Listening

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) spoke for ten-plus hours yesterday on the Senate floor in an effort to block the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, which he calls “the most un-patriotic of acts,” as Dustin Volz and Kaveh Waddell recount for National Journal.

Eighty-eight percent of Americans do not want to be watched without their permission, Mary Madden and Lee Rainie report, citing data from two new surveys of public opinion done by the Pew Research Center. They also have little confidence that government agencies, landline telcos, or credit card companies will keep their records private and secure.

Playing off the fact that many Americans claim not to be bothered by the NSA listening in on their communications, WeAreAlwaysListening.com, an anti-NSA spoof, has posted online the recorded audio of conversations it surreptitiously collected of real New Yorkers as they go about their day, Andy Greenberg reports for Wired.

The first GOP presidential debate, which will take place August 6 in Cleveland, will be presented by Fox News in partnership with Facebook, the two companies announced yesterday. According to a joint release, “the debate will feature Facebook data illustrating how the issues of the day are resonating with people on today’s largest platform for political conversation. FOX News viewers and Facebook users will also be able to share images and video questions via Facebook, some of which will be used to help formulate questions for the candidates and broadcast during the debate.” According to Andy Mitchell, Facebook’s news and partnerships director, Fox’s use of Facebook “demonstrates how the platform has become an essential part of the political process.”

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is now on LinkedIn. And she has just 489 followers (something you can collect there as a verified “influencer”). Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is also there, but he has just 128 connections and no followers. Not an influencer? Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has 500+ connections, befitting his Ivy League education. (Oops, not supposed to mention that.) Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), whose profile lists him as “candidate for US Senate), has just 40.

New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo, fresh off of reviewing a high-tech toilet that he says he can’t live without, now zings Silicon Valley for mainly catering to the very rich. In today’s tech boom, he writes, the “hottest start-ups will help people on the lowest rungs of the 1 percent live like their betters in the 0.1 percent.”

Flickr’s new auto-tagging system “appears to be misfiring frequently,” reports Alex Hern for the Guardian, with some truly offensive results, including labeling photos of concentration camps as “sport” and “jungle gym.”

Related: Google has apologized for racist results in Google Maps, including the use of the n-word to label the White House, first discovered by Brian Fung for the Washington Post on Tuesday.

If you are a public figure in Russia with a dissenting point of view, you get a lot of online abuse. Global Voices posts the translation of a series of profiles by Nina Nazarova, describing what internet life is like there for an LGBT rights activist, a former US ambassador to Russia, a lawyer, and a journalist.

I spent most of yesterday at the Annotation Summit held by the Poynter Institute at the New York Times and made some fun discoveries, including:

Hypothes.is, which is probably farthest along of any project aiming to build an open annotation system covering the entire web, has collected an amazing “Historical Survey of Annotation Efforts” Google spreadsheet that dates all the way back to 1993, when the Mosaic browser initially included built-in annotation, and covers more than 60 dead, defunct, and “living dead” efforts, along with several that are alive and kicking.

Betaworks has just released an early version of ScaleModel.com, which listens to the real-time tweets of a particular community and offers a rich dashboard view of what it is talking and hashtagging about. See, for example, this window on US politics.

The annotation site Genius.com has started a section called “Wealth Genius” where it is encouraging users to add information about billionaires.

Gistory.co is an internet start-up that uses an interactive world map for the display of news briefs.

Soundcite is a Northwestern University Knight Lab startup that lets you insert sound clips right inside the text of a story.

In the New Republic, Nathan Schneider (Civic Hall member) writes in praise of what he calls the “Slow Computing” movement, likening his use of free and open software like Ubuntu and Emacs and a locally-based service called ownCloud, to the Slow Food movement. To wit:

There is a habit in tech culture of saying that the latest app is “democratizing” whatever it happens to do. This is lovely, but best not to confuse it with actual democracy. Democracy is about participation with control, freedom with accountability, privacy with transparency. Tech companies tend to pick and choose from that list rather inventively. We’re expected to participate in their networks without having control over how they work. We’re transparent about every detail of our lives with them, while they’re private about what they do with it. Free-and-open software, however, operates on a different time-scale. Since nobody owns it, it’s harder to become fabulously wealthy from it. People make these programs because they need them, not because they think they can manipulate someone to want them. It’s slower. Instead of relying on rich kids in a Googleplex somewhere, Slow Computing works best when we’re employing people nearby…