiences I had (having never been south of the Mason-Dixon line except to visit DC years ago) was a trip to the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum in Savannah, Georgia.

Not being very active in online gaming, I always sort of idly wondered how apps as bland and harmless as Farmville could pull off the sort of profits they achieved. I presumed there was some advertising, but it seemed unlikely that much data mining could be done from users who are (as far as I can tell) spend hours manipulating a virtual plot of land.

In a post titled "The Temporary Web", Jeff Jarvis muses on the temporary nature of the internet after Twitter. It's these three or four sentences which strike a chord with me, highlighting a shift in the collective consciousness: