An article on Wired today caught my attention while scanning my feeds (FBI’s Secret Spyware Tracks Down Teen Who Made Bomb Threats) however, it was the following paragraph that concerned me even more:

“Under a ruling this month by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, such surveillance — which does not capture the content of the communications — can be conducted without a wiretap warrant, because internet users have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the data when using the internet.”

Digging around in this ruling, I find information regarding IP addresses and routing info in email address headers. According to the “secret spyware” story.

“Sanders wrote that the spyware program gathers a wide range of information, including the computer’s IP address; MAC address; open ports; a list of running programs; the operating system type, version and serial number; preferred internet browser and version; the computer’s registered owner and registered company name; the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL. “

Now I am left asking, how the heck does this apply to installing software on a person’s computer and tracking information such as programs used and users logged in? This is like looking through someone’s underwear drawer when your warrant says the closet.

You will notice that I put the word Internet in parenthesis because once you are snooping around on the computer’s activities, it is no longer just the “Internet” user with the privacy issue. Monitoring offline applications is not the same as monitoring online activities nor is it monitoring visited URLs or the IP addresses found in an email header. I am left a tad bit confused as to how the ruling applies to the logic used by the FBI to install the “spyware” on the computer other than they are counting on the accused and the Courts lacking the technical information to see the difference. I lock down my system as much as possible, therefore I DO have a reasonable expectation of privacy for many of these items that this program reports on.

What do you think?

Wubi is an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users that will bring you into the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other application. If you heard about Linux and Ubuntu, if you wanted to try them but you were afraid, this is for you.

Wubi claims there is no partition modifications or bootloader changes to Windows and that is easily uninstallable. While I haven’t tried it yet (perhaps because it will require me to install Windows) , Tom Merrit (the linux hippy) was tweeting about Wubi last week.  If you have used it, please let me know in the comments what you think of it!

The competition to win a trip to BlogHer 2007 from Scrapblog is over and unfortunately I was not a winner. Not even so much as a lousy t-shirt. Another gal won the trip thanks to her 4000 pageviews and it is pretty obvious that she has a much larger network that I do. I’m not bitter about that (though I am impressed) because I learned that I do indeed have a ton of friends on the social networks I have joined and participated in and what I lack in quantity I surely make up for with quality. Most of the people I communicate with on a daily basis are on more than one social network and because of that I have gotten to know them as more than just voices… they are pretty neat people.

I hear about their daily adventures, emotions, thoughts and frustrations on Twitter. I see little moments of their lives thanks to the photos they share on Flickr. I read more detailed posts about interests, causes and hobbies on their blogposts at Vox, Virb and privately owned domains. I know what music moves them thanks to their Last.fm streams. They share small excerpts of things the find on the web through the Tumblr and Pownce shares and del.icio.us tags. With Facebook apps I can even find out that they too are members of LibraryThing and some of their books are pretty darn interesting so I might add their selections to my library as well.

It was these total “strangers” on the internet that clicked on my Scrapblog and graciously put up with my cheesy slideshow and listened to the silly (and some thought more than slightly annoying) music repeatedly in order to help me earn entries into a competition (thank you!!). It is these people who let me know when my website has taken a crap or give me tips on improving my podcast. It is these total strangers, many of whom I share my life with in 140 characters or less and that for the large part have never met, that I can now consider friends all over the US and even the world.

These were more than random pageviews, these were clicks from people I have gotten to know and that I communicate with everyday. I must come to the conclusion that my life has been enriched by social networking because of the positive impact these “strangers” have had on my life already.

I think my toddler’s upset stomach has subsided enough that we can safely return to bed and dreamland with minimal discomfort and I can stop writing posts at 3 am. Please excuse the podcast release delay for Alternageek.com; the podcast is recorded but I have some editing to do and being in VMware training this week has slowed me down a bit.

YourOnRamp is a new community designed for women looking to re-enter corporate America.

For women that have taken time off of work, often to raise children, many find that coming back to the work world is difficult, and is often hard to find companies that are family-friendly, and equally as difficult to find a balance between work and family. YourOnRamp is looking to be an online resource for these women, offering news articles and other editorial content, along with a career coach and a social network for the purpose of getting women back on track. Most of the basics are present for typical social network functionality, including personal profiles, blogs and forums.

Read more about this at Mashable

Closed door negotiations left net radio with a glimmer of hope but it hasn’t solved the problem of crazy high fees for streaming music.  The following article from Webware has the details:

But contrary to some published reports traversing the blogosphere on Thursday and Friday, SoundExchange, the nonprofit group charged with collecting the payments, has not made any sort of blanket pledge to delay enforcing the contentious new Webcaster payments established earlier this year by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board, according to spokesman Richard Ades.

“There is a misunderstanding, and SoundExchange is making it very clear that everybody is expected to comply with the law,” Ades told CNET News.com Friday.

