So many memories… Thanks !

Ah, the duck alarm and human to the rescue XD

This post made my day, thanks!

I agree with the sentiment.

Especially in the case of video rental stores… Entering a space blasting concord dawn & massive attack after Pi was released. Having to discuss, sometimes literally for hours, movies I 've watched with an actual filmmaker that was working the shop like they owned it. Witnessing an absolutely androgynous person pushing back through art in a place where bigotry was unquestionably the norm being respected by everyone entering the space. Trading music (in the form of CDs or even worse cassette tapes). Even arguing about the worth of certain filmmakers, which sometimes even resulted in the obligatory (free) viewing of a film in much cared for private space built just for this purpose. Let alone actually making friends through this process. Actually having a person knowing my taste and instead of browsing endlessly I would just have to say a few words about my mood and I would get a new movie to watch (actually in VHS). I mean who wouldn’t hate all that. Thankfully digitalization and broadband first, then Netflix and the like, came along and rescued me and many other inefficient people from all this drudgery. Fortunately we are not going back.

Also, thankfully, younger people won’t have to go through such shit. The get a more efficient social life, without a doubt.

The television went from being a babysitter to a mistress

Technology made it easy for us to stay in touch while keeping a distance

Til we just stayed distant and never touched

Now all we do is text too much

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA8hzUDXvtk

At least, not at first. As the scandal heated up, EFF took an impassive stance. In a blog post, an EFF staffer named Donna Wentworth acknowledged that a contentious debate was brewing around Google’s new email service. But Wentworth took an optimistic wait-and-see attitude—and counseled EFF’s supporters to go and do likewise. “We’re still figuring that out,” she wrote of the privacy question, conceding that Google’s plans are “raising concerns about privacy” in some quarters. But mostly, she downplayed the issue, offering a “reassuring quote” from a Google executive about how the company wouldn’t keep record of keywords that appeared in emails. Keywords? That seemed very much like a moot point, given that the company had the entire emails in their possession and, according to the contract required to sign up, could do whatever it wanted with the information those emails contained. EFF continued to talk down the scandal and praised Google for being responsive to its critics, but the issue continued to snowball. A few weeks after Gmail’s official launch, California State Senator Liz Figueroa, whose district spanned a chunk of Silicon Valley, drafted a law aimed directly at Google’s emerging surveillance-based advertising business. Figueroa’s bill would have prohibited email providers like Google from reading or otherwise analyzing people’s emails for targeted ads unless they received affirmative opt-in consent from all parties involved in the conversation—a difficult-to-impossible requirement that would have effectively nipped Gmail’s business model in the bud. “Telling people that their most intimate and private email thoughts to doctors, friends, lovers, and family members are just another direct marketing commodity isn’t the way to promote e-commerce,” Figueroa explained. “At minimum, before someone’s most intimate and private thoughts are converted into a direct marketing opportunity for Google, Google should get everyone’s informed consent.”

Google saw Figueroa’s bill as a direct threat. If it passed, it would set a precedent and perhaps launch a nationwide trend to regulate other parts of the company’s growing for-profit surveillance business model. So Google did what any other huge company caught in the crosshairs of a prospective regulatory crusade does in our political system: it mounted a furious and sleazy public relations counteroffensive.

Google’s senior executives may have been fond of repeating the company’s now quaint-sounding “Don’t Be Evil” slogan, but in legislative terms, they were making evil a cottage industry. First, they assembled a team of lobbyists to influence the media and put pressure on Figueroa. Sergey Brin paid her a personal visit. Google even called in the nation’s uber-wonk, Al Gore, who had signed on as one of the company’s shadow advisers. Like some kind of cyber-age mafia don, Gore called Figueroa in for a private meeting in his suite at the San Francisco Ritz Carlton to talk some sense into her.

And here’s where EFF showed its true colors. The group published a string of blog posts and communiqués that attacked Figueroa and her bill, painting her staff as ignorant and out of their depth. Leading the publicity charge was Wentworth, who, as it turned out, would jump ship the following year for a “strategic communications” position at Google. She called the proposed legislation “poorly conceived” and “anti-Gmail” (apparently already a self-evident epithet in EFF circles). She also trotted out an influential roster of EFF experts who argued that regulating Google wouldn’t remedy privacy issues online. What was really needed, these tech savants insisted, was a renewed initiative to strengthen and pass laws that restricted the government from spying on us. In other words, EFF had no problem with corporate surveillance: companies like Google were our friends and protectors. The government—that was the bad hombre here. Focus on it.

I don’t know whether it is illegal for someone to open a letter addressed to you or not, in the country you live, but this is pretty important. If the information presented here is accurate, this is not simply EFF focusing on the government, its EFF actively resisting similar rules to be applied on e-mail as those applied on regular mail. Would anyone use any of the non-electronic mail service providers or courier services if it was a given that for each piece of mail sent, there would be exactly one open and read, shared with multiple other parties besides the sender and receiver?

It seems to me that this is the whole point of this (quite long, but interesting) article and this instance probably illustrates it better than any other chosen to discuss in the article.

I can remember a time when I was a kid, that one of the most recent chicks got to feel so accustomed to my presence that it would follow me around when I was near and let me pet it. So it was easy for me to pick various insects and provide instant snacks, probably tastier than what the rest of the flock was getting. This is also how hen’s teach little chicken (few days old) how to locate food when they are young. After it grew a little, when it spotted me, it used to behave like a dog does when you return home. It sprinted towards me, made silly (to my perception) noises and examined me tilting it’s head. This picture reminded me of those sprints and made me smile.