The CRB ruling at issue requires Internet radio operators to pay additional fees to SoundExchange, which passes them on to artists and record labels, retroactive to 2006 and through 2010. Webcasters opposed to the new rules say the changes could drive up their mandatory payments by as much as 300 percent for larger entities and 1,200 percent for smaller ones, arguing such increases could put them out of business.

Get all the details by reading the full article here…

Looking for invites to Pownce, Gleamd, or GrandCentral? Send me your name and email address and I will get you hooked up until I run out again. :)

If you follow my tweets on Twitter you would have seen my Twitter breakdown on Thursday (07/05/2007). It really wasn’t Twitter’s fault, it was some of the tweets I was getting that apparently sent me over the edge. Some of my problem is the number of tweets I might get on any given day can be overwhelming. I have added a lot of people as “friends” even if I didn’t know who they were prior to their adding me. I will add anyone who adds me if I think they tweet about anything even remotely interesting, and/or their profile is interesting, and I am positive they are not just “friend whores” or spammers. This can result in tweet storms sometimes and, well, I was having a bad day Thursday.

Twitter is gloriously simple and that is what makes it so beautiful. What are you doing in 140 characters or less. Do you really need to say more than that to tell people what you are doing? If you do, that is what blogs are for. I send all tweets (with the exceptions of feeds) straight to my phone and should one contain a link to something that looks better on the computer when followed I check it out when I get back to a desk.

The TwitterGrams became quite popular especially with Robert Scoble this week. They were driving me bonkers because I HAD to follow a link to find out what the tweet was about. Do I really want to do this from my phone? No. Do I want to save more than a dozen tweets to lookup when I get back to my desk? No. Twitter gives me all I need to know in 140 characters or less and should I want to know more I have the option of following links. TwitterGrams give me no info other than a TwitterGram has been sent. I have NO inkling what it is about. I compare them to partial RSS feeds; the title of the post and a sentence doesn’t tell me enough about the post itself to warrant a click through when I am trying to parse through thousands of feeds every week. Half the time I feel duped after clicking through only to find out it is something I didn’t want to read or that the title had nothing to do with the post. I still click through with full RSS feeds; feeds are not a substitute for site visits, just a way for me to get through more info in less time. I am anti-click. ;)

Back to the topic of TwitterGrams… I think they have a place after listening to one finally. They are actually really nifty but I am not convinced they are a replacement for a text post to Twitter. If Twitter is micro-blogging, then TwitterGrams are micro-podcasting. Do I have an idea of where they belong? Not yet.

On the topic of Jaiku (which is all I could seem to tweet about on Thursday):

I signed up for a Jaiku account on the sly when the whole Leo Laporte and TWiT v. Twitter thing went down so I could see what was going on over there. I never really used it alot for several reasons:

1. No US SMS
2. All my friends were at Twitter
3. No US SMS

On the other hand, there are a lot of neat things that Jaiku does that Twitter doesn’t. Jaiku links to the thread of replies (not just the last reply) so you can see everything that is being said if you don’t have friends in common with everyone replying. Jaiku has built in feed support so that you can use it to update everyone on everything you have all over the internet. Jaiku allows pictures and icons in your posts as well. which makes things pretty. And lastly, Jaiku has channels which allow you to post to everyone in a group that might have something in common with you but that aren’t on your friends list. Truly fancy.

Because of these fancy features I headed over to Jaiku for a day. I added some more contacts including some friends from Twitter. I created a channel. I wrote some updates. Then I pretty much stopped using it again. It is cluttered. All these feeds coming from people fill up my screen and frankly, I just don’t want to see that much crap in my stream. I am just as guilty as others on this as I have every feed from every where including my Wakoopa feed updating to Jaiku. Do you think my contacts really give a rats ass when I start using Firefox or switch over to check my email in Outlook? I don’t think so. Some networks don’t need to be running as a lifestream and should be checked manually if you want an update. (Note: I was reminded through a comment on Jaiku that users do have the ability to unsubscribe from contacts feeds without removing the contact.)

That said, I also started using Pownce. I felt special when I got hooked up with an invite last weekend and I signed up for the “exclusive” (*cough *cough) network, posted that I had invites available then gave them all out in a matter of hours. Pownce is nice, but I haven’t gotten good use out of it yet although I would LOVE to have something like that at work so I am not plagued with regular IMs. On Pownce I feel like I need to post something with quality content then I wind up frustrated and don’t post at all. Some of the finest tweets at Twitter (not saying my own) are random thoughts. I have writers block at Pownce.

To sum it up, this week I walked a mile in someone else’s 2.0 shoes and found myself coming back home to Twitter. There are a few features I would like to see added, but at the same time the simplicity is what makes it so great. Honestly, I hope the fine people at Twitter never get too development happy and just continue to work to make the backend application strong